As he left Downing Street as Prime Minister for the last time, Rishi Sunak apologised to the nation for the record of his Conservative Government. Here, Mark Ellse imagines what else he should have apologised for…
To the country I would like to say first and foremost I am sorry.
I have given this job my all but you have sent a clear signal that the Government of the U.K. must change, and yours is the judgement that matters.
I have heard your anger, your disappointment, and I take responsibility for this loss.
But there is one particular way in which I failed you as a member of the Government. Now that I am leaving political leadership, I should like to say sorry and, so far as I am able, speak honestly about my errors.
During the Covid years, the Government of which I was a part failed you. We lacked the humility to acknowledge that there are some difficult things in life over which no human has control. Instead we made rash promises to defeat an airborne virus like flu, something we simply put up with every winter as we now indeed do with Covid.
Whether from faith or stoicism, we all know we have the ability to face very difficult human situations with courage rather than unbridled fear. Yet instead of demonstrating such courage, the Government deliberately encouraged fear, for reasons that we can now clearly see were unjustified.
The Government was preoccupied with the need to be seen to be doing something, preoccupied with the vain promise of “defeating covid” instead of acting with wisdom. Sufficient of us were aware of the economic chaos we were causing. Despite that, we silenced and pilloried those who predicted that shutting down much of our health service and the economy would damage us profoundly. We failed to balance any good that lockdowns might be doing with the harm we knew they would do. To my shame, I even allowed myself to be silenced on this matter by Hugo Keith KC when giving evidence to the Covid Inquiry.
There is now a general scientific consensus that the burning of fossil fuels is contributing to natural climate change, raising global temperatures and resulting in potentially serious consequences for human life on this planet. So, as with Covid, there are predictions of catastrophe. The temptation is for governments to spread fear instead of quiet wisdom, and to act precipitously whether or not it does more harm than good. We are inclined to act even when we know, if we are being honest, that our efforts will have little benefit. As with Covid we are in danger of abandoning wisdom and silencing those who challenge the consensus. We are reluctant even to allow the discussion of whether the harms we would do by depriving so many in the world of affordable energy would be greater than any benefits of abolishing fossil fuels.
I say these things now because I want to leave office having been completely open and honest with you and I want to help a future Government avoid making the same mistakes over Net Zero that I made over Covid.
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I was listening to some chat about the Canadian approach, and the word (from someone very close to the process), was that Trudeau went with whatever the public opinion polls said at the time. Sounds like we were about the same. The Teaching Unions insisted on masks, in large part because ‘independent Sage’ were promoting it. There was no pushback from official Sage nor the Chief Medical Officer, so masks it was.
Seems like the case with pretty much everything now; the Twitter/Reddit/online-sphere screams and shouts about something irrational and the career “leaders” sway like grass to appease them. No backbone, no pointing to rationale. Then again, I’m not sure that the social-media mess would listen even if they did.
I’ve said for a while now, social media is to blame for most of the world’s social issues and has been for years. Giving too much voice to people who shouldn’t have any at all and relying pretty much entirely on snap emotional response. Baaaaa-stards.
“the Twitter/Reddit/online-sphere screams and shouts”
Indeed. They are not overly representative of the general population, and we know that the bosses and the employees of those firms are overwhelmingly leftists.
Redaction of official documents may be justified when concerned with national defence or perhaps when they mention specific individuals and their person affairs or in the very short term where disclosure may prejudice some ongoing legal case or be price sensitive. Hard to believe it’s necessary for documents discussion masks in schools, unless the intention is to cover up incompetence or lies.
Precisely so.
Just as it is hard to believe that redaction of documents is necessary when providing evidence relating to the details of correspondence between Ursula Von der Leyen and Albert Bourla in her securing of vaccine contracts from Pfizer. The documents that came back prompted by an FOI (or its EU equivalent) from a concerned MEP, supposedly containing details of text messages exchanged between the two, resembled the Black hole of Calcutta!
What a surprise. Many of us took the view that they were a daft idea, but those who promoted their use in “education” appear to have been deluded, and delivering false information to those who they are supposed to be delivering education to. I do know one or two primary school teachers, and to some extent they have been victims of scaremongering, via which they were sucked into it. Not necessarily a valid excuse for being on the wrong side, though.
So, ignorant cretins in the unions causing as much damage to education services as they do to the health service. At least what they do in the health service is to protect their fiefdoms so in a way is understandable though not excusable. What they’ve done with masking in education seems to have no reason or reasoning whatsoever.
And to think how many parents send their children into that environment, day in, day out…
The only reason is for the union to demonstrate its power to disrupt. Plus ça change.
Everything about the Fakedemic and Government policy was about politics and wider agenda of power and control, just like the climate change cult and Net Zero lunacy.
They reacted to polls of screaming bedwetters and then made up any justifications on the fly.
As and when these inevitably imploded and their non-effectiveness and harms became visible, they reacted by doubling down on them, to save their skin.
The story of our times.
And then they stabbed them.
Bastards.
You know, some of this evidence really should feature in a court trial for that former health secretary’s crimes against humanity.
This is very welcome analysis but feels generous to me. Masks were introduced all over the world as the visual branding of a fake pandemic. This was a global crime carried out by organised criminals, who wished to impose their own biosecurity control grid on all of humanity. Let’s try to focus on these criminals, not their hapless local enforcers (the UK government).
I teach in Vietnam, where around 1/3 of students still wear masks all day in school for nebulous reasons I’m currently investigating. The reach and scale of this crime is almost unfathomable, but it is essentially a crime against humanity and we should all be focused on how we make those responsible pay.
Unions constantly driving for more lockdowns, restrictions, school
closures snd measures is precisely why I don’t support any of their demands or strike action. I’d cheerfully level the state and all its quangos.
None of the ludicrous “rules” and restrictions imposed on the country had any genuine scientific evidence to support them. They wrecked the economy and ruined millions of lives without any justification whatsoever.
I will never forget and never forgive them.
Nine children in the UK have now tragically died from Strep A infections – and the Government has admitted that the lockdowns are at least partly to cause since children were unable to interact and their immune systems were not primed to resist infections.
It would be very interesting to know if these nine children were jabbed against Covid because these jabs suppress the natural immune system.
But there is no way they will ever let us know that. Move along …..
It is not just mask-wearing in schools that was teaching-union driven. The entire lockdown policy was forced on the government by public sector unions. Up to the 10th March 2020 the government was pursuing a sensible herd immunity policy. On that day, medical GMB members threatened mutiny, citing inadequate PPE for NHS workers. Other unions waded in. The RMT threatened a rail strike, UCU threatened university closures. The NEU waved the threat of national withdrawal of labour in schools. Faced with a multiple mutiny of public-sector unions, Boris and Co began frantically seeking for pretexts on which to abandon herd immunity. At the 16-Mar-20 press conference, Ferguson’s preposterous forecasts were wheeled out, perhaps with government-requested spicing – ‘schools may need to close’. On 18-Mar-20, Boris caved in to NEU strike threats by agreeing schools would close. This was the decisive step. Parents cannot go to work if their kids are off school. On 20-Mar-20, the whole economy went into lockdown. On 04-Jan-21 the same thing happened again. The NEU held a zoom meeting with 400,000 of its members at which the decision was taken not to return to work after the Christmas holidays. The government caved in again and declared lockdown 3, which lasted 6 months. The entire panics, both times, had been union-driven and totally unnecessary.
I saw a clip from Ireland AM on One Live (Dublin) in December 2021 where female presenters were demonstrating on a doll the best way to get a “nice tight fit” on a baby’s masked face. They recommended getting small children to assist with this in order to “normalise and demystify face coverings”. I sent details to my MP…. The Republic of Ireland is at the vanguard of the Great Reset or whatever other names that goes by. This global attempt to blank out faces and therefore the individuality of people is deeply sinister. I will not be surprised that instead of linking Strep Throat with the use of masks, where germs breed in ideal conditions for them, the infection will be used as a reason to reintroduce them. It is the youngsters they want to train to be compliant.
How have children been so tragically under-represented throughout this whole saga? What have all those children’s rights charities and organizations been doing for the past three years?
Are children considered the lowest-hanging fruit in a campaign to soften up tomorrow’s generations for ultimate compliance? If these youngsters have been trained not to complain about wearing masks 8 hours per day without any evaluation or supporting evidence, what might they acquiesce to as future adults without question or objection? And might they be further programmed to instinctively shame those do not?
They’ve already tried to “nudge” us into this type of behaviour. If this state of affairs persists in schools, in future we will need no nudging. I think this is the general flavour of what is going on.
To all those rebellious adolescents who just won’t fall in line: I salute you!
The evidence from Matt Hancock is that, “Gosh, the leftwing fanatics in Scotland covering 8% of the UK’s population have imposed masks on schoolchildren, so we must do it.” The logic of this argument defeats me.