In the Telegraph, Daniel Hannan reminds us that, five years ago, Britain chose a path to financial ruin, crushed civil liberties and shattered public trust by succumbing to lockdown hysteria. Here’s how his piece begins:
What the hell were we thinking? Five years ago, we were sliding towards the most expensive mistake ever made by a British government, a mistake that led to our financial ruin, the annihilation of our basic freedoms and the obliteration of public trust.
Never before had our civil liberties been so blatantly disregarded. We were subjected to house arrest on the basis of unsupported conjecture, our property rights were violated, our freedom of expression repressed, even our ability to leave the country denied.
Where were all the human rights lawyers when they were needed? Where were the Doughty Street types, so vocal in their defence of illegal migrants, convicts and terrorists? The one time that there truly was a national human rights violation, they were cheering it on.
Meanwhile, the British state told lie after lie after lie. Just three weeks! Facemasks are dangerous! One more month! Facemasks are essential! Squash the sombrero! Young people are at risk! Just two more weeks! Wait for the vaccine! Wait for the second vaccine! Your jab protects others! It’s the third shot that really works! Dangerous new variant! One last lockdown! Just three more weeks!
As we approach the fifth anniversary, we don’t like to admit that we destroyed our economy, took away part of our kids’ childhoods, permanently aggrandised the state and indebted ourselves for a generation – all for nothing.
Because we don’t want to accept such horrifying truths, we reach for excuses. We could only work on the basis of best-guess models, we tell ourselves. We followed the science as it stood. Who knows how much worse things might have been had we not locked down?
I’m afraid these justifications are, as the saying goes, pure cope. The careful protocols of our own scientific advisers, as well as of the World Health Organisation (WHO), counted for nothing when set against hysterical newspaper headlines, panicky opinion polls and feverish rants by Piers Morgan. …
The tax hikes, the devaluation of our savings, the uncontrollable national debt – these things were inescapable consequences of paying people to stay home for the better part of two years. …
For years to come, Britain will be poor, indebted and repressive because, in early March 2020, no one (with the exception of one brave Sunday Telegraph columnist, modesty forbids, etc.) wanted to stand in the way of a stampede. We did this to ourselves.
Worth reading in full.
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I think it’s clear that on various levels, these people are collaborators and have been offered a special place in the post-industrial gulag that has been constructed around us since early 2020. Whether any of them are clever enough to realise is another matter but I think they should be considered collaborators and accessories to the crimes against humanity that ‘climate change’ and ‘covid-19’ represent. Every word their traitorous mouths utter about climate or vaccination is evidence that must one day be used against them.
Never mind the few filthy rich celebrities private-jetting across the world; If there really was a climate “emergency” (you know, one of those must-act-now-or-bad-things-will happen-immediately-scenarios) then why haven’t the airlines taken one for the team and scrapped their business- and first-class sections and filled them out with economy seats instead?
I know it sounds extreme, but this is an emergency is it not?
If it were an emergency then extreme measures like this would be justified, perhaps even insisted on to reduce the overall carbon footprint of the aviation industry (and this would dramatically reduce it).
The answer is simple: “Emergency” is not the correct word at all to describe the current environmental circumstances. In fact it’s a vast overstatement that has been invoked for many decades by hysterical activists. (Don’t get me wrong, I agree wholeheartedly with environmental activism, as an antidote to the destruction us humans have left in our wake over the past century, but that destruction has taken the form of deforestation, water pollution and many other collective assaults on the earth, rather than carbon, climate and all the rest of this silly little mind game that’s been visited upon us).
Pretty much any preachy pronouncement on any subject from a member of the elites is likely to stink of hypocrisy
Any pronouncements from the self-styled elites will be stuffed with hypocrisy. The two go together like bread and cheese.
Arkle and Markle fly half way round the globe in a private jet. Arkle disembarks, takes his shoes off and then lectures the world on saving the planet. Admittedly the Windsors have severe intellectual deficiencies but crap like this suggests Ging needs the bottom block. Sharpish.