Boris is the Great Appeaser Who Caves in to the "Experts" at the Expense of Ordinary People

There follows a guest post by Dr Timothy Bradshaw, a retired Oxford Theological Lecturer.

Allegra Stratton, Boris’s replacement for Lee Cain as policy communicator in No.10, has gone, to the BBC as an eco-analyst, after a short spell of announcing nothing, maybe she offended Carrie too? And that communications room, fitted out for a couple of million, won’t be used. So that “reset” of No 10 has itself been reset, maintaining that sense of fairground chaos so beloved of our leader.

But his utterances are, as Janet Daley has shown in her Telegraph column, less and less convincing and being taken as incoherent by a growing number of intelligent people, not just “conspiracy theorists”. He bizarrely proclaimed that the successful lowering of Covid cases and deaths in the UK was not caused by the vaccination programme but by… the lockdowns, which therefore must remain the chief weapon against the epidemic – if the epidemic should return. Hence the shutting of the Nightingale hospitals and no plan for future epidemics being developed. As Daley said, this statement was surely plain wrong, and also politically a gaffe as it portrayed his one massive success as an irrelevance. It also would discourage the population from offering to be vaccinated, a Macronic blunder. Why this idiocy from our leader?

“Save lockdowning” is the only credible answer, combined with the fact of Boris being, apparently willingly like Patty Hearst, held hostage by that strange and frightening gang of “experts”. Boris is in effect their glove puppet. Their latest utterance through him is that “a third wave is definitely coming” – “hurricane Boris” is building up in India and will soon be blowing us away. Really, or is this just more “precautionary” weather forecasting to get us to board up the economy again, more fear-inducing talk?

At present we can hardly be said to be in an epidemic, but the “experts” are very keen to keep finding Covid wherever they can, and so “save lockdowning”, as if hoping to keep this phenomenon going to maintain their grip on the population.

The grotesque plan is to keep perfectly healthy and non-vulnerable people taking two home tests per week, followed up by a PCR test for positive results, and these go to a central lab. These tests are for the Covid “genome sequencing” programme and can hardly be defended as a sensible use of the health budget. It is predicated on scanning for and locking down any tiny group of people infected with a new variant, and not on getting a medically based plan for treating future SARS viruses. It is clearly in line with keeping the lockdown hammer available, permanently.

Might this scheme be the start of genomic information gathering for a wider purpose? Or is that another wild conspiracy theory, for the moment anyway?

Commentators are perplexed as to why the UK’s reopening is so glacially slow and capricious: as pub landlord Rod Humphris told lockdowner Starm-ban-fuehrer, pubs are not big transmitters of Covid, unlike hospitals, so why pick on pubs for ongoing repression? It makes no sense. Is it just precautionary fear on steroids, is Boris just a terrified Patty in the hands of his brainwashers, or is there a deeper reason? We need to know. These experts are clearly almost all of the left and almost certainly all “remainers” in the Brexit context: do they want an ultra-slow UK recovery post Brexit to sabotage a successful UK, free of Brussels’ control – that is a plausible thesis available to fill the void of a rational explanation?

This could key in to the analyses of Boris’ political manoeuvrings across the board. His sacrifice of the Ulster Unionists, breaking a personal pledge to them by putting them into the governance of EU customs regulations enforced by UK officials, illustrates a ruthless capacity to inflict pain on people who trusted him. The Irish Protocol is designed to pressurise the Unionists, as Jenny McCartney reports. She concludes that Article 16 of the Protocol actually encourages violent protests: “The British Government and the EU have now created an awful incentive for loyalist paramilitaries to demonstrate an equivalent level of threat. That incentive is not just implied, but actually written into Article 16 of the Protocol itself. There, it states that the UK or the EU can unilaterally suspend aspects of the Protocol’s operation if it is causing ‘serious economic, societal or environmental difficulties that are liable to persist’. That’s the political equivalent of a teacher telling a delinquent school pupil that they can only get out of a locked classroom by setting it alight.” Boris is turning the Nelsonian eye on this growing crisis.

MP Johnny Mercer has just resigned in protest at the UK Government’s breach of its promise to stop investigating and prosecuting UK veteran soldiers of the Troubles, while pardoning IRA killers, saying that Boris lacks the “moral strength and courage” to keep the Government promise. The Telegraph reports: “Johnny Mercer, the sacked Defence Minister, has accused Boris Johnson of surrounding himself with ‘cowards’ and ‘desperately weak’ advisers who had ‘betrayed’ veterans of the Northern Ireland conflict.” Boris does seem to need the approval of his peers in Whitehall across all policy areas and is a great appeaser.

Boris caved in to the EU, to the civil servants of the MoD, to the ludicrous HS2 bonanza for foreign constructors, to Hinkley Point nuclear power station and its huge gift to French industry, to the death-dealing Smart Motorway construction, to the BBC licence fee… in fact he caves in everywhere, at the expense of ordinary people on behalf of massive corporations. The Guardian sees Boris as a clown who gets away with it thus far, Tom Newton-Dunn says he is political chameleon now morphing into a Blairite. And let’s not forget the all-powerful Carrie in the Sultan’s tent, who switched him to being an eco-extremist overnight.

But Rod Humphris’s well-reasoned protest at the ongoing repression is, hopefully, a straw in the wind. This capricious, unparliamentary governance, deeply anti-democratic, has to stop. The “data” compels this now. Lockdowning must be ended. We the people must be trusted again with our own lives, our health and that of our families, not Big Brother.