We’re publishing another guest post by Charlotte Niemiec, a freelance journalist. This one is about the unseemly haste with which the Government raised National Insurance earlier this week and the flimsy rationale for doing so. How can the Government ask us to fund a financial shortfall in the NHS when it has wasted so many billions of taxpayers’ money through its mismanagement of the pandemic?
Earlier this week, the U.K. Government voted to increase national insurance contributions by 1.25% from April 2022 – a “fair and reasonable” amount that will raise £12 billion a year in extra funding for the health and social care sector, according to PM Boris Johnson. It is hardly unexpected.
I suspect many of us would willingly contribute what we could to the public purse in the face of a serious humanitarian crisis. Most stoically accept year-on-year rises that reflect inflation and population growth, especially when that money is invested in services we or those we love use now or will one day. We’re told the hike is a regrettable consequence of an unforeseen pandemic that has served to reveal cracks in the system, most notably a lack of resources in our ‘world-beating’ NHS. This should sound perfectly reasonable.
Why then, if Twitter is anything to judge by, do so many people on both sides of the political divide feel totally shafted? Perhaps it’s because we don’t have bottomless pockets and altruism only goes so far when we see our money being wasted. Forcing us to pay more to deal with a backlog that is a direct result of the government’s own poor decision-making feels like something of a cheek. The NHS needs extra funds primarily because it chose multiple, short-term, ineffective lockdown policies instead of strategies that safeguarded public health, the NHS and the economy in the long-term. Alternatives, such as the Great Barrington Declaration or the Swedish model, have always been available, but never considered.
We are to pay – again! – for the Government’s bungling ineptitude over the last 18 months, for the public funds it washed down the sink, enriching themselves and their friends while the rest of us feared for our jobs. The Government purchased PPE to the tune of £18 billion, much of which turned out to be unusable. Next it coughed up – by some estimates – £530 million for the temporary ‘Nightingale’ hospitals it never used because it hadn’t realised the NHS didn’t have the manpower to staff them. (They did, however, inspire arguably the most Orwellian image of the pandemic so far, although this may not be a real photograph.) Its next brainchild was the £22 billion barely-fit-for-purpose ‘test and trace’ system, which ‘pinged’ those who hadn’t left their homes for weeks while the phones of those in direct contact with infected individuals stayed silent. The PPE scandal and test and trace disaster together cost around £40 billion. It will take more than three years to claw this back under the new tax rate.
We can add to the tally the £12 billion spent on the first two doses of ‘vaccines’ with results that seem to be, at best, disappointing. In the final week of August last year, England saw 46 deaths attributed to Covid, with no vaccine available. In the same week this year, that figure is 391, with a vaccine. What has been achieved? The Government will now spend more money on vaccines that don’t appear to be very effective to jab those who are not at risk from the disease and reinject those whose six-month vaccine loyalty card is running out. The ongoing plan seems to be to repeat this strategy, ad nauseam, with an ever-mounting bill. Are we getting our money’s worth?
How will these extra funds be spent? Maybe on more ‘Equality, Diversity and Inclusion’ managers imploring white people to “be uncomfortable” in return for £50K salaries, while 13 million people wait for medical treatment. Perhaps it will be spent training and recruiting the estimated 190,000 new NHS workers we’ll need if the existing, fully-qualified-but-unvaccinated ones are forced to leave their jobs in the wake of the Government’s anticipated ‘No Jab, No Job’ policy. It could also be spent on the additional NHS workers we’ll need because of the shortfall we started with in the first place. The Government could scrap – or at the very least, defer – the ‘No Jab, No Job’ policy. But it probably won’t. Instead, it will choose to throw good money after bad.
Some of this cash, albeit allocated in name to the healthcare sector, could even be spent on the insidious ‘vaccine passports’ – the biggest threat to our civil liberties since the war, to go along with the biggest tax hike since the war – even though they have no medical justification.
Once again, those who have the least will lose the most. The higher tax will penalise the young, the working class and ethnic minorities, those who made the largest sacrifices to ‘protect’ their wealthier elders. They were the frontline workers, delivery drivers, rubbish collectors, shelf stackers. Many did not have the luxury of furlough but worked on regardless of any risk Covid posed them. Their reward is to be worse off – the Government will take from the poor and give to the rich.
And the rise coincides with a record 12% hike in energy prices that may very well see the elderly and vulnerable we sought to protect die of cold this winter. This, combined with ill-thought-through ‘net-zero’ schemes designed to make the PM look good on the international stage at COP26 in November – to ‘Build Back Better!’ – will see us only building backwards.
But most disturbing isn’t that the Conservative party has broken its manifesto commitments, or that hiking taxes goes against Tory principles (to such an extent that many in the tax-loving Labour party balked at endorsing the idea) or even that so few Tories voted against the rise. No – it’s that this vote took place with only 24 hours’ notice, under threat of a reshuffle. It is yet another example of the many changes Boris and his closest cronies have pushed through without proper scrutiny. In June, the Government even had the gall to send press releases to the papers outlining plans for the Covid roadmap before it told fellow MPs what information they contained. An apoplectic Speaker Hoyle found it “totally unacceptable that, once again, once again, we see Downing Street running roughshod over members of Parliament”. Hear, hear, Hoyle.
Contempt for the House is one thing, but the Government now looks set to disregard the advice of its own medical advisors and proceed with vaccinating 12-15 year-olds. In doing so, it can no longer be said to be “following the Science”. It is on a dangerous footing, climbing the first few rungs of a totalitarian ladder.
Who will guard the guards? We, the people, must protest, protest, protest this Government’s hubris before we wake to find our wallets empty, our rights permanently eroded and our liberties held hostage.
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Lab leak hypothesis a “wacky right-wing conspiracy theory”? Sorry, but that’s just not true. The founder of the Scottish branch of the Christian People’s Alliance (CPA) was a former Labour party member. The CPA (who also take a fairly “Campaign for Nuclear Disarmament Position” on nuclear weapons) have said from the start that it was a lab leak.
The People’s Republic of China may be communist, but not everyone who takes a different position from the CCP is right wing. (though whether the government, which has been far too close to China, is right wing or in any way conservative is another matter).
I would also argue that it’s never been a conspiracy theory either! Just because media paints some opinions as wacky conspiracies does not make them so. Plain old common sense wasn’t it? X
If covid really is something that leaked from a lab, it has behaved the same way as ordinary seasonal corona virus. The survival rate is extremely high – almost no one dies of it.
The real crisis is a political one. Ferguson admitted global governments copied the Chinese communist’s authoritarian rule – and they didn’t think they could get away with it until Italy locked down. An immeasurable number of people have died/will die because of lockdown, restrictions, fear, and being injected with gene therapy.
Everything the government and their co-conspirators have done and continue to do has resulted in death. Their chosen corona virus didn’t do that – the powers that be did that.
Giving oxygen to the theory this ordinary corona virus is a dangerous lab-creation only supports the hysteria that the government wants us to experience.
I agree it will turn out to be a distraction. It’s important to know the truth, and if there has been deception it may heighten people’s suspicions generally, but the most likely result is simply China-bashing and as you say more hysteria.
But China didn’t want to purposely release a dangerous virus that was akin to a chemical weapon? They were already doing gain of function research on similar coronaviruses for years. And from the papers they were doing so in labs that were biosecurity level 2/3 rather than 4. In the same city as the initial outbreak.
You only have to look at the global history of lab leaks to see how easily they happen.
Whatever has happened since then is by the by, follow the money, follow the power, follow the incompetence, it doesn’t matter, you’ll still never convince me that it was a naturally occurring virus.
“Guns as prizes in vaccine lottery”
If they win, they can play Russian roulette with them as well!
As demonstrated by the people of Israel, widely ignoring Covid Passports is the key to getting them scrapped if they get introduced. Let’s not let the introduction of health passports signal the end of the resistance.
Report in the Telegraph yesterday was that “vaxport” plans were to be scrapped. Health passports aren’t a done deal yet are they?
This just feels like a part of the game… constantly reeling us in and then letting out the line again…. part of the psy-op fear mongering followed by relief. I always doubted that the passports would come into effect or at least if they did, not for long. Folk will be cheering if they don’t just like they will be cheering when lockdowns are lifted…. ‘isn’t it wonderful that we are all free and clean!’ Job done…. 80% vaccinated…. easy to vaccinate with the follow ups! It does seem that the whole focus was only ever on getting folk vaccinated….ummmm wonder why!
They are working on an international standard instead.
Also, as a government IT project it would probably not have been on time anyway, and the contract no doubt had generous provisions for cancellation. Why complete a project when you can be paid for a cancelled one.
Yes they are concentrating on travel through an internationally recognised one. Its easier at this stage to produce national prisons than try to force it within each country. Slowly slowly catchee monkey.
“Ethical considerations concerning Covid-19 vaccinations”.
So there were 1,213 “vaccine” deaths reported by the yellow card system, with a suspicion that actual deaths from vaccines could be many more than that – 10 times, or even 100 times that number. So, PHE was quite happy last year to give the impression that anyone who died who had ever had a positive test result for Covid-19 was a Covid death, and still to this day report any death within 28 days of a positive test result as a “coronavirus death”. I call on the BBC and other media outlets to report all deaths within 28 days of a “vaccination” in the same way.
Of course, some of these deaths may be from causes other than “vaccination”, and likewise with “Covid” deaths. And there may be a case for believing that being “vaccinated” prevents transmission (although this is disputed). It is the duty of the media to set out the scientific arguments impartially, rather than acting as a propaganda arm of the pharmaceutical industry. Shame on them!
Media grossly overreports “covid death” statistics, magnifying their credibility in the public mind.
Media grossly underreports “covid vaccine death” statistics, diminishing their credibility in the public mind.
In that contradiction, the corruption of the media is revealed, as clear as day.
The TrialSite \News link ATL is well worth a look.
Very good summary of the vaccine effects.
Also the latest Hugo Talks https://hugotalks.com/2021/06/01/doctor-says-weve-made-a-big-mistake-with-vaccine-hugo-talks-lockdown/
Delaying club opening risks “gifting a huge slice of the country’s night economy to the black market for most, if not all, of the summer” ATL
That would be pretty good. The more society moves outside the law, the better, at this point. Raves have already been catalysts for anti-lockdown protest in France, and as protest increasingly obviously fails to change anything, they might mutate into catalysts for action instead. We need large-scale, grassroots disruption.
‘Lockdown kitsch’ genius. David McGrogan: legend.
‘Kitsch, says Kundera, causes two tears to flow, one after the other. “The first tear,” he tells us, “Says ‘How nice to see children running on the grass!’” But the second tear says, “How nice to be moved, together with all mankind, by children playing on the grass!” It is the second tear which elevates the moment to kitsch.’
‘….totalitarianism, Kundera tells us, is founded in kitsch. “When I say totalitarian,” he writes, “What I mean is that everything that infringes on kitsch must be banished for life: every display of individualism (because a deviation from the collective is a spit in the eye of the smiling brotherhood); every doubt (because anyone who starts doubting details will end by doubting life itself) [and] all irony (because in the realm of kitsch everything must be taken quite seriously.”
‘…there has unquestionably developed a kind of ‘lockdown kitsch’ since March 2020, in which people do not only care about Covid deaths out of their own compassion, but care all the more because of the awareness that others are all caring. They are sharing in collective emotion, and their feelings are made all the stronger because of it.’
‘….anyone who, like me, has sought to express doubt about the wisdom of all of this to friends, family and colleagues will vouch for the applicability of Kundera’s description: the sense that one is “spitting in the eye of the smiling brotherhood” is overwhelming.’
https://www.aier.org/article/lockdown-kitsch/
Nailed it! Priceless!
Should the next ‘lockdown sceptics’ competition now be nominations for the King and Queen of lockdown kitsch?
I hereby nominate Devi Sridhar as the Kitsch Queen of lockdown.
And the Kitsch King surely has to be Professor Pantsdown?
My nomination for Kitsch Queen goes to Dr. Samantha Batt-Rawden, for this tweet after the April demo in London.
I’ll be honest – she’s being directly dishonest.
as an ICU doctor – weaponising her profession, one tiny step from here to “you oppose lockdowns, I refuse to treat you”
this actually makes me want to cry – and I’ll do it in public and you can all join in and we can celebrate our kitsch hurt and kitsch outrage
A gut punch for NHS staff everywhere tonight – ooh, punching an NHS worker in the guts, that only adds to the beauty and horror of the scene I want you all to cry about
I’m gutted – soon this will be the only adjective people are allowed to use
#tootiredforthisshit – but not too tired to weep and wring her hands in public and tweet about it
More like Samantha Butt-Hurtin. Kitsch Queen suits her
Best thing I’ve read about this yet. I think it hits an extremely important nail on the head. (A personal side-note… I wonder if this is why I was immune to it all from the start. If anything, I care all the less if I am aware that others are all caring. I’m allergic to that kind of mass emotion.) Significant that the lesson comes to us from the much-maligned Kundera, who tried for decades to promote the reform of Czech communism, then finally admitted defeat and defected.
Zombies don’t care about sadlideaths out of their own compassion. They care because they think they might be the next covviecorpse.
I think that’s unfair. I think the article is insightful and balanced and reveals something important. I think it’s childish to just dismiss them all as zombies. They aren’t.
Yes I too thought this article gets to the heart of why its been so easy for the psyop to work. Years of conditioning has gone into this. Looking back the first time the UK exhibited such ‘kitsch’ was Diana’s funeral, people wanting to be seen to be so affected by the death of someone they only knew on a TV screen.
Having said that, all we could see was the media show of the thousands of flowers and folk milling around Kensington Palace. Easy to be conditioned into believing it’s the majority. How do the crowds numbers compare to the folk at home getting on with their daily lives? We have to constantly remind ourselves of the fact of media hype and simply portrayal of one single facet of society…. Not the masses.
Communitarianism has always been been the end game. “The Big Society” and “No One Left Behind” have been gradually braintrained into the unsuspecting public, to make them easier to control in the Great Reset. “I care about you, you care about me!” Individualism will be outlawed. You don’t count anymore, it’s all about the Greater or Common Good.
I don’t disagree with you – it was exceptionally weird.
But most royal events – particularly the usual preparations for divorce (marriage) evoke a similar sort of response. It wasn’t that new.
Television soaps do the same, and I’m sure others can extend the trail.
The clapping for the NHS thing was a perfect example of the totalitarian kitsch thing. My friend/neighbour described how fantastic the feeling was as all the people in our Close came out to clap. She used the word ‘wonderful’. She was also disapproving of me that I hadn’t joined in. ‘I didn’t see you out there clapping.’ No, and you never will, I said. Disapproval, almost shocked silence followed. I told her I thought it was mawkish and false. To be honest, I think that’s why we’re now more neighbour than friend.
Thankyou for highlighting the article.
I could not agree more.
‘Totalitarian kitsch’ is such a brilliant way of describing the whole ‘Diana moment/thank you NHS’ thing.
It is a madness of crowds. It is a virtue signal and it is a bit of a clique/political thing; self indulgent/absorbed, so quite complex and difficult to easily capture as a phenomenon but, for me, ‘totalitarian kitsch’ so exactly does capture it.
And once a subversive idea is explained, understood and ridiculed, it loses a great deal of its power to subvert, particularly, in this case, since it has been framed, with unerring accuracy, as ‘kitsch’.
Yes, I called out the Clapping as ‘virtue signalling’ to a long-standing, dear friend. The barrage of abuse I endured was beyond belief. Friendship destroyed.
Here’s another article that’s worth a read. An opinion piece on open discussion in science..
https://www.medpagetoday.com/blogs/vinay-prasad/92868
https://www.breitbart.com/europe/2021/06/01/vaccinate-the-whole-world-by-2022-says-boris-johnson/
This man’s ego knows no bounds.
‘If you look at what happened in the world in 2020, it was a terrible year for humanity and it was a terrible year for the international system.’ said Johnson. Out of 7.7billion, 3.5 million died WITH covid. For these people covid = money
What came first ‘vaccine’ or virus? Plus, those dying are the elderly from other diseases, not the unvaccinated.
Worth reading the article in RoundUp AND watching the video: https://www.washingtonexaminer.com/politics/key-figure-in-wuhan-research-thanked-fauci-for-downplaying-lab-leak-hypothesis . Note that a few minutes into the video the letter organised by Peter Daszak ridiculing the Wuhan lab leak theory is featured and includes a shot of the other signatories. Surely it is significant that infamous Christian Drosten is one. He is the guy responsible for the WHO advocating the use of PCR tests and not only that but his paper said to use cycles of 45 (rendering results over 97% – if not 100% false). Both these 2 guys and of course Fauci are intrically connected to the WHO.
I lost the number of times Julia Hartley-Brewer and Ian Duncan Smith celebrated the ‘vaccine’ and declared that it is proven to work (on the basis that a minority of those hospitalised in Bolton had been jabbed).
The covid psyops definitely extends to those who pretend to oppose this political crisis.
I know it seems odd, but I think it’s possible to question lockdowns and the coronapanic but believe in the vaccines. Vaccines are like an article of faith for the vast majority. Most people were jabbed at school or had their kids jabbed. It is deeply ingrained.
These aren’t vaccines in that sense.
They just ‘pop’ it in dont they, when actually, the unvaccinated are not dying either
They clearly haven’t read Paul Alexander’s letter ATL.
Is Asymptomatic Covid similar to an Air Guitar?
When I go into shops I wear an Asymptomatic Mask.
Me too and it works!
With Fascist Israel in mind, probably a jew’s harp.
Highly recommended exposition, including an examination of the actual nature of ‘Covid’ as a didease.
This article from 2008 is interesting, linked in the TrialSite piece above:
https://www.cidrap.umn.edu/news-perspective/2008/08/researchers-find-long-lived-immunity-1918-pandemic-virus
Immunity to the Spanish Flu found in people 90 years later. Quotes one Anthony Fauci, who said: recent studies have projected that immunity lasts several decades; the current study provides proof. “This is the mother of all immunological memory here”
Back to Mrs FP’s hometown this morning (Stourbridge).
First of all, I passed 2 “old Biddies”, all of about 60 ( your’s truly is 72) and heard 1st “Biddie” saying to 2nd “Biddie”: “We’re not out the woods yet and we won’t be for a long time yet”.
WHAT IS THE MATTER WITH THESE PEOPLE???, then whilst waiting outside Greggs,I saw a bloke pop in, slop a copious amount of gunk on his hands but never bought anything; I assume that he was a hand sanitizer “junkie”.
GOD SAVE US!!!!!
If you go into the wood today, you’re in for a nasty surprise,
If you go into the wood today, you will not believe your eyes,
For all the zombies that ever there was
Are in the wood today, because
They don’t know how to get their arses out of it.
Well said, Annie,(As always).
Disappointed in the Reverend Franklin’s ethical analysis. On the surface, an excellent wrap up, but not a word about the vaccines’ use of fetal tissue in development, testing, and ingredients. These are taken from living human fetuses. If your mind can encompass this horror, it takes little imagination to see where we are headed.