When he
announced his new, repressive measures aimed at frightening us into submission,
Boris Johnson thanked the first ministers of Scotland, Wales and Northern
Ireland for their ‘collaboration’.
This is a
significant word. ‘Collaborator’ has an infamous ring to it. Mostly it brings
to mind Vichy France and the Governments of other countries willing to work
with the Nazis during World War Two.
And I
suspect, without meaning to, Boris Johnson was subliminally thinking of Nazi
totalitarianism when he imposed his latest nationwide lockdown, promising
bigger fines for misdemeanours and threatening to call in the army to police
the streets.
It won’t be
long before your average shopping centre looks like Belfast in the 1970s with
armoured cars on street corners and soldiers toting machine guns glaring with
hostility at every passer-by (not to mention probably shooting on the spot
anyone who dares to chat with an acquaintance let alone fails to wear a face
mask).
To what
purpose this novel coronavirus clampdown? To save us from ourselves, of course.
We’ve been eating out to help out; we’ve been down the pub; we’ve even taken a
brief holiday, probably in this country and certainly after self-isolating
before, during and afterwards.
But it seems
the supposed ‘rule of six’ imposed only a week ago was, within days, apparently
‘not working’, at least according to the demented statistic-peddlers Boris put
before the nation to scare the children.
Chris Whitty
and his sidekick Sir Patrick Vallance, the Tweedledee and Tweedledum of the
coronavirus pandemic, displayed a bogus graph claiming that, without drastic
action, the spread of the virus would double every seven days. By mid-October,
the total would reach 50,000, they claimed.
They did
admit this graph and its scary number was ‘not a prediction’. But it was
misleading, dangerous and irresponsible for them to concentrate on a
nonsensical statistic which, if we were to give them any credit, could be seen
as a ‘worst-case scenario’.
Sadly,
throughout this pandemic, the first casualty has been the truth. Nobody is
prepared to admit they really do not know what might happen in any given
situation. They bandy about numbers like the 50,000 - or, more terrifying
still, the 500,000 originally doomed to die unless lockdown was imposed in
March - without real evidence to support their claims.
Yet the
health doom-mongers and their captive politicians, led by Mr Johnson who is
half the man he used to be, are allowed to run wild.
They have
been so successful in terrifying us all that, in some polls at least, a
majority of the population even now thinks the Government has not gone far enough
in protecting us.
We have a
Government determined to sacrifice everything on the altar of the pandemic. The
economy is shot to pieces. Much of it will never recover. Shops, pubs, clubs,
restaurants, theatres, airlines, even football clubs - some of them will never
re-open. Any business or pastime where people get together and socialise is
doomed to decay and, in many cases, death.
Meanwhile
the National Health Service has abandoned the idea of caring for the nation’s
health. You can’t see a GP. You can’t get a flu jab if you’re under 65. You
daren’t bother A&E. You can’t get early warning of cancer or many other
fatal diseases.
Hideously,
you are now much more likely to die at home of some treatable but ignored
condition than you are to catch, let alone die from, coronavirus.
In one week
earlier this month, according to the Office for National Statistics, one of the
less untrustworthy sources of numbers, 99 people died of Covid-19 while a
needless 830 died at home of other causes.
The virus
panic, not the pandemic itself, is killing us and killing our economy and
hardly a voice is raised to question what’s going on let alone protest.
Take, as a
small example, the 10pm curfew on pubs. Even the Government itself admits there
is no evidence this will do any good, reduce the rate of infection or save a
single life. Yet we accept the decision with scarcely a murmur.
The
totalitarian imposition of what is almost martial law across the United Kingdom
- thanks to the ‘collaboration’ of the First Ministers - is taking place with
the supine, unquestioning acquiescence of our politicians.
The long
list of Government failings - from the shortage of PPE at the outset to the collapse
of the virus testing system under Dido Harding, the staggeringly inept wife of
a Tory MP who was at university with David Cameron - makes it impossible to
believe a word they tell us any more.
We cannot
believe what we are told. We watch with incredulity at the imposition of
curfews, house-arrest, swingeing fines and a new authoritarianism we have been
browbeaten into believing is for our own good.
We need
fewer collaborators. We must question every statement and assertion. We must
trust nobody in any position of power. They are lying to us.
