IT’S crazy. There are several anti-lockdown groups and many brilliantly outspoken critics of lockdown – scientists, businessmen, lawyers and commentators – out there. They include Lord Sumption, Peter Hitchens, Karol Sikora, Carl Heneghan, Luke Johnson, Toby Young and Simon Dolan, to name but a few.
Add to them the 70 MPs of the Covid Recovery Group, led by Graham Brady, Mark Harper and Steve Baker. And also the millions, some 30 per cent of the public, that successive polls show haven’t been roped into the Save Our NHS lockdown mantras.
Yet despite this evidence of potential dissent, the case against lockdown has had no traction politically – none. Despite the Daily Mail alone of the MSM taking up the cause.
Why? Because beyond following each other on Twitter, publishing and endorsing each other in a new online industry, there’s been no serious or adequately financed, co-ordinated opposition to the Government’s authoritarian diktats. Not that I can see, anyway.
Is it then surprising that however cogent – legally, scientifically and morally – their case is, that these disparate and fragmented groups and individuals have failed to change the conforming mainstream media’s reporting narrative?
Or that, eight months after Britain was turned to the dark side, they’ve failed to prevent a seemingly beleaguered Boris Johnson from entrenching himself in his bunker as the nation’s Big Brother, against whom there is no rising up?
Or, indeed, that we now find ourselves listening to the Prime Minister’s latest and (in true Orwellian style) ever-changing social rules, which he tells us we must endure in the name of this spectral disease through to next October? With every newspaper co-operatively giving its columns over to dutiful explanations of ‘what they mean’ to an already subjugated and compliant public.
Is it surprising that we watch helplessly as Covid-free normality recedes further across the horizon? Or to find that, in this period of restriction, our ‘liberty’ and economic activity is to be conditional on following whatever the latest set of arbitrary rules and / or compliance with vaccination or testing, is chosen for us?
This is indeed the fast track to fascism, as I wrote on Monday, as well to dole queues worse than the Eighties and maybe as bad as those of the Great Depression of the 1930s, hidden though they may be in the digital world of online Universal Credit payments.
So how a newspaper such as the Telegraph can still report the PM’s edicts at face value, rather than as the truly terrifying trashing of our economy, liberty and human values they mean, is hard to understand.
It says a lot about the ‘chumocracy’ media coterie that outlets such as the Spectator think they can joke around with headlines like ‘Floods of tiers’ on Monday, when the devastation of whole industries and communities is at stake.
I can only think that they don’t rate the chances of those of us opposing this insanity, and that keeping in with the Government matters more than independent, critical and investigative reporting and positioning.
With an almost entire political, media and business / trade union establishment on the side of lockdown, it is not surprising that the Government has been able to ride roughshod over any objections and take in so many people. Though it is the ‘small’ people who will go to the wall.
And this is my fear – that unless the various and disparate critics of lockdown policies come together on a non partisan basis, independent-minded British people will be locked out forever, their rights relinquished and their freedoms traded for a spurious reward of return to economic and social normality. Which, of course, won’t be normal, but one based on dramatically scaled back aspirations and compliance with unprecedented regulation of our private and public lives.
Yet the response from readers of The Conservative Woman, from the thousands of followers of columnists such as Peter Hitchens, Allison Pearson, James Delingpole and our own Laura Perrins, shows how many see lockdowns, far from being in the nation’s interests, as exactly the opposite.
The frustration of these potentially powerful objectors is palpable. They see their genuine protests clamped down on by the police, or discredited in the MSM. They have no one organisation where they can rally and combine to make their voices effectively heard.
This is why it is time to unite. Groups such as Time for Recovery, Keep Britain Free, The Covid Recovery Group, the new Reform UK and Reclaim Parties, websites such as Lockdown Sceptics, New Culture Forum, The Conservative Woman and many others all need to come together publicly along with the scientists and signatories of the Great Barrington Declaration, businessmen such as Ewen Stewart, Luke Johnson and Rocco Forte, leading journalists and commentators from the left and right, in a new Alliance Against Lockdown. It cannot be nameless and faceless, but a veritable congress of names from all walks of life and political stances. That is my challenge. No ego should be too big to join, or too big not to put the country first.
Its manifesto would explain first and foremost why lockdown was, and is, a disproportionate response to the Covid virus. It would further explain:
1. How the public have been frightened and misled into supporting lockdown in the deliberate fostering of a climate of fear and hysteria (as set out by Lord Sumption) about a disease that turns out to be of limited risk and a remarkably low Infection Mortality Ratio.
2. Why the populist ‘Save our NHS’ Covid priority policy was misjudged and mismanaged, leaving millions of patients untreated and at risk of illness and death from all other conditions and diseases.
3. That the SAGE (Scientific Advisory Group for Emergencies) ‘science’ the Government has used to justify its lockdown policies is provenly unsound, as senior and distinguished scientists, academics and medics have confirmed and the facts of which Lockdown Sceptics continues brilliantly to expose, interrogate and report.
4. How lockdown ‘control’ of the virus has proved ineffective – that countries not resorting to lockdown have escaped collateral damage to their economies, health and welfare, and to the education of their children.
5. How the elderly, who lockdown was primarily meant to protect, have instead been harmed and abused by it.
6. That the impoverishing costs of lockdown to the population and country are underestimated at our peril, economically as here and here, and healthwise, as here, and here.
7. How the emergency powers imposed by the Government – authorised by ministerial decree – endanger our democracy and why these drastic measures are rightly disputed by Simon Dolan’s Keep Britain Free campaign, which continues to pursue their judicial review.
8. Why testing and vaccination should never be made either conditional or mandatory as a requirement for basic freedoms.
9. Why, finally, all Government policies related to Covid-19 must be subject to intense scrutiny and that none should be accepted without full examination of alternative medical and scientific evidence, or without being subject to the most rigorous cost-benefit and collateral damage analysis.
Before it is too late, now is the time to reveal that the emperor has no clothes – that it is lockdown, not Covid, that is the existential threat we face.
SOS, any philanthropists who care about our country.
