SEVERAL weeks ago I tweeted on how lockdowns and curfews are the stuff of police states.
Along with others I found it hard to understand that people were demanding ever more draconian measures.
The Conservative MP Lucy Allan wrote a supportive reply to me pointing out the limited impact of the virus on the majority of the population.
For her bravery in breaking rank with her government’s line she was savaged by packs of Twitter hyenas. Their responses were astonishing in their brutal hyperbole, accusing her of wanting to ‘kill granny’, shrieking about Long Covid and claiming that millions in Britain have died from the virus. Was it coincidental that most of them had the EU flag or FBPE (follow back, pro-EU) in their Twitter bios?
FBPE is the identity mark of the most extreme of Remainers, the fervent ‘Rejoiners’, many of whom are on the Left, who will never accept the Brexit result and appear incapable of criticising the EU – even after its latest hubristic attempt to erect a hard border in Ireland to block Britain from getting vaccines, an act that even Tony Blair criticised as foolish.
So is it the case that Rejoiners have now transferred their rage over Brexit on to anyone who dissents from the pro-lockdown narrative? Have they taken on lockdown as their new cause?
There are well known exceptions to this: examples of former Remainers aligning with lockdown sceptics, the most notable of which is Lord Sumption, the former senior judge who sat on the Supreme Court of the United Kingdom between 2012 and 2018. And then there are the ‘Borinistas’, who support all the Prime Minister’s devastating Covid-19 policies because of his achievement in ‘delivering’ Brexit.
Nonetheless Remainers who previously scorned the Brexit-supporting Tory government, even hysterically accusing Boris Johnson of staging a coup against democracy last summer, are now cheerleaders for his actual coup against the British people, and his authoritarian rule in the name of Covid-19.
How odd that after years of railing against the Tories these extreme Remainers now act as a propaganda arm for the government on social media and in the MSM, diverging only in demanding harsher lockdowns and crackdowns on dissenters.
The same people who raged against Brexiteers, derogatorily calling them racist, uneducated, old ‘gammons’, accusing them of robbing the young of their future, are suddenly very concerned about ‘killing granny’. No street protests on the present assault on their liberty by the government? No leading of youth rebellions? University students who were youth cheerleaders for the EU, thanks to their Remainer lecturers, have gone very quiet on lockdown.
Yet it’s lockdown policies, and not Brexit, which are destroying their economic livelihood and future job prospects.
For years Remainers accused Brexiteers of ruining their future ability to travel freely to, and work and study in, the rest of Europe. Yet current restrictions have abolished foreign travel and prevent freedom of movement. Their cognitive dissonance is astounding.
If Remain-supporting Marxist university lecturers, their hapless students, the chattering middle classes, Left-wing economists and ageing socialist journalists think they are ‘sticking it to the man’ by attacking lockdown sceptics, they are mistaken. They harboured a similar delusion for their support of that uber example of the prevailing Establishment – the EU.
They are curiously blind to that fact that the lockdowns they so devoutly champion enrich the ‘man’ they profess to hate, such as the vast capitalist enterprises of Amazon, Netflix and supermarket chains. They ignore the evidence that it is the working classes who are suffering the most from lockdown and curfews, their jobs obliterated.
Could it be that they are still furious with the working classes for voting for Brexit? Is this why they appear to care nothing for their suffering under lockdown?
The Leftie Remainer commentariat is trying hard to turn the lockdown debate into a Left versus Right clash: by smearing sceptics as ‘covid deniers‘ and ‘Right-wing’, using the same tactics they did with Brexit. In doing so they give the game away and expose themselves for what they are: lovers of big and authoritarian government, whether EU or Chinese Communist Party style. In fact it’s unsurprising that extremist Remainers have turned into lockdown zealots. Brexit was a threat to their hegemony and now lockdown scepticism is.
No wonder they are pushing for an even more extreme, authoritarian lockdown than the ones the Tories have imposed on us – given this unprecedented opportunity to create their socialist utopia. Thanks to this Tory shift to the left, these post-liberal Puritans are now free to come out and play.
By keeping a terrorised populace under house arrest and cracking down on free speech, and with Conservative MPs such as Neil O’Brien leading a witch hunt of those scientists and journalists countering the official government narrative, they are more than halfway there.
Brexiteers successfully pushed back against the slurs – uneducated, racist, old. They must do it again; and will, once they realise the contempt they are held in, and the lack of any concern about their economic interests and future welfare.
