The writer is in Australia.
ONE of the great lines in A Man For All Seasons is uttered, unsurprisingly, by Saint Thomas More. It is addressed Sir Richard Rich, who sold out More for a job and whose testimony helped to nail the martyr. More says: ‘For Wales? Why Richard, it profit a man nothing to give his soul for the whole world . . . but for Wales!’
The guy who runs Wales these days is called Mark Drakeford. He is a Labour man. He recently declined to hold an inquiry into Wales’s draconian Covid policies which were similar to those of Nicola Sturgeon in Scotland and Daniel Andrews in Victoria, and considerably less liberal than those of England next door. His reason? That the world had ‘moved on from Covid’.
Readers here will be familiar with the theories of the issue attention cycle promoted by the late Anthony Downs. Every political issue has a natural life, and few last for ever. Voters ‘move on’ to other things.
Drakeford certainly seems to be an adherent of Downs’s theory. In seeking to avoid scrutiny for his administration’s egregious Covid policies, he is banking on voters thinking that Covid is now ho-hum. Appallingly, he seems to believe that heinous acts by the State can simply be swept under the carpet once people have stopped thinking about them. The people of Wales, if they care what has happened to them at Drakeford’s hands, might want to make a bit of noise about this. Drakeford is no President Harry Truman, who realised where the buck stopped. Ministerial responsibility can be so annoying.
Sometimes there is a good reason for ‘moving on’. If George W Bush has simply ‘moved on’ from 9/11, we might have been spared the catastrophes of Iraq and Afghanistan, and the world would be a far better place for that.
Covid is not one of those cases.
Why not? Well, there is the horror (and stupidity) of the policies that were visited upon us. Some things should simply never be forgiven in politics, if not in life, where forgiveness is a blessing for all those who give and who receive it. Then there is the fact that the Covid policy overhang remains. For those who lost their jobs and careers and businesses through vaccine mandates, and who are yet to be compensated for that loss. For the families of those, including children, who committed suicide during lockdowns. For those killed or disabled by the clot-shot and their families. For those who missed years of school or university, the former who may never recover educationally and the latter still paying for the dubious privilege of online learning (an oxymoron if ever there was one). For those who rightly fear the policy responses to the next fake (or even real) pandemic. For those not permitted to say goodbye to their dying loved ones. For those not allowed to leave their country (like me). For those who now live with the real fears engendered by the use of Covid-style policies and tools in other areas of life. Think contact-tracing technology, digital passports, facial recognition, further alarming and intrusive state surveillance, control of our lives by central bankers. And the rest.
Oh no, the culprits have to pay.
Otherwise, it will all happen again. Covid is both over and not over. And we-the-people pay twice over. We are left with politicians who have now the tools of oppression and are likely to have got away with it. They and their corporate, Big Pharma, Big Tech and media Covid cronies. Thugs and bullies all. And all involved in the great psyop of 2020.
It is not beyond the wit of politicians to help the process of moving the world along. They are experts at ‘look over there’. There has been a range of distractive approaches by governments to the cause of helping voters ‘move on’ since the start of 2022 and the waning of the virus. In Australia we have had the floods and now a change of government, placing a barrier between Covid and post-Covid. Globally, we have a likely depression, rampant inflation, a war with potentially nuclear consequences, an energy crisis, a food crisis, a new government in the UK and a faltering presidency (to put it kindly) in America. Not a bad list, as distractions go. Never mind that a number of these new issues are the direct result of the Covid policy fiasco. That doesn’t matter to politicians bent on cover-ups.
Ironically, Drakeford’s gaffe occurred just before a senior Pfizer executive admitted (under oath, which always helps) before a committee of the European Parliament that they never even tested for whether the vaccines stopped transmission of the virus.
In response, Rob Roos, a Dutch MEP and Covid truth-seeker, stated abruptly: ‘“Get vaccinated for others” was always a lie.’
The new Premier of Alberta, Canada, Danielle Smith, is similarly unimpressed: ‘The community that faced the most restrictions on their freedoms in the last year were those who made a choice not to be vaccinated. I don’t think I’ve ever experienced a situation in my lifetime where a person was fired from their job or not allowed to watch their kids play hockey or not allowed to go visit a loved one in long term care or hospital are not allowed to go get on a plane to either go across the country to see family or even travel across the border . . . And I want people to know that I find that unacceptable. We are not going to create a segregated society on the basis of a medical choice.’
Naturally, the Canadian establishment got stuck right in. The Covid State will not give up without a fight. A fight to protect their sorry butts and to avoid jail-time. They believe that the issue attention cycle of Anthony Downs is their friend.
Astonishingly, Google placed this statement atop its search engine in relation to the Janine Small testimony:
‘It looks like the results below are changing quickly. If this topic is new, it can sometimes take time for reliable sources to publish information. Check the source: Are they trusted on this topic?
‘Come back later. Other sources might have more information on this topic in a few hours or days.’
Wow! They are really scared by this development. And the case for not moving on just got a lot more compelling. Someone had better tell Mr Drakeford. He is the Welsh emperor without a stitch on. As is anyone else in power, elected or otherwise, who is determined to avoid his or her own Nuremberg Two.
