First they came for Tommy Robinson. Then they came for Brexit activists. And then they came for doctors and nurses at anti-lockdown rallies. Who will be next, in the tightening ratchet on British liberties? There was no outcry by politicians about the police brutality at Trafalgar Square on 26th September, just as in 2018 little concern was expressed about the summary imprisonment of Tommy Robinson (later ruled unlawful) or the imprisonment of Amy Dalla Mura for giving MP Anna Soubry a piece of her mind.
The government response to the Covid-19 pandemic has exposed a fault line in the character of those who represent us in the House of Commons. This is a divide that cuts across political parties. Sitting on or behind the government and opposition front benches are the ‘we know best’ puritans, a political class in moated detachment. Occupying the benches furthest from the Speaker are representatives grounded in the common sense and social norms of their constituents.
Cavaliers, by nature, throw caution to the wind. They want us to get on with our lives and to fear the coronavirus no more than seasonal flu. The puritans consider every death as avoidable, and perhaps in fear of being blamed themselves, point a finger at reckless citizens who fail to follow a cascade of national and local rules. The former have learned to expect little reward, but stick to their principles. The latter have more power and influence, because they are the virtuous type that gets promoted – whether in politics or any organisation.
There is no chance of a ministerial position for Sir Desmond Swayne, and let us be thankful for that. Sir Des made headlines last week with his broadside on the slavish bowing of Boris Johnson to scaremongering chief scientific advisors. The prime minister ‘has been abducted by Doctor Strangelove and reprogrammed by SAGE’, he observed. ‘I will not make myself popular for saying this’ but Vallance and Whitty ‘should be sacked’.
The New Forest MP has form in standing up for the freedom of citizens. He was the only one who raised alarm over the instant jailing of an ‘enemy of the state’ in 2018, challenging ministers on whether they ‘understand the level of public unease in to which Tommy Robinson tapped’ on grooming gangs and official silence.
Another example of straight talking is Philip Davies, the Yorkshireman who has trenchantly fought the creep of subversive feminism and its divisive notions of toxic masculinity and patriarchy. Davies criticises the Covid regime as a dream come true for the Nanny State, with arbitrary rules that destroy livelihood. The majority of parliamentarians, sadly, are killjoys who regard the coronavirus as too good a crisis to waste. Pub curfews are the merely the thin end of the wedge.
The Liberal Democrats, a party whose title has persistently breached the Trades Description Act, are poor advocates of liberty. Yet all eleven of them voted against the Coronavirus Act last week, and Daisy Cooper, MP for St Albans, savaged the government for its 10pm pub curfew.
Facing these irritating questions is health secretary Matt Hancock, who seems to be relishing his puritanical role. He responded to reasonable concerns expressed by a Slough MP with a stroppy ‘I will not have this divisiveness’, refusing to answer the question or to even to look at the source.
Hauptkapitan Hancock has history. As culture secretary in 2018 he proposed censorial controls on social media, pledging to make Britain ‘the safest place in the world’ for using the internet. Tech companies would be required to quickly remove any abusive messages. As so much of our life is on social media we are prone to the totalitarian urges of governments, whose unholy alliance with Big Tech is a serious threat to free speech and democracy. If he had his way, Hancock would bring in China’s social credit system overnight.
The vote on the coronavirus law showed that Hancock is generally supported in the house. However, some on the Labour side think that he is not going far enough. A staffer for Clive Lewis, an enthusiastic lockdowner, replied tersely to an e-mail imploring his vote against restrictions: ‘I ask that you do not contact our office again’. Lockdown sceptics must be dismissed as dangerous conspiracy theorists and, as though they were terrorists, denied the oxygen of publicity.
The Covid regime is an opportunistic power-grab by politicians who have settled into a master-and-servant relationship with the people who they supposedly represent. From the dark days of Brexit subterfuge, I have a transcript (16th January 2019) of the government’s call to assure corporate business leaders that Britain would be leaving the EU in name only, despite the clear referendum result. Chief undertaker Philip Hammond, flanked by Stephen Barclay and Greg Clark, chose their words carefully but the message was clear: we will seek the least disruptive withdrawal so that your profits and cheap labour supply are unaffected.
This would have been Brexit in name only. But as we have seen with the contrived Covid crisis, disenfranchisement is now the rule. We are now on a seemingly irreversible road to serfdom. Resistance, belatedly, is emerging, with some pubs banning all MPs from their premises until they rescind the absurd curfew (although Daisy and Des should be exempt). More rallies are planned, despite politicians demanding that we stay in our homes. Pitchforks at the ready, for the peasants’ revolt!
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Dear Richard.
I should have made the point that, despite Julia Hartley-Brewer’s machine-gun delivery, she is not a slave propagandist for the lefty establishment as for Mike Graham too. However, it’s their invited guest commentators such as Ian Duncan-Smith, Peter Hitchens, Nigel Farage, and others who provide authoritative opinions on subjects that are considered settled by the government and the BBC that makes listening to the station for the otherwise silenced alternative viewpoint worthwhile.
Dear Richard.
I can’t disagree with your comment and a good analogy to Ts. & Cs. It’s a style imported from the U.S. and makes listening difficult
Dear Harry.
Yes, it’s no wonder that so many who aren’t gulled by such stories are turning away from main-stream media. The torrent of false accusations and bile aimed at Donald Trump via the media and shadowy-funded activists is reminiscent of the red-guard in Mao’s China who drowned out all opposition with loud repetitious propaganda and physical intimidation.
Dear Michelle.
I echo your comment wholeheartedly. So many people in Britain today have become, and are now encouraged, to be self-righteous guardians for petty rules becoming human equivalents to the surveillance cameras that blight our lives. The trend to find ever-more ways to micro-manage all aspects of our lives, including what we think and say, is turning western society into a variant of communist China. How long before Britain has ‘re-education’ centres instead of fines or prison for those whose thoughts on race and gender are not acceptable. We already have a model in the ‘speed awareness course’ to avoid ‘points’ on a driving licence. The rot began when having any designated implement in your home to defend yourself in the event of a violent burglary confrontation meant a prosecution and a likely prison sentence for the home-owner and a possible successful injury claim by the burglar.
Dear Derek -yes, and see the overnight news from the USA.
The FBI has rounded up a gang that was “plotting to kidnap” the governor of Michigan -who happens to be a marxist-inspired politician.
The plotters/kidnappers are being portrayed by the media and the Deep Staters
in the US Dept of Justice, of which the FBI is part, as right-wing Trump supporters.
Naturally.
But eagle-eyed good people have already rumbled these “plotters” as bad people:
The “plotters/kidnappers” are actually aligned with marxist-inspired/BLM/Antifa alliance and are anti-police/anti-government activists.
They are not Trump supporters.
Such is the situation.
The Deep State, as it is known in the USA, is anti-Westernist and will say and do anything to halt the pro-Western counter-revolution that is embodied in Trump.
Dear Harry. Yes, we need to box clever and counteract the ‘Nazi’ slurs and smears aimed at respectable and honourable conservatives by never missing an opportunity to make analogies to their ‘politically correct’ policies with the brutally enforced conformity suffered for seventy years in Eastern Europe under home-grown socialists along with fusillades of Cuban and Venezuelan ‘social success’ stories. Julia Hartly-Brewer and Mike Graham on ‘Talk Radio’ are among the forceful voices of ‘fightback’ with invited important conservative-minded guests commentators who the BBC shun.
I have stopped listening to Hartley-Brewer. Not because I know from listening to her on programmes such as Question Time that she generally speaks truth and good sense. No, I cannot listen to her on TalkRadio because she speaks so quickly, often leaving out the last word or two of a sentence in a breathless gabble that I cannot understand the detail of. Can the Producer ask her to speak and annunciate better. She often sounds as if she is reading out the T & Cs at the end of a radio advert. Or is it my fault?
Dear Harry. Your call ‘to the front’ to overcome the liberal-left’s control of Britain is a passionate one for which I concur but I liken the situation to Nazi occupied France in which there was no ‘front’ to fight at and only the Maquis to ineffectively snipe at their foes. Liberation from the Nazis – both German and French – came not from within but from an external gigantic force in June 1944. We have no liberating external force for our salvation so, as you have previously commented, ‘we are well and truly sunk’.
Dear Derek -yes I agree, no external saviour will or can help us now.
Softly, softly, over the decades, acting wisely in all ways, a couple million of us could do it.
Must minimise activities that will draw the attention of the Nazis -must act in smart ways.
Unflinching determination, no naive idealism -use all methods and means to keep the enemy ignorant of our activities and apply fail-safe counter-measures if/when we are rumbled.
This sort of thing.
And along the way, they destroyed the methods by which earlier generations of Britons and other Westerners had been taught/educated to engage with and assess their environments and by which they could make quite good decisions about what to do in response to threats and opportunities.
Yes, they did away with literacy and numeracy -the underpinnings of empiricism and logic.
And so when the plague came, they were able to claim that the number of deaths due to the plague were anything they declared them to be.
They conflated “deaths by plague” with deaths by effects of flu, pneumonia, diabetes, clogged blood vessels, and due to the breakdown of organs subject to a wide variety of diseases and naturally occurring old age.
And the superstitions they deployed against the so-called plague resulted in deaths and misery due to many other kinds of diseases, physical and emotional, that were not detected and/or not treated during the Great Plague Panic-Hysteria.
They had also achieved similar results by way of the anti-empirical Great Human-Caused Climate Scam and the marxist-inpired destruction of the organising capabilities of the entire civil services, including the immigration/refugee system and the criminal justice system.
They supported all of this by spending vast resources created by the striving middle-classes to fund education systems and the BBC to propagandise the plain folk into accepting just about all restrictions on the freedom of thought and freedom of movement -except for people’s need to drink alcohol, or take other recreational drugs, to excess in public and private places and/or wreck public and private property.
Oh, and to transfer social and political power from whites to blacks, browns, Muslims from everywhere, and agents of the Chinese Communist Party which controls China which has a massive job of feeding, keeping occupied and thereby controlling its own 1.4Bn people who create more carbon-dioxide than just about any other group except for the 1.3Bn who do so in India.
Attention Britons! Attention all Westerners!
If you do not like this, and want to help save Western Civ, it is time to volunteer for the front.
Talking amongst ourselves about how bad it all is will not be a decisive or sufficient factor in saving ourselves.
Yes, the time for talk is over. We the people will be judged in history by our actions (or lack of ).
Yes, Niall -and by “the front” I mean precincts where forces can quietly and unseen both by enemies and by those naive idealists who’d dob us in.
…can act…
Absolutely Harry Black. You’ve laid out fully what’s going on.
Yesterday I heard that millions more will be spent on this flu fiasco.
Worryingly, money for councils to employ ‘covid marshalls’.
This coming the day after I’d comforted a poor old lady on her zimmer frame who didn’t want to go into a shop because she’d been given a hard time by one woman for not wearing a mask.
Heaven help us when these sort get an official badge and pay packet.
Dear Harry.
I must agree with your sage comments on the BBC and the civil service both of which are completely infiltrated by ‘melons’ (green on the outside and red inside) from the long-march begun in the 1960s and completed by the Blair creature. So, as you say ‘well and truly sunk’! In 1963, an Arab prince at the LSE who ardently pursued my wife-to-be (she outshone me in intelligence, bravery, and compassion for others) told her that Britain has always avoided revolution by lifting the lid on the boiling kettle just enough to prevent an explosion. He may well have been right as there is no mass-movement fired-up enough to resist the green/Marxist dominance we now must suffer and the nearest we got to resistance was the orderly referendum vote on E.U. membership. For any problems that mass-ownership of guns in the U.S. might cause, it’s a price well worth paying for, among other liberties, that precious (and oft mis-quoted as ‘bogus’ by anti-gun zealots) ‘a well regulated militia’ of the citizenry (government controls the army and police) as a deterrent against a despot from taking over the country. I don’t generally approve of assassinations but who would seriously not have wished that Hitler, Lenin, Stalin, Mao, and Pol Pot had died at the hands of an assassin? When you ban guns, only the police and criminals have guns. Cowardly English hypocrites celebrate the political/military plotters who conspired to murder Hitler in his ‘Wolf’s Lair’ with a bomb but are disdainful of the disarmed and powerless German people for not resisting the Nazis at the height of their power.
Dear Derek,
Again, you make strong, valid points, make interesting observations, and thereby pose important questions.
My respect to you.
All best, Harry.
Dear Niall,
You write with great perspicacity, the Western establishment seems to have declared war upon its own people.
In all the oppressive attacks by ‘them’ upon ‘us’, There is another factor to be considered, in the response of a percentage of those infected by the virus, and it is this, difficult to measure surely but important:
Henry Marsh (the neurosurgeon) talks about the nocebo effect in one of his books, he says that he has never found evidence of mechanical/physical damage in any of the cases of ‘whiplash’ that he has looked at. However, he is also sure that the pain and debilitating effects that those referred to him with whiplash feel, are real, or at least real in the way the patient perceives them.
This apparent reality is reinforced, by the fact that insurance companies, and the legal system take such ‘injuries’ seriously enough to pay large sums of money to those involved in such motor accidents, and some patients will even pay privately for surgery, thus reinforcing (with scar tissue and stitches) the reality of the ‘damage’ they perceive they have experienced.
Therefore, in the case of a virus to which the reaction of nearly all the world’s powerful bodies has been extreme and out of proportion to the threat, a large percentage of people have been made to feel troubled, and fearful to a degree that has little relationship to the risk they personally face.
They have been also encouraged to feel guilty for trying to live a normal life (since they will, in some strange theoretical way, be putting ‘others’ at risk, by so doing).
Is it not possible that such an induced mental state will both reduce a person’s immune system, thus making the effects of any viral infection more severe, and in addition will not the nocebo effect be (at least in a percentage of patients) extremely powerful, creating, and exaggerating symptoms? Of course, these symptoms will be real in every aspect to the patient, but will have been created by the patient’s own mind. What the ancients might have termed ‘the evil eye’.
R
Fair comment . I suppose what I meant is that freedom of speech must be defended even when it is exercised by those with whom I disagree. That I consider Marxism etc to be mad is another issue.
This reply was to Guessed Worker
Dear Harry.
I wish what you say could be achieved but the Conservative Party has, for many years, conducted the selection of candidates from central office that excludes any possibility of a local ‘grass-roots’ candidate who might not follow slavishly the party line on every issue. The constituency workers simply fear a Labour Party or Liberal-anti-democrat win and so, like worker ants, continue to toil away for those who see them as an expendable asset. One glimmer of hope faded this morning on reading in the Mail on Sunday that Charles Moore has declared that he will not put himself up as a candidate for BBC chairman.
Dear Derek,
Yes, I understand -the re-making of the Conservative party requires deep and wide-spread efforts at re-construction.
The work of the several million plain-folk volunteers will be greater and more ardous than simply labouring at branch level.
Now, if there is no such re-construction, we will advance ever-further into The Abyss.
In prospect, that’s all there is.
Separately, but obviously related:
My view is the BBC cannot be reformed by appointment of a non_leftist/non-greenist chairman -or even by the the appointment of a dozen senior admin people who are anti-marxist/anti-greenist.
The BBC’s culture, as is the culture of entire civil services -including the education and criminal courts systems- is thoroughly dominated by marxist-greenist group-think.
For the BBC, the only thing to do would be to take 50% of the its annual budget and 50% of its assets and re-allocate to a new multi-media platform that is constituted and managed to be anti-marxist and anti-greenist.
And that awaits an anti-marxist/anti-greenist government with the will to see it through.
So, with no reformed Conservative Party working under the close supervision of millions of anti-marxist/anti-greenist citizens, it looks like we are well and truly sunk, I’d say.
All best, Harry.
Dear Harry.
‘The people’ are powerless without someone in a position of power to represent their collective wishes. The unexpected referendum result on E.U. membership left the establishment dumbfounded and resentful with no political party with any power having the slightest intention of bucking the current hegemony of the liberal-left that now has absolute power via the two-party ‘first past the post’ system by capturing both the main parties. The French, having suffered defeat and occupation are more jealous in protecting their national status and culture and are determined to maintain it unlike Britain that has succumbed to the old maxim – ‘no good turn goes unpunished’. The Conservative Party has embraced a Marxist inspired model for society and struggles to maintain a bloated bureaucratic welfare program designed in the 1940s by selling off the country and its legacy bit by bit. Unless a political party has the strength and support to throw off the hated ‘European Convention of Human Rights’ scam and end the worship of the N.H.S. with a rationalisation of medical care and its costs accepted, the general downturn in the quality of public life in all areas in Britain will continue to erode any will to restore a culture of self-reliance and confidence that made Britain a force for good in the world.
Dear Derek,
Yes, I agree -your points are true and good.
My view is this:
That to save Britain, and to save all of the West, it is best to start by acting strongly to make the existing democratic systems work as they must.
The evidence is that no new political party can gain government -the task is too big.
Must use the nation-wide infrastructure of an existing political party.
For Britain, that’s the Conservative Party.
Several million people, perhaps as many as 20% of proper citizens, must join local branches of the party and do the necessary to push and shove the local good/right forces -branch office-holders, candidates for office, media platforms, and big donors- in the right direction, and support them in detail.
This requires these millions of plain folk to be prepared to spend/sacrifice their own time and their money in the campaign -for perhaps 10 hours per week, every week, for all their live-long days.
I’m open to other ideas.
But that’s the way I see it for now.
Spectator democracy does not deliver a safe and secure civil order, or effective and necessary borders, or economic/material prosperity.
As we see.
Adults are presumably entitled to risk catching the virus themselves by not wearing masks but they are not entitled to risk spreading it to others.
Meanwhile, Macron yesterday delivered a very public speech in which he said that Islam is in crisis all over the world, and his government will work to halt foreign funding of French mosques and other Islamic entities in France.
He said that his government seeks to stop “Islamic separatism” within France.
Now that’s an act of good government -very, very good.
Meanwhile, Germany is on hiding to nothing -on many fronts.
In the coming re-arrangement of the West in general and Europe in particular, I’m with those who say that France will emerge in far superior shape to that of Germany.
Germany eh.
Time and again, to say the obvious, Germany has mis-read its situation and consequently acted badly and thereby caused massive pain for its own people and for many other people too.
Perhaps the UK, or perhaps just England, will smarten up and save itself.
Or perhaps not.
All depends on the plain people, not the politicians.
The plain people must volunteer for front-line service and be willing to sacrifice their own time and their money to save the nation.
The politicians will not lead in this matter.
The natives are revolting!
To paraphrase Bertolt Brecht: the people have failed the government, we must dissolve the people and elect another. Sadly, unlike the East Germans, most English appear now to support their enslavement with willing snitches to denounce face-nappy dissidents. .
If the “least disruptive withdrawal” were “Brexit in name only” then it would not be a withdrawal,
I wish they would come for the marxists and the greenists and the anti-hetrosexualists and the anti-nuclear family people and the many and various anti-empiricists who now control the details of our daily lives.
If they come for the loonies that you mention, they might come for me next . Or you.
Very true Ray Hall.
At that point, we must fight.
That’s what I believe.
So, Ray, don’t use the Establishment’s dehumanising language of dissenters who are striving often at great cost to themselves, to protect our people’s life and freedom.
“when tyranny becomes law, rebellion becomes duty” Thomas Jefferson