10 August 2020 12:51 PM
08 August 2020 10:00 PM
PETER HITCHENS: Should the woman who said the IRA had a right to kill children really be a Baroness?
This is Peter Hitchens’s Mail on Sunday column
I once applied to be a peer. This was not because I wanted to be known as Baron Hitchens, but because I thought it might be possible to do some good in the House of Lords, where the brutal and rigid party machines do not bully members into line the way they do in the Commons.
The Government of the day said it would appoint a small number of ‘People’s Peers’, the sort of people who might not normally get in.
I filled in a long form explaining my virtues. Silence fell, and many months later I read in the papers that Elspeth Howe, wife of the former Cabinet Minister Geoffrey Howe, had been chosen.
I’d actually assumed she was already a Baroness, since she was exactly the kind of great and good soppy liberal person who normally does get ennobled, or was in those days. So I laughed, and told myself not to be so silly in future.
Since then the Upper House has got worse and worse. There are quite a lot of people there now who are so dim and unqualified that it defies belief. And I have for some time thought the moment had come to abolish the whole thing.
But then came the Prime Minister’s latest list of new peers. There are some reasonable people on it, though if I were Mr Johnson I’d have hesitated before elevating my own brother to the peerage. It just doesn’t look good, from any direction.
But the really strange appointment was that of Claire Fox. I invite those of you who still think Mr Johnson is a traditionalist patriotic conservative to ask yourself why he has put Ms Fox into Parliament.
I have known Claire for years and actually quite like her. I’ve watched in admiration as she has used her headship of a mysterious thing called The Institute of Ideas to create a major broadcasting career. She has some sound instincts, and – as we shall see – she can be ruthlessly honest.
But no traditionalist conservative could conceivably give her a lifetime seat in Parliament. Claire was for many years a member of a strange cultish group called the Revolutionary Communist Party (RCP). This wasn’t a youthful dalliance like mine in the International Socialists, which I left in 1975. She carried on belonging to the RCP for 20 years after leaving university.
And there is every sign that she still hasn’t really broken with it. The RCP itself has disappeared after a series of misfortunes, and how has a ghostly afterlife in web-based outfits such as Spiked.
In this strange milieu, she must have met Munira Mirza, head of Mr Johnson’s policy unit but weirdly far less famous than that other crazy Downing Street radical, Dominic Cummings.
Ms Mirza, whose husband used to be famous for organising sex parties, is also linked with the RCP. And she has been close to Mr Johnson since his days as Mayor of London.
So could Lady Fox’s ennoblement have been her idea? Who can say?
What startles me is how little fuss it has created. Baroness Fox, in her RCP days, defended the cruel, violent actions of the Provisional IRA. This was RCP policy. Its newspaper, The Next Step, said at the time of the 1993 Warrington bomb, which killed three-year-old Johnathan Ball and 12-year-old Tim Parry: ‘We defend the right of the Irish people to take whatever measures are necessary in their struggle for freedom.’
Long ago? Well, yes, but Lady Fox was challenged about this very recently when she stood as a Brexit Party candidate for the European Parliament in a constituency which includes Warrington.
Did she say, ‘I am deeply ashamed of these policies, which I now see as having been gravely mistaken’? She did not.
Last April, politely but firmly confronted by Tim Parry’s father Colin, she said that she stuck by what she had believed back in 1993.
‘My personal politics and views are well known and I have never sought to deny them, though on this issue they have remained unaired for many years.’
This statement (were her views well-known?) was carefully surrounded by various sentiments of sympathy at the loss suffered by the Parry and Ball families. But Colin Parry himself reckoned (as I do) that she had not actually changed her mind.
He still thinks she hasn’t, and when her peerage was announced, he tweeted: ‘We all do and say things when young that we later regret. Claire Fox never apologised for defending the IRA bombing of Warrington which took the life of my son Tim and Johnathan Ball. Now she is offered a peerage. This offends me and many others deeply.’
I think he has a point, though of course nobody will now pay attention to his reasoned and civil protests. But ask yourselves why a supposedly Tory Government should give such an honour, and such a part in running the nation, to such a person.
No doubt there is a case for having all kinds of people in Parliament. But how strange that this award should come from a party whose emblem is the Union Jack, which is given to singing Land Of Hope And Glory, and which excoriates Jeremy Corbyn for meeting terrorists. Have we been had?
Repression by men in black uniforms is not a good look
The great city of Melbourne in Australia is now under a severe six-week curfew from 8pm until 5am.
Its businesses are crippled. Even the authorities admit it could cost hundreds of thousands of jobs.
Muzzles are, of course, compulsory. Inhabitants can leave their homes only once a day for essential supplies and food, and once for one hour of exercise, within a three-mile radius. Police and soldiers are hammering on the doors of those who have tested positive for Covid (who are now forbidden to exercise), to check they are at home. Huge fines face those who don’t comply.
Victoria State Premier Daniel Andrews says: ‘We can no longer have people simply out and about for no good reason… you will be stopped and you will be asked and need to demonstrate that you are lawfully out and you are not breaching that curfew.’
The local police chief, Shane Patton, fetchingly dressed in black shirt and black tie (does he know no history?) is pleased that non-muzzle-wearers are being ‘shunned’ and says his officers ‘had’ to smash into cars whose drivers did not co-operate with stop and search.
Why this wild repression? Because of 15 deaths in a day, mostly among the very old, in a state of more than six million people. Once again, the words ‘out of proportion’ spring to mind.
I predict that a major British city will be subjected to something similar in the coming winter.
Strikingly, it is in the formerly free English-speaking world, inheritors of Magna Carta and the Bill of Rights, that the most severe attack on freedom is happening. They seem confident we will not defend it.
I gave blood- and got freedom
I am pleased to report that I have now managed to donate the pint of blood I tried and failed to give to the English Blood Service last week. They refused to let me do so because I was not prepared to wear a muzzle.
I gave my blood in Wales, and found the Welsh Blood Service staff every bit as delightful and helpful as their English counterparts.
Better still, they do not have concrete-headed dogmatic bosses who treat donors as nuisances, and lack any flexibility at all. So no muzzle.
Luckily for me, I have both the time and the money to travel 200 miles to give blood. But others, at present, must either submit to this dodgy diktat (many believe it is unsafe as well as needless) or stop giving freely of their own blood.
In any case, my critics will now have a tough time calling me selfish for making a stand. My blood does just as much good in Wales as it would have done in England.
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03 August 2020 3:09 PM
My latest conversation with Mike Graham. We discuss Al Johnson's growing megalomania ...
....blood donation, and how much safer freedom was during the Cold War.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=eNukYWoJWXk&feature=youtu.be
02 August 2020 1:32 AM
PETER HITCHENS: The Government’s National Panic Service is being used to keep us in a condition of perpetual alarm about coronavirus
This is Peter Hitchens’s Mail on Sunday column
The most common symptom of Covid-19 is that you feel just fine. A huge number of those now being absurdly listed as ‘infected’ with this bogeyman disease are perfectly healthy.
If the trained hunters of the Government’s National Panic Service had not tracked them down, most of them would never have known they were supposed to be ill. Why do we take this seriously?
It is a fact, not a ‘conspiracy theory’, that the power of the state is now being used to keep us in a condition of perpetual alarm. We are ceaselessly threatened with a ‘second wave’ for which there is, in fact, no evidence.
As I began to write this, I received a ridiculous text message from my GP squawking urgently: ‘We have been made aware that the number of coronavirus cases in Oxfordshire is starting to rise.’
No doubt Oxford will be one of the next cities to undergo some sort of renewed shutdown, to keep us in our place. This fatuous propaganda is just preparing the way. The more scared we are, the more we obey.
It ended by intoning: ‘We must each do our bit to protect ourselves and others.’ The use of the phrase ‘do our bit’, of course, invokes the phoney Blitz spirit that is used against anyone who looks at the actual researched facts and says, as I do: ‘Don’t be silly.’
For daring to stay calm, I am then accused of being a collaborator with the wicked Nazi virus. The played-out, once-independent magazine Private Eye, now a boring mouthpiece of wokeness, actually did this to me last week.
The truth is that the number of deaths from Covid, even the fiddled and inflated version which the Government clings to, is falling closer and closer to zero.
So, even more significantly, are hospital admissions, which would be rising steeply if these ‘infection’ figures actually represented large numbers of seriously ill people.
These things are true both of Britain and of Spain, whose supposed spike in Covid was used to destroy the holiday plans of more than a million people last week in an arbitrary decision of astonishing uselessness.
At the peak of the epidemic in April, Spain at one point suffered 961 deaths in one day.
According to the Coronavirus Worldometer, the daily Covid deaths in Spain for the past few weeks have rarely risen above five a day, and have often been fewer than that.
And for this we destroy the happy innocent pleasures of hundreds of thousands, and deal another smashing blow to a travel industry already devastated by Government folly? Why do we put up with it? I have no idea.
Welby is such a pathetic prelate
The Archbishop of Canterbury, Justin Welby, is, in my view, prissy, pathetic and political. He has utterly failed to stand up for his church against its first compulsory shutdown since the days of Bad King John eight centuries back.
Not long ago Welby supported the disgraceful smearing of a man whose mitre he would not have been fit to carry, the courageous and selfless Bishop George Bell of Chichester (please, please do not confuse Bell with the revolting criminal Bishop Peter Ball, with whom he is not remotely connected).
Bell, long after his death, was wrongly labelled as a child abuser by a secret kangaroo court of the Church of England, which did not even bother to look for living witnesses for the defence.
When this outrage was met with a wave of fury from the many who had known and loved Bell, an independent inquiry tore the case against him to shreds. But even after Bell was cleared to the satisfaction of all open-minded people, Welby (like many weak men reluctant to admit an error) continued to insist that a ‘significant cloud’ still hung over Bell.
Am I now entitled to see a spot of divine retribution in the revelation last week that the C of E is investigating how Welby dealt with complaints of serial abuse of young men at Christian holiday camps? Well, I do. One of those affected has now written to the Church with a formal complaint against the Archbishop, once a dormitory officer at the camps, saying Welby did not do enough when he learned of the abuse.
The man claims Welby failed to refer the abuse directly to social services and the police, in breach of church guidelines.
Welby has always said he knew nothing of the allegations until 2013, when the Church referred them to the police. Well, no doubt Welby will be cleared of all this. But will he then proclaim that a ‘significant cloud’ still hangs over himself? Or will he learn that if you desire justice for yourself, you have to desire it for others?
France spots the link between Marijuana and Violence
In France, a brief flash of good sense. The new Prime Minister, Jean Castex, is introducing on-the-spot fines for marijuana possession, partly because of the obvious link between this allegedly ‘soft’ drug and criminal violence.
He announced the plan during a visit to Nice, which has recently suffered weeks of drugs-related violence.
I only hope his security chiefs have finally spotted the fact that almost all the terrorist killers in France in the past few years (including Mohamed Bouhlel, the atheist petty criminal who was the culprit of the lorry massacre in Nice itself in July 2016) have been marijuana users.
I’ll happily give blood, but not in a muzzle
Last Monday I tried to give a pint of blood, something I do reasonably regularly – though not as often as I should. I was prevented from even entering the Donor Centre by a senior functionary of the English Blood Service, because I declined to wear a muzzle.
Oh, how selfish and pompous of me, to deprive someone in need of my blood, because I wouldn’t don a strip of cloth for a few minutes! Well, I don’t agree. And if you do you can easily nip along to your nearest blood bank and replace the pint I didn’t give with one of your own. But will you really?
It’s precisely because I’m the sort of person who gives blood (fewer than a million in England do so) that I’m also the sort of person who objects to being forced to wear futile garments by bossy bureaucrats.
There’s no good evidence that these muzzles stop transmission of Covid. And I view them as a badge of submission to a series of stupid and damaging Government policies which I oppose and despise. To don one of these things would be compelled speech, like being forced to wear a badge saying ‘I LOVE BORIS’, when I don’t.
But it’s worse than that. The enforced wearing of face-nappies by donors – which even the Government does not require – may actually be making the process less safe in England. The blood services of all three of the other nations in the UK ask donors to remove masks during donation. This is because, as Welsh Blood puts it: ‘Wearing a face covering will hide the signs that indicate to staff that a donor is about to faint and possibly injure themselves. It is essential that our staff can see donors’ faces so they can intervene at the earliest opportunity if a donor is about to faint.’
The services in Scotland and Northern Ireland confirmed to me that they take the same view. But the English service, the NHSBT, refuses to discuss it, taking a Dalek-like view that you will jolly well obey. I think they have forgotten that donors are volunteers.
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27 July 2020 10:13 PM
My latest conversation with Mike Graham on Talk Radio
Is here.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=P_kq8RnomBk&feature=youtu.be
We deal with the destruction of Spanish holidays and the muzzle frenzy
25 July 2020 10:04 PM
PETER HITCHENS: Boris Johnson's decision to force us to wear face nappies will kill the British high street
This is Peter Hitchens’s Mail on Sunday column
The Government’s dedicated efforts to destroy our economy and an entire way of life have moved up a step.
High streets had just begun to stir feebly back into life after months of enforced shutdown. Then the futile decree went out from Downing Street that customers must wear muzzles.
And what will happen? Why, more people will choose not to bother to go near shops at all. They will buy from the internet giants instead.
The Government has convinced itself that this idiotic measure will somehow increase confidence. Really? After deliberately terrifying us with horror stories about a huge and deadly plague poised to slay millions and to turn our hospitals into charnel houses?
This did not happen because it was never going to happen, as more and more studies (the latest from Toronto University) are showing. The Government panicked over the wrong advice.
This superstitious, anti-scientific rubbish was challenged repeatedly by distinguished experts of all kinds, ignored by Government and BBC alike. But it has worked only too well. Travellers on public transport, where the muzzle edict has been in force for weeks, could have told them.
Forcing passengers to don facial nappies has not led to more travelling by train or bus. I speak here from direct personal experience. Passenger numbers remain pitifully low.
People are still scared to travel. Or – and this is a major factor in our approaching national doom – they have worked out that by pretending to be afraid, they can continue to stay away from work while still getting paid.
In fact, Prime Minister Alexander Johnson (can we drop the matey ‘Boris’ for ever? He is not our mate) has in a few short weeks done more damage to Britain’s railways than the notorious axeman Dr Richard Beeching of despised memory did back in the 1960s.
Now Mr Johnson is destroying high streets too. This means the wreckage of lives and the impoverishment of life at the same time. As new figures clearly showed yesterday, his actions have already greatly boosted mail-order shopping at the expense of real shops.
If you think this does not matter, then do two things: find out about the working lives of those who toil in the vast computerised warehouses that so efficiently send you the goods you order with a click of your mouse; and imagine your own home town with most of its familiar traders closed down. Imagine what, if anything, will replace them, and the personal service and contact they provide.
This is just a small instance of the great hurricane of economic destruction that has been unleashed on us by a government that has no idea what it is doing. The free money cannot last much longer.
Closures, job cuts, inflation, tax rises and a slashing of public services are all on their way.
The price of gold, that great warning barometer of economic storms to come, is climbing almost daily. And what looks increasingly like a badly bungled exit from the EU will only add to our perils after Christmas.
The prophetic words of Rudyard Kipling return again and again to my mind ‘… we were promised abundance for all / By robbing selected Peter to pay for collective Paul / But, though we had plenty of money, there was nothing our money could buy / And the Gods of the Copybook Headings said: “If you don’t work, you die.” ’
I see the Prime Minister and his colleagues as a gaggle of Oxbridge undergraduates, full of their own brilliance, chattering wittily and slurping champagne beneath a parasol as their punt drifts down the pretty river.
But the river, smooth as it is, is not the quiet Cam or the gentle Isis – it is the Niagara, and that deep growl they hear in the distance when they pause in their banter is the catastrophe towards which they are steering, because they dare not admit to us or to themselves that they made a terrible mistake.
Now the Revolution Turns towards the Wanton Destruction of Beauty
One of the most beautiful things in England, in fact in the world, is the music of cathedral choirs, now under severe threat from the Government’s suppression of almost all normal human activity.
That music is about as diverse and inclusive as it can get, as it comes from the ancient monastic cycle of prayer and song that once united the whole of Europe but survives, almost uniquely, here.
Some of it is so lovely that I cannot believe anybody, from any culture in the world, will not be profoundly moved by it.
Yet here we see Sheffield Cathedral, perhaps grabbing its chance amid the state-induced coma which grips the country, declaring that it will ‘stand down’ its choir. It’s not diverse enough, you see.
Such choirs are forged by centuries of tradition and long hours of hard and dedicated work. They cannot be made overnight, and once dispersed are as hard to recreate as a dream that faded on waking.
We are truly living in revolutionary times, and only beginning to discover what a terrible thing that is.
Does the Dame have no shame?
Dame Cressida Dick, head of the Metropolitan Police, perhaps knows a little about shame.
She might feel a bit of it, most recently, over her force’s terrible and so far unpunished mistreatment of the late Field Marshal Edwin Bramall and others, after they were falsely accused of filthy crimes by an obvious fantasist.
So what are we to make of her telling a London radio station that she hopes people who do not comply with the face mask decree ‘will be shamed into complying or shamed to leave the store by the store keepers or by other members of the public’?
Is this, as it appears to be, the condoning by a senior police officer of bullying vigilante action?
Such bullying may well be directed against people with legitimate exemptions invisible to their persecutors. If so, then shame on her. I have never understood how even the politically correct elite could have promoted Dame Cressida to such an important job.
The Russia report’s just one big joke
I am afraid I chortled several times as I read the Parliamentary Intelligence and Security Committee’s oh-so-serious report on Russia.
As well as being almost entirely free of new facts, it hilariously accused the Russians of being paranoid about us. Well, perhaps they are. Russia has been invaded so many times (even we have had a go) that it is entitled to be a bit over-defensive.
But if so, the British attitude towards Moscow is just as psychiatric, especially given our elite’s greed for Russian money and their readiness to consort with (and take donations from) Russian billionaires who are no better than they ought to be.
We have no border with Russia, nor any other territorial, naval or economic conflict, and long ago lost the Indian empire that lay at their back door. We hardly trade with them.
I am pretty sure that they spend very little time thinking about us, except as a minor hanger-on of the USA. Do they really seek to intervene in our politics? For what end? They are a poor, under-populated country nearly 2,000 miles away, in serious danger of being bought up by China. And if they mount cyber-attacks on us, as I am sure they do, are we not doing the same to them?
I learned from the report that we now have something called a National Offensive Cyber Programme, whose title suggests that its staff might possibly engage in a little bit of electronic aggression from time to time. And quite right too.
Countries that don’t prepare for battle lose wars. But it is a bit ridiculous to have an offensive cyber programme and then moan self-righteously when your target returns the favour.
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24 July 2020 3:42 PM
People who Call me Selfish for Refusing to Wear a State-Ordered Muzzle should read this article in the Spectator
Why should I have to wear a face mask to give blood?
https://www.spectator.co.uk/article/why-should-i-have-to-wear-a-face-mask-to-give-blood
I expect to be on the panel of Any Questions? Tonight on BBC Radio 4 just after 8.00 PM news, repeated after 1.00 PM news on Saturday.
Details of panel etc here
20 July 2020 3:34 PM
The Struggle to Get the Nation Back to Work
My latest conversation with Mike Graham on Talk Radio
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=E6bmHmZfw1U&feature=youtu.be
19 July 2020 12:09 AM
PETER HITCHENS: Face masks turn us into voiceless submissives - and it’s not science forcing us to wear them, it’s politics
This is Peter Hitchens’ Mail on Sunday column
In the name of Covid, the State has already thrust itself into every corner of our existence.
It has come between husbands and wives at the ends of their lives. It has forbidden the old to embrace their grandchildren.
It has denied us funerals and weddings, locked the churches, silenced the ancient monastic music of cathedral choirs and prevented the free worship of God for the first time in 800 years, and banned us (unless we are Left-wing) from holding or attending public meetings.
It has ordered us to stay at home, scolded or fined us for sunbathing, going on country rambles or even entering our front gardens.
It has forced millions of us to stop working, sabotaged the educations – at school and university – of untold numbers of young people and has become our boss and paymaster in the biggest state takeover of life and work ever attempted by non-Communists.
Soon we will discover that it has also wrecked an already wobbly economy and separated untold numbers of us from jobs and businesses we thought were safe. Soon, too, it will also separate us from our savings, through punishing tax and savage inflation, to pay for the disaster it has caused.
Now it presumes to tell us what to wear. And what it wants us to wear is a soggy cloth muzzle, a face-nappy that turns its wearer from a normal human into a mumbling, mouthless submissive.
And this, it seems, is popular. Is there nothing the modern British people will not put up with? Britain’s muzzle consumption is now so high that six months from now there will be reports of dolphins and whales floundering about in an ocean made sticky by millions of gallons of hand-sanitiser, as they choke on congealed clumps of used muzzles.
These items are set to become the new plastic bags. Why is this frenzy taking place?
Here is a clue. On July 12, Deborah Cohen, the medical correspondent of BBC2’s Newsnight, revealed an astonishing thing. The World Health Organisation (WHO) had reversed its advice on face masks, from ‘don’t wear them’ to ‘do wear them’.
But the key fact was that it had not done so because of scientific information – the evidence had not backed the wearing of face coverings – but because of political lobbying.
She revealed on Twitter that: ‘We had been told by various sources [that the] WHO committee reviewing the evidence had not backed masks but they recommended them due to political lobbying.’ She said the BBC had then put this to the WHO, which did not deny it.
In March, the WHO had said: ‘There is currently no evidence that wearing a mask (whether medical or other types) by healthy persons in the wider community setting, including universal community masking, can protect them from infection with respiratory viruses, including Covid-19.’
The American TV news channel CNN reported on March 31 that Mike Ryan, executive director of the WHO health emergencies programme, had said at a briefing in Geneva: ‘There is no specific evidence to suggest that the wearing of masks by the mass population has any potential benefit.
‘In fact, there’s some evidence to suggest the opposite in the misuse of wearing a mask properly or fitting it properly.’
A few weeks ago, the WHO changed its advice to say it ‘advises that governments should encourage the general public to wear masks where there is widespread transmission and physical distancing is difficult, such as on public transport, in shops or in other confined or crowded environments.’
Earlier that same month, England’s chief medical officer, Chris Whitty, had said that wearing face masks would do little to combat the outbreak.
While noting that if someone was infected, they might reduce the danger of spreading the disease by covering their faces, Prof Whitty said wearing a face mask had almost no effect on reducing the risk of contracting the illness.
He stated: ‘In terms of wearing a mask, our advice is clear: that wearing a mask if you don’t have an infection reduces the risk almost not at all. So we do not advise that.’
Also in March, the Advertising Standards Authority banned two firms’ advertisements for masks, saying that the adverts were ‘misleading, irresponsible and likely to cause fear without justifiable reason’.
At about the same time, Dr Jenny Harries, a Deputy Chief Medical Officer, warned that people could be putting themselves more at risk from contracting Covid by wearing muzzles. She said masks could ‘actually trap the virus’, and cause the person wearing it to breathe it in. She explained: ‘For the average member of the public walking down a street, it is not a good idea.’
On April 3, the other Deputy Chief Medical Officer, Professor Jonathan Van-Tam, said he did not believe healthy people wearing them would reduce the spread of the disease in the UK.
The British Government has also zig-zagged. As recently as June 24, in a series of official pamphlets for reopening shops and services, the Department for Business and Enterprise said repeatedly: ‘The evidence of the benefit of using a face covering to protect others is weak and the effect is likely to be small.’
This was true at the time and it is still true. The evidence is indeed weak. There is plenty of research showing that the case for muzzles is poor, especially a survey done for the dental profession four years ago, which quietly vanished from the internet after mask opponents began to cite it.
The scientific papers in favour of muzzling are full of weak, hesitant words such as ‘probably, ‘could’ and ‘may’ – which can equally well be expressed as ‘probably not’, ‘could not’ or ‘may not’.
There has not been any great discovery in the past few days.
Generally, the main way of discovering if something works is the Randomised Control Trial (RCT), in which the proposed treatment or method is tested directly and thoroughly.
This hasn’t been done with muzzles, probably because it would be a bit difficult and possibly because muzzle zealots fear the results would not help their case.
Amazingly, the chief spokesman for science in this country, who should surely support proper rigour, has dismissed such RCTs.
Venki Ramakrishnan, president of the Royal Society, sneered at ‘inappropriate’ RCTs as ‘methodological fetishism’. He did this while advocating more compulsory muzzle-wearing when he appeared on Radio 4’s Today programme on July 7 – as the political lobbying for muzzles intensified.
All that has changed is the politics. Why are they changing? Interestingly, Health Secretary Matt Hancock’s muzzle edict was the first action by the London Government which actually copied a move made by Nicola Sturgeon’s extremely Left-wing Edinburgh administration.
There are many signs that it has not been thought through, at least by scientists.
Why are we more likely to spread Covid in a shop than we are to do so in a pub or restaurant? The question cannot be answered.
What evidence there is certainly suggests that the risk of transmission is greater if we linger longer, but the Government does not dare close down the catering trade again, because it would be wildly unpopular and because these businesses are on the point of bankruptcy – and such an action would shut them.
The truth is that the muzzle policy is all about power and fear.
The Government began its wild, disproportionate shutdown of the country by spreading fear of a devastating plague that would destroy the NHS and kill untold thousands.
Now, as many people find that Covid-19 is, in fact, nothing of the kind, new ways have to be found to keep up the alarm levels.
One was exposed on Friday by the superb scientists of the Oxford Centre for Evidence-Based Medicine. Puzzled by the way that Covid death figures in England continued to pour in, while they had all but ceased in Scotland, they looked at the figures from Public Health England (PHE).
And they found, in their own devastating words ‘It seems that PHE regularly looks for people on the NHS database who have ever tested positive, and simply checks to see if they are still alive or not.
‘PHE does not appear to consider how long ago the Covid test result was, nor whether the person has been successfully treated in hospital and discharged to the community. Anyone who has tested Covid positive but subsequently died at a later date of any cause will be included on the PHE Covid death figures.
‘By this PHE definition, no one with Covid in England is allowed to ever recover from their illness. A patient who has tested positive, but been successfully treated and discharged from hospital, will still be counted as a Covid death even if they had a heart attack or were run over by a bus three months later.’
This problem would be avoided by having a simple cut-off, where those who tested positive more than 28 days ago were no longer counted as Covid deaths. Scotland does this. That is why its figures are lower.
Findings are now also pouring in which suggest that a horribly high number of the excess deaths during the last few months were not caused by Covid, but by people failing to seek treatment for heart attacks, strokes and cancer.
Despite the propagandists of the BBC, which has tried as hard as it can never to mention the legions of dissenting scientists who dispute the Government’s policy, people are beginning to wonder, in increasing numbers, if they might have been taken for a ride.
This Government has no great authority. It is a Cabinet of undistinguished, inexperienced unknowns, headed by an exhausted and empty Prime Minister whose sparkle, such as it was, is fast fading.
In a few weeks’ time, the Government faces the onset of what may be the worst economic crisis since 1929. It needs to keep the fear levels up to maintain its authority.
One way of doing this is the ceaseless promotion of an alleged ‘second wave’ of Covid, for which there is no evidence.
Another is to undertake a ferocious testing policy. This is now happening in Leicester where testers go from door to door to discover people who are ‘infected’ with Covid, even if they have no symptoms (which is usually the case) and are perfectly healthy. Then they can raise the alarm and close down the city.
But muzzling the populace is even better. People such as me, who think Ministers’ response to the virus is wildly out of proportion, have until now been able to live amid the propaganda, trying to stay sane.
But the muzzle is a badge of subservience and submission. Anyone who dons it publicly is agreeing to the Government’s crazy assessment of the level of danger.
Societies in which citizens are discouraged from speaking out against the regime, as this has become, are pretty disgraceful. But countries where the citizens are compelled to endorse the opinion of the state are a serious step further down the path to totalitarianism.
It is even worse than that.
Look at the muzzled multitudes, their wide eyes peering out anxiously from above the hideous gag which obscures half their faces and turns them from normal human beings into mouthless, obedient submissives.
The psychological effect of these garments, on those who wear them, is huge.
And it also has another nasty result for society as a whole.
Dissenters, who prefer not to muzzle themselves, are made to stand out from the surrendered majority, who then become quite keen on pressuring the non-conformists to do as they are told, and on informing against them.
I predicted the same outcome during the House Arrest period in April, and was mocked for it, but it came true.
When all this began, I felt fear. But it was not fear of the disease, which was clearly overstated from the start.
It was fear of exactly what is happening to us, the final closing down of centuries of human liberty and the transformation of one of the freest countries on Earth into a regimented, conformist society, under perpetual surveillance, in which a subservient people scurries about beneath the stern gaze of authority.
It is my view that, if you don that muzzle, you are giving your assent to that change.
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- PETER HITCHENS: Should the woman who said the IRA had a right to kill children really be a Baroness?
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- People who Call me Selfish for Refusing to Wear a State-Ordered Muzzle should read this article in the Spectator
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