“Never forget that making Britain into a broke, repressive dystopia was a deliberate choice”, writes Daniel Hannan in the Telegraph.
The article starts by repeating a familiar refrain about the unprecedented loss of civil liberties during the pandemic.
As we approach the fifth anniversary, we don’t like to admit that we destroyed our economy, took away part of our kids’ childhoods, permanently aggrandised the state and indebted ourselves for a generation – all for nothing.
All true, but the real meat is here:
Five years ago this Tuesday, Jenny Harries, then the deputy chief medical officer, gave an illuminating, though now neglected, interview. It was not neglected at the time. On the contrary, it took place in No 10, and the interviewer was the prime minister himself, Boris Johnson.
Dr Harries – who has since become Dame Jenny, and been put in charge of the UK Health Security Agency – was impressively level-headed. She explained that, “for most people, it really is going to be quite a mild disease”.
She advised against wearing facemasks unless told otherwise by your doctor. She explained why Britain, unlike many countries in Europe, was not banning large meetings or sporting events. There was, she reminded us, a plan in place, and it provided for the gradual spread of the disease through the population in a way that would not overwhelm hospitals. Try to suppress the spread too vigorously, she said, and there would be a peak later on (which, indeed, is exactly what happened).
Dr Harries was absolutely right, but she was only repeating the global consensus. A little earlier, the WHO had looked at lockdowns and concluded that they were “not demonstrably effective in urban areas”. Its researchers had carried out a study of 120 US military camps during the 1918 Spanish flu epidemic, and found “no statistical difference” between the 99 camps that had confined men to quarters and the 21 that had not.
As recently as 2019, the WHO had declared that lockdowns as a response to respiratory diseases were “not recommended because there is no obvious rationale for this measure, and there would be considerable difficulties in implementing it”.
Dr Harries knew all this. And so did Boris, who spoke what was, in retrospect, the most telling line of the entire interview: “Politicians and governments around the world are under a lot of pressure to be seen to act, so they may do things that are not necessarily dictated by the science,” he said.
If was capable of having that thought, he was capable of acting on it, or rather of continuing to act on it. He was not, as I once thought, a man in a panic who, pathetically but understandably, followed the the united voice of “the experts” because he could not imagine doing anything else. As a successful politician he knew the political nature of the pressure he was under and chose to give into it. He switched which expert to follow – switched from the expert who was right to the “expert” who was wrong – on political grounds. Oh, no doubt his decision was influenced by which expert shouted the loudest (it was not Jenny Harries) and said the scariest things, but a refusal to be moved from a rationally-decided course by emotional displays is the very definition of a leader. I wonder, does he ever think now about how near he came to being the second Churchill he dreamed of being? All he had to do was stay firm.
Dr Harries responded that she was proud that Britain’s response had remained scientific.
Five days later, Boris took to the airwaves to tell people “to stop non-essential contact and travel”. A week after that, we were in lockdown (a term borrowed from prison, which I held out against using for as long as I could). What changed? Well, on March 16, Neil Ferguson and the team at Imperial College published an apocalyptic report based on modelling that estimated that if no measures were put in place deaths over the following two years could reach more than half a million.
And it was popular. Very popular.
Although we sometimes now imagine that Boris wrenched our freedoms from our unwilling hands, it was the other way around. We have forgotten the “Go Home Covidiots” banners, the terrified phone-ins, the YouGov poll showing that 93 per cent of voters wanted a lockdown.
Persuading people that they have been badly treated is easy. Persuading them that they themselves have behaved badly and stupidly is not easy at all. How do we do it? A cynic would say there is no need to try. Just publicly blame everything on “the politicians” (in this case Boris Johnson, who certainly deserves plenty of blame but not all of it) in the same way that the Greens publicly blame all the environmental damage they believe comes from humanity’s reliance on oil on “the oil companies” rather than the people who use the oil, namely all of us. But I do not believe that any strategy of persuasion that relies on a conscious lie can succeed in the long run.
This is a wonderful illustration of the ineptness of the ruling elites and the sheep like behaviour of the masses world wide. The internet has enabled those few, who saw or came to see the reality of the situation, the opportunity to convince a growing number of people of the propensity of elites and masses to descend into irrationality. Perhaps, in the future, this lesson will prevent a repetition of such stupidity.
I can’t say for certain, but I doubt that was the only “expert evidence” he received. Any PM or minister would be remiss if they asked a single person.
The fact that countries like Belarus and Nicaragua seemed to have the least mad policies towards COVID (speaking at national level, aware some US states didn’t go overboard) kind of reflects how fucking insane the world went.
Lockdown was quickly accepted (hence the 93% approval which no politician could resist, let alone a narcissistic man of straw – but I repeat myself) by the masses before relenting of it at their leisure. It went on anyway.
The public approval of net zero and mass immigration is only a small fraction of that figure yet governments of both alleged political hues have plowed on regardless with these far more ruinous policies.
The majority surely don’t believe the conscious lies they are being told but it doesn’t matter. The initial support for lockdown certainly helped, driven by a mixture of genuine and stoked-up fear of the unknown, free money and a flattering sense of “doing the right thing” but it would have gone ahead regardless.
Because of previous pandemics or possible pandemics consideration was given to what course of action should be taken. Basically, very little.
When covid struck the politicians panicked.
“Something must be done” and this was something.
Doing nothing may not have led to more deaths but the politicians would have been blamed for the deaths that did occur.
Versus
The second quote from Natalie is far closer to the truth.
Ineptitude was not a key driver behind the actions of politicians during COVID. Malicious cowardice is a more accurate descriptor of the main driver behind the actions of politicians during COVID. The people who stood up against the mass delusion were not particularly not inept, for the most part we were brave and we genuinely cared about the wellbeing of our fellow man.
I think there is a missing piece here. Lockdowns were only possible because technology — the pervasiveness of high speed internet and zoom — made it possible. If people went home and just simply stopped getting paid for the work they were not doing it would have been a whole different story.
Covid was not the first modern pandemic. It was just the first one to occur after ubiquitous Zoom.
Absolutely nailed it with that comment.
This lockdown was overwhelmingly supported by the white collar, “laptop class”. I tend to be wary of class analysis but I think it applies a lot here.
Builders, lorry drivers, farmers, cargo ship crews and supermarket staff didn’t have the same experience as the “laptop class”.
Isn’t that the truth!
And I note the frenzy of fibre broadband installation in the preceding years, all suggesting to those that join the dots that the whole thing was waiting to be put in place.
No one else seems to have asked how the long and complicated Coronavirus Act 2020 was drafted in such quick time if it hadn’t been waiting for a ‘Change all’ for ‘Scary disease’ to ‘Coronavirus’ and presto.
At least 400 Billion Pounds, “not much if you say it quick”, were spent on insane policies – such as the lockdowns. This (not “Liz Truss”) “crashed the economy”.
Meanwhile Early Treatments were neglected indeed smeared – people who could have been saved by Early Treatment were not saved, they DIED.
Lastly came the injections – with the death and injury they caused.
No one will be punished for any of the above.
“How do we get back from this?”
Read my previous comment – in a political culture where no one is held responsible for blunders (if they were blunders – and not deliberately seeking to do harm) on this scale, indeed when there is no admission that Early Treatments (that could have saved so many lives) were unjustly smeared, that the “lockdowns” were medically useless (and did massive societal harm), and the injections did NOT “save millions of lives” (as the computer models say – because that is what they are programmed to say), but, in fact, did terrible harm…..
There is no “back from this” – we can not get “back from this” whilst the political culture, the culture of governance, remains as it is.
If officials, “experts” and others do not have to admit terrible blunders – if they can pretend that their terrible blunders were good decisions, for which the deserve their Knighthoods and so on, then there is no “back from this”.