The first lockdown in the UK did not technically have legal force until three days after Johnson’s address. But that didn’t stop police going after people almost immediately. This may sound like a trivial oversight, but it does underscore the authoritarian nature of how lockdown rules were made and imposed. For a brief period at least, police were arresting people on the basis not of laws passed democratically in parliament, but on the mere words of the prime minister, merely because they had been uttered in a television broadcast. This really did bring Britain into ‘police state’ territory.
|
|||||
|
We are developing the social individualist meta-context for the future. From the very serious to the extremely frivolous... lets see what is on the mind of the Samizdata people. Samizdata, derived from Samizdat /n. - a system of clandestine publication of banned literature in the USSR [Russ.,= self-publishing house] Authors
Arts, Tech & CultureCivil LibertiesCommentary
Economics |
Samizdata quote of the day – Lockdown: a reckoningMarch 25th, 2025 |
 12 comments to Samizdata quote of the day – Lockdown: a reckoningLeave a Reply |
Who Are We?The Samizdata people are a bunch of sinister and heavily armed globalist illuminati who seek to infect the entire world with the values of personal liberty and several property. Amongst our many crimes is a sense of humour and the intermittent use of British spelling. We are also a varied group made up of social individualists, classical liberals, whigs, libertarians, extropians, futurists, ‘Porcupines’, Karl Popper fetishists, recovering neo-conservatives, crazed Ayn Rand worshipers, over-caffeinated Virginia Postrel devotees, witty Frédéric Bastiat wannabes, cypherpunks, minarchists, kritarchists and wild-eyed anarcho-capitalists from Britain, North America, Australia and Europe. CategoriesArchivesFeed This PageLink Icons   |
|||
All content on this website (including text, photographs, audio files, and any other original works), unless otherwise noted, is licensed under a Creative Commons License. |
|||||
Police forces tend to attract assholes (“Arseholes”? I’m not entirely familiar with your peculiar variant of American) so police forces need to screen better.
Fine words from Fraser Myers that unfortunately ring hollow in view of his previous foaming at the mouth hit piece on Andrew Bridgen for trying to shine a light on so much of the misinformation concerning Covid for which he was ignored by his fellow MPs (as evidenced by the nearly empty chamber whenever he spoke) and pilloried by shallow media hacks.
Spiked is a mixed bag. Some truly excellent stuff, including pretty much everything nowadays from Brendan O’Neill, but a lot of wind and hypocrisy to go with it.
Fred_Z – if police officers do not act in this way, they risk getting forced out of the force. The higher one goes in police forces the more finds “Woke” political types. Training and promotion are not the only factors – I repeat, an “old fashioned” policeman who respects the principles of the Common Law risks getting forced out – losing their pension and everything, and they have families.
Even if a policeman is a personal friend and knows that modern “laws”, for example violating Freedom of Speech, are unjust – they must still put their own families first (they can not risk not being able to pay the mortgage, risking making their family homeless, and so on). I understand that – I know that when-and-if they come for me it will NOT be personal.
John – yes indeed.
Sadly basic facts have to be repeated again and again.
The lockdowns were medically useless – all (all) the nations that did NOT lockdown had a lower (not higher – lower) death rate than we did. Whatever the lockdowns were really about – reducing deaths from Covid was NOT what they were about.
Covid itself came from the lab in Wuhan – a facility part funded by American (not just Chinese) government agencies and such “non government” bodies as the “Eco Health Alliance” led by Peter Daszak of the World Health Organisation – the same World Health Organisation that lied about Covid not being a threat (a lie that Tony Fauci of the American government also pushed – first he said that Covid was not a threat to the United States, then he exaggerated the threat) and lied about the origins of the virus – Peter Daszak and others covering for themselves.
However, it is unknown whether Covid was deliberately released (perhaps to coincide with the international games that were held in Wuhan – in order to spread the disease internationally, it should be noted that the international airport in Wuhan remained open for a long time) – or whether it was released by ACCIDENT.
Either way (accident or deliberate release) Covid was used as an justification for the preexisting agenda of getting people dependent on government and large partner corporations – and crushing independent small business enterprises. This agenda (sometimes associated with United Nations Agenda 2030) seems to have been behind the sort of lockdown that was followed in California and many other places.
There were generally effective Early Treatments for Covid – but these were deliberately smeared by such people as Tony Fauci, indeed the international establishment generally – thus many thousands of people were condemned to death who could have been saved. Doctors and medical scientists who tried to tell the truth and save lives – were persecuted, they were smeared and ridiculed and their jobs (their income and the income of their families) were threatened.
This international campaign of establishment lies, against Early Treatments, seems to have been put into effect in order to justify the Covid injections – which were not “vaccines” by the traditional definition of that word. These injections were pushed as “safe and effective” – they were not very effective and they were certainly not safe.
The last lines of the article are:
“We must not let the elites off the hook for the unhinged experiment they inflicted on us.”
Lockdowns were not inflicted upon us by elites. They were demanded by a large majority of the population, who were clamouring for the government to ‘do something’. Lockdowns were all the things the author describes them as, and they were happily accepted by the majority of the public, indeed actively demanded. If they had not been, there is no way the authorities could have coped with mass refusal to obey.
And the fact the majority of the public are complicit in the whole lockdown fiasco means there will never be a real reckoning, because no one wants to be reminded of their support for something that they either now realise was a catastrophe, or they still think was a good thing anyway. There will never be any public surge of opinion in favour of a Truth and Reconciliation Commission on covid, that will lay out in brutal terms how wrong it all was, because that would rub the noses of the public who supported it all in the ordure as much as those who made and enacted the lockdown decisions. So it will not happen until many decades hence, when it can be viewed more as history than a matter of truth and justice.
Not really, because the technocratic elites were telling everyone something had to be done & were stamping hard on anyone who suggested otherwise.
Not just the government and technocratic elites.
Far too often nowadays I come across otherwise decent and sensible people who unquestioningly believe something just because they read, saw or heard it on the bbc.
During lockdown this unhealthy reach and influence was dialed up to eleven when pretty much an entire population was glued to the box. America may have its Karens, we had the twin harridans Kay and “Beff” (both of whom ironically were taken off air for several months due to breaking the same isolation rules they so shrilly decried when committed by Johnson, Cummings or Hancock while remaining strangely silent about the current PM and his chums).
You have this backwards. The public were clamouring for lockdown only after months of ramping fearmongering and demands that something be done from the media and the rest of the elites. Add on top that the elite almost criminalised dissent on this.
The elites frequently ignore genuine public opinion. Majorities in Britain have always opposed mass immigration and want capital punishment reintroducing, yet the elites fastidiously ignore public sentiments in these areas. Do you really think the elites would have imposed lockdowns if they didn’t want to?
Exactly correct. In no way was the COVID response a grassroots lead response.
Being unaware at the time of the Diamond Princess or that the infection rate had already peaked, I was in favour of the first lockdown which was sold under the slogan ‘three weeks to flatten the curve’. Why? Because it made sense to me at the time that a short lockdown would help the NHS to cope by spreading infections over a longer period. Tha appalling effects of locking down for any extended period seemed so obvious to me that I couldn’t believe that the Government would be crazy enough to do it. It turned out of course that it was and by the summer I was writing to my MP begging her not to support any further lockdown – to no effect of course.
Jim – the lockdowns were an international policy (although some nations said NO and stuck to NO). The idea that the public of various nations suddenly thought up the lockdown policy is not correct – the public “demanded” what the international establishment manipulated them into “demanding”.
It was disturbing, profoundly disturbing, to see the public manipulated like this – if they could be made to demand the destruction of their own basic liberties (in a campaign that was NOT about “saving lives” – this was never what this was about) then what could the public not be manipulated into demanding?
I believe in free will, in human agency – moral responsibility, I believe that humans are beings – subjects (moral agents) not just objects.
But it is also clear that this free will, this moral agency, can be subverted – horribly subverted.
Conditioning, indoctrinating, “psyops”, “brainwashing” – call it what you will, it is still horrible to see it in operation.
You only have to look at the polls from the time – the public were very much on board with lockdown policy. Boris was ludicrously popular for bringing them in. 93% support for the 2020 measures (here: https://yougov.co.uk/politics/articles/33585-brits-support-national-lockdown-jan-2021). That support was still 85% in Jan 2021 when the 3rd(?) national lockdown was announced. Indeed 77% said it should have come sooner. When Boris ended lockdowns in July 2021 a majority of the UK public wanted lockdown measures to continue until covid had been brought under control globally ie for an indeterminate amount of time. (here:https://www.ipsos.com/en-uk/majority-britons-support-extending-certain-covid-19-restrictions-not-forever) From that link the most amazing figure is that 19% of the UK public wanted a 10pm curfew for all households enforced permanently, rising to 27% for such a curfew until covid had been controlled globally.
I’m sorry to have to say it, but lockdowns were absurdly popular with the public. Now you could say they had been brainwashed by the MSM and the authorities working in conjunction, but regardless they loved Big Brother. And I don’t buy the ‘false consciousness’ argument, beloved of the Left, that somehow these people had been hoodwinked into wanting something they didn’t really want against their better interests by nefarious means. The public is more interested in security over freedom, and those who value the opposite are the small minority, as covid exposed in no uncertain terms. The State may have be opportunistic in going for lockdowns when and how they did, but they were pushing at an open door.