I Can't Believe It's Not Lockdown!
There are lies, damned lies and statistics. and then there’s ‘modelling’ and ‘Next slide please . . .’ On the basis of alarmist projections by ‘experts’ who have been spectacularly wrong time and again, Christmas has been thrown into disarray.
Welcome to I Can’t Believe It’s Not Lockdown. as this newspaper’s front page headline declared yesterday: ‘IT’S BOrIS VerSUS The SCIeNTISTS’. Despite the PM’s protestations to the contrary, the scientists are winning on away goals.
City centres are once again deserted. Shops, bars and restaurants are bereft of customers. Public transport is virtually empty. Frustration, especially within the Tory party, is boiling over. after 100 backbenchers voted against vaccine passports this week, anger at the overmighty influence of unelected advisers has now spread to the lower reaches of Government.
Tory MP Joy Morrissey, a junior bag carrier at the Foreign Office, tweeted on Wednesday: ‘Perhaps the unelected Covid public health spokesperson should defer to what our eLeCTeD Members of Parliament and the Prime Minister have decided. I know it’s difficult to remember but that’s how democracy works. This is not a public health socialist state.’
Morrissey was referring to Chris Whitty, one half of the Two ronnies of Doom double act, who has done his best to put the mockers on the festive season. Last night he warned us to prepare for another 18 months of misery.
england’s Chief Medical Officer Whitty, a man with the funereal demeanour of a pox doctor’s clerk, used a Downing Street press conference to ramp up Project Fear 2.0. Painting an apocalyptic picture of the Omicron variant spreading like Triffids, he urged people not to mix unless it ‘really matters to them’.
What’s that supposed to mean? Don’t blame me if you die of Covid, kicking and screaming in agony? Is it any wonder people err on the side of caution?
HIS priapic graphs closely resemble climate Jeremiah Michael Mann’s notorious global warming hockey stick and are designed to maximise alarm and despondency. But you can prove anything with statistics, provided you pick and choose your starting point.
as the eminent statistician Sir David Spiegelhalter has admitted, the claim that millions of people will soon be infected with Omicron was ‘a bit naughty’.
That’s putting it mildy. regular readers will be aware that 18 months ago I stopped believing a single word they say about Covid. That’s largely down to their
cynical refusal to define what they mean by people dying with the virus, rather than from it.
as the distinguished oncologist Karol Sikora said this week: how do we know the first patient to die with Omicron wasn’t knocked down by a bus? We don’t, and the Government isn’t saying. But it wouldn’t be the first time.
Despite blood-curdling assurances that we face a tsunami (Wee Burney) or tidal wave (Boris) of Omicron cases, the health
Minister Gillian Keegan was forced to admit yesterday that there were just ten — or was it 11? — Omicron patients in hospital.
yet based on suspect ‘modelling’, the Government has been prepared again to restrict civil liberties and send the economy into a tailspin. an allegedly Conservative Government, with an 80-seat majority, elected on a promise to ‘take back control’, continues to capitulate to ‘The Science’, a catch-all term for everyone from proper doctors to college lecturers and ‘public health professionals’ without a medical qualification to their name.
how some of us cheered in 2016, during the Brexit campaign, when Michael Gove said people were tired of ‘experts’ who claimed to know what was best, while consistently getting everything wrong.
Now we’re told the Govester has morphed into the most gung-ho minister in favour of a Wuhan-style clampdown. If he had his way, we’d be barricaded into our homes and shot on sight if we dared to venture outside.
Who’d have thought it? Michael Gove, the Manchurian Candidate. Boris, too, despite his former libertarian instincts, has been captured by the forces of Zero Covid, even though he insists that unlike last year the latest Lockdown Lite restrictions are entirely voluntary. ‘We don’t want to make your choices for you about your social life, we are not closing things,’ he said. But as long as his sidekicks like Whitty keep implying that ‘yOU’re aLL GOING TO DIe!’ is it any wonder most people choose to vote with their feet and head for the hills?
even Lockdown Lite isn’t severe enough for the fanatics of so-called Independent SaGe, who are demanding a ten-day circuit breaker — in other words, another complete shutdown backed by the full force of the law.
With any luck, the revolt by 100 backbenchers will stop Boris caving in to that. But the PM is clearly spooked by the extent of opposition within his own party.
The truth hurts, which is why Joy Morrissey’s tweet was unceremoniously taken down in double-quick time and her promotion prospects disappeared down the gurgler. (Heaven knows, she’s miserable now.)
But Morrissey got one thing wrong when she wrote: ‘This is not a public health socialist state.’
Sorry, Joy, that’s exactly what Britain has become. a public health service socialist state.
The reason Boris presses the panic button over and over again is because he is terrified of being remembered as the Prime Minister who killed the NhS.
It’s his own stupid fault, for mythologising Our amazing NhS as the envy of the world. It isn’t. But we must all pay the price to maintain the fantasy.
If that means wrecking Christmas, destroying the hospitality sector and cancelling tens of thousands of long-overdue life-saving operations, tough. all must be sacrificed on the altar of Covid to appease the Great God Science.
Next slide, please . . .