Don’t dare try to force us into another lockdown nightmare

MY BLOOD doesn’t often boil. But when Chief medical officer Chris Whitty declared he would plunge us into another lockdown if there was a new virus like Covid, it came close.

He announced this even as he acknowledged that, because of the lockdowns we have already suffered, the nation faces a ‘prolonged period’ of excess deaths — there have been some 30,000 from heart disease alone already, along with a shocking number of undetected cancer cases.

Sorry, Chris, but if you think the millions of us who endured those two deeply traumatising lockdown years will go through it again, you’ve got another think coming.

you can arrest me, throw me in prison, do whatever you like. But I will never again accept a situation where the state imprisons me in my own home.

It’s not just the loss of freedom. The damage wrought by lockdowns is incalculable.

We were told they were to protect the nHS. But waiting lists are now at an all-time high, ambulances have given up and GPs won’t see patients. In fact, we have never been so poorly served by our health service.

Schoolchildren everywhere are still trying to catch up after the mess lockdowns made of their education. many continue to suffer from serious mental health problems. meanwhile, the billions poured into furlough schemes have all but bankrupted the country and engendered a work-from-home mentality that has changed the dynamism of our get-go economy for ever.

The new work — or lack-of-work — ethic has virtually destroyed the state sector, which can no longer be relied on to provide even such basic services as renewing driving licences and passports.

The legacy of lockdown is everywhere to see. And, most perniciously, it has given our politicians and civil servants such as Dr Whitty a taste for powers that no citizens in a free country should ever condone.

Whitty and the others even denied many people the right to say a final farewell at a loved one’s funeral, to comfort a suffering parent in a care home, visit the ill in hospital or attend the birth of their own child.

Lockdowns were an outrageous deprivation of our civil liberties. millions of us who did the right thing at the time, by accepting them for the public good, now know the truth — and we will never endure them again.