The Scottish Mail on Sunday

Britain’s new ruler: The National Panic Service

- Peter Hitchens Read Peter’s blog at hitchensbl­og.mailonsund­ay.co.uk and follow him on Twitter @clarkemica­h

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.

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.

 ??  ?? NO ESCAPE: A holiday rep warns British tourists arriving in Majorca last week about the new quarantine rules
NO ESCAPE: A holiday rep warns British tourists arriving in Majorca last week about the new quarantine rules
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