How many female news reporters were threatened by men shouting ‘Allahu Akbar’ at the anti-lockdown rally in London’s Hyde Park two weeks ago? How many TV crews were menaced by the mob and had their microphones stolen? How many police were assaulted? How much property was damaged?
The answer to all these questions, of course, is none.
Rather, all the ugly incidents above happened in the course of the more recent Black Lives Matter demonstrations in London which though nasty at times as it was, has at least done us all one huge favour: they have exposed the utter absurdity of Boris Johnson’s ongoing lockdown and social distancing policy.
Against the trend — and in contradiction of the latest scientific evidence — Britain is maintaining some of the world’s strictest Covid-19 protocols. The lockdown is still in force; a two-metre social distancing rule (even the World Health Organisation says one metre is more than enough) remains in place; and rather than relax these silly rules, as most other countries around the world are, the British government is looking for new ways of tightening them.
The government has effectively made casual sex illegal (by forbidding visiting strangers’ houses): a bit rich, you might think, from an administration led by Bonker Boris, the most priapic Prime Minister in British history. It’s also planning to introduce — at enormous cost to the already hobbled travel and hospitality industry — a two-week quarantine for tourists and homecoming travellers arriving in the UK.
But how do all these strictures square with the events of the last few days, in which thousands of people, in Hyde Park and elsewhere, have been permitted to gather in huge crowds in support of Black Lives Matter in flagrant contravention of all social distancing rules?
Well they don’t, obviously, and anyone with half a brain can see this.
Either Covid-19 remains a clear and present threat to the safety of Britain — so great a threat that the quarantine, the lockdown and the social distancing regulations are totally justified.
Or it poses no significant threat — and the quarantine, the lockdown and the social distancing regulations are a nonsense.
It’s either one or the other. It can’t be both. Yet current UK government policy appears to vacillate between the two positions, depending on the circumstances.
So, for example, as I discovered the other week, if you’re protesting against the lockdown the police will turn up mob-handed and threaten you with arrest for inadequate social distancing.
But if you’re part of menacing mob claiming to be outraged by an incident that happened 4,000 miles away across the Atlantic in an entirely different legal jurisdiction, then as far as the authorities are concerned no action need be taken short of arresting people physically beating up police officers.
The official hypocrisy, double standards and general stupidity are breathtaking.
Here, for example, is one of Boris’s cabinet ministers, Penny Mordaunt:
I don’t want to be too hard on Mordaunt — there are many worse people in government, Matt Hancock for example — at least she’s sound on issues like China. Nonetheless, this is a fantastically idiotic tweet from a Conservative minister.
Not only is she tacitly endorsing the protests — ‘rightly motivated’ — but, worse, she appears to be taking the side of those deeply embarrassing policemen and policewomen who have been photographed kneeling pathetically in acknowledgement of their supposed white privilege and guilt. In the United Kingdom, we do not pay our police to take political positions when in uniform.
Of course, you expect this sort of politically correct, virtue-signalling nonsense from Labour MPs and celebrities; but not from a member of a government whose key task is to represent the whole country, without fear or favour, not to pander to special interest groups, some of them hell-bent on fomenting chaos and destabilising the system.
And isn’t it funny that so many of the voices celebrating the Black Lives Matter protests were, only a few days ago, castigating Dominic Cummings for having broken the lockdown?
Whatever you think of Cummings — in my case, not much now I know that he is the pillock largely responsible for the quarantine, which he has been pushing because it has public support — the chances that he could have infected anyone with Covid-19 on his notorious drive to Barnard Castle are negligible.
The chances, on the other hand, of several thousand people gathering cheek by jowl of passing on a virus are surely significant. Or at least they are if you believe what the critics of Cummings were contriving to pretend about its deadly infectiousness just last week. They now seem to have adjusted this view very rapidly with regards to the Black Lives Matter protests.
What does all this tell us?
It tells us, I think, that the lockdown (and related coronavirus policies) no longer have anything to do with science (if indeed they ever did) but are entirely about politics.
No one supporting the Black Lives Matter protests can possibly claim with any credibility that the lockdown is justified. Deadly viruses do not take time off for fashionable left-wing political causes — and I don’t imagine there’s a single person among the thousands who attended those demos, nor among the millions supporting them, who believes that they do.
It follows therefore that the large number of people now pretending that the lockdown should continue as a matter of public safety are simply faking it or, at best, telling themselves a lie which deep down they know to be untrue.
I think the Black Lives Matter protests — certainly the UK version — are dangerous, stupid and wrong for a number of reasons. But I’m grateful to them for one thing: they’ve made it quite impossible for anyone with even half a brain to see the ongoing lockdown as anything other than a ridiculous joke.