Boris Johnson has led a fascist coup against the United Kingdom.
If that sounds like an exaggeration, just ask yourself how you’d have felt a year ago — or even six months ago — if you’d been told a British government was planning to institute a 10pm curfew, ban gatherings of more than six people, impose daily immunity tests before you were allowed to go about your business, employ Stasi-like volunteer ‘marshals’ to ensure public compliance and warning that it might even have to cancel Christmas?
Your first reaction would have been: “Impossible. This is the kind of thing that excitable foreigners engage in. Never the phlegmatic, rational British – and certainly, never, ever, EVER so long as there’s a Conservative government in power.”
Your second reaction would have been: “Oh, I get it. It’s a joke, right? You’re telling me the plotline of some new dystopian graphic novel on the lines of Watchmen currently being adapted for Amazon Prime or Netflix, yeah?”
I still can’t quite believe it myself.
Who exactly is that dishevelled oaf on the rostrum issuing all these fascistic ordinances?
Definitely no relation — apart from the dishevelled oaf part — to the shambolic but benign, witty, amiable freedom-loving figure we re-elected as prime minister in December last year.
Sure many of us may only have voted for Boris’s Conservatives faute de mieux — because, for all their flaws they were infinitely preferable to the alternative — a regime led by Jeremy Corbyn’s Marxists.
But there were at least grounds for hope at the time that Boris was on the side of prosperity, liberty and optimism.
Not any more. How massively he has betrayed all our hopes!
It’s possible that Boris’s brush with death earlier this year — his excessive weight, unfortunately, put him in the Covid at-risk category — may have stolen his mojo and left him a dried-out husk entirely unfit for public office.
Or it may just be that Boris was always going to be exposed for the chancer he is, sooner or later: all that was needed was the crisis which would cruelly reveal just how useless he is — at least where statesmanship is concerned — at rising to the occasion.
Either way, ‘lovable’ Boris Johnson is currently presiding over the biggest assault on the British people’s freedoms since Cromwell’s Commonwealth (which was the last occasion on which Christmas was more or less banned).
But maybe the most shocking part of the tyranny Boris is currently imposing on Britain is the lack of justification for it.
If Covid-19 really were a version, say, of the Black Death — which wiped out 60 per cent of Europe’s population — most of us would probably agree to sacrifice our freedoms in order to reduce the risk of dying in agony with pustulous buboes while vomiting black blood. Back in the 14th century, there might possibly have been a place for a Boris Johnson, or a Matt Hancock or a Chris Whitty — and if only someone could build a time machine, sharpish, maybe we could facilitate this.
Here in 2020, we need Boris Johnson, Matt Hancock, Chris Witty, Neil Ferguson, Grant Shapps and the rest of the cabal of fascistic Covid bedwetters now running Britain about as much as we need a dose of necrotising fasciitis in our groin area.
How did such a bunch of totalitarian hysterics ever gain such untrammelled power to impose such draconian measures on a first-world economy when we supposedly have a parliamentary system — and an upper chamber — designed to put a check on such deranged extremism?
Why, even now, are so few of our elected parliamentary representatives challenging this outrageous nonsense?
And outrageous nonsense it most definitely is.
Everyone who still buys into the government’s and the mainstream media’s propaganda that Covid-19 poses any kind of serious threat really needs to read this measured, coolly rational paper by three distinguished scientists — Paul Kirkham, Professor of Cell Biology and Head of Respiratory Disease Research Group at Wolverhampton University, Dr Mike Yeadon, former CSO and VP, Allergy and Respiratory Research Head with Pfizer Global R&D and co-Founder of Ziarco Pharma Ltd, and Barry Thomas, one of only a handful of epidemiologist to work with the NHS.
This contrarian paper mentions, inter alia, that — contrary the shrill claims being made by Boris Johnson et al — there is next to no danger of a ‘second wave’.
Here, courtesy of Lockdown Sceptics, is the short version:
Daily deaths from and with COVID-19 have almost ceased, having fallen over 99% from peak. All the numbers monitored carefully fall like this, too: the numbers being hospitalised, numbers in hospital, number in intensive care – all are falling in synchrony from the April peak. Viral evidence historically tells us that you don’t generally get infected by the exact same virus twice, certainly not within a short period of time. It’d be a poor immune system which lets that happen and we’d probably not have made it as a species into the 21st century if that’s how it worked. So there’s an expectation of some duration of immunity. It needs studying, but our experience and evidence for coronaviruses (Le Bert et al, 2020) suggests that if you have memory T-cells, durability can be very long lasting. This study showed that people still had robust T-cell responses in 2020, 17 years after the first SARS outbreak back in 2003. The concerns people have expressed about falling antibody levels underscores a lack of knowledge about acquired immunity. It is not efficient nor required for immunity to maintain high levels of antibodies to everything to which you are immune. Instead, cellular memory enables very rapid re-generation of antibodies upon re-encounter with the antigen, if that is required to defend the host. Alternatively, innate and cellular memory responses can be sufficient.
The NHS currently remains ‘COVID-19 ready’ in preparation for an expected second wave, a highly unlikely scenario based upon an initial model with highly sensitive input variables that we already know to be inaccurate. The evidence we’ve presented leads us to believe there is unlikely to be a second wave and that while there have been apparent multi-‘wave’ respiratory viruses in the past, notably 1918-20, in many cases it became clear that this was either different populations being infected at different times or in some cases multiple different organisms involved. There is no biological principle that leads us to expect a second wave based on the accumulation of data over the past six months. Instead, it is likely there will be local, small and self-limiting mini-outbreaks as areas previously unexposed come into contact with the virus.
Perhaps never before in human history have advanced, free market democracies imposed such dramatic, totalitarian proscriptions on their citizenry on so flimsy a basis. Under Boris Johnson, Britain could have been one of those countries that defied this trend, as Sweden did and Brazil did. Instead, he has bought into the madness of the times wholesale and continues to double down.
As Conservative prime ministers go, Boris Johnson is now so bad he makes even Edward Heath look like a towering figure of statesmanship. Whenever he stands down citing health reasons, it really cannot be soon enough. The man is a walking disaster and we are all suffering for it.