Graham Brady, Chairman of the Tory 1922 Committee of backbench MPs, has written a trenchant piece attacking the Johnson government’s draconian and excessive coronavirus policies.
The piece is headlined: ‘I believe the real purpose of masks is social control — it’s time to turn down the fear dial.’
Brady writes in the Mail on Sunday:
Many politicians and advisers will admit privately that the policy change compelling people to wear masks was not really about the spread of infection at all but about the psychological effect that they would have.
That real purpose is social control – to provide a constant reminder to maintain distance from other people.
To maintain a state of anxiety that leaves people more likely to comply with the restrictions that might otherwise be resisted or forgotten.
And:
This is exactly the same approach that the Government’s behavioural experts on the sinister-sounding advisory group known as SPI-B – the Independent Scientific Pandemic Insights Group on Behaviours – has admitted using.
‘The perceived level of personal threat needs to be increased among those who are complacent, using hard-hitting emotional messaging,’ said the SPI-B paper of March 22, 2020.
This will be one of the most important questions when the inquiry into the handling of the pandemic begins: just how far it can ever be right for the state to use fear to manipulate the population of a free democratic country?
While all this is perfectly true you have to ask: where has Graham Brady been for the last 16 months? And where, for that matter, was the newspaper that published this “provocative view” (as it bills it), the Mail On Sunday?
Brady is supposed to be the leader of the backbench MPs who hold the government to account. He could have been the principled, fearless, leader of the resistance to the most draconian, illiberal and destructive measures ever inflicted by a British government on its people.
Instead, while he has made a few discomfited noises here and there, and voted against the government with reasonable frequency, what he has not done (almost no MP has) is spell out clearly from the beginning and throughout that what is being done to the United Kingdom is totalitarian, evil, and wrong.
Brady and his Brexiteer crew were once risibly dubbed the Spartans. What events of the last 16 months have shown us is that Xerxes I, had he ever met these milksops in battle, would have had them on toast for breakfast. Steve Baker MP, the most slippery of the bunch, would probably have played the Ephialtes role and betrayed them by revealing the path the Persians used to outflank the 300.
We can all agree with every word of Brady’s article, which might equally have been titled ‘Pope Found In Vatican’ or ‘Bears Defecate In Forests’.
But I still smell a rat, especially since the newspaper that published him also happens to be the most bedwetting, Covid-fanatical, and on-message organ in the whole of what used to be Fleet Street.
The wankerati are shifting the narrative. Masks are no longer good, m’kay, they’ve decided, because the public have shown themselves sufficiently scaredy cat and malleable. So now it’s on to the next stage of the operation: jab everyone now; and scapegoat and marginalise and vilify anyone who doesn’t want to take one of those new shots.
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