It has been said by a number of different people that the definition of stupidity is to carry out an action, see it fail and then repeat the process, exactly as before, over and over again and expect different or better results. This is a definition that would most certainly apply to the British Government who have introduced a third covid lockdown, despite lockdowns one and two being the failures that many expected them to be.
This is because whilst restrictions may be useful in controlling Typhoid, Cholera and Ebola, which are all food and water or bodily fluid bourne diseases, it is all but impossible to control an airborne virus with lockdowns. Airborne infections such as influenza travel swiftly and you can end up with an epidemic flu situation almost before you realise that the flu is here. You cannot fence off the air in a town or city like you can fence off contaminated food or water supplies which is why airborne pathogens spread incredibly swiftly.
It is no more possible to control an airborne pathogen, than it was for King Canute to command the sea, unless a country completely cuts itself off from the outside, a difficult task in the modern world. The opportunity to ‘do a Trump’ and make the attempt to shut off Britain from the early entry of covid was missed and throughout the first and second lockdowns, Britain’s borders were wide open, even though our pubs were shut.
Unlike the original King Canute who attempted to command the sea in order to show his acolytes that he was not a deity, the current King Canute in the form of Boris Johnson, actually believes that he can control that which by definition is uncontrollable. In the form of lockdowns Boris Johnson, his Cabinet and his advisors, have implemented a cure that is far worse, for the majority, than the disease itself.
The cost of these unnecessary and useless lockdowns is tremendous. The penalty,which will be paid by ordinary British subjects not the politicians and administrative classes, are almost unimaginable in their scale. There is physical and mental health damage caused by lockdowns because the NHS has turned itself into a mostly covid only service, depression and other mental health ailments seem to be rising and I’ve little doubt that this period of covid related madness on the part of government will see a jump in the suicide rate. There’s also the economic cost. Thousands upon thousands of small businesses will never reopen, killed by the Government’s lunatic enthusiasm for lockdowns. Then there’s the social, educational and emotional cost of these damnable lockdowns. Loneliness and its close partner depression has risen, social trust has been decimated as people start to fear their neighbour because their neighbour might be a covid grass and our children’s education and the education of older students has been unnecessarily disrupted in a way not seen since World War II.
And for what you may ask? Why has a society and an economy that took centuries to build being destroyed? The answer, lunatic as it is, but then we are now governed by lunatics, is that it is over a disease that kills approximately 0.3-1% of those whom are infected with it. Even then the death toll for Covid is confined mostly to those who are either very elderly or who have serious co-morbidities. We, or rather our by now malevolent and deluded government, have killed our nation and our society for what is virtually nothing. A moral and sensible society would have not sacrificed the seed corn of our nation, our children, to a whole year of non-education merely because of a disease that mostly afflicts those who were in bad shape anyway, it would have shielded the elderly and medically vulnerable and allowed the rest of society to function in as normal a manner as possible. This immoral government has not done this. Instead as Peter Hitchens recently said they are embarking on an equivalent path to a man burning down his house because he has a wasps nest in his loft.
Repeated, informed and erudite calls to Boris Johnson to ‘Let my people go’ have fallen on death ears and like the Biblical Pharaoh he has, because Johnson is a weak leader imprisoned by his advisors and unable to think for himself, continued to become ever more stiff necked. A better leader would have consulted those who really do understand the progress of epidemics rather than men, like Professor Ferguson, whose previous predictions regarding other diseases has been proven wrong time and time again. If Johnson had done this then he would have understood that epidemics eventually burn themselves out and that viruses evolve into forms that are often less deadly but more infectious than previous versions. Instead Boris Johnson has employed a lockdown policy that failed in the face of Bubonic and Pneumonic Plague in London in 1665. Back then locking people into their houses did not stop plague from spreading just as these useless lockdowns have failed to eradicate covid in the present day. For a person such as Boris Johnson who claims to be well educated in history, it is more than surprising that he has not realised that fact.
I no longer trust the government, a government that I voted for in December 2019 to get us out of this mess. I believe that they are enjoying the control of the populace just as the government and civil service enjoyed the control over the populace that they gained in Wartime and never fully gave up. We are now ruled by tyrants who believe that they have all the answers, even when they obviously do not and who suffer from the hubris of governance and have come to believe that they can control a disease that if left unchecked would most likely evolve into a endemic condition that we would have to learn to live with. The lockdowns only put off the day when that condition of endemic status, with only those very ill succumbing to it as is the case with other respiratory illnesses including the common cold, is achieved.
This is yet another terrible policy from a terrible and tyrannical government that have become ‘The Commieservatives’. I have little faith that the Parliamentary Tory party will step up to the plate tomorrow and do what they need to do and defy the government, there are few in this party, such as Sir Desmond Swayne, who are prepared to speak up against the damage that has been done and which continues to be done. Tory MP’s are now little more than careerist yes men on the whole and this party needs to pay for the damage that it has done either directly by imposing policies that are doomed to fail and which have been shown to fail, or by Tory MP’s failing to stand up for the rights and liberties of their constituents. I hope and pray that change can come via the ballot box and via the alternative parties, even those who I have profound political disagreements with. But I fear for the future when the government money runs out, people realise that they have no jobs to go back to and the bills start piling up. It is then when a large cohort of people that feel that they have little to lose is created, that we might see something far worse than Parliamentary democracy in Britain.
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