You can almost hear the BBC presenters drooling at the prospect of yet another of the shutdowns they long for and enjoy so much.
The combination of new Covid reports and medical repression on Europe has given them hope that England could once again close its doors for Christmas.
Once again, they have begun moving the supposedly menacing figures of ‘cases’ (positive tests resulting from endless state-sponsored testing) back up their bulletins.
That is BBC. But almost as bad are the others who still believe that there were only two options – shutting the country and ‘letting it rip’.
Sweden chose not to follow the closure route. Although it took many steps, Sweden did not resort to forced mass quarantine or economic strangulation.
Only last week, a rather intelligent person wrote, as if to excuse the devastation of the NHS by months of near-closure: ‘If we’d let Covid rip, if we hadn’t locked down, I’m not sure there’d have been a functioning hospital to go to.’ I am sure she really believes this, alas.
And among those who howled for yet more damaging measures back in March 2020, there remains the other baseless belief that ‘we should have locked down faster and harder’. You can be sure that this is the verdict of every official inquiry.
But even then, the evidence was not strong enough to support this conclusion. Sweden didn’t follow the closed down route. While it tried many things, the government did not force Sweden to quarantine all its citizens or strangle its economy.
If closedowns worked, if milder measures more fitted to a free country were ‘letting rip’, then surely Sweden’s figures would be far worse than those of any other country. These aren’t.
Sweden’s response was not perfect, especially in care homes, and many died. But the country’s tally of Covid deaths per million has for some months remained on the low side of comparable European figures. A study of all the national responses, from Japan to Brazil, shows that there is no connection between severity of repression or the number of deaths. Even so, the Covid surges are not limited to those countries in Europe that have been praised by liberals because they use strict masking laws.
I have no doubt that in March 2020, this country’s Government went into a spasm of panic. The government was encouraged by its advisers to resort to naked fear. This fear became raw power.
If closedowns worked, if milder measures more fitted to a free country were ‘letting rip’, then surely Sweden’s figures would be far worse than those of any other country. These are not the case.
Some panic-makers were supporters of far Left. They may have thought that this was the ideal time to expand the state’s control over health. We don’t know. They did it.
The response revealed that British citizens would have behaved more cautiously and with care than they did fear and showed no bossiness.
This information has been digested by the Government for a very long time. It will never publicly admit that its March 2020 financial crisis was a disaster, but let’s hope the majority of MPs can see this clearly and we won’t be subject to another self-destructive, state-sponsored panic in winter. It won’t do anything.
For years here, I have pointed out the scientific fact that the evidence for the effectiveness of ‘antidepressants’ is extremely weak and their side effects are very worrying. You might be able to see that official opinion has begun to catch up to me many tragic events later.
Marijuana is the killer
If last week’s mass killing in Wisconsin had been the work of a gunman, the USA would still be convulsed with renewed demands for more gun control. It would have been on the other side of Atlantic and an individual from a Muslim nation was involved. We’d still be taking additional precautions to stop Islamist terror.
Both the gun control lobby as well as the terror obsessives remain silent. The motor vehicle was used to carry out the attack, which is a lethal weapon that no liberal or conservative red-blooded American would be without. And the suspect, Darrell Brooks, plainly isn’t an Islamist.
This is why it’s been so quickly removed from the front pages. It does have one thing in common, however, with approximately 95 percent of mass murders in France or the USA. He is known to be a marijuana user. The alarming link between marijuana and mental illnesses is so obvious that even The Times – a liberal modish newspaper – has noticed it.
So is the gigantic mountain of reports of wild, irrational crimes in which the culprit was a marijuana user, including last week’s British case of Jake Notman, who stabbed his girlfriend, Lauren Bloomer, 30 times, then got into his car and ran her over. He was clearly out of control.
The prosecutor in the case had little doubt about the reason, explaining, very upsettingly, that Ms Bloomer ‘was just trying to care for him in this state of being disordered through cannabis’.
Professor Sir Robin Murray, one of Britain’s most distinguished psychiatrists, no longer bothers to hedge his bets on the link between the drug and mental illness. He said last week: ‘One third of young people who develop schizophrenia-like psychosis in London do so because of their heavy use of high-potency cannabis.’
He warned: ‘Everywhere that cannabis has been legalised, the use and potency of the drug have increased, and more cannabis-induced disorders have followed. Most worryingly, tobacco companies that have experienced falls in the sales of cigarettes are now buying into cannabis companies with the aim of selling as much cannabis as they once sold tobacco.’
This poses a grave danger. Big Tobacco has mastered the art of profiting off misery. It now supports Big Dope with its financial resources.
Big Dope is for marijuana being legal, advertised, and available everywhere. Many fools will believe it. Even teenagers who have never grown up, and are now the government of Germany. Similar fools are here.
Grounded – by M&S red tape
I’m not sure I can be bothered to go abroad again. I had a wonderful time visiting 57 countries over the past half century, but the current bureaucracy is so tedious and annoying that I just don’t fancy it.
What a pleasure it was to keep a good collection of foreign banknotes to take with me when I traveled. But I note that Marks & Spencer’s foreign exchange desks are telling me that, to buy currency, I ‘need’ to produce a passport or some other document. I don’t. I have checked with HM Revenue & Customs, and such things are compulsory only for transactions of €15,000 and above. This is in order to avoid money laundering.
M&S, which took ages to respond to my query about this, can’t really explain why they wish to make life difficult in this way. They say: ‘In our bureaux, we highlight that ID may be required so that customers can have this to hand if needed.’
But they don’t. They flatly say customers will ‘need’ documents. No if. Why?
Stella Creasy is a Labour MP and I like her. I also think that she can have a point about bringing her well-behaved child into the House of Commons. There have been many MPs who were drinking in this chamber. Many others have done nothing but be stupid.
Even if Ms Creasy’s baby started crying, it would show more sense than is contained in many parliamentary speeches. Personally, I think raising the next generation is a more important and respectable task than full-time politics, but if she wants to combine the two, I’m not going to criticise her for it.
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