UK Parliament debates coronavirus response and excess deaths

N.B.: New posts will be intermittent for the time being. Home responsibilities at the moment have overtaken my spare time. My apologies! At any rate, I hope to continue with exegeses of Lectionary readings and Forbidden Bible Verses as a minimum.

On April 18, 2024, an Independent MP (former Conservative), Andrew Bridgen, representing North West Leicestershire, was granted a Parliamentary debate, ‘Covid 19: Response and Excess Deaths’.

Bridgen has a degree in biology with a focus on genetics. As such, the effect that coronavirus vaccines have had on the general population has been of great interest to him, in particular, the number of excess deaths during and after the pandemic.

The link above is to the transcript from Hansard. I will excerpt Bridgen’s introduction, contributions from two other sceptical MPs and the Government minister’s conclusion at the end of the debate.

Andrew Bridgen

Bridgen has always doubted the narrative that the vaccines were and are ‘safe and effective’.

He introduced the debate as follows (emphases mine):

I beg to move,

That this House has considered the covid-19 pandemic response and trends in excess deaths; and calls on the covid-19 inquiry to move onto its module 4 investigation into vaccines and therapeutics as soon as possible.

We are witnesses to the greatest medical scandal in this country in living memory, and possibly ever: the excess deaths in 2022 and 2023. Its causes are complex, but the novel and untested medical treatment described as a covid vaccine is a large part of the problem. I have been called an anti-vaxxer, as if I have rejected those vaccines based on some ideology. I want to state clearly and unequivocally that I have not: in fact, I am double vaccinated and vaccine-harmed. Intelligent people must be able to tell when people are neither pro-vax nor anti-vax, but are against a product that does not work and causes enormous harm to a percentage of the people who take it.

I am proud to be one of the few Members of Parliament with a science degree. It is a great shame that there are not more Members with a science background in this place; maybe if there were, there would be less reliance on Whips Office briefings and more independent research, and perhaps less group-think. I say to the House in all seriousness that this debate and others like it are going to be pored over by future generations, who will be genuinely agog that the evidence has been ignored for so long, that genuine concerns were disregarded, and that those raising them were gaslit, smeared and vilified.

One does not need any science training at all to be horrified by officials deliberately hiding key data in this scandal, which is exactly what is going on. The Office for National Statistics used to release weekly data on deaths per 100,000 in vaccinated and unvaccinated populations—it no longer does so, and no one will explain why. The public have a right to that data. There have been calls from serious experts, whose requests I have amplified repeatedly in this House, for what is called record-level data to be anonymised and disclosed for analysis. That would allow meaningful analysis of deaths after vaccination, and settle once and for all the issue of whether those experimental treatments are responsible for the increase in excess deaths.

Far more extensive and detailed data has already been released to the pharma companies from publicly funded bodies. Jenny Harries, head of the UK Health Security Agency, said that this anonymised, aggregate death by vaccination status data is “commercially sensitive” and should not be published. The public are being denied that data, which is unacceptable; yet again, data is hidden with impunity, just like in the Post Office scandal. Professor Harries has also endorsed a recent massive change to the calculation of the baseline population level used by the ONS to calculate excess deaths. It is now incredibly complex and opaque, and by sheer coincidence, it appears to show a massive excess of deaths in 2020 and 2021 and minimal excess deaths in 2023. Under the old calculation method, tried and tested for decades, the excess death rate in 2023 was an astonishing 5%—long after the pandemic was over, at a time when we would expect a deficit in deaths because so many people had sadly died in previous years. Some 20,000 premature deaths in 2023 alone are now being airbrushed away through the new normal baseline …

Bridgen reminded MPs — and us — of the traditional ways that the medical world once treated viruses and why some people die from them:

The average time to death from experiencing covid symptoms and testing positive was 18 days. It is a little-known fact that the body clears all the viruses within around seven days; what actually kills people is that some, especially the vulnerable, have an excessive immune response. Doctors have been treating that response for decades with steroids, antibiotics for secondary pneumonia infections and other standard protocols, but they did not do so this time.

Coronavirus changed all of that and probably not for the better:

Even though the virus was long gone, doctors abandoned the standard clinical protocols because covid was a “new virus”—which it was not. They sent people home, told them to take paracetamol until their lips turned blue, and then when those people returned to hospital, they sedated them, put them on ventilators and watched them die.

The protocol for covid-19 treatment was a binary choice between two treatment tracks. Once admitted, ill patients were either ventilated in intensive care or—if they were not fit for that level of care—given end of life medication, including midazolam and morphine. The body responsible for that protocol, NG163, which was published on 3 April 2020, is called the National Institute for Health and Care Excellence, or NICE. Giving midazolam and morphine to people dying of cancer is reasonable, but there is a side effect, which is that those drugs have a respiratory depressant effect. It is hard to imagine a more stupid thing to do than giving a respiratory suppressant to someone who is already struggling to breathe with the symptoms of covid-19, but that is exactly what we did …

Remember how nearly every cause of death during the pandemic was classified as from or with coronavirus? Once the vaccines were distributed, no deaths were seemingly attributed to them:

After a positive covid test, any illness and any death was attributed to the virus. After the experimental emergency vaccine was administered, no subsequent illness and no death was ever attributed to the vaccine. Those are both completely unscientific approaches, and that is why we have to look at other sources of data—excess deaths—to determine whether there is an issue.

Then there is the question surrounding the words ‘safe and effective’:

The fear deliberately stoked up by the Government promoted the idea of being rescued by a saviour vaccine. The chanting of the “safe and effective” narrative began, and the phrase seemed to hypnotise the whole nation. “Safe and effective” was the sale slogan of thalidomide. After that scandal, rules were put in place to prevent such marketing in future by pharma companies, and they are prohibited from using “safe and effective” without significant caveats.

That did not matter this time because, with covid-19 vaccines, the media, the Government and other authorities turned into big pharma’s marketing department, and it is very hard now to hear the word “safe” without the echo of the words “and effective”, but they are not safe and effective. In March 2021, when the majority of UK citizens had already received these novel products, Pfizer signed a contract with Brazil and South Africa saying that

“the long-term effects and efficacy of the Vaccine are not currently known and…adverse effects of the Vaccine…are not currently known.”

That is verbatim from the Pfizer contracts.

These so-called vaccines were the least effective vaccines ever. Is there anyone left under any illusion that they prevented any infections? When he was at the Dispatch Box for Prime Minister’s questions on 31 January, even the Prime Minister, in answer to my question, could not bring himself to add “and effective” to his “safe” mantra. In his own words, he was “unequivocal” that the vaccines are “safe”. The word “safe” means without risk of death or injury. Why is the Prime Minister gaslighting the 163 successful claims made to the vaccine damage payment scheme, totalling £19.5 million in compensation for harm caused by the covid vaccines? Have these people not suffered enough already? Those 163 victims are the tip of the iceberg, by the way. It also should be noted that the maximum payment is only £120,000, so each of those 163 victims got the maximum possible award, which should tell us something. The same compensation scheme paid out a total of only £3.5 million between 1997 and 2005, with an average of only eight claims per year, and that is for all claims for the entire country for all vaccines administered. So much for “safe”.

How about effective? On 25 October 2021, the then Prime Minister—the right hon. Member for Uxbridge and South Ruislip, Boris Johnson—even admitted that the vaccine “doesn’t protect you against catching the disease and it doesn’t protect you against passing it on” …

Those who imposed these vaccines knew full well that they could never prevent infection from a disease of this kind. An injection in the arm cannot do that. Only immunity on the surface of the airways and the lungs can prevent viral infection; antibodies in the blood cannot. In Dr Anthony Fauci’s words,

“it is not surprising that none of the predominantly mucosal respiratory viruses have ever been effectively controlled by vaccines.”

He continued:

“This observation raises a question of fundamental importance: if natural mucosal respiratory virus infections do not elicit complete and long-term protective immunity against reinfection, how can we expect vaccines, especially systemically administered non-replicating vaccines, to do so?”

They knew that the so-called vaccines would never protect from infection, which explains why they never tested for protection from infection …

Bridgen highlighted Australia, which, interestingly, distributed the vaccine before there was a Covid outbreak; the state governments had effectively quarantined their residents:

The Australian Government have launched an inquiry into Australia’s excess deaths problem. Australia is almost unique as a case study for excess deaths; as it had the vaccine before it had covid, its excess deaths are not so easily blamed on the long-term side effects of a virus. Like us, it saw a rise in deaths, which began in May 2021 and has not let up since. The impact was evident on the ambulance service first. South Australia saw a 67% increase in cardiac presentations of 15 to 44-year-olds. That increase peaked in November 2021, before covid hit. We saw a similar, deeply worrying effect here. In the UK, calls for life-threatening emergencies rose from 2,000 per day to 2,500 per day in May 2021, and that number has never returned to normal.

By October 2021, despite it being springtime in Australia, headlines reported that ambulances were unable to drop off patients in hospitals, which were already at full capacity …

In April 2022, Yvette D’Ath, Queensland’s Health Minister, said about the most urgent ambulance calls, called “code ones”:

“I don’t think anyone can explain why we saw a 40% jump in code ones… We just had a lot of heart attacks and chest pains and trouble breathing, respiratory issues. Sometimes you can’t explain why those things happen but unfortunately, they do.”

I think we could explain this if we were to look at the link to the vaccine roll-out. Omicron did cause some excess deaths in Australia from 2022 onwards. However, there was a huge chunk of excess deaths prior to that, which doctors have not been able to blame on the virus. Could those deaths be caused by the vaccine? Very few people dare even ask that question.

Bridgen explained how traditional vaccines are made contrasted with the ones for Covid-19:

Traditionally, the key to making a vaccine is to ensure that the pathological, harmful parts of the virus or bacteria are inactivated, so that the recipient can develop an immune response without danger of developing the disease. In stark contrast, the so-called covid vaccines used the most pathological or harmful part of the virus—the spike protein—in its entirety. The harm is systemic because, contrary to what everyone was told, the lipid nanoparticles, encapsulating the genetic material, spread through the whole body after injection, potentially affecting all organs. At the time, everyone was being reassured that the injection was broken down in the arm at the injection site. Regulators ought to have known that those were problems.

It is possible that the way the coronavirus vaccines work can lead to cancer in certain cases:

Cancer is a genetic disease disorder that arises from errors in DNA, allowing cells to grow uncontrollably. Moderna has multiple patents describing methods for reducing the risk of cancer induction from its mRNA products. That risk comes from the material interrupting the patient’s DNA. It turns out that an mRNA injection has very high quantities of DNA in it, and that massively increases the risk of disturbing a patient’s own DNA. Worse still, the DNA that was injected contained sequences that were hidden from the regulator. That is the SV40, or simian virus 40 promoter region, which has been linked to cancer and has been found in the Pfizer vaccines. That was no accident. Yet again, crucial information was hidden from the regulator and the public with absolute impunity. An independent study in Japan, published last week, has found links between increased cancer rates in Japan and those who took the first and subsequent booster vaccines. Perhaps that explains why Pfizer acquired a cancer treatment company for a reported $43 billion earlier this year.

Those are the main points from Andrew Bridgen’s introduction.

The Gallery

The coronavirus vaccines and their effects are a controversial subject in the UK, as it no doubt is elsewhere in the West. The Gallery had quite a few members of the public in attendance.

After the second speech from Sir Christopher Chope MP, the Deputy Speaker of the House, Dame Rosie Winterton said:

Order. Before I call the next speaker, I want to be absolutely clear, for the benefit of everybody who is watching our proceedings or participating in them, that if there are any more interruptions from the Gallery and it has to be cleared, I will have to temporarily suspend the House, which may mean that those who want to participate will be denied the opportunity. To be clear, I am trying to create a situation whereby everybody can have their say.

Graham Stringer

Graham Stringer, who holds a degree in chemistry, is the only Labour MP I hold in high regard, including during the pandemic restrictions, which he opposed.

Let it be noted that Graham Stringer was an outlier within Labour, which clamoured for earlier and longer lockdowns.

He began by noting that politics and science make strange bedfellows:

It is a pleasure to follow the hon. Member for Christchurch (Sir Christopher Chope), who has done remarkably good work on vaccine-damaged people. I co-chair his all-party parliamentary group’s sister group, the APPG on pandemic response and recovery, which has allowed me to see that we have a whole body of expert opinion before us. Medics, lawyers, experts in childcare and a whole range of politicians have come to very different views on what the right response to covid was and, in some cases, on both the law and the science itself.

Before I go any further, let me say that my experience of the APPG, and of climate change or global warming debates, is that science and politics make very uneasy bedfellows. There is often an attempt in a political debate to resolve matters that are only resolvable by looking at the evidence, doing more experiments and finding out the truth of the matter, which is not always possible in a debate where people feel very strongly about things.

He went on to discuss how the virus affected the general public and how the Government adopted a one-size-fits-all lockdown policy:

I want to talk about something we have not really talked about so far: the disease itself. People have different views about the damage done by covid. Some people think it is harmless and just another flu, whereas some treat it as though it were the plague. It is neither. It was a nasty disease for some people who got it, but its major characteristic was the profile of people who were killed or made ill by it. It affected older people much more severely. I think the median age of those who died was 82 for men and 84 for women, so it was a disease of the elderly. Those below 50 were relatively safe—some died, but not many. That was known at the beginning of the epidemic.

This comes back to the point about politics, and the protection of Government politicians, being more important than looking at the science. A rational response to a disease with the profile of covid-19 would have been to put a cordon sanitaire around those people who were vulnerable because of their age or because they had other diseases, such as lung diseases, and to let the rest of us go about our business and take the risk, as we do every year with seasonal flu, but the Government did the opposite. They locked everybody up and sent untested people back from hospital into care homes, where they infected other people, which led to a spike in deaths.

At the same time, the Government were telling us that they were following the science. I have a scientific background—it is not in biology, but I have a degree in chemistry—and I believe in following the science and finding out exactly what is going on. The science was not followed, and not only because the response did not follow the natural profile of the disease. In their early statements, people from the NHS, and both Chris Whitty and Patrick Vallance, said that masks were a complete waste of time and that lockdowns were ineffective because there would be a peak six months later that would probably be worse than if we had not locked down. That advice changed very quickly, I believe under political pressure. Again, I think that was a mistake.

One country that did follow the science, Sweden, made mistakes—it made the same mistake that we made by sending infected people back into care homes—but it did not lock down and it did not restrict people’s freedom, or it did so in only a moderate way. It came out as about the best of comparable countries in Europe in terms of deaths.

He thinks that the UK ended up in a parlous financial situation for no good reason:

Another consequence, which we see in every debate in this House, is that there is no money left. We spent £400 billion on covid, a lot of it wasted. We can read National Audit Office reports on the test and trace system, which was money almost totally wasted. There is also the money given to people who could quite easily have gone about their jobs. The businesses needed the money, given the decisions that the Government had taken, but the Government should not have taken those decisions.

I agree, but Labour — Stringer’s party — would have done the same, if not worse.

Stringer discussed that point, after another MP commented about the benefit of hindsight:

I therefore voted against my own party, which supported the Government and more on this issue. I went through the [voting] Lobby with a small number of colleagues from my party and the hon. Gentleman’s party to say that what was happening was wrong, and that the damage being done by the policies was probably worse than covid. It might be hindsight for March and April 2020, but not for the rest of the time and the second lockdown.

He talked about the general lockstep of the media during the pandemic:

Our democracy’s second important check and balance is the fourth estate. These publications are not normally my politics but, with the exception of The Daily Telegraph and The Spectator, and the Daily Mail to a certain extent, the rest of the media, led by the BBC, were quite uncritical of what was happening. People say that BBC reporters were told not to criticise and not to ask difficult questions, and political journalists—not specialist health journalists who might have asked more pertinent questions—were sent to the press conferences. It was a political question, but it was also a science and health question. We were really let down by the BBC primarily, and by other parts of the media.

He then went on to address the possible futility and very real expense of the ongoing Covid inquiry, led by Baroness Hallett:

The hon. Member for Christchurch and other hon. Members have talked about the Hallett inquiry. I supported the inquiry but, having seen the way it has gone, I have given myself a good talking to. I do not think I will ever again support an inquiry. Do we really want to spend half a billion pounds on this inquiry? I attended the previous debate on recompense, and we heard how lawyers are getting fat on all these inquiries. I do not know when the Hallett inquiry will report, but it may well last for years and cost half a billion pounds. It certainly will not provide us with any advice on what to do if there is a pandemic next year—I suspect that advice is what we all want. By the time it reports, there may have been another Government or two and it will be a historical document. Sweden is not a perfect society, but its inquiry has reported. The motion before us calls for the fourth part of the inquiry, which will be on vaccines, but is the inquiry really the technical body to do that? I do not think so.

In the first stage, the inquiry has shown an extraordinary bias towards believing in lockdowns. I would want to know a number of things from an inquiry: did the lockdowns work? Did they save lives? Have they cost lives? Where did the virus come from? The inquiry is not even looking at that and it is not dealing with any of those things, but it is taking a long time. It has made it abundantly clear that it is going to look at the impact of the virus on social divisions and poverty. I am a member of the Labour party and I can tell the inquiry, because I know, that poor people come off worse from diseases. It can go back to look at the Black report from 1981, I believe it was, if it wants to see that, as it talks about both regional and class disparities. We do not need to look at this issue, as we know that poor people do badly when there are epidemics—that has been true for all time.

He talked about the absurdity of what happened during the pandemic with regard to policy compared with events that occur daily:

I have never made this point before, and I hope I am not going off-piste too much, Madam Deputy Speaker, but every time there is an horrific murder of a child we get a report with 90-odd recommendations, and the question is: does that protect the next child? No, it does not. I do not believe that these inquiries do. We need serious cultural change in many of these organisations, rather than another report on something. That is an easy thing to say and a very difficult thing to achieve.

Stringer then attacked the statistics from the pandemic:

Let me come on to the other part of the debate, which is about excess deaths and the number of deaths. It appears that just over 200,000 people were killed in this country by, or died of, covid. I had my doubts about these figures from the beginning. On a number of occasions, right from the start of covid, the Science and Technology Committee heard from statisticians. We had Sir Ian Diamond and Professor Spiegelhalter in to talk to us about the statistics. We heard from people from what is now the UK Health Security Agency but was then a named part of the NHS. We asked them whether they had the statistics on the difference between people who died from covid and those who died with it. If someone was dying of cancer and went into hospital, there was a fair chance that they would have got covid, because there was not perfect protection within hospitals. Such a person would then be registered as having been a covid death, but clearly they were going to die of cancer. From the very beginning, that obscured the statistics.

Dr Kieran Mullan, a Conservative MP, defended the statistics and the clinicians involved in completing death certificates.

Stringer replied to two of Mullan’s interventions. Ellipses separate the two responses:

The hon. Gentleman makes a fair point, but I happen to know that in some local authorities, instructions went out to the people who were registering deaths essentially to say, “If there is a cough involved in this, we want it down as covid.” There was a different process because the health service was not working under normal—[Interruption.] …

… I am suggesting that at that time, when it was difficult to examine people because there was a distance between clinicians and the people who had suffered death, there was a temptation and a view that covid should go on the death certificates. I suggest no conspiracy, though. I do not believe in conspiracies.

Stringer concluded by addressing the excess death data:

I want to move on to excess deaths over the last couple of years, since covid, and the figures during covid. One of the ways of measuring the impact of covid was looking at excess deaths during covid. They were measured against a five-year average—that was the gold standard; it is the way it has been done—and that gave quite large figures. That is interesting given what has happened when the excess 100,000 deaths per year over the past two years have been looked at. The Office for National Statistics has moved away from that basis and on to a different one, and the figures are coming down.

We need an anonymised account of those excess deaths—this was part of a recent Westminster Hall debate—because that will help us to understand what is going on. The pharmaceutical companies have been given that information, but Ministers just give reassuring statements that there is no evidence that excess deaths are caused by the covid vaccinations—by the mRNA vaccinations. How do they know? They do not tell us that. We need to know, first, how they have come to that conclusion and, secondly, if that is a fair, reasoned and balanced conclusion. We also need a detailed look at the anonymised statistics, so that we can ask further questions about the problems that are worrying us—that certainly worry me—and so that we can make better decisions in future.

Neale Hanvey

Neale Hanvey is one of two MPs belonging to Alba, a Scottish independence party made up of MPs who broke away from the Scottish National Party (SNP). He has a medical degree, which led him to a 25-year-long career in the NHS and as a contributing author to medical textbooks.

He began by making three points about the thorny issue of raising doubts about the coronavirus vaccines — and others, such as gender identity:

I will begin by picking up on a few of the points that have been raised this afternoon. First, there is a parallel with a very important report that we received last week, and to which the Government responded on Monday: the Cass review. When concerns were first raised about what was happening in gender identity development services, those of us who spoke up at that time suffered both political and public pile-ons that were very uncomfortable. It gives me no pleasure to have been vindicated by the content of the Cass review. Certainly, when the hon. Member for North West Leicestershire (Andrew Bridgen) first raised his concerns on this issue, he was also subjected to a political and public pile-on. The reason I raise that is that this cannot be how we tackle thorny issues. We must have a much more reasoned and mature approach to these things, where ideological positions are not sacrosanct and we have the flexibility to engage with, and look at, the points that are being raised.

My second point is about the discussion regarding correlation versus causation. It is fair enough to say that correlation does not necessarily mean causation, but it is sufficient evidence for us to start asking questions about what is actually there. That is a fundamental question that anybody who has been involved in any scientific endeavour must surely understand.

My next point is a slightly more difficult issue to raise, because it is quite emotive. Like many others in this Chamber, I have had two vaccines and a booster. My family had the same, but there is a question about the presumption that that is what saved lives. We cannot prove that, unfortunately—that is just not the way it works—but what we do have to grapple with is the fact that the treatment we were given, like any agent, can cause harm. We have a responsibility to interrogate those concerns, which is why I am very disappointed that module 4 of the inquiry has been delayed.

My last point is about the record-level data and the importance of how it is tabulated. The methodology for assessing excess deaths has changed; that might be a reasonable change in practice at a time of peace, if you like, but we have just come through a very difficult period with the pandemic. Changing the methodology immediately afterwards seems perverse at best and deeply concerning at worst, because it is important that from this moment on, we are able to understand how trends are changing in a directly comparable way. With a change in methodology, that becomes impossible, so it is not a good idea—just in terms of scientific rigour, it is problematic.

He then drew on his personal experience of clinical trials:

I will start off my contribution by expanding on some of the comments I made during the debate on 16 January, because we had very limited time to speak in that debate. I want to take us a step back, away from the emotive issue of whether there is correlation, causation, and a relationship between excess deaths and the covid vaccine, and remind ourselves of the principles that underpin how clinical trials should be conducted. The ethical principles that underpin those trials have their origin in the declaration of Helsinki and are consistent with internationally published good clinical practice guidelines and, obviously, all of the regulatory mechanisms that fall out from those guidelines.

Anybody who has been involved in clinical trials of any type will know that, as I have said, any agent has the potential to cause injury or harm. That is just the nature of the beast, and one of the things we try to establish during a clinical trial is to find out the harm, however minimal or maximal it may be, so as to mitigate it, manage it or rule the agent out because it is too risky. Performing such a test rigorously is the foundation of good clinical practice, and I make these comments as someone who has been involved in the management and delivery of clinical trials over many years. I think that, as politicians, as clinicians and as the industry, we all carry a duty of honesty and candour in these matters.

The aforementioned Dr Mullan intervened, as if to question what Hanvey said.

Hanvey replied:

Well, the hon. Gentleman can shake his head, but that is my experience. I worked at University College London Hospitals and the Royal Marsden, and those are the principles that we applied in such a context. I can only speak to my experience.

Dr Mullan intervened again.

Hanvey elaborated on questions surrounding the available vaccine and death data as well as possible harm:

… The principles I have been outlining are there because they are the basis on which good science is established and based.

Let me move to some of the questions that we must raise and answer today, openly and transparently, and with full access to ONS record-level data. I am not saying that that should be disclosed to all and sundry, but surely the Government cannot defend the position that they are not willing to release that information to interested clinicians and clinical academics as a minimum. Those are the people who need to interrogate the data. It is of little relevance to me—I do not have the means or academic ability to interpret it—but it is something that interested clinical academics should have access to.

Let me move on to what we know about some of the issues surrounding mRNA technology. We know that it does not replicate locally, as we were assured it would do on launch. It metastasises to distant tissue, and replicates spike protein systemically distant from the site of administration. That is problematic for a number of reasons. According to the University of London Professor of Oncology, and principal of the Institute for Cancer Vaccines and Immunotherapy, Professor Angus Dalgleish, this has precipitated various serious and sometimes fatal consequences due to antibody development mediated by the spike protein. I will not go into the detail of that, but at a meeting convened by the hon. Member for North West Leicestershire, Professor Dalgleish told us that the UK Government and their agencies are in serious denial about this issue, resulting in many deaths being poorly understood.

Let me give a couple of examples. Vaccine-induced immune thrombotic thrombocytopenia is one of the principal causes of blood clot formation, which can cause stroke, pulmonary emboli, and other cardiac-related events including heart attacks, all of which can be life-limiting or fatal. Another antibody linked to the spike protein exerts an effect on myelin, and is associated with Guillain-Barré syndrome and transverse myelitis, which is a swelling around the spinal cord. Professor Dalgleish believes that that constitutes medical negligence, because the facts are there for all to see. He contends that many deaths are as a direct result of unnecessary vaccination. Furthermore, he advises that there are a greater number of yellow cards in MHRA for covid vaccines than for all other vaccines recorded, and nothing has really been done.

In a recent written answer to me, it was confirmed that the MHRA has received 489,004 spontaneous suspected adverse drug reaction reports relating to the covid-19 vaccine, up to and including 28 February this year. Across the United Kingdom, 2,734 of those reports were associated with a fatal outcome. Of course the true number is unknown—that is the nature of yellow card reporting, as only a fraction of adverse events are reported—and that is probably because of limited public awareness about some of the potential consequences and complications of vaccines, and the well-understood under-reporting of those adverse events. That is important, because the yellow card system is a key element of safe and effective clinical care. If things are not being evaluated properly, I can think of no greater betrayal of the MHRA’s clinical governance responsibility. I suggest that accountability for that must be swift and decisive. The rigorous assessment of these data is essential and must be actioned urgently. Will the Minister now engage with the MHRA and invite it to come to the House to explain the facts on these reports?

I was delighted to see that someone used data correctly: in the plural. Datum signifies the singular.

Hanvey then zeroed in on the MHRA, the Medicines and Healthcare products Regulatatory Agency:

Another issue, which arises from a further written question that I tabled, relates to the role of the MHRA. It has a crucial role—in fact, it is a statutory function—to provide post-marketing surveillance and to operate the yellow card system, but the Minister responded to my question about the assessment of the potential implications of the BMJ article “Pfizer-BioNTech vaccine is ‘likely’ responsible for deaths of some elderly patients, Norwegian review finds” by stating:

“The MHRA communicates safety advice based upon consideration of the totality of evidence from all relevant information sources, rather than the strengths and limitations of individual data sources.”

Surely, a fundamental step in any meta-analysis of published data is to interrogate the robustness of those data and for the public to have confidence that that is happening.

That point links right back to where I started, on the Cass report. One of the fundamental failings that the report identified was circular citation among various different organisations. They were validating one another’s position to create a false impression that there was an evidence base for the practice they were involved in. If the MHRA will say, “We do not interrogate the data when we do a meta-analysis,” who does? Who will validate the data? If I can hand over to the MHRA a whole load of numbers and it will just count them and accept that I have said my methodological rigour is robust, that is not good enough as far as I am concerned.

The Minister’s response to my written question was that the MHRA does not

“assign causality at the level of individual reports,”

as that is not its responsibility. If that is the case, whose responsibility is it? Who is interrogating the data and making that decision? If no one is, how can we get from correlation to a developed picture of causation? That is an essential step. It raises fundamental questions about that responsibility and the reliability of the data that the MHRA is relying on. If we are to learn anything from the general implications of the Cass report, we must have a clear steer from the MHRA on how these fundamental scientific principles will be observed and upheld …

Hanvey discussed other coronavirus-related issues and included quotes from the aforementioned Professor Dalgleish:

Let us move on to what we do not know. We have had no real progress on the points raised in the debate, particularly on record-level data. We need either that data to be released to clinical academics and others or a cogent explanation for why that is not happening. Why were those concerns kept hidden by the FDA? Are similar concerns or issues being hidden by the UK Government? Some of the points made about the delay in the MHRA taking action on clinical impacts is relevant to that point.

According to a House of Commons Library briefing, the Government-operated vaccine damage payment scheme, which has been discussed in both this debate and the previous one, provides only a one-off tax-free payment, which is currently a modest £120,000, to applicants where a vaccine has caused severe disablement. Data on VDPS claims relating to covid-19 vaccination is not routinely published, so we do not have particular metrics that establish how many claims are being made against those vaccines.

The most recent data is from September 2023. According to the NHS Business Services Authority, at that time it had received 7,160 claims relating to covid-19. Following medical assessment, 142 claims—just under 2%—were awarded, and 3,030 were rejected. A further 192 claims were found to be “invalid”. We need to understand why that was. What are claims being measured against and who is interpreting the clinical assessment information? We must also ask whether the exclusion criteria are reliable, given the concerns raised in the debate.

Based on the data that I have here, there are currently 3,796 unresolved claims, 1,010 of which have been unresolved for more than six months. If the 142 successful claims receive the full payment, the total cost will be around £17 million. If there are a further 177 successful claims from the unresolved cases, the associated cost will be a further £21 million. I am advised that the Government set aside some funding for this issue, but this has the hallmarks of the contaminated blood scandal [a decades-long one, only being resolved with the current Government] written all over it. We must get ahead of the game and make sure that people get the compensation that they desperately need at a time when it is important to them.

There is another question: why are the Government so willing to pick up the tab on vaccine injury, however inadequate the scheme is, given the fatalities and the significant life-limiting impact on the victims? These concerns have been amplified significantly following the publication in The Spectator Australia of an account by genomics scientist Kevin McKernan of his accidental discovery. It states:

“While running an experiment in his Boston lab, McKernan used some vials of mRNA Pfizer and Moderna Covid vaccines as controls. He was ‘shocked’ to find that they were allegedly contaminated with tiny fragments of plasmid DNA.”

His concern has been considered further by Professor Angus Dalgleish, who noted that the contaminant, simian virus 40, is

“a sequence that is ‘used to drive DNA into the nucleus, especially in gene therapies’ and that this is ‘something that regulatory agencies around the world have specifically said is not possible with the mRNA vaccines’. These SV40 promotors are also well recognised as being oncogenic”—

or cancer-inducing genetic material. Other scientists have confirmed those findings. Professor Dalgleish further notes:

“To put it bluntly, this means that they are not vaccines at all but a…Genetically Modified Organism that should have been subject to totally different regulatory conditions and certainly not be classed as vaccines.”

Worryingly, Professor Dalgleish also notes that oncologists have contacted him from across the world, and the consensus is that this is thought to be precipitating relapse in melanoma, lymphoma, leukaemia and kidney cancers. He concludes with the following warning:

“To advise booster vaccines, as is the current case, is no more and no less than medical incompetence; to continue to do so”—

with his cited evidence—

“is medical negligence which can carry a custodial sentence.”

Neale Hanvey concluded, in part:

Personally—I say this frankly—I will never accept another mRNA vaccine, and I am far from alone. Will the Minster agree to full disclosure of the data and an investigation of the facts? Will she also commit to instructing the Office for National Statistics to release the record level data, or will it take someone like New Zealander Barry Young, a whistleblower imprisoned for publishing its record level data, to surface concerns about the covid vaccine programme? As we have seen with the Horizon scandal, the Government must never bury the facts when lives are being lost and futures destroyed. There is no greater betrayal.

In closing, the foundations of good clinical practice are under threat. I will put that in context with the December 2023 Pathology Research and Practice paper on “Gene-based covid-19 vaccines” from Rhodes and Parry. They gave the following warning:

“Pandemic management requires societal coordination, global orchestration, respect for human rights and defence of ethical principles. Yet some approaches to the COVID-19 pandemic, driven by socioeconomic, corporate, and political interests, have undermined key pillars of ethical medical science.”

None of these clinical experts are quacks or conspiracy theorists. As the Government said so often during the pandemic, we must follow the science.

Maria Caulfield, speaking for the Government

Maria Caulfield MP (Conservative), a nurse, spoke for the Government.

She said, in part:

As I said, we have had a number of debates on this issue, including in January, when I acknowledged that the hon. Member for North West Leicestershire [Andrew Bridgen] was correct to say that we have seen excess deaths in recent years. However, excess deaths are not new; they were happening before covid and have happened since then as well. It is important to look at the figures, because the Office for National Statistics indicates that the number of excess deaths has been reducing, year on year, since the high in 2020, when there were 66,740 excess deaths in England. I can only talk about England because health is obviously devolved and the Governments in Scotland, Wales and Northern Ireland will have their own data. In 2022, that number went down to 37,701, and in 2023, there were just 10,206 excess deaths in England. It is important to remember that every single one of those is a person, a family member, and a loved one, but it may reassure hon. Members greatly, as it does me, that the ONS has reported negative excess deaths for every week so far in 2024.

When Andrew Bridgen questioned the figures, she replied:

The hon. Gentleman may have missed my last sentence before his intervention. I said that the ONS data shows that in every week in 2024 so far, we have had negative excess deaths. That goes specifically to his point …

Routine treatments and access to appointments are difficult even now, given the backlog of examinations and tests that need to happen. When we looked at this, we saw that last year, the rate of deaths from cardiovascular disease was 2% higher than expected, with there having been more than 2,200 excess deaths.

That is why we are reinvesting in our NHS health check. It was on pause during covid, when people could not get their blood pressure or cholesterol checked and could not go on smoking prevention programmes. We restarted those, and as a result, excess deaths from cardiac disease are starting to fall. We want to use the opportunity to roll out our new digital health checks. We recognise that access to GPs is sometimes difficult, but this roll-out is expected to deliver an additional 1 million checks in the first four years. We also have a £10 million pilot to deliver cardiovascular checks in the workplace. Again, that is about making it as easy as possible for people to get checked. We have our Pharmacy First roll-out as well. That is all for general health purposes. We know that all these things contributed to excess death rates.

I want to touch on the crux of the matter, which is the covid vaccine; that has come through in all these debates. I was not a Health Minister at the time, so I did not have to make these difficult decisions, but the hon. Member for Blackley and Broughton is absolutely right: as the pandemic preparedness Minister, I want the findings of the inquiry. I have to make difficult decisions now about potential future pandemics that may never happen, but could happen tomorrow—we just do not know. The results of the inquiry with regard to lockdowns, face masks and vaccines will all be really useful information, and at the moment, I am not much the wiser on those results.

On module 4, I want to see any evidence about vaccine safety, because that is how we learn. I think we are all singing from the same hymn sheet. We want to do the best, but during the pandemic, when we watched TV footage from around the world, and the media were often pushing us to lock down harder, faster and longer, we had to make difficult decisions without the benefit of hindsight.

I went back to the wards during covid, and I looked after covid patients who were being treated for cancer. We lost many of them, and we lost a number of staff, too. I have seen this from both sides of the fence.

Dr Mullan intervened to say that he, too, worked on the front lines during the pandemic.

Caulfield issued the usual praises and the pot-banging (every Thursday night at 8 p.m.) narratives by way of thanks. You can read the transcript.

Of the vaccine data, she said:

The Office for National Statistics published data last August showing that people who received a covid-19 vaccination had a lower mortality rate than those who had not been vaccinated. Given that 93.6% of the population has been vaccinated with either one or two doses, or multiple does, it is almost impossible to determine correlation versus causation. Vaccinated people will feature highly in excess death numbers because most people have been vaccinated, which is why we need to go through the data really carefully and not just take the first data at face value.

The covid virus continues to circulate, and we are now living with covid. Some people are still very vulnerable to covid, although the current variant is obviously less severe than the initial variant. We have just had our spring vaccine roll-out, and those who are invited should please go to get their vaccine. We know that it makes a difference to the most vulnerable. Over this winter, after both the flu and covid vaccine roll-outs, we have seen a significant reduction in hospital admissions.

She went on to say:

I will answer some of the many questions that have been asked in this debate. I reiterate that no medicine or vaccine is completely risk free. Even simple paracetamol has the potential to kill people if it is not taken properly, and people with certain conditions might not be able to take it at all. We have monitoring systems in place. The MHRA, which I know has come under criticism, took a stand when in April 2021, following concerns raised through the yellow card system, it reduced access for the under-30s and then for the under-40s. When concerns are raised, it absolutely takes action. There are now recommendations about the type of vaccine, and about whom we vaccinate, bearing in mind the current evidence.

I have said that no vaccine is 100% safe, which is why we have the vaccine damage payment scheme. I hear concerns about that, and I have met my hon. Friend the Member for Christchurch (Sir Christopher Chope) to discuss it. We took the scheme off the Department for Work and Pensions and moved it into the Department of Health and Social Care to speed it up and get claims turned around more quickly. We have had more than 4,000 claims, 170 of which have been awarded. Roughly speaking, the majority of claims are decided on within six months, and the vast majority are decided on within 12 months. Of course, we want to speed up on those. We recognise the time limit of three years, which is why we are working as hard as we can to get through as many claims as possible, so that if people have been affected by the covid vaccine, they get some help and support through that funding.

My hon. Friend the Member for South Basildon and East Thurrock (Stephen Metcalfe) raised the issue of research. We are absolutely researching the issue of covid-19 vaccines—not just future types of vaccines, but their safety. There is £110 million from the National Institute for Health and Care Research going specifically into covid-19 vaccine safety, and I encourage all Members to keep an eye on that as the evidence comes forward.

I have to give the hon. Member for North West Leicestershire a few minutes to reply, so I will just say that we take this issue extremely seriously …

I have been as open and transparent as I can be. If there are concerns, we will always look into them, but there is no doubt that covid vaccines save lives. There is no doubt that some people have experienced harm from them—we acknowledge that, and we want to help and support people who have been affected—but the vaccines did get us out of the pandemic and we need to be mindful of that as well.

Conclusion

Andrew Bridgen concluded:

… I wish this debate were not needed; I wish the experimental covid-19 vaccines were safe and effective, but they are not. The longer we go on not admitting the problem, the bigger the problem that will come, and the greater the harm that will continue to be caused. Those in this House can continue to deny that the vaccines are causing harm and deaths, and the legacy media can continue to censor all reports of vaccine harms and excess deaths, but the people know, in increasing numbers, because they are the ones who are losing their loved ones and relatives. I urge the Government: release the control-level data, and let us sort this out once and for all.

I could not agree more.

The Hallett inquiry could do much better, too.

I fear there will be doubts for years to come on coronavirus vaccines, further polarising the public’s view of them.

Hard times for America’s middle class

It has become tiring to constantly — so it seems — hear and read that the Conservatives have plunged the UK into a cost of living crisis and that we are the only people on earth experiencing such a dire situation.

Anyone who knows a second European language will know that EU countries are also experiencing similar hard times.

Interestingly enough, so are the middle class from across the pond whom The Guardian interviewed for a feature published on April 9, 2024, ‘”I run out of money each month”: the Americans borrowing to cover daily expenses’. Five people’s stories are included. Three of them follow.

Keep in mind this is happening under a sainted Democrat administration, that of Joe Biden.

Most of the people interviewed rely on credit cards to get them through the month. The credit card debt is piling up in many cases.

Inflation, particularly where groceries are concerned, is a huge problem. However, health care expenses are an even bigger worry.

We discover that:

US consumer borrowing rose by $14.1bn in February, driven by the largest increase in credit card balances in three months. Analysts believe that the soaring cost of consumer debt for US households could affect president Biden’s chances for re-election, as for the first time on record, interest payments on credit cards and car loans are as big a financial burden for Americans as their mortgage interest.

Respondents to an online callout about personal levels of consumer borrowing in the US included adults of all ages and from areas across the country, with most saying they were now struggling to repay their debts.

Robin, 70, a retired arts teacher in California, depends on an annual Social Security income of $14,000. She said that she is used to being frugal but recent price hikes are defeating her best efforts at economising:

I became disabled and retired about 20 years ago …

Now, because prices have gone up dramatically – for bread, gas, everything – I run out of money each month, so I end up paying for necessities with my credit card. This has been going on for at least six months. I’m so worried. How will I ever pay this back when everything costs more and more?

I can usually manage the regular things. I rent a room for $450. My monthly credit card payment is $100, I like to pay it down as fast as possible.

It’s the unexpected expenses I struggle with, and they happen all the time, don’t they: new car tyres, taking my dog to the vet. I owe $2,500 dollars and I chip away at it, but what if my rent goes up? What if my 1997 vehicle needs to be replaced?

If the Federal Reserve would lower the interest rates, I’d at least be able to pay less interest on my debts. It’s so stressful, and lots of people are in this situation.

However, the Federal Reserve has no plans to change its policy at the moment:

The Federal Reserve announced on Wednesday that it would leave US interest rates at 5.25% to 5.5% – a 25-year high – where they have been since July.

Donna from Oregon, 63, is an accountant who suffered a foot injury. She makes $50,000 a year. Her private insurance excess is $10,000 [Obamacare, another Democrat initiative], which she is trying to pay off for surgery she had on her foot. Even an accountant taking advantage of 0% credit cards can be defeated by soaring costs of goods and services:

The last couple of years, when inflation hit really hard, that’s when my credit card borrowing started, as I haven’t had a raise in three years.

I’m now playing the credit card swap game: large expenses such as car repairs go on a 0% card. I then carefully monitor the expiration date of that deal on a spreadsheet and eventually transfer the balance to a new 0% interest card …

Wages aren’t catching up with costs. Handymen charge $125 per hour now in my area. You can’t make $24 an hour and pay someone $125 an hour to do your maintenance. In 2008 I made $65,000 before I lost that job. How am I supposed to get by on 15% less than I was making 15 years ago?

She has had to dip into her retirement fund to make ends meet:

The 0% credit cards have been a godsend, but this year I’ve pulled $7,000 out of my retirement fund to pay off some of my debts, and over the past couple of years I’ve taken out 10% of my retirement pot to cover bills. This will be impossible to replenish.

The surgery cost $9,200, 25% of my net annual income of $36,112 after taxes and social security – no wonder I’ve had to live off credit cards and retirement savings!

It’s frightening to pull from my retirement fund just to get by, wondering how poor I’ll be when I finally do retire, if I’ll be able to maintain my home. If you’ve worked your whole life, it’s just not right.

Chris, 52, is a special education teacher who lives in Denver and works two jobs. He worries about the long term effect on his health, which he was already paying for previously. He:

racked up $47,000 in loans because of unaffordable healthcare bills and essential home repairs over the past three years.

In 2020 he was finally debt-free after paying off $54,000 since his divorce, he says, but then a $12,000 medical bill came in, two HVAC [air conditioning] units in his house needed replacing and some trees removing.

Chris borrowed $33,000, then took out another $17,000 loan to help repay the first.

He says:

… although I increased my salary from $65,000 to $125,000 last year by teaching summer school and additional classes. Denver is pretty expensive, and I pay child support, so I ended up working a second job, driving for a ride-share company, to fight my way out of this debt.

I drive all night over the weekend to make $1,000 extra a month, so sometimes I worry about my health. I hope I can keep this up for a few more months, I still owe $14,000. Most Americans I know have a second job.

A fourth interviewee, whose story features at the end, concluded by saying:

The American economy is so cut-throat that people are too scared to take annual leave. The rat race is toxic, and the American dream? It’s dead for the majority.

So, there you have it, my fellow Britons. Be grateful for the flawed NHS and the ability to take annual leave. The grass isn’t always greener on the other side.

Ingestibles news: food, drink, tobacco

Many news items about ingestibles have appeared in recent weeks.

Here are but a few, arranged by category.

Drinks

Who knew that England’s wine production was such a success, despite our rather damp and cool summers over the past two years.

Coloured glass

Before going into England’s wine success, however, it should be noted that coloured glass is back in fashion.

However, this is not your grandmother’s transparent coloured glass selection of cranberry or teal green goblets. The new high-end glasses and containers happen to be opaque.

I wonder if this opacity is a short cut, obviating the artistry of traditional methods of colouring glass.

On October 22, 2023, The Guardian reported on the trend for coloured glass in general. The article includes photos of the new opaque glass (emphases mine):

After years of minimalist, clear wine glasses, tumblers and dishes, colourful glassware is making a comeback. Brightly hued glass pieces such as purple goblets from the 1970s and coral-pink 1930s candlesticks have seen sales rise 30% since last year, according to Narchie, an app for buying and selling vintage homeware.

And on the high street, John Lewis says that sales of drinkware in shades of damson, amber and cobalt have risen 71% on figures from the same week last year. The department store’s Confetti range – a modern collection decorated with flecks of colour – has gone up by 20%.

It’s a similar story at Ikea. “Customers are daring to introduce new energy and shades into their table settings,” says Paul Kinnen, home furnishing business leader for kitchens at the Swedish furniture retailer.

The opaque coloured glass did nothing to raise my appetite for a glass of cold water or a cocktail. Sometimes the old ways are the best.

That said, the article did cover something more interesting, which is the history of traditional transparent coloured glass dating back to ancient times:

“Coloured glass goes back to the bronze age,” says Dr Sally Cottam, secretary for the Association for the History of Glass. “Well, glass is naturally coloured a bluish green and you decolourise it using different compounds. In the Augustan period, you had vessels in every colour of the rainbow – some really quite tasteless, but fabulous in their own way. Then the Romans went crazy for colourless glass in the later first century. It became the norm, probably in part because the level of glass production increased and also because it lets you show off the colour of your wine.”

And decorative glass has never completely disappeared. Enamelled glass was very popular in the Islamic world; the Venetians rediscovered Roman polychromatic glass in the 15th century and the Victorians also loved it – “particularly cranberry and Bristol blue”, according to Cottam.

Fortunately, ancient traditions are once again in the ascendant:

A Bristol-based glassmaker has revived the Bristol Green shade, manufacturing it in the city for the first time in 200 years. This colour is famous in Europe and North America, and is the origin of the traditional dark green wine bottle. When wine-makers started using clear bottles, Bristol lost its glassmaking industry …

Award-winning designer Tom Dixon’s new collection of tableware and vases, called Bump, uses borosilicate – better known as lab glass, which is strong and withstands heat – and comes in a calming emerald green.

“Made from easily available, unlimited materials and completely recyclable, glass has served us for millennia,” says Dixon. “It is so ubiquitous that it’s easy to forget how extraordinary it is as a material, as packaging, as a precious object.”

Lovely. Enjoy some nostalgia, if not Granny’s, then something new that’s transparent yet coloured.

English wine

English winemakers are going from strength to strength.

I have tasted some of their products which certainly rival French wines. That was not the case 30 years ago.

On October 19, The Guardian told us:

Many English winemakers say they are expecting to harvest their biggest ever crop over the next few weeks as a combination of favourable weather conditions and expansion boosts production.

Gusbourne, the Kent-based producer and one of the first major wineries to complete its harvest, said it had gathered its largest ever crop, up 25% on last year.

The company, controlled by former Conservative party chair Lord Michael Ashcroft, said the warm growing season last year meant vines emerged from winter in a healthy condition and then enjoyed favourable weather during the flowering period between April and June this year, producing “an abundance of fruit”.

The big brands Nyetimber, Chapel Down and Ridgeview have all said they are expecting their largest ever crop as a result of the weather and investing in additional acreage.

Most production goes to sparkling wines, which will not be available for at least two years, but still wines made this year could be on shelves in the spring.

Ned Awty, the interim chief executive of the trade body WineGB, the national association for the wine industry in England and Wales, said: “This year is shaping up to be a high volume and high-quality harvest. We’ve had reports about impressive bunch size and weight and ripe fruit from all across the country.”

Andrew Carter, the chief executive of Chapel Down, which is two-thirds of the way through its harvest, said he was expecting its output to be “materially larger” than last year’s, and the brand’s previous record, set in 2018.

The group, based near Tenterden in Kent, has added 200 additional acres to take it to 750 under production. Carter said the weather had also been a factor in producing high-quality grapes.

“The weather this year has been truly exceptional,” he said. Carter said the wet July and August had helped vines stay healthy and had not led to problems with disease because the weather had remained cool, and then the warm, sunny September had helped to ripen grapes. “The balance of sugars and concentration of flavours in the grapes is a joy to behold,” he said.

Southern England is blessed with favourable conditions for wine production:

Britain’s winemaking industry is concentrated in Kent, but vineyards in Essex, Hampshire and Sussex also supply independent retailers and UK supermarkets. British wine is sold overseas and the industry has estimated that exports could be worth as much as £350m by 2040.

Winemakers have been expanding – more than doubling in the past decade – as financial investors bet on a market that has been helped by the changing climate and production becoming more professional …

There are now 943 vineyards across Great Britain, according to WineGB. The industry produced 12.2m bottles in 2022, a big step up on the 5.3m bottles in 2017 as investors have piled into the growing market.

Production is expected to reach 25m bottles by 2032, with 7,600 hectares (18,800 acres) of vines planted – almost double the 4,000 hectares (9,900 acres) under production at present.

Excellent news!

English sake

An even more amazing development is that of sake made in — who would have guessed it? — England.

On October 27, The Telegraph‘s Joel Hart wrote about the boom in sake in Great Britain, ‘How British sake became the calling card of the country’s hottest restaurants’:

Picture 10 drinks on tap, ranging from a light and crisp, aromatic brew with notes of apricot and almond to a luxurious pour delivering notes of lychee and cereal. No, these are not the latest beers to hit the market, nor are they wines – this is a line-up of “craft sake”, a new take on Japan’s famous fermented drink. 

At Kanpai, which was the UK and Europe’s first sake brewery and taproom when it opened in 2016, rice – rather than hops or grapes – takes centre stage. Sourced from paddy fields across three prefectures in Japan and fermented with water, yeast and koji (rice grain cultivated with a “magic mould” that kick-starts the yeast fermentation), the rice is transformed into drinks that have distinct styles for each season – and deliver a subtle nod to their surroundings. 

“The local London water has been making [our] delicious drinks for many years,” says Kanpai’s co-founder Lucy Wilson. “The hard water enables us to brew fuller flavoured styles of sake. [Its] minerality is fantastic for fermentation as it excites the yeast,” she explains, producing “lots of fruit-forward, delicate aromatics and bold, luscious flavours”.

Sake’s flavour profiles certainly give grape-derived wines a run for their money. With five traditional brewing styles, versions range from dry to sweet, elegant to complex, unfiltered to crystal clear, with still, sparkling, aged and ume-(plum) and yuzu-infused iterations now sold all over Britain. 

Sake pairings are becoming popular, especially with seafood:

The current vogue of omakase restaurants has also had a role in enhancing the drink’s image. The trend of yielding control to the chef (omakase translates as “I leave it in your hands”), diners can enjoy styles of sake tailored to the sushi they are served. “The rich umami flavours present in both Japanese sake and seafood make them a perfect match,” explains Endo Kazutoshi, a third-generation sushi master and executive chef/owner of Endo at the Rotunda in west London. “The pairing is not merely a chemical coincidence but [based on] wisdom passed down through centuries from master to apprentice.”

The article tells us about various British restaurants that showcase sake.

Ultimately:

For sake bars, it is important to showcase the drink on its own, so while it isn’t uncommon to find sake in cocktails, there has been a shift away from seeing it as an ingredient for mixologists …

When you enter the bar, bottles are displayed on the wall, from mildly sweet to dry, and from light and aromatic to rich and savoury. There’s a sake flight for those who want to explore different styles.

England is a perfect place for manufacturing sake from Japanese rice:

Dojima opened at Fordham Abbey in 2018 with the intent of restoring an ancestral family tradition dating back to 1830s Osaka. Having brewed in Japan, Korea and Myanmar, the family relocated to the UK and settled on the Cambridgeshire estate for their new site.

“We knew that the UK would be a great place to set up if we were to make sake more globally recognised, as London sets trends for food, drink, fashion, arts and music,” explains Kumiko Hashimoto, a family member and the company’s PR and marketing director. “We could have perhaps just imported our family sake from Osaka, but we wanted to do more than that. We wanted to make sake in the UK using local water and the best rices from Japan.”

A sake produced from the well water of Fordham Abbey might be fresh and elegant (the Junmai Dojima) or honeyed and umami-rich (the vintage Cambridge version), but there are yet more styles in production within the county with the Sparkling Sake Brewery established there in 2021. It all points to a fizzing UK sake scene, where the first sip is unlikely to be your last.

How true. I had sake only once, in the United States, and that was 35 years ago. I must try it again.

The article ends with links for sake lovers and novices. There are even sake pairings with cheese, of all things (italics in the original):

Sake can be bought online at Kanpai and Moto, as well from shops including Sorakami and Tengu Sake.

A sake and cheese hamper curated by Erika Haigh can be purchased at La Fromagerie.

How extraordinary!

World Cheese Awards, Norway

Speaking of cheese, on Friday, October 27, the results of the World Cheese Awards held in Trondheim, Norway, were announced.

On Saturday, October 28, The Telegraph‘s Tomé Morrissey-Swan reported:

Delicate, creamy, buttery and soft, with mild peppery blue veins, Norway’s Nidelven blå, a pasteurised cow’s milk blue cheese made on a small farm two hours from Trondheim, was named the best cheese in the world at the World Cheese Awards on Friday.

At the event, held in Trondheim itself, the home favourite trumped a record number of entrants – 4,502 different cheeses submitted from across the globe – to be crowned supreme champion in front of a partisan home crowd. The winner beat a Belgian morbier-style cheese into second place, with a Swiss Alpine entrant coming third.

“This is really great,” said Moren Gangstad, the winning cheesemaker. “All of us who work in the dairy are here today, and we did not expect this. But it’s fantastic.”

Hmm.

I hadn’t heard of the World Cheese Awards until 2022, but the event has been running for decades:

Celebrating its 35th anniversary this year, the World Cheese Awards, run by the Guild of Fine Foods, has risen to be one of the world’s most respected food events, beamed online to viewers around the globe. Winners often see sales spike, with cheese buyers rushing to stock their product. 

Morrissey-Swan was there as a member of the judging panel:

In a huge gymnasium in Trondheim, which is well used to smelling this funky, 100 oversized trestle tables laden with around 45 cheeses each were prepared for the global judging panel of experts.

Despite this being my third year on the panel, I’m still not used to that smell. It’s the first thing that hits you – all the beautiful sweet, salty, musty notes blended with sweat and mould. Around 20 people watched from the stands, a bigger crowd than any football match I’ve ever played in …

Cheeses are evaluated on four categories: their look (is the rind appealing, is the colour consistent?), body and texture (they are squidged to assess moisture and fat content – harder to do with a cream cheese), aroma (does it small as expected? Ammonia can be good, but it shouldn’t smell off), and, most importantly, flavour and mouthfeel – it should be balanced and complex, with no bitter off-notes.

My table was stellar … We argued over the merits of paprika-smeared goat’s cheeses, smoky cow’s cheeses (is the smoke artificial or natural?), and a particularly beautiful cheese aged in sandstone that smelt just like roast mutton …

Each table awards products bronzes, silvers and golds, and one super gold, to be taken to a small panel of elite judges who, almost unfathomably, eat a hundred or more cheeses throughout the day. We dished out 12 golds on our table – others struggled to find one.

Being a French then a British cheese aficionado, I was desperate to find out how my two favourite countries fared.

Unfortunately, France won only one award in the top 16 cheeses. It came in at 13th with:

Goustal La Bergere from Société des Caves, FRANCE

The UK fared comparatively better, with two, in 12th and 16th places, respectively:

Sinodun Hill from Norton and Yarrow Cheese, UNITED KINGDOM

Wigmore from Village Maid Cheese, UNITED KINGDOM

A British cheesemaker explains why but says it’s good news in the long run:

… London-based cheese and cider expert, and World Cheese Awards veteran, Sam Wilkin thinks the range is becoming increasingly diverse. Indeed, judges hailed from all over, as did cheeses …

“We’ve become very anglo and eurocentric about cheese, but when you come to an event like this, you realise these cheeses are being made everywhere,” said Wilkin. “There are people doing delicious things, traditions being upheld, innovations happening, it’s really very exciting. I tried a camel cheese from Kazakhstan, and a viking cheese that, though certainly not to my palate, is a delicacy here in Norway and exemplifies that cheese is really just a way to preserve milk”…

It might not have been a great year for Britain, but British cheeses have won on 11 previous occasions, almost a third of the total winners, with Cornish Blue and Bath Blue winning in recent years. Cornish Kern, a more intense, longer-matured relation to the nettle-wrapped Cornish Yarg, was the most recent winner, picking up the top prize in 2017. Last year a gruyère earned top spot at the event in Newport, Wales.

Wilkin predicts the prize could be transformative for the winning dairy. “You hear wonderful stories of really small-scale cheeses winning the World Cheese Awards, and their businesses are transformed literally overnight. There are people I know waiting on the phone.” Nidelven blå isn’t currently sold in the UK, though around 300 shops in Norway stock it. Expect that to change soon.

My commiserations to France. They have not done well at the World Cheese Awards in recent years, which is disappointing.

French cuisine world’s best

After my disappointment at France not receiving more World Cheese Awards, I was encouraged to read an article in The Telegraph which appeared the following day on Sunday, October 29, ‘Ignore the statistics: French cuisine is the best in the world’, in which Anthony Peregrine told us about the new labelling law concerning restaurant food made on the premises:

… clearly this move is a good thing. Though the 175,000 figure includes bars, pubs, take-aways and even some bakeries, 4 per cent, if correct, remains unimpressive. It’s also a measure which the French catering business should have seen coming, following the flop of a similar, but voluntary, scheme introduced in 2014.

But it needs nuancing. French restaurants, like restaurants everywhere, have had a torrid time of late. Covid shut them down, staff subsequently proved unfindable, and prices have rocketed. An estimated 4,500 French restaurants shut down in 2022.

As one Languedoc restaurateur said: “We’re being strangled. The only way through for some is to buy in some dishes and trust that nobody minds. Which, generally, they don’t.”

Peregrine then listed ten categories in which France reigns supreme: truffles, oysters, cheese, choucroute, Charolais beef, mushrooms, foie gras, charcuterie, wine and bread.

I discovered the history of Camembert and Roquefort in his section on cheese:

Where to start? Camembert, obviously. South-east of Caen, the most famous rural hamlet in the world hosts tastings within a good little museum set-up. It explains, inter alia, how a priest on the run from the French Revolution taught local lass Marie Harel the rudiments of soft cheese making (maisonducamembert.com; £3.90). Then Roquefort, another titchy place (population 550), near Millau in the Aveyron. Legend suggests that a shepherd boy around there spotted a beautiful shepherdess, dumped his cheese sandwich in a damp cave and lit out to woo her. He failed, returned to his sandwich which, in the meantime had grown mouldy and, he discovered, delicious. Voilà Roquefort, still refined in those caves. Visit the Roquefort Société for £6.50 (roquefort-societe.com).

The bread section was also revealing:

This year’s best traditional Parisian baguette is made by Tharshan Selvarajah, a 37-year-old who arrived in France from Sri Lanka in 2006 – and is, apparently, allergic to flour. In the annual comp, last May, Mr Selvarajah’s bread topped 175 rivals. Among other perks, he now gets to deliver 30 baguettes a day to the Elysée Palace from his Au Levain des Pyrénées premises in the 20^th arrondissement (lepaindetharshan.fr).  Best bread nationally is from Gourmandises & Traditions in the village of Beaulieu, near Montpellier. I’ll say no more. There are already quite enough people ahead of me in the queue (boulangerie-gt.com).

Amazing.

Hazelnut shortage

I’d always thought that Italy and France produced the world’s hazelnuts.

Apparently not. It’s Turkey.

On October 10, The Times reported that 2023 was not a good year for one of my favourite nuts:

Christmas chocolate is in jeopardy … there is a looming hazelnut shortage. Crop levels of the favourite festive nut are lower than usual in Turkey, the world’s largest producer, due to bad weather and damage from wildfires. That means your Christmas choc — Ferrero Rocher or a bar of gianduja, depending on where you sit on the taste spectrum — is under threat.

Not to mention Nutella and imitations sold by other companies.

Oh, dear.

The article lists a number of other nuts that are equally ‘good for health’ but does not warn about the subsequent weight gain. It is all too easy to sit in front of the television with a bowl of nuts. I have been there before and gained weight that took a long time to shift because of the ageing process!

Drinking apple cider vinegar

This is another health experiment I tried after I lost weight after gorging on nuts: drinking apple cider vinegar.

Do not do it unless you have signs of diabetes. Well, I did not know that at the time. Mine was a short-lived experiment and I do not recommend it.

On October 28, The Telegraph posted a warning about drinking apple cider vinegar, but in the middle of the article:

… A summary of findings from a range of studies revealed a significant reduction in blood glucose and insulin in people who consumed vinegar compared with a control group. Again, it’s worth noting that this was vinegar in general, not specifically ACV, so it’s likely due to the acetic acid content rather than any special ACV magic.

Most of the research in this area has involved healthy volunteers, but there have been some small studies in people with type 2 diabetes that suggest that a shot of vinegar can be an effective way to reduce blood sugar following starchy carbs. So, does this mean everyone should be drinking vinegar shots with their meals? Crowe [Dr Tim Crowe, dietitian and host of the podcast Thinking Nutrition] has this advice, “No. If you don’t have diabetes, then your blood glucose is being regulated just fine.” Crowe goes on to advise that simply having a shot of vinegar wouldn’t be enough to counteract Type 2 diabetes. 

Crowe also says that he is not convinced that apple cider vinegar burns fat:

There have been several taste studies done that found that drinking vinegar in general can induce a slight feeling of nausea and a lessening of appetite. That does not negate that apple cider vinegar may have a small benefit on weight loss, but the mechanism here is that the ACV is probably making the person feel a little ill and reducing their appetite.

I can vouch for that.

Vinegar also has an adverse effect on teeth and prescription drugs:

Apart from the fact that drinking vinegar on its own is not exactly pleasant, there are some other drawbacks, as Crowe explains:

“ACV has a pH of around three, so it can dissolve the tooth structure when it comes into contact with the teeth. One study monitored dental erosion over 8 weeks and it went up 18 per cent in those taking vinegar. So, if you still want to take a daily shot of apple cider vinegar or any other type of vinegar, please dilute it first.”

Additionally, ACV can interact with certain drugs, such as diuretics and diabetes medications. If you are taking any medications, it’s a good idea to talk to your doctor first.

The most sensible way to ingest vinegar is via salad dressing:

… make up a tasty salad dressing by mixing it with olive oil, mustard, honey and dried herbs and enjoy it that way instead.

Eco-friendly restaurant charges

Moving on from health to restaurants, I was appalled to read this in The Telegraph on October 27, ‘Diners hit with “carbon footprint charge” on restaurant bills’:

Diners are being hit with carbon footprint charges on restaurant bills to “counterbalance the environmental impact” of meals.

Customers have reported charity donations for a scheme called Carbon Friendly Dining being added to restaurant cheques, on top of service fees.

The scheme, an initiative backed by retail consultancy Lightspeed, aims to tackle global warming by charging each cover £1.23 to pay for fruit trees to be planted in developing countries.

Carbon Friendly Dining’s website says the charge “helps counterbalance the environmental impact” of diners’ meals and “also help some of the poorest communities on the planet”. Celebrity chefs including Marco Pierre White and James Martin are among a number of restaurant owners to have signed up.

The cost of the donation is added on to the bill at the end of the meal. Diners can ask for it to be removed and staff are given instructions on how to take off the charge.

As with every other social cancer, this started in the United States:

The trend has previously caught on with climate-conscious eateries in California, with a similar scheme launched in 2018 adding a 1pc surcharge to bills to help farmers decarbonise.

Hilton hotels was also recently reported to have added a climate rating, similar to calorific ratings, to menus to let diners know the carbon impact of each dish.

It comes after this newspaper revealed how restaurants are increasingly adding optional charity donations onto bills, with psychology experts saying the trend was leaving people facing the prospect of social embarrassment when asking for the extra fees to be removed. 

A Carbon Friendly Dining spokesman said that the charges were “highly visible” and “completely optional” and that diners were given leaflets explaining the initiative’s goals.

I neither want nor need a lecture — or a ‘voluntary’ contribution to anything. I go to a restaurant to eat for enjoyment — and pay for the privilege of doing so.

One British diner told the Telegraph about his experience:

… one diner, who had noticed the additional fee when paying for a meal at a Cubitt House pub in London, said: “It really made me laugh when I spotted it, I thought adding 15pc service charge was cheeky but this takes the biscuit.

“If they are so concerned about the environment, why don’t they just stop selling meat? The sum was too small for me to bother complaining about but it’s very sneaky.”

Dozens of restaurants, pubs and hotels across the UK and internationally are listed as being signed up to the carbon offsetting donation on the scheme’s website …

Cubitt House was approached for comment.

Splitting the bill

On October 15, The Telegraph‘s veteran restaurant reviewer William Sitwell explained, ‘Why I’d rather pay the whole damn thing than split the restaurant bill’:

Hell is a busy place these days. But, wrote restaurateur James Chiavarini this week on Twitter: “Hell needs a special room for those who split the dinner bill item by item.”

And I couldn’t agree more. Indeed, if not a room then an annexe, an extension, or an entire wing. Chiavarini, whose family Italian restaurant Il Portico has traded in London’s Kensington for more than 50 years, posted his utterance having presided over yet another frustrating bill-splitting episode. 

“A table of 20 on a busy night,” he tells me, struggling to maintain his composure.

Interestingly, the restaurateur blames Tony Blair’s 2007 smoking ban, at which point diners traded in their cigarettes for more mobile phone interaction:

“I think I can trace this behaviour back to 2007,” says Chiavarini, “when the smoking ban came in and everyone starting bringing their phones to dinner. It changed human behaviour and micro bill splitting is a part of it.”

As he suggests, if you bring your phone into a restaurant you can’t leave the problems of the world on the other side of the restaurant door, so the romance of the dining experience lessens. People became more inward looking, more selfish, more mercurial. Bill-splitting goes mad.

And so it does.

Tony Blair has a lot for which to answer, the smoking ban being one of them that changed the UK forever — and not in a good way.

Smoking: Rishi Sunak as the heir to Blair

At the end of September, I about flipped when I saw on the news that Prime Minister Rishi Sunak wants to bring in an incremental New Zealand-style smoking ban.

As if that will stop our cost of living crisis or the migrant boats or the general social division that pervades the UK.

No, none of that is important to Rishi. Nor can he solve it, apparently, which is why he is turning his attention to cigarettes.

It should be noted that we are in the low double-digits when it comes to smoking rates, which explains why Britons have become fatter over the past 20 to 30 years.

On October 8, The Telegraph‘s Melanie McDonagh, a practising Catholic by the way, was equally appalled, contrasting Rishi’s faux conservativism with a freedom-loving artist in ‘Smoking David Hockney is a truer conservative than killjoy Rishi Sunak’:

If smoking has a bullish face, it is painter Sir David Hockney’s. From his farmstead in Normandy, the great man has surfaced to denounce Rishi Sunak’s proposal to ban the sale of cigarettes gradually.

Well done, that man.

Hockney gives his reasons for not giving up cigarettes anytime soon:

This, he says, “is just madness to me. I have smoked for 70 years. I started when I was 16 and I’m now 86 and I’m reasonably fine, thank you. I just love tobacco and I will go on smoking until I fall over”…

As he says defiantly, “Many artists have smoked. Picasso smoked and died at 91, Matisse smoked and died at 84 and Monet chain-smoked and died at 86. He smoked and painted at the same time. I can’t do that. I don’t smoke while I’m painting. I light a cigarette every 15 minutes when I stop to check what I’ve done … Why can’t Mr Sunak leave the smokers alone?”

I couldn’t agree more.

Ditto Melanie McDonagh:

Here, I say, is the authentic Conservative spirit. This is a man who has taken on board the health warnings and decided to ignore them all. He has calculated the risks, set them against the benefits and decided that he’s going to carry on with smoking because he likes it and it helps him paint …

When the New Zealand government, under bossy Jacinda Ardern, announced that it would be phasing out the sale of cigarettes, many Tories thought this is where progressive policies gets you. I wonder how they’re handling the prospect that a Tory PM will be introducing the same measure.

It’ll be an unwhipped free vote for Tory MPs – but will almost certainly be passed with the enthusiastic support of Labour. Sir Keir doesn’t need to worry about being called the nation’s nanny – the PM has taken that role on himself.

Compulsory clean living isn’t really what people vote Tory for, is it? I had reservations about Mr Sunak when, as chancellor, he aligned duty on drink in proportion to its strength, so port took a bigger hit than girly prosecco. But Mr Sunak doesn’t drink. Or smoke.

If he wants to be seen as the successor of Mrs Thatcher this is a funny route. She drank; Denis smoked. It’s come to a pretty pass when the heir of Churchill isn’t a Tory PM but David Hockney.

Yes, David Hockney, who probably never voted Conservative in his life, is more conservative than the PM, at least in this respect.

Countries that allow indoor smoking

On October 9, following on from the great Sunak proposal on banning cigarettes, The Telegraph‘s Chris Moss had an article in the Travel section, ‘The surprising countries where you can still smoke indoors’.

Bhutan is the biggest surprise of them all:

… not every country is clamping down; in some nations, the mood music around public smoking is reversing. In 2010 Bhutan was lauded all over the world for being the first country to ban tobacco sales and smoking in public places. The ban lasted for over a decade but, somewhat ironically, the Covid-19 pandemic “compelled policy makers to change course” and the sale of tobacco was legalised again. Dedicated rooms in bars and discotheques are once again free-to-smoke zones.

Excellent news. I wish Bhutan well in showing common sense.

Chris Moss summarises the varied — and surprising — smoking patchwork around the world:

Interestingly, there’s often no obvious connection between a country’s social values and its attitude to smoking. Albania completely bans smoking in bars and restaurants. Italy doesn’t. South Africa allows up to 25 per cent of a bar or restaurant to be set aside as a designated smoking area, though stricter laws are in the offing.

In Japanese restaurants and bars, smoking is permitted in all areas (although in practice many such places restrict or ban smoking). Danes can still enjoy a cigarette in smaller pubs, but most direct smokers to the streets. In Benin, meanwhile, smoking is banned in all indoor spaces.

In the US, the law changes from state to state, and can vary between neighbouring towns and districts. Economics as well as attitudes to freedom is a factor. Many Las Vegas casinos continue to allow smoking indoors. It’s also permitted in bars, taverns, and saloons where minors are prohibited or that don’t offer food service, in strip clubs and – as you’d expect in business-friendly America – on some floors at tobacco-related trade shows.

So common are smoking bans, these days, that it can be quite jarring when you walk into a restaurant on holiday and realise that smoking indoors is still permitted. I remember going to Porto about a decade ago, when smoking was already a social sin in the UK, and my astonishment on seeing a gutter below the counter in a hole-in-the-wall restaurant absolutely brim-full of cigarette butts.

Of course, an indoor smoking ban doesn’t always happen quite as planned. Some German states have banned smoking in bars, restaurants and sports stadiums, but according to the NGO coalition, the Smoke Free Partnership, compliance across the country is limited where laws do apply … 

If you are looking for a smoke-free holiday, South America is the destination for you. In December 2020, when Paraguay approved anti-smoking legislation, it became the first major region to achieve full smoke-free status. New Zealand is also on course to become an effective smoke-free nation. At the other end of the spectrum, the WHO calls out India, Tanzania and Indonesia as countries that only protect a small percentage of their populations with smoke-free zones.

Moss gave up smoking some time ago, but he still has fond memories of it:

As an ex-smoker I have to say I broadly – if begrudgingly – approve of the Sunak proposal, but can’t let go of some fond smoking memories. I still see two InterRail trips I took in the Eighties through the romantic haze of cigarette smoke on railway platforms and can still recall the pungent perfume of black tobacco – exotic, European, a bit dirty.

I started smoking in the Eighties, too. It brought me my best relationships, including marriage, and my best jobs.

With that, I’m off for a ciggie break. See you tomorrow.

The health ‘industry’: helpful or not?

Healthcare as an industry is nothing new and has been going on for years.

As with so many other malignancies of our time, this ‘industry’ began in the United States. It seemed to have got going in its present state in the 1980s. Its presence in Britain took root about 15 or 20 years ago.

Mental health

Mental health is all the rage in post-lockdown Britain. It’s a regular topic in the House of Commons as well as in the media.

UnHerd featured a thought-provoking article recently, ‘The student mental-health crisis is a myth’. Author Ashley Frawley says we are told that we can no longer be trusted to deal with the ups and downs of life without professional ‘help’. We’re not qualified. Emphases mine below:

Long before there was evidence, therapeutic entrepreneurs were certain that a widespread “mental health crisis” demanded these interventions. In 2013, with this in mind, the National Union of Students (NUS) conducted a survey in collaboration with mental health advocacy groups to push for more funding. The results must have been disappointing. Released during Mental Health Awareness Week, it claimed that “20% of students consider themselves to have a mental health problem” — a figure that combined those suspecting they had a diagnosable condition (8%), those actively seeking diagnosis (2%), and those with a confirmed diagnosis (10%). The only problem? The number was slightly lower than the general population of the same age …

The campaigners, however, continued undeterred. Ignoring the findings that students were at no greater (and probably lower) risk than age-matched populations, Poppy Jaman, chief executive of Mental Health First Aid England, stated that the NUS findings were “unsurprising”. It was proof, she said, that “the student community is considered high-risk for mental ill health, with exams, intense studying and living away from home for the first time all contributing factors”. Perhaps as insurance, the survey also produced the eye-catching claim that 92% of students suffered from “mental distress” — which spanned everything from “feeling unhappy/down” to “suicidal thoughts”. Put this way, it is surprising that 7% of respondents reported no “negative” emotions at all throughout their university experience (1% selected “prefer not to say”).

Still, campaigners highlighted that their “main concern” was the proportion of students preferring their informal networks to professional ones. As one newspaper asked of a recent NUS survey: “Why don’t students seek help from their universities — and how can this be reversed?” Or as one Director for Student Experience warned: “Ultimately, if high-stress situations go unmanaged, they can sometimes develop and even lead to mental illness.” It became common to hear that, no matter how small the problem, only professional support could prevent things from spiralling out of control. And the consequences of failing to seek help could be dire: “They may start to self-medicate with drink or drugs, self-harm, or even take their own lives,” claimed one commentator …

Despite years of encouraging young people to seek help for any problem “no matter how small”, increased help-seeking itself thus became a key indicator of the severity of the “student mental health crisis”. And here, campaigners were pushing at an open door. While the majority of students might still take their problems to their friends, they have been seeking help in greater numbers since the early 2000s. Today’s students have been taught through years of therapeutic education; trained in the virtues of constant self-surveillance, they know that as good citizens in the making, they should interpret distress as a potential “symptom” for which they should “seek help”.

… It’s easy to see how this happens. For instance, two years after the disappointing results of the NUS survey, the organisation put out another which shed the restrictive language of “diagnosis”. Instead, it asked: “Do you believe that you have experienced problems with your mental health in the last year, regardless of whether you have been formally diagnosed?” This produced the headline-grabbing statistic that 78% of university students suffered from “mental health problems”.

At the same time, universities became increasingly receptive to the claims of professionals who promised that they could contain risk and breathe new life into institutions already struggling with their meaning and purpose. Universities, after all, are constantly exposed to the reputational risks that might result from young people’s behaviour. To soften this threat, promises to provide ever greater levels of therapeutic and “wellbeing” support have quickly become part of the “package” sold to eager students and their parents on Open Days.

Ashley Frawley, an Associate Professor in sociology at Swansea University and COO of Sublation Media, gives us her common sense conclusion:

For all that is invested in myriad new-fangled interventions, they struggle to live up to that great healer: time. The kids might not be all right, but most of them will be eventually.

To say this has become heresy. I’m not discouraging therapy and counselling and no doubt many will need professionals … Twenty years ago, when I ended up seeing a university counsellor, I realised in that awkward interaction that I didn’t need a stranger, much less some diagnosis into which I could safely place all of my problems. I needed some experiences, some meaning and purpose in my life and some friends to share it with. If I had not had that realisation, I probably would have become dependent on strangers and discouraged from relying on those networks that ultimately provided my release. Today, it’s difficult to avoid the conclusion that this is precisely the point.

The comments that follow the article say similarly that more common sense is needed. Young people, progressing from childhood through their early 20s, are going through phases of learning each step of the way. These learning phases are a normal — and expected — part of life. They certainly include ups and downs, hormonal changes, creating and maintaining friendships and coping with the stress of school and university. This is what life is about and what it involves!

Two of the comments pointed to the dark side of a mental health industry.

One says:

… Life can be very difficult for all of us and a few people suffer terribly and, I like to think, get help from skilled, compassionate people. But most people don’t need it, they don’t need experts when they have their own robustness, their friends and their families. I find it distressing that some people want to make a few quid and undermine this.

The other says:

It’s the fact that those who need help struggle to get it because the system is clogged up with mental health hypochondriacs, that have been created/encouraged by all this nonsense. Not to mention that there are now whole sections of society that are holding the rest of us hostage with the threat of suicide!

The most valuable thing parents and older relatives can teach children is that life is full of ups and downs. We live in a fallen world. Things don’t always go to plan and certainly won’t go the way we like all of the time.

The sooner young people get that message in their heads and learn to expect negatives along with the positives, the better off they will be.

Physical health

On September 11, 2023, The Guardian had an article about preventive medicine and treatment, ‘The Guardian view on preventable cancers: we need to avoid illness as well as cure it’.

I won’t excerpt it, as it has the usual guff about not smoking, cutting back on alcohol and adopting a healthy diet. Capitalism is also to blame.

On the other hand, the comments that followed were pretty darned good for the most part.

My view on preventive medicine is that it creates a class of the ‘worried well’ who turn into hypochondriacs. I know a few in the US. Their worries started with routine check ups of one sort or another.

Preventive treatment can have unexpected consequences in causing unnecessary worry. One of the comments says:

Discussions about preventative healthcare invariably end up sounding a lot like victim blaming. Sure it seems like poor diet and alcohol are correlated to some cancers, but some people who are fat are perfectly healthy and some people with ‘healthy’ lifestyles die young. As someone who recently went through breast cancer screening (multiple mammograms, two biopsies, a month of fear) only to be told it was “nothing” and therefore I was one of the 3 women over-treated for every woman found to have cancer, I remain unconvinced that leaving preventative healthcare in the hands of doctors would be cost effective. We can barely treat sick people – why would we use limited means to extensively investigate healthy people? We need to look after people better – more time to cook and enjoy a little leisure, decent remuneration and good housing won’t necessarily cure cancer, but it might help to help people remain healthier and keep it at bay. But we’d rather fund complicated research and expensive medication rationed by medics than spread the cash around.

Another questioned the cost savings of preventive treatments:

Those of us at risk adjust our lifestyles, half or two thirds of us, or more, avoid these cancers.

We pay less alcohol and tobacco duty, we claim the state pension for a decade or two more than we might have done, we need some expensive care in our old age we wouldn’t have and we die of something that costs the NHS a bucket load to deal with anyway.

If you’re going to talk about how much this preventable cancer costs then what does avoiding it cost?

Fewer people dying young is, ignoring the money, a good thing but once you bring the costs in and make it an economic issue it gets a lot murkier because it’s in no way clear cut that lifestyle changes mean money saved.

I fully agree with that.

Do the best you can with diet, exercise and what one can only refer to as habits.

At a time when the UK’s NHS waiting lists are at a total of 7.4 million thanks to the National Covid Service which ran between 2020 and 2022, my philosophy is to stay away from doctors unless necessary. This is no time to be talking about preventive medicine which will only create a British class of the ‘worried well’, just as it has done in the United States. No thanks.

WHO plan for global health certification launched

On Thursday, August 10, 2023, the WHO launched its plan for global health certification.

Dr John Campbell shows us the speech from Dr Tedros, who gives special thanks to the European Union for the plan — as well as money — and says it is all for the ‘public good’:

How this is going to work is not explained, other than Tedros saying that vaccination information will be available worldwide — yet, people’s privacy will be maintained.

This announcement raises so many questions and answers so few.

In August 2017, just a few weeks after he was appointed as the head of the WHO, Tedros had this to say about healthcare reform (emphases mine):

What we have agreed on is to engage finance ministers, heads of states, heads of governments and other important sectors because health reform cannot be achieved by the health sector alone. It requires the mobilization of other sectors, too. So what you said about the rhetoric, it is because we are not reaching out to other stakeholders to ask them to help or do their part. That is why we have agreed that WHO is not just technical organization, but also a political one. So we will explore political mobilization.

In 2020, there was information online about his personal politics, which are decidedly left-of-centre. Three years on, there is little that comes up readily in a search.

However, Canada’s Globe and Mail has a story from April 24, 2020, which explains how closely tied Ethiopia — Tedros’s homeland — and China are:

For many years, health experts in Ethiopia noticed a strange phenomenon: The government was refusing to acknowledge cholera outbreaks.

Instead, the authorities labelled the outbreaks as “acute watery diarrhea” – a broader term that includes milder diseases. Research by Human Rights Watch found that the Ethiopian government was pressuring its health workers to avoid any mention of cholera, which could damage the country’s image and deter tourists.

Throughout this period, one of the most powerful officials in Ethiopia’s authoritarian government was Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus, first as health minister and then foreign minister. In 2017, he was elected to a new post: director-general of the World Health Organization.

Critics say the cholera saga in Ethiopia is a sign that Dr. Tedros is comfortable with the secrecy of autocratic states – a tendency that may have led him to accept China’s earliest reports on the novel coronavirus outbreak in December and January without challenging its officials with tough questions …

Ethiopia has become more democratic under its new prime minister, Abiy Ahmed, who took power in 2018. But before that, Mr. Smith said, it was a “highly repressive surveillance state in which a lack of government transparency was a hallmark.” And Dr. Tedros played a role in helping construct and maintain that state.

Ethiopia also had close relations with China, obtaining much of its surveillance technology from Chinese state suppliers, which allows it to monitor and punish dissidents.

With the WHO facing growing criticism for praising China’s pandemic response, there is fresh scrutiny of Dr. Tedros and his role at that organization and in Ethiopia.

In his current position, Dr. Tedros is constrained by the WHO bylaws, which make the agency dependent on the information provided by its member states. The issue is whether his leadership set a tone that tended to accept China’s reports without sufficient questioning …

Something to ponder: a global Chinese-controlled surveillance state for vaccinations — for the ‘public good’.

The Telegraph‘s Lockdown Files — conclusions — part 2

Today’s post concludes my long running series on The Telegraph‘s The Lockdown Files.

Those who missed it can read Part 1 of the conclusions.

All other posts in my series are on my Marxism/Communism page under The Lockdown Files.

MPs in the dark (cont’d)

In yesterday’s post, I featured articles about several Conservative MPs who said that they had no idea the Government was suppressing evidence about coronavirus data and that what the WhatsApp messages revealed was shocking, considering Parliament was given so little time to debate pandemic policy measures.

Another MP in this category is David Davis.

On March 6, 2023, The Telegraph published ‘Covid polling data used to shape decision-making still being kept secret, claims ex-minister’ (emphases mine below):

The Government has been accused of failing to rapidly disclose Covid polling data that shaped decision-making during the pandemic.

In the wake of The Lockdown Files, David Davis, the former Cabinet minister, has called for the taxpayer-funded research – worth at least £1.5 million – to be made “easily accessible and comprehensible to the public” after ministers repeatedly refused his requests to publish the information in a near three-year transparency battle.

However, the Cabinet Office has insisted some of the data is already in the public domain …

Until April last year, ministers pushed back time and again against Mr Davis’s requests for polling data to be put in the public domain on the grounds the information was still being used to shape policy, or would cost too much to publish.

Documents seen by The Telegraph show Mr Davis first submitted a Freedom of Information request in July 2020 seeking the cost and content of all polling conducted by the Cabinet Office, dating back to January that year …

After demanding an internal review and investigation by the Information Commissioner’s Office, the former Cabinet minister turned to the parliamentary tools at his disposal – lodging a series of 20 written questions over 18 months.

In September, the government promised to release “evaluation reports” from a review of data held by the Cabinet Office – and wrote to the Public Administration and Constitutional Affairs Committee (PACAC) in December to say details from surveys by pollsters Kantar had been published online.

Oliver Dowden, the Chancellor of the Duchy of Lancaster, also said in his letter to William Wragg, the PACAC chairman, that further data tables from Ipsos were available “on request”, while the National Institute for Health Research had published results from its own study.

But Mr Davis told the Commons on Monday he had not seen the data in question, while Mr Wragg said the notion the information had been made available to PACAC was “news to me”.

The former Brexit secretary stressed that the details “must be made easily accessible and comprehensible to the public”.

Asked for the whereabouts of the reports promised in September last year, the Cabinet Office pointed to the data referenced in the PACAC letter.

The following is an excerpt from David Davis’s Point of Order raised on March 6, 2020:

… I kept pressing, and eventually, in April last year, I was told that a timetable for releasing the information would be available in the spring. That deadline came and went, so I tried again in September, when I was told that the data would be published by the end of the year. Now, three months into 2023, I have still not seen it. About an hour ago, a journalist was told by the Cabinet Office that it had been made available to the Public Administration and Constitutional Affairs Committee, whose Chairman, my hon. Friend the Member for Hazel Grove (Mr Wragg), is present; but I have not seen it.

Public money was used to obtain polling information relating to some of the biggest policy decisions in a generation. It must be made easily accessible and comprehensible to the public. May I seek your advice, Madam Deputy Speaker, on how the House can make the Government give it the data on the basis of which it appears to have created policy throughout the pandemic?

William Wragg intervened:

Further to that point of order, Madam Deputy Speaker. As my right hon. Friend prayed me in aid during his point of order, let me simply say that this is news to me, as Chair of the Public Administration and Constitutional Affairs Committee. I can certainly inform the House that the Committee has never received the data in any simple form, such as the questions that were asked and the answers that were received.

Deputy Speaker Rosie Winterton (Labour) responded, in part:

… if a Member has been told that information will be made available by a particular date, I would expect that commitment to be met. Knowing him as I do, I am sure that the right hon. Member will be assiduous in pursuing this matter, for example through parliamentary questions, and I hope he will receive helpful responses.

As for the point from the Chair of the Committee, I suspect that he may go back and request further information, but that is entirely up to him and his Committee.

Lockdown a big mistake, Sweden emerges best

Columnists from The Telegraph and elsewhere were deeply disappointed to see that Government officials ruined the British economy for political purposes and expedience.

Matt Hancock wanted to make himself look good. One of Boris’s advisers said that England should side with Scotland on mask-wearing because having a conflict with Nicola Sturgeon would not be worth the trouble.

It’s interesting to note that none of those three is in any leadership role in 2023. Boris’s adviser resigned a long time before ago.

On March 4, The Telegraph‘s Allison Pearson posted ‘Lockdown sceptics like me were demonised — but we were right’:

… don’t tell me thousands more would have died if we hadn’t locked down because thousands more are dying because we had lockdown. Men and women in their thirties, forties and fifties with families; fit, younger people whom the virus could not harm, now presenting with incurable cancers. Will they be putting their names on the National Covid Memorial wall? They should.

Human beings have an astonishing capacity to forget, especially when something is embarrassing to look back on or when it makes us feel a bit stupid …

The biggest shock revealed by The Telegraph scoop is quite how often our leaders, who always claimed to be guided by “the science”, were making decisions on the hoof.

Astonished, we read conversation after conversation where, it becomes clear, that decisions affecting the suffering of the elderly entombed in care homes, of children shut out of schools and playgrounds is filtered through the prism of something called “Comms”.

So, when Boris Johnson asks his top team whether masks in schools are necessary, Chris Whitty, the Chief Medical Officer, replies: “No strong reason against in corridors etc, and no strong reason for. The downsides are in the classroom because of the potential to interfere with teaching.”

But Lee Cain, the PM’s director of Comms, is not happy. Scotland has just confirmed masks in schools so England is under pressure to follow suit lest Nicola Sturgeon gain the advantage. “Why do we want to have the fight on not having masks in certain school settings?” asks Cain …

The Lockdown Files reveal that Matt Hancock and other key players often had a callous disregard for everything except their own egos …

Children’s wellbeing? Forget it. Hancock, we learn, launched a disgraceful “rearguard action” to close schools when Gavin Williamson, then-education secretary, was, to his credit, battling to keep them open … Keeping children out of education for another two months (until March 2021) turned out to be the real car crash …

Ironically, Downing Street had become a prisoner of the public’s fear. That sense of dread which, as Laura Dodsworth points out in her definitive book, State of Fear, was itself created by government scientists “using a battery of weapons from distorted statistics, ‘nudges’ and misleading adverts on TV to control the public in order to make them comply with lockdown requirements”. So people were convinced that Covid was a uniquely ruthless killer.

… The elderly were at risk of “just giving up” because they had been isolated for so long. Too bad. Hancock did nothing to alleviate the misery experienced by tens of thousands as they enacted a pitiful pantomime of intimacy through care-home windows and Perspex screens. (Visits to care homes and hospitals only returned to something like normality in July 2021 and, appallingly, many are still fortresses.) …

… as time went on, and the restrictions bit deeper, I began to shout at the TV during the Downing Street press briefings. Why did no one ask why having a “substantial meal” with alcohol in a pub protected you against Covid in a way that standing at the bar eating a bag of crisps did not? Robert Jenrick, the communities secretary at the time, explained that “a Cornish pasty on its own” would not constitute a substantial meal, “unless it came on a plate, to a table, with a side of chips or salad”. This gave rise to one of the great dilemmas of the pandemic: The Scotch Egg Question. Food minister George Eustice said a scotch egg “probably would count” as a substantial meal, but a No 10 spokesman hastily over-ruled that deplorable, devil-may-care attitude, sternly insisting that “bar snacks do not count”.

Grown men, our democratically elected representatives no less, actually said ludicrous things like that with a straight face. On the basis of no scientific evidence whatsoever. It was farcical.

The farce insulted our intelligence, but it was the cruelty I abhorred. Common sense and basic human decency had been overridden, leading to the isolation of the most vulnerable (the very people we were meant to be “saving”); so many lonely deaths, so many families damaged, so many self-harming teenagers. Every day, my Telegraph inbox filled up with devastating stories …

To speak out, however, was to be demonised as a “Covidiot” and worse. The Left of the Labour Party, still smarting from the recent defeat of Jeremy Corbyn, redirected all its fire-breathing zealotry into advancing the cause of “zero Covid”, the better to undermine the hated Tories. I regularly found myself under attack, and trending (not in a good way) on Twitter. Once, it was for the heresy of suggesting that we should allow young people to get Covid and build up natural immunity which could then help protect their grandparents. Prior to the pandemic, that had been an uncontroversial precept of epidemiology. As Martin Kulldorff, former professor at Harvard Medical School and co-author of the Great Barrington Declaration, observed drily this week at a Covid hearing in the House of Representatives, “I guess we knew about it [natural immunity] since 430 B.C. – the Athenian plague – until 2020. And then we didn’t know about it for three years, and now we know about it again.”

I was naïve enough to be shocked when I discovered that a Conservative MP, Neil O’Brien, had set up (at the behest, it was alleged, of certain ministers) a McCarthyite website to monitor the work of journalists like me who took a sceptical attitude to lockdown. How could that be happening in a free society? While I undoubtedly got certain things wrong, especially in the early days, I was repulsed by the way that Matt Hancock assumed the moral high ground, bulldozing over any criticism of his own highly questionable decisions. Intoxicated by his new totalitarian powers. Mr Hancock, I felt, was getting away with murder …

The Covid Inquiry, which began this week [albeit not publicly], with a dismaying lack of lockdown sceptics among its “core participants” had better buck up its ideas, or else. (At first, the inquiry wasn’t even going to consider the damage done to children, if you can believe it.

Anne Longworth, the Children’s Commissioner, has not been included and there is still not a single witness from the hospitality sector.) If the Establishment was hoping for a whitewash, the Lockdown Files will make that very hard indeed …

The Lockdown Files are not a betrayal. They are a declaration of loyalty to the public which has the right to know.

May we never forget the stick that Isabel Oakeshott got for The Lockdown Files:

Whistleblower acting in the national service – or not?

This week’s Difficult Woman is @isabeloakeshott – the journalist and scoop-getter who landed the Lockdown Files for the @Telegraph

Heroine – or villain?

On ⁦⁦@GlobalPlayer⁩ https://t.co/QYttbMe3QX

— Rachel Johnson (@RachelSJohnson) March 11, 2023

On March 18, The Telegraph published Daniel Hannan’s ‘The evidence is in. Lockdowns kill people — and the more you lock down, the more you kill’:

… Britain was driven into abandoning its proportionate, cool-headed epidemic plan, not just by shrieking TV presenters, but by perverse incentives. Put simply, decision-makers knew that they would not get into trouble for excessive caution. They could blow away billions, bankrupt businesses, ruin children’s education, and none of it would be a resigning matter. But make the slightest mistake the other way, and they would be done for.

Easy to say in hindsight? Maybe. But those of us who said it at the time were roundly denounced as granny murderers. In February 2020, I recalled the ridiculous forecasts that had accompanied bird flu and swine flu, and cautioned against panic: “Politicians, like most people, are bad at calculating risk, and almost every minister would rather be accused of over-reacting to a threat than of having done too little. There is a similar bias, albeit a less pronounced one, among the various medical advisory bodies”.

Every time I criticised the lockdown – and this column was one of only three or four doing so in March 2020 – I would steel myself before pressing send. I knew that demanding a reopening was hugely unpopular. What if it also turned out to be wrong?

Yet the facts remained stubbornly at odds with the policies. As the disease spread from China, Chris Whitty pointed out that it was not dangerous enough to merit an acceleration of the vaccine approval process (no one, at this stage, was contemplating a UK lockdown).

“For a disease with a low (for the sake of argument 1 per cent) mortality a vaccine has to be very safe so the safety studies can’t be shortcut,” he messaged on February 29 2020. Reader, the mortality rate for Covid in this country never rose as high as 1 per cent.

Why, then, were we panicked? What happened to the original epidemic plan, which was to allow infections to seep gradually through the population so that hospitals would not be overwhelmed at any one moment?

The answer can be glimpsed in a message on March 8 from James Slack, Boris Johnson’s calm and measured spokesman: “I think we’re heading towards general pressure over why our measures are relatively light touch compared to other countries.”

Too bloody right. And the pressure – cretinous rants from Piers Morgan, false rumours of hospitals being overrun, “Go Home Covidiots” signs – grew until, two weeks later, a prime minister who hated nannying with every bone in his body felt obliged to sentence the population to house arrest.

Could he have resisted that pressure? Other countries had already closed, 92 per cent of the electorate wanted to be confined and the scientific advisers, sniffing the wind, had switched to arguing for tougher measures.

But one country held out. Sweden, lacking its own pandemic plan, had adopted Britain’s – and, unlike Britain, it did not crack under criticism. Sweden is our counterfactual, a laboratory quality control showing what would have happened here had we held our nerve. And the evidence it presents looks damning. A study has found that, from 2020 to 2022, Sweden had the lowest excess mortality rate in Europe.

That finding blows the case for lockdowns out of the water. In the early days of the pandemic, when the Government was being criticised for what looked like a high death rate (largely because it had sent NHS patients into care homes), ministers and medical advisers urged us to wait until all the evidence was in …

Judged by this metric, Britain did not do badly. Our overall excess death rate was behind Scandinavia, in line with Germany and the Netherlands, and ahead of most of southern and eastern Europe. But the real outlier was Sweden, which had the lowest excess mortality in Europe, and one of the lowest in the world, throughout 2020 and 2021.

During the pandemic, I assumed that Sweden would emerge with a slightly higher death rate, but a much stronger economy. Since poverty correlates with lower longevity, I expected that, over time, Sweden would see fewer deaths from other causes, so ending up healthier as well as wealthier. But I underestimated the lethal impact of the lockdowns themselves. Sweden did not just do better over time; it actually killed fewer people during the pandemic.

How did Britain’s leaders respond to the evidence that they should have stuck to Plan A? They took it as a personal affront. Hancock referred in his messages to the “f***ing Sweden argument”, and asked officials to “supply three or four bullet [points] of why Sweden is wrong”.

But Sweden was not wrong, and no amount of desperate deflection about Norway also having a low death rate can disguise it. The horrible truth is that lockdowns killed people. Sweden had lots of coronavirus cases but relatively few excess deaths. Australia had few coronavirus cases, but a strict lockdown. It ended up with higher excess mortality than Sweden.

Are people ready to believe it? Are we prepared to admit that the disasters we are still experiencing – undiagnosed diseases, absenteeism, debt, lost education, price rises, mental health problems – were self-inflicted?

It seems not. We will go into the next crisis with the same skewed incentives. And all because, like so many Hancocks, we don’t want to “imply we’ve been getting it wrong”.

On March 22, The Telegraph published Madeline Grant’s ‘Nobody wants to confront the truth about lockdown’:

… Even now, pro-lockdowners ignore the example of Sweden because its experience of Covid doesn’t fit their mantra – “we had no choice”. Justifications (but not opinions) have shifted with the evidence. When Sweden appeared to be doing badly, it was “because it failed to lock down”. Now the data have moved in Sweden’s favour, it’s because “Sweden had an unofficial lockdown all along” [false]. The Telegraph’s Lockdown Files exposed the self-fulfilling logic behind many decisions. Coercion became its own justification, as when Matt Hancock feared cutting isolation times would dilute the message and “imply we’ve been wrong”. Whether you agree with lockdown or not, this is an appalling way to govern.

… Public readiness to allow so many basic functions of life – worship, exercise, social interaction – to be dismissed as “non-essential” suggests an inability to bear ordinary risks once inseparable from existence; expectations of a level of “security” unthinkable to previous generations. Even if we never lock down in precisely the same way again, a Rubicon has still been crossed.

So we didn’t finish stronger or more united, we simply ended up with the cold truth that, for many of us, things we claim to value – freedom, the next generation, prosperity, mental wellbeing didn’t really matter that much – at least not enough to fight for. When that becomes clear, there is little left for a society to coalesce around. All that remains are the fragments of those past illusions.

… Vital questions risk being lost along the way; about whether those laws were ever justified, and the incalculable damage they caused.

On March 23, UnHerd‘s Freddie Sayers, who is half-Swedish, asked ‘Why doesn’t Britain regret lockdown?’

He says:

… To the majority of people who believe lockdowns were right and necessary, the Covid era was no doubt distressing, but it need not have been cause to re-order their perception of the world. Faced with a new and frightening disease, difficult decisions were taken by the people in charge but we came together and got through it; mistakes were made, but overall we did what we needed to do.

For the dissenting minority, the past three years have been very different. We have had to grapple with the possibility that, through panic and philosophical confusion, our governing class contrived to make a bad situation much worse. Imagine living with the sense that the manifold evils of the lockdowns that we all now know — ripping up centuries-old traditions of freedom, interrupting a generation’s education, hastening the decline into decrepitude for millions of older people, destroying businesses and our health service, dividing families, saddling our economies with debt, fostering fear and alienation, attacking all the best things in life — needn’t have happened for anything like so long, if at all?

To those who place emphasis on good quality evidence, it has been particularly exasperating. In the early days of 2020, we had only intuitions — there was no real data as to whether lockdowns worked, as they had never been tried in this way. As millions tuned in to our in-depth interviews on UnHerdTV with leading scientists, we made sure to hear arguments in favour of lockdowns as well as against …

In the past year, however, we have for the first time been able to look at the Covid data in the round. Many of the countries which appeared to be doing “well” in terms of low levels of infections and deaths caught up in the second year — Norway ended up much closer to Sweden, while countries such as Hungary, which were initially praised for strong early lockdowns, have ended up with some of the worst death tolls in the world. Due to the peculiarly competitive nature of the lockdowns, the results were neatly tracked, allowing clear comparison between countries and regions. While we spent the first year arguing about deaths “with” Covid as opposed to deaths “from” Covid, all sides in this discussion have now settled on overall “excess deaths” as the fairest measure of success or failure: in other words, overall, how many more people died in a particular place than you would normally expect?

My view on these results is quite simple: in order to justify a policy as monumental as shutting down all of society for the first time in history, the de minimis outcome must be a certainty that fewer people died because of it. Lockdown was not one “lever” among many: it was the nuclear option. The onus must be on those who promoted lockdowns to produce a table showing a clear correlation between the places that enacted mandatory shutdowns and their overall outcome in terms of excess deaths. But there is no such table; there is no positive correlation. Three years after, there is no non-theoretical evidence that lockdowns were necessary to save lives. This is not an ambiguous outcome; it is what failure looks like.

If anything, the correlation now looks like it goes the other way. The refusal of Sweden to bring in a lockdown, and the neighbouring Scandinavian countries’ shorter and less interventionist lockdowns and swifter return to normality, provide a powerful control to the international experiment. Three years on, these countries are at the bottom of the European excess deaths league table, and depending on which method you choose, Sweden is either at or very near the very bottom of the list. So the countries that interfered the least with the delicately balanced ecosystem of their societies caused the least damage; and the only European country to eschew mandatory lockdowns altogether ended up with the smallest increase in loss of life. It’s a fatal datapoint for the argument that lockdowns were the only option.

So why, three years on, do most people not share this conclusion? Partly because most people haven’t seen the evidence. Nor will they. The media and political establishment were so encouraging of lockdowns at the time that their only critique was that they weren’t hard enough. They are hardly going to acknowledge such a grave mistake now. Nor do I expect the inquiry to ask the right questions: obfuscation and distraction will continue and mea culpas will never arrive.

But it can’t all be put down to the media. Over that strange period, we were reminded of something important about human nature: when frightened, people will choose security over freedom. Endless opinion polls confirmed it, and politicians acted upon it. Tellingly, those constituencies most in favour of lockdowns in our polling are leafy and affluent — New Forest West, Bexhill, Henley, The Cotswolds. Perhaps some people even enjoyed it.

Meanwhile, the dissenting minority is not going anywhere. This new class of citizen is now a feature of every Western society: deeply distrustful of authority, sceptical of the “narrative”, hungry for alternative explanations, inured to being demonised and laughed at. The dissident class skews young (it includes 39% of 25-34 year olds) and clusters around poorer inner-city neighbourhoods; it heads to alternative media channels for information. Its number was greatly increased over the lockdown era as those people lost faith in the way the world is run. They will continue to make their presence felt in the years to come.

As for me, the past three years have changed how I view the world. I feel no anger, simply a wariness: an increased sense of how fragile our liberal way of life is, how precarious its institutions and principles, and how good people, including those I greatly admire, are capable of astonishing misjudgements given the right atmosphere of fear and moral panic. In particular those years revealed the dark side of supposedly enlightened secular rationalism — how, if freed from its moorings, it can tend towards a crudely mechanistic world in which inhuman decisions are justified to achieve dubious measurable targets.

I hope there is no “next time”, and that the political class will never again think nationwide lockdowns are a proper policy option in a liberal democracy. But if they do, I suspect the opposition, while still perhaps a minority, will be better organised.

On March 9, The Telegraph‘s Fraser Nelson, who also edits The Spectator, had more on Sweden’s success in ‘Britain may well repeat its lockdown blunders sooner than anyone thinks’:

… The winner, with the smallest rise in “excess” deaths since the pandemic began, is Sweden.

For those who had accused the lockdown-rejecting Swedes of pursuing a “let it rip” policy that left people to die, this is all rather baffling …

Sweden had the unflappable Anders Tegnell as chief epidemiologist, who went all-out to argue against what he saw as populism: lockdowns that were not backed by science and could cause more harm than good. He never stopped arguing, giving television interviews while waiting on train platforms and publishing study after study. He won people over. Sweden ended up with middling Covid but among Europe’s least economic damage and lowest increase in deaths. In an interview last week, Tegnell offered advice for his successor: “Have ice in your stomach.”

… The science on Covid still isn’t clear. On masks, on social distancing, even school closures – it’s hard to say what difference they make to the spread of a virus. The UK hasn’t commissioned a single high-quality study into what works and what doesn’t. Even the excess deaths count is complicated – but Sweden is at or near the bottom, whichever way you cut it. But even now, no one seems very interested in the actual science, or learning lessons any time soon.

It’s now 20 years since the boring old coronavirus mutated into a killer in the Sars epidemic. Asian countries updated their pandemic emergency plans – but Britain didn’t, sticking with its flu-based approach. Are we seeing the same complacency yet again? We have now seen, in the Lockdown Files, much of what went wrong. We have also seen, in Sweden, what can go right. We will now see whether Rishi Sunak can put the two together.

The following day, The Telegraph reposted Nelson’s February 23, 2022 article, ‘Was Sweden right about Covid all along?’

It explains more about the psyche of the Swedes as a people:

To understand Sweden, you need to understand a word that’s hard to explain, let alone translate: lagom. It means, in effect, “perfect-simple”: not too much, not too little. People who are lagom don’t stand out or make a fuss: they blend right in – and this is seen as a virtue.

Essays are written about why lagom sums up a certain Swedish mindset – that it’s bad to stand out, to consider yourself better or be an outlier. That’s why it’s so strange that, during the lockdowns, Sweden became the world’s defiant outlier.

Swedes saw it the other way around. They were keeping calm and carrying on: lockdown was an extreme, draconian, untested experiment. Lock up everyone, keep children out of school, suspend civil liberties, send police after people walking their dogs – and call this “caution”? Anders Tegnell, Sweden’s state epidemiologist, never spoke about a Swedish “experiment”. He said all along he could not recommend a public health intervention that had never been proven.

Tegnell also made another point: that he didn’t claim to be right. It would take years, he’d argue, to see who had jumped the right way. His calculation was that, on a whole-society basis, the collateral damage of lockdowns would outweigh what good they do. But you’d only know if this was so after a few years. You’d have to look at cancer diagnosis, hospital waiting lists, educational damage and, yes, count the Covid dead.

The problem with lockdowns is that no one looks at whole-society pictures. Professor Neil Ferguson’s team from Imperial College London admitted this, once, as a breezy aside. “We do not consider the wider social and economic costs of suppression,” they wrote in a supposed assessment of lockdown, “which will be high.” But just how high? And were they a price worth paying? …

… its people were incredibly cautious. But unlike Brits, they had a government that trusted them.

There were some Swedish diktats: a “rule of eight” was set up for a while. Bars, restaurants and cafes were all socially distanced and, at one point, had to close by 8.30pm. For a few weeks, Swedes even had vaccine passports. But that was about it: the rest was guidance, and it was followed.

What no statistic can convey is just how careful Swedes were; something that struck me whenever I’d visit. It was perfectly legal to meet up in bars and for a fika in a coffee shop, but most didn’t. A friend of mine had a rule that she’d only ever meet friends outside – even in the Stockholm winter (she did this so much that she got frostbite). In summer last year, studies showed Swedes working from home more than in any other European country.

This kept Covid low, while the lack of rules allowed for people to use their judgement while minimising economic and social damage. Sweden’s GDP fell by 2.9 per cent in 2020, while Britain’s collapsed by 9.4 per cent.

The cost of the various Covid measures is best summed up by the debt mountain: an extra £8,400 per head in Britain, and £3,000 in Sweden.

Swedish schools kept going throughout, with no face masks. Sixth-formers and undergraduates switched to home learning, but the rest of Swedish children went to school as normal. That’s not to say there weren’t absences as the virus spread: it was common to see a third, at times even half of the class absent due to sniffles or suspected Covid. But there were no full-scale closures and, aside from some suspicions about minor grade inflation (the average maths grade sneaked up to 10.1, from 9.3), there is no talk in Sweden about educational devastation …

Pimlico Plumbers’ Charlie Mullins recants on the vaccine

Charlie Mullins was, until recently, the owner of London’s Pimlico Plumbers, the capital’s best known plumbing outfit. He has since sold the company.

He still owned it during the pandemic and insisted that all of his many employees have the vaccine. In fact, he went so far as to say that no one — no one — should be walking around in public unless they had the vaccine.

On March 7, Mullins changed his tune after having read The Lockdown Files. He appeared on GB News that day to say that the British people were ‘misled and lied to’. The second video has the content of what he said when he was pro-vaccine:

We will NEVER forget @CharlieM_OBE pic.twitter.com/AmAgTMcv1N

— Freedom World🗽5k (@FreedomWorld_) March 7, 2023

Better late than never. I wonder how many of his plumbers lost their jobs because they refused the jab.

He’s the sort who probably would have agreed with the jailing of the Scarborough woman for coughing in February 2021:

Shameful.

Don’t mention China; meanwhile, Joe Biden and FBI are on the case of suspected virus origin

From the beginning of the pandemic, Matt Hancock, to his credit, was suspicious of the origins of the virus. He wanted to include that in his December 2022 book, Pandemic Diaries, but Downing Street refused.

On March 8, The Telegraph published ‘Matt Hancock Covid memoirs censored over Wuhan lab leak comments’:

Matt Hancock was censored by the Cabinet Office over his concerns that the Covid-19 pandemic began with a lab leak in Wuhan, the Lockdown Files reveals.

The former health secretary was told to tone down claims in his book because the Government feared it would “cause problems” with China.

Mr Hancock wanted to say that the Chinese explanation – that the virus being discovered close to a government science lab in Wuhan was coincidental – “just doesn’t fly”.

But, in correspondence from late last year and leaked to the Telegraph, the Cabinet Office told him that the Government’s position was that the original outbreak’s location was “entirely coincidental” .

It is the first time that the British position has been categorically stated. Mr Hancock was warned that to differ from this narrative, which resembles China’s version of events, risked “damaging national security”.

In his book, Pandemic Diaries, Mr Hancock also wanted to write that “Global fear of the Chinese must not get in the way of a full investigation into what happened” but this too was watered down …

The changes to the book were made by the Cabinet Office when Mr Hancock submitted his manuscript for review – a process all former ministers are expected to follow – last year. Once alterations were made, the book was signed off for publication by Simon Case, the Cabinet Secretary, on November 4 2022.

That same day, Hancock’s co-author Isabel Oakeshott, to whom he gave his WhatsApp messages that form the basis of The Lockdown Files, noted that the FBI has since gone public with its suspicions in ‘Upsetting China is the Government’s biggest taboo, as I found out the hard way’:

Sunak recently used his first foreign policy speech to declare that the “golden era” of relations between our two countries is over. Unfortunately, the panjandrums in the Foreign Office have yet to catch up, as the Cabinet Office’s painstaking attempts to water down Matt Hancock’s book about the pandemic expose.

Did Covid-19 originate in a Wuhan lab, a global centre for the study and storage of exactly the type of coronaviruses that led to the outbreak? The FBI is certainly warming to the theory. Just last week, the US intelligence agency said that was the most likely cause of the outbreak.

Choosing his words carefully, FBI director Christopher Wray declared that a “potential lab incident” was “most likely” to blame. Other intelligence agencies also struggle to believe that the proximity of the first known case to the world’s leading coronavirus research laboratory – a place where samples are deliberately altered to make them more deadly to humans – is just happenstance.

As for Downing St? They won’t go there. During tortuous negotiations between Hancock and the Cabinet Office over what he could and could not say in his Pandemic Diaries, officials let slip something quite extraordinary: that they believe the proximity of the Wuhan lab to the first recorded Covid outbreak is “entirely coincidental.” They seem terrified of anyone saying otherwise.

On March 20, The Guardian reported that Biden ordered the release of intelligence relating to potential links between the virus and the Wuhan lab:

It was discussed on March 21 on GB News:

🗞 Covid origins: Joe Biden orders release of files on lab leak theory 🗞@TheSimonEvans, @LeoKearse and @ScottCapurro react to a headline in The Times 🗞 pic.twitter.com/uZ5g8PyoMS

— GB News (@GBNEWS) March 21, 2023

Conservative MPs have been eager to discuss this in more depth; The Telegraph covered their concerns two weeks before Biden ordered the American intelligence release.

Let us hope that Rishi is not reticent. His father-in-law has an important Infosys office in China.

Conclusion

The Telegraph did the UK a huge favour in publishing The Lockdown Files.

They confirmed all my suspicions in their marvellous ‘read it and weep’ articles.

Sadly, even friends of mine have criticised Isabel Oakeshott — ‘that girl’ — and say that everything will be properly dealt with during the inquiry. As if!

Then again, they were proponents of lockdown. And, yes, they live in a leafy place in the Home Counties with a huge garden where they plant their own vegetable supply. They didn’t suffer one bit.

When will some people ever learn?

End of series

The Lockdown Files: Matt Hancock’s hunger for absolute control — part 2

Yesterday’s post introduced Matt Hancock’s hunger for absolute control during the coronavirus debacle.

The story, with excerpts from The Telegraph‘s The Lockdown Files, continues after a brief interlude.

Giles Coren: ‘we all broke the rules’

On the afternoon of Wednesday, March 22, broadcaster and Times columnist Giles Coren, son of the late humourist and Punch editor Alan Coren, gave a radio interview in which he said that ‘we all broke the rules’, meaning during the pandemic.

The subject arose as former Prime Minister Boris Johnson was taking his place at the parliamentary Privileges Committee hearing to defend himself over Partygate.

As a result, Giles Coren trended on Twitter — and not in a good way:

Is it “abolish Giles Coren”? pic.twitter.com/wS0HAZYMiu

— Alex (@MarklewA) March 18, 2023

A few of the cleaner tweets follow:

We measured 2m apart in our small garden so our then five-year-old could see a friend for the first time in months. And we were the lucky ones. Friends had babies alone, heard distressing news alone, had to let loved ones die alone. Giles Coren can get all the way into the sea. https://t.co/WCxZwI1yiC

— Caroline Dodds Pennock (@carolinepennock) March 22, 2023

When Giles Coren claimed 'everyone broke the rules', the police cautioned a child for playing outdoors in her own front garden, fenced off period products in a supermarket for being unnecessary and surveilled the countryside with drones for people walking too close together

— AlexWattsEsq (@AlexWattsEsq) March 22, 2023

https://twitter.com/jharrison_94/status/1638479553436811266

Giles Coren says: “everyone broke the rules”- maybe in his entitled arrogant circle, but not what I experienced. I officiated funerals where widows sat alone, a man couldn’t be hugged at his sisters funeral, where a Funeral Director lived in a caravan to protect their family.

— Judy Mansfield (@JudyMansfield) March 22, 2023

No, Giles Coren, we didn't all break the rules. We had some brief hours with our mum as she died in a locked-down nursing home, and then a funeral attended by seven people in a locked-up crematorium. You may have no moral compass but others do.

— Kate Eaton 💙 🧡 🇮🇪🇪🇺🇺🇦🌈 #FBPE (@kate_tweeton) March 22, 2023

However, this next tweet nails it. Giles Coren doesn’t mean average Britons. He’s referring to the media class and other privileged oafs:

when giles coren says 'we all broke the rules' he doesn't mean us. he means journalists and columnists.

— ℓყรɓεƭɦ (@SloaneFragment) March 22, 2023

Which brings me neatly to Matt Hancock.

Hancock wants immunity over care home deaths

On March 4, 2023, Chronicle Live recapped an article from the Mirror about a talk that the former Health and Social Care Secretary gave to a group of top-flight London lawyers about who was to blame for care home deaths (emphases mine):

Matt Hancock told a gathering of city lawyers he should be immune from court action over Covid blunders, The Mirror reports – just days before shocking WhatsApp messages he sent during the pandemic were published.

Mr Hancock said he should not be held personally responsible for failings during the fight against Covid-19, such as the Department of Health and Social Care’s failure to safeguard care home residents, simply because he was Secretary of State. Instead he said that “HMG” – the whole Government – should take the blame.

This comes even as prominent campaigners call for the ex-minister to be prosecuted.

He was heard saying that he believes lawyers pursuing him personally “were chasing tabloid headlines”. He was speaking to lawyers from firm Mishcon de Reya in a talk over his book, Pandemic Diaries, coming just months after his stint in the I’m A Celebrity jungle.

Mr Hancock has furiously denied claims that his leaked WhatsApp messages show he ignored Chief Medical Officer Chris Whitty’s advice to test all people going into care homes.

His department’s policy of discharging untested patients into them from hospital was ruled unlawful by the High Court in April in a case brought by Dr Cathy Gardner, who lost her father. At the time of the ruling, union GMB said the department had shown a “callous disregard” for care homes.

The messages leaked to the Daily Telegraph this week by Isabel Oakeshott, journalist and the co-author of Mr Hancock’s memoir, show he thought committing to testing people coming into care homes from the community – including staff – didn’t “add anything” and “muddies the waters” …

And 12 days ago he held an online question and answer session with top lawyers from Mishcon de Reya and told them it was wrong that a Secretary of State of a department should be held legally responsible for failures and it should be “HMG” instead. Currently, the defendant in any judicial review against a Government department has to be the Secretary of State.

But Mr Hancock said: “I don’t think it’s an appropriate use of the courts to essentially go chasing tabloid headlines. You know, ‘Hancock broke the law’ – I didn’t break the law.” In the Q&A, Mr Hancock also claimed to have “banned alcohol” in his department to stop his team being “more social”.

Some of the leaked WhatsApp messages reveal then-aide Gina Coladangelo – who is now his partner – telling him there were drinks in the fridge to celebrate hitting his testing target in May 2020. She wrote, adding a beer glasses emoji: “Drinks cold in fridge at DH. Feel free to open before we are back.”

A spokesperson for Mr Hancock confirmed he did not introduce a booze ban until the next January. Mr Hancock also blasted criticism of the Tories’ bungled PPE procurement as “offensive” in the Q&A and justified writing off £12billion of PPE, most of it unusable, saying: “I’d rather save lives.”

… Meanwhile, activist Gina Miller, leader of the True and Fair Party and who took the Government to court over Brexit, has written to Met Police Chief Sir Mark Rowley calling for Mr Hancock to be prosecuted.

She wrote: “The threshold has been met to investigate Mr Hancock for gross negligence manslaughter… a common law offence that carries a maximum of life imprisonment.”

‘Mr Vaccine’

As 2020 dragged on for many of us, Hancock was keen for his moment of glory, as The Telegraph related in ‘Inside Matt Hancock’s desperate bid to be known as ‘Mr Vaccine”’.

Emphases mine below:

Matt Hancock feared he would not get credit for the UK’s vaccine success and described the speeding up of the jabs rollout as a “Hancock triumph”.

The former health secretary’s WhatsApp messages show he fought to be the face of Britain’s vaccine campaign at the height of the pandemic and became furious if he thought others were getting the credit.

And he was told by his media advisers that fronting Britain’s vaccine programme would allow the press and public to “forgive” him for imposing lockdowns and that “politically” he must balance the two. 

However, the Department of Health and Social Care had to work with the Department of Business, Energy and Industrial Strategy (BEIS) on the vaccine procurement.

Hancock was unhappy:

Mr Hancock had already battled with his Cabinet colleagues over who should have overall control of the procurement strategy, and struck an uneasy compromise between the Department of Health and Social Care and the Department of Business, Energy and Industrial Strategy.

The announcement of the Pfizer vaccine made things worse for him:

In November 2020, the Department of Health caught wind that Pfizer was planning an imminent announcement that its vaccine was more than 90 per cent effective against Covid-19.

The Pfizer vaccine was the first to report its interim trial data and went on to be the first to be administered to the public in the UK the following month …

On hearing that the news was about to break, Mr Hancock bemoaned he was not live on camera and worried he would be overshadowed by Alok Sharma, the then business secretary.

The article has a screenshot of the WhatsApps he exchanged with adviser Damon Poole:

Pity I’m not up in the Commons!

I should do a clip

We should pump out the NHS doc

Do No10 know?

When Poole answered in the affirmative, Hancock was eager to do the media round the next morning:

I should DEFINITELY do the round tmrw

Just to reinforce the point, he messaged Poole again:

It MUST NOT be Alok!

On December 8, Hancock appeared on ITV’s breakfast show, Good Morning Britain (GMB), to watch the first Britons, a man and a woman, both elderly, get their ‘jabs’:

… Mr Hancock gave one of his most memorable interviews of the pandemic …

Wiping a tear from his eye, he told the programme it had “been such a tough year for so many people” and he was relieved that people could at last “get on with their lives”.

The lady was Margaret Keenan, aged 90 at the time. She received her jab in Coventry.

The man’s name was William ‘Will’ Shakespeare. He was 81 at the time and has since died (nothing to do with the vaccine). When the presenter announced his name, it was hard to know whether Hancock was laughing at it or crying about his step-grandfather who died of Covid (more here).

The frames extracted from that moment don’t exactly make for comfortable viewing. Thank goodness someone online captured them for posterity. Don’t miss the caption:

However, there was no immediate big media momentum for Hancock after those initial jabs, even though millions of people watch GMB.

On Boxing Day 2020, Damon Poole WhatsApped Hancock to ask if he had spoken with journalists from the Sunday papers. Poole did not like all the articles about the vaccine, which he called ‘this vaccine spray’. As it was the day after Christmas, Hancock hadn’t looked at the papers until he heard from Poole:

Now I’ve seen it. Sure it’s not No10?

Poole replied:

I’m pretty sure it’s them

MOS [Mail on Sunday]/Times/Tele[graph]

Hancock fired back:

The thing that p—–s me off is the Mail on Sunday links it to Rishi. What’s that all about?

The first few days of 2021 proved no better for Hancock’s desired media exposure. On January 7, Hancock asked Poole to send him the link to a Mail story with the headline ‘Vaccine approval is finally cut from TWENTY days to five’. Poole sent him the link and added:

MHRA [Medicines and Healthcare Regulatory Agency] briefing [I’m] pretty sure

Hancock asked if that was true. Poole said he thought it was and sent him a link to a tweet of the Mail‘s front page:

MAIL: At last! A turbo booster for jabs #TomorrowsPapersToday pic.twitter.com/0wmWgbSuni

— Neil Henderson (@hendopolis) January 6, 2021

Hancock replied:

I CALLED FOR THIS TWO MONTHS AGO. This is a Hancock triumph! And if it IS true we neeed [sic] to accelerate massively.

The Lockdown Files article continues:

The strategy of taking credit for the vaccine, and therefore the impact on lockdown restrictions, was eventually given its own slogan: “Own the exit.”

The phrase is repeated several times between Mr Hancock and his aides in the months that followed.

Then, finally, there was success at last. On January 11:

… the day the official vaccine delivery plan was published, Mr Hancock sent Mr Poole screenshots of news articles about his announcement.

Hancock messaged Poole:

These shots are extraordinary. Positive coverage in the Sun AND Mail.

Poole replied:

Keep riding it through to spring – own the exit!

Well, Hancock owned his own exit that June. That’s for sure.

‘Headless chicken’ over vaccines

Not everyone who worked with Hancock would call him ‘Mr Vaccine’.

Clive Dix wrote a first-person article for The Telegraph about his experience, ‘I worked with Matt Hancock on Covid vaccines – he’s a headless chicken’:

I worked with Matt Hancock the whole time I was at the Vaccine Taskforce and he was, without doubt, the most difficult of all the ministers because he didn’t take time to understand anything.

He was all over the place, a bit like a headless chicken. He often made statements saying “we are going to do X and we want to let the world know about it”, but we were dealing with an uncertain situation in bringing the vaccines forward.

The manufacturing process was brand new and any process like this is fraught with problems, which we need to fix as we go along, but normally you would spend two or three years stress-testing something like this.

Hancock was laying down timelines by saying things like “we will vaccinate the whole population”, and these timelines drove his behaviour.

Hancock was upset when there was a problem with the AstraZeneca vaccine production:

When we said the AstraZeneca vaccine had manufacturing problems, that is when Hancock panicked. 

He didn’t believe us. We were working night and day to make it work and he was turning around and saying: “I have said the UK population will all get vaccinated.”

But we couldn’t change the nature of the process and he didn’t get that. He thought it was like procurement. That is where his behaviour came from. He panicked and that led to them going to India and taking vaccines that had been meant for the developing world.

I thought that ethically it was very wrong to take doses that it had been agreed would go to the developing world just to meet an arbitrary timeline. This is why I ended up resigning, because I could no longer advise a government that acted on these terms.

Nonetheless, the team pressed on with getting doses from India:

Here, we were taking 10 million doses from the developing world just to meet Hancock’s timeline and it was a timeline that had just been plucked out of the air. We were still well ahead of the majority of the world, ministers should have been upfront and said that we can vaccinate everyone within a month, but we won’t quite hit the timeline. They should have admitted that they were slightly wrong.

I couldn’t stop them doing it, because it wasn’t my job to make policy decisions about where we get the vaccine from. But I said if this is where you are, then I don’t want to advise this government anymore. I didn’t resign there and then, but I did resign in March 2021. I didn’t want to disrupt the work.

It was all driven for the wrong reasons and then Hancock – rather than put his hands up – blamed the Vaccine Taskforce for stalling.

For him to be sending messages and saying Kate Bingham [head of the Vaccine Taskforce] was not reliable is appalling.

On October 4, 2020, Damon Poole WhatsApped Hancock a link to a Financial Times article: ‘Less than half UK population to receive coronavirus vaccine, says task force head’.

Hancock replied that he didn’t have a subscription to the paper, which is behind a paywall. He asked Poole:

… is that Kate?

When Poole responded in the affirmative, Hancock messaged back:

If so we absolutely need No10 to sit on her hard. She has view [sic] and a wacky way of expressing them & is totally unreliable. She regards anything that isn’t her idea as political interference

Poole messaged back, agreeing, saying he’d had a ‘blazing row’ with her when he was working at No. 10.

Clive Dix resumes his story, alive with memories of Hancock:

We were working as hard as we could and he thought he could just come in and make a bold statement to the public and tell us that we have got to do it. I don’t think he understood the process. He was a loose cannon.

Dix tells us more about how Health and Social Care worked with BEIS. Here, too, Hancock had to have his own way:

The taskforce sat in the Department for Business, Energy and Industrial Strategy (BEIS) and that is where the budget came from. We reported to Alok Sharma and then Nadhim Zahawi came in as vaccines minister. Hancock wanted to get involved and because he was secretary of state, Alok stepped aside.

He was using the vaccine to protect his reputation.

Dix, who was a volunteer, gives us an insight into the wider politics involved:

I had worked for nine months from 4am until midnight without any pay to do this.

It is certainly extraordinary to see how two-faced they are. They were all nice to me to my face but to see what they were saying to Boris Johnson was particularly unpleasant.

It reflects badly on Nadhim and all the civil servants who worked so hard to get this right. In my humble opinion, Hancock was actually the problem.

Hancock hoped to treat French Covid patients

Incredibly, during lockdown, Hancock wanted to appeal to French president Emmanuel Macron to allow his nation’s coronavirus patients to be treated in the UK.

With the NHS under pressure, Hancock somehow thought he managed to find spare beds … for the French.

Don’t get me wrong. I love the French as much as I love the British and the Americans, in no particular order. They’re the three societies I know the best. But this was a step too far.

After all, the Government locked down the UK to save the NHS, right? So how was it that Hancock suddenly found spare beds, especially for patients from other countries?

Meanwhile, British patients with cancer, heart disease and other serious illnesses couldn’t get a look in to a doctor, never mind a hospital.

The Telegraph‘s ‘Matt Hancock’s secret plan to import French Covid patients’ says that, in November 2020:

Matt Hancock planned to bring French Covid patients to the UK for treatment during the second wave of the pandemic, despite national lockdown restrictions in force to protect the NHS.

Messages between the then health secretary, his advisers and Boris Johnson, then the prime minister, show he hoped to offer “spare” intensive care unit beds to Emmanuel Macron to help the French president deal with a major outbreak in his country in November 2020.

At that time, Britain was under a second national lockdown that was sold to the public as necessary to prevent the “medical and moral disaster” of an overwhelmed NHS.

But Downing Street and the Department of Health and Social Care created a secret plan to transfer Covid patients from the busiest French hospitals, bringing more cases of Covid to the UK.

However, that wasn’t enough. Hancock also wanted to make the same offer to Italy. The article has screenshots of the relevant WhatsApp messages.

That aside, let’s continue with France:

The plan is not thought to have ever been implemented, but Mr Hancock said: “We may need to make a similar offer to Italy,” despite exponential increases in Britain’s own case numbers.

On Nov 13, Mr Hancock shared with his top advisers a letter that he planned to send to Olivier Veran, the French health minister, offering to import French Covid patients to the UK for treatment.

“I have seen the pressure on your hospitals, and that some patients are being transferred abroad,” the letter said. “We have our epidemic largely in the north of England, and some spare capacity in London and the south.

“We could provide some ICU beds to which you could transfer some patients. Would that be helpful to relieve pressure on your most affected regions? Our countries have always stood by each other in times of need.”

By this point in the European second Covid wave, the UK was looking to Europe as case numbers exploded in France, Italy and Spain, with a second national lockdown imposed in an attempt to reduce transmission.

France had already been taken off the UK’s travel corridor list, meaning that any person travelling to Britain from France was required to quarantine for 14 days or face a fine. By late November, France and Britain had similar rates of the virus, with around 275 cases per 100,000 people.

However, on October 31, Boris stated publicly that the UK had reached capacity:

In an address to the nation on Oct 31, Mr Johnson said that even in the south-west of England, where Mr Hancock had proposed housing French patients, “it is now clear that current projections mean they will run out of hospital capacity in a matter of weeks unless we act”.

He said that if new measures were not imposed, the growth of Covid numbers would mean that “doctors and nurses would be forced to choose which patients to treat, who would get oxygen and who wouldn’t”, adding: “The overrunning of the NHS would be a medical and moral disaster beyond the raw loss of life.

“It is crucial to grasp that this general threat to public health comes not from focusing too much on Covid, but from not focusing enough, from failing to get it under control.”

It should be noted that Hancock got this mad idea from a life peer and was immediately swept up by it:

An earlier WhatsApp conversation between Mr Hancock and Mr Johnson about the idea shows it originated with Lord Llewellyn of Steep, who was then serving as Britain’s ambassador in Paris.

“I love this idea of Ed Llewellyn’s to offer Macron (privately) to treat some of their cases where they have pressure on the health system,” Mr Hancock wrote to Mr Johnson on Oct 2, 2020. “Because we have a regional problem we also have regional capacity in East Anglia (Cambridge?) or the SW.”

Lord Llewellyn is now serving as the UK’s ambassador to Italy. He is a former Downing Street chief of staff, serving in Number 10 under David Cameron.

The mind boggles.

That’s enough Matt Hancock for one day.

Don’t worry. There’s more to come.

Soon.

The Lockdown Files’ WhatsApp messages reveal political self-interest at the public’s expense

Over the past several days, I have been digesting The Telegraph‘s series about the pandemic, The Lockdown Files.

Readers who missed them can catch up on my posts here, here, here, here and here. That last post, from March 8, 2023, discusses then-Health and Social Care Secretary Matt Hancock’s desire to ‘frighten the pants off people’ with the Kent variant at the end of 2020. Top civil servant Simon Case agreed that behavioural change using fear and guilt was paramount. Masks, as many Covid sceptics suggested at the time, were the most visible means of compliance — or submission — to Government diktats.

Top oncologist reacts

On Thursday, March 9, The Telegraph published a post from the UK’s top oncologist, Prof Karl Sikora: ‘Lockdown supporters called me a killer — they should be disgusted with themselves’ (emphases mine below):

Opposing the relentless raft of lockdown policies was a lonely and, at times, extremely unpleasant experience. Those of us who voiced concerns about effectively closing down a country were labelled as far-Right extremists who were happy to see millions perish to the disease. It was a disgrace, legitimised by low-grade politicians such as Matt Hancock who were far too interested in advancing their own public image. Thousands succumbed to the destructive, and often pointless, lockdown measures they pushed at every opportunity.

There will be no apologies from the baying lockdown mob – the damage has been done, the debate has mostly moved on and the inquiry may well become a total whitewash. The Telegraph’s lockdown files have done a great service in partially halting that march. 

… Many of those voices are now totally silent on the thousands and thousands of non-Covid excess deaths related to lockdown delays and backlogs. I have no regrets in my opposition to a variety of lockdown policies and the language I used throughout the pandemic – I wonder if they can say the same?

We now know for sure that some decisions taken were based in PR and politics, rather than science and sense. When the Health Secretary is talking about “frightening the pants off everyone” with a new strain, those of us who voiced scepticism at the time about the language used can feel vindicated …

I’m desperate for a Covid inquiry whitewash to be avoided for one simple reason: this cannot be allowed to happen again. If we don’t at least ask the questions, when another pandemic, or the threat of one, comes around, lockdown cannot be the go-to option. The advisers who made the past recommendations cannot be used ever again.

… Routine healthcare for non-Covid conditions was effectively shut down to millions for months on end, and now we have thousands and thousands of non-Covid excess deaths. What did they think would happen, honestly? 

My lockdown inbox was overflowing with desperate cancer patients whose treatment had been indefinitely postponed. I remember one case of a mother who had her chemotherapy cancelled, leading to her tragic death leaving behind three young children and a loving husband. And it’s not just cancer: cardiac issues untreated, blood pressure out of control, strokes uncared for, other preventative measures forgotten and of course soaring obesity. The post-lockdown crisis is across all aspects of healthcare, physical and mental. That is for those lucky enough to receive any medical support or diagnosis at all. Others were told to stay home and that’s exactly what they did – dying there without the care they needed and deserved.

To those of you who took a brave stand speaking out against various restrictions and policies – from me, a sincere thank you. We comprehensively lost the argument in the court of public opinion, but hopefully a small difference was made. I suspect the national mood may have significantly shifted over the last week. Sunlight is the best disinfectant after all, and spring is on the way.

That same day, Helia Ebrahimi, who had a mastectomy in 2022, told her story to the paper: ‘They said I’d lose a breast and maybe my life — but the NHS made me wait four months’:

In the UK, more than 5,500 women are diagnosed with invasive lobular carcinoma every year. But often their diagnoses are late. Sometimes too late. When it became clear how progressed my cancer was, my surgeon wanted to start treatment immediately. I was at The Royal Marsden in London, a standard bearer in cancer care that also benefits from charity funding. But even at the Marsden, the pressures on the NHS are inescapable. Especially last year, when the country was reeling from a Covid backlog and 327,000 people were on the cancer waiting list in England alone, with 34,000 people failing to get treatment within the Government target of 62 days – the worst backlog on record. Almost 10,000 people were still not receiving treatment within 104 days …

Ultimately, my husband and I decided we couldn’t wait, so I used my work health insurance scheme to cover most of the cost. My surgeon from the Marsden still performed the operation but at a private hospital, with theatre space.

An article about the waiting list times also appeared in The Telegraph that day, ‘Nearly half of cancer patients waiting too long for treatment, the worst on record’:

More than 7,000 patients did not receive their first treatment within 62 days following an urgent GP referral, official figures for January show.

Only 54.4 per cent of patients with an urgent referral were seen within the target time, against a benchmark of 85 per cent – the lowest on records dating back to 2009 …

It comes after NHS bosses admitted this week cancer recovery targets are likely to be pushed back another year to March 2024.

The article has more statistics.

It is interesting that there is no mention of the pandemic or the lockdown of the NHS to patients such as these. Equally interesting is Prof Stephen Powis’s response. Powis was also an adviser on pandemic policy:

Professor Stephen Powis, NHS national medical director, said there had been “no let-up” of pressures, with staff facing “significant levels of respiratory illness in hospital, which came at the same time as disruption from industrial action”.

“Despite this, staff continued to deliver for patients, bringing down elective waits, treating more cancer patients and delivering more diagnostic tests for people than ever before,” he said.

Instead, he points to possible upcoming strikes by junior doctors:

He added: “The NHS will not stop in its efforts to bring down 18 month waits for elective care and bring down the cancer backlog, but it is inevitable that if the upcoming junior doctors strikes happen they will have a significant impact on cancer care and routine operations that were scheduled to happen.

“As ever, we will do all we can to limit the impact to patients.”

Early 2020: Persuading MPs through messaging

Going back to the start of 2020, chief Downing Street adviser Dominic Cummings and Matt Hancock thought that Boris Johnson’s 2019 campaign director could get ‘hawkish’ Cabinet members on board with the pandemic measures. A full lockdown began on March 23, 2020.

On March 2, 2023, The Telegraph explains how the two did it in ‘Dominic Cummings deployed election mastermind to reassure Cabinet hawks of public support for lockdown’:

they set up a meeting between Cabinet ministers and Isaac Levido in April 2020.

Mr Levido, an Australian political strategist and protegee of the former Tory aide Sir Lynton Crosby, was recruited to Downing Street in March 2020 to improve the Government’s Covid messaging.

He is credited with masterminding Mr Johnson’s 2019 election victory three months earlier and is a close ally of Mr Cummings.

In a conversation between Mr Hancock and Mr Cummings on April 23 exactly one month after the imposition of the first lockdown, the former health secretary said his Cabinet colleagues should be told that more than half of voters either supported lockdown measures or thought they should be strengthened.

At that point, if we look at Boris’s words from March, the two or three weeks ‘to flatten the sombrero’ would have meant that a lifting of lockdown was in sight. Not so. England remained in lockdown until July 4 that year, with a gradual loosening in between for construction workers and, in June, schools.

Not surprisingly, in April, some Cabinet members were ready to lift lockdown, for obvious reasons:

… the conversation took place as some ministers were beginning to make the case, often in anonymous briefings to newspapers, that keeping lockdown measures in place for too long would have serious consequences for the economy and society.

It was unclear what polling Hancock was using. In addition, Isaac Levido stayed on board only for a few months before pursuing his own interests:

It is unclear which polling Mr Hancock was referring to in his messages to Mr Cummings, but research from a Cambridge University team led by Prof Sir David Spiegelhalter in April 2020 showed 87 per cent of the public did believe lockdown should remain in place for at least another three weeks.

Mr Levido left Downing Street in July 2020 and founded Fleetwood Strategy, a public relations firm. He was later brought back into Conservative Campaign Headquarters (CCHQ) as a strategist during Nadhim Zahawi’s tenure as chairman.

By late April, Mr Hancock had recently announced a testing capacity target of 100,000 swabs a day, and been criticised by Downing Street sources for an “irrational” and “arbitrary” approach to the pandemic.

“Hancock’s not had a good crisis,” one No10 source told The Telegraph at the time.

“The prime minister will say he has confidence in him, but it doesn’t feel like that.”

At this point, Boris was out of hospital recovering from his near-fatal bout of the virus. According to a WhatsApp message from Cummings shown in the article, he allegedly urged harmony:

“FYI Boris called a few people tonight to say — all these attacks [on] Matt, I want us to stick up for him etc,” he said.

Cummings’s approach to policy was similar to Hancock’s:

On June 1, the day schools began to reopen from the first lockdown, he suggested enforcing mask-wearing on trains and buses.

“I think we shd make it legally compulsory to wear mask on public transport (with only eg small child/disabled etc exception). It’s free, buys us some R, no real downside,” he said.

Lee Cain, the Downing Street director of communications, replied: “We need to bottom out enforcement etc – if we are doing it PM can drop it on Wednesday.”

The policy was announced three days later, and came into force on June 15.

How libertarian Boris became lockdown ‘zealot’

On March 4, The Telegraph published ‘How Boris Johnson veered from lockdown sceptic to zealot’.

The article explains how Cummings began to refer to the then-Prime Minister as ‘the trolley’. In other words, like a shopping trolley with a wonky wheel, he careered all over the place with decision-making during the pandemic:

New evidence suggests Mr Cummings was at least partially right. In WhatsApp conversations with ministers and officials, Mr Johnson veered between lockdown sceptic and lockdown zealot, as he reacted to the ever-changing data and advice.

The former prime minister would sometimes introduce an idea, only to abandon his stance even when others agreed with him.

Mr Johnson’s biggest internal conflict came over the three national lockdowns that were controversially imposed in 2020 and 2021.

A libertarian by nature, Mr Johnson repeatedly changed his mind over forcing people to stay at home depending on who he had been talking to …

In July 2020, Mr Johnson described the idea of a second lockdown as the “nuclear option”. In Oct 2020, he described the idea as “the height of absurdity”.

Yet in June 2020, when the country was still in the grip of the first national lockdown, Mr Johnson’s attitude seemed to be different …

He has always denied that his brush with death changed his mind on government policy.

The article includes screenshots of WhatsApp exchanges during that time.

Later in 2020, Matt Hancock began to find Boris’s vacillating exasperating:

At the end of Oct 2020, the then prime minister was wrestling with the decision of whether or not to put the country into lockdown for a second time.

At Prime Minister’s Questions on Oct 21, in response to a question from Sir Keir Starmer, the Labour leader, Mr Johnson described a second lockdown as “the height of absurdity”.

And on Oct 30, Mr Hancock was messaging Simon Case, the Cabinet Secretary, expressing exasperation that Mr Johnson appeared even more reluctant than Rishi Sunak, the then chancellor, to take tough measures.

Less than a week later, Mr Johnson introduced a second lockdown, saying: “Now is the time to take action, as there is no other choice.”

It was claimed at the time that he had been “bounced” into announcing the lockdown after Michael Gove, the then Chancellor of the Duchy of Lancaster, was accused of leaking plans for the lockdown to the media before Mr Johnson had made up his mind.

England entered a third semi-lockdown on Monday, January 4, 2021. Pupils had returned to school that day only to be told by the end of it that schools were closed for the forseeable future.

Hospitality venues, having lost out on Christmas 2020 bookings, were also severely affected during that time. Some never recovered.

Nor, indeed, had a significant number of schoolchildren. Mental health problems exploded during and after lockdown.

Schoolchild kills himself

On March 4, Isabel Oakeshott, to whom Hancock gave 100,000 WhatsApp messages which form the basis of The Lockdown Files, told us about a tragic case of suicide in ‘The dreadful consequences of Matt Hancock’s lockdown scare tactics’:

While Matt Hancock breezily discussed how to “frighten the pants off everyone” with a new strain, a boy called Mark was listening to the drumbeat towards another national lockdown grow louder in deepening despair.

It was December 2020, and the 15-year-old’s life had already been turned upside down by the pandemic.

A few months earlier, his mother Anna Marie had decided that they should move house because they couldn’t even go to the local park during the first lockdown.

She describes how over-zealous council officials had shut the playground, leaving her struggling to cope with Mark’s little brother, a hyperactive five-year-old …

Now, the family was in a better place in the North East, but Anna Marie had been unable to get Mark into a new school.

With “home schooling” now an easy default, education authorities shrugged that he could just study for his GCSEs online.

Unable to play football during the first lockdown, he started putting on weight. When other children returned to school that autumn, he became increasingly isolated – and frightened.

As Mr Hancock and his acolytes plotted to use a new strain of coronavirus to terrify the population, that fear descended into paranoia. Mark became so scared of the virus that he would not even open his bedroom window.

“His nails were bitten to the bone. He was literally frightened of the air. He wore a mask everywhere,” his mother says …

“We tried to keep the TV off, but we were being bombarded,” she says, of the prophecies of doom relentlessly pumped out by an acquiescing media.

“Mark knew we were going into another lockdown. The fear was the thing that affected him most. He was disconnected; distant. I didn’t know what to do.”

In December 2021:

Almost exactly a year later, when most of the population had been vaccinated against Covid but the Omicron variant prompted yet another fear campaign, he told his mother he was popping out to the shops – and never returned.

His body was found by dog walkers three days later, hanging from a tree.

Though he had never talked of taking his own life, his family had been prepared for the worst, after discovering that he had searched the internet for how to tie a noose …

An intelligent child, Mark had hoped to study computer science when he left school. Instead, his education came to a juddering halt …

After the harrowing discovery on Christmas Eve, Mark was cremated. His mother and siblings took his ashes to Seaton Carew Beach near Hartlepool, a place Mark loved. They scattered the ashes over the sand dunes.

“He went off on the wind,” Anna Marie says quietly.

Let not the lessons from this tragedy also blow away on the breeze.

“Frightening the pants off people” had truly dreadful consequences.

Oakeshott expresses thoughts I have had since March 2020 about Britons who had houses with gardens versus those who were trapped in flats along with our notional betters who were at the helm of this tragic decision-making:

Those responsible for “Project Fear” had no idea about the lives of people like Anna Marie and her children.

In their spacious houses, in leafy parts of London, with access to all the luxuries that made lockdowns quite tolerable for the better off, their own families were doing fine.

Hancock and his advisers were caught up in their own sense of heroism.

Mr Hancock and his advisers did not even try to imagine how the tactics they were gleefully discussing to achieve “proper behaviour change” would affect the most vulnerable in society.

Heady on the unprecedented power they had seized to control all our lives, they were caught up in the excitement of managing the day-to-day crisis and their own sense of heroism at their leading roles in the drama.

They were completely removed from the reality of lockdowns for those at the other end of the socio-economic spectrum.

Judging from the total absence of any discussion about collateral damage in their WhatsApp messages, they had zero interest in hearing about it either …

Is Simon Case pondering his future?

Cabinet Secretary Simon Case, who is also the head of the Civil Service, has come under criticism for his WhatsApp messages revealed in The Lockdown Files.

Case’s messages show that he that he thought quarantining holidaymakers ‘hilarious’. He also thought that fear and guilt were appropriate tools to get the British public to comply with pandemic policies.

Conservative MPs were unhappy with what they had read in The Telegraph. On Saturday, March 4, the paper published ‘Tories accuse Simon Case of left-wing bias over Covid rules’:

Britain’s top civil servant has been accused of left-wing bias by senior Tories after he dismissed concerns about Covid rules as “pure Conservative ideology”.

Simon Case is facing questions over his political impartiality and conduct during the pandemic, following the emergence of leaked WhatsApp messages obtained by The Telegraph.

On Saturday Rishi Sunak, the Prime Minister, was forced to declare that Mr Case, who is Cabinet Secretary and head of the Civil Service, retained his “confidence”.

Mr Case’s comment that Sir Alok Sharma, the then business secretary, opposed compelling hospitality venues to keep customers’ details because of “pure Conservative ideology”, have led to claims that he overstepped the mark of Civil Service impartiality.

At the time, Mr Case was the Downing Street permanent secretary in charge of the Civil Service response to Covid.

At various points during the pandemic, he appeared to side with Matt Hancock against other Cabinet ministers, including Mr Sunak, the then chancellor, who on one occasion he described as “going bonkers” over a policy that hospitality venues should keep customers’ details for contact-tracing purposes. Mr Case added that Sir Alok would be “mad” to oppose it.

Elsewhere, the leaked messages show that he joked about passengers being “locked up” in “shoe box” rooms in quarantine hotels.

The criticism of Mr Case comes at a time when the Civil Service is facing increased scrutiny over its impartiality, after the decision of top mandarin Sue Gray to quit Whitehall and accept a job as Sir Keir Starmer’s chief of staff.

Esther McVey, a former Cabinet minister, led the criticism of Mr Case’s conduct, saying: “This is the highest civil servant in the land letting the cat out of the bag by suggesting that one of the most centrist of Conservative MPs was pursuing ‘pure Conservative ideology’ simply for questioning some of the lockdown rules.

“Leaving aside the fact that this is a Conservative government and so what would he expect from its ministers, if Mr Case thinks Alok Sharma was pursuing such a hard-line Conservative ideology it can only mean that he is yet another senior civil servant on the left wing of British politics.”

She was joined by fellow former Cabinet minister Jacob Rees-Mogg who said the messages revealed that there was a desire from Mr Hancock and Whitehall officials to “lock us down and keep us locked down”.

“They seem to have enjoyed taking control of people’s lives,” he said, adding that the messages between Mr Case and Mr Hancock show that “they criticised the Chancellor and anyone who is not in favour [of stricter measures], then they tried to marginalise them” …

A third former Cabinet minister said Mr Case’s language is “inappropriate”, adding that civil servants are “not there to make judgement on people’s motivations. It just undermines people who are democratically elected. They are meant to be impartial, professional and objective”.

And a fourth said: “Sue Gray is clearly not the only party political civil servant who doesn’t like the Conservatives. She confirmed what many people thought – that the Civil Service is hostile to the Tory party. And this [Simon Case’s messages] just underlines it.”

However, civil servants also objected to what they have read about Case. One spoke to The Telegraph:

Jill Rutter, former Treasury mandarin, said she was surprised by the “casual callousness” of Mr Case’s remarks.

“The interesting thing is who does Case think he is working for?” she said. “Does he think he is there as a neutral broker to get all the ministers to a view they can accept? Or does he know what the PM wants and is helping him to achieve that outcome? Or is he just trying to achieve Matt Hancock’s objectives?” …

Case’s remarks were one of the more surprising revelations from The Lockdown Files:

The Lockdown Files piled further pressure on Mr Case after a string of difficult news stories.

He faced questions over his apparent role in clearing a controversial £800,000 loan facility for Boris Johnson when he was prime minister and he was also criticised over the partygate affair.

In one exchange with Hancock, Case seemed to doubt Boris Johnson’s honesty:

In another, from October 30, 2020, Case intimated that Boris — his boss — was seen to be untrustworthy:

By Monday, March 6, 2023, despite Rishi’s expressed confidence in him, Cabinet ministers were calling for Case’s departure for his ‘level of indiscretion’. The Times had the story:

Exclusive:

Cabinet ministers call for Simon Case to go after he criticised Sunak and Johnson in WhatsApp messages

‘Case is looking more and more ridiculous, I think he has to go. Rishi needs to clear him out. It’s the level of indiscretion’https://t.co/UAlu3u2ExW

— Steven Swinford (@Steven_Swinford) March 6, 2023

That day, The Financial Times had a story about Case on its front page, purporting that he was eyeing an ‘early exit’:

Tuesday's FT: Speaker McCarthy to meet Taiwan's leader in US to avert Beijing backlash #TomorrowsPapersToday #FinancialTimes #FT pic.twitter.com/R8oN4MVM9G

— Tomorrows Papers Today (@TmorrowsPapers) March 6, 2023

The article says, in part:

“I can’t see how Simon Case survives this, especially if there are more messages of his directly slagging off other ministers,” one senior Conservative backbencher told the Financial Times.

While friends of the cabinet secretary say that he has continued to receive support from his colleagues, he is also said to be “fed up”.

Among Case’s fellow officials, there is particular concern about his handling of “partygate”, which centred on rule-breaking in Downing Street and Whitehall during Covid restrictions in 2020 and 2021.

One senior official said: “Simon didn’t stand up for his own people over partygate,” adding that junior staff were issued with fines for attending events happening on his watch.

Case has also drawn scrutiny for his knowledge of Johnson’s personal financial relationship with the chair of the BBC and for the government’s response to bullying allegations against Dominic Raab, the justice secretary.

Rishi Sunak’s spokesman declined to comment on the WhatsApp messages. Downing Street said: “The cabinet secretary has the confidence of the prime minister and that has not changed.”

An ally of Case said that they contained “casual language being used in a casual setting . . . There are a lot of Conservatives who dislike the civil service, but who can name only one civil servant.” Another ally of Case said that his “original sin was being young and talented and promoted to that job before he was grey”.

Another issue upsetting officials was the removal of Tom Scholar, the former permanent secretary of the Treasury, by Kwasi Kwarteng, who briefly served as chancellor in Liz Truss’s shortlived government. This was regarded as inappropriate over-reach by ministers. Case, however, is known to be wounded by the implication that he failed to support Scholar.

And yet:

A Cabinet Office insider said they considered a departure this year very unlikely.

Another senior official said: “The charge sheet is now so long against him, the only interpretation can be that the PM probably doesn’t want to get rid of him.”

However, The Financial Times had pointed the finger at Case on January 31 this year in ‘Simon Case: can the head of Britain’s civil service survive?’

Although he is a career civil servant, Case took a break to work for Prince William. The Prince highly recommended him to Downing Street when Boris became Prime Minister.

It seems as if Case picked up courtier-type habits:

One serving senior official said: “He operates as a courtier. His writ doesn’t run across Whitehall. He doesn’t seem to be in key meetings with the prime minister.” Another former permanent secretary in a major department said: “I don’t think he has any credibility left and really he should go.”

That said, he has his supporters:

… Case’s supporters insist that he is determined to uphold standards and that he retains the confidence of Rishi Sunak, the prime minister. They also argue that he has given the “best possible advice” and point out his job was not always easy during the chaotic premierships of Johnson and Liz Truss.

In the last days of Truss’s crumbling 44-day administration, he advised her to reverse parts of her disastrous “mini” Budget to stave off economic disaster, according to Downing Street insiders. They say he was also instrumental in coordinating with Buckingham Palace over arrangements for the Queen’s funeral.

Case’s supporters add that he hoped to serve at Sunak’s right hand until at least the next election, expected in late 2024. “Cabinet secretaries tend to change after an election,” said one.

Case became cabinet secretary and head of the civil service in September 2020 when Johnson sacked his predecessor, Sir Mark Sedwill, after only two years in the post.

Dominic Cummings, Johnson’s former chief adviser, was instrumental in bringing Case in. At the age of 41 he had held a range of roles in Whitehall and had been Prince William’s private secretary.

A series of scandals engulfed Johnson’s premiership, ranging from the financing of his flat refurbishment and the partygate scandal over Covid-19 lockdown-breaking gatherings in Downing Street, to the appointments of Zahawi and Sharp, which reverberate today. Case, as the prime minister’s most senior adviser, is inevitably in the line of fire.

The article goes on to enumerate the scandals.

Apparently, morale among civil servants began declining in 2022:

Case recognised the problem of falling morale last month in a memo to civil servants, saying that results from a staff survey were “heading in the wrong direction and show that you feel things have become worse”.

Returning to March 6, The Telegraph published ‘Simon Case branded “naive” by top civil servants over “embarassing” WhatsApp remarks’:

Simon Case’s WhatsApp messages, exposed by the Lockdown Files, reveal a “naivety” and “inexperience” that has damaged his reputation, current and former senior civil servants have said …

One former permanent secretary told The Telegraph that the messages showed “a certain naivety and to be honest inexperience”, adding: “It will hurt his reputation.”

The source said: “You should be a bit above the fray [as Cabinet Secretary]. I don’t know why he engaged in those sorts of exchanges. He didn’t need to.”

A former civil servant who advised prime ministers during a decades long career in Whitehall is understood to have found the exchanges highly unusual in their political nature.

The concerns also stretch into the senior echelons of the current civil service, with some insiders noting the pronounced difference in tone of Mr Case’s messages to senior scientific advisers such as Prof Sir Chris Whitty and Sir Patrick Vallance.

A senior Whitehall source told this newspaper of the Case messages: “They are really embarrassing. It is absolutely cringe-worthy. The things he was saying, the way he was saying them, the awful embarrassing chumminess of them all.”

Mr Case and the Cabinet Office have not responded directly to the contents of the leaked messages sent by Mr Case …

Mr Case became the youngest ever Cabinet Secretary when he was appointed to the role in September 2020 under Boris Johnson.

He had never headed up a government department as a permanent secretary before taking up the position, breaking with the experience of many of his predecessors.

Mr Case is onto his third prime minister, having served as Cabinet Secretary to Mr Johnson, Liz Truss and now Mr Sunak.

Fraser Nelson, The Spectator‘s editor who also writes for The Telegraph, made some excellent points in ‘Simon Case must take his share of the blame for chaotic lockdown decision-making’:

When Simon Case was made the youngest-ever Cabinet Secretary, Matt Hancock sent a message congratulating him.

“I think 41 is a good age to be in these very big jobs,” said the 41-year-old health secretary. By this time, both were wielding incredible power, overseeing the biggest suspension of civil liberties in peacetime.

The members of the “top team” WhatsApp group had started to see lockdown as a political campaign – with enemies to be identified, mocked and destabilised. The only person in the group in a position to lower the political temperature and insist upon sound government was Simon Case.

But The Lockdown Files show that, time and time again, he ended up as political as the politicians – in some cases, even more so. Some of the most outrageous comments on the files are his.

Like others, he started off quite moderate. But before too long he was revelling in the power to lock people up (saying he wished he could see “some of the faces of people coming out of first class and into a Premier Inn shoe box”) and being just as gung-ho as the ministers he worked with. The civil servant became indistinguishable from the politicians …

His predecessor, Mark Sedwill, had clashed with Dominic Cummings about reshaping the Civil Service. Case, a former principal private secretary to David Cameron, had by then left the civil service and was working for Prince William.

He was called back to Whitehall to run the Government in a new, more buccaneering way: first in Number 10 and then running the whole show as Cabinet Secretary. There seemed to be an unspoken deal: Case would be given unprecedented power at a young age. In return, he’d be more likely than his predecessor to go with the political flow …

We know what other permanent secretaries might have done because they’ve made it public. Gus O’Donnell, who ran the Civil Service from 2005 to 2011, has pointed out the biggest architectural flaw.

Sage had far too much power, he says, and its reports should have been fed into a higher committee that would have made the decisions – not just on Covid, but factoring in economic and social damage. In other words, there would have been a cost-benefit analysis: a basic tool for public health interventions.

In The Lockdown Files, we see the prime minister appallingly served and briefed. Almost suspiciously so. At one stage, he is so in the dark about Covid’s fatality rate that he misinterprets a figure by a factor of one hundred – thinking it’s 0.04 per cent, not four per cent. It’s easy to mock a Classics graduate for numeracy issues, but it raises another question.

He had Simon Case by his side: so why did Case not make sure the PM had all of these basic facts to hand? Or had Case, like Cummings, come to regard his boss as a “wonky shopping trolley” to be steered, rather than served? And if so, steered at whose direction? …

Simon Case could at least have addressed the abysmal state of Sage reports: opaque, confusing and – as it turned out in the omicron wave – staggeringly wrong. By then, JP Morgan ended up giving its clients far better Covid analysis than ministers were given by the UK Government, and these ministers (including Rishi Sunak) ended up phoning around contacts to find non-government (ergo, trustworthy) advice. Case presided over this shambles …

Prime ministers run the civil service, and they are ultimately responsible for any dysfunction. But Case should not have taken sides during the lockdown wars. He ought to have been on the side of basic government standards, of cost-benefit analyses and informed, properly-communicated decisions.

The Lockdown Files show that Britain ended up with a standard of decision-making far below what could or should have been. And for that, Case deserves his full share of the blame.

I will have a few more articles about Simon Case to share next week. Along with that comes political infighting over pandemic policy.

Fraser Nelson is right. This was an absolute shambles.

Karol Sikora is also right. This must never happen again.

Scotland: a look back at Nicola Sturgeon — part 2

The SNP (Scottish National Party) are currently looking for a new leader with the recent resignation of Nicola Sturgeon, Scotland’s First Minister.

I’m doing a brief series on Sturgeon’s time in office. Part 1 appeared last week.

Style over substance

Sturgeon will long be remembered for her expensive suits and shoes.

She prioritised style over substance and often had a grand project in mind, such as a publicly owned not-for-profit energy company announced in 2017, which never saw the light of day:

She was too busy doing other damage pic.twitter.com/m2bzugApM7

— Ian (@Ian66219823) April 11, 2021

In 2019, she gave us her reading list, which, ironically, included 1984. A Twitter user reminded her that the SNP were imitating Orwell’s dystopia rather too well. Their Named Person project would have seen a government representative monitor each child’s upbringing:

You are not supposed to be following Orwell's 1984 as an instruction manual, Nicola.

Your "named person" project was designed to phase out parents' rights over the upbringing of their children
And give the Government power to indoctrinate them as it saw fit –
thank god it failed pic.twitter.com/C2dAPeLZWE

— Steve Ross ℹ (@lancashirelad33) December 21, 2019

During the 2021 election campaign, a local one for much of England but one of governance for the devolved nations, Sturgeon felt the need to announce her pronouns:

After a year of excessive use of the first person singular to emphasise her total “control” of all matters Covid, this smacks more of electioneering than some Damascene Moment.

— Atomic Teuchter 🇬🇧🏴󠁧󠁢󠁳󠁣󠁴󠁿 (@admt62) April 20, 2021

While Sturgeon did participate in some debates during the 2021 campaign …

A panel consisting of the SNP's Nicola Sturgeon, Scottish Conservatives' Douglas Ross, Scottish Labour's Anas Sarwar, Scottish Green's co Leader Patrick Harvie and Scottish Lib Dem's Willie Rennie will all take part in Tuesday’s Channel 4 News broadcast.

— Channel 4 News (@Channel4News) April 22, 2021

… she pulled out of the BBC Question Time special. Guido Fawkes pointed out that, suddenly, after giving coronavirus press briefings nearly every day, she became camera-shy (red emphases his):

When Boris refused to debate Sturgeon in 2019, the SNP put out a Facebook graphic accusing him of “running scared” and being a “big feartie”.

Sturgeon hasn’t been having a great campaign, getting dragged into debate scraps with Douglas Ross, and appearing relatively low-energy. Today’s poll has the SNP’s constituency vote share down by 3%, and their list voting intention down to 38%. It’s amazing someone who’s hosted unchallenging live television briefings almost every day throughout the last year has suddenly become camera-shy…

When put on the spot, Sturgeon does not react well. In this BBC interview, fellow Scot Andrew Neil gave her a grilling over her poor record on almost everything north of the border. Unfortunately, the following clip does not include her response, but her facial expression is a familiar one, often seen at First Minister’s Questions when Scottish Conservatives leader Douglas Ross and Scottish Labour leader Anas Sarwar question her government’s shortcomings:

No one is allowed to question the results of her leadership especially Education

— Deva, 🇬🇧🇬🇧🇬🇧🇬🇧🇬🇧🇬🇧 (@DevaGheel) July 29, 2021

Scotland’s drug deaths highest in Europe

One of Sturgeon’s most appalling failures is the number of drug deaths in Scotland.

During the 2021 election campaign, Douglas Ross asked her about them.

Guido had the story and a video:

Nicola Sturgeon was put on the back foot last night during STV’s Scottish leadership debate. Pressed by Douglas Ross over her appalling record on Scotland’s escalating drug crisis – drug deaths have doubled since she became First Minister – Sturgeon floundered, saying:

I think we took our eye off the ball with drug deaths and I’ve said as much to the Scottish Parliament […] I set out at the start of this year £250 million investment programme to build up rehabilitation services including residential rehabilitation to make sure we give more support to community services, to make sure we provide faster access to treatment.

… Taking her eye off the ball is putting it mildly…

On August 2 that year, Dr Campbell Campbell-Jack, a retired Presbyterian minister, wrote an article for The Conservative Woman: ‘Sturgeon’s catalogue of catastrophe’.

On the drug deaths, he says (purple emphases mine):

… some SNP failures enter the realm of the tragic. If we are to judge a government on how they treat society’s most vulnerable members, the SNP have a long way to go before their practice matches their pronouncements on the country’s drug crisis.

A report released by the National Records Scotland on Friday shows that for the seventh year running Scotland had a record number of drug deaths last year with 1,339. The rate of drug deaths in Scotland, 231 people per million, is more than three and a half times higher than that in the rest of the UK and is the worst in Europe, 15 times higher than the European average. Statistics from developing countries are hard to come by but it is generally acknowledged that Scotland’s record is one of the worst in the world. 

The SNP government, which has devolved power over health, has been in place since 2007. The number of drug deaths in 2007, when it came to power, was 455. This was considered scandalous at the time.

Nicola Sturgeon said the number of lives lost ‘is unacceptable, each one a human tragedy’. She added, ‘Today, my thoughts are with every family who has lost a loved one – I am sorry for the loss you have suffered.’ Ms Sturgeon, however, has previously admitted some responsibility, saying that her government ‘took our eye off the ball’ on drug deaths.

Not surprisingly, the SNP blame the UK government for not allowing Scotland to have supervised shooting galleries for drug users.

However, the other three nations of the UK do not have the same problem:

Whilst it is possible to make an argument for a health-based approach to drug use, one wonders why if present drug laws do so much supposed harm in Scotland they don’t do equivalent harm in England and Wales? Scotland’s drug problem cannot be argued away by saying ‘It wisnae me, a big boy did it and ran away’. The SNP have to take responsibility for their actions.

Dr Campbell Campbell-Jack alleges some drug users are so desperate for rehabilitation treatment that they commit a crime in order to get it in prison:

Rather than funding more rehab facilities and restoring the budgets of local alcohol and drug partnerships, which is within their power, the SNP have taken the easy way out by accusing the UK government of binding their hands by blocking plans for their innovative policies such as safe consumption rooms where addicts could shoot up in sanitary conditions rather than in underpasses and waste ground.

There is such an acute shortage of publicly funded rehabilitation places and cuts to local multi-agency drugs services that Scotland has entered Kafkaland where some addicts pursue what seems to them a logical course of action: they choose to commit crimes ensuring a prison sentence rather than remaining in the community because they know they have a better chance of accessing treatment behind bars. For Scotland’s addicts, HMP Barlinnie beats NHS Scotland.

A failed lawyer [Sturgeon] leading a failed government is leading almost inexorably to a failed country, and the most vulnerable are paying the price.

On February 19, 2023, four days after Sturgeon stood down as SNP leader, veteran political journalist Simon Heffer wrote an article for The Telegraph: ‘Nicola Sturgeon’s dreamland is over — Scotland faces a painful reckoning’.

Since 2021, there have been only nine fewer drug deaths — 1,330 instead of 1,339:

An indication of the state of Scottish society is that nearly 60,000 people in a country whose population is five and a half million have a drug addiction problem. That is a higher proportion of addicts than any other country in Europe. Recent figures showed that Scotland had an annual rate of 1,330 deaths from drug addiction. In Slovakia, which has an identical-sized population, the number of deaths (in 2017) was 19.

In Scotland, the government-run treatment services for addicts are dismal. Around 40pc of Scottish addicts are in treatment, compared with 60pc in England. The rate of around 25.2 deaths per 100,000 of the population is three and a half times England’s.

Incredibly, Sturgeon’s government blames Margaret Thatcher, who left office in 1990:

When being forced to admit this shocking failure, the SNP blames Margaret Thatcher and the legacy of her economic policies for closing down much (inefficient and obsolete) Scottish heavy industry. In other words, the failure of the British state (which the SNP purports to loathe) to use the money of predominantly English taxpayers to subsidise the inefficiency and restrictive practices that undermined so much Scottish industry is the cause of the country’s out-of-control drugs problem.

Mrs Thatcher left office more than 32 years ago; an SNP administration has run Scotland since 2007. There are, frankly, no excuses. If parts of Scotland are enduring poverty it is largely down to the failings of those who have ruled the country for the last 16 years, whose hostility to capitalism and incomprehension of business were proved by the many businesses that planned to relocate in England had the referendum in 2014 gone the other way.

Education disaster

Simon Heffer reminds us that Scottish schools were, until recently, the envy of the world. They aren’t anymore:

Education has also been a disaster under the SNP. Scotland’s schools were once among the finest in Europe; in the 18th and 19th centuries they sent young people to university from social classes that would not get inside an English university until the 1940s.

In June 2021, however, the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD) said that the SNP administration had no long-term strategy or vision for schools, and had failed to keep abreast of best practice. It attacked the examinations system, curriculum development, the management of teachers and the availability of data for measuring schools’ performance. John Swinney, who has proved an entirely incapable education minister, was so embarrassed that he delayed publishing the report until after that year’s Holyrood elections.

For maths and sciences, in which high attainment is now considered essential for the prosperity and development of any society, Scotland ranks 25th and 24th respectively among OECD countries. In 2019-20, the proportion of pupils in Scottish schools passing three or more Highers was 43pc lower than in any other year since 2015, when another international report from the Programme for International Student Assessment [PISA] condemned the standards of attainment in reading, maths and science.

To try to massage the figures, the SNP has relied on a feeble system of continuous assessment rather than rigorous examinations. This has ensured that the gap in attainment between those at the bottom of the ladder economically and those at the top has widened.

The other consequence of this failure to develop Scotland’s human resources through education is that the brains, skills and talent that might improve the Scottish economy are scarce: and for those whose talents are developed, Dr Johnson’s adage that the noblest prospect many of them ever see is the high road that takes them to England remains painfully true.

NHS and National Care Service in dire straits

At First Minister’s Questions, Sturgeon becomes deeply annoyed at questions from Douglas Ross and Anas Sarwar over the lingering problems with the NHS and Scotland’s National Care Service.

It is worth noting that Sturgeon was Scotland’s health secretary for several years before becoming First Minister in 2014. According to Ross and Sarwar, some of the existing problems began then.

Simon Heffer tells us:

If the NHS is said to be on its knees in England, it is prostrate in Scotland. The British Medical Association said last month that the country was 2,000 GPs short and about three in 20 vacancies for consultants were unfilled. There were also 6,400 vacancies in nursing and midwifery. A Royal College of Nursing spokesman said that six in 10 nurses were thinking of leaving their profession because they have had enough of their overloaded working conditions.

The medical and paramedical professions in Scotland have repeatedly savaged Humza Yousaf, the Scottish Health Minister, for having (in the words of a Scottish geriatrician) “no plan, no strategy”, and therefore inspiring “no trust” from the professions.

Waiting times in A&E have reached a record high, with 5,000 people in the last week of 2022 waiting over eight hours, and half of them for over 12 hours. The malfunctioning of Scotland’s National Care Service means hospital beds are filled with people who otherwise could be discharged. Over 600,000 people are awaiting “planned procedures” compared with just over 300,000 when Ms Sturgeon took office in 2014.

High taxation, sluggish economy

The SNP are fond of blaming Brexit and the UK government for Scotland’s economic woes.

However, Heffer says that a report from January 2023 points out that Sturgeon’s government has no clear economic strategy:

The report said there was no clear strategy for innovation, that for the last decade productivity had been “muted” and that Scotland had failed to become a “hotbed of start-up activity”. The SNP blame Brexit for this, which hardly explains why other cities in Britain are performing far better; the SNP will not admit that it has no idea how to encourage and support entrepreneurs …

The entrepreneurs Scotland so desperately needs are driven away by high taxation, the deep economic uncertainty provided by the threat of separatism, and a shrinking skills base.

Independence dream dies

During the 2021 election campaign, Holyrood magazine featured Mandy Rhodes’s highly critical editorial, ‘The mendacity of hope’.

Rhodes takes us back to the 2014 independence referendum campaign:

Back in 2014 in a campaign video for the independence referendum, Nicola Sturgeon asked us to imagine a baby – Kirsty – and to think about what kind of country we wanted her to grow up in.

It was a brilliant, evocative message, a hopeful one, with a positive vision that things could only get better, that our children could live their best lives. And who wouldn’t want that?

Two years later, after the SNP were re-elected, Sturgeon made this pledge:

Let’s all resolve that, when this parliament dissolves five years from now, we’ll be able to say we’ve done everything we can to give all of Scotland’s young people the best possible future.

Rhodes continues:

Well, we are now five years on, with independence no closer and Baby Kirsty now seven. The SNP heads into an election that it will win, still stuck on repeat, pledging to make Scotland the best country for any child to grow up in.

The SNP has been in power for 14 years and despite cleverly positioning itself as the party of opposition, lest you blame it for any of the country’s ills, it is set to return to power on the back of yet more promises for that same change.

So, when is it coming?

… Yet here we are, with the SNP still winning votes on the back of a promise to build a fairer, more equal, Scotland. If it’s window dressing you are after, then artifice has won over substance.

Every opinion poll has the SNP winning this next election. The only question now, is by how much.

Yet contrast that 2014 video message of hope, that forward-looking vision for a more positive future, with the dystopian styled, party-political broadcast issued by the SNP last week and the difference is clear. Fourteen years in government, and the SNP can’t offer a positive narrative for its record, it can only blame Westminster for everything that is still wrong …

But if the Scottish Parliament does not have the powers to find Scottish solutions to Scottish problems, then what is its point? What is the point of a party of independence being in power for so long but not delivering on independence? What is the point of having a woman in power but who lets women down?

What is the point in an election that will merely deliver more of the same? And what is the point in promising a better future for children when those already growing up under the SNP’s watch have been let down?

Come on. Nicola Sturgeon has said she hopes that this election will breathe fresh air onto the toxicity of our politics, but those winds of change need to sweep over her and her party too. It needs a clear out. Some fresh thinking. Some challenge, and some ambition to make the change it has promised over and over again.

There is something very sour about the SNP right now – a party that doesn’t take well to criticism; that sneers at opposition; that hectors journalists, and silences its detractors.

Too often, political commentators are assumed to be people who care too much about party politics. We are accused of having an agenda, of being too close to power, of having nefarious causes that we are trying to promote. That in fact we are political stooges. But none of that is remotely true.

In the main, we are here to see change, to hold truth to power …

During the 2021 campaign, Sturgeon said she wanted to sort out the coronavirus crisis before holding a second independence referendum.

The Revd Stu Campbell of Wings Over Scotland took issue with Sturgeon’s preference for ‘patient persuasion’ before a second referendum. On April 30 that year, he wrote:

As we noted earlier today, her “patient persuasion” has taken Yes from a 10-point lead to an 8-point deficit in the last four months. She’s going backwards at a rate of knots, and in the most favourable circumstances she could ever dream of – Brexit, a pandemic in which she’s been (erroneously) seen to have performed well, and a wildly unpopular and almost comically crooked complete buffoon in 10 Downing Street.

She HAD a majority for independence, and she’s blown it. It’s almost impossible to imagine anything that could possibly provide a bigger boost to the Yes vote than what she’s already had and wasted.

She used to promise that she’d deliver a second indyref “before it is too late” to avoid the effects of Brexit. But Brexit happened 15 months ago and now we have to wait for some unspecified point at which the effects of COVID are over before she’ll even begin to try. There’s always an excuse, and there always will be …

The truth of the matter is that Nicola Sturgeon has poisoned the Yes movement. Every part of it is now at war with every other part, and so bitterly that it’s hard to imagine the peace and unity of 2014 returning even if and when she’s finally dragged kicking and screaming out of Bute House.

Simon Heffer, writing in 2023, seems to be of the same opinion:

… the nationalist movement may well become more of a minority sport. It is already split following the creation of the Alba party by Alex Salmond, who fell out with Ms Sturgeon over her handling of complaints of sexual misconduct against him. He was later acquitted of 13 offences in a criminal trial.

And although the fanatics will endure any hardship to be shot of the colonial oppressor, many others won’t. Scotland reached peak Sturgeon a couple of years ago, after her polished performance in the pandemic, when she enjoyed being more welfarist at every turn than the English government.

It will require a remarkable achievement by her successor to lift support for nationalism to the point where it would look likely that the Scottish people would back separatism in a referendum. The SNP has scrapped a special conference it was holding on the question. Talk of the next UK election being a referendum on separatism is ending.

When SNP sources say, as they have in recent days, that a second referendum is off the agenda for the next five years, what they really mean – all being equal – is 10, 15 or 20 years. Every further failure in health, education, infrastructure planning and social care lines up more voters against them: for in the extensively devolved system, only they are responsible.

Heffer tells us how important English subsidies are to Scotland:

It is one thing to tell an opinion pollster that you, as a Scottish voter, would like to be shot of England; quite another to vote in a referendum, were there to be one, to cut the umbilical cord to the Treasury in Whitehall, whose subventions to Scotland under the block grant are around £41bn per year.

For every £100 the government spends per person in England, it spends £126 in Scotland. As the IFS’s comments on the country’s economic future imply, the SNP has nothing but pie in the sky to suggest as the source of that money post-independence.

The SNP never had a detailed plan for independence.

More on that tomorrow.

Yes, we can change — an old idea that needs more publicity

According to statistics, 19% of Britons are classified as disabled.

The Government has a rather loose definition of disability as ReviseSociology explains (emphases mine):

Anyone ticking YES/ YES and either ‘my illness affects me a lot or a little’ is classified by the UK government as disabled.

The problem with the above is that if you have Asthma and similar mild conditions you could be classified as disabled, and this doesn’t tie in with the government’s own definition of disability which requires that someone has a condition which ‘substantially’ affects their ability to carry out every day tasks.

Stating that you have asthma which affects your breathing a little, does NOT IMO qualify you as disabled, but it does in this survey.

The government doesn’t publish the breakdown of responses to the final disability question, but it’s roughly a 50-50 split between those answering ‘a lot’ and ‘a little.

In conclusion, it might be more accurate to say that one in ten people is disabled.

Even so, that is still a lot of people.

The report, Family Resources Survey 2018/2019, states (p. 7, PDF p. 8):

Of those who reported a disability, 27 per cent reported a mental health impairment in 2018/19, up from 24 per cent in 2016/17. This is an increase of 12 per cent in the numbers of people reporting a mental health impairment, overtaking the number reporting dexterity impairments (which fell by five per cent).

The next page says:

Working–age adults were the most likely group to report mental health impairments, with 39 per cent of disabled working–age adults reporting this type of impairment, compared to 36 per cent in 2016/17. In contrast mobility impairments for disabled working–age adults have fallen from 43 to 40 per cent in the same period. Children were much more likely to have learning or social/behavioural impairments than adults. Thirty–four per cent of disabled children were reported to have a learning impairment. Across all ages, there has been an 18 per cent increase in social/behavioural impairments during the last three years, with 42 per cent of disabled children now reporting a social/behavioural impairment.

Beneath that paragraph is an alarming graph breaking down reported disability by nation or, in the case of England, by region, with the following explanation:

The prevalence of people reporting a disability varied across the UK. The North East had the highest percentage of people reporting a disability in 2018/19; 28 per cent (0.7 million people). The percentage of people reporting a disability was higher than the UK national average in Wales (25 per cent), Scotland (24 per cent), and Northern Ireland (23 per cent). In contrast, London had the lowest percentage, 13 per cent, of people reporting a disability (1.2 million people), followed by the South East, with 19 per cent (1.7 million people).

These regional differences could partially be explained by the varying demographics in each region, for example disability prevalence may correlate with the percentage of the population of State Pension age in a particular region, noting that reporting of a disability is more than double amongst this age group, compared to the overall population (see Table 4.1 and 4.4 for full data).

Hmm.

A cynic would say that this is about benefits, or, in popular parlance, ‘being on the sick’.

With that in mind, I was intrigued and encouraged to read an article in The Guardian on February 13, 2023: ‘The big idea: your personality is not set in stone’.

It’s by David Robson, the author of The Expectation Effect: How Your Mindset Can Transform Your Life.

I skipped through the first half of the article, which most people commenting, sadly, did not. Here’s the main point:

What if educating people about their potential for personality change placed them on a more positive trajectory? To test this idea, Jessica Schleider, assistant professor of clinical psychology at Stony Brook University, New York, and John R Weisz, professor of psychology at Harvard, selected a group of around 100 adolescents who had previously shown signs of anxiety or depression. They took a brief computerised course that explained the science of brain plasticity, alongside statements from older students, who described the ways they had grown over their school years. They were then given worksheets to consolidate what they had learned.

When Schleider and Weisz checked in on the teens’ mental health nine months later, the students reported a significant decrease in their anxiety and depression compared with those who had instead taken part in a course on “emotional expression”. The same strategy has since been tested in other settings, with larger numbers of participants, that have produced equally positive outcomes. Teaching people about personality growth is not a panacea, but these results suggest that it may be a useful tool to help build greater psychological resilience.

Whether you are wrestling with serious issues or simply want to polish off your rougher edges, it is reassuring to know that character is ultimately within your own hands. DNA and our upbringing may predispose us to certain traits, but we also have the power to shape our future selves.

It is a pity that comments on the article were so negative. What logically-thinking person wouldn’t want to be less anxious or depressed?

Then again, some people use depression and anxiety — the two often go together — as a comfy cloak. I know one person who has been on anti-depressants for years. The dosage seems to get higher and higher as the decades pass. That person had a well-educated married mother who, for whatever reason, became a recluse in middle-age and stayed that way for the rest of her life. How tragic. Did my friend adopt a learned example?

Parliamentarians often bring up the UK’s mental health statistics during debates, especially those involving young people. It would seem to me that teaching youngsters about brain plasticity and hearing from older students who evolved positively during their school years would be a good direction in which to move. It would enable them to progress to further education, either in a trade or at university.

The article discusses another experiment involving changing personality traits:

In one 15-week trial of nearly 400 people, participants accepted an average of two challenges each week. Provided they actually completed those tasks, their traits shifted in the desired direction, according to a standard big five questionnaire.

Similarly exciting results could be seen in a later experiment, which used a smartphone app to coach participants in their desired big five traits. Crucially, this study involved a much larger sample – 1,500 people. And in addition to the typical self-report questionnaires, it asked participants’ friends and family to rate their personalities before and after the intervention. The differences were still apparent three months after the experiment had ended. As Aristotle argued more than 2,300 years ago, we become what we repeatedly do.

The unexpected malleability of our minds should be good news for anyone who wishes they were a bit more sociable, organised, or happy-go-lucky. Another potential benefit is that awareness of this research could help improve mental health.

What are we waiting for?

I remember when, in the 1980s, self-help books were all the rage. Maybe it’s time to give them — and cognitive behavioural therapy (CBT) — another look rather than play the victim.