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Because of an anonymous judge from the EU blocking the only flight so far to Rwanda in 2022 and because of a UK judge finding that Rwanda is not a ‘safe’ country for notional refugees, the British government came up with the Safety of Rwanda bill to counter both objections.
The full text of the new December 2023 treaty with Rwanda is here.
The objective of sending potential refugees to Rwanda for processing is to be a deterrent to the tens of thousands of young men travelling across the Channel on dinghies every year.
The legislation passed the House of Commons on Wednesday, January 17, 2024. A few Conservative MPs proposed amendments to the bill which would have greatly strengthened it, but MPs — including a majority of Conservatives — voted these down.
Lee Anderson and Brendan Clarke-Smith both resigned their positions as Deputy Chairmen of the Conservative Party earlier this week. However, Anderson, a former Labour Party member, could not bring himself to vote against the bill when the time came. Not surprisingly, he found the chuckles from Labour MPs off-putting. This is what he told his fellow GB News presenter Christopher Hope in Westminster Hall after the vote:
His abstention is a grudging way of voting ‘Yes’, in my opinion.
Only 11 Conservatives voted against the bill. Guido Fawkes tells us who they were: Suella Braverman (former Home Secretary), Simon Clarke, Bill Cash (who came up with some of the proposed amendments), Danny Kruger, Sarah Dines, James Duddridge, David Jones, Robert Jenrick (Immigration Minister who recently resigned and who also raised amendments), Andrea Jenkyns, Mark Francois and Miriam Cates.
Guido says (red emphases his):
Rebellious Tory MPs decided earlier this evening they would back the government to prevent the whole thing falling apart. All amendments have been voted off and the bill has passed at third reading 320 to 276. The government’s majority is 44. Déjà vu…
Jenrick’s amendment to ensure the government would ignore Rule 39 injunctions from Strasbourg got 65 votes with 61 Tory rebels. Last night’s rebellion carried over…
Overall, Prime Minister Rishi Sunak must be relieved the bill is now on its way to the Lords.
Immigration in a nutshell
Britain — England, in particular — has a tremendous immigration problem.
On November 23, 2023, Migration Watch provided the total figure of net migration from June 2022 to June 2023 (purple emphases mine):
New figures from the Office for National Statistics reveal that in the year ending June 2023, net migration to the UK was 672,000.
Most of that number is comprised of legal immigrants to the United Kingdom. What follows is a partial breakdown by country. The numbers for Indians and Nigerians are especially high because they bring the most dependents with them:
Migration Watch’s press release from that day states:
Commenting, Alp Mehmet, Chairman of Migration Watch UK, said:
These figures are truly shocking. They will result in intolerable pressure on our housing and public services. The government have abandoned their promises at the last election and have simply caved in to every pro-immigration pressure group. Indeed net migration is now at four or five times the level of three years ago.
If this is allowed to continue, Britain’s population could well soar to about 85 million by 2046. This would be equivalent to 18 new cities the size of Birmingham, and would place an intolerable strain on our land, housing, transportation, and public infrastructure.
Apart from the economic pressures brought by this eyewatering net migration figure, how on earth will we integrate the 1.2 million long term migrants arriving every year? It will only add massively to the problem of integrating the millions of migrants already here.
The British people have been utterly betrayed.
On Tuesday, January 16, 2024, The Telegraph‘s Allison Pearson gave us another startling statistic about the level of migration to the United Kingdom. It is higher than that to the United States:
The UK now has a higher proportion of foreign-born residents than the United States – more than 10 million people, which is 15 per cent of our population and roughly twice as many as it was 10 years ago.
People crossing the Channel
However, the Rwanda legislation is targeted at a much smaller although no less significant group: those crossing the Channel from France in small boats, often dinghies.
Britons, especially the English, wonder how this can happen. Once here, they are put up in three- and four-star hotels commandeered by third-party services companies working for the Government.
A commenter on Guido Fawkes’s post on the Rwanda bill explains what happens and how the migrants’ legal status changes when our own Border Force accompanied by the lifeboats charity, RNLI, escorts these vessels to the UK:
Under existing British law, it’s illegal to enter the country without a visa or special permission.
However, they are protected from prosecution if once they arrive they claim asylum.
Further, they have not entered the country illegally if they have been rescued at sea and brought here by the agency that rescued them.
After the Safety of Rwanda bill passed, No. 10 issued the following statement:
The passing of the Bill tonight marks a major step in our plan to stop the boats. This is the toughest legislation ever introduced in Parliament to tackle illegal migration and will make clear that if you come here illegally you will not be able to stay. It is this government and the Conservative party who have got boat crossings down by more than a third. We have a plan, we have made progress and this landmark legislation will ensure we get flights off to Rwanda, deter people from making perilous journeys across the channel and stop the boats.
However, all of that sounds suspiciously like the statement the Government issued when the first Rwanda bill was passed when Priti Patel was Home Secretary. Labour are not wrong when they say that more Home Secretaries have visited Rwanda than asylum seekers. The sum total of the latter group is precisely zero.
Anger at Conservatives
On the morning of Wednesday, January 17, the day of the final debate and vote on the Safety of Rwanda legislation, GB News broadcasted a confrontation between Reform Party Chairman Richard Tice and Conservative MP Richard Graham from Gloucester.
Tice’s views aligned with those of much of the British public, while Graham presented the real-life nuances in processing and transporting notional refugees. I couldn’t help but agree with both:
The aforementioned column from The Telegraph‘s Allison Pearson encapsulates everything the British are angry about with regard to recent successive Conservative governments. I’ll just cover the immigration issue, for which she has a comparative graph:
It is hard to overstate the sense of betrayal and anger. Back in October, I said that the Tories would be lucky to retain 150 seats and that was before we heard the Oh-dear-God legal immigration figures.
To wilfully welcome a population the size of Birmingham when your own people are struggling to access healthcare, housing and safe maternity services, which they have paid for out of their taxes, goes beyond mere incompetence. It is plain rude.
A “kick in the teeth”, as Suella Braverman said. Oh, and massively disrespectful of your loyal supporters. Immigration at those levels undermines social cohesion and it stops social mobility in its tracks because too many of our young people, who know they will never own a home and must live in extortionate rented accommodation while they pay off their student loan (like my two, in fact), get despondent and give up …
Did any Conservative vote for that? Did they heck. But the people in whom we first placed our trust back in 2010, whose manifesto commitments we stupidly believed, went ahead and did it anyway. How did Tory MPs come to believe they were better judges of what the country needs than the British voter?
While many who came to this country as immigrants, and the children of those immigrants, are making a fantastic contribution and are every bit as British as any of us, we all know there are a horrifying number of idle ratbags sponging off the efforts of hardworking families, getting priority for social housing, university places and even hospital appointments.
A poisonous minority hates the West while living in the, er, West and enjoying its comforts and freedoms. We don’t want them here.
Record mass immigration “and under a Conservative government”. I’ve lost count of how many times I’ve read or heard that incredulous rider. People say it all the time: The highest taxes for 70 years “and under a Conservative government”.
Over 40,000 migrants arriving illegally on our southern coast “and under a Conservative government” …
In November, the Home Office admitted that they do not know the whereabouts of 17,000 asylum seekers whose claims have been discontinued. In a functioning country, that scandalous admission would have seen public apologies and resignations. In Broken Britain, it was par for the course …
A poll in The Telegraph … showed that “in almost all constituencies in the country the preferred option is for quick detention and deportation (to Rwanda)”.
As Margaret Thatcher once said, ‘Weak, feeble’. What would she make of today’s Conservative ‘wets’, as she called them in her day? Ours are wetter than hers:
Blame Tony Blair for courts’ power
Remember how, in 1996 and during the general election campaign of 1997, Labour’s leader Tony Blair never spelled out any of his ideas for government?
I do. Now, looking back nearly 30 years, I see that he had plenty of ideas for governing and understand why he didn’t tell us what they were at the time. If he had, fewer people would have voted Labour in May 1997, even though the Party still would have won the election, just not by a landslide.
During his time as Prime Minister, Blair, a lawyer — his wife a human rights lawyer — nicely convinced voters that courts should reign supreme, something we are finding out to our peril in the second decade of the 21st century.
A November 16, 2023 article in UnHerd, ‘How the judges took back control’, explains what he did and how we are seeing it unfold in the context of the Rwanda treaty:
The Supreme Court’s ruling against the Government’s Rwanda plan may have been a foregone conclusion, but the broader political fall-out was not. Even though the Supreme Court struck down the migrant bill without relying on the European Convention of Human Rights (ECHR) or the Human Rights Act, the decision is nonetheless bound to reignite the discussion about the ECHR — which is what kickstarted the British courts’ judicial review of the bill in the first place …
… The influence of the ECHR is only one part of a much bigger story: the wider judicialisation of our political and democratic systems.
Over the past few decades, an unprecedented amount of power has been transferred from representative institutions to judiciaries, transforming national and supranational courts into full-blooded political and decision-making bodies — and giving rise to a new type of political regime altogether: what some have called juristocracy. As legal scholar Ran Hirschl wrote as far back as 2004, from matters of national security to macroeconomics, “courts have become crucial for dealing with the most fundamental questions a democratic polity can contemplate”. The view that “nothing falls beyond the purview of judicial review”, as Aharon Barak, the former Chief Justice of the Supreme Court of Israel, said, has become widely accepted.
As a result, it has become standard practice for core political decisions relating to the very essence of public life — such as immigration policy — to be taken by courts and judges. Questions that ought to be resolved through public deliberation in the political sphere are increasingly being settled behind closed doors by a self-selecting judiciary elite …
For the UK, this journey largely accelerated with its entry into the EU in 1972, which over time transformed EU law into something akin to a higher law. The second big push towards judicialisation came in the late Nineties and early 2000s under New Labour, with the creation of the Human Rights Act [1998] and then the Constitutional Reform Act of 2005, which paved the way to the creation of the Supreme Court in 2009.
Yet for Britain’s political elites, judicialisation still carried a risk — namely, that the courts would start producing judgments that no longer reflected the ideological preferences of those who handed authority over to the judiciary in the first place. Hence, the Conservative Party finds itself unable to enforce its Rwanda policy …
Fast forward to this week, Wednesday, January 18, and UnHerd had another article about Blair’s far-reaching transformation of our government in ‘How New Labour created the Rwanda stranglehold’:
The backlash that followed last year’s Supreme Court ruling — which found the Rwanda policy to be unlawful — is a direct product of New Labour and Lord Derry Irvine’s rights-based judicial reforms. Those reforms, firstly, ensured all policy and legislation-making centred around a culture of rights-compatibility. This was to be given priority over debates regarding the merits and necessity of an elected government’s policy preferences and assessment of the public interest. Secondly, it encouraged the perception of the judiciary as being unchallengeable and hierarchically superior to other branches of the state. The result, as we’re now seeing, is the constraint of an elected government that commands a majority in Parliament.
For New Labour, the aim was to ensure that domestic policy and legislation was subject to, and heavily shaped by, the European Convention (ECHR) rights found in the Human Rights Act 1998 (HRA), regardless of whether the domestic public interest or common good, according to a democratically elected majority government, required otherwise. As such, governments of all stripes would be forced into designing and arguing for policy that sits within the HRA’s framework and adhered to decisions made by the European Court of Human Rights (ECtHR). Other pertinent questions about the need, validity, strengths, weaknesses and democratic support for these proposed measures would become secondary.
Lord Irvine was clear-eyed about the types of rights-based reforms he wanted to introduce. He unequivocally claimed that New Labour’s HRA sought to mould not only the content of law in a range of areas, but also the law-making process. As such, it was New Labour’s specific intention to ensure government policy and legislation was framed around individual rights. To this end, the requirement for ministers to make statements of compatibility when introducing a Bill into Parliament was vital; the “responsible minister” would have to justify their decision in the “full glare of parliamentary and public opinion”. Strikingly, “Sovereignty”, Lord Irvine wrote, “will in future have to be exercised within an environment highly sensitive to fundamental rights”.
Moreover, because the HRA ensures executive and public bodies carry out their work under the umbrella of rights compatibility, Lord Irvine claimed such bodies would be subject to “considerably more rigorous scrutiny” than before — and he conceded the “special arena of human rights” would entail high degrees of judicial intervention.
While Lord Irvine, and New Labour, maintained that parliamentary sovereignty would be preserved, and Parliament could continue to legislate as it wished, the intention was to reposition the terrain for legislating towards matters of compatibility and away from concerns about public interest. If Parliament sought to legislate against the HRA grain, the question would not be of sovereignty or public interest but of rights-compatibility. Further, the duty on domestic courts to read legislation in a HRA-compatible way has led to a wide range of British government policies being reduced to such debates. The results, as we have seen, include well-documented cases of IRA members claiming to suffer a breach of the right to life, and the blocked deportation of suspected terrorists. Even government policies concerning public ownership and late-night flights from London Heathrow airport have been subject to questions of compatibility …
To make matters even more tiresome for any current or future government, New Labour’s HRA created the perception that the judiciary, and their judgments, were hierarchically superior to the elected majority government in Parliament. In other words, a false impression was created that framed Parliament, and the majority government within, as being unable to question or legislate against judicial decisions … New Labour encouraged an Americanised feeling of judicial supremacy by, first, reframing the role of judges and, secondly, allowing them to enter more substantive discussions about the merits of any given policy or legislative measure.
I vaguely remember the way Labour mooted the Supreme Court on current affairs programmes: ‘Why don’t we have a Supreme Court?’ in the way someone might bandy around a random topic at a dinner party. No sooner said than done. Labour did away with the perfectly serviceable Law Lords and gave us a Supreme Court, because in Blair’s mind it was what every other advanced society had. Never mind that Britain, via the Magna Carta in 1215, was the first to enshrine human rights.
What a crafty move the Supreme Court was:
Despite New Labour arguing these reforms maintained the position of Parliament as the ultimate arbiter, Lord Irvine specifically claimed there would be great pressure to concede ground to any decision that the court has made …
Indeed, the political pressure created by a “Supreme” Court ruling against a government tends to be so enormous that, in practical terms, the court, not Parliament or the government within, is viewed as supreme. In effect, such a measure is tantamount to ordering the Government and Parliament itself to halt or change direction — something which, prior to 1998, was constitutionally improper.
Moreover, when ensuring the legislation or policy in question was compatible with the HRA, Lord Irvine claimed judges would also be able to conduct a more substantive review of human rights and policy. He argued that the domestic courts would be able to examine whether it was necessary to limit a right, and whether a proposed limitation was appropriate. Therefore a moral approach to judicial decision-making was created. The courts would now have to be satisfied that any interference with a protected right was justified in the public interest of a free democratic society. The result, Lord Irvine explained, would be judicial decisions based on the morality of government policy and legislation — not simply its compliance with the bare letter of the law.
Finally, although seemingly cosmetic, New Labour’s decision to disband the Appellate Committee of the House of Lords and create a new, relocated Supreme Court — via the Constitutional Reform Act 2005 — lent further weight to its aim of fostering feelings of judicial supremacy. Instead of adhering to the unique commixture of powers in the British constitution, the Department of Constitutional Affairs explained the intention was to redraw the relationship between the judiciary and other branches of the state — in addition to enhancing judicial independence. Overall, then, an image starts to emerge of New Labour and Lord Irvine’s responsibility for those in Britain who have spent the past two decades appealing to the paramountcy of the HRA and finality of judicial decisions. This can be clearly seen in the responses to the Rwanda policy from civil society, commentators in the media, and politicians.
This next bit about the Rwanda treaty is all too true. Criticism comes from Labour along the following lines all the time:
Following the Supreme Court judgment, for example, third-sector organisations unequivocally called for the Government to abandon and draw a line under the measure. Others have also criticised the Government’s response for “disapplying” aspects of the HRA and “disabling the courts”, while reporters have framed the Government’s response as one which “brushes the historic role of our country’s courts aside”. Similarly, among politicians, legislating against the Supreme Court has been described as “an affront to democracy”, with MPs expressing concern about “the possibility that, by effectively reversing through statute a Supreme Court judgment on the facts, the Bill could undermine the constitutional role of the judiciary”.
The ECHR and ECtHR
Both the European Convention on Human Rights and the European Court on Human Rights have been seen as roadblocks to getting Rwanda flights going.
The question is, even though Winston Churchill helped to create them, does Britain stay or does it leave both?
Even Lord Sumption KC, who sat on the Supreme Court between 2012 and 2018, thinks the UK should leave. He had this to say in an October 2023 interview with Freddie Sayers of UnHerd:
I don’t think this is likely to happen, but it would be a good thing if it did. I am not against a rule-based system and I am not against human rights. I simply think that we need to decide what human rights we want and to what degree we want them. At the moment, the problem is not the Convention itself, which is a collection of principles, not a single one of which I would question in any way. What I oppose is the legislative process by which the Strasbourg court, the European Court of Human Rights, has emancipated itself from the only thing that the states party to the Convention ever agreed, which was the text of the Convention. I do not think that it is the function of judges to revise the laws to bring them up to date — that is a function of representative institutions, certainly in a democracy.
So I would favour withdrawing from the European Convention and substituting it for an identical text, but simply interpreting it responsibly in accordance with what it’s intended to mean, and not in accordance with a wider political agenda — which I’m afraid is the animating spirit currently of the Strasbourg Court. I had hoped before that the Strasbourg Court would learn from the occasions when, particularly in this country, we have jibed at what they’ve done. I had hoped that things would improve as a result of the Brighton declaration, and its statement in favour of what was called, rather pompously, “subsidiarity”. I no longer believe that the Strasbourg Court is capable of independent reform.
I think the point about rules is that they’re designed to bring some kind of order to human affairs. If you have a rule which depends on whatever a legislator in Strasbourg thinks it ought to be, the essential predictability which rules are designed to achieve is gone. I have no problem about the notion of a foreign tribunal deciding whether our observance of human rights is adequate provided that the tribunal in question follows the rules. What I object to is a situation in which they require everyone else to follow rules of their own devising, but recognise no rules governing their own decisions.
He also thinks that the 1951 Geneva Convention on Refugees requires updating:
I certainly think that the Geneva Convention was made for a different world: a world in which travel across national borders was a lot more difficult, and a lot more expensive … in the wake of the catastrophe involving millions of displaced persons at the end of the Second World War, there was a strictly temporary Refugee Convention designed to enable these people to be resettled. In 1951, that was changed so that it became a permanent institution, and not limited to the persons displaced by the Second World War.
I think the people who agreed to that at the time did not appreciate that, with the disappearance of the European colonial empires, a lot of the world would come into chaos; that people suffering persecution would become very numerous — millions and millions in many countries of the world; and that, simultaneously, the improvements and the easing of the actual logistical difficulties of travel over long distances would enable lots of them to make their way towards the remaining ordered parts of the world.
It isn’t fit for purpose, but whether one should depart from it is a different question. I confess that I’ve not studied this as carefully as I have studied the problems associated with the European Convention on Human Rights. I think it’s obvious that the Refugee Convention was made for a world that no longer exists. I am much less certain about what we should do about that.
The NGOs
Finally, we have the non-governmental organisations — NGOs — that are working hard for migrants crossing dangerous waters.
A January 17 article on EuroNews explains how the Italian government is trying to keep them in check, and yet, they seem to prevail:
Barely one day into the new year, on 1 January, the Ocean Viking – a migrant rescue boat chartered by the NGO SOS Méditerranée – was impounded by Italian authorities for breaking the government’s strict rules on charity groups operating such ships, proving that 2024 is shaping up to look a lot like the year before.
Giorgia Meloni’s right-wing government, which was installed in late October 2022, has introduced new regulations for migrant rescue ships in January 2023 which activists have condemned, as they say it intentionally makes their job much harder and puts migrants’ lives at risk.
According to the government’s decree, NGOs must notify Italian authorities immediately after a rescue operation and head to the port indicated by officials without delay, which is often far from the ship’s location. Ships cannot embark on more than one rescue operation at a time unless authorised to do so by Italian authorities.
If an NGO boat is found in violation of these rules, the vessel can be denied access to Italian ports or blocked for up to two months, while their captains face a fine between €10,000 and €50,000. If a ship is found in violation of the decree more than once, the vessel can be seized by Italian authorities …
Upon arrival in Bari, the Ocean Viking’s crew received a 20-day detention order for the ship and a €3,300 fine. The detention order expires on Friday, when the ship hopes to get back to sea.
“We know this is a tactic to try and stop our operation rather than something that is valid in some way,” Mary Finn, another Ocean Viking rescuer, said. “And I find it painful to feel that humanity’s not on our side or that the authorities aren’t on our side, because it’s so obvious when you do this work that what we’re doing is the right thing to be doing.”
Sara Kelany, the migration policy coordinator for Meloni’s Brothers of Italy party, agreed that saving lives is a priority. But she said the presence of charity-run ships in the Mediterranean must be limited and strictly regulated.
Kelany alleged that many of the groups that organise humanitarian missions in the Mediterranean also have a stated political objective of changing the European Union’s migration policies.
“In essence, they want to be political actors within the dynamics of immigration,” she said in an interview. “Immigration is a state’s national competence, and we cannot allow private organizations to influence our migration policies with their policies.”
Once in Italy, those crossing the Mediterranean start moving westwards to France. Ventimiglia, the Italian town on the border between the two countries, has become a hotspot. French police turn the migrants back, and this video from December 30, 2023, shows a local man and NGOs aiding the migrants. The man makes daily runs picking up migrants and ferrying them back to the railway station at Ventimiglia while the NGOs have offices there where they hand out food and clothing. This is subtitled in English and is a must-watch:
Ventimiglia used to be the port of call for French day-trippers shopping for cheaper goods then settling down to a nice lunch before heading back in the late afternoon. I wonder if it still is so attractive these days.
Conclusion
When it comes to immigration, many European countries are hamstrung by courts.
It is unclear how things will turn out for the United Kingdom, where much of the public wonder why the Conservative Party, which has been in power for nearly 14 years, cannot manage to change the course of court rulings and overthrow Tony Blair’s questionable reforms.
Their best chance came with an 80-seat majority in 2019. Sadly, it has become crystal clear that many Conservative MPs just do not have the gumption for turning back the clock and restoring sovereignty to Parliament, where it rightly belongs.
Rwanda is but a small part of this picture, yet it will partially determine the Conservatives’ results at the general election later this year.
Matt Hancock looms large in The Telegraph‘s Lockdown Files series which ended earlier this month.
For more background, see parts 1 and 2.
Matt Hancock latest
The series continues after an update on latest news about the UK’s former Health and Social Care Secretary.
On Saturday, March 25, 2023, The Guardian reported that Hancock had been one of a handful of Conservative MPs caught in a prank set up by the left-wing activist group Led By Donkeys, ‘Top Tory MPs ask for £10,000 a day to work for fake Korean company’ (emphases mine):
The former chancellor, Kwasi Kwarteng, and former health secretary, Matt Hancock, agreed to work for £10,000 a day to further the interests of a fake South Korean firm after apparently being duped by the campaign group Led by Donkeys.
Kwarteng attended a preliminary meeting at his parliamentary office and agreed in principle to be paid the daily rate after saying he did not require a “king’s ransom”. When Hancock was asked his daily rate, he responded: “It’s 10,000 sterling” …
The senior politicians have complied with all relevant rules and referred to their obligation to their constituents during preliminary meetings. The Led by Donkeys project, conducted with investigative reporter Antony Barnett, comes at a time when people face a cost of living crisis. The campaign group released a report on its investigation on Twitter on Saturday, with recorded undercover footage …
The purported firm that approached the politicians did not exist and had a rudimentary foreign website with fake testimonials. MPs have been warned by the Home Office to be on their guard against the “threat of foreign interference”, and the group’s investigation demonstrated the ease with which they seemed able to gain access to the MPs.
Led by Donkeys is understood to have approached 20 MPs from the Conservative party, Labour and Liberal Democrats after examining the outside earnings of MPs on the parliamentary register of interests. An email sent by the fake investment and consulting firm, Hanseong Consulting, said it wanted individuals for an international advisory board to “help our clients navigate the shifting political, regulatory and legislative frameworks” in the UK and Europe.
It said advisers would be required to attend six board meetings a year, with a “very attractive” remuneration package and “generous expenses” for international travel. Five MPs agreed to be interviewed on Zoom, with one who was clearly suspicious of the firm’s credentials terminating the call. The MPs were interviewed by a woman purporting to be a senior executive, with a backdrop of the skyline of Seoul, the South Korean capital, at her office window …
In early March, Hancock agreed to an online meeting for the advisory role. The Telegraph had that week published his leaked cache of more than 100,000 WhatsApp messages, but he seemed relaxed for the meeting with the fake foreign firm. He said it had been “quite a busy week” but that March was the “start of hope”.
“We were wondering, do you have a daily rate at the moment?” he was asked by the interviewer, posing as a senior business executive. “I do, yes,” Hancock replied. “It’s 10,000 sterling.”
… Hancock is an independent MP after he had the whip suspended for taking part in I’m a Celebrity, for which he was paid £320,000, with Rishi Sunak’s spokesperson saying at the time that “MPs should be working hard for their constituents”.
Hancock said in the meeting that he followed the “spirit and letter” of parliamentary rules, and would also require additional approval for the role because he had been a minister, but outside interests were permitted. He said he was mindful of the responsibility to serve his constituents …
Led by Donkeys was established in 2018 as a campaign in response to Brexit. Its high-profile projects and satirical stunts have since included a spoof episode of the BBC show Line of Duty with Boris Johnson being interrogated by the anti-corruption AC-12 unit and painting the colours of the Ukrainian flag outside the Russian embassy in London.
A spokesperson for Hancock said: “The accusation appears to be that Matt acted entirely properly and within the rules, which had just been unanimously adopted by parliament. It’s absurd to bring Mr Hancock into this story through the illegal publication of a private conversation. All the video shows is Matt acting completely properly.”
Furthermore, Matt will be looking for a new job as he will not be standing again as an MP come the next general election.
Although I am not a defender of Hancock, former BBC presenter Jon Sopel is hardly in a position to take pot shots at him, considering that he, too, fancies filthy lucre, as Guido Fawkes revealed on Monday, March 27:
Days earlier, on March 18, The Mail‘s Richard Eden reported that Hancock’s girlfriend and her estranged husband sold their South London house to Gordon Ramsay for several million pounds:
Should she ever tire of turning her boyfriend, Matt Hancock, into a TV star, Gina Coladangelo has a lucrative alternative career as a property tycoon.
I can disclose that she and her estranged husband, Oliver Tress, managed to sell their marital home to fiery TV chef Gordon Ramsay and his wife, Tana, for a staggering £7.5 million.
It’s an astonishing price for the area of South London. Not only is it almost double the £3.8million that Gina and Tress paid in 2015, but it’s £2.5 million more than the top price paid previously for any property in their street.
Zoopla had estimated its value as between £3.8 million and £4.6 million …
The sale, which Land Registry documents confirm went through in January, is all the more impressive as it comes when British property prices are predicted to plunge by ten per cent.
The five-bedroom Edwardian house is in one of London’s most desirable areas. Ramsay, 56, and his wife, 48, bought it in their joint names from Gina and Tress, the founder of upmarket homeware and clothing chain Oliver Bonas.
Gina, 45, left Tress, 55, with whom she has three children, for former health secretary Hancock, 44, who competed in I’m a Celebrity . . . Get Me Out Of Here!.
Ramsay, who has an estimated fortune of £175 million, already owns a huge house, said to be worth £7 million, less than a mile away …
Last year, he, Tana and their five children were reported to have temporarily moved out after work began on a super-basement …
Tatler adds:
It is easy to see why Ramsay might need a new home. The chef announced at the start of the year that he and wife Tana are expecting their sixth child. On the Heart Breakfast show, the chef said that ‘there’s one more on the way’ to join their five children: Megan, 25, twins Jack and Holly, 23, Tilly, 21, and Oscar, three. Holly recently featured as one of the most eligible singles at Tatler’s Little Black Book party. According to Hello! magazine, the Ramsays are believed to have paid in cash for their new luxury pad; they also own a £6 million house in Cornwall and a mansion in Los Angeles. Gordon and Tana marked their 26th wedding anniversary very recently, having married in Chelsea in 1996.
On March 6, as The Lockdown Files were drawing to a close, The Telegraph reported, ‘Matt Hancock cancelled after indiscreet WhatsApps “upset” travel industry’:
A major international travel conference has axed Matt Hancock from its programme after The Telegraph revealed he had been highly critical of the travel sector during the pandemic.
The Institute of Travel and Tourism (ITT) confirmed that Mr Hancock will no longer be speaking at its annual conference in Doha, Qatar, saying that the messages uncovered by The Telegraph had caused upset to many in the travel industry.
Last week, as part of its Lockdown Files series, The Telegraph revealed that Mr Hancock and Simon Case, the country’s most senior civil servant, shared jokes about those being forced to stay in quarantine hotel rooms during the pandemic …
The former health secretary was also highly critical of the airline and airports industry, describing them as being “totally offside” and “unhelpful”, while Mr Case [top civil servant Simon Case] labelled them as “horribly self-serving” ...
In a statement to The Telegraph, Steven Freudman, chairman of the ITT, said that Mr Hancock had become a “major distraction”.
He added: “We have over 25 distinguished speakers and it would have been unfair on them for the focus to have been solely on Matt Hancock.”
The ITT annual conference is regarded as one of the sector’s key annual events, with thousands of travel professionals and high-profile speakers from across the globe attending.
The initial decision to invite Mr Hancock as a speaker at the conference was widely criticised by sector figures even before The Lockdown Files revelations were published.
Industry figures told The Independent that they wanted the ITT to reconsider its decision, accusing Mr Hancock’s policies of “destroying the sector” and resulting in thousands of travel jobs being lost …
Dr Freudman said: “The original invitation was issued in the hope that Matt Hancock would recognise the damage that he and his government caused the travel industry with its handling of the pandemic.
“We were also hoping that he might confirm that lessons had been learnt and that any future crises would be handled differently.
“However, his WhatsApp messages have upset many of us in the travel industry and his presence would clearly have been a major distraction.”
The Telegraph has contacted Mr Hancock for comment.
That day, Hancock’s lawyer appeared on GB News and was introduced as such. He responded vehemently that he did not want that detail mentioned. The presenter calmly read out the lawyer’s email to GB News stating that he permitted them to describe him as Hancock’s lawyer. The lawyer sheepishly responded that he forgot to type ‘not’. Comedy gold:
Isabel Oakeshott describes The Telegraph ‘bunker’
Hancock gave Oakeshott access to the 100,000 WhatsApp messages because she co-authored his book, Pandemic Diaries.
On Friday, March 24, she wrote an article for Tatler describing what working in seclusion with The Lockdown Files reporters was like at the beginning of 2023:
… The Daily Telegraph was the only newspaper that consistently challenged the lockdown agenda and had a track record of managing huge investigations in the public interest – famously exposing the MPs’ expenses claims in a scandal that rocked Westminster in 2009. They immediately agreed to put a full team of top journalists on the project: The Lockdown Files.
In a secure bunker, well away from the main newsroom, I worked alongside their reporters, filleting the messages: a team of eight or so, full time, for eight weeks. To avoid hackers, our computers were not connected to the internet. We worked from hard drives stored overnight in a safe. Anything printed was swiftly shredded. Nobody else came into the bunker, which, as the weeks went by, became increasingly unhygienic. Discarded takeaway containers, half-eaten packets of Colin the Caterpillar sweets, mouldy mugs and other detritus were strewn over every grubby surface. Hunched over our computers in a room with no windows, we were like lab rats in some dubious experiment, wracked by colds, coughs and – oh, the irony – Covid. By the week of publication, our core team had swelled to some 25 writers and digital news experts. The Daily Telegraph’s newsroom was emptying out – leaving those who remained wondering where all their colleagues had gone.
There was a curious voyeuristic pleasure in reading the banter between Government ministers and their aides – including some very flirty exchanges between two household names. Who was sending who the heart emojis and who was complimenting who on their sexy outfits? I’ll leave it to your imagination. Suffice to say, they wouldn’t be too happy if that news was in the public domain.
On Sunday, March 26, we got an answer about the heart emojis. Michael Gove sent them to Hancock:
Hancock responded, ‘You have been true throughout’.
Gove explained to Sophy Ridge on Sky News that he agreed, particularly on that day, with Hancock’s course of action. No surprise there. They’re cut from the same cloth.
Guido Fawkes has the interview:
Oakeshott’s article continues:
The WhatsApp from Matt Hancock came through at 1.20am: ‘You have made a big mistake,’ it said darkly – leaving me to imagine what punishment he had in mind. The following day, he released a furious statement, accusing me of ‘massive betrayal’. Fair enough – I had breached his trust and would face plenty of questions about that decision. But did anyone outside the media bubble seriously doubt it was for the public good? The torrent of grateful messages from ordinary people, often with harrowing personal stories about their own suffering during lockdown, was answer enough for me … Dining in a mountain restaurant in the French Alps, my partner, Richard Tice [leader of the Reform Party], was surprised – and touched – to be passed a note by the waiter from a fellow diner who had recognised him. On the crumpled piece of paper were the words ‘please thank Isabel’.
Lord Sumption on Hancock: ‘a fanatic’
On March 10, after The Lockdown Files came to an end, Lord Sumption, a former Supreme Court justice and guardian of civil liberties, wrote an editorial for The Telegraph: ‘Matt Hancock was never a policy maker — he was a fanatic’:
The 19th-century sage William Hazlitt once observed that those who love liberty love their fellow men, while those who love power love only themselves. Matt Hancock says that he has been betrayed by the leaking of his WhatsApp messages. But few people will have any sympathy for him. He glutted on power and too obviously loved himself.
Some things can be said in his favour. The Lockdown Files are not a complete record. No doubt there were also phone calls, Zoom meetings, civil service memos and the like, in which the thoughts of ministers and officials may have been more fully laid out …
Nevertheless, Hancock’s WhatsApp messages offer an ugly insight into the workings of government at a time when it aspired to micromanage every aspect of our lives. They reveal the chaos and incoherence at the heart of government, as decisions were made on the hoof. They expose the fallacy that ministers were better able to judge our vulnerabilities than we were ourselves. They throw a harsh light on those involved: their narcissism, their superficiality, their hypocrisies great and small. Above all, they show in embarrassing detail how completely power corrupts those who have it.
… Even the most ardent lockdown sceptics accept that in extreme cases drastic measures may be required. But Covid-19 was not an extreme case …
No government, anywhere, had previously sought to deal with epidemic disease by closing down much of society. No society has ever improved public health by making itself poorer …
The fateful moment came when the government chose to go for coercion. This ruled out any distinction between the vulnerable and the invulnerable, because it would have been too difficult to police. It also meant that ministers began to manipulate public opinion, exaggerating the risks in order to justify their decision and scare people into compliance. So we had the theatrical announcement of the latest death toll at daily press conferences from Downing Street. Shocking posters appeared on our streets (“Look him in the eyes”, etc). Matt Hancock announced that “if you go out, people will die”.
The scare campaign created a perfect storm, for it made it more difficult to lift the lockdown …
Hancock was the chief peddler of the idea that everyone was equally at risk from Covid-19. This proposition was patently untrue, but it was useful because it frightened people. “It’s not unhelpful having people think they could be next,” wrote his special adviser, who knew his master’s mind well. Other countries did not behave like this. In Sweden state epidemiologist Anders Tegnell was able to reassure his public that a lockdown was neither necessary nor helpful. Events have proved him right.
… Matt Hancock insisted on schoolchildren wearing masks in class in spite of scientific advice that it made little difference, because it was necessary to keep up with Nicola Sturgeon. When Rishi Sunak had the temerity to suggest that once the vaccine rollout started the lockdown should be relaxed, Hancock resisted. “This is not a SAGE call,” he said, “it’s a political call.”
Once ministers had started on this course, there was no turning back. It is hard to admit that you have inflicted untold damage on a whole society by mistake. Hancock resisted shortening the 14-day quarantine period in spite of scientific advice that five days was enough, because he did not want to admit that the original policy had been wrong. Relevant evidence was simply shut out. His response to the success of Sweden’s policies was not to learn from it but to dismiss it as the “f—ing Swedish argument”. Having no grounds for rejecting the Swedish argument, he had to ask his advisers to find him some. “Supply three or four bullet [points] of why Sweden is wrong,” he barked.
The adrenalin of power is corrosive. It was largely responsible for the sheer nastiness of the Government’s response to criticism. Hancock lashed out at the least signs of resistance or dissent. He wanted internal critics sacked or moved. He suggested the cancellation of a learning disability hub in the constituency of an MP who intended to vote against the tier system. Ministers “got heavy” with the police to make them tougher on the public …
I’ll get to the learning disability hub in a moment. Shameful, just shameful.
Lord Sumption’s editorial continues:
There is no sign that Hancock either thought or cared about the wider consequences of his measures. He seems to have believed that there was no limit to the amount of human misery and economic destruction that was worth enduring in order to keep the Covid numbers down. Rishi Sunak is on record as saying that any discussion of the wider problems was ruled out in advance, and this is fully borne out by the WhatsApp messages. Any hint from Sunak or business secretary Alok Sharma that the cure might be worse than the disease provoked an explosion of bile but no actual answers.
Hancock fought tooth and nail to close schools and keep them closed. Deprived of many months of education, cooped up indoors and terrified by government warnings that they would kill their grandparents by hugging them, children suffered a sharp rise in mental illness and self-harm although they were themselves at no risk from Covid-19. Cancer patients were left undiagnosed and untreated. Old people, deprived of stimulation, succumbed to dementia in large numbers. Small businesses were destroyed which had taken a lifetime to build up. A joyless puritanism infected government policy. No travel. No wedding parties or funeral wakes. No hugs. Anyone who spoke up for a measure of decency or moderation in this surreal world was promptly slapped down as a “w—er”.
Real policy-making is never black and white like this. It is always a matter of judgment, of weighing up pros and cons. In that sense, Matt Hancock was never a policy-maker. He was a fanatic.
Why did hitherto decent people behave like this? In Hancock’s case, at least part of the answer is vanity. The crisis was good for his profile. He saw himself as the man of action, the Churchill of public health, the saviour of his people, earning the plaudits of a grateful nation. As early as January 2020, he was sharing a message from a sycophantic “wise friend” assuring him that a “well-handled crisis of this scale could propel you into the next league”. He fussed over his tweets. He pushed his way in front of every press camera. He tried to divert the credit for the vaccines from Kate Bingham to himself. “I think I look great” is one of his more memorable messages.
Sumption says that Boris Johnson, his Cabinet and his advisers could not have restrained Hancock. Boris had no strategy, and the others were lacklustre:
Apart from Sunak and Gove, his Cabinet was probably the most mediocre band of British ministers for nearly a century. Collectively, they proved unable to look at the whole problem in the round. Their eyes were never on the ball. They were not even on the field. These are the lessons of this sorry business.
Blocking disability hub
Hancock did not tolerate Conservative MPs voting against his health policies during the pandemic.
On Tuesday, March 7, The Telegraph led with a story about James Daly MP from Bury North:
‘Matt Hancock’s plan to block funding for disabled children if MP opposed lockdown’ tells us:
Matt Hancock discussed a plan to block funding for a new centre for disabled children and adults as a way of pressuring a rebel Tory MP to back new lockdown restrictions, The Lockdown Files show.
WhatsApp messages between Mr Hancock, the then health secretary, and his political aide show they discussed taking a plan for a learning disability hub in Bury, Greater Manchester, “off the table” if James Daly, the Bury North MP, sided against the Government in a key vote.
It came ahead of the vote on Dec 1, 2020 on the introduction of a toughened new local tiers system of restrictions for England.
The Telegraph has also obtained a WhatsApp message with an attached list of 95 Conservative MPs planning to vote against the tier system and detailing their concerns about it.
The article has that list.
On November 20, 2020, Allan Nixon, one of Hancock’s Spads (special advisers) WhatsApped his boss:
… Thoughts on me suggesting to Chief’s spads that they give us a list of the 2019 intakes thinking of rebelling. Eg James wants his Learning Disability Hub in Bury – whips call him up and say Health team want to work with him to deliver this but that’ll be off the table if he rebels
These guys’ re-election hinges on us in a lot of instances, and we know what they want. We should seriously consider using it IMO
Hancock replied:
yes, 100%
James Daly only found out about this through The Lockdown Files:
Mr Daly – whose constituency is the most marginal in the UK mainland with a majority of just 105 – told The Telegraph he was “appalled” and “disgusted” that the disability hub, for which he had been campaigning, had been discussed as a way of coercing him into voting with the Government.
He said he had never been contacted by the Whips’ Office and no threat to block the scheme had been made.
The conversation between Nixon and Hancock continued on December 1, 2020:
On the morning of the vote, Mr Hancock messaged his adviser to say: “James Daly is with us”, but Mr Nixon responded with the caveat: “If extra hospitality support is forthcoming.”
Later that day, Mr Nixon also forwarded his boss a new list of MPs who were undecided on the vote. In the event, Mr Daly voted against the Government, according to the parliamentary record.
In total, 55 Conservative MPs opposed the tiers system, forcing Mr Johnson to rely on Labour abstaining to get the measures through. It was, at the time, the biggest rebellion of the Johnson administration.
After revealing that he had not been contacted by the Whips’ Office, Mr Daly said: “It sounds like the whips didn’t bother.”
The Bury North MP said he was surprised that the hub, which would allow specialists to coordinate activity under one roof, was even being threatened because “it never got dangled in the first place”.
He added: “They were never proposing to give it to me. I still don’t have it. Even though I have repeatedly campaigned for it, Hancock never showed the slightest bit of interest in supporting it. I had a number of conversations with Hancock at that time, but I can definitively say the hub was never mentioned.
“I think it is appalling. The fact that they would only give a much needed support for disabled people if I voted for this was absolutely disgusting.”
Mr Daly had discussed the need for the centre with Mr Hancock in January 2020. In a post on his website about “how we improve health outcomes for all Bury North residents”, he published a photograph of himself with the then health secretary. The hub, he said, would benefit “the most vulnerable in our community”.
That afternoon, The Telegraph published ‘Rishi Sunak rebukes Matt Hancock over plot to block disability funding’:
Downing Street has rebuked Matt Hancock after it emerged that he had discussed a plan to block funding for a new disabled centre to pressure a Tory MP to back lockdown restrictions …
Asked whether this was not the way Rishi Sunak would like his ministers to operate, the Prime Minister’s official spokesman said: “Of course. There are rules and guidelines which apply.
“I can’t speak for the actions of a former government. I think you heard from the Prime Minister, who said it’s important that the inquiry looks at all the issues in a complete way rather than relying on piecemeal bits of information.
“You will know that funding decisions are taken in line with strict guidelines to ensure value for money set out in the spending framework, and ministers’ departments are held accountable for their decisions.”
Allison Pearson: Hancock ‘should be arrested’
After The Telegraph published No. 10’s rebuke to Hancock, one of the paper’s columnists, Allison Pearson, weighed in with ‘Matt Hancock should be arrested for wilful misconduct in public office’:
… Dismayingly, if not entirely unpredictably, it was the very restrictions Matt Hancock and his lockdown zealots told us were necessary to save the health service which have very nearly finished it off. “The NHS has collapsed anyway as a direct result of the lockdowns and the vast backlog they caused,” says my source. Ironies don’t come much more bitter than that …
Just when you think he has sunk as low as is humanly possible, he ponders using children with special educational needs as leverage (“yes 100%,” enthused Hancock). By unhappy coincidence, I have just had an email from Rob, a father with an autistic son. This is what Rob wrote: “Lockdown sent him from a happy 14-year-old into a complete psychological breakdown. The fear of why everyone was wearing masks, the breaking of routine (so important for SEN children) and closing of schools. He was utterly terrified. The knock-on-effect for our family has been devastating. Thanks to anti-psych meds he’s slowly getting there, but from the second lockdown onwards it’s destroyed the fabric of our family to say nothing of our life savings being lost (self-employed). To read the WhatsApps in The Telegraph makes me so angry. Having the heartbreak of a disabled child made worse by self-aggrandising fools is almost too much to take. Administering psychiatric medicines to your child tends to focus the mind as to where the blame lies and it isn’t with Isabel Oakeshott.”
Well, there’s another Hancock Triumph. A 14-year-old boy who successfully had the pants frightened off him. (Hope you feel proud of yourself, Matt.) Are Members of Parliament seriously not going to debate what we suspected, but now know for sure, was done quite deliberately to Rob’s son and thousands of other vulnerable children, some of them no longer with us because they were scared into taking their own lives? …
As for Matt Hancock, he has lost the Whip and, unfortunately, can no longer be disciplined by the Conservative party. The slithy tove can – and must – be dragged before a Select Committee. Personally, I would like to see him in jail for the vast hurt he has caused.
Are there grounds for a prosecution of the former minister for misconduct in a public office? Did Matt Hancock “wilfully misconduct himself to such a degree as to amount to an abuse of the public’s trust in the office holder without reasonable excuse or justification”? …
Now, that’s what I call an Urgent Question.
Also of interest is ‘Dominic Cummings takes “nightmare” swipe at Rishi Sunak and Matt Hancock’.
I hope to wrap up the rest of my review of The Lockdown Files tomorrow.
Freedom Day — Monday, July 19 — in England is turning out to be a damp squib with the exception of nightclubs — for now.
Everyone’s preoccupation now is vaccine passports, which France is already rolling out with a grace period of six weeks.
Here in England, vaccine passports are likely to be rolled out in September not only for nightclubs and music venues but anywhere else that can be deemed as a ‘crowded space’.
Julia Hartley-Brewer interviewed the owner of a group of entertainment venues, who said that this is a ‘very dangerous step’ for the Government to take:
She also interviewed a spokesman for the Night Time Industries Association who says that random security guards will be checking people’s health status, something that should be private information:
It is the thin end of a very nasty wedge, indeed.
Oxford’s Prof Carl Heneghan rightly wonders if he will need a vaccine passport if he takes the Tube in London:
Here’s Julia Hartley-Brewer’s opening editorial on the danger such a policy presents:
She interviewed the Conservative MP, Sir Iain Duncan Smith. He is not one of my favourite politicians by a long shot, but he gave a considered 10-minute interview and said that we need a balance of risk, otherwise we could end up like China, where you cannot leave the house without the government knowing about it:
Lord Sumption wrote an editorial for The Telegraph on Monday. He says that Prime Minister Boris Johnson has no coronavirus plan:
We are squandering our vaccination success, which is the best in Europe. Lord Sumption concludes:
Vaccination is an impressive achievement. It represents the best that humanity can do about Covid. If it is not enough, then there are only two options. One is to impose total and permanent restrictions on human interaction, something which even governments realise is impossible. The other is to recognise defeat and allow their populations to live with Covid-19 – just as humanity had learned to live with worse pathogens for centuries before governments embarked on their current unprecedented and ill-advised experiment.
Bob Moran, a cartoonist for The Telegraph, has been concerned about coronavirus restrictions for a long time.
On Monday, July 12, he tweeted:
https://twitter.com/bobscartoons/status/1414676416512266248
He had quite the Twitter thread on Tuesday. Politicians, he says, do not like solving difficult problems:
https://twitter.com/bobscartoons/status/1417403128979283986
https://twitter.com/bobscartoons/status/1417403132900958244
https://twitter.com/bobscartoons/status/1417403135937634314
Yes, but Labour MPs, except for a handful, have actually voted with the Government on continuing coronavirus restrictions.
Moran has no love for Labour leader Sir Keir ‘Keith’ Starmer, either:
https://twitter.com/bobscartoons/status/1417013332494663682
Bob Moran is genuinely concerned about what is happening:
https://twitter.com/bobscartoons/status/1417408537957916672
Also:
https://twitter.com/bobscartoons/status/1417151846746136582
If only we could remove the boot on our collective necks.
The next discussion point in England will be vaccinations for children. Even other conservatives, such as James Delingpole, are sounding the alarm:
I have no words for how awful this is.
Although I’m writing about England, Scotland and Wales are no better with their restrictions. I despair.
Retired Supreme Court Justice Lord Sumption has been a doughty opponent of lockdown since last year.
He has given many interviews during that time.
His most recent one was to Freddie Sayers of UnHerd, an excellent site which explores the world of ideas, history and current affairs.
I found out about Lord Sumption’s interview via Guido Fawkes. On Friday, March 5, Guido posted an article about it as well as an ONS (Office for National Statistics) survey about over-80s breaking lockdown rules:
Guido’s post says (emphases in the original):
Buried in the latest ONS data dump of Covid research is a remarkable – if logical – statistic. Just 33% of over 80s have not met with anyone indoors since having their jab, with 43% admitting to meeting with people other than their carers or support bubble after receiving the first dose. After two jabs, this explicit rule-breaking rises to 48%. Despite the widespread rulebreaking, hospitalisation and death rates amongst the age group are tumbling…
Cheeky octogenarians are not alone – spritely 72-year-old Lord Sumption yesterday made a splash by telling UnHerd that “sometimes the most public-spirited thing that you can do with despotic laws like these is to ignore them” – even claiming that a quiet campaign of “civil disobedience” has already begun …
With regard to the vaccine, most in this age group support it enthusiastically, despite the fact that 41% of the survey’s participants experienced side effects after the first dose. Here are more ONS findings on that subject (emphases mine):
-
- Of those who had experienced side effects and were still awaiting their second dose of a vaccine, 63% said the side effects would not affect their decision to get the second dose, and 35% were more likely to get the second dose.
- Around 19 out of 20 over 80s (96%) would be very or somewhat likely to encourage others to get a COVID-19 vaccination.
Also:
Of over 80s who had received at least one dose of a COVID-19 vaccine, 49% reported that they had met someone who they do not live with, outdoors, since receiving their vaccination; 54% had left home to go shopping, and 45% had left home to participate in outdoor leisure activities.
In contrast, one in five (20%) people who had received at least one dose of a vaccine reported that they had not left home for any reason since receiving their vaccination.
The survey findings add background to what Lord Sumption, 72, told Freddie Sayers of UnHerd.
The video is 51 minutes long and requires concentration:
Note his tie, which has a motif of American flags from the Colonial era with ‘We the People’ printed on it. He also sits with his arms crossed much of the time to hide a physical ailment.
It looks as if they met in his office. Sayers must have been thrilled to resume in-person interviews, as he has had to do them remotely over most of the past year.
Many of the comments beneath the video are from Britons disappointed that Lord Sumption implied that the vaccine will be the only way forward at this point in returning to a normal life. To be fair to him, he did describe it as ‘a regrettable step’ and that ‘people should be prepared to trust each other’, instead (31:00-31:14). Also:
I recognise that most of my fellow citizens want coercive measures.
Unfortunately, I agree with him. There is no way out right now. It is doubtful that the vaccine will be made mandatory by law, but most adults won’t be able to resume much of their prior lives without it. Many employers and businesses will require proof of vaccination. This is likely to also be true for package holidays and international travel.
Lord Sumption talked about how we arrived at this point. He said that the public were afraid of this pandemic and wanted protection from the government. The government protected the public and helped to reinforce the fear factor in their coronavirus briefings and other public statements. Hence, civil liberties went out the window. He said that once those are gone, it is very difficult to regain them, particularly as government ministers enjoy their new roles in controlling the population.
UnHerd has an article with notable quotes from the interview.
On the dangers of public fear, Lord Sumption said:
John Stuart Mill regarded public sentiment and public fear as the principal threat to a liberal democracy. The tendency would be for it to influence policies in a way that whittles away the island within which we are entitled to control our lives to next to nothing. That’s what he regarded as the big danger. It didn’t happen in his own lifetime; it has happened in many countries in the 20th century, and it’s happening in Britain now.
He pointed out that the civil liberties we have taken for granted as being well established are, in fact, highly fragile. They can vanish at any time. To this end, he explained that democratic forms of government are but recent developments in the time line of history:
Democracy is inherently fragile. We have an idea that it’s a very robust system. But democracies have existed for about 150 years. In this country, I think you could say that they existed from the second half of the of the 19th century — they are not the norm. Democracies were regarded in ancient times as inherently self-destructive ways of government. Because, said Aristotle, democracies naturally turn themselves into tyranny. Because the populace will always be a sucker for a demagogue who will turn himself into an absolute ruler…
Now, it is quite remarkable that Aristotle’s gloomy predictions about the fate of democracies have been falsified by the experience of the West ever since the beginning of democracy. And I think one needs to ask why that is. In my view, the reason is this: Aristotle was basically right about the tendencies, but we have managed to avoid it by a shared political culture of restraint. And this culture of restraint, which because it depends on the collective mentality of our societies, is extremely fragile, quite easy to destroy and extremely difficult to recreate.
Allow me to add that this is why America’s Founding Fathers established a republic, not a democracy. They feared eventual despotism. The establishment of the Electoral College was also intended to be a safeguard against demagoguery.
Freddie Sayers asked Lord Sumption how we got to the point where we consented to the government taking away our civil liberties when they had been held sacrosanct for so long.
Lord Sumption said that our stability as a society and as a nation relies on the support most citizens have towards national institutions. Once a large enough percentage of people begin to question those, everything is gradually thrown into doubt. Socio-political fissures develop and something or someone comes in to replace what citizens as a whole once respected and valued.
Sayers asked him how he became so outspoken on the government’s coronavirus policies. He replied that no one else was stepping up to do so, therefore, he decided to speak up:
I would very much have preferred the kind of points that I have been consistently making for the last year to have been made by just about anybody else. Those colleagues or former colleagues who disapprove of what I’ve been doing have got a perfectly good point. But there are some issues which are so central to the dilemmas of our time, which are so important, where I think that you have to be prepared to stand up and be counted.
He reiterated his awareness that he is in a minority, however, that small minority from last year is now becoming a ‘significant’ minority.
He thinks the Coronavirus Act 2020 is an example of bad law. As such, he does not feel any moral obligation to obey it and advises each of us to do as we think best as individuals:
I feel sad that we have the kind of laws which public-spirited people may need to break. I have always taken a line on this, which is probably different from that of most of my former colleagues. I do not believe that there is a moral obligation to obey the law… You have to have a high degree of respect, both for the object that the law is trying to achieve, and for the way that it’s been achieved. Some laws invite breach. I think this is one of them.
Politically, Lord Sumption describes himself as a ‘small-l Liberal’, which is classical liberalism — free market economy and small government — rather than what Americans define as ‘liberal’, meaning left-wing. He served as a Justice of the Supreme Court under David Cameron’s and Theresa May’s Conservative governments.
He had this advice for Boris Johnson’s government:
My first proposal is that governments should not treat information as a tool for manipulating public behaviour. They should be calmer than the majority of their citizens; they should be completely objective. My second lesson would be that governments dealing with scientific issues should not allow themselves to be influenced by a single caucus of scientists. They should always test what they are being told in a way that, for instance, judges test expert opinion by producing a counter expert, and working out which set of views stacks up best.
In other words, the government should stop ginning up fear and listen to scientists other than those on SAGE.
In closing, while watching the video and based on nothing at all, I had a recurring thought that Lord Sumption is an opera lover.
Afterwards, I looked up his Wikipedia entry. Amazingly, I found this:
An opera lover, he serves as a director of the English National Opera and as a governor of the Royal Academy of Music.[46]
I do wish Boris and Co. would meet with Lord Sumption, listen carefully to what he has to say, then act on his advice.
In closing, curtailment of civil liberties can extend to protests. There are the correct kind of protests, such as those in June 2020. Then there are the wrong type of protests.
This one was obviously in the latter category, because the organiser received a £10,000 fine:
Currently, the only places in the UK where a group of people can gather to discuss anything outside the home are the two Houses of Parliament.
An MP pointed that out last week.
As he said, that is wrong on so many levels.
On Monday, January 18, 2021, former Supreme Court Justice Lord Sumption appeared on Julia Hartley-Brewer’s talkRADIO show to discuss the perils of lockdown:
From early last year, Lord Sumption has been a calm, rational opponent of lockdown.
Breitbart has a summary of the three-minute interview clip. Excerpts follow, emphases mine.
I am pleased that his stance has not changed:
Lord Sumption, who last month branded lockdowns “profoundly immoral” and “useless”, told talkRADIO’s Julia Hartley-Brewer on Monday: “We are in the process of turning a public health crisis into an economic, social, and educational disaster.
“We didn’t have to do this. One of the problems is that the government has never been prepared at least to acknowledge that it is necessary to weigh up one thing against another. We cannot have both: lockdown and a prosperous economy. The fact is that no country ever managed to reduce deaths by making itself poorer.”
He warned that this will have a long-term, generational effect:
Lord Sumption continued: “What we have is a lot of people in this country that because they are frightened, or in the case of the government because they are manipulative, are only prepared to look at part of what is actually a very complicated problem.
“You can’t just look at it as a public health issue because it’s a major economic issue. I’m not talking just about the prosperity of businesses, I’m talking about jobs, and how a generation of young people entering the job market is entering a void and the consequences of that are terrible.
“It’s going to live with them for years and years. Long after we’ve forgotten about COVID, they’ll be suffering from the consequences of this. The problem is that emotion is a tool for avoiding difficult choices and the idea that there are no difficult choices — in this case, that the answer is simply to lock down — is frankly absurd.”
Using independent sources, Breitbart supports Lord Sumption’s views about the economy and about the effect on NHS services in other areas:
A survey conducted by the Federation of Small Businesses (FSB) found that it is expected that around a quarter of a million small businesses will collapse as a result of the lockdown this year.
Reports since the beginning of the lockdowns have also revealed the cost to the nation’s wider wellbeing as NHS hospitals prioritised COVID care and cancelled other services, including a fall in chemotherapy attendance and early cancer referrals, and people dying on transplant waiting lists. There has also been a rise in people feeling depressed or suicidal.
The following graph shows that lockdown was — and is — not necessary. It shows deaths in England between 1971 and 2020. There was hardly an uptick last year:
LBC’s talk radio show presenter Maajid Nawaz has also been an outspoken opponent of lockdown.
Last Sunday, he put together an exhaustive thread — excerpts of which follow — about the dangers of lockdown worldwide, especially for children:
https://twitter.com/MaajidNawaz/status/1350903262917103619
https://twitter.com/MaajidNawaz/status/1350903265895067652
https://twitter.com/MaajidNawaz/status/1350903268814237699
https://twitter.com/MaajidNawaz/status/1350903271939043334
https://twitter.com/MaajidNawaz/status/1350903277727215618
https://twitter.com/MaajidNawaz/status/1350903287734788097
https://twitter.com/MaajidNawaz/status/1350903290981199881
Lockdown is made for the middle class a) who have houses with gardens and b) who never have to worry about losing their jobs — public sector employees:
Ten months on, this is a never-ending downward spiral, where the rules change every few weeks and are often contradictory. More on that in another post.
Last week proved to be another emotive and passionate one in the House of Commons with regard to coronavirus and Brexit.
This post concerns coronavirus.
On Monday, September 14, Prime Minister Boris Johnson’s Rule of Six, which he announced on September 9, came into effect. It sounds rather Chinese.
It means that people living in England cannot meet in groups of greater than six, indoors or outdoors. If we do, according to him, we ‘will be breaking the law’.
He also introduced a new platoon to keep us in line: COVID marshals, to remind us of existing coronavirus rules in England — ‘hands, face, space’.
Recall that Boris said after the December 2019 election that we now have the People’s Government. Hmm.
The UK government is copying a Belgian idea. The Rule of Six reduced their second spike.
Increasingly, Britons have been looking back at Sweden, which refused to lock down. Fraser Nelson is the editor of The Spectator. Chris Whitty is our Chief Medical Officer; in May, he said that coronavirus was harmless for most people and most of us would never get it:
Michael Gove MP, a Cabinet minister and Chancellor of the Duchy of Lancaster, made matters worse when he confirmed that under-12s were part of the Rule of Six, unlike in Scotland and Wales, where under-12s are not. With life getting back to normal as school has started again, this came as a blow to many families:
https://twitter.com/simondolan/status/1305050680340754442
The Telegraph reported that the Cabinet was split on the proposals (emphases mine):
… one senior Tory source said that “half the Cabinet” had doubts about the so-called ‘rule of six’, and it was “pretty hard to find a Conservative member of Parliament who agrees with all of this”.
The COVID marshals are also a problem for police and local councils:
Meanwhile, Mr Johnson’s plan for coronavirus marshals to help enforce the six-person rule was unraveling as police derided them as “Covid Wombles” and councils said they were a “gimmick”.
Downing Street admitted councils would not be given any money to pay for the marshals, suggesting volunteers could do the job, and said it would be up to individual local authorities to decide whether they actually wanted them.
It got worse, as curfews were mooted:
The Government has discussed going even further with new lockdown restrictions, and has drawn up “a well-developed proposal” for a nationwide curfew which was discussed at ministerial level.
My head spun.
Then the ministerial snitch crowd appeared on weekend news programmes to say that people must tell on their neighbours if they are seen to be violating the Rule of Six:
Political journalist Isabel Oakeshott rightly responded:
I couldn’t agree more. This is supposed to be the People’s Government, isn’t it?
History will not look kindly on 2020 with regard to the measures taken to combat the virus:
I was wrong.
Home Secretary Priti Patel said that people should not even talk when they see friends in the street, even at a distance (audio here, thanks to Guido Fawkes, and there’s video, too):
Yebbut, if you DO report what appears to be criminal activity, allegedly, the police do not want to know. Here is a printscreen of a set of comments on a Guido Fawkes thread. I call your attention to the last two. Police would rather pick on mums and their children. Ironically, that was posted on the anniversary of the Battle of Britain. Go figure.
A mild-mannered man from Buckingham called talkRADIO to say he would not comply with the Rule of Six because the Government had gone too far.
So did a lady from Brighton, saying that the Rule of Six was about:
control. They’re trying to see how much they can get away with.
Another talkRADIO host, Julia Hartley-Brewer, had a go at Roy Lilley, former NHS Trust chairman. She said:
We are being scared into thinking we have to give up our civil liberties when that won’t save lives. Being sensible will save lives.
The Telegraph‘s Salley Vickers wrote of the restrictions on her and her loved ones:
I would rather risk dying and have the joy of their company than lose that vital contribution to my own happiness.
With the festive season only several weeks away, the Daily Mail‘s Peter Hitchens told talkRADIO’s Mike Graham that the Rule of Six has:
made Christmas an arrestable offence.
Another Daily Mail journalist, Bel Mooney, wrote an editorial for Conservative Woman saying that she was surprised at the amount of resistance she received when she wrote that she would be defying the Rule of Six at Christmas:
… in response to Matt Hancock’s sudden, arbitrary and illogical ‘rule of six’ diktat, I wrote a strong opinion piece (at the request of my newspaper) headlined ‘NO, NO, NO! I’m having Christmas for 14 – and no puffed-up Covid marshal will stop me’.
As you might expect, there was a huge response. I never look online, and am not on Twitter (I expect there was a lot of poison swilling around out there). I am talking about emails to me and the newspaper. What interested me was the fact that, if I am to be honest, the antis outnumbered the pros. I didn’t expect that from Mail readers.
You can never tell with Mail readers, though. They’re a tricky lot.
Oxford University’s Professor Carl Heneghan and honorary research fellow Tom Jefferson wrote an article for The Spectator against the Rule of Six, saying that Boris must bin it:
At Oxford University’s Centre for Evidence Based Medicine, we have spent years trawling through the scientific evidence on the effects of measures such as distancing on respiratory viral spread. We are not aware of any study pointing to the number six. If it’s made up, why not five or seven? …
Northern Ireland has taken a more measured approach and not announced any changes to how many people can meet. These disagreements in policy reveal how decisions are being made without evidence. It seems that somebody in government sat in a cabinet office room and said six is a good idea and nobody disagreed …
The problems with policy stem from the current cabinet’s vast inexperience: the Health Secretary has been in post for just over two years now; the PM and the Chief Medical Officer a year. The Joint Biosecurity Centre is overseen by a senior spy who monitors the spread of coronavirus and suppresses new outbreaks. Add to this mix the new chair of the National Institute for Health Protection, who similarly has little or no background in healthcare. Our leaders amount to little more than a Dad’s Army of highly paid individuals with little or no experience of the job at hand.
This inexperience leads to rash decisions and arbitrary policies.
One example is that entire areas can be locked down if they have 50 cases per 100,000 people. Yet the recognised alert threshold for ‘regular’ acute respiratory infections is 400 cases per 100,000.
Lord Sumption, who has been speaking out against lockdown this year, said that the Rule of Six will be unenforceable. I hope he is right:
Tom Tugendhat (Tunbridge and Malling, Con) expressed his concerns about the new rule and rightly wanted MPs to vote on it and similar measures:
It’s unlikely that the House of Lords can help, either. They already have a full schedule. We should thank Lord Lamont for raising the issue of consulting the public, however. ‘SI’ means ‘statutory instrument’:
Monday, September 14
Behind the scenes and well outside of Parliament, an email emerged dated May 23, wherein Chief Scientific Adviser Sir Patrick Vallance stated he had pushed the most for March’s lockdown:
Guido Fawkes has the full text of the email. I am not sure how Sir Patrick thinks that a vaccine will achieve herd immunity, though.
In the first of the debates on the Brexit-related Internal Market Bill, Charles Walker MP (Broxbourne, Con) prefaced his comments by expressing his dismay about the Rule of Six, the lack of consultation with Parliament and the fining of Jeremy Corbyn’s brother Piers at the anti-lockdown rally on Saturday, September 12.
Thank you, Charles Walker:
https://twitter.com/cptreddog/status/1305628650499436547
This is short and well worth watching:
Tuesday, September 15
Secretary of State for Health and Social Care Matt Hancock poled up to make a statement to MPs about the Rule of Six and testing.
Excerpts follow:
There are signs that the number of cases in care homes and the number of hospitalisations is starting to rise again, so last week we acted quickly, putting in place new measures—the rule of six, which came into force yesterday. We do not do this lightly, but the cost of doing nothing is much greater.
Testing also has a vital part to play. Everyone in this House knows that we are doing more testing per head of population than almost any other major nation, and I can tell the House that we have now carried out over 20 million tests for coronavirus in this country. As we expand capacity further, we are working round the clock to make sure that everyone who needs a test can get a test. The vast majority of people who use our testing service get a test that is close to home, and the average distance travelled to a test site is now just 5.8 miles —down from 6.4 miles last week; but the whole House knows that there are operational challenges, and we are working hard to fix them.
We have seen a sharp rise in people coming forward for a test, including those who are not eligible.
Jonathan Ashworth (Leicester South, Lab/Co-op), speaking for the opposition, said:
I am grateful for advance sight of the Secretary of State’s answer. That was decent of him.
Yesterday LBC revealed that there were no tests available in covid hotspots, including Rochdale, Pendle and Bradford. Over the weekend in Bolton, where infections are the highest in the country, a mobile testing centre failed to turn up. Meanwhile, in Bury hundreds queued for five hours for a test. In Walsall, a father with his sick child travelled 76 miles to an appointment in Wales, only to find on arrival that tests had run out. Increasing numbers of teachers and pupils are not in school. In hospitals, operations are cancelled while NHS staff are stuck in limbo, waiting for tests.
The Secretary of State blames increased demand, but when tracing consistently fails to reach 80% of contacts, when less than 20% of those with symptoms self-isolate properly and there is a lack of financial security, infections rise. When schools reopen and people return to workplaces and social distancing becomes harder, infections rise. Extra demand on the system was inevitable. Why did he not use the summer to significantly expand NHS lab capacity and fix contact tracing?
Just as demand is increasing, the ability to process tests is diminishing. Post-graduate students working in the Lighthouse labs are returning to university, so why did the Secretary of State not plan for the inevitable staff shortages in the Lighthouse labs? Those commercial pillar 2 labs, The Sunday Times revealed at the weekend, have a huge backlog of 185,000 tests. Thursday’s data revealed that 65,709 test results were not returned by the end of the week. Care home residents now wait an average of 83 hours for their result. The Prime Minister promised us a 24-hour turnaround for results, so what is going on? What is the current backlog and what is the timeframe for clearing it?
We were promised a world-beating system, so why are we sending tests to Germany and Italy for processing? But, most importantly, people want to know when they will get a test and when this mess will be fixed. Today there will be thousands of ill people trying to book a test, only to be told none is available. When will people be able to book a test online again, or has the online booking system been deliberately disabled? When will ill people no longer have to travel hundreds of miles for a test that should be available on their doorstep? When will pupils and teachers out of school get access to testing, so they can get back to school? When will NHS staff have access to regular testing, so they can focus on their patients and not be sitting at home?
We are at a perilous moment. Imperial College estimates the virus is doubling every seven to eight days. We all want to avoid further restrictions or another national lockdown, but when testing and contact tracing break down, the growth of the virus cannot be tracked. The Prime Minister promised us whack-a-mole, but instead his mallet is broken. The Secretary of State is losing control of the virus; he needs to fix testing now.
Many MPs — from both Opposition and Conservative benches — said that their constituents could not get tests.
Even the Speaker of the House tweeted that his constituents were having similar problems:
The testing situation is shocking — as Terry-Thomas used to say in the Boulting Brothers films: ‘An absolute shower!’
On the upside, the British coronavirus jobs situation is improving, thank goodness (more from Guido here):
Wednesday, September 16
Deputy Labour Leader Angela Rayner (Ashton-under-Lyne) stood at the Opposition despatch box for Prime Minister’s Questions (PMQs), as Sir Keir Starmer was self-isolating:
She did a good job.
She began by saying:
Many people in the Chamber will think that the battle of Britain is today, but actually we marked the 80th anniversary of those veterans yesterday, and I want to put on record our thanks to all those who fought for our country in the past.
I want to start by reading to the Prime Minister a message that I have received from a man called Keir. Keir was not able to go to work today and his children could not go to school because his family had to wait for their coronavirus test results, despite the Prime Minister’s promise of results within 24 hours. Keir was able to do the right thing and self-isolate and work from home, but other people are not in this position, and many of them are the very people who were getting us through this crisis, such as the care workers, who I used to work alongside before I was elected to this House. The Prime Minister once earned £2,300 an hour; can he tell us the average hourly rate of a care worker in this country?
Boris was singularly unimpressed, although he had a neutral expression on his face, even when discussing Starmer:
I congratulate the hon. Lady on her elevation. She speaks of the constituent Keir, and I can tell her that—allegedly, apparently—he has had a negative test, and I do not know quite why he is not here. But 89% of those who have in-person tests get them the next day, and we are working very fast to turn around all the test requests that we get. I think that most people looking at the record of this country in delivering tests across the nation will see that that compares extremely well with any other European country. We have conducted more testing than any other European country, and that is why we are able to deliver tests and results in 80% of cases where we know the contacts.
The hon. Lady asks about care homes, and I can tell the House that today we are launching the winter care home action plan. She is right to raise the issue of care homes, and we are concerned about infection rates in care homes, but we will do everything we can to ensure that care homes and their workers are protected.
On the hon. Lady’s final point, I am proud that it is this Government who have instituted the national living wage to ensure that every worker in this country, including care home workers, is paid substantially more, thanks to the care and the work of the people of this country.
Boris listened attentively and responded sensitively to all the points that Angela Rayner raised until this point, which came several minutes in, when she said:
Infections are rising. The testing system is collapsing. When you are the Prime Minister, you cannot keep trying to blame other people for your own incompetence. We have the highest death toll in Europe, and we are on course for one of the worst recessions in the developed world. This winter, we are staring down the barrel of a second wave, with no plan for the looming crisis. People cannot say goodbye to their loved ones. Grandparents cannot see their grandchildren. Frontline staff cannot get the tests that they need. And what was the top priority for the covid war Cabinet this weekend? Restoring grouse shooting.
I suppose that is good news for people like the Prime Minister’s friend who paid for a luxury Christmas getaway to a Caribbean island and funded his leadership campaign, and just so happens to own two grouse moor estates. So Prime Minister, is this really your top priority?
The Prime Minister answered:
While the Labour Opposition have been consistently carping from the sidelines throughout this crisis and raising, frankly, issues that are tangential, if not scare stories about what is going on, we are getting on with delivering for the British public. We are not only massively ramping up. She has not contested any of my statistics today about the extent to which this country is now testing more than any other European country.
She has not disputed the massive acceleration in our programme. [Interruption.] I will answer the substance of her question, thank you very much. We are getting on with delivering on the priorities of the British people: getting us through this covid crisis; delivering on making our country safer, bringing forward measures to stop the early release of dangerous sexual and violent offenders, which I hope she will support; strengthening our Union, which in principle Opposition Front Benchers should support; and building more homes across this country and more affordable homes across this country, which she should support. That is in addition to recruiting more doctors and more nurses, and building more hospitals.
I do not think anybody is in any doubt that this Government are facing some of the most difficult dilemmas that any modern Government have had to face, but every day we are helping to solve them, thanks to the massive common sense of the British people, who are getting on with delivering our programme and our fight against coronavirus. It is with the common sense of the British people that we will succeed, and build back better and stronger than ever before.
If only.
That day, news of an upcoming curfew in London emerged.
Apparently, the British people don’t have much common sense, after all.
Currently, London has some of the fewest new coronavirus cases (i.e. positive tests, little hospitalisation):
Guido rightly wrote (emphases in the original here):
If this afternoon’s splash from the Evening Standard is true, it is a step too far. The London director of Public Health England (yes, the organisation is still limping on for now, despite the Health Secretary announcing its abolition back in August) has issued a “curfew alert” to the capital through the newspaper, saying residents could face a mandatory curfew if Covid cases continue to rise. A ridiculous suggestion that should be forcefully opposed.
Shutting pubs, bars, restaurants, and just about everything else at an arbitrary hour will obviously do nothing to stop the spread of coronavirus. If anything, the move will be counter-productive – compressing the same number of customers into a shorter time and making social distancing harder still. Or pushing social gatherings into homes not bars, which are thought to be more likely to spread the virus. This no doubt ineffective PHE [Public Health England] nannying should have been dumped when the organisation was. The government need to remember there is a limit to people’s compliance. This might just hit it.
As I write early on Tuesday, September 22, Boris is planning to bring in an England-wide curfew for pubs and restaurants on Thursday. As if the virus will know the difference between a 10 p.m. closing time versus the usual one of 11 p.m. The mind boggles.
Thursday, September 17
Matt Hancock appeared again with another update on coronavirus.
This time, it was about measures taken on lockdown in the North East of England. This includes strict adherence to household bubbles, table service only in hospitality venues and a curfew between 10 p.m. and 5 a.m.:
Once again, he was straining every sinew, an expression he has been using since March:
The battle against coronavirus is not over, and while we strain every sinew to spring free of its clutches, with winter on the horizon we must prepare, bolster our defences and come together once again against this common foe.
Then he announced upcoming plans to make everyone using A&E (Accident and Emergency) departments to make a booking! Good grief:
… we are working to get patients the right care in the right place, by expanding the role of NHS 111. During the peak of this pandemic, we saw millions of people using NHS 111, on the phone or online, to get the best possible advice on coronavirus, helping them to stay safe and, where possible, to stay out of hospital, where they could have unknowingly spread the virus. It is crucial that, ahead of winter, we use this window of opportunity to seek out what worked and build on it, so we provide a better service for patients and protect the NHS. Of course, no one will ever be turned away from our emergency departments in the most serious of cases; however, we have worked with the royal colleges, the NHS and others to develop a better, quicker and more clinically appropriate service for patients by using NHS 111 first.
This is how it works. We will invest £24 million to increase call-handling capacity and to make sure there are more clinicians on hand to provide expert advice and guidance, and we will build on our trials to make NHS 111 a gateway to the emergency care system, providing a first port of call for patients. In future, rather than having to queue in an emergency ward, we are testing that people should call NHS 111 first to book an appointment with whoever can give them the most appropriate care, whether it is a GP, a specialist consultant, a pharmacist, a nurse or community services. Of course if they need to go to the emergency department, NHS 111 will be able to book them into an appropriate time slot. We want to see this approach lead to shorter waiting times and better availability of appointments for patients. We will consult on how its performance is best measured, and, with successful pilots, we will roll out NHS 111 First to all trusts from December.
This is the bit that galled me the most:
The purpose of 111 First is to improve access, including in terms of inequalities in the NHS, by ensuring that people get the right treatment in the right place and easier access if they do need to go to an emergency department, because the emergency department will know that they are coming. It is commonplace now in almost every part of our life to let people know that we are coming. If we are going to do something as important as visit an emergency department, it will help both the patient seeking treatment and the NHS to let them know that they are coming first. That is the principle behind 111 First. It sits alongside 999, which anybody should call in a serious incident.
‘People’s government’, my eye.
Nor is the NHS the people’s health service.
If you have a serious injury, you or your loved ones could be losing life- or limb-saving time by calling 111 or 999.
Based on what I read during the March lockdown, calling 111 was life-threatening. Children calling on behalf of elderly parents were told, ‘If your relative is not turning blue, do the best you can.’
Calling the ambulance service on 999 generally produced this result: ‘We’re overloaded. If you can take your relative to hospital yourself, please do so.’
Over the past few months, I have heard NHS senior executives give testimony to Select Committees. They do not want patients coming in to a hospital, to a GP surgery — anywhere on NHS property.
An absolute shower!
Speaking of absolute showers, Baroness Harding — Dido Harding, a former jockey and failed business consultant/corporate director — gave testimony to a Select Committee, the Commons Science and Technology Committee, led by Greg Clark MP (Tunbridge Wells, Con).
Wow. It was car-crash television on BBC Parliament.
Baroness Harding is, inexplicably, the director of NHS Test and Trace programme.
Greg Clark is no slouch. He pressed and pressed the same question. Did she not anticipate the increase of demand for tests after lockdown lifted?
Finally, she gave the answer.
The Independent reported:
Demand for coronavirus tests is three to four times the number available, the director of NHS test and trace has admitted.
Baroness Dido Harding, who told MPs there was capacity to carry out 242,817 tests a day, said the “sizeable” rise in demand had been unexpected.
Boris Johnson has pledged to raise capacity to 500,000 by next month – but Baroness Harding’s estimates suggest that even that figure would not be enough to satisfy demand.
Even then:
despite images of queues outside Covid-19 drive-in centres, the testing tsar said: “I strongly refute that the system is failing.”
She put the blame on SAGE …
Baroness Harding insisted current capacity had been based on modelling provided by the government’s Scientific Advisory Group for Emergencies (Sage) and suggested that around a quarter of those seeking tests did not have symptoms.
… and the testing laboratories:
Quizzed by the committee chair and former Tory minister Greg Clark on the current issues in the system, she said that the “constraint” in the testing was in processing and laboratories.
On Friday, Sir Jeremy Farrar, a SAGE member and director of the Wellcome Trust, hit back.
The Telegraph reported:
Sir Jeremy Farrar, the director of the Wellcome Trust, who sits on the Government’s Scientific Advisory Group for Emergencies, said the body had given “clear advice” that a fully functioning test, track and trace system should be in place …
Responding to her comments on social media, Sir Jeremy said he had personally warned that a growing testing crisis was looming.
“Interesting to be blaming Sage,” he wrote on Twitter. “Has been clear, and in the advice, that the UK faced an inevitable increase in community transmission and cases after the summer and needed a fully functional and trusted test, track and trace in place.”
Sir Jeremy posted his comments from a BBC interview with Andrew Marr in June, in which he warned of a “nasty rebound” if steps were not taken to improve testing. He also re-posted an article from May in which he warned that lifting restrictions was difficult even with a fully working testing programme in operation.
The testing crisis deepened on Friday when it emerged that children at four out of five schools are staying at home because they cannot get a test …
This coronavirus business will only get worse. Watch and wait.
Part 2 concerns the Brexit-related Internal Market Bill.
Last week, a number of essays and interviews about lockdown appeared in Britain.
There are still people who think that it can be lifted as quickly as it was imposed in so many countries. As we have seen across much of the Free World, as it used to be called, lifting lockdown must be done in stages, otherwise, we might have a second spike in coronavirus cases.
Here in the UK, Prime Minister Boris Johnson followed the Swedish model until the evening of Monday, March 23, when he announced lockdown.
Was it because of Professor Neil Ferguson’s (dodgy) numbers? Was it media pressure as they asked daily for a lockdown ‘like Germany, like Italy’? In time, we will find out why. Perhaps Boris did not want to be labelled a mass murderer, as he surely would have, if he did not succumb.
Here are the British fatality figures from COVID-19 compared with other pandemics over the past 112 years:
Did we lockdown in 1918 and 1919 for the Spanish Flu with 200,000 deaths when our population was smaller? No.
Did we do it for the Hong Kong flu in 1968 and 1969 with 80,000 deaths, again when the population was smaller than today? No.
Therefore, it makes little sense that we did so in 2020 with a larger UK population and 43,479 projected deaths.
Lionel Shriver, an American author (We Need to Talk about Kevin), who lives in the UK, provides current worldwide death statistics from other causes in ‘This is not a natural disaster, but a manmade one’, which she wrote for The Spectator on May 16. Emphases mine below:
For maintaining a precious sense of proportion, check out some other annual global fatalities: influenza, up to 650,000. Typhoid fever, up to 160,000. Cholera, up to 140,000. Malaria, 620,000 in 2017, almost all in Africa (so who cares, right?). In 2018, tuberculosis, developing treacherous antibiotic resistance, killed 1.5 million people. Why haven’t we closed down the whole world for TB?
I couldn’t agree more.
She expresses my deepest reservations here:
I am steeped in dread. I foresee months, if not years, of inane gesturing towards ‘safety’ that makes no appreciable difference to the nation’s health, but does manage to 1) ruin everyone’s enjoyment; 2) perpetuate the socially poisonous notion that one’s neighbour is a threat to one’s very life; 3) maintain an atmosphere of the extraordinary, in which the state may violate civil rights at will; 4) lay waste to what little might otherwise have remained of this country’s economy. The lockdown has been bad enough. Post-lockdown could be worse.
Shriver understands. Forget ‘science’, this will be the reality:
With narrow profit margins, restaurants can’t survive serving a fraction of their previous clientele. Half of all UK pubs are already kaput, and the other half will soon go under if lone customers self-isolate over their drinks like sullen alcoholics. Plenty of manufacturing won’t function with employees so far apart. The arts are finished.
What she says about London is bang on the button:
West End theatres with audiences a third their former size will close. The Albert Hall is also looking at social-distancing bankruptcy, as well as considering the banning of intervals because the loos will have to be shut (sounds relaxing). The Royal Opera House’s streaming of Swan Lake without a live audience makes no money.
Oh, and transport! In London, social distancing is expected to reduce Tube passenger numbers by 90 per cent. Five million people daily ride the Tube, or used to, so how are the other 4.5 million meant to get around? By bicycle. Right. Now, I can assure you that pre-Covid it was already a nightmare to cycle in the capital, as chocka with two-wheelers as the old Shanghai. But forget buses, allowed to carry 15 per cent of their previous ridership. We’re told that to get into a sparsely populated lift, we may have to make a reservation on an app. But never fear. I guess we could always throw ourselves off the balcony instead. Why, with the masky, glovey, get-away-from-me future we’re all facing, taking that shortest route to the pavement starts to appeal.
Then there is the 14-day quarantine of incoming air passengers from other countries. France is implementing the same policy and, oddly, the French think it’s a good idea:
Worst of all, lest some sector somewhere still struggles back to solvency, we’ll now order air passengers from abroad to ‘quarantine’ for a solid fortnight straight off the plane. Because passengers can promise to quarantine themselves in a particular location, this policy comes with obvious enforcement problems. Quarantines will either be roundly ignored (so what’s the point?), or they’ll require extravagant police resources to keep rapping on doors to ensure some visiting Canadian didn’t nip out for a litre of milk. What this policy is guaranteed to achieve is the total devastation of both the British tourist industry and British airlines, especially since the business travel on which aviation depends will evaporate.
On Sunday, May 17, The Spectator posted another article: Claire Fox’s ‘My fears about the “new normal”‘. It explores how we are beginning to view the return to freedom in England during our partial lockdown lift as well as at the resistance to lockdown lifting:
The present lifting of restrictions – despite being mild to the point of mealy-mouthed – is opposed with similar howls of caution; each minor freedom we are granted is treated as a dangerous act of rashness. This approach indicates a deeper estrangement from freedom than merely a pragmatic shrug of acceptance of short-term measures.
In this context, I fear that the ‘new normal’ will involve a new attitude to freedom. Already, culturally, you can feel a shift. I find myself grateful to be given access to public parks, to be allowed to take more exercise (when normally I would take none). Going to the shop for a non-essential birthday present last week, I was as furtive as a would-be criminal. And in all the discussions on post-Covid life, basic freedoms are treated as something that we need permission for: a piecemeal, rules-based, government allowance, handed down and punitively policed if we dare over-step the mark, whether it is by a clandestine meeting with mates or a sly assignation with a lover.
The left are more worried about lifting lockdown than conservatives are. Who gets nearly all the media attention? The left.
Fox rightly points out that we are going to have to wean ourselves off the overriding concern over COVID-19 deaths and start looking at what else has been going on in our society over the past two months: serious health conditions and suicide among them.
The tension between the left and conservatives reveals how each group views God-given liberties, which Western governments are supposed to defend. Instead, we are now experiencing discussions in the media about freedom versus safety. Fox says:
My nervousness is that for many the value du jour is safety rather than freedom.
The state’s role in keeping its citizens safe has historically created familiar tensions in weighing freedom versus security. Most recently, civil liberties activists internationally raised concerns that policies introduced to keep people safe from the threat of jihadi terrorism have resulted in widescale illiberal incursions into the rule of law, privacy and free expression. But in dealing with Covid, there’s an added element. When those who resist lifting lockdown cite what-if doomsday scenarios, they posit freedom itself as the enemy of safety: liberty itself is presented as threatening lives …
Is it really such a stark choice as: dead or safe? Alive or free? In fact, we owe our own freedoms to others who put their safety and lives on the line. Every freedom fighter – whether Hong Kong democracy activists, Kurdish fighters who defeated Isis, or those we remembered on the VE Day anniversary – all took on totalitarian states and risked their lives and safety in the fight for free societies.
…reorganising life around safety as an end goal feeds on subjective, free-floating feelings of insecurity and can rob us of the confidence to live free lives. And that is my greatest dread: that we lose the habit of living freedom. Like the apocryphal released prisoner who misses the routine and security of jail so much that he contrives to be re-arrested, is there a danger that we become institutionalised into withdrawing from the undoubted demands that freedom makes of us?
The government has made physical exercise almost mandatory during this lockdown. But freedom, too, is a muscle that needs to be exercised, or it will atrophy. But exercising freedom is no easy ride, and can be as painful metaphysically as the most strenuous workout. To exercise our freedom as autonomous citizens we have to make difficult decisions, use our judgement, live with the uncertainty of knowing there are no preordained outcomes. It’s a risky business: we will invariably make mistakes that we’ll be held responsible for; we will sometimes take the wrong road and have to live with the consequences, with no-one to blame but ourselves. Relieved of many of these dilemmas during this extraordinary period of having our liberty curtailed, it is perhaps understandable that many of us rather dread entering the fray of freedom.
Several weeks ago, I saw a BBC interview of a Chinese family coming out of lockdown. The mother said that they valued a draconian lockdown because the State was protecting their health. She said that safety trumped liberty (as much as can be had in China). How soon will it be until we have a sizeable number of Britons saying the same thing?
But who wants to be cooped up — accomplished in a five-minute announcement on television — when it robs our lives of meaning?
Fox concludes:
So if we are to have a ‘new normal’, can it aim to embed within it freedom’s historic role as a virtue worth dying for, and make its clarion call the joyous rewards of a free society that makes life worth living. Being able to love who we want; read, write and think what we want; associate with who we want; vote for what we want – all this and so much more allows us to be agents of our own destiny, to write our own life story rather than being bit part characters in someone else’s story.
If the Covid narrative insists on a new normal, let’s ensure the script contains Goethe’s quote that ‘freedom and life are earned by those alone who conquer them each day anew’. Despite the grim tragedy of recent months, we need to make freedom central to the Covid storyline to ensure that there’s at least some chance of a happy ending to this tragedy.
On May 17, the BBC interviewed a retired Justice of the Supreme Court, Lord Sumption, who offered similar, salient arguments against lockdown, which he said should be lifted now, as there is no need for it. He said that he has been obeying lockdown rules, because the law obliges it, but, if the pubs were open — even crowded ones — he would go to one. Similarly, he said, if theatres were open, he would attend a performance. He spoke of the many negatives of lockdown to health and civil liberties. At the end, the interviewer asked him what he had been doing during lockdown. He replied that he would not say because he did not want to be verbally attacked by the BBC!
This is definitely worth watching (eight minutes in length):
There was a time, back in early March, when I thought the Conservatives were on our side.
I hope I am wrong in doubting them. We’ll see what happens in the weeks to come.
Churchmouse Campanologist 