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Last Friday’s post introduced Red Wall MP Lee Anderson, who serves the Ashfield constituency in Nottinghamshire.
I ran across an article about him in the Daily Mail, which published it exactly one month before the 2019 general election.
To set the background, Anderson had switched party membership from Labour to Conservative the year before, largely because of Brexit but also because of radical elements in Labour. Jeremy Corbyn, now an Independent MP, was Labour leader and his followers formed a movement within the party called Momentum. The movement has since lost its, err, momentum, particularly during the leadership challenge which Sir Keir Starmer won in 2020.
The Mail‘s portrait of Lee Anderson tells us about his situation three years ago. His predecessor Gloria de Piero, for whom he worked, was and currently is a television presenter. She appears on GB News (emphases mine):
A former aide to a Labour frontbencher has defected to the Tories claiming he was hounded out of his old party by far-Left bullies.
Lee Anderson, an ex-miner who worked for MP Gloria de Piero, said he was labelled a ‘traitor’ by party officials for backing Brexit.
He claims they camped outside his home to spy on him and spread false rumours about his terminally-ill wife.
Now Mr Anderson, a lifelong Labour supporter, is standing as a Tory candidate in Mrs de Piero’s old seat, Ashfield in Nottinghamshire.
That seat will be one of the most closely-watched of the election and currently has a Labour majority of just 441.
Mr Anderson, 52, claims the constituency Labour party was taken over by Momentum ‘almost overnight’ after Jeremy Corbyn was elected leader in 2015.
He claims they started bullying him in the run-up to the Brexit vote in June 2016 labelling him ‘treacherous’ and a ‘traitor’ for wanting to leave the EU.
At the time, Mr Anderson’s wife Sinead was ill with cystic fibrosis and on a life-support machine awaiting a double lung transplant.
He said: ‘It was like being in a crowded room of people who were whispering all the time. Finger-pointing, I’m a freak in the house, the Brexit freak. There was social media bullying, ‘traitor’, ‘Tory-boy’, ‘scum’. People were camped outside, spying on me.
‘At the time my wife was terminally ill and we thought she only had a few months to live. They said I was just using her illness as an excuse not to attend a meeting.’
Mr Anderson claims the party also targeted Mrs de Piero after she tried to oust Mr Corbyn in a failed coup in 2016. She is not standing at the election …
The former Citizens’ Advice counsellor said: ‘My background is mining and if the pits were still open now, the miners would not be voting Labour …
‘You’re in a Labour group meeting in Ashfield when really we should be talking about litter, grass-cutting, cemeteries, dog-fouling. They’d want to be talking about Palestine.’
Mr Anderson resigned as Mrs de Piero’s office manager 18 months ago and was recruited by the local Conservative party to be a campaigns manager.
His wife’s health was transformed following a lung transplant in 2016 and she is now a Tory councillor in Mansfield.
Brexit and Bray
After seeing off the Labour candidate in Ashfield, Anderson went up to London, only to meet with a new, albeit occasional, adversary: Steve Bray, who is rumoured to be paid and housed by unknown benefactors to denounce Brexit every day near the Houses of Parliament.
Everyone thought that the middle-aged man clad in an EU flag or EU tee shirt and hat would have given up his daily shouting after the 2016 referendum. He didn’t. Then we thought that he would stop on January 1, 2021, after we officially left the EU. He didn’t.
Guido Fawkes captured the moment when Lee Anderson met Steve Bray on June 16, 2021:
Guido reported the scene outside the Red Lion pub near Parliament:
Steve has continued loitering around SW1 to yell at politicos and interrupt interviews. He may have picked off more than he could chew as he tried taking on rottweiler Lee Anderson outside the Red Lion … Anderson rightly repeatedly told Bray to “get a job” and concluded with:
You’re nothing but a parasite, a malingerer and a scrounger!
You always know where you stand with Lee Anderson.
Bray quickly threatened legal action against the MP:
Of the threatened legal action, Guido said (red emphases in the original):
… On what grounds, Guido cannot fathom.
If the threat is anything more than a cry for attention, Bray has a decent pot of funds. He’s been crowdfunding for 46 weeks in support of his general nuisance-making and has scrounged over £21,000. Anderson tells Guido he “won’t be losing any sleep over it”…
Anderson’s second encounter with Bray came on November 24 that year, with Bray strangely continuing to accuse Anderson of lying to the people of ‘the North’:
Anderson told Bray that he had a look at the activist’s CV (resumé) and that it was not very impressive. When Bray moved in closer, Anderson told him that his breath was foul. One can imagine that it is:
Guido wrote:
… For some reason, Bray must think he won the exchange, given he uploaded the clip to his own Twitter account…
Responding to Bray’s Twitter threat of possible legal action, Guido asked Anderson whether he was concerned. He said “Yes, it keeps me awake every single night. I would love to see the evidence that he has a job though.”
Their third meeting took place on March 16, 2022, when Anderson had to shove Bray out of the way so he could get to the Tube. Once again, Bray threatened legal action, this time for assault:
Guido has the story:
Steve Bray is once again pottering around Westminster, shouting at MPs and blabbering about Brexit. And once again, Red Wall rottweiler Lee Anderson was having absolutely none of it…
With Bray squawking about “Russian money” and how he somehow “pays [Anderson’s] wages” as an unemployed man who loiters around SW1 all day, Anderson bit back:
I tell you what, Steve, if you’d have been around 100 years ago, you’d have been traveling around the country in a tent. You’re nothing but a freak-show.
Lee had to give Bray a small shove out the way to enter the Tube station, at which point Steve lost it. Guido makes that 3-0 to Anderson…
On their most recent encounter — April 20 — Anderson told Bray that he would make a good tramp:
Guido had the video and the dialogue:
Despite the threat of police involvement, Steve Bray is still spending his days floating around Westminster to badger MPs and shout about Brexit. This afternoon, however, Bray once again collided with his nemesis – the Red Wall rottweiler Lee Anderson … Today it was time for the rematch…
Inevitably, it was another knockout win for Lee, who told Bray:
Listen, you’re nothing but a parasite. We’ve established that. You’re a scrounger. Why are you here every day dressed like a tramp? … In fact, I’ll rephrase that, if you smartened yourself up, you’d make a good tramp.
At one point Bray asked Anderson, “People fund me to do this. Do you know why?”. The MP hilariously shot back “Because they’re tapped.” 4-0 to Anderson…
Steve Bray’s daily rants are a nuisance, so much so that, on May 11, Anderson’s fellow Red Wall MP Marco Longhi brought his noise up in Parliament as news emerged that parliamentary authorities have been investigating Bray’s behaviour.
GB News asked Bray for his reaction. He said:
“You know what these Tories are like. They don’t want protests which is why they are stripping away our rights.
“And Marco Longhi and also his best buddy Lee Anderson, they are not happy to see me because they normally try and wind me up but I end up turning it on them.
“Here is the thing about those two – they are going to lose their seats in the next election, so they are just griping for any little bit of press coverage they can get. The less they get the better, to be honest, because they are so insignificant.”
The problem is that hardly any witnesses with evidence are coming forward enabling a court case. Bray is playing his long game well, making it impossible to distinguish whether he is harassing people or just a right pain in the proverbial.
There could be a case to be made for breach of the peace. Police are out there every day. Surely they can do something about Steve Bray. Oh, what a fitting name.
Media
Lee Anderson has also shown himself to be a plain speaker when it comes to the media.
On May 24, 2021, he announced that he had torn up his TV licence, necessary to watch anything on television, even though the BBC is the recipient of the annual tax:
He made an impassioned plea to then-Government minister John Whittingdale MP.
Guido wrote:
Co-conspirators’ favourite no-nonsense Tory MP Lee Anderson had another barnstorming outing in the Commons yesterday, professing that he has torn up his TV Licence following the Martin Bashir scandal, and the corporation “won’t get another penny” out of him “ever“. The Ashfield MP told fellow MPs the BBC is “rotten”:
In my opinion, the once-great BBC is rotten, and my constituents should not have to pay for a service if they don’t use it.
He ended his intervention with a call to the minister to transform the BBC into a subscription service. Whittingdale didn’t fully avoid the point, saying “I have no doubt that that is a debate that has already started and will continue.” Guido will make sure of it…
Later that year, in the middle of November, he and other MPs who were first elected in 2019 attended a meeting with Boris Johnson about MPs’ standards in the wake of the Owen Paterson scandal which saw that MP resign.
Channel 4 interviewed various MPs who gave brief, courteous answers to the reporter. Not Lee Anderson. He simply said:
I’m just the window cleaner, mate.
Here’s the video:
On a more serious note, Anderson fought and won a court case against Google, which served a defamatory advert about the MP:
The legal fight took nearly a year to resolve.
Guido has the full story from March 10, 2022, excerpted below:
After nearly a year locked in a legal fight with the tech giants, Red Wall heavyweight fighter Lee Anderson has finally walked away victorious after Google issued a formal High Court apology to the MP for serving a defamatory advert falsely accusing him of protecting a paedophile. An advert which was targeted at Guido readers…
It was bought via Google’s programmatic network and was unseen by our commercial representatives, nor indeed ourselves, until it popped up. Google has a near monopoly on this type of advertising, where publishers offload unsold advertising inventory to Google to fill. Scam adverts get through frequently, though this is the first time we have ever seen a defamatory attack via this method …
While the terms of the settlement are confidential, Google finally apologised in court. They also accepted that they should not have allowed this advert to appear. Guido would argue that they were negligent in allowing this advert to appear and they should be held liable for any damages arising in this situation. Guido argued before the case began that we should not be a party to it because we had no knowledge of the advert prior to it appearing in a space that Google had effectively rented and published to without our active involvement. We were akin to the paper supplier to a newspaper, not the printer or publisher. This settlement avoided the arguments being heard, though no doubt lawyers will study this for future cases.
Lee tells Guido that
I am pleased that Google has publicly apologised in Court and put an end to this very difficult and distressing time for me and my family.
I do however think it is a real shame that it has taken so long for this to happen and that I had to get lawyers involved and threaten Google with legal action to get here.
I want to thank Guido for swiftly taking down this ad once they were made aware and for their ongoing support through a difficult time.
M’learned friends can read and study the official Statement (Anderson v Google). We’re just glad that Lee fought and won justice in his battle against the trillion dollar plus Google behemoth…
I’m delighted that Anderson won, too.
Guido’s post has Lee Anderson’s statement in full.
He is an incredible MP with a niche following of Britons who think he’d make a great Prime Minister. It will never happen, but we can but dream.
More on Lee Anderson soon.
To be continued
It happened, but it happened two years too late.
A third Telegraph journalist has come out against Joe Biden.
Earlier this month, Tim Stanley declared that Trump made the right assessment about Russia.
This week, Nile Gardiner asked whether Europe has finally awakened to the truth about Joe Biden.
Two days later, on March 30, 2022, Allister Heath wrote ‘Joe Biden is president in name only but the US establishment refuses to admit it’.
Heath details the chaos of the White House at home and abroad. Emphases mine below.
First, there were his pronouncements about Putin and Russia from last month to the present:
His embarrassingly downgraded role became obvious last week when he suddenly veered off-script during his keynote address in Poland, ad-libbing of Vladimir Putin that “for God’s sake, this man cannot remain in power”. It was a dramatic escalation, a clear and simple message that no reasonable person could possibly misinterpret, and yet the White House appeared not even to ask him for permission before “clarifying” his statement. Biden’s people – who are supposed to work for him, rather than the other way around – immediately denied that he was calling for regime change. They claimed, within seconds of his speech, that the words he uttered didn’t actually mean what he obviously intended them to signify.
They were undoubtedly seeking to protect Biden from himself, and to look after US interests, by cancelling an intervention that could have provoked a furious Russian reaction. But it was an astonishing moment none the less, demonstrating that Biden’s role is now largely ceremonial: this is a collegiate administration, with an all-powerful Democratic Cabinet and federal bureaucracy. What Biden says should not be taken too seriously. He is not the fount of power, and has a habit of blurting out what colleagues might have been discussing in private.
Time and again in recent days, the President’s pronouncements have been “walked back” by those really in charge. Most notably, he wrongly told members of the 82nd Airborne Division that they would be “going to” Ukraine soon; he said America would respond “in kind” were the Russians to use chemical weapons.
His worst blunder came when he claimed prior to Russia’s invasion of Ukraine that “it’s one thing if it’s a minor incursion and then we end up having a fight about what to do and not do”. He was then asked whether he was “effectively giving Putin permission to make a small incursion into the country”. Biden’s answer sent an even more catastrophic message to the Russians: “Good question. That’s how it did sound like, didn’t it?”
Heath notes that the American media are, unsurprisingly, giving Biden a pass:
… the president isn’t really presiding and … America’s constitution is once again in deep crisis. It is a scandal.
Mainstream commentators were grumpy at the White House denials, but refused to ask the obvious questions about the president’s series of gaffes or to demand an investigation into why this may be happening. Had this been Trump, there would have been calls for the Cabinet to at least consider invoking the 25th amendment to the US constitution relating to whether a president could be considered unfit to remain in office …
There is no excuse for failing to scrutinise and hold to account any president, regardless of party.
Then there are Biden’s Afghanistan disaster as well as his intent to turn back the clock with Iran:
On foreign policy, he is seeking to turn the clock back to the time when he was vice president. Biden is proposing a disastrous surrender to Iran on the nuclear issue, and even to remove the Revolutionary Guards’ terrorist designation. His withdrawal from Afghanistan was right in theory but catastrophically executed, and helped signal to rogue regimes that the US had gone soft.
Biden has done no better domestically. He began rolling back Trump’s successes as soon as he was sworn in.
Now he is considering a radically left tax plan for Americans — taxing unrealised capital gains. Scary. This would affect many middle class taxpayers:
Biden’s shocking weakness also helps to explain the disastrous drift of US policy in all other respects. He was supposedly elected as a reasonable centrist, a liberal rather than a woke activist, a traditional Democrat rather than a neo-socialist.
Yet on economics, his latest tax proposal is far worse than anything Jeremy Corbyn dreamt up. Biden wants to tax unrealised capital gains, something that has never been attempted before in this way. He wants to tax wealthy Americans – in reality, not just billionaires but many other entrepreneurs and investors without whose contributions the US economy would collapse – on the basis of the paper increase in their fortunes. This would be a recipe for economic meltdown, a brain drain, capital flight and a massive recession.
Heath concludes that radical advisers behind the scenes are running the show:
The fact that Biden is in office, but not in power, has given his party’s hardliners free rein to wreak havoc. His presidency is turning out to be a catastrophe for America, and a calamity for the rest of the world. For how much longer will we have to put up with this travesty?
There’s no way back for the time being.
It is hard to imagine that voters preferred Joe Biden to Trump and his ‘mean tweets’ in 2020, but there we are.
Mid-term elections cannot come soon enough. All being well, Republican control will pave the way for further victory in 2024.
Isn’t it interesting that the media narrative has changed from wall-to-wall coronavirus coverage to Ukraine?
It seems that there is never room for more than one media narrative at a time. Sadly, this is now true even on GB News.
Fortunately, I have a few coronavirus gems from last month.
We must never forget what our notional betters did to us over the past two years.
The UK will hold a formal inquiry, although we do not know when it will start.
On Saturday, February 5, GB News’s Neil Oliver delivered a five-star editorial on coronavirus measures in Scotland and other Western nations:
This was the theme:
Well, the narrative certainly changed by the end of the month.
Nonetheless, even as I write, coronavirus measures are still a thing in Scotland. First Minister Nicola Sturgeon has lifted some, with others to go this month. However, it might be some months before all of them disappear north of the border.
This was the state of play in Scotland in early February:
Somehow, Covid still manages to be in our faces – suffocating us bit by bit and all the time.
My children are still required to wear masks at school all day every day – rebreathing their own exhaust fumes for hours at a time.
In Scotland last week, first minister Nicola Sturgeon said her devolved assembly would spend hundreds of thousands of taxpayers’ pounds cutting the bottoms off classroom doors so as to improve air flow in schools.
Seriously – that’s what she said. Get this: she actually said there’s a worry about how much CO2 children are inhaling in improperly ventilated classrooms.
They have to keep the masks on – so that they exist in a permanent cloud of their own, self-generated CO2, held over their mouths and noses like a smothering hand, but rather than let them take off those masks and breathe air like free people should, Sturgeon’s proposed solution is to take a saw to the bottom of the classroom doors.
To say you couldn’t make it up is an insult to made up things.
The fact that you can open a door to increase ventilation, on account of its hinges, the fact that doors exist in schools at least in part to inhibit the spread of smoke and flames in the event of fire, significantly more of a threat to the lives of children and staff than Covid ever was, has apparently passed Sturgeon by.
But, hey-ho, if there’s one thing we’ve learned after two years, it’s that everything is all and only about Covid.
Some days it feels like it always will be.
Covid could and should be behind us, as I have already said, but the powers that be keep pulling it back around until it’s front and centre.
[Boris] Johnson announced some sort of an end to restrictions, but still, that air of lives limited, lives controlled, prevails, like the smirking grin that remains after the Cheshire Cat has otherwise disappeared.
And do you want to know why? Because after these two years like no others in our history, Covid is all they’ve got to explain and to justify everything else.
He took issue with Western governments:
Governments need Covid, and desperately …
All the money we ever had and most of the money we might ever dream of having – they blew the lot on Covid.
And since Covid is all the Governments have got now, by God they’re determined to keep it.
Covid, as it turns out, is like a sort of Swiss Army knife, equipped with all sorts of useful little tools for all sorts of jobs, large and small. And meanwhile the evidence of manmade disaster is all around us.
He referred to the Johns Hopkins study that came out a few days beforehand:
A recently published study from the world-renowned Johns Hopkins University, in Baltimore, found lockdowns had had little to zero public health benefits and instead imposed enormous economic and social costs.
Like we didn’t know that already, having been there while it was actually happening – but anyway, let’s hear it again.
Researchers found lockdowns in Europe and the US lessened the Covid-19 mortality rate by just 0.2 percent.
The authors concluded that lockdown policies are ill founded and should be rejected in future.
Everywhere they were applied – everywhere – lockdowns caused enormous economic and social costs.
He went on to discuss how our various governments ‘blew it’:
Allow me to summarise those findings even more: Our governments blew it.
Faced with what they told us was the greatest threat to our civilisation in our lifetimes, for a hundred years or more, our governments took a bad thing and, through over-confidence, monumental incompetence and with the dull-eyed stubbornness of mules made it massively worse.
More importantly, when they must have known they were making it worse, they did it again. And again.
Now, rather than take responsibility and own up to their catastrophic failures – maybe say sorry for all the lives ended, lives ruined, lives compromised, a generation of children used like sandbags to protect the vulnerable from a flood, like stab vests worn on the chests of adults – they keep holding up the tattered rags of Covid, like the remnants of a curtain to stop us seeing the reality that lies behind it.
What lies behind that shabby curtain are consequences, and even now those powers that be don’t want us looking at them, far less talking about them and thereby understanding the crippling reality of them.
Isn’t it convenient that the TPTB now have Ukraine with which to distract us? Thanks, Putin. The news overkill on that is the ultimate distraction.
Oliver then talked about the horrors of quantitative easing:
What they did with money – your money, my money, everybody’s money – during the pandemic is what the banks have been doing with money for decades now, and it’s largely to blame for the bigger mess we’re in now.
Quantitative Easing, they called it – printing money, to you and me.
For decades the tactic applied by the banks, with governments in cahoots, was to print uncountable, unthinkable amounts of money.
“We don’t have any money left.”
“Well print more, then.”
“How much?”
“As much as you like – and keep it coming, I need another super yacht, and so does my mum. No one’ll notice. And if they do, say it was Covid.”
Imagine a glass of orange squash – a little bit of concentrate, topped up with water.
Tastes like orange, you know how it goes.
Then imagine tipping that glass-full into an empty swimming pool and turning on the taps.
By the time the pool is filled up with water, any orange in the mix is so diluted as to be utterly undetectable.
That, more or less, is what has happened to our money.
The value of our money has been so diluted it is quite literally not worth the paper it’s printed on – which probably explains why they don’t seem to want to actually print it on paper anymore.
They just add more zeros on their computer screens instead. Look at what they did with some of that pretend money: trillions of pounds worth of debt that will never, ever be repaid.
Billions blown on dodgy PPE, billions handed over as ‘Bounce Back Loans’ to companies that didn’t even exist. Gone.
Those gazillions are gone – and the truly troubling point is that in every way that matters, they didn’t really exist in the first place.
Rishi Sunak and Boris Johnson and the like have the gall to say they’ve got a way to fix the mess.
They might as well try to put out a factory fire by blowing on it.
On account of all that funny money, and then their use of Covid as a hammer to flatten business after business, the economic and financial model we’ve taken for granted for the last 50 years or more is finally done.
He looked at Covid measures in various countries:
Much of Europe is an interesting watch, to say the least. Austria is a police state now, in all but name, thanks to Covid.
Papers, please! Italy and Germany are much the same.
France would likely go the same way – except President Macron is too properly scared of too many of his own people to go all the way to vaccine mandates.
Instead, he remains committed to making the lives of the unvaccinated as miserable as possible. In Western Australia unvaccinated parents are barred from the hospitals where their children lie sick, dying.
In Canada the GoFundMe organisation has withheld millions of dollars raised in good faith, in support of the truckers protesting vaccine mandates.
What will become of that money, donated by hundreds of thousands of ordinary Canadians, remains unclear.
More and more questions are being asked about the vaccines, all around the world.
Questions about efficacy, about safety, and yet governments like the US, Canada and Australia, as well as here and just about everywhere else continue to dig in, more and more determined to get a needle into every arm on the planet.
Israel is beavering away with injection number four – and the positive cases are spiking in what looks, on the graphs, like a vertical line pointed into space.
With the Covid narrative in tatters now, new weapons of mass distraction are being deployed to stop us thinking too much about the mess.
Enter Putin with his invasion of Ukraine. How timely. In early February, we knew it was coming:
I’d like to say, Don’t Mention the War, but of course there’s Russia and Ukraine to look forward to as well.
Oliver brought up non-Covid health issues:
There was a GP on the telly last week saying the stress of lockdown is causing heart attacks and strokes.
Well, I never.
He brought up the irony about the silence surrounding all the plastic face masks being dumped into the environment:
Climate crisis and environmental meltdown are back to the fore again – never mind the fact we’ve dumped trillions of filthy face masks, and Covid tests into that environment, that doesn’t seem to matter.
He concluded:
Weapons of mass distraction or not, there’ll be no hiding the fuel bills due in a few weeks’ time.
People forced to choose between eating and heating tend to behave differently than before.
Energy black hole, Net Zero and its consequences and only pretend money with which to pay for it all.
How much longer can our dear leaders hide behind Covid?
We do a lot of weather forecasting on this channel. I tell you this – there’s a storm coming.
Oliver then had Benjamin Loughnane (pron. ‘Loknayn’) from The Bow Group think tank to discuss the Johns Hopkins study about lockdown. This was also a very good segment:
Richard Tice from the Reform Party also appeared to talk about our leaders’ mistakes:
You can see the full show below. Almost all of it concerns coronavirus:
Later in the evening, Mark Dolan presented an excellent editorial on how the media and Government handled the pandemic:
The replies to the tweets were worthwhile, such as this one:
Some of us knew from the beginning that most of the coronavirus measures in Western countries were bogus, but anyone who mentioned that PCRs were picking up old viruses was dismissed as a crank.
Lo, it emerged last month that the intrusive PCR testing was proven to be ineffective in accurately diagnosing coronavirus.
Dolan said (emphases mine):
A major new study confirms that PCR tests are horribly inaccurate. There’s a surprise.
According to researchers at the University of Oxford, if you’ve heard of it, a third of people who tested positive for coronavirus via PCR tests were not contagious and did not need to self-isolate.
The study found that many laboratories are setting the positivity bar very low, meaning they’re picking up people, who are – quotes – “a danger to no one”.
Hand sanitising is also inconclusive:
Do you remember our blistered skin, in March 2020?
Sing happy birthday twice, as you wash your hands? After which a couple of scientists with half a brain cell, pointed out that the virus is transmitted through the air, via aerosols. No sugar, Sherlock.
Perspex screens in shops — or, in cars, as was the case in France — might not have been a good idea, either:
A report came out in August of last year, suggesting those environmentally catastrophic Perspex screens you see in shops, offices and on TV, may make matters worse.
The Environmental Modelling Group, a panel of 16 SAGE experts, said “There is some epidemiological and mechanistic evidence, that suggests screens could increase risks of aerosol transmission, due to blocking/changing airflow patterns or creating zones of poor air circulation behind screens.
Well done everyone.
The best masks couldn’t stop the rise in contagion:
Even where countries have demanded better N95 masks, like Austria, cases have sky rocketed nonetheless.
There was no evidence that vaccine passports stopped the spread:
What about vaccine passports? We’re saving lives aren’t we?
Except that cases have continued to soar in countries that have implemented these divisive measures, which link your medical status to certain basic rights, freedoms and privileges, including in particular in France and Italy.
The same held true for closing nightclubs:
What about closing nightclubs?
The Welsh first Minister Mark Drakeford, who likes a boogie himself, was able to demonstrate no evidence that closing nightclubs would have an impact on spread.
After two years, our health service is on backlog overload and probably will be until the end of the decade.
Some people’s lives are in ruins: closed businesses, relatives’ suicides, nervous breakdowns, missed diagnoses of terminal illness. I could go on.
Dolan said:
Two years in which we have incarcerated the healthy, stopped people from going out to work and making a living, closed once viable businesses, wrecked mental health and ignored worse diseases like cancer.
The Telegraph are reporting that up to 87,000 cancer diagnoses may have been missed. And the rest.
If you think Covid is worse than cancer, there is something wrong with you.
But that’s been the message of the pandemic response.
‘If it’s not Covid, they don’t care’ is something I’ve heard from so many of you over the last two years.
The famously deadly disease of cancer, that affects all age groups, has been relegated in importance for two years, with tragic consequences that will be with us for years to come, with cases like young mothers who didn’t get that lump checked or weren’t able to. Well done everyone.
There will be a day of reckoning for what Professor Jay Bhattacharya, one of the most respected medics in the world, has called the biggest public health mistake in history. He’s being polite.
Dolan rightly took issue with governments, modellers and the media:
So who’s to blame?
Well, weak politicians who panicked in March 2020 and discarded decades of pandemic planning …
I blame the modellers like the randy professor, Professor Pants Down himself, Neil Ferguson, who predicted half a million deaths at the start of the pandemic, which spooked ministers into taking this ruinous path.
Some government scientific advisors predicted 6000 deaths a day if we didn’t cancel Christmas …
I blame Sage, who failed to equate economic damage with death.
The University of Bristol have told me that half a million people will die as a result of creating the biggest recession in 300 years. And what about wrecked lives?
It’s a question no one has ever been able to answer me. Why is it okay to wreck lives? Of course, it isn’t. But wreck them we did. And it’s most reprehensible when you think of the needless impact on young people and children, who face vanishing threats from the virus. So who else do I blame?
Well I blame the media …
… I blame the media for offering just one narrative. Lockdowns work, masks work and absolutely everybody’s got to have the vaccine.
Now these views are valid, arguably the majority of people and perhaps most scientific professionals think exactly that. No problem. Let’s hope you’re right, because that’s the hell you’ve put us through.
As data come in from around the world, based upon different approaches, with no obvious difference from where I’m standing, I have my doubts. But remember those press conferences – the Beeb, Sky, ITV – why are we not locking down longer, tougher, harder?
By offering such one-sided coverage of the pandemic, by betting everything on the words of SAGE, and freezing out other scientific voices like Sunetra Guptha, Carl Henegan, Martin Kulldorf and Jay Bhattacharya, the media let us down.
To say that the media have lied to you is a bit strong. But they have not provided the full picture.
And any lawyer will tell you concealing information is tantamount, in its own way, to an untruth.
Shall we be polite and just call it government propaganda? I think that’ll do.
I shouldn’t name names, but I will. The Mail and the Telegraph are the only papers I can think of that have consistently balanced their reporting and have dared to offer a critique about these debatable lockdowns.
The Guardian is a paper I’ve always admired and read every day.
But where was their coverage of the Johns Hopkins University report, a meta analysis of 24 studies into lockdown, suggesting the measures saved 0.2% of lives, whilst of course exacting colossal harm.
Not peer reviewed and the study has been done by economists, but worth reporting?
I’d say so.
Sweden got it right. That was something that many of us were criticised for saying offline.
Dolan said:
Sweden have seen a fraction of the economic damage, the societal damage and have had fewer per capita deaths than so many countries that locked down hard.
He concluded:
In the end I think the media have got this wrong – they’ve backed the wrong horse and they are on the wrong side of history.
So there will be a day of reckoning for their one-sided coverage. But will we ever get an admission of guilt, or dare I say it, an apology? I doubt it.
There will be no contrition. And for all of those well paid and high profile figures in the media – we know who they are – the relentless cheerleaders for these disastrous and, in my view, failed measures, sorry seems to be the hardest word.
Now to the present day.
On Wednesday, March 2, the House of Commons Science and Technology Select Committee gathered oral evidence on coronavirus in a session called ‘UK Science, Research and Technology Capability and Influence in Global Disease Outbreaks’. Greg Clark (Conservative) chaired the session.
You can watch it here.
After the first hour, Prof Graham Medley — who exchanged tweets late last year with The Spectator‘s Fraser Nelson on modelling — gave his oral evidence on SPI-M’s modelling of the pandemic. He is SPI-M’s chair.
Sorry seemed to be the hardest word for him, too, as he saw no need to apologise for Prof Neil Ferguson’s mad models which the Swedes described as ‘hysterical’.
Medley told MPs that SPI-M ‘didn’t have the time’ (his words) to calculate the probability or feasibility of their overblown scenarios. They plugged garbage in, and, lo, garbage came out. However, he defended everything. He had no regrets.
Three MPs gently took him to task for the modelling. Labour’s Graham Stringer came right out and said that he doesn’t trust modelling at all, none of it.
One of the MPs tried to press him on the Twitter exchange with Fraser Nelson. Medley replied:
I wish you wouldn’t do that.
In the end, he managed to get himself out of any controversy.
Most of the other MPs wanted to question the person from the behavioural part of SAGE, SPI-B. This person was to have sat along side Medley. However, the SPI-B representative cancelled. How convenient.
Dr Camilla Holten-Møller appeared in the final segment. She is the Chair of the Expert Group for Mathematical Modelling at Statens Serum Institut (SSI) in Denmark. What a breath of fresh air she was.
She admitted that SSI did get one of their models woefully wrong, so they quickly regrouped, studied their mistakes and liaised more closely with university research and clinical groups who provide them with data.
It would be nice if Medley had showed the same candour. As it was, he didn’t even look bothered.
I can hardly wait for the formal coronavirus inquiry in the UK. The Science and Technology Select Committee will write a report on this evidence session, as they have with others, and submit it to the Government. The reports will be part of the inquiry process.
On Monday, February 28, 2022, The Telegraph released the findings of their Freedom of Information request concerning modelling that SAGE and other scientists in the UK used to promote the case for 2020’s initial lockdown.
The Telegraph reported (emphases mine):
Scientists did not have accurate Covid case numbers, and were unsure of hospitalisation and death rates when they published models suggesting that more than 500,000 people could die if Britain took no action in the first wave of the pandemic, it has emerged.
On March 16 2020, Imperial College published its “Report 9” paper suggesting that failing to take action could overwhelm the NHS within weeks and result in hundreds of thousands of deaths.
Before the paper, the UK coronavirus strategy was to flatten the peak rather than suppress the wave, but after the modelling was made public, the Government made a rapid u-turn, which eventually led to lockdown on March 23.
However SPI-M (Scientific Pandemic Influenza Group on Modelling) minutes released to the Telegraph under a Freedom of Information request show that by March 16, modellers were still “uncertain” of case numbers “due to data limitations”.
The minutes show that members were waiting for comprehensive mortality data from Public Health England (PHE) and said that current best estimates for the infection fatality rate, hospitalisation rates, and the number of people needing intensive care were still uncertain.
They also believed that modelling only showed “proof of concept” that lockdowns could help, and warned that “further work would be required”.
The team was also encouraged to look for collaborators and resources outside of the infectious diseases network.
Well, that never happened. They stayed within their closely knit group and never ventured outside of it for data sources from other scientists and clinicians.
For the millions of us around the world who had been looking at the data from the Diamond Princess cruise ship in Asia and thinking that coronavirus was no big deal, it was a shock to find that those data had not been considered in the Government’s strategy.
Those waiting for a certain hapless modeller’s name to appear need wait no longer:
Imperial College held a press briefing about its model on the afternoon of March 16, and on the same day, Boris Johnson ordered the public to avoid pubs, restaurants and non-essential contact and work from home if possible.
At the briefing, Prof Ferguson told journalists that the new conclusions had been reached because “the last few days” had provided “refinements” in the estimates of intensive care demand and hospital surge capacity.
But the minutes now show that SPI-M did not believe the data were complete …
Minutes from the following day, March 17, also show that the Department of Health wanted to know whether Prof Neil Ferguson had referenced other papers in the Imperial model.
And both Imperial and the London School of Hygiene and Tropical Medicine (LSHTM) were asked to renew modelling ahead of a Sage meeting on March 18 which would “include reviewing the commonality of assumptions” and look specifically at a London lockdown, where cases were rising more quickly.
All of Neil Ferguson’s predictions, going back to the Millennium, have been wildly wrong. How the Government could not have questioned these figures is beyond me. To make matters worse, the modelling went around the world, including to the US and to Sweden.
Good grief. What a global shambles.
Furthermore, Ferguson couldn’t even keep to the rules himself, having visited his mistress who lived on the other side of London to him and his wife.
These modelling inaccuracies went on through 2021. The article has more, but, in short, the minutes recorded that blame for incomplete data belonged to NHS Test and Trace on one occasion, to NHS England on another and Public Health England (PHE) on a third.
Last year, the Government planned to lift the post-Christmas lockdown on June 21 but waited another month. Modellers:
did not use the most up-to-date figures, which was criticised by MPs at the Science and Technology Select Committee.
That means that June 21’s Freedom Day could have gone ahead! Instead, we had to wait until July.
Two scientists who have never been invited to share their views on coronavirus with SAGE or the modellers told The Telegraph what they thought. Prof Carl Heneghan and Dr Tom Jefferson are colleagues at the University of Oxford:
Prof Carl Heneghan, the director of the centre for evidence based medicine (CEBM) at the University of Oxford, said: “This has always concerned me about the modelling. Throughout the two years there has been systematic error, consistent over-estimation and a tendency to go directly to the media with conclusions, without validation or peer review.
“It’s clear from the SPI-M minutes there were issues with the data, it wasn’t robust. And it shows that they should have been looking for additional outside expertise.
“What concerns me is if we don’t fix these problems we will end up being bounced back into restrictions or end up spending money in ways that detracts from the healthcare problems at hand.”
… Dr Tom Jefferson of the CEBM at Oxford branded the early pandemic modelling “irresponsible”.
“They should have said ‘I’m sorry, we do not have the data,” he said. “Any forecast based on limited data is just a guess, it’s unethical and reckless, and we can now see the consequences of this behaviour with people dying because of the destruction of our services.”
One of the people just as upset, if not more so, with Neil Ferguson and the other modellers is the MP for the Isle of Wight, Bob Seely.
He has been sounding off on this in Parliament for a few months now. My guess is that he wants modelling to be included in the UK’s coronavirus inquiry.
He told The Telegraph:
The arguments for and against lockdown are complex, but what is becoming clear is that the evidence that the Government saw was incomplete and potentially inaccurate.
This is a national scandal. No question about it. The data that petrified politicians was inaccurate.
The Daily Mail also covered this story. The blue sidebar discusses Ferguson’s modelling:
The scientific paper published by Professor Ferguson and his colleagues on the Imperial College COVID-19 Response Team was credited for persuading Boris Johnson’s Government to ramp up their response to the coronavirus.
The paper, released on March 17, and titled Impact of non-pharmaceutical interventions (NPIs) to reduce COVID19 mortality and healthcare demand, predicted that the Government’s original plan to ‘mitigate’ the outbreak instead of trying to stop it could have led to a quarter of a million people dying.
Using data from Italy and China, the scientists predicted how different Government measures would have different impacts on the outbreaks.
If no action at all had been taken against the coronavirus it would have claimed 510,000 lives, the team’s report said. Had the Government stuck with their strategy of trying to ‘mitigate’ the spread – allowing it to continue but attempting to slow it down – with limited measures such as home isolation for those with symptoms this number would be roughly halved to 260,000.
If the strictest possible measures are introduced, the number of deaths over a two-year period will fall below 20,000, the scientists said.
Even reading those numbers in a newspaper report is dumbfounding. They do not make sense.
Returning to Bob Seely, he first started mentioning Ferguson’s modelling on December 14, 2021, when MPs were asked to vote on a few new coronavirus measures, including a Christmas lockdown in England because of Omicron, already known to be mild. Fortunately, 101 Conservative rebels voted against the lockdown. As news was emerging about Boris’s Christmas party during the previous year’s seasonal lockdown and the fact that the Conservatives were tanking in the polls, another year of Yuletide misery would not have gone down well with the public.
This is what Bob Seely said on December 14, 2021, when Health Secretary Savid Javid was at the despatch box during the debate:
I strongly support getting vaccinated. I had my booster jab two weeks ago. I thank all Islanders who are engaged in the vaccination process in my constituency. I congratulate the Government on an ambitious booster programme. When it comes to the vote tonight, I will accept and trust what they say on face masks and on the daily tests, which seem infinitely more sensible than locking people down in hotels. I will not support them on passports or mandatory jabs. Threatening the jobs of 73,000 NHS staff seems an odd way to support the NHS.
I want to raise a wider issue with those on the Front Bench, which has somewhat coloured my judgment. I have heard nothing to reassure me on the following points. I am fed up with dubious forecasts and ridiculous extrapolations the kind of which many hon. Members have talked about. Academics—I am not quoting myself—have talked about Imperial College London’s forecast being “hysterical”, “inflated”, “consistently over-confident”, “lurid”, “flawed” and “spectacularly wrong”. What do the Government have to say about the incredibly questionable extrapolations that they have used?
I am tired of all the leaks. It was leaked that omicron could kill 75,000. It could, but it may not. All these doomsday forecasts, leaked at critical moments, erode public trust.
Thirdly, we are told we have to follow the science. Of course we have to follow the science, but it is a misleading statement as science is shaped by the inputs and by the desired outcome. For example, we had 70 pages of evidence from Scotland on vaccine passports, but there was no evidence to support their value for uptake, so why are we introducing them? We are doing so because of the precautionary principle. That is not science.
One of the most disturbing things is the lack of context for the statistics that have been used. Was that to increase knowledge or to increase fear? My right hon. Friend the Member for New Forest West (Sir Desmond Swayne) said that between 500 and 1,000 people die each day in this country, and people die of flu all the time. It is about putting this information in context, and I fear that the result of too much of this has been to scare people, especially the old and now the young. They are petrified of covid without taking account of more genuine and potentially more damaging threats such as the appalling impact on education.
I will vote against the Government on two of the motions tonight, but my decision to do so has been coloured by the past 18 months of policy, which we need to improve.
On January 5, 2022, Boris Johnson gave Parliament an update on the Omicron variant’s effect on health in England.
Seely said:
I congratulate the Prime Minister on his balanced approach, unlike that of others in this House. There is increasing concern among epidemiologists, modellers, oncologists and scientists about the use of modelling and forecasts. Among the comments are that the forecasts we may have been using over the past two years are “almost hysterical,” “lurid,” “spectacularly wrong,” “consistently overconfident” and “substantially inflated.” Those comments are from scientists, not journalists or politicians. Does the Prime Minister trust the modelling he is getting, and will the Government consider an inquiry into the use of modelling and forecasts, many of which have been found to be unrelated to reality?
Boris did not like that one bit. I saw the debate.
He replied:
It is important for everybody to understand the limitations of models; they are not forecasts, but mathematical projections based on the data the modellers currently have, particularly when it came to Omicron, about the severity of the disease. That is why, when we feed assumptions about severity that are excessive into the models, we get results that are excessive; that is what my hon. Friend is driving at. Some of the models or calculations are much closer to what is happening now, and models are useful and cannot be dispensed with as we need to have projections, and we in this House should not in any way try to undermine or attack the independent scientists, whose independence is absolutely vital for our ability to handle this disease.
Oh, please!
On January 18, Seely led a motion at a Select Committee chaired by Sir Edward Leigh MP:
I beg to move,
That this House has considered forecasting and modelling during covid-19.
This was a rather heated debate, not so much by Conservatives but by the left-wing MPs responding to Seely’s lead contribution.
Excerpts follow:
… Thanks to some questionable modelling that was poorly presented and often misrepresented, never before has so much harm been done to so many by so few based on so little questionable and potentially flawed data.
I believe that the use of modelling is pretty much getting to be a national scandal. That is not just the fault of the modellers; it is how their work was interpreted by public health officials and the media—and yes, by politicians, including the Government, sadly. Modelling and forecasts were the ammunition that drove lockdown and created a climate of manipulated fear. I believe that that creation of fear was pretty despicable and unforgivable. I do not doubt that modelling is important or that there has been some good modelling, but too often it has been drowned out by hysterical forecasts. I am not, as Professor Ferguson implied, one of those with an “axe to grind”. I do, however, care about truth and believe that if someone influences policy, as the modellers and Imperial College London have done, they should be questioned. Frankly, they have not been questioned enough.
Above all, I want to understand why Government, parts of the media and the public health establishment became addicted to these doomsday scenarios, and then normalised them in our country with such depressing and upsetting consequences for many. I do not pretend to be an expert; I am not. I defended my own PhD at the end of last year, but it is not in epidemiology and I do not pretend to be particularly knowledgeable about that. But depending on time—I know others want to come in as well—I will quote from 13 academic papers and 22 articles authored by a total of approximately 100 academics.
Seely went into Neil Ferguson’s history of poor modelling over the past 20+ years, which had disastrous results for British farmers in earlier epidemics, then the greater populace during coronavirus:
This is a story of three scandals, and the first one took place 21 years ago. In 2001, we faced the foot and mouth emergency. We reacted drastically by slaughtering and burning millions of animals, and farmer suicides and bankruptcies followed. That policy was allegedly heavily influenced by Imperial College modelling and Professor Ferguson. Since foot and mouth, two peer-reviewed studies examined the method behind that particular madness. I quote from them now to show there are practical and ethical questions over modelling going back two decades.
In a 2006 paper, and I apologise for these wordy, long titles, titled “Use and abuse of mathematical models: an illustration from the 2001 foot and mouth disease epidemic in the United Kingdom”—they are not that catchy—the authors confirmed that Ferguson’s model
“probably had the most influence on early policy decisions”
and
“specifically, the introduction of the pre-emptive contiguous culling policy”.
That is the mass slaughter of animals near infected farms. The authors said that the consequences were “severe” and
“the models were not fit for the purpose of predicting the course of the epidemic”
—not a good start. They remain “unvalidated”. Their use was “imprudent” and amounted to
“the abuse of predictive models”.
Devastatingly, the authors wrote
“The UK experience provides a salutary warning of how models can be abused in the interests of scientific opportunism.”
It is difficult to find a more damning criticism of one group of scientists by another.
A 2011 paper, “Destructive tension: mathematics versus experience—the progress and control of the 2001 foot and mouth disease epidemic in Great Britain”—bit of a mouthful—by four academics said the models that supported the culling policy were “severely flawed” and based on flawed data with “highly improbable biological assumptions”. The models were
“at best, crude estimations that could not differentiate risk”.
That is not a very good “at best”. At worst, they were “inaccurate representations”.
Sadly, the paper said, impatience for results
“provided the opportunity for self-styled ‘experts’, including some veterinarians, biologists and mathematicians, to publicise unproven novel options.”
Some of the scientific work—some of it modelling, some of it not, with some modelling by Ferguson and some not—was cited as “unvalidated” and “severely flawed”, with inaccurate data on “highly improbable assumptions” leading to “scientific opportunism”. Is anybody reminded of anything more recent that would suggest the same?
I scroll forward 20 years. As with foot and mouth, with covid we had a nervous Government presented with doomsday scenarios by Imperial—the 500,000 dead prediction—that panicked them into a course of profound action with shocking outcomes. After the lockdown had gone ahead, Imperial publicised on 8 June a study by, I think, seven of them arguing the justification for lockdown. It claimed that non-pharmaceutical interventions saved more than 3 million lives in Europe. Effectively, Imperial marked its own homework and gave itself a big slap on the back.
That work is now being challenged. Because of time, I will quote only a small selection. In a paper entitled, “The effect of interventions on COVID-19”, 13 Swedish academics—Ferguson ain’t popular in Sweden, I can tell Members that much—said that the conclusions of the Imperial study were not justified and went beyond the data. Regensburg and Leibniz university academics directly refuted Imperial College in a paper entitled “The illusory effects of non-pharmaceutical interventions on COVID-19 in Europe”, which said that the authors of the Imperial study
“allege that non-pharmaceutical interventions imposed by 11 European countries saved millions of lives. We show that their methods involve circular reasoning. The purported effects are pure artefacts, which contradict the data. Moreover, we demonstrate that the United Kingdom’s lockdown was both superfluous and ineffective.”
I am not saying that this stuff is right; I am just saying that there is a growing body of work that is, frankly, taking apart Imperial’s. Remember, we spent £370 billion on lockdown that we will never get back. I could continue with other quotes, but I think Members get the flavour.
Moreover, a substantial number of other papers now question not Imperial per se but the worth generally of lockdowns. A pre-print article by four authors, “Effects of non-pharmaceutical interventions on COVID-19: A Tale of Three Models”, said:
“Claimed benefits of lockdown appear grossly exaggerated.”
In another paper, three authors found no clear, significant benefit of lockdowns on case growth in any country. Other papers continue that theme. I will quote one more, on adults living with kids. Remember: we shut schools because we were scared that kids would come home and infect older people, who would then die. This paper, in The BMJ, found
“no evidence of an increased risk of severe COVID-19 outcomes.”
We shut down society and schools just in case, doing extraordinary harm to people’s lives, especially young people. I am not a lockdown sceptic, as Ferguson casually describes some of his critics, but I am becoming so. Do you know why, Sir Edward? Because I read the evidence, and there is a growing body of it. In fact, there is one quote that I did not read out. There was a study of lots of countries that had lockdowns and lots that did not, and the data was inconclusive.
The third element of the scandal is the recent modelling. Swedish epidemiologists looked at Imperial’s work and compared it with their own experience. Chief epidemiologist Anders Tegnell said of Imperial’s work that
“the variables…were quite extreme…We were always quite doubtful”.
Former chief epidemiologist Johan Giesecke said Ferguson’s model was “almost hysterical”. In the House of Lords, Viscount Ridley talked of a huge discrepancy and flaws in the model and the modelling. John Ioannidis from Stanford University said that the “assumptions and estimates” seemed “substantially inflated”.
There was a second example last summer. In July 2021, the good Professor Ferguson predicted that hitting 100,000 cases was “almost inevitable”. He told the BBC that the real question was whether we got to double that or even higher. That is where the crystal ball starts to fail: we got nowhere near 200,000, and we got nowhere near 100,000. There was nothing inevitable about Professor Ferguson’s inevitability, and his crystal ball must have gone missing from the start. In The Times, he blamed the Euros for messing up his modelling because—shock horror—people went to pubs a lot to watch the games during the competition. When the tournament finished—shock horror—they did not. That seems to be the fundamental problem: where reality comes up against models, reality steamrollers them because models cannot cope with the complexity of real life. To pretend that they can and even that they are useful, when so many of them have proved not to be, is concerning.
Ferguson is only one of many people in Independent SAGE especially, but also SAGE, who did not cover themselves in glory. Raghib Ali—a friend of my hon. Friend the Member for Wycombe (Mr Baker), who I am delighted is present—is one of the heroes of covid. He noted that many left-wing SAGE members
“repeatedly made inaccurate forecasts overestimating infections”.
Very often, they were falsely described on the BBC.
After a brief intervention of thanks from another Conservative MP, Seely continued, mentioning another member of SAGE who seemed to appear regularly on the BBC:
Just for the record, the communist Susan Michie, who is quoted quite often by the BBC, is not a medical doctor, a virologist or an epidemiologist. She is a health psychologist, so why on earth is she talking about epidemiology?
The third scandal took place this winter. Imperial, the London School of Hygiene and Tropical Medicine and others—I think they included Warwick—predicted 5,000 daily covid deaths, with 3,000 daily deaths as the best-case scenario. They were hopelessly inaccurate, and at this point the tide really begins to turn. Dr Clive Dix, a former vaccine taskforce head, said:
“It’s bad science, and I think they’re being irresponsible. They have a duty to reflect the true risks, but this just headline grabbing.”
As I say, the tide is turning. Oncology professor Angus Dalgleish describes Ferguson’s modelling as “lurid predictions” and “spectacularly wrong”. The great Carl Heneghan, another scientist who has emerged with great credit for his honesty and fairness of comment, says:
“it’s becoming clearer all that ministers see is the worst-case scenario”.
Professor Brendan Wren says:
“Dodgy data and flawed forecasts have become the hallmarks of much of the scientific establishment”—
what a damning quote!—
“which has traded almost exclusively in worst-case scenarios…this must stop now.”
I agree.
I will wind up in the next two to three minutes—I will speak for no longer than 15 minutes because other people wish to get in, and I am always mindful of that. What is the result of all this? The result, as UCL’s Professor Francois Balloux notes, is a
“loss of trust in government and public institutions for crying wolf.”
That is just it. We have had hysterical forecasts, models taken out of context, and worst-case scenarios normalised.
In the Army, there is something called the most dangerous course of action, and there is something called the most likely course of action. To sum up in one sentence how we got this wrong, we have effectively taken the most dangerous course of action and collectively—the politicians, media, scientists and health professionals—presented that as the most likely course of action, but it was not. Why did politicians say, “Follow the science” as a way of shutting down debate, when we know that science is complex and that our outputs are dependent on our inputs? It was down to public-health types, whose defensive decision making would only ever cost other people’s jobs, other people’s health, other people’s sanity, other people’s education and other people’s life chances.
We know that the Opposition supported lockdown from the word go, but a little more opposing might have been helpful. The BBC and the Guardian have been salivating at state control and doomsday scenarios. Against this tsunami of hysteria and fear, thank God for The Spectator, The Telegraph and, yes, the Daily Mail for keeping alive freedom of speech and putting forward an alternative, which is now being increasingly scientifically vindicated. I accept that lockdown was understandable at first—I get that—but I believe the continuation of lockdown after that first summer was an increasingly flawed decision.
In wrapping up, I have some questions. To Professor Ferguson and the doomsday modellers: why are so many of your fellow academics disputing your work and your findings? To the BBC, as our state broadcaster: why did you so rarely challenge Ferguson, SAGE or Independent SAGE? Why did we misrepresent experts, and why did the BBC allow itself to become the propaganda arm of the lockdown state? To the Government: how could we have been so blinkered that we thought that following the science meant shutting down scientific debate? Why did we never use other datasets in contexts with the British people, or even in contexts in which these profound and enormous decisions were made? Why did we think that it was in our nation’s interests to create a grotesque sense of fear to manipulate behaviour? SAGE and Independent SAGE kept on getting it wrong. To the public health types, I quote from Professor Angus Dalgleish again:
“Flailing around, wallowing in hysteria, adopting impractical policies and subverting democracy, the Chief Medical Officer is out of his depth. He has to go if we are ever to escape this nightmare.”
He is not a journalist; he is an oncologist—a senior oncologist.
Twice in 20 years, we have made some pretty profound and significant errors of judgment, using modelling as a sort of glorified guesswork. I suggest respectfully to the Government that, after foot and mouth and covid, never again should they rely on dubious modelling, regardless of the source and regardless of the best intent. I am sure that Imperial and all these other people do the best that they can, and am very happy to state that publicly. However, why has so much of their work been described—and I will use the words of other academics—as “unvalidated”, “flawed”, “not fit for purpose”, “improbable”, “almost hysterical”, “overconfident”, “lurid”, “inflated”, “pessimistic”, “spectacularly wrong”, “fraudulent” and as “scientific opportunism”?
On January 26, the Daily Mail published his speech as an article, which was a great idea. Only political geeks, myself included, watch Parliament in action. This is information the public need to know.
I read the comments following the article. This one caught my eye:
The only accurate data analysis of Covid19 remains the Diamond Princess incident where an entire population were analysed and it showed that Covid19 was not the severe threat to all population that it was made out to be and even more interesting now is that if you rerun the incident again yet pressure that cruise ship population was vaccinated, you get statistically the same results.
Hmm.
To think that millions of ‘ordinary’ people knew about the Diamond Princess early in 2020, yet very few ‘important’ people ever brought it up in the media — or in political settings.
It’s no wonder that many of us think that we were severely taken advantage of over the past two years.
As I have said before, sometimes things are not as they appear.
This is especially true of media attacks on Prime Minister Boris Johnson.
Fake news polls
On February 6, 2022, The Sunday Times published a poll showing that Chancellor Rishi Sunak is more popular with Red Wall (ex-Labour) voters than Boris.
However, Guido Fawkes has shown this is not true — including on a national level.
In fact, Boris is far more popular in Red Wall seats — and nationally — than Rishi is:
Guido seems to be the only one who has uncovered this fake news:
On Monday, Guido wrote about the poll as well as another one published last weekend and asked (emphases in the original):
Who benefits from briefing the Sunday paper most closely read by Tory MPs with fake polls that falsely inflate the electoral prospects of Rishi Sunak?
Guido resolved the issue on Tuesday, February 8:
Yesterday Guido reported on the mystery of the fake polls creating fake news in the Sunday Times. The paper claimed two polls from Survation and Focaldata showed Rishi was the top choice nationally, especially with Red Wall voters. Survation and Focaldata later denied these polls ever existed. The CEO of Focaldata now says he actually forgot* about a poll commissioned by Hanover Communications, and has since provided the data tables which generated the above chart. It shows that, based on the stated “first preference for Prime Minister”, voters nationally prefer Boris and he currently ties with Starmer in Red Wall seats.
Given the Sunday Times article reported the poll as showing Rishi Sunak supposedly had the best chance of reaching voters in the Red Wall seats that flipped to the Tories in 2019, it is striking that the actual data shows Rishi well behind in the Red Wall seats and nationally as the first choice for voters. Whomever span the poll to the Sunday Times emphasised that Rishi was a strong second choice versus Starmer and Boris …
*Justin Ibbett, CEO of Focaldata, who tweeted on Sunday that he had not conducted a poll regarding a “hypothetical leader” has now explained that his firm is primarily a software platform. Customers like Hanover Communications can automate their polling without human intervention from them. Hence his ignorance of a poll his firm conducted.
Biased BBC reporting of Downing Street parties
On a related Boris-bashing topic, the media have been going into overdrive over parties in Downing Street. I fully appreciate why and agree with the exposure of rule-breaking of draconian lockdown measures which the rest of the population obeyed, being cruelly separated from loved ones in life and in death.
However, the BBC — an organisation we all have to pay for in order to watch any television — have taken their coverage of the parties to a whole new level.
On January 18, The Telegraph‘s Charles Moore wrote about their coverage, which is supposed to be impartial: ‘The BBC has been acting like the Fox News of the Left’.
Moore wrote, in part (emphases mine):
I actually do believe that Tim Davie, the director-general, is serious about impartiality, but the corporation’s implementation of his Action Plan is slow in that special way that only great bureaucracies can manage.
The story about Boris and parties is a classic case where the national broadcaster needs to show super-impartiality; but the coverage has showed no recognition whatever of what Mr Davie seeks.
On the contrary, from the news that starts the day to Newsnight, with presenters like Lewis Goodall, which ends it, the BBC has tried to prove that this is the worst scandal in living memory and will be fatal to Boris Johnson’s premiership. It has dragged out the sort of disgruntled Tory backbenchers it normally despises and given them endless airtime to attack the Prime Minister. It is not far off being a Fox News of the Left, taking a line and incessantly promoting it.
Newspapers, too, have made a great meal of the scandal, and a good read it has often been. But this is exactly the sort of occasion where a compulsorily funded broadcaster should not try to ape Fleet Street. If you had relied solely on BBC coverage last week, you would have concluded that Boris was about to be kicked out. There was almost no presentation of the contrary view – which precedent suggests is likelier to be right – that he probably wasn’t.
Moore points out that there are other news stories that the BBC could be covering, which are far more important in the long term than events from 2020 and 2021:
The biggest story in the world last week (and this) is the possibility of Russia invading Ukraine. The BBC virtually forgot this.
The news that a Chinese agent had donated nearly half a million pounds to the office of the Labour MP Barry Gardiner was also strong – a much more significant example of apparent political corruption than the standard “Tory sleaze” tales which the BBC relishes, yet it was downplayed.
Egregious coverage of Boris’s accusation of Keir Starmer over Jimmy Savile
Speaking of Labour and the BBC, in his January 31 statement about the Sue Gray inquiry looking into the parties, Boris accused Sir Keir Starmer of not investigating Sir Jimmy Savile while Starmer was the Director of Public Prosecutions.
Savile was the BBC’s darling, presenting Top of the Pops (TOTP) for many years and then his own show, Jim’ll Fix It.
The BBC have said that Boris’s accusation is fake news and should be retracted.
However, the accusations against Savile for taking advantage of minors have been many and have been circulating for years. One famous punk rock lead singer said several years ago on a late-night programme on another network that everyone was discussing Savile’s proclivities backstage on TOTP in the 1970s!
Savile’s death in 2011 provoked months of discussion on English websites asking why he was never prosecuted for taking advantage of young people who were part of the dancing audience on TOTP.
In other words, everyone knew what Savile got up to, but he was untouchable — and the BBC refuses to hear any criticism of their iconic star.
On Monday, February 7, a group of left-wing protesters which gathered in London to voice their discontent with coronavirus measures, verbally attacked Starmer while he and another Labour MP were walking back to Parliament from a meeting elsewhere.
They asked him about Freemasonry, called him a traitor, denounced his lack of opposition to the Government and — at the bottom of the list — criticised his lack of prosecution of Savile’s crimes against minors. In the end, police had to escort him and the other MP to a car to drive them back.
Piers Corbyn led the anti-coronavirus protest. He has led many of these in England. He is the brother of Labour MP Jeremy Corbyn.
Piers Corbyn is not a Boris supporter.
However, the BBC blamed Boris for the mob’s verbal attack on Starmer. Below is Laura Kuenssberg’s analysis, saying that the Prime Minister should retract his accusation of January 31. Note how she doesn’t even mention the name Jimmy Savile, only ‘false claims’:
However, Channel 4 News actually interviewed Piers Corbyn, who said that Boris had nothing to do with his group surrounding Starmer in the street:
It’s a good interview, with intelligent questions from the reporter.
Corbyn says that people have known about Savile for years.
Conclusion
Fake news used to be an American phenomenon.
It’s quickly spreading here and, sadly, infecting what used to be our most trusted media outlets.
Readers of The Times and viewers of the BBC should be aware that not everything is as it seems.
What we are witnessing is a kangaroo media court.
On Wednesday, August 18, 2021, a retired CIA man, Douglas London, wrote an article for Just Security: ‘CIA’s Former Counterterrorism Chief for the Region: Afghanistan, Not An Intelligence Failure — Something Much Worse’:
Douglas London is that former counterterrorism chief. He worked for the CIA for 34 years. Nowadays, he teaches at Georgetown University, is a non-resident fellow at the Middle East Institute and is author of the book The Recruiter, which details the changes in the CIA post-9/11.
Excerpts follow, emphases mine.
Until his retirement in 2019, he was responsible for preparing security assessments for President Trump about Afghanistan. He volunteered in the same capacity for then-candidate Joe Biden.
Withdrawal — how and when?
He writes that the American withdrawal from Afghanistan has long been predicated with ‘what-if’ scenarios (emphasis in the original, those in purple mine):
The U.S. Intelligence Community assessed Afghanistan’s fortunes according to various scenarios and conditions and depending on the multiple policy alternatives from which the president could choose. So, was it 30 days from withdrawal to collapse? 60? 18 months? Actually, it was all of the above, the projections aligning with the various “what ifs.” Ultimately, it was assessed, Afghan forces might capitulate within days under the circumstances we witnessed, in projections highlighted to Trump officials and future Biden officials alike.
He says that Biden and Trump viewed withdrawal differently, citing Biden’s speech of August 16 (emphases mine):
In his prepared remarks on Monday, President Biden stated, “But I always promised the American people that I will be straight with you. The truth is: This did unfold more quickly than we had anticipated.” That’s misleading at best. The CIA anticipated it as a possible scenario.
By early 2018, it was clear President Trump wanted out of Afghanistan regardless of the alarming outcomes the intelligence community cautioned. But he likewise did not want to preside over the nightmarish scenes we’ve witnessed. Then-Secretary of State Mike Pompeo was the principal architect of America’s engagement with the Taliban that culminated with the catastrophic February 2020 withdrawal agreement, terms intended to get the president through the coming elections. Pompeo championed the plan despite the intelligence community’s caution that its two key objectives– securing the Taliban’s commitment to break with al-Qa’ida and pursue a peaceful resolution to the conflict — were highly unlikely.
Douglas London outlines the various scenarios:
Scenarios for an orderly withdrawal ranged from those in which the United States retained roughly 5,000 troops and most of the existing forward military and intelligence operating bases, to what was determined to be the minimum presence of around 2,500 troops maintaining the larger bases in greater Kabul, Bagram, Jalalabad and Khost, as well as the infrastructure to support the bases we would turn over to Afghan partners. The larger of these two options was judged more likely to prevent Afghanistan’s collapse for 1-2 years and still provide for a degree of continued U.S. counterterrorism pressure; the smaller footprint was more difficult to assess but allowed flexibility for the United States to increase or further reduce its presence should circumstances rapidly deteriorate. (It would be valuable if commentators and news coverage included a greater appreciation of how such contingency-based assessments work rather than conflating assessments.)
Initially, even a “Kabul only” option included the retention of the sprawling U.S. Bagram Air Base and other intelligence facilities in the greater capital area through which the United States could project force, maintain essential logistical, intelligence and medical support to Afghan operated bases, and retain some technical intelligence collection and counterterrorist capability across the country. But without any U.S. military and intelligence presence beyond the Embassy in Kabul, faced with a Taliban military and propaganda offensive, and undermined by Ghani’s fractious relationship with his own national political partners, the intelligence community warned the government could dissolve in days. And so it went.
Ambassador Zalmay Khalilzad, a questionable special representative
Ambassador Zalmay Khalilzad was America’s special representative during the Trump administration’s negotiations.
In 2018, he was a private citizen who had contacts with a number of Afghans. Douglas London said that the intelligence community did not trust him because he was:
dabbling on his own in 2018 with a variety of dubious Afghan interlocutors against whom the intelligence community warned, trying opportunistically to get “back inside.” Undaunted, his end around to Pompeo and the White House pledging to secure the deal Trump needed which the president’s own intelligence, military and diplomatic professionals claimed was not possible absent a position of greater strength, was enthusiastically received. Our impression was that Khalilzad was angling to be Trump’s Secretary of State in a new administration, were he to win, and would essentially do or say what he was told to secure his future by pleasing the mercurial president, including his steady compromise of whatever leverage the United States had to incentivize Taliban compromises.
Because the withdrawal plan was popular with voters in 2020, the Biden camp also endorsed it:
Moreover, from my perspective, they appeared to believe that negative consequences would be at least largely owned by Trump, the GOP, and Khalilzad, whose being left in place, intentionally or not, allowed him to serve even more so as a fall guy. For the candidate, who had long advocated withdrawal, the outcome was, as it had been with Trump, a foregone conclusion despite what many among his counterterrorism advisors counselled. President Biden himself has said as much in terms of his mind being made up.
There was a rather naïve confidence among Biden’s more influential foreign policy advisors that the Taliban’s best interests were served by adhering to the agreement’s main points. Doing so, they argued, would guarantee the U.S. withdrawal, and leave room for more constructive engagement, possibly even aid, should the Taliban come to power.
The Taliban’s PR offensive
Meanwhile, the Taliban were becoming more aware of the importance of a PR offensive aimed at the West:
The Taliban learned a great deal about the utility of PR since 2001, and maximized their access to Western media as highlighted by Taliban deputy and Haqqani Taliban Network leader Sirajuddin Haqqani’s apparently ghost written New York Times OpEd. The reality, of course, as the intelligence community long maintained, was that the Taliban’s control over the country was predicated on isolation from the rest of the world, rather than integration. International recognition, global financial access, and foreign aid were not going to influence how the Taliban would rule.
Also:
Momentum the Taliban needed to secure their adversaries’ cooperation was facilitated by a robust propaganda machine that, in many instances, successfully manipulated the media into positive, disproportional coverage from the outset of their offensive in casting their conquest as inevitable. Neither the Afghan government nor the United States could ever effectively counter the Taliban’s persistent and savvy media efforts given the need to protect sources and methods, legal restraints, and an unfortunate lack in investment and imagination.
For Afghan politicians, money talks
Greasing palms is part of Afghan life among those in power locally and regionally. Money can also determine one’s political alliances, which can be fluid:
U.S. policy makers were also cautioned that the broad coalition of Afghan politicians, warlords and military leaders across the country benefiting from the money and power that came with a sustained U.S. presence were likely to lose confidence and hedge their bets were U.S. military forces and intelligence personnel to withdraw. Further, that President Ashraf Ghani’s stubborn resistance to the Afghan political practice of buying support and his dismantling of the warlords’ private armies would weaken their incentives to support the government. Switching sides for a better deal or to fight another day is a hallmark of Afghan history. And U.S. policy to impose an American blueprint for a strong central government and integrated national army served only to enable Ghani’s disastrous and uncompromising stewardship.
On that topic, Britain’s talkRADIO has been interviewing another seasoned American counterintelligence specialist, Malcolm Nance, who said that, over the past year at least, the Taliban were co-opting other Afghans, including those from the country’s Western-backed army.
He said that it did not have to be that way, since he went into Afghanistan in November 2001. The US could have done the job in short order, had Bush II not switched priorities to Iraq:
Keeping the money aspect in mind, Douglas London describes how the 2021 debacle unfolded. Al Qa’ida also played a part:
The clock began to accelerate when US military and intelligence elements withdrew from Kandahar on May 13, and thereafter closed remaining forward operating bases and “lily pads,” the term used for temporary staging areas under U.S. or coalition control. By the time Bagram was closed on July 1, the United States and NATO had also departed Herat, Mazar I Sharif, Jalalabad, Khost and other locations I am not at liberty to name. The Taliban was moving in even as we were packing up. They were quite likely joined by the many al-Qa’ida members (some of whom had enjoyed Iranian sanctuary),-if not direct operational support, augmented further by recently released comrades the Taliban set free from Afghan detention at Bagram and elsewhere.
Policy makers were also aware of the Taliban’s effective use of a parallel “shadow government” structure maintained since losing power that provided for reliable lines of communication with local elders across the provinces, as well as government authorities, often owing to shared family or clan connections. To an American it might be surprising, but it was nothing out of the ordinary for an Afghan military commander or police chief to be in regular contact even with those faced daily in combat.
The Taliban was thus well positioned to negotiate and buy rather than fight their way to successive conquests, itself an Afghan tradition. Moreover, the Taliban was prepared to quickly rule and provide services in the territories coming under its control. And by prioritizing the periphery to secure borders and the lines of communication required to sustain an insurgency, striking first from where they were defeated in 2001, the Taliban clearly learned from history, whereas we still have not. But where did the money come from to finance this campaign?
Persuading low level government fighters and functionaries to turnover their weapons and abandon their posts was well within the Taliban’s means, but it was undoubtedly more expensive securing the cooperation of senior officials with the authority to surrender provincial capitals. Layer on that the need to pay the surge of their own fighters, many of them essentially part-time and seasonal. Payroll and care for the families of fighters killed and wounded is often the greatest expense for the Taliban and its terrorist partner groups, and in Afghanistan, likewise the most important incentive to attract fighters.
Where Taliban money comes from
The Taliban finance themselves from a variety of sources, from drug trafficking to donations from other foreign countries:
The Taliban’s finances are complicated, more so by a structure which is not monolithic, and heavily dependent on the vast international criminal network operated by the Haqqani Taliban Network in the East, and somewhat autonomous regional commanders in the West. Revenues are variously drawn from taxes imposed on locals, narcotics trafficking, foreign donations-largely from Arab Gulf countries, real estate (some of which is abroad), the extortion of mining companies operating in areas under their control–many of which are Chinese government parastatals, and other foreign governments. Pakistan has long been a principal backer, but Russia and Iran increased their investments to court the group in recent years. Moreover, both benefited decidedly from the Taliban’s swift, bloodless conquest that expeditiously purged and humiliated the United States, and minimized what might have been a violent, prolonged fight that increased regional instability and the flow of refugees.
Dichotomy between US Department of Defense and CIA
Douglas London noted the disparity of opinion between the Department of Defense and the CIA:
… in grading their own homework, the U.S. defense establishment only exacerbated the problem. While it’s little surprise the Department of Defense was unwilling to objectively evaluate the resolve and capacity of those they trained, equipped, and advised to resist a forthcoming Taliban offensive, their rose-colored depictions of achievement over 20 years flew in the face of reality, and was consistently challenged by the CIA’s more gloomy, albeit realistic projections.
Conclusion
He concludes:
… there was no intelligence failure by the agency in warning either Trump or Biden as to how events would play out. Operating in the shadows and “supporting the White House” will prevent the intelligence community from publicly defending itself. But the failure was not due to any lack of warning, but rather the hubris and political risk calculus of decision makers whose choices are too often made in their personal and political interest or with pre-committed policy choices, rather than influenced by (sometimes inconvenient) intelligence assessments and the full interests of the country.
It is difficult to see how the Afghanistan debacle can ever be rectified now, especially after 20 years.
As to what happens going forward, unfortunately, the grim possibilities are endless.
More on Afghanistan tomorrow.
Below are snippets from this week’s news, involving coronavirus and the Tokyo Olympics.
Coronavirus
TikTok is looking for a ‘GP’ to deliver TikTok scripts on coronavirus.
Presumably, the popular Chinese-owned video platform wants to dispel what they consider to be myths and conspiracy theories about the virus and the vaccines.
However, it is unclear whether TikTok are seeking an actual general practitioner — licensed physician — or someone who can impersonate a GP. The pay is £100 per diem.
Here’s the advert, which I saw online in a comments section on another website:
Then there are the mask snitches. Since July 19, the Government has told us to use common sense in densely populated enclosed spaces, such as trains. There is no longer a Government mandate to wear masks, although transport companies and retailers can request them. They are also a given in clinical environments and in some pharmacies.
One chap tweeted the London Metropolitan Police about the lack of masks on his train the other day. Surely, one would have tweeted the British Transport Police in the first instance. That said, the Met asked for more information. Many Londoners wish they were as responsive to crime reports as they are to missing muzzles:
On the other side of the coronavirus debate, Neil Oliver of GB News voiced his call for freedom from coronavirus restrictions in a powerful broadcast last weekend. He got a lot of criticism from Twitter users:
His colleague Dan Wootton asked him about the blowback. Oliver said that only 20% of the UK population are on Twitter, so they are a minority. He said that the YouTube of his editorial garnered many positive comments. He has also received letters thanking him for his stance, as the average Briton has no public voice. Oliver spoke from his home in Stirling, Scotland:
Meanwhile, in England, former Top Gear star Jeremy Clarkson dispensed common sense in voicing his opinion on SAGE to the Radio Times. The magazine interviewed him for a lockdown edition of his popular Amazon series, The Grand Tour. Clarkson also hosts another well-received Amazon programme, Clarkson’s Farm, in which he is learning how to become a farmer.
The Guardian was horrified at Clarkson’s views on coronavirus: ‘Jeremy Clarkson criticises Covid scientists, saying “if you die, you die”‘.
Excerpts follow from the August 3 article. Emphases mine below (unless stated otherwise):
Now Jeremy Clarkson has opened himself up to more anger after he criticised “those communists at Sage” preventing opening up because, he argues, “if you die, you die.”
The paper could not resist editorialising:
In an interview with the Radio Times, Clarkson gives his views on the pandemic and what should happen next. Many will find his thoughts typically boorish and insensitive.
In his interview with the Radio Times, Clarkson said:
“When it started, I read up on pandemics and they tend to be four years long,” he said.
“I think the politicians should sometimes tell those communists at Sage to get back in their box. Let’s just all go through life with our fingers crossed and a smile on our face. I can see Boris doesn’t want to open it up and shut us back down again. But if it’s going to be four years … and who knows, it could be 40 years.”
Or it could be for ever. “Well, if it’s going to be for ever, let’s open it up and if you die, you die.”
Guido Fawkes saw the coverage …
… and opined (emphasis in the original):
Guido can’t see anything objectionable about his usual no-nonsense, factual, appraisal…
Tokyo Olympics
Clarkson also voiced his views on the Olympics:
Clarkson’s comments come as he was on Monday labelled the “Grand Bore” by, of all publications, the Daily Star. It published on its front page an unflattering photograph of a topless Clarkson and asked: “Why is it the tubs of lard who are so critical of our Olympic heroes?”
That backlash came after a newspaper column in which he dismissed shot putting, diving and dressage as pointless fringe sports. Why do we care, he asked. “Nothing marks out a country’s minor-league standing more effectively than its pride in things that really don’t matter.”
Any MP would tell Clarkson that he is missing the point, because the Olympics are about ‘soft power’. Team GB is currently sixth in the medals table in terms of gold and fourth overall.
These are the first Games in which a trans person, Laurel Hubbard from New Zealand, has participated. You can read all about Hubbard, offspring of a former mayor of Auckland, in the Daily Mail.
Hubbard’s speciality is weightlifting, but that proved to be a damp squib. You can see the short video at Guido Fawkes. Hubbard now wishes to slink into obscurity.
GB News commentator and author Paul Embery, who describes himself as Blue Labour, tweeted about the fact that Hubbard’s participation had to be handled as if one were walking on eggshells:
Guido’s article on Hubbard discusses the sensitivity of the topic of sexual identity and how activists want the media to report it (emphases in the original):
Guido appreciates the BBC has the freedom to be biased towards Team GB, though spots the corporation’s sports voiceover chose to wish the first trans Olympian “all the success” before Laurel Hubbard crashed out of the competition, having failed to lift in any round. They also pityingly said that she’d given her “absolute all”.
It seems the BBC had been reading from the Olympics’ official guide to wokery; taking their seats, sports reporters found every desk adorned with a “Guide for journalists covering LGBTQ athletes & issues at the summer Olympics and Paralympics”. The guide’s “terms to avoid” section included “Born male/born female. No one is born with a gender identity”. The Telegraph’s Chief Sports Writer Oliver Brown asks how it was allowed to be disseminated at an Olympic venue as a supposedly balanced document…
Guido posted the document, which one can read in full.
I feel sorry for the female New Zealand weightlifter who was next in line and could not participate.
In closing, outside of the rowing, Team GB did a fantastic job in Tokyo. Congratulations!
Last Friday’s post was about Matt Hancock’s fall from grace as Health Secretary as featured on the front page of The Sun.
The Queen had lost confidence in him before then, as my post explains, covered in another front page feature, in The Times.
Hancock’s final 48 hours as health secretary were pivotal, not only for his political but also his personal life.
Thursday, June 24
The Sun allegedly contacted Hancock to ask him if he had any comment before they published the compromising photo of him in a steamy embrace with a female aide.
Hancock went home that evening and dropped a life-changing bombshell on his wife and youngest child.
On Sunday, the Mail reported (emphases mine):
Mother-of-three Martha was reportedly blissfully unaware of her husband’s infidelity until he broke the news to her on Thursday night when it became clear the footage would be published the next day.
And he reportedly even woke up the couple’s youngest child, aged eight, to tell him he was leaving.
How unspeakably cruel.
My commiserations to both — as well as to his two other children.
Apparently, Hancock is serious:
Friday, June 25
On Friday, YouGov and Savanta ComRes took snap polls to test public opinion on The Sun‘s revelations about Hancock.
It was clear that this representative portion of the public were deeply unhappy and thought he should resign.
These were YouGov’s results:
Savanta ComRes found that 46% of Conservative voters thought Hancock should resign:
The full video of Hancock’s illicit embrace became available online.
A number of newspaper columnists expressed their disgust with Hancock’s hypocrisy.
The Telegraph‘s Emily Hill wrote:
Four days after Freedom Day failed to dawn, what fun it is for the masses who must continue to abide by the Minister’s absurd rules to see this! Dancing inside at a wedding – verboten. Nightclubs – verboten. Standing at the bar in a pub talking to perfect strangers – verboten. It’s as if they don’t want the young and fit and healthy to mate anymore. Sex privileges, it seems, are reserved for middle-aged men in Westminster while the rest of us can only watch, helpless, wondering how much their cheating is costing the taxpayer.
… But it is now the afternoon and Hancock has merely cancelled his appearance at a vaccine centre while Grant Shapps [Secretary of State for Transport] was sent out to inform us: “First of all, I think the actual issue is entirely personal for Matt Hancock.” Seconds later he stated: “whatever the rules are, the rules will have to be followed” in relation to the ministerial code. This makes hypocrites of much of the Government, not to mention every world leader who flouted social distancing rules so publicly at the G7 summit.
The Telegraph‘s Alison Pearson pointed out how much the British public has sacrificed in personal relationships over the past year and a bit because of Hancock’s restrictions:
Thousands of people posted reactions on social media. Some were bitterly mocking the official mantras: “Hands, Face, Back to My Place”. “Saving Lives, Shagging Wives”.
Others were simply devastating: “I wasn’t even allowed to kiss my dying father because of Hancock.”
The anger and disbelief were palpable. Was this really the minister who told us on the 17th May that, after fourteen months of physical and emotional self-denial, we were free to hug our loved ones, when, a fortnight earlier, he’d been giving mouth-to-mouth to some glamorous chum he’d put on the public payroll? Knowing Hancock, he’d call it First Aide.
We are all humble sinners and a man or woman’s private peccadillos shouldn’t disqualify them from doing their job. But no such understanding or humanity – not a sliver of mercy – has been shown by the Secretary of State or this Government to members of the public who have broken often cruel and arbitrary rules. Remember how we watched in horror as police arrested a retired nurse as she tried to drive her 97-year-old mother away from a care home. Hundreds of thousands of people have departed this life without a last touch or kiss from their best beloveds because the restrictions forbade it so relatives sobbed in the carpark because Matt Hancock said it must be so. Almost 30,000 children have been put on anti-depressants yet just one positive test (without any Covid symptoms) can still send an entire year group home to self-isolate for ten lonely days. Parents know this is insanity, but they must suck it up because that prating popinjay Hancock tells them it’s vital to keep us “safe”…
If I had a gasket left to blow it would have exploded when Culture and Sports minister John Whittingdale explained this week how up to 3,000 Uefa officials will be allowed to arrive in the UK, without quarantine, for the Euro semis and finals. “We’ve always said that for some people who are important…”, said the hapless minister, accounting for the fact that normal people would be held to different standards.
“All animals are equal but some animals are more equal than others.” I never ever thought George Orwell’s satirical take in Animal Farm on an arrogant, unaccountable elite patronising the masses would apply in our country. More fool me. We’re all in this together, eh, Matt? …
Trust me, it’s not closed. There are millions of us, and we are raging now, and we will not allow it to be closed. If the Government permits one law for Hancock and “important people” and another for the rest of us then it is morally bankrupt. Boris must act this very day to restore the people’s faith, to prove that we haven’t been mugs.
Fraser Nelson, also writing for the Telegraph, pointed out how Hancock insisted on following his draconian rules, therefore, he should not expect privacy now:
Mr Hancock has always been one of the most emphatic for the rules. In internal government debates, he has invariably pushed for the toughest restrictions and wanted 10-year jail sentences as a penalty for trying to dodge draconian quarantine rules. “I make no apologies for the strength of these measures,” he said: they’d target a “minority who don’t want to follow the rules.” Who, presumably, he thinks, deserve everything coming their way. When two women were fined by police for walking together, Mr Hancock was unforgiving. “Every time you try to flex the rules,’ he said, “that could be fatal” …
This is the irony in his request on Friday for “privacy for my family on this personal matter” now. There is no doubt his family deserves it. But a great many other families would have been grateful for more privacy over the last 15 months. Instead, the Tory Government decided to legislate for what people do in their own homes. And in so doing, set up a system where people came to worry that they’d be reported to the police – perhaps by their neighbours – if they stretched the rules by inviting children over to play in their back gardens. Greater Manchester Police issued a statement boasting that they had raided a family home to break up a child’s birthday party.
Sweden managed to fight back two Covid waves while respecting privacy and civil liberty. There are bans on mass gatherings, and a rule of eight for public places. But no rules would apply inside anyone’s property, where they had sovereignty. Government would not come through your front door: in Sweden, your home is your castle. It wasn’t so long ago when this respect for privacy summed up civic life in Britain.
When Mr Hancock started issuing advice on where we should hug (embracing outside, he said, was better than inside) alarm bells ought to have been ringing in Number 10. It was a sign that the Government machine had gone way out of control, losing any sense of its remit or boundaries. Number 10 should have stepped in, and perhaps asked for a study on the efficacy of the intrusions or work of Project Fear: the blood-curdling posters showing Covid victims on their deathbeds. If there was no proof that the campaign was making a difference, they could have been told to change tack …
Paul Waugh of HuffPost dug up a quote from April 2020 (and a 2021 photo), showing how dictatorial Hancock was:
Conservatives in Parliament began complaining about Hancock. Christopher Hope, writing for the Telegraph, reported:
Baroness Foster of Oxton, a Tory peer, accused Mr Hancock on Twitter of having “used emergency powers to impose these punitive restrictions leading to horrendous consequences across society without debate yet ignored them himself & at work!”
Backbench Conservative MPs contacted their whips about the Health Secretary. One texted: “You don’t need me to tell you what I think.” Another said that “children have missed out in so many ways” and that Mr Hancock’s behaviour was “so hypocritical”, while a third MP said the Government “is looking ridiculous now, I am sorry to say”.
Oddly, the Shadow (Opposition) Health Minister Jonathan Ashworth was silent.
The day ended with The Sun‘s Harry Cole appearing on the BBC’s Newsnight:
Saturday, June 26
The Telegraph had running live coverage of the Hancock debacle. Excerpts follow.
Coverage began at 9:01 a.m.:
Tory MPs urged Boris Johnson to “pull the plug” on Mr Hancock and expressed their frustration to party whips over the Health Secretary’s “hypocritical” behaviour …
A senior government source said public reaction was being monitored and could determine Mr Hancock’s fate.
At 9:30:
The Telegraph understands Mr Hancock had no idea the camera existed when it captured him kissing adviser Gina Coladangelo, and government sources said it was “unheard of” for cameras to be installed in ministers’ offices.
It raises the possibility that the camera was deliberately placed by someone with access to his office with the intention of catching the pair cheating on their spouses and breaking Covid rules. It is the first time a Cabinet minister has been filmed in their own office without their knowledge.
In a further twist, the Department of Health and Social Care’s offices use CCTV cameras made by the Chinese company Hikvision, which is banned in the US because of national security concerns.
At 10:20:
A healthcare company which employs as a senior director the brother of the aide Matt Hancock was pictured kissing has insisted it had never benefited from the connection to the Health Secretary.
Reports suggested Roberto Coladangelo, strategy director at Partnering Health Limited (PHL Group), was the brother of Gina Coladangelo, a familial connection later confirmed.
At 11:06:
The Health Secretary is under mounting political pressure this morning after a video was published of him hugging and embracing Gina Coladangelo, a non-executive director in his department, in early May.
At the time, hugging and socialising indoors with people outside one’s household was banned.
But according to The Sun, they have been “all over each other” again this week in the same ninth-floor office of the Department of Health and Social Care.
At 11:19:
Duncan Baker, Conservative MP for North Norfolk, has called for Matt Hancock to resign.
Mr Baker, who was elected in 2019, is believed to be the first Tory MP to openly call for Mr Hancock to go and told his local newspaper the Eastern Daily Press: “In my view people in high public office and great positions of responsibility should act with the appropriate morals and ethics that come with that role …
“I will not in any shape condone this behaviour and I have in the strongest possible terms told the Government what I think.”
Duncan Baker was not alone. Three other Conservative MPs spoke out against Hancock — Esther McVey, William Wragg and Sir Christopher Chope:
Sir Christopher told the Dorset paper, the Daily Echo:
“I think that he should resign rather than be sacked because this should actually be an issue for him and his conscience.
“One of the benefits of having been around for a long time is that I’ve seen this sort of thing before and the strength of feeling is such, within the party and outside, that this will not simply go away.
“The sooner he resigns the better so we can have a new secretary for health who commands public respect.
“Hancock is finished.
“The sooner he goes the sooner he can be rehabilitated.”
That afternoon, Hancock and Prime Minister Boris Johnson had a conversation. Hancock wrote a letter of resignation. Boris responded with a written reply:
Around 6 p.m., Hancock announced his resignation via a personal video:
Shadow Health Secretary Jonathan Ashworth said that Boris should have sacked Hancock:
However, given Boris’s philandering, that would have been hypocritical.
Also, Hancock will now return to the backbenches. Boris will want to keep him sweet. Even I can figure that out.
Around two hours later, it was announced that Sajid Javid would be Hancock’s replacement. Javid has been Home Secretary and Chancellor of the Exchequer, so he will be comfortable with another post in the Cabinet.
This means that Boris’s expected reshuffle will not now take place until perhaps later in the year. A smart move:
This thread summarises Javid’s career. He is the son of a bus driver. His teachers told him that he should pursue television set repair as a career. Were they ever wrong:
Dominic Cummings was quick to react, blaming Boris’s wife Carrie for the appointment. She had at one time worked for Javid. Cummings said he himself had ‘tricked’ Boris into firing Javid from Her Majesty’s Treasury (HMT):
Sky News’s Beth Rigby appeared outside of No. 10 late on Saturday:
Beth has some nerve. She was suspended from Sky News for a few months for having revelled in a non-coronavirus-compliant way at her colleague Kay Burley’s 60th birthday party evening in central London:
Sunday, June 27
Newspaper editors must have been pulling out their hair in changing their front pages for Sunday.
The Sun went for a play on words (matt paint):
The Mirror had the same idea, adding that his aide has quit her job, too:
The Times had a front page article adding that Hancock used a personal Gmail account to conduct Department of Health business. Apparently it’s done now, but any of those emails are subject to FOIA requests with regard to Government business. It also means that the Government might not be able to get a trail of all of his activity with regard to contracts:
The Express said that Conservative donors threatened to stop contributions if Hancock stayed in office:
I will stop there for now.
The Sunday articles and news programmes had much more to explore.
For now, it looks as if Sajid Javid has a more libertarian approach to handling the virus and wants restrictions lifted as soon as practicable.
Matt Hancock, Secretary of State for Health and Social Care, could well experience the worst weekend of his life.
The Queen has her say
On Thursday, June 24, The Times featured an article on its front page about Prime Minister Boris Johnson meeting the Queen in person for their weekly meeting for the first time since lockdown in March 2020.
It says (emphases mine):
Matt Hancock has had a difficult few weeks. And while his line manager may have contributed to his woes, his ultimate boss has seemingly taken pity on him.
The Queen told Boris Johnson, at their first in-person meeting in 15 months: “I’ve just been talking to your secretary of state for health — poor man. He came to privy council. He’s full of . . .”
“Full of beans!” the prime minister interjected, in the clip filmed by broadcasters in the private audience room at Buckingham Palace yesterday.
“He thinks that things are getting better,” said the Queen, to which Johnson responded: “They are.”
… In a 1992 documentary to mark her 40th year on the throne she said that by meeting prime ministers she helped to take a weight off their shoulders. “They unburden themselves or tell me what is going on . . . and sometimes I can help in some way as well,” she said.
The media were allowed to film the first few minutes of their meeting. This was shown on BBC Breakfast:
It’s telling that the Queen chose to say that on camera.
Hancock’s affair
On Friday, The Sun featured a worldwide exclusive featuring Hancock, husband and father of three:
Normally, I would not comment on extramarital affairs, however, Hancock has left us in lockdown for 16 months and counting. Yet, here he is violating his own rules. For thee, but not for me.
The Sun‘s political editor Harry Cole broke the story:
Excerpts from Cole’s article follow:
He cheated on his wife with Gina Coladangelo, 43, who he hired last year with taxpayers’ money, as Covid gripped Britain.
Mr Hancock, 42, and millionaire lobbyist Gina were caught on camera in a steamy clinch at his Whitehall office.
Whistleblowers revealed the Health Secretary had been spotted cheating on his wife of 15 years with married Ms Coladangelo.
He was seen kissing her at the Department of Health’s London HQ during office hours last month as the mutant strain began spreading.
And today, Mr Hancock apologised for his actions, saying: “I accept that I breached the social distancing guidance in these circumstances.
“I have let people down and am very sorry.
Is Hancock going to resign? No, he is not:
I remain focused on working to get the country out of this pandemic, and would be grateful for privacy for my family on this personal matter.
There should be no mercy shown for this egregious hypocrisy.
A year ago, Prof Neil ‘Dodgy Modelling’ Ferguson entertained his mistress, who travelled across London to spend an afternoon with him at the height of the pandemic. Ferguson resigned from SAGE, although he has been readmitted as a member.
At the time of Ferguson’s resignation, Hancock said that it was the right thing to do:
Guido Fawkes has the dialogue from Hancock’s interview with Kay Burley of Sky News. She, too, was a coronavirus restrictions violator and was suspended from Sky News for several months:
Matt Hancock: “I think he took the right decision to resign”
Kay Burley: “You wouldn’t have fought to keep him?”
Hancock: “That’s just not possible in these circumstances”
Guido also said that Hancock supported a police investigation:
Guido notes that when government Covid advisor Neil Ferguson broke the government’s social distancing rules to hook up at the start of lockdown, Hancock said he was both right to resign, and backed any police action necessary.
Returning to Harry Cole’s article:
Last night, a friend of the Health Secretary said: “He has no comment on personal matters. No rules have been broken.”
Mr Hancock was pictured embracing his aide. The image was from just after 3pm on May 6 — as the rest of Westminster was engrossed by the local elections.
We did not yet have a relaxation on hugging at that time. That happened 13 days later.
A whistleblower tipped off Cole. Hancock:
is seen in his distinctive ninth-floor office inside the sprawling Department of Health building, which is a stone’s throw from the Houses of Parliament.
During the pandemic, the office has provided the backdrop to his Zoom appearances on TV — including the Andrew Marr Show.
Mr Hancock is seen checking the corridor is clear before closing the door and then leaning on it to ensure he cannot be disturbed.
Ms Coladangelo then walks towards him and the pair begin their passionate embrace.
According to a whistleblower, who used to work at the department, the pair have regularly been caught in clinches together.
The source said: “They have tried to keep it a secret but everyone knows what goes on inside a building like that …
“I’m just amazed he was so brazen about it as he was the Secretary of State.
“It has also shocked people because he put her in such an important, publicly-funded role and this is what they get up to in office hours when everyone else is working hard.”
The office where the tryst happened is where Mr Hancock famously hangs his Damien Hirst portrait of the Queen.
Unfortunately, the Government is defending Hancock:
The lunchtime press briefing on Friday indicated that Boris:
considers the matter closed.
By the way, Hancock has an Instagram account. This was one of his posts:
You couldn’t make it up:
One wonders if this woman has any involvement in keeping us in restrictions:
It also emerged she had accompanied Mr Hancock to confidential meetings with civil servants and visited No10. Sunday Times sources revealed at the time: “Before Matt does anything big, he’ll speak to Gina. She knows everything.”
She began working for the Department of Health and Social Care (DHSC) in September 2020:
In September, Mr Hancock appointed her as a non-executive director at DHSC, making her a powerful member of the department’s oversight board.
It hit the headlines as there was no public record of the appointment, which was set to see her earn at least £15,000 of taxpayers’ money, potentially rising by a further £5,000.
The role makes her responsible for “overseeing and monitoring performance” — in effect, scrutinising matters of concern to Mr Hancock.
A DHSC spokesman said the appointment was “made in the usual way and followed correct procedure”.
It is also understood that since April, she has had a parliamentary pass, giving her unregulated access to the Palace of Westminster.
It bears her husband’s surname, which she does not use professionally, and is sponsored by Lord Bethell, the hereditary peer, health minister and former lobbyist.
I am sorry to read about Lord Bethell’s involvement. Until now, I respected him. I hope the House of Lords asks questions of him next week.
However, she also worked for Hancock in the early stages of the pandemic:
Mr Hancock secretly appointed her to his department as an unpaid adviser on a six-month contract in March last year.
It appears that, six months later, her appointment became official.
Both the woman and Hancock studied together at Oxford, where they read PPE (Philosophy, Politics and Economics):
The pair first met at Oxford University in the early 2000s but Mr Hancock went on to wed Martha Hoyer Millar in 2006.
Chumocracy
There is an interesting history behind the associations Hancock has in this affair.
Many call it ‘chumocracy’.
Hancock
This is a biography from Hancock’s website:
Before entering politics he worked as an economist at the Bank of England, and for his family tech industry.
Matt is married to Martha and has three young children. He is the first MP in modern times to win a horse race, having raced to victory at the Newmarket July Course in August 2012. He is an avid cricketer and plays for the Lords & Commons Cricket team. Matt once played the most northerly game of cricket on record, and succumbed to frostbite en route to the Pole. He retains all his fingers.
He certainly has retained all of his fingers.
A lengthy article in the Daily Mail tells us about his formative years:
Mr Hancock was born in Chester where he went to the exclusive private school the King’s School.
He did his A-levels in maths, physics, computing and economics before doing computing at West Cheshire College.
Like numerous Conservative MPs before him, he studied PPE at Exeter College, Oxford – where he graduated with a first.
It was at the elite university that he realised he had dyslexia, which he only opened up about in recent years.
He later did an MPhil in economics at Christ’s College, Cambridge, before turning to politics in 1999 when he joined the Tories.
Hancock’s woman and her husband
The Sun‘s article says:
Mother-of-three Ms Coladangelo is communications director at Oliver Bonas, the fashion and lifestyle store founded by her husband Oliver Tress.
She is also a director and major shareholder at lobbying firm Luther Pendragon, which offers clients a “deep understanding of the mechanics of government”.
The Daily Mail has more:
Mr Bonas opened his first store on London’s Fulham Road in 1993 with handbags and jewellery he had brought from Hong Kong where his parents lived.
Speaking to the Independent in September 2015, he said: ‘I’d been bringing presents back for friends and they were really popular so I thought, ‘I wonder if I can make a go of this?’ And to my amazement it just worked.’ Bonas was the surname of his then girlfriend Anna Bonas, who is the cousin of Prince Harry’s former girlfriend Cressida Bonas, and he told how ‘she very kindly hasn’t demanded that I changed it’.
Hancock’s wife
Mrs Hancock’s family history is one of privilege:
Mrs Hancock works as an osteopath and is believed to practice at a clinic in Notting Hill, West London.
She is the granddaughter of Frederick Millar, 1st Baron Inchyra – a British diplomat and Ambassador to West Germany.
Mrs Hancock is also the great granddaughter of the 1st Viscount Camrose, a Welsh newspaper publisher.
Her father, Alastair Millar, was Secretary of The Pilgrim Trust between 1980 and 1996.
The trust is responsible for supplying grants, predominately to preservation projects for historically significant buildings or artifacts. Nowadays, around £2million is divvied out by the trust each year.
Conclusion
Matt Hancock has annoyed me greatly for the past 16 months.
This parody of his testing regime is not far from the truth:
In England, we have lost billions of days of our normal lives:
This was the daily death total for June 23, 2021 (Chief Medical Officer Prof Chris Whitty is pictured):
Here are the death statistics from the past 16 months. Note that most coronavirus deaths are not ‘from’ the virus but ‘with’ it:
1. Heart Disease 205,000 (0.31% of the population)
2. Cancer 182,000 (0.25%)
3. Covid 128,000 (0.18%)
4. Dementia 82,000 (0.12%)
5. Stroke 46,000 (0.07%)
6. Diabetes 32,000 (0.05%)
An article on Reaction — ‘Hypocritical Hancock: Don’t hug your granny but you can hug Gina’ — makes the following points about the Secretary of State’s affair:
We don’t know if anyone was taking morality lessons from Hancock back in September. But the question raises itself once again – is it one rule for you, Matt Hancock, and another for everyone else?
The government has been using its draconian Covid social distancing and travel restrictions to restrict and police morality. While the public may well overlook his private relationships as none of their business, voters are unlikely to stomach hypocrisy.
Number 10 is, so far, silent on the Hancock scandal. The Prime Minister hates morality plays and the invasion of private lives. That’s not what this is about though. It’s about a leading figure in the government imposing extraordinary restrictions on the rest of us while carrying on inside the Department of Health.
I look forward to an Urgent Question or two in the House of Commons next week.
It’s unlikely many of my readers are old enough to remember transactional analysis (TA), a method of psychoanalytical therapy from the 1960s and 1970s which involved role-playing mind games.
The Canadian psychiatrist Eric Berne developed it in the 1950s. Ultimately, the goal was to produce in the patient the outlook of ‘I’m OK, you’re OK’.
In a comments section on one of the many blogs I read, someone linked to an article from 2016, ‘American Narratives: The Rescue Game’, which posits that today’s identity politics involve TA mind games. The topic discussed is racism in the United States, although, as the author John Michael Greer says, it can be done with any identity politics cause.
Excerpts follow, emphases mine.
Greer describes what is called the Rescue Game:
There’s a school of psychology called transactional analysis, which focuses on interactions between people rather than the vagaries of the individual psyche. Transactional analysis covers a lot of ground, but I want to focus on just one of its themes here: the theory of interpersonal games.
An interpersonal game, like most other games, has a set of rules and some kind of prizes for winners. In a healthy interpersonal game, the rules and the prizes are overt: that is, if you ask the players what they are, you can pretty much count on an honest answer. As this stops being true—as more of the rules and prizes become covert—the game becomes more and more dysfunctional. At the far end of the spectrum are those wholly dysfunctional games in which straight talk about the rules and payoffs is utterly taboo.
The accepted mainstream narrative about race in America today can best be described as one of those latter category of wholly dysfunctional games. Fortunately, it’s a game that was explored in quite a bit of detail by transactional analysts in the 1960s and 1970s, so it won’t be particularly difficult to break the taboo and speak about the unspeakable. Its name? The Rescue Game.
There are three roles in the Rescue Game — Victim, Persecutor and Rescuer:
The first two roles are allowed one move each: the Victim’s move is to suffer, and the Persecutor’s move is to make the Victim suffer. The Rescuer is allowed two moves: to sympathize with the Victim and to punish the Persecutor. No other moves are allowed, and no player is allowed to make a move that belongs to a different role.
That may seem unduly limited. It’s not, because when a group of people is assigned a role, all their actions are redefined as the move or moves allotted to that role. In the Rescue Game, in other words, whatever a Victim does must be interpreted as a cry of pain. Whatever a Persecutor does is treated as something that’s intended to cause pain to a Victim, and whatever a Rescuer does, by definition, either expresses sympathy for a Victim or inflicts well-deserved punishment on a Persecutor. This is true even when the actions performed by the three people in question happen to be identical. In a well-played Rescue Game, quite a bit of ingenuity can go into assigning every action its proper meaning as a move.
What’s more, the roles are collective, not individual. Each Victim is equal to every other Victim, and is expected to feel and resent all the suffering ever inflicted on every other Victim in the same game. Each Persecutor is equal to every other Persecutor, and so is personally to blame for every suffering inflicted by every other Persecutor in the same game. Each Rescuer, in turn, is equal to every other Rescuer, and so may take personal credit for the actions of every other Rescuer in the same game. This allows the range of potential moves to expand to infinity without ever leaving the narrow confines of the game.
Even worse:
There’s one other rule: the game must go on forever. The Victim must continue to suffer, the Persecutor must continue to persecute, and the Rescuer must continue to sympathize and punish. Anything that might end the game—for example, any actual change in the condition of the Victim, or any actual change in the behavior of the Persecutor—is therefore out of bounds. The Rescuer also functions as a referee, and so it’s primarily his or her job to see that nothing gets in the way of the continuation of the game, but all players are expected to help out if that should be necessary.
Sadly, politicians and social activists play this game with real issues and real people who are enduring real problems.
Greer describes how the game plays out, something we read about or see every day in the media:
Like most games, this one has an opening phase, a middle period of play, and an endgame, and the opening phase is called “Pin the Tail on the Persecutor.” In this initial phase, teams of Victims bid for the attention of Rescuers by displaying their suffering and denouncing their Persecutors, and the winners are those who attract enough Rescuers to make up a full team. In today’s America, this phase of the game is ongoing, and a great deal of rivalry tends to spring up between teams of Victims who compete for the attention of the same Rescuers. When that rivalry breaks out into open hostilities, as it often does, the result has been called the Oppression Olympics—the bare-knuckle, no-holds-barred struggle over which group of people gets to have its sufferings privileged over everyone else’s.
The middle phase:
is called “Show Trial.” This has two requirements, which are not always met. The first is an audience willing to applaud the Victims, shout catcalls at the Persecutors, and cheer for the Rescuers on cue. The second is a supply of Persecutors who can be convinced or coerced into showing up to play the game. A Rescue Game in which the Persecutors don’t show quickly enters the endgame, with disadvantages that will be described shortly, and so getting the Persecutors to appear is crucial …
However their presence is arranged, once the Persecutors arrive, the action of the game is stereotyped. The Victims accuse the Persecutors of maltreating them, the Persecutors try to defend themselves, and then the Victims and the Rescuers get to bully the Persecutors into silence, using whatever means are allowed by local law and custom.
At some point, either there are no more Persecutors or people get bored with the game and leave it. The game then enters a new, and final, phase:
At this point the action shifts to the endgame, which is called “Circular Firing Squad.” In this final phase of the game, the need for a steady supply of Persecutors is met by identifying individual Victims or Rescuers as covert Persecutors. Since players thus accused typically try to defend themselves against the accusation, the game can go on as before—the Victims bring their accusations, the newly identified Persecutors defend themselves, and then the Victims and Rescuers get to bully them into silence.
We recognise the pattern, which is a daily narrative for current affairs outlets, turning real issues that require real solutions — e.g. race — into some sort of gamesmanship.
Greer gives two more uses of the Rescue Game — in sexual identity and Marxist politics:
I first encountered the concept of the Rescue Game, in fact, by way of a pamphlet lent to my wife by her therapist sister-in-law, which used it as the basis for an edgy analysis of class conflicts within the lesbian community. From there to the literature on transactional analysis was a short step, and of course it didn’t hurt that I lived in Seattle in those years, where every conceivable form of the Rescue Game could be found in full swing. (The most lively games of “Circular Firing Squad” in town were in the Marxist splinter parties, which I followed via their monthly newspapers; the sheer wallowing in ideological minutiae that went into identifying this or that party member as a deviationist would have impressed the stuffing out of medieval scholastic theologians.)
Nationwide, the Rescue Game looks like this:
With impressive inevitability, in fact, every question concerning privilege in today’s America gets turned into a game of “Pin the Tail on the Persecutor,” in which one underprivileged group is blamed for the problems affecting another underprivileged group, and some group of affluent white people show up to claim the Rescuer’s role. That, in turn, leads to the third issue I want to consider here, which is the question of who benefits most from the habit of forcing all discussion of privilege in today’s America into the straitjacket of the Rescue Game.
Ultimately, there is only one winner in any form of these Rescue Games, and that is the Rescuer:
It’s only fair to note that each of the three roles gets certain benefits, though these are distributed in a very unequal fashion. The only thing the people who are assigned the role of Persecutor get out of it is plenty of negative attention. Sometimes that’s enough—it’s a curious fact that hating and being hated can function as an intoxicant for some people—but this is rarely enough of an incentive to keep those assigned the Persecutor’s role willing to play the game for long.
The benefits that go to people who are assigned the role of Victim are somewhat more substantial. Victims get to air their grievances in public, which is a rare event for the underprivileged, and they also get to engage in socially sanctioned bullying of people they don’t like, which is an equally rare treat. That’s all they get, though. In particular, despite reams of the usual rhetoric about redressing injustices and the like, the Victims are not supposed to do anything, or to expect the Rescuers to do anything, to change the conditions under which they live. The opportunities to air grievances and bully others are substitutes for substantive change, not—as they’re usually billed—steps toward substantive change.
The vast majority of the benefits of the game, rather, go to the Rescuers. They’re the ones who decide which team of Victims will get enough attention from Rescuers to be able to start a game. They’re the ones who enforce the rules, and thus see to it that Victims keep on being victimized and Persecutors keep on persecuting. Nor is it accidental that in every Rescue Game, the people who get the role of Rescuers are considerably higher on the ladder of social privilege than the people who get given the roles of Victims and Persecutors.
Greer ends his article with this:
Perhaps, dear reader, you find it hard to imagine why affluent white people would want to keep everyone else so busy fighting one another that they never notice who benefits most from that state of affairs. Perhaps it hasn’t occurred to you that giving the underprivileged the chance to air their grievances and engage in a little socially sanctioned bullying is a great deal less inconvenient for the affluent than actually taking action to improve the lives of the underprivileged would be. Such thoughts seemingly never enter the minds of most Americans; I’ll leave it to you to figure out why.
Speaking from personal experience, everyone I know who empathises with similar Rescue Games in the UK is in line for a whopping great pension, often from the public sector, and lives in a large house, often in a gated community.
It’s time we, the general public, ignored all of these media-fuelled narratives, which only serve the Rescuers’ purposes, and focus on creating a better world for our fellow citizes, in whatever small way we can.
Churchmouse Campanologist 