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For the past several weeks, Prime Minister Boris Johnson and the Conservatives have been lagging behind Labour in the polls.
Boris and the Conservatives held the top spot for most of 2021, apart from one week in January. Their ratings began to sink in November, if I recall correctly. Initially, this had to do with Net Zero policies (far out of reach from the normal Briton), a tax increase to help pay for the NHS and rumours of parties during lockdown at No. 10 Downing Street.
Later, around Christmas, news emerged of parties dating from late 2020. More recently, news leaked about a No. 10 gathering on May 20, 2020 (during lockdown), for which Prime Minister Boris Johnson apologised during Prime Minister’s Questions on January 12, 2022:
Today, it is alleged that parties also took place in Downing Street the evening before Prince Philip’s funeral in April 2021.
For Keir Starmer and Labour to be ahead of Boris and Co for this long is a parlous state of affairs:
On January 8, 2022, GB News reported that the Conservatives were beginning to regain lost ground (emphases in purple mine throughout):
The Conservative Party has recovered some of its lost lead against the opposition Labour Party, an opinion poll showed on Saturday, but Boris Johnson’s personal ratings remain deeply negative as he faces ongoing ethics questions.
Polling company Opinium said Labour’s poll rating held at 39% in a January 5-7 survey, unchanged from late December, while support for the Conservatives rose two percentage points to 34%. The Liberal Democrats were on 11% and the Green Party was on 5% …
Johnson’s own net approval rating in the Opinium poll was minus 24%, up from minus 31% before Christmas but well behind Labour Party leader Keir Starmer at plus 3%.
Soaring inflation was also souring the public mood, with 86% of people saying their living costs had risen, the polling company said.
On Monday, January 10, the Conservatives continued to gain ground, although they still trail Labour:
Guido Fawkes noted that not moving to Plan C coronavirus restrictions over the Christmas period probably helped:
Labour’s 8 point poll lead at the end of last year has halved in the latest YouGov poll. The plunged best PM rating for Boris has bounced 6 points and Starmer’s has eroded a point, though Boris still trails. Making the right call on Omicron appears to be paying off for Boris. Who knows, if the Tories get their act together and govern a bit more like Tories, they might even regain their lead…
Moving on to coronavirus measures, a number of news items broke since the New Year, some of which relate to England only; the devolved nations have their own measures, largely socialist in nature.
Self-isolation time
On Monday, Boris said he is considering lowering the number of days that people have to self-isolate:
Guido Fawkes reported that Levelling Up Minister Michael Gove said that the current Plan B measures are likely to expire as planned on January 26.
Boris’s comment followed Gove’s on Plan B:
This follows Michael Gove’s comments earlier today on the potential lifting of Plan B measures in a few weeks, provided the NHS continues to keep Omicron under control. Looking increasingly likely that pandemic measures will – finally – wind down sooner rather than later…
On self-isolation being reduced from seven days to five, as the US is doing, Boris said:
We’re looking at [it]… we will act according to the science as we always have. But what I would say to everybody is that Omicron is still out there, it’s incredibly contagious. Everyone will know somebody who has had it, it can be pretty unpleasant.
Boris was likely reconsidering because British scientific advisers ‘misread’ US self-isolation guidance. Dr Jenny Harries, head of the UK Health Security Agency (UKHSA), is pictured:
Guido Fawkes showed the difference between the UKHSA guidance on January 1 and January 10.
Guido concludes:
The US Centres for Disease Control has now clarified their isolation periods do start after the first appearance of symptoms, giving further credence to Tory backbenchers’ calls for a cut. This country has had enough of experts…
Indeed, we have had enough of experts. Unfortunately, Jenny Harries is receiving a damehood, having been on the New Year’s Honours list.
The move for a shorter isolation period is to enable those with coronavirus to return to work as soon as possible.
It is a curious thing that, since the beginning of the pandemic in early 2020, I have seen the same shop assistants week after week. By contrast, when I watch the news, there is a plethora of public sector workers — the NHS and teachers, to name but two groups — who are constantly sick.
This tweet expresses the phenomenon well:
On Thursday, January 13, Health Secretary Sajid Javid announced in the House of Commons that self-isolation will be reduced to five days beginning on Monday, January 17, provided that the person involved can provide two negative lateral flow test results on Days 4 and 5:
The end of mass vaccination?
On Sunday, January 9, Dr Clive Dix, the former chairman of the UK’s vaccine taskforce, said that it was time to end mass vaccination and begin urgent research into antibodies as well as T-cells.
The Observer reported:
Covid should be treated as an endemic virus similar to flu, and ministers should end mass-vaccination after the booster campaign, the former chairman of the UK’s vaccine taskforce has said.
With health chiefs and senior Tories also lobbying for a post-pandemic plan for a straining NHS, Dr Clive Dix called for a major rethink of the UK’s Covid strategy, in effect reversing the approach of the past two years and returning to a “new normality”.
“We need to analyse whether we use the current booster campaign to ensure the vulnerable are protected, if this is seen to be necessary,” he said. “Mass population-based vaccination in the UK should now end.”
He said ministers should urgently back research into Covid immunity beyond antibodies to include B-cells and T-cells (white blood cells). This could help create vaccines for vulnerable people specific to Covid variants, he said, adding: “We now need to manage disease, not virus spread. So stopping progression to severe disease in vulnerable groups is the future objective.”
On Wednesday, Professor Jeremy Brown of the Joint Committee on Vaccination and Immunisation (JCVI) echoed Dr Dix’s call for a post-pandemic plan. He rightly pointed out that we do not test for influenza:
Schoolchildren suffering
I do feel for children having to wear masks, undergo regular testing at school and for being persuaded — with parental consent — to get vaccinated. My commiserations also go to their parents.
On Sunday, Education Secretary Nadhim Zahawi said that the rate of children’s vaccinations must speed up:
The topic of mask-wearing, although confined to secondary school students, came up on a recent instalment of ITV’s This Morning programme. Author and television presenter Gyles Brandreth explained how difficult this is for children with learning difficulties:
I am glad to see that pupils are refusing to wear masks: sensible kids showing common sense.
Vaccines
Having watched all the coronavirus briefings on television, I remember when either then-Health Secretary Matt Hancock or one of our senior health advisers told us that not everyone would need to get vaccinated in order to put the pandemic at bay.
This historical example from the smallpox era shows that a only relatively small percentage of people need a vaccination in order to eradicate the disease. In the case of smallpox, this was 32%:
Yet, the UK is now jabbing children, mandating vaccine passports as well as threatening loss of employment in April 2022 to unvaccinated NHS and care home workers. WHY?
The biggest news story on this subject appeared on Friday, January 7.
The Telegraph reported that Steve James, a consultant anaesthetist at King’s College Hospital in London told Health Secretary Sajid Javid that he had had coronavirus and has the antibodies. He said he had no intention of getting a vaccine.
He said that the science does not warrant a health worker vaccine mandate:
Here is a clip from The Telegraph‘s article:
NHS is doing well
On Sunday, Education Secretary Nadhim Zahawi said that the NHS is coping well. Eight Nightingale facilities will also be opened in the coming weeks:
Socialist policies in Scotland and Wales do not work
On Monday, January 10, talkRADIO’s Kevin O’Sullivan said that vaccine passports are not working in Scotland and Wales. He rightly wonders why Boris Johnson wanted to extend their reach in England.
Wales’s rate of infection is three times higher than England’s. Scotland recorded its highest ever number of coronavirus ‘cases’:
Dan Wootton of GB News also had plenty to say on the Welsh and Scottish approach to coronavirus:
The chilling reality of the United Kingdom under a Labour/SNP coalition was laid bare over the New Year period.
And it’s not something any of us should want to become a reality.
More on that below.
Wales
On Sunday, January 9, Prif Weinidog (First Minister) Mark Drakeford (Labour) said that Welsh coronavirus rates are lower than England’s. Note that, at one point, he did specify Welsh rates were lower than those in England’s hotspots, not the whole country. In that sentence, he told the truth, less so overall:
Drakeford came up with a few more new rules before Christmas. People couldn’t work in an office, but they could go to the pub.
Dan Wootton said:
In socialist Wales, Mark Drakeford – seemingly so intent on smashing the economy to smithereens – has started to fine honest folk £60 for going to work in an office.
Genuinely. I’m not making that up. Doesn’t matter if you’re perfectly healthy, either.
But Drakeford is the man who forced supermarkets to cordon off aisles selling toys and clothes, remember. Now the Chief Medical Officer in Wales Sir Frank Atherton is hysterically proposing that we should all self-isolate for days on end if we have a common cold.
And, with Labour’s love of restrictions, circuit breakers and draconian laws controlling our behaviour, have Welsh Covid rates been any lower than the rest of the UK? Nope!
According to government data across the pandemic, Wales has had the second highest total rate of cases per 100,000 – just under Northern Ireland – at a rate of 20,386.2.
That compares to England’s 20,174.2 and Scotland’s 17,673.4.
In the last seven days, Wales remains the second highest, again just behind Northern Ireland.
The following tweet shows another absurd aspect of the situation, with an English non-league football (soccer) club, Chester, wondering how it can survive under Drakeford’s draconian rules. Chester’s stadium lies just over the border in Wales:
This exchange shows how complicated the situation is:
Scotland
North of the Border, First Minister Nicola Sturgeon (SNP) has implemented some of the strictest coronavirus restrictions in the UK.
Dan Wootton says that these are a smokescreen for the lack of a second independence referendum. Nonetheless, he details how totalitarian they are:
In Scotland, Nicola Sturgeon prizes her role as a Covid dictator using press conferences broadcast to the nation by the BBC to spread fear and introduce harsh controls on poor Scots.
She insists it’s to keep them safe.
But in my opinion, it’s to keep the Covid crisis running for as long as possible, so she doesn’t have to face the fact her dream of a second independence referendum lies in tatters.
So to Sturgeon omicron has been a blessing, allowing her to impose new social controls essentially killing off the Scottish hospitality industry once more for months. Compare and contrast today’s [January 3] Times front pages.
The English edition reports that ministers in Westminster are confident new curbs won’t be needed, given Plan B has already been imposed and Omicron is a far less severe variant.
The Scottish edition, by contrast, reports that large public gatherings could be forbidden in Scotland well into the spring, with National Clinical Director Jason Leitch saying April will still be too early to host a postponed Hogmanay celebration in Edinburgh.
And it’s these draconian policies propagated by Sturgeon that resulted in ridiculous police overreach and brutality in Scotland that you won’t see reported in the mainstream media.
Case in point: police raiding the Avant Garde gastropub in Glasgow on New Year’s Eve, where there were around 50 folk, most of them over 60-years-old, simply trying to enjoy their night.
Then, for some reason, two large police vans carrying more than 20 officers, according to witnesses, turned up because they were suspected of breaking Sturgeon’s outrageously over the top Covid rules.
The pub may have been targeted because it displays this poster on its door saying…
“We have no discrepancy over whether you want to wear a mask or not.” This is what happened when multiple cops stormed the pub…
The footage is included with this interview of the man who filmed it:
What a despicably unnecessary show of force from Scottish police who routinely fail to investigate muggings and burglaries.
But it’s not their fault, it’s Sturgeon’s for introducing such authoritarian laws, banning bar service and enforcing social distancing between groups.
Sturgeon has implemented these measures despite only ONE patient with omicron having been admitted to intensive care in Scotland. Only one!
The police claim they were simply making a ‘routine visit’, but, come on, it should never have come to this.
Sturgeon is criminalising people drinking and having a good time.
This month — and we’re less than two weeks in — she has had to backtrack on her stringent restrictions.
When the editor of the Scottish Daily Mail, Mike Blackley, asked her on December 17 if she could reduce the number of self-isolation days, she turned caustic:
Yeah, because that’d really help ’cause that would spread infections even further and that would not be doing any favours to businesses.
Guido Fawkes has an update from Wednesday, January 5:
On 22nd December, England’s Covid rules changed so infected individuals can stop isolating after seven days rather than ten, so long as they test negative on day six and seven. Six days ago Wales followed suit, and a day later Northern Ireland copied the change. Leaving one obvious outlier…
It now looks like Sturgeon will confirm the cut, with a statement expected later today and her deputy John Swinney saying yesterday that their administration is “actively considering” reducing the self-isolation period. There’s just one problem with the move if it goes ahead – it’ll be a very embarrassing U-turn on Sturgeon’s part…
So, will she now apologise to the Scottish Mail‘s Mike Blackley?
Unlikely.
Late last week, SNP MP Stewart Hosie appeared on the BBC’s Politics Live to say that Scotland had a lower number of coronavirus cases than England.
The SNP then tweeted this news, which was based on out of date statistics:
Guido Fawkes rightly called out the SNP, including a graphic of the updated statistics.
Not only does England have a lower prevalence than Scotland, it has the lowest prevalence of all four UK nations despite having almost no legal restrictions. The lockdown lovers always say they’re following the science… except when they aren’t.
Last weekend, England still had a lower prevalence of coronavirus than Scotland, which demands mask wearing and vaccine passports:
Last week, Sturgeon took exception to Boris Johnson’s idea to scrap free lateral flow tests. He wants to reserve them for ‘high-risk settings’:
On Monday, January 10, Sturgeon apparently decided Scotland will have to live with the virus. We’ll see:
The Scottish Daily Express reported:
Nicola Sturgeon is under mounting pressure to scrap crippling Coronavirus restrictions after she admitted for the first time that Scots will need to “learn to live” with the virus.
The First Minister is due to announce whether an extension to Scotland’s restrictions will occur in Holyrood today, with critics claiming they have made little difference to infection rates.
Currently the rules put in place on Boxing Day to rein in the Omicron Covid-19 variant include curbs on spectator sports, the closure of nightclubs and the resumption of table service in pubs.
But speaking ahead of her statement to MSPs, the First Minister said that Scots would have to ask themselves “what adaptations to pre-pandemic life” would be required in the longer-term to “enable us to live with it [the virus] with far fewer protective measures.”
Ms Sturgeon also warned the NHS would need to be managed differently to cope with Covid in the long term with more patients treated away from hospitals.
In an interview with STV Scotland Tonight, she added: “Covid will change all of our considerations of how we manage our health service, and that will be part of the way in which we all learn to live with it over the months and years to come.
“We are in a position where we all want to get to as much normality as possible. All of us, me included, really crave that.
“But we need to recognise that this virus, although we hope Omicron is milder than previous variants, this virus still takes lives and it still causes significant health impacts for people.
“So we have got to treat it seriously and not underestimate the damage that it can do.”
It comes after Ms Sturgeon last week said the SNP-led Scottish Government would unveil a blueprint for Scots to live with the virus in the long term that would be “more proportionate and sustainable and less restrictive”.
Opposition parties in Scotland are particularly keen for these restrictions to end.
The Scottish Conservatives are the main opposition party in Holyrood:
Scottish Conservative leader Douglas Ross said: “The Scottish public need to see some light at the end of the tunnel, so it’s time for the First Minister to produce a timetable on the new strategic framework that she promised.
“People want reassurance that restrictions won’t stay in force for a moment longer than absolutely necessary.
“After almost two years of sacrifice, the public need to see a bold timetable from the Scottish Government that will enable us to live safely with Covid.”
Labour are the next largest party in opposition:
Anas Sarwar, Scottish Labour leader added: “Almost two years into the pandemic, I don’t think we have yet built the resilience in the system in order to respond appropriately to Covid.
“I think we accept that Covid is a risk to people’s health and wellbeing and we’ve also got to accept that how we respond to Covid is also a risk to people’s health and wellbeing particularly their mental health.
“I think this day by day decision making and waiting to see what may and may not be said at a press conference is not actually a good way of responding to the pandemic.
“I would like to see a framework in place that builds resilience, that sets quite clearly what the trigger mechanisms for any potential restrictions are and what those restrictions maybe and also then what the trigger mechanisms are for financial support for individual businesses …
“I don’t think the government has done that work here in Scotland and across the UK and I think we urgently need to do that work.”
The Liberal Democrat response was the best:
Alex Cole-Hamilton MSP, leader of the Scottish Lib Dems, said: “I’ve been concerned at the absence of data offered to Parliament by the SNP.
“We still don’t have a firm idea of those who are in hospital because of Omicron or who just test positive when they go in for something else.
“Without that information, Parliament can’t take a view on whether restrictions are appropriate.
“There’s no clear evidence that the enhanced restrictions in Scotland have reduced the rates of infection compared to other parts of the UK.”
Too right!
Conclusion
If Boris can return to a rational outlook on coronavirus measures, England can be the first to exit the dystopia we have found ourselves in since March 16, 2020, with lockdown implemented one week later on March 23.
Let those who wish to take precautions do so.
Let those of us who wish to live and work again do so freely, without hindrance.
On Tuesday, October 12, 2021, Sir David Amess MP (Conservative), posted the following tweet promoting his upcoming constituency surgery in Leigh-on-Sea, Essex:
These surgeries are an opportunity for constituents to present their problems to their MP. They might be seeking help with schooling, crime or health, among other things. Meetings are face-to-face, one-on-one. One’s MP then cuts through bureaucracy to achieve a successful resolution to the problem.
It seems this type of in-person connection between a member of the public and an elected constituency politician is unique to the UK. Long may it continue.
Two days later, Sir David posted a photo of himself and the Emir of Qatar. Amess was the chairman of the All-party Parliamentary Group fostering good relations between Britain and Qatar:
That same day, the MP for Southend West tweeted his gratitude for the government aid to Southend-on-Sea, no longer a smallish, seaside resort, but a town with a population of 160,000. Sir David has been campaigning tirelessly in Parliament for it to have city status. Winter fuel poverty was another of his big causes:
Little did he realise those would be his final tweets.
Just before noon on Friday, October 15, I was watching a heart-warming segment on GB News about the Westminster Dog of the Year charity event, to be held on October 28 in Victoria Tower Gardens, London. Isabel Oakeshott was interviewing Matt Vickers MP (Conservative) and his dog Karen. Karen was paying attention to the conversation. As soon as it turned to dog-napping, she began barking.
The public can vote up for their favourite MP-dog pairing until October 27. Sir David had already registered with his French bulldog Vivienne. Recently, he said:
If I am feeling down, the dog lifts my spirits as she is always pleased to see me and she makes me smile.
Little did I know watching the GB News segment with Matt Vickers and Isabel Oakeshott that Sir David was minutes away from his last breath.
Amess’s last meeting was a Zoom call about the Children’s Parliament, which pairs up an MP with a young member of the public. The meeting ended at 12:02 p.m.
At 12:05, Sir David was gasping his final breaths, having been stabbed multiple times in the church hall.
It was just moments after midday on Friday when Sir David Amess had his last appointment.
Richard Hillgrove, a PR professional, shared a call with Amess to discuss the Children’s Parliament, an event where kids are matched with members of parliament to debate the important issues of the day.
As usual, the MP for Southend West was firing on all cylinders, full of buzz and ideas for the event: the running order, the voting system, what software they should use. Hillgrove’s daughter, Lola, 11, had been matched with Amess, who visited her at school so they could have their picture taken.
Hillgrove says he ended the Zoom call at 12.02pm, so that Amess could host a constituency surgery at the Belfairs Methodist Church in Leigh-on-Sea. It was his final farewell. By 12.05pm, Amess had been stabbed to death.
A few minutes later, Hillgrove saw the first reports of the murder on television. “I didn’t even realise it was Sir David at first,” he recalled. “I was absolutely horrified, every minute that came passed seemed like an hour, the longer it went, the more concerning it got.”
Eventually the unimaginable news filtered through. Lola came home from school in tears. “I was honoured to have known him,” said Hillgrove. “He was such an inspiration, his engagement was incredible. He made sense of a crazy world.”
The events of Friday afternoon have pierced the quiet provincial calm of Leigh-on-Sea, leaving the tight-knit Essex community fearful and furious. A deep, heavy sadness hangs over this seaside town. Yesterday, the flower bins were empty at the Co-op on Eastwood Road, just 100 yards from where Amess was stabbed 17 times by a 25-year-old man. Every tulip, rose and pansy had been scooped up and deposited at the tribute for the man alternately known as “Sir David” or simply “Dave”.
The Telegraph reported that Amess’s staff, women, witnessed his horrifying murder. Paramedics from an air ambulance worked in vain for two hours trying to stabilise him:
Sir David was attacked seconds later, stabbed repeatedly in front of his horrified staff.
… Sir David’s wounds were so many and severe that paramedics were unable to stabilise him sufficiently for a transfer to hospital. After two hours of vain struggle to stem his injuries, the air ambulance took off empty.
The Telegraph spoke with the aforementioned Richard Hillgrove:
Mr Hillgrove recalled how, during their conversation, Sir David had periodically glanced to his right.
He assumes this was towards trusted assistant, Rebecca Hayton, upon whom Sir David, not being the most technologically savvy parliamentarian, relied for help when making video calls.
It was she who witnessed at close quarters the full ferocity of the knife attack, running from the Belfairs Methodist Church hall screaming. Her screams alerted Sir David’s other assistant, Julie Cushion, who was positioned in the church hall lobby.
Shortly after the attack, Stephan Aleyn, a former Southend Conservative councillor, spoke to Ms Cushion.
“She is in absolute bits,” he said. “What she saw is going to stick with her for the rest of her life.
“It was a normal surgery and they were assisting Sir David in helping his constituents.
“Julie and Rebecca thought this man was just another constituent who needed help from their MP, when suddenly he launched his attack on Sir David.
“For anyone to witness that sort of shocking, unprovoked assault is awful. It was a lovely, normal, sunny day – then this.”
After stabbing Sir David several times, his assailant sat down next to his body, making no effort to evade police, it has emerged.
A Southend Conservative Party source said: “One of Sir David’s office staff was in the hall with him, and it now appears that after attacking Sir David, this man sat down and waited for police to arrive. It’s absolutely chilling.”
The article says that 999 calls were made at 12:05 p.m. Police, including an armed response unit, and the air ambulance responded immediately. The suspect went quietly with the police:
The 25-year-old suspect was detained inside the church hall and led out to a police van. A knife was recovered.
Amess’s staff must have also contacted a Catholic priest he knew. The Revd Jeffrey Woolnough showed up shortly afterwards and asked police to be admitted to administer Last Rites — or Extreme Unction, as it used to be known. However, he was refused entry:
He was denied entry, however, and so stood on the street with another man reciting the rosary. He described it as a “great disappointment” for a Roman Catholic not to be able to receive the last rites.
“It was remarkably calm by the time I arrived,” Fr Woolnough told The Telegraph.
“I prayed from outside and I just hope David received those. I know he would have done, because any prayer said that is sincere is received by the recipient.
“I was praying the rosary – it’s a half hour prayer going through all of those intentions, asking that whatever was going on in there, for God’s will to be done. That’s all I could pray at that point in time.”
I did not know until he died that Sir David was a devout Catholic, but, given his serene demeanour, sincere smile and gentle wit, it does not surprise me that he was a churchgoer.
The Spectator‘s Melanie McDonagh, also a devout Catholic, expressed her displeasure with the police response regarding Last Rites:
It’s not known whether Sir David was alive when the priest arrived at the scene, but he still should have been there. Nothing should come between a dying man and the mercy of the Church. Of course the police were dealing with a tremendously difficult situation and would have been shocked and confused – how could they not have been? – but it doesn’t excuse this failure of judgment, which we can assume stems from a failure of training.
Essex Police sent The Spectator a statement, which says, in part:
As with any police incident, it is of the utmost importance that we preserve the integrity of a crime scene and allow emergency services to tend to those in need. A cordon is put in place to secure and prevent contamination of the area. Access into a scene is at the discretion of the investigating officers. This is a fundamental part of any investigation to ensure the best possible chance of securing justice for any victim and their family.
McDonagh says that the priest was ‘an emergency service’. I cannot disagree:
The most troubling element of the statement is that the police wanted to ‘allow the emergency services to tend to those in need.’
A priest is an emergency service. In the case of Sir David, the priest was someone who could help see him into the next world, not just keep him in this one. You don’t have to share a belief in the efficacy of confession to go along with this; you just need a very elementary knowledge of and respect for the faith to refrain from standing between a confessor and a dying man. As for the reference to the ‘emergency services administering potentially life-saving treatment,’ Catholic priests are used to operating together with medics for precisely this reason.
You might like to know that Essex police recently engaged in that exercise in cultural conformity, Hate Crime Awareness Week. Perhaps in future, some awareness of Christianity might be part of the training.
Monsignor Kevin Hale, who knew Sir David, told GB News how Catholicism informed the MP’s life. Amess’s mother was a Catholic and she brought him up in the faith:
Monsignor Hale said that Sir David had grown up in the East End of London and attended St Bonaventure’s Roman Catholic School in Newham. It is a secondary school for boys.
The Right Revd Stephen Cottrell, the Anglican Archbishop of York, lived for a time in Amess’s constituency and paid a warm, faith-filled tribute to his former MP and friend in The Telegraph:
It was said of Sir David Amess that though he had opponents, he didn’t have enemies. As we come to terms with the horror of his murder on Friday, this is a distinction worth pondering.
I think of David Amess as a friend. Leigh-on-Sea is my home town and, for ten glorious years as Bishop of Chelmsford, part of the diocese I served. We often met: in parliament, but usually in his constituency, Southend West.
He was, as we have heard over the weekend, a dedicated, zestful, persevering constituency MP. He loved Southend, as I do. He rooted for it. He exemplified that vital, but overlooked, root of our democracy that Members of Parliament may get elected on a party ticket, but, once elected, serve everyone …
David Amess was a kind man. The word kind is related to the word kin. When we are kind to someone, it doesn’t mean we necessarily agree with them, or even like them, but that we recognise a kinship, a common humanity and treat them accordingly; or as we sometimes say, “treat them in kind”.
David’s robust kindness came from his Christian faith. He was a devout Christian, a Roman Catholic. But the idea that we human beings belong to one another and have a responsibility to each other is not self-evident. Observation of our behaviour and attitudes shows us the opposite. Our worst desires can be seen everywhere, leading us to separation, fuelled by selfishness, and bearing fruit in hatefulness and the possession of each other.
The picture of humanity that God gives us in Jesus Christ offers something else. In this regard, perhaps the most radical words Jesus ever spoke are the ones most of us know and many of us say every day: “Our Father.” In saying these words we don’t just acknowledge we belong to God, we acknowledge our belonging to each other as kith and kin …
David Amess, the friend with whom I sometimes disagreed, had the same values and the same vision. It shaped his life and it is what made him such a loved and effective constituency MP and an exemplar of what our democracy can be.
He was always very kind to me. He supported the Church. He cared. He liked to build coalitions of goodwill so that people could work together. Kindness and kinship, it turns out, gets things done.
My heart goes out to his wife and family and the constituents of Southend West. I am praying for them …
David Amess didn’t wear his faith on his sleeve. He wore it in his heart. That’s the best place for it. It means it runs through your very being.
Late on Friday, the Metropolitan Police’s Counter Terrorism Command took over the case from Essex Police:
Early on Saturday, October 16, it was established that the suspect is a Briton of Somali parentage.
The Mail on Sunday reported that the BBC’s home affairs correspondent, Dominic Casciani, downplayed the suspect’s parental origins:
The BBC‘s home affairs correspondent was accused yesterday of trying to downplay the suspect’s reported Somali origins …
Although every national newspaper with the exception of the Financial Times mentioned that the suspect had Somali ‘origins’, ‘heritage’ or ‘descent’ yesterday, Casciani appeared to wrestle with the issue on Radio 4’s Today programme.
Presenter Nick Robinson asked him: ‘The suspect is a British citizen, but he’s also of Somali origin. Is that regarded as significant?’
Casciani replied: ‘The Somali element – erm, no. The reason why some reporters have established this fact is that there has been some misreporting …’
Twelve hours earlier, he had tweeted: ‘We have learnt from official sources that detectives have established the individual is a UK national, seemingly of Somali heritage. We report this in the interests of accuracy’ …
The BBC says Casciani ‘focuses on stories relating to law, order, society and belonging – including immigration, ethnicity’.
The Telegraph reported on the Met’s discoveries made on Saturday. The suspect lived in London, far from Sir David’s constituency:
On Saturday, officers from the Metropolitan Police’s counter-terrorism team, which is leading the investigation into his death, were searching three addresses in London – at least two of which were believed to be in the east of the capital. One search had ended but the others remained ongoing on Saturday night. The suspect, a British national of Somali origin, is thought to have acted alone and travelled by train from his north London home to Essex to carry out the attack.
The Daily Mail told us that the suspect lives among at least one celebrity in London, the rest of his neighbours clearly well-heeled, and might have spent a week planning the bloody attack:
Ali, who is thought to have been targeted by the Government’s anti-terror Prevent programme, may have lived in Sir David’s Southend West constituency in Essex in the past.
His most recent residence is believed to be in London. Officers have been carrying out searches at three addresses.
The security services are providing assistance to Scotland Yard, which is leading the investigation. Last night, detectives were granted a warrant of further detention, allowing them to keep Ali in custody until Friday.
Police officers were yesterday standing guard outside the North London council house where Ali lives. It is in a street of £2 million three-storey townhouses where the late actor Roger Lloyd Pack, who played Trigger in Only Fools And Horses, used to live.
That day, news emerged that Sir David had received a menacing threat just days before his murder. However, police believe that the two events are unconnected, according to The Telegraph:
The threat to the veteran MP was made in the past few days and reported to police …
It is understood that Essex Police received a report of the threat, but they are not connecting it with Friday’s attack.
John Lamb, the former Mayor of Leigh-on-Sea and a close colleague of the murdered MP, said Sir David had received the “upsetting” threat in the past few days …
Mr Lamb said it had been Sir David’s idea to hold his surgeries in places like the Methodist church, so he could be more accessible to his constituents, rather than in the local Conservative Party offices in Southend.
It is understood this came despite concerns being expressed by some of his staff over the potential security risk at more open venues.
Mr Lamb said: “Sir David used to hold them at the Conservative Association, but that made it hard for older people to see him so around a year ago he started going out into the community. He didn’t want to hide away, he wanted to be visible and accessible. He told me: ‘I want them to be able to see me in their local area’.
Before this, the last time an MP was murdered was in June 2016, just days before the Brexit referendum. A white male fatally stabbed Labour MP Jo Cox outside her own surgery. He was said to have had mental health problems, aggravated by the threat of eviction. His mother was also in poor health. That is not in any way to excuse his horrific crime of murdering a young wife, mother and MP. However, at the time, the media said the motive was because he was pro-Brexit and she was not.
Sir David, along with every other MP, was deeply affected by her death. He mentioned it and attendant security issues in his 2020 book, In Ayes and Ears: A Survivor’s Guide to Westminster, published last November.
He wrote:
The British tradition has always been that Members of Parliament regularly make themselves available for constituents to meet them face to face at their surgeries. Now advice has been given to be more careful when accepting appointments. We are advised to never see people alone, we must be extra careful when opening post and we must ensure that our offices are properly safe and secure. In short, these increasing attacks have rather spoilt the great British tradition of the people openly meeting their elected politicians.
He also said that he had to check the locks on his property and that certain ‘nuisance’ (his word) members of the public occasionally showed up outside his home. Other MPs have installed CCTV cameras on their properties.
Jo Cox’s sister, Kim Leadbeater, is now an MP in her former constituency, Batley & Spen. She tweeted her condolences:
The Emir of Qatar also sent a message of sympathy. Last week, he and Sir David were discussing Afghanistan refugees who are currently living in Qatar, awaiting settlement in other countries:
On Sunday, October 17, the father of the suspect in custody spoke. The Sunday Times reported:
The father of the suspected killer of Sir David Amess said he had been left “traumatised” by his son’s arrest after the stabbing of the veteran Tory MP.
Harbi Ali Kullane, a former adviser to the prime minister of Somalia, confirmed that his British-born son, Ali Harbi Ali, 25, was in custody. Kullane said that anti-terrorist police from Scotland Yard had visited him.
Speaking at his sister’s home in north London last night, Kullane said: “I’m feeling very traumatised. It’s not something that I expected or even dreamt of.”
The suspect was a “self-radicalised” lone operative known to counterterrorist police, according to Whitehall sources. He is believed to have been referred to Prevent, the government’s deradicalisation programme, before allegedly stabbing Amess on Friday …
Investigators are examining the theory that he was radicalised online during lockdown.
Officers were yesterday granted a further warrant to detain him until Friday under terrorism laws. Scotland Yard said that early inquiries had uncovered “a potential motivation linked to Islamist extremism”.
Amess, 69, an MP for almost 40 years, was a devout Roman Catholic who was guided in his daily life by his strong faith …
Intelligence sources said the suspect had not been on the radar of MI5, which is monitoring more than 3,000 people who it is feared could be plotting a terrorist attack. However, he is believed to be one of thousands of extremists who have been referred to the voluntary Prevent programme after displaying potentially disturbing behaviour such as inflammatory postings on social media.
More than 6,000 people were referred by police and other agencies to the programme in the year ending March 31, 2020.
By the way, referral to the Prevent programme does not include monitoring by police and/or security services.
That day, the Amess family issued a statement thanking the public for their messages of support and urged the Government to grant Southend-on-Sea city status.
Sir David Amess’s family have said that achieving city status for Southend would be a way of paying tribute to a “patriot and man of peace”.
In their first public comments since the MP’s murder, his family thanked people for the “wonderful, wonderful tributes paid to David following his cruel and violent death. It truly has brought us so much comfort.”
Amess, 69, was married with five children and in a statement tonight they said: “The support shown by friends, constituents and the general public alike has been so overwhelming. As a family it has given us strength.”
They urged people “to set aside their differences and show kindness and love to all” so that some good might come from their father’s death. His family said there was “still so much David wanted to do” insisting: “This is not the end of Sir David Amess MP. It is the next chapter and as a family we ask everyone to support the many charities he worked with.”
They cited his efforts to raise money for a statue of Dame Vera Lynn and said: “Closer to home, David was working hard for Southend to gain city status. In his memory, please show your support for this campaign.”
As I write on Monday, no known motive for Sir David’s gruesome murder has emerged.
Some of his friends believe it was because he was a devout Catholic. I’m not sure about that. I did not know he was one until he died, and I’m a political junkie and frequent viewer of BBC Parliament.
A radical Islamist preacher says it was because Sir David was pro-Israel, as the MP had been an honorary secretary of the Conservative Friends of Israel since 1998.
However, let us not forget Qatar and the current tensions in Somalia.
In Monday’s Times, speculation arose over whether Amess was murdered because he headed the APPG fostering relations between the UK and Qatar. Qatar supports the current regime in Somalia:
Meanwhile, members of the public are calling for those voting for the Westminster Dog of the Year to choose Sir David and Vivienne as a fitting posthumous tribute to the tireless yet cheerful MP, who will be sorely missed.
I will have more on Sir David’s life in tomorrow’s post.
My deepest condolences go to the Amess family, Sir David’s staff and his many friends. May the good Lord grant them His infinite grace and comfort in the days and months ahead.
Eternal rest grant unto your servant David, O Lord, and let perpetual light shine upon him. May his soul and all the souls of the faithful departed rest in your eternal mercy and peace. Amen.
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!
A lot happened during Holy Week 2021 to Christ’s faithful.
They, too, suffered afflictions, some more serious than others, all because of coronavirus.
London
On Good Friday, a Polish Catholic congregation in Balham, south London, received a visit from the Metropolitan Police which ended their service:
Too many people showed up:
The BBC has more on the story:
The Daily Mail also featured a report, including a lot of photos. It points out the service was only going to be 30 minutes long.
I can see the social distancing problem, so why didn’t the cop just ask for some people to leave and the remaining congregants could then spread out a bit in the pews?
Looks like another soft target for the police: obedient Christians with little command of the English language.
The BBC reports that people living near the church called the police (emphases mine):
Police say they were called to reports of large groups of people queuing outside Christ the King church on Balham High Road.
The video went viral:
Video of officers addressing the congregation, from the altar of the church, has been circulating online.
The church said all “government requirements have been complied with”.
A representative of Polish Catholic Mission Balham, which runs the church, added worshippers “obeyed” the police “without objection”.
“We believe, however, that the police have brutally exceeded their powers by issuing their warrant for no good reason,” the spokesman added.
“We regret that the rights of the faithful have been wronged on such an important day for every believer, and that our worship has been profaned.”
On Saturday, the Archbishop of Southwark, John Wilson, visited the church to discuss the incident.
Rector of the Catholic Polish Mission, Stefan Wylezek, said he intended to contact the Met to discuss how the situation was handled …
No fines were issued to worshippers.
The Met said it was “engaging with the church authorities” in connection with numerous events taking place at the church over the Easter period.
Incidentally, the next day, more protests about the proposed policing bill took place:
I’m tempted to make a comment, so I’ll refrain.
Canada
Now let’s cross the pond for more Holy Week stories.
Our first stop is Calgary, Alberta, where, coincidentally, another Polish pastor was targeted.
On Holy Saturday, Pastor Artur Pawlowski, the head of Calgary’s Street Church in Alberta, Canada, was holding a service at the Fortress (Cave) of Adullam when the officers entered the building.
This is because, according to local media, Pawlowski has violated coronavirus regulations before. He:
has been charged multiple times under Alberta’s Public Health Act for breaching Covid-19 regulations.
‘We expect that all places of worship across Alberta follow the CMOH restrictions and we thank everyone who continues to do their part to prevent the spread of COVID-19 this holiday weekend and throughout the pandemic.’
CTV News reported that officials from the City of Calgary Bylaw Services were also in attendance, alongside city police …
Churches in the area can hold services but must keep attendance below 15 per cent and follow guidelines including wearing masks and social distancing.
However the controversial pastor was praised by some on social media who see pandemic restrictions as infringing on their right to religious worship.
Ezra Levant, the founder of far-right commentary website Rebel News, said Pawlowski’s response was ‘how you handle police who enter a church without a warrant.’
Here is Levant’s tweet, along with a video taken at the church showing the main confrontation (H/T to the Gateway Pundit):
Fox News reported what Pawlowski said:
“Get out of this property immediately,” he says in the video. “I don’t want to hear anything … out immediately.”
Most of the officials don’t engage Pawlowski, but an unidentified woman seems to try and explain their presence. Pawlowski was not having it.
“Out!” he yelled. “Out of this property … immediately until you come back with a warrant.” The officials and officers slowly exit the building, and Pawlowski followed them.
“Nazis are not welcome here,” he then says. “And don’t come out without a warrant.”
The pastor also called them “Gestapo.”
The second video follows. The pastor says that the Canadian government is trying to take people’s rights away and will succeed if people do not rally together to stop it:
The Church of Adullam is a group of churches in North America which offer spiritual refuge to those experiencing brokenness in their lives:
We aim to provide a safe place of help, hope, and healing for all who enter the cave.
At Adullam, we believe deeply in the power of community. We believe community in the church means an ongoing fellowship of connectedness with Jesus by His spirit taking his rightful place among the people as King.
The church also provides food to those in need.
Its name comes from 1 Samuel 22:1-2:
1 David left Gath and escaped to the cave of Adullam. When his brothers and his father’s household heard about it, they went down to him there. 2 All those who were in distress or in debt or discontented gathered around him, and he became their commander. About four hundred men were with him.
On Easter Sunday, the Calgary Police Service issued a statement:
United States
The US also had sad Holy Week episodes.
Texas
The following story broke on Lazarus Saturday, the day before Palm Sunday. Technically, it did not take place during Holy Week — rather two weeks before — but it circulated during that time, especially when the Gateway Pundit featured it on Monday, March 29.
Dr Taylor Marshall, a husband and father of eight children, converted to the Catholic faith. He was mainline Protestant. He is an author who also broadcasts on YouTube:
In the video, Mrs Deirdre Hairston, mother of a one-year-old with another baby expected later this year, described her experience at Holy Trinity Church in Dallas. She has been permanently barred from entering that church — her parish church — again:
She says that, during Mass, the pastor approached her — the assistant pastor was saying Mass — and told her that she had to wear a mask or he would call the police. Mrs Hairston purposely sat in the back row of chairs. She had her baby with her and wanted to be able to make a quick exit should the baby start crying.
She told Taylor Marshall that she was not wearing her mask because she did not feel well, which isn’t surprising, given that she is in the early stages of pregnancy.
She went to receive Holy Communion with her baby in her arms. She returned to her chair to pray, the Eucharist still in her mouth, when she felt a rough tug on her arm.
It was a police woman who said she was going to put handcuffs on her. Remember, she was holding her baby at the time!
Hairston asked if she was under arrest. The police woman said that she was not.
Here’s the clip:
Texas has not had a state mask mandate since early March.
Therefore, she was under no legal obligation to wear one, although businesses can ask a person to do so.
Hairston and her baby left the church. In the video, it appears as if her husband shows up — a man wearing shorts and a polo shirt. The police woman tells him that the church is a business. He tells her that it is not, under 501c(3) rules. She insists that it is.
Anyway, the family left, and Mrs Hairston can no longer attend that church — her parish church!
I love this tweet addressed to the Roman Catholic Bishop of the Diocese of Dallas:
The CBS affiliate in Dallas/Fort Worth picked up the story on Monday and reported:
Cell phone footage shows Hairston asking what crime she has committed, to which police replied she was “trespassing on a business.”
Hairston said her parish-priest, Father Ryan called police.
Once outside, Hairston said the usher ran to her car and took photos of her license plate as police were taking her information. She also said she was issued a ticket for trespassing.
Holy Trinity, which serves the uptown community near Oak Lawn and Lemmon Ave. responded on March 29, two weeks after the incident and two days after Marshall shared the interview on Youtube.
In it, they state that Hairston wasn’t arrested or ticketed, merely issued a trespass warning. They also said the pastor of the parish has required masks at Mass out of concern for the health and welfare of its entire congregation. Hairston and her husband said that isn’t true. They said it wasn’t required – only encouraged.
How can Holy Trinity ‘encourage’ it when the parish priest calls the police? As for ‘concern’, has he no concern for a pregnant mother who isn’t feeling well?
In the video, Hairston and Marshall discuss what impact incidents such as these might have on church attendance.
Some Catholics are angry:
This might even unintentionally encourage Catholics to attend other churches.
And, lo, here’s a Twitter exchange on that very subject:
Too right.
New York
My final news story — a sad and violent one — took place in Manhattan on Monday of Holy Week.
Vilma Kari, a 65-year-old woman of slight build, was on her way to church on Monday when a man at least twice her size pushed her to the ground and began kicking her in the head.
Ms Kari is an American of Filipino heritage. Her attacker is black.
Here’s the video. Watch the security guards of the nearby building close the door on the scene:
People were outraged that the security guards did not come to her rescue:
On Wednesday, March 31, the NYPD arrested the perp:
That also angered people, especially when they found out he killed his own mother and was out on parole:
The New York Post reported:
Bystanders did nothing to help an Asian woman as she was being beaten in broad daylight in Manhattan this week — and didn’t even bother calling 911, police said Wednesday.
An NYPD spokesperson said it had zero records of a 911 call from Monday’s unprovoked attack — when convicted murderer Brandon Elliot, 38, allegedly kicked a 65-year-old victim to the ground and repeatedly stomped on her face outside 360 West 43rd Street.
At a press conference Wednesday afternoon, Det. Michael Rodriguez said police on patrol drove by and saw the victim after she was attacked.
“They came upon the victim after she was assaulted,” he said.
Outrage has mounted over the caught-on-camera beatdown — the latest in a disturbing trend of hate crimes against Asian Americans — after at least three staffers inside the building were caught doing nothing to thwart Elliot.
NYPD Commissioner Dermot Shea said detectives would be interviewing those on video tape who witnessed the assault first hand.
“I fully understand the public’s anger,” Shea said about the bystander inaction …
The staffers who witnessed the attack have since been suspended as an investigation plays out …
The victim, Vilma Kari, suffered a broken pelvis and was released from the hospital Tuesday.
Early Wednesday morning, police nabbed Elliot — a homeless man who was out on parole for murdering his mother in 2002 — for the alleged hate crime.
The New York Post had an article on Elliot, who lived near the building in front of which he assaulted Ms Kari:
Brandon Elliot, 38, who lives in a nearby hotel that serves as a homeless shelter, was arrested early Wednesday and hit with a number of charges, including assault as a hate crime and attempted assault as a hate crime, police said.
He was caught on video mercilessly punching and kicking the 65-year-old victim in front of an apartment building at 360 West 43rd Street around 11:40 a.m. Monday, yelling “F–k you, you don’t belong here,” according to cops and police sources.
In April 2002, Elliot was charged with murder for using a kitchen knife to stab his mother, Bridget Johnson in the chest three times in their East 224th Street home in the Bronx, according to previous reports.
The deadly attack took place in front of Elliot’s 5-year-old sister, sources told The Post. It’s unclear what led to the slaying.
Johnson, 42, died a couple of days later.
Elliot was convicted of murder and sentenced to 15 years-to-life in prison.
He was denied parole twice — first at a February 2017 hearing and again in December 2018, according to a state Department of Corrections official.
But the following year, he was approved for release in September and sprung on lifetime parole two months later.
Also:
Kari is Filipino American, according to Philippine Ambassador to the US Jose Manuel Romualdez.
Elliot is expected to be arraigned in Manhattan criminal court sometime on Wednesday.
A resident at the Four Points by Sheraton — the West 40th Street homeless shelter where Elliot was staying during the alleged attack — said he knew the brute well after spending time with him at another shelter.
“He told me he was [a] diagnosed paranoid schizophrenic,” the man, who declined to give his name, told The Post. “He’s quiet. He doesn’t talk much. He is really paranoid. He has mental issues.”
Elliot’s latest bust comes in the wake of a surge of attacks against Asian victims in New York City and elsewhere.
That is because of coronavirus. Shameful and ignorant on so many levels.
UPDATE — April 6: The two security guards have been fired. However, under their union’s — SEIU’s — procedures, they can appeal, although that could take weeks or months, according to a union official. The perp, Elliot, will be arraigned on April 21.
——————————————————————————–
All of these incidents happened because of coronavirus or coronavirus restrictions.
May the Risen Lord Jesus look graciously upon His believers who have been afflicted during the past few weeks, particularly those profiled here. May He give them sustained hope and healing, especially during this Easter season.
At the weekend, demonstrations took place across Europe protesting lockdown and other continuing coronavirus restrictions. Most of those were peaceful.
Meanwhile, in Bristol, on Sunday, March 21, 2021, a violent group of rioters took exception to the proposed Police, Crime, Sentencing and Courts Bill making its way through Parliament. It passed its second reading last week and goes into committee for further debate this week.
It has been a long time since such violence has touched our shores. It was as if poison had come from across the pond, so to speak.
Having seen videos of what happened, millions of people living in England will now hope that the proposed legislation makes it through Parliament and the Lords with few amendments.
On Monday, March 22, Chief Constable Andy Marsh of Avon and Somerset Police detailed the damage and injury for Sky News. A number of officers had to be sent to hospital, two with injuries that required immediate treatment. One of those officers had a punctured lung, another a broken arm. Chief Constable Marsh said that every one of them is doing well and are out of hospital. Twelve police vans were also destroyed. Police have arrested seven people but the Chief Constable says that he will need the public’s help in the coming days to arrest more:
You can see the police vans being set alight in this video:
Here is a burnt-out police car:
And who will pick up the tab for replacements? Taxpayers:
The riot’s name was Kill the Bill. On the face of it, it was about the legislation, however, the police are also known colloquially in England as ‘the Bill’, for many reasons, one of which was that they used to carry a Bill of Parliament with them to certify their authority:
It is attempted murder when you look beyond the name of the riots….’kill the bill’…..nothing to do with the ‘bill’ passed in Parliament.
No doubt Bristol’s authorities thought they saw the last of their problems once they started acquiescing to demonstrators’ demands last summer. But the radical left always want more:
ITV News has a video of a police van being rocked back and forth. It also includes the broken windows at Bristol’s Bridewell Police Station. Bristol residents quickly disowned the gratuitous vandalism:
Police tried to do the right thing last summer, but the ‘softly, softly’ approach does not work in the long run. Think Seattle. Think Portland:
This is what happened Sunday afternoon:
This is what happened on Sunday night:
According to Rep. Adam Schiff (D-California), rioters are attempting to achieve peace through violence. Sounds like the Bolsheviks of a century ago:
The British public are understandably unhappy:
Note the reaction to this tweet from Home Secretary Priti Patel:
Yes, the English will want rioters brought to book and properly sentenced:
Some think that Bristol’s Labour council might be onside, just as Democrat-controlled cities were with American protests last year:
Labour MPs also opposed the proposed legislation last week, even though the principles of the bill, not specifics, were being discussed.
As much as we support the police, they, too, need to rethink their optics and their tactics.
Only a week ago, the public saw this in London during the vigil for Sarah Everard:
Just days later, police in England went after soft targets at pro-democracy rallies but appeared seemingly helpless when confronted by anarchists:
It’s not a good look.
By and large, the British support the police but find their modus operandi confusing, to say the least. No new laws will help that.
My previous posts in this series covered Piers Morgan’s pontifications and the new Hate Crime Bill in Scotland.
Today’s post looks at the Sarah Everard vigil on Clapham Common on Saturday, March 13.
On March 3, 2021, 33-year-old Sarah Everard disappeared from the streets of south London while walking home from a friend’s house. A week later a woman’s remains were found in the eastern part of Kent. Because of the extraordinary nature of the case, the UK Government have since placed a D notice on coverage of the details which have emerged thus far.
The case moved women across the UK to express their grief.
Women were also angered when, last week, after Ms Everard was missing for six days, officers from London’s Metropolitan Police advised women not to go out alone at night.
Interestingly, Mayor of London Sadiq Khan told a radio station that London’s streets are not safe for women and girls:
The same advisory went out many years ago in England when Peter ‘Yorkshire Ripper’ Sutcliffe was on the prowl for his latest victim. Julie Bindel recalled her memories of that time in an article for The Spectator: ‘Why are London police telling women to stay at home?’
Bindel wrote (emphases mine):
I moved to Leeds in 1979, during the hunt for serial killer Peter Sutcliffe. I was 17-years old and had been raised, as had most girls, being warned that our safety was our own responsibility. ‘Don’t go out alone at night’, ‘don’t talk to strange men’, ‘cover your flesh if you don’t want to get yourself raped’. Men were rarely told that they were to blame for the fact that we constantly looked over our shoulder whenever we were out alone in case a predator was looking to strike.
As a response to West Yorkshire police issuing what was effectively a curfew on women, feminists organised the first Reclaim the Night marches which occurred simultaneously across 12 English towns and cities, from Manchester to Soho.
Women on these marches carried placards reading ‘No curfew on women — curfew on men’ as they shouted about their anger at being kept off the streets — the supposedly public highways, after all — by the threat of male violence.
I recall feeling very angry at being told by police to ‘stay indoors’ and ‘Do not go out at night unless absolutely necessary, and only if accompanied by a man you know.’ Ironically, Sutcliffe himself gave the same advice to his sister.
Bindel provides other instances where police forces across England gave women the same advice.
She concludes:
Women should be able to go for a walk without fear or a male chaperone. We feel scared not because we are pathetic, weak creatures but because so many men target us. Feminism exists because women are sick and tired of being in danger in both the home and on the streets. They should be the ones to lose their freedom of movement, not us.
Perhaps Wales’s First Minister Mark Drakeford read her article of March 10. Two days later he told the BBC’s Charlie Stayt that he might consider a curfew on men in Wales:
Alternatively, perhaps Mark Drakeford saw Baroness Jones (Green) advocate such a measure the day before in the House of Lords:
Guido Fawkes saw a potential problem with that (emphasis in the original):
The Green Party also backs gender self-identification for all so Guido can already think of one loophole in Jenny’s plan…
Some of Sarah Everard’s friends had the idea of organising a vigil for her at Clapham Common, through which she walked on her way home on March 3. They decided to cancel it.
However, a vigil did take place there, at the bandstand, on Saturday, March 13. People could pay their respects and place flowers at the bandstand.
The Duchess of Cambridge went to pay her respects with a bouquet that afternoon.
As the sun set, what was a quiet day of reflection and grief turned into something else. Protesters gathered, as did the Metropolitan Police.
The BBC’s Charlie Haynes tweeted:
Independent journalist Ahmed Kaballo tweeted his footage:
The London correspondent from the Washington Post was there and posted her footage:
Here is a photo:
Then police arrested a young woman. Reports say she is petite — 5’2″:
I am surprised that a woman of her small stature had to be held to the ground in order for an arrest to take place. Couldn’t four policemen do that standing up?
Reports say she was later released, but the point still stands.
With coronavirus lockdown still in place, everyone who is everyone was at home. Those people saw it online or on the telly.
In the early hours of Sunday morning, March 14, the Met’s Assistant Commissioner Helen Ball, who reports to Commissioner Cressida Dick — two women! — issued a statement, which says, in part:
“Around 6pm, more people began to gather close to the bandstand within the Common. Some started to make speeches from the bandstand. These speeches then attracted more people to gather closer together.
“At this point, officers on the ground were faced with a very difficult decision. Hundreds of people were packed tightly together, posing a very real risk of easily transmitting Covid-19.
“Police must act for people’s safety, this is the only responsible thing to do. The pandemic is not over and gatherings of people from right across London and beyond, are still not safe.
“Those who gathered were spoken to by officers on a number of occasions and over an extended period of time. We repeatedly encouraged those who were there to comply with the law and leave. Regrettably, a small minority of people began chanting at officers, pushing and throwing items.
“After speaking with officers, the vast majority of people quickly left. Four arrests have been made for public order offences and for breaches of the Health Protection Regulations.
“Part of the reason I am speaking to you tonight is because we accept that the actions of our officers have been questioned.
“We absolutely did not want to be in a position where enforcement action was necessary. But we were placed in this position because of the overriding need to protect people’s safety.
“Let me end by saying that across the Met, we review every single event that we police to see if there are lessons that can be learnt. This one will be no different.”
The Sunday morning news shows were only hours away. Not surprisingly, this was a huge story.
The Safeguarding Minister (?!) told Sky’s Sophie Ridge that the events were ‘very upsetting’:
The Victims’ Commissioner told Ridge that police had made a bad situation worse:
The Met’s Commissioner defended her men:
But the story and the emotion didn’t go away. On Sunday, demonstrators gathered in Parliament Square to protest the Met’s handling of the vigil.
Two other British cities held peaceful vigils. Birmingham’s police worked well with organisers, as local MP Jess Phillips explained to the BBC. Glasgow held a quiet ribbon vigil. Elsewhere, such events took place online.
On Monday morning, Prime Minister Boris Johnson voiced his disapproval:
However, Boris voiced his support for Dame Cressida in her role (Guido Fawkes has the story and a video).
Guido Fawkes’s cartoonist, Rich, posted his weekly cartoon:
The public, however, thought that the vigil should not have taken place, probably because of coronavirus restrictions:
A retired Metropolitan Police officer posed these questions:
On Monday afternoon in Parliament, Home Secretary Priti Patel gave a statement and paid tribute to Ms Everard:
“women and girls must feel safe while walking our streets“, and cited the Domestic Abuse Bill which is going through the Lords this evening as the action the Government is continuing to take.
During the debate that followed, Sir Charles Walker said that what happened at the vigil was the fault of the overwhelming majority of MPs who voted for the Coronavirus Act 2020:
He said (emphases mine):
This House criminalised the freedom of protest. This House. Us. Not Dame Cressida. Not the Metropolitan Police. We did. We criminalised freedom to protest collectively. We are up to our eyeballs in this.
I couldn’t agree more.
Walker wanted to amend the law that afternoon to allow protests again. That did not happen.
Tom Harwood, who writes for Guido Fawkes, asked whether police took advantage of a soft target:
Really difficult situations provoke a different response from the Met, such as last summer’s protests. They walk away:
Incidentally, skin colour is irrelevant. Last autumn, the Met bought sandwiches for Extinction Rebellion who were occupying Smithfield Market.
On Monday night, Boris tweeted a statement about women’s safety:
Even if the general public objected to the vigil, conservative and libertarian columnists took strong objection to the Met’s handling of it as well as to the law against protests.
UnHerd posted ‘The police have a woman problem’.
Conservative Woman featured ‘Police at Sarah vigil were trying to enforce a rotten law’. They also posted ‘I hate what is being done to my country’.
Spiked remembered the reason the vigil took place: ‘This is not what Sarah would have wanted’.
The Leader of the House of Commons, Jacob Rees-Mogg, said on Thursday, March 18, that the coronavirus laws will most likely stay in place until the end of June, when the furlough programme expires.
That said, they will be debated next week.
In conclusion, illiberal laws bring illiberal — and inconsistent — enforcement.
On Wednesday, January 13, 2021, investigative reporter John Solomon of Just The News appeared on Actionable Intelligence to tell host Eric Greitens that the January 6 siege on the Capitol was ‘pre-planned’:
It appears that President Trump did not have access to intelligence stating that the siege would take place, according to a Just The News article, also published last Wednesday.
‘Rush to judgement? Three crucial questions remain unanswered about Capitol siege’ states that the FBI and New York Police Department knew, but the White House did not (emphases mine below):
A senior intelligence official told Just the News he has found no evidence that the president, the White House or the National Security Council was alerted in formal intelligence briefings to the pre-warnings or suspicions of violence the FBI and NYPD have admitted they had.
Yet, last Wednesday, Nancy Pelosi and the House of Representatives impeached President Trump for a second time — unprecedented in US history — on the basis that he fomented the violence at the Capitol. That was after a six-hour debate with no due process for the US president.
Mitch McConnell says that he will not reconvene the Senate before the Inauguration on January 20 because of time constraints. The Senate would also have to vote whether to impeach or acquit Trump, but only after a trial, which, as we know from Trump’s first impeachment, takes several days. However, can the Senate impeach Trump once he becomes a private citizen again? Or is there something we don’t know about January 20?
It is also vital to know that Trump was still giving his speech to rallygoers at The Ellipse, next to the White House, when the siege of the Capitol was taking place:
… the official timeline of events constructed by the New York Times through videos shows protesters began breaching the perimeter of the Capitol a full 20 minutes before Trump finished his speech.
This new evidence raises the first compelling question that remains unanswered. How could Trump incite an attack that had already been pre-planned and was in motion before his speech ended?
Indeed.
Information began to emerge the weekend after the January 6 siege:
Since the weekend, major bombshell revelations already have substantially revised the initial story of a spontaneous mob overrunning an unsuspecting Capitol police force.
The FBI admitted Tuesday it received information ahead of the Jan. 6 tragedy suggesting some participants were planning a “war” on the Capitol, including killing officers and distributing maps of the complex. It alerted Washington D.C. law enforcement through the joint terrorism task force alert system. It also “disrupted” the travel plans of some of the suspected trouble-makers.
“We developed some intelligence that a number of individuals were planning to travel to the D.C. area with intentions to cause violence,” Assistant Director Steven M. D’Antuono said. “We immediately shared that information, and action was taken.”
The New York Police Department is reported to have given the Capitol Police similar intelligence warnings of impending violence.
The chief federal prosecutor in Washington declared Tuesday he is pursuing conspiracy charges, signaling the attacks on the Capitol involved multiple acts and multiple conspirators working in concert with each other. The prosecutor talked about the planting of carefully constructed IEDs as one such act. In other words, there was pre-planning for some elements of last Wednesday’s chaos.
In the video above, Solomon wonders what the Sergeants at Arms knew. One reports to Nancy Pelosi in the House and the other to Mitch McConnell in the Senate.
Solomon says that the Sergeants at Arms are the top security for both Houses of Congress. The Speaker and the Senate Majority Leader have very close working relationships with them. Did they receive this intelligence? We do not know at this point, but both resigned or were reassigned. The Capitol Police Chief, Steve Sund, also resigned. He said that neither Sergeant at Arms was willing to help Sund with reinforcements. The National Guard did not arrive until 5 p.m. that day.
A Gateway Pundit article summarising the contents of the video states that Solomon and his team have been stymied in their efforts for the release of information under FOIA:
Investigative reporter John Solomon dropped a bombshell on Wednesday night and said the DC police rejected his FOIA request for records pertaining to their investigation of the siege of the U.S. Capitol.
The DC police said release of the records would be ‘personally embarrassing’ and privacy invading to release the documents.
“We’re gonna fight for those documents but something tells me what’s in those documents has some very very big relevance to what happened on The Hill and the question I have is what did Nancy Pelosi know, what did Mitch McConnell know about these threats beforehand,” John Solomon told former Missouri Governor Eric Greitens. “If they didn’t know then, it’s an intelligence failure of the police. If they did know there’s something they didn’t tell us before we went into this impeachment.”
Also worth noting:
The US Attorney is bringing a conspiracy case which is further proof the siege was planned.
To say this situation is galling is the understatement of the month.
As lynnfay said in yesterday’s guest post, Trump had a lot of naysayers who never wanted him in office in the first place.
So far, this has been a deeply sad month in Trump’s life.
He’s the best president the US has had in living memory. It is a crying shame that a whole host of people have allowed or forced him, as the case may be, to end his four years in ignominy.
Let us avoid enthusing over a possible vaccine.
The coronavirus lockdown is a joke. All it does is suppress the ‘infection rate’ — number of positive tests.
England’s second national lockdown — from November 5 to December 2 — ends in a three-tier system.
Most of the nation fared worse after lockdown was lifted. Only Cornwall, the Isles of Scilly and the Isle of Wight are in Tier 1.
The rest of the country ended up in Tiers 2 or 3. The south west — largely clear of the virus — ended up in Tier 2. They had been in Tier 1 and had no appreciable increase in ‘infection’ rates.
Leicester has been in some state of local, regional or national lockdown for months, which continues today.
London is in Tier 2, even though some of the capital’s boroughs have very few positive test results.
The people of Manchester believe they were politically penalised because their politicians argued with the government. They are in Tier 3.
As the lockdown came to an end yesterday, MPs had to vote on confirming the tier system on Tuesday, December 1.
I watched the afternoon debate that day. Many more MPs spoke out against not only lockdown but also the wide-ranging tier system, which makes no allowance for local or regional differences. Kent’s number of positive tests are high in the area of the county nearest London, however, the further one goes out into the countryside, the lower the positives. Nonetheless, the whole county is in Tier 2.
I was heartened to hear a number of Conservative MPs speak out against their own government and was also happy to hear from Labour and DUP MPs who opposed the tier system.
What follows is a summary of proceedings:
With 650 MPs, and excluding the SNP MPs who did not vote on the legislation, there were a lot of abstentions. I only wish those abstaining had actually voted NO. During the debate, a few MPs asked why a policy of common sense (e.g. the Swedish model) couldn’t be adopted. That would make much more sense.
As Sammy Wilson, a DUP (Northern Ireland) MP, said during the debate, whatever happens in England follows in Northern Ireland. That is why they voted against:
In any event, the number of rebel MPs is increasing. As more people started paying attention to Brexit last year in Parliament, more have been watching how their MPs vote. Someone from Devon is rightly unhappy with his MP:
One MP voted Aye and No, signalling an abstention:
Wow. The deputy chief whip (Conservative) had to cast proxy votes against the Government. Not every MP can show up in the House of Commons. Some are looking after vulnerable family members or have health issues themselves:
Because the national lockdown ending on Wednesday, December 2 cannot be extended, the Government needed legislation for the tier system, to be reviewed in a fortnight’s time.
As the new legislation was necessary, the House of Lords needed to approve it, too. Like the House of Commons, they also had a division — a vote:
This is the detail of the regret motion, which passed:
The Lords approved the new tier system:
In the House of Commons debate, a few MPs chided the allegation that these lockdowns and tier systems were a conspiracy. The MPs said that the Government is too inept to do such a thing. Hmm.
However, the public, whether in the UK or the US, can’t really be criticised for noticing that a two- to three-week lockdown ended up in three-quarters of the year under government authority. Yes, the situation was worse in other Western countries, like Australia:
The article discussed coronavirus vaccines as well as digital payments (emphases mine):
The review said the commonwealth should set up agreements between governments and banks so contact tracers could request details of people who had made a payment at a hotspot venue. This method was used to find passengers of a Sydney taxi driver who caught the virus.
Governments are also making plans for distributing vaccines once they become available.
Any COVID-19 vaccine will be free for all Australians or Medicare-eligible visa holders. It will not be mandatory.
“There may, however, be circumstances where the Australian government and other governments may introduce border entry or re-entry requirements that are conditional on proof of vaccination,” the Australian COVID-19 Vaccination Policy said.
Hmm.
Returning to Britain, a few MPs criticised members of the public, some of whom contacted them, who were sceptical of the recently announced vaccine.
The Government has measures to deal with such people — members of the British Army who were deployed earlier this year to combat lockdown scepticism. Pictured below is Piers Corbyn, MP Jeremy’s brother, who was fined £10,000 a few months ago for protesting against lockdown:
It’s no wonder people wonder what in the heck is going on.
ZeroHedge reported on the vaccine situation and included this photo, also from an anti-lockdown protest in London last weekend. An American tweeted:
The ZeroHedge article covered one in The Sunday Times (emphases in the original):
As anti-lockdown protests continue to rage in London, resulting in the arrests of over 150 this past weekend, The Sunday Times is out with a hugely alarming report that almost has to be seen to be believed given how open and brazen an example it is of the state using every means possible to crush free speech and independent thought.
Britain will literally use military intelligence to seek out and stamp out what The Times calls “anti-vaccine militants” and related “propaganda content” in cyberspace.
Of course, it’s entirely open to state authorities’ interpretation as to what this even means, and will likely morph into cracking down on any speech that’s even remotely critical or questioning as to the potential harmful side effects of the new rapidly developed COVID-19 vaccines.
This as the UK has agreed to buy more than 350 million doses of vaccines from at least seven global producers, and hopes to start vaccinating as fast as possible as confirmed cases continue to rise into the winter months.
The Times writes that a secretive elite unit will be used as part of information warfare combating anti-vaccine content online:
The army has mobilized an elite “information warfare” unit renowned for assisting operations against al-Qaeda and the Taliban to counter online propaganda against vaccines, as Britain prepares to deliver its first injections within days.
The defence cultural specialist unit was launched in Afghanistan in 2010 and belongs to the army’s 77th Brigade. The secretive unit has often worked side-by-side with psychological operations teams.
If this doesn’t sum up the British state’s self-understanding of its own immense power and control over citizens in the year 2020 then nothing else will: the military will use psyops on UK citizens to enforce vaccine group think.
Here’s another tweet included in the article:
I wrote about police ganging up on protesters a few months ago, but it seems to be getting worse. Wow.
One of our Government ministers is in charge of a vaccine roll-out. The other day he said that taking the vaccine would be mandatory, which the Government denied. Before he entered politics, Nadhim Zahawi, co-founded polling company YouGov:
This vaccine is like none other. Apparently, it uses an mRNA technology, which has never been used before in a vaccine. Is it a vaccine or is it gene therapy?
Is China using this vaccine? Are they dispensing any coronavirus vaccine? This was the scene back in August:
These days, you don’t even need to be an anti-vaxxer to get your collar felt. Pity poor Luke, a law student in England. The police made a mistake but wouldn’t readily admit it:
How can you ‘go to bed’ after something like that? Luke did a good job. He’ll make a great lawyer. His mum should be pleased:
Looking back to March, why would any Western nation impose a two- to three-week lockdown on its people then extend it for the rest of the year?
By New Year’s Day 2021, we will have been in some form of restriction for over nine months:
Even worse, some people cannot open their businesses because of government diktat. On the one hand, in England, at least, are wet pubs (taverns). On the other are wedding organisers and venues; there can only be up to 15 people max at weddings. Meanwhile, conferences here with a few hundred people can go ahead in person.
Uhh, correct me if I’m wrong, but don’t we fight wars against totalitarianism and tyranny?
There’s probably a really simple preventive solution to COVID-19: vitamin D, sunlight during the summer months and a nutritious hot meal once a day throughout the year:
Instead, we have to go for nearly a year of social deprivation, awaiting a vaccine and a cashless society. The Western world has been turned on its head.
C S Lewis had a point:
Of all tyrannies, a tyranny exercised for the good of its victims may be the most oppressive. It would be better to live under robber barons than under omnipotent moral busybodies. The robber baron’s cruelty may sometimes sleep, his cupidity may at some point be satiated; but those who torment us for our own good will torment us without end for they do so with the approval of their own conscience.
We could be approaching that time.
The next tweet is from the US — a reply from an investigative journalist to a commercial litigation lawyer about our new relationship with government:
I’ll close with this strangely prescient video from April 2019:
But, hey, we’re looking forward to Christmas, right?
These next items are probably made in China:
How they must be laughing at us.
Just remember:
And we thought that voting in a Conservative government with an 80 seat majority nearly a year ago was a guarantee against things like this! Ha!
On Saturday, September 26, 2020, another anti-lockdown protest took place in Trafalgar Square and at Speaker’s Corner in Hyde Park.
The media have showed protesters charging the police, with the police reacting violently, eventually dispersing the crowd and shutting down the protest.
The crowd were of all ages and races. The middle class people attending were nicely dressed, as is evidenced in the images below.
Many people from all walks of life are questioning the Government’s handling of the coronavirus crisis:
Yet, with selective editing, newscasts made protesters look like crazed fanatics.
One person who read a protester’s account in The Sun shared it in a comment on one of Guido Fawkes’s posts. I can’t hyperlink it because Guido’s commenting software does not have that facility. Here is the comment, left in its original state (emphases mine below):
OT. Just read the following c0mment from a sun reader on yesterday’s pr0test. So far I’ve not seen one MSM news report telling the truth.
I would just like to let you know what happened yesterday at the mass demonstrations in London yesterday – to counter the lies and distortions that were published yesterday in the Mainstream media. We were there from 11am and watched as Trafalgar Square got more and more full, up to capacity which was 35,000 and not the 15,000 reported by the media.
The rally began with a one minute silence for the police man who died on Friday. 35,000 people observed it without a sound. There was a big round of applause for the police. Not mentioned anywhere in the medias shameful coverage of this event.
There were 2 hours of talks with no trouble. Many were at two previous rallies and the question was raised did any previous attendee get ill from Covid-19 by attending. There was silence. As none did. Just as followed the much larger BLM marches when the virus was much more prevalent.
-
- Then as soon as a well-respected German doctor began speaking, who represents a group of 1,000 medical experts and doctors worldwide speaking against the Lockdown, the police moved in confiscated equipment and with raised batons attacked the crowd, many of whom were sitting down. This was a coordinated attack on peaceful protestors. A large group were sitting on the floor and the police stomped over them. The police attacked peaceful elderly demonstrators as Save our Rights UK FB. People were batoned in the face. in the mainstream media the videos they show, show protestors moving towards the police.
Here is Dr Heiko Schöning, who travelled to England from Germany, giving an interview some time before he spoke. The video ends with his arrest, which took place later that day.
If I were the Metropolitan Police Commissioner, I would be very embarrassed indeed.
Oops, look. YouTube removed a very intelligent interview. Only the past two minutes covered Dr Schöning‘s arrest:
He spoke in his home country, in Berlin, a few weeks ago with no problem, even though his perspective on coronavirus probably differs from Angela Merkel’s. He was still in custody on Sunday. Good grief:
David Kurten, a Brexit Party member of the London Assembly who has just founded the Heritage Party, commented:
As of Sunday it appears as if he was still being held but not charged with any offence (?!):
Police finally released the good doctor from custody on Sunday afternoon (!). He was quick to comment, rightly frustrated that his phone and computer had been confiscated. He said that a book, Corona, False Alarm, had been translated from German into English recently. (He is not one of the authors; Karina Reiss PhD, an associate professor in biology, biochemistry, infection and inflammation, co-wrote it with Dr Sucharit Bhakdi.) He thinks that was the trigger for his arrest. He says that this is a ‘plandemic’ and goes back to the bank crash of 2008, where TPTB were just ‘biding their time’ for a reprise in order to create chaos:
Thank goodness he can return home.
Yet, Dr Schöning committed no crime, unlike the person who vandalised Churchill’s statue in London:
It took quite a while before the defacer of Churchill’s statue was arrested:
Now on to those attending the protest.
At the 43-second point in the next video, a man is escorting a young woman away from the police. She looked as if she were about to throw up. Hmm, looks as if something’s gone wrong and possibly not by her own making:
After allegedly roughing up a 59-year-old man carrying an American colonial Don’t Tread on Me flag in Hyde Park, police allegedly laughed at him:
Fully agree about the shocking murder in cold blood of the police sergeant. My deepest condolences to his family and friends.
Back to protests, however. It’s hard to disagree with those who say we have seen two-tiered policing on display over the past few months:
It seems that way. Contrast Saturday’s protest with a police-escorted one from June. Talk about double standards:
Kathy Gyngell, editor of Conservative Woman, attended Saturday’s protest. This is her report, excerpted:
As I approached Trafalgar Square from Whitehall, it seemed almost too quiet. I even wondered for a moment if the rally was happening. Then I knew it still was. For, arriving within the Square, I found thousands of people quietly and respectfully listening to a speech, as I then tweeted.
All ages were there, all races, classes, colours and creeds – and many, many young people.
‘Look at this’, I messaged a friend with this picture, ‘compared with the crazy disruptive XR that the police did nothing about for weeks.’
By contrast with the positive gaiety and smiling police faces I witnessed day after day trying to get through XR’s massive disruption of Trafalgar Square earlier this year, I felt a lowering police presence. I did notice and wonder about the armed police poised menacingly between the columns of the neo-classical National Gallery frontage looking down on the crowd.
Nor were they there, it later became obvious, to protect the speakers or the organisers.
I moved through the crowd chatting to different friendly people – who was speaking, who was next on? Everyone was straining to see and hear. But no one could have missed the event’s organisers’ repeated stress on the importance of the rally’s peaceful credentials. Though they really didn’t need to. The atmosphere was warm, wonderful and good-humoured. The placards said it all – with so few but such apposite words:
Democracy not Dictatorship; No Gestapo Policing; When Tyranny Becomes Law; Fear is Contagious so is Hope; In the Name of Public Health – Hitler Said the Same; Take the Masks Off – Smell the Bullshit; We do not Consent; We are the 99 Per Cent; We Are Being Gaslit; Matt Hancock can go Vaxx himself.
I felt proud to be British again. It felt the best of how British people are; in a great tradition of British questioning of authority.
Soon I was singing along to ‘We are the 99 per cent’ and more words I cannot repeat here – hard to hear anyway because there was so much laughter.
Then it got serious again with a rather long and worthy speech about the need for world or free trade (I couldn’t make it out) which decided me to do a final survey of the crowd before setting off home. More young people. All races. All good-humoured.
As I reached the south-west corner of the Square I saw police by their motorbikes were donning helmets.
Heading on towards Pall Mall, I saw that grim faced masked police in vans were beginning to pull out from a side street parking. In my innocence I thought this over-manned convoy was off back to base because with no trouble and relatively few people they were just not needed.
How mistaken I turned out to be. It was not till I got home that I found to my horror from the news that far from going back to base this must have been the start of their mobilising against the crowd. Which indeed they did. Officers determined to disperse the crowd, penned it in. Protesters and police were hurt.
Who authorised them to pen the crowd in? There was no need – there was no overspill into surrounding streets. And why did the police not regard this crowd with the same tolerance they did with the recent BLM protests? …
As a friend who was there to the bitter end reported back to me: ‘It was an amazing day but so tarnished by the police at the end. I feel deeply shocked by the way they stormed in. It was totally unnecessary and quite worrying in our democracy that this is how a peaceful demonstration is treated. It’s made the whole situation all the more worrying, I feel. It did feel amazing however to be surrounded by people not willing to accept this so-called New Normal.’
The Metropolitan Police tweeted about the protest on Saturday, before the event. The photos in the reply were from that afternoon. Note the lady in the tweed suit (lower right hand corner):
Here’s a close-up of her and a contrasting photo of police from early in the summer at a violent protest, proving two-tiered policing:
Let’s get a closer look at the contrast between June and September:
This video shows what happened to that lady. A policeman punched her in the stomach and she was thrown to the ground:
I hope that lady and other attendees will be all right and were able to get prompt medical attention.
However, an alternative version of the lady’s actions, implying she was a crisis actress — possibly for the police — is here, part of a thread.
Whether she was a playing a bit part or not, Saturday afternoon proved to be an abject lesson on how to deliberately reverse a peaceful protest.
Anna Brees, a former journalist for both the BBC and ITV, interviewed honest, hard-working people at the protest who have genuine concerns about their livelihoods under the Coronavirus Act 2020. They are not actors. Many are first-time ‘protesters’. They attended in good faith, to make their views heard peacefully:
This is what the Mayor of London had to say:
Terrible. Just terrible.
I remember nearly 30 years ago when one could ask a bobby on the beat for directions and have a pleasant exchange with him.
Back then, our police — including London’s Met — were the best in the world for fairness and courtesy.
We have been hearing throughout the coronavirus crisis that British policing is ‘by consent’. Historically, that has been true.
Those were the days — long gone, it seems, in some contexts.
How sad.
Last week proved to be another emotive and passionate one in the House of Commons with regard to coronavirus and Brexit.
This post concerns coronavirus.
On Monday, September 14, Prime Minister Boris Johnson’s Rule of Six, which he announced on September 9, came into effect. It sounds rather Chinese.
It means that people living in England cannot meet in groups of greater than six, indoors or outdoors. If we do, according to him, we ‘will be breaking the law’.
He also introduced a new platoon to keep us in line: COVID marshals, to remind us of existing coronavirus rules in England — ‘hands, face, space’.
Recall that Boris said after the December 2019 election that we now have the People’s Government. Hmm.
The UK government is copying a Belgian idea. The Rule of Six reduced their second spike.
Increasingly, Britons have been looking back at Sweden, which refused to lock down. Fraser Nelson is the editor of The Spectator. Chris Whitty is our Chief Medical Officer; in May, he said that coronavirus was harmless for most people and most of us would never get it:
Michael Gove MP, a Cabinet minister and Chancellor of the Duchy of Lancaster, made matters worse when he confirmed that under-12s were part of the Rule of Six, unlike in Scotland and Wales, where under-12s are not. With life getting back to normal as school has started again, this came as a blow to many families:
The Telegraph reported that the Cabinet was split on the proposals (emphases mine):
… one senior Tory source said that “half the Cabinet” had doubts about the so-called ‘rule of six’, and it was “pretty hard to find a Conservative member of Parliament who agrees with all of this”.
The COVID marshals are also a problem for police and local councils:
Meanwhile, Mr Johnson’s plan for coronavirus marshals to help enforce the six-person rule was unraveling as police derided them as “Covid Wombles” and councils said they were a “gimmick”.
Downing Street admitted councils would not be given any money to pay for the marshals, suggesting volunteers could do the job, and said it would be up to individual local authorities to decide whether they actually wanted them.
It got worse, as curfews were mooted:
The Government has discussed going even further with new lockdown restrictions, and has drawn up “a well-developed proposal” for a nationwide curfew which was discussed at ministerial level.
My head spun.
Then the ministerial snitch crowd appeared on weekend news programmes to say that people must tell on their neighbours if they are seen to be violating the Rule of Six:
Political journalist Isabel Oakeshott rightly responded:
I couldn’t agree more. This is supposed to be the People’s Government, isn’t it?
History will not look kindly on 2020 with regard to the measures taken to combat the virus:
I was wrong.
Home Secretary Priti Patel said that people should not even talk when they see friends in the street, even at a distance (audio here, thanks to Guido Fawkes, and there’s video, too):
Yebbut, if you DO report what appears to be criminal activity, allegedly, the police do not want to know. Here is a printscreen of a set of comments on a Guido Fawkes thread. I call your attention to the last two. Police would rather pick on mums and their children. Ironically, that was posted on the anniversary of the Battle of Britain. Go figure.
A mild-mannered man from Buckingham called talkRADIO to say he would not comply with the Rule of Six because the Government had gone too far.
So did a lady from Brighton, saying that the Rule of Six was about:
control. They’re trying to see how much they can get away with.
Another talkRADIO host, Julia Hartley-Brewer, had a go at Roy Lilley, former NHS Trust chairman. She said:
We are being scared into thinking we have to give up our civil liberties when that won’t save lives. Being sensible will save lives.
The Telegraph‘s Salley Vickers wrote of the restrictions on her and her loved ones:
I would rather risk dying and have the joy of their company than lose that vital contribution to my own happiness.
With the festive season only several weeks away, the Daily Mail‘s Peter Hitchens told talkRADIO’s Mike Graham that the Rule of Six has:
made Christmas an arrestable offence.
Another Daily Mail journalist, Bel Mooney, wrote an editorial for Conservative Woman saying that she was surprised at the amount of resistance she received when she wrote that she would be defying the Rule of Six at Christmas:
… in response to Matt Hancock’s sudden, arbitrary and illogical ‘rule of six’ diktat, I wrote a strong opinion piece (at the request of my newspaper) headlined ‘NO, NO, NO! I’m having Christmas for 14 – and no puffed-up Covid marshal will stop me’.
As you might expect, there was a huge response. I never look online, and am not on Twitter (I expect there was a lot of poison swilling around out there). I am talking about emails to me and the newspaper. What interested me was the fact that, if I am to be honest, the antis outnumbered the pros. I didn’t expect that from Mail readers.
You can never tell with Mail readers, though. They’re a tricky lot.
Oxford University’s Professor Carl Heneghan and honorary research fellow Tom Jefferson wrote an article for The Spectator against the Rule of Six, saying that Boris must bin it:
At Oxford University’s Centre for Evidence Based Medicine, we have spent years trawling through the scientific evidence on the effects of measures such as distancing on respiratory viral spread. We are not aware of any study pointing to the number six. If it’s made up, why not five or seven? …
Northern Ireland has taken a more measured approach and not announced any changes to how many people can meet. These disagreements in policy reveal how decisions are being made without evidence. It seems that somebody in government sat in a cabinet office room and said six is a good idea and nobody disagreed …
The problems with policy stem from the current cabinet’s vast inexperience: the Health Secretary has been in post for just over two years now; the PM and the Chief Medical Officer a year. The Joint Biosecurity Centre is overseen by a senior spy who monitors the spread of coronavirus and suppresses new outbreaks. Add to this mix the new chair of the National Institute for Health Protection, who similarly has little or no background in healthcare. Our leaders amount to little more than a Dad’s Army of highly paid individuals with little or no experience of the job at hand.
This inexperience leads to rash decisions and arbitrary policies.
One example is that entire areas can be locked down if they have 50 cases per 100,000 people. Yet the recognised alert threshold for ‘regular’ acute respiratory infections is 400 cases per 100,000.
Lord Sumption, who has been speaking out against lockdown this year, said that the Rule of Six will be unenforceable. I hope he is right:
Tom Tugendhat (Tunbridge and Malling, Con) expressed his concerns about the new rule and rightly wanted MPs to vote on it and similar measures:
It’s unlikely that the House of Lords can help, either. They already have a full schedule. We should thank Lord Lamont for raising the issue of consulting the public, however. ‘SI’ means ‘statutory instrument’:
Monday, September 14
Behind the scenes and well outside of Parliament, an email emerged dated May 23, wherein Chief Scientific Adviser Sir Patrick Vallance stated he had pushed the most for March’s lockdown:
Guido Fawkes has the full text of the email. I am not sure how Sir Patrick thinks that a vaccine will achieve herd immunity, though.
In the first of the debates on the Brexit-related Internal Market Bill, Charles Walker MP (Broxbourne, Con) prefaced his comments by expressing his dismay about the Rule of Six, the lack of consultation with Parliament and the fining of Jeremy Corbyn’s brother Piers at the anti-lockdown rally on Saturday, September 12.
Thank you, Charles Walker:
This is short and well worth watching:
Tuesday, September 15
Secretary of State for Health and Social Care Matt Hancock poled up to make a statement to MPs about the Rule of Six and testing.
Excerpts follow:
There are signs that the number of cases in care homes and the number of hospitalisations is starting to rise again, so last week we acted quickly, putting in place new measures—the rule of six, which came into force yesterday. We do not do this lightly, but the cost of doing nothing is much greater.
Testing also has a vital part to play. Everyone in this House knows that we are doing more testing per head of population than almost any other major nation, and I can tell the House that we have now carried out over 20 million tests for coronavirus in this country. As we expand capacity further, we are working round the clock to make sure that everyone who needs a test can get a test. The vast majority of people who use our testing service get a test that is close to home, and the average distance travelled to a test site is now just 5.8 miles —down from 6.4 miles last week; but the whole House knows that there are operational challenges, and we are working hard to fix them.
We have seen a sharp rise in people coming forward for a test, including those who are not eligible.
Jonathan Ashworth (Leicester South, Lab/Co-op), speaking for the opposition, said:
I am grateful for advance sight of the Secretary of State’s answer. That was decent of him.
Yesterday LBC revealed that there were no tests available in covid hotspots, including Rochdale, Pendle and Bradford. Over the weekend in Bolton, where infections are the highest in the country, a mobile testing centre failed to turn up. Meanwhile, in Bury hundreds queued for five hours for a test. In Walsall, a father with his sick child travelled 76 miles to an appointment in Wales, only to find on arrival that tests had run out. Increasing numbers of teachers and pupils are not in school. In hospitals, operations are cancelled while NHS staff are stuck in limbo, waiting for tests.
The Secretary of State blames increased demand, but when tracing consistently fails to reach 80% of contacts, when less than 20% of those with symptoms self-isolate properly and there is a lack of financial security, infections rise. When schools reopen and people return to workplaces and social distancing becomes harder, infections rise. Extra demand on the system was inevitable. Why did he not use the summer to significantly expand NHS lab capacity and fix contact tracing?
Just as demand is increasing, the ability to process tests is diminishing. Post-graduate students working in the Lighthouse labs are returning to university, so why did the Secretary of State not plan for the inevitable staff shortages in the Lighthouse labs? Those commercial pillar 2 labs, The Sunday Times revealed at the weekend, have a huge backlog of 185,000 tests. Thursday’s data revealed that 65,709 test results were not returned by the end of the week. Care home residents now wait an average of 83 hours for their result. The Prime Minister promised us a 24-hour turnaround for results, so what is going on? What is the current backlog and what is the timeframe for clearing it?
We were promised a world-beating system, so why are we sending tests to Germany and Italy for processing? But, most importantly, people want to know when they will get a test and when this mess will be fixed. Today there will be thousands of ill people trying to book a test, only to be told none is available. When will people be able to book a test online again, or has the online booking system been deliberately disabled? When will ill people no longer have to travel hundreds of miles for a test that should be available on their doorstep? When will pupils and teachers out of school get access to testing, so they can get back to school? When will NHS staff have access to regular testing, so they can focus on their patients and not be sitting at home?
We are at a perilous moment. Imperial College estimates the virus is doubling every seven to eight days. We all want to avoid further restrictions or another national lockdown, but when testing and contact tracing break down, the growth of the virus cannot be tracked. The Prime Minister promised us whack-a-mole, but instead his mallet is broken. The Secretary of State is losing control of the virus; he needs to fix testing now.
Many MPs — from both Opposition and Conservative benches — said that their constituents could not get tests.
Even the Speaker of the House tweeted that his constituents were having similar problems:
The testing situation is shocking — as Terry-Thomas used to say in the Boulting Brothers films: ‘An absolute shower!’
On the upside, the British coronavirus jobs situation is improving, thank goodness (more from Guido here):
Wednesday, September 16
Deputy Labour Leader Angela Rayner (Ashton-under-Lyne) stood at the Opposition despatch box for Prime Minister’s Questions (PMQs), as Sir Keir Starmer was self-isolating:
She did a good job.
She began by saying:
Many people in the Chamber will think that the battle of Britain is today, but actually we marked the 80th anniversary of those veterans yesterday, and I want to put on record our thanks to all those who fought for our country in the past.
I want to start by reading to the Prime Minister a message that I have received from a man called Keir. Keir was not able to go to work today and his children could not go to school because his family had to wait for their coronavirus test results, despite the Prime Minister’s promise of results within 24 hours. Keir was able to do the right thing and self-isolate and work from home, but other people are not in this position, and many of them are the very people who were getting us through this crisis, such as the care workers, who I used to work alongside before I was elected to this House. The Prime Minister once earned £2,300 an hour; can he tell us the average hourly rate of a care worker in this country?
Boris was singularly unimpressed, although he had a neutral expression on his face, even when discussing Starmer:
I congratulate the hon. Lady on her elevation. She speaks of the constituent Keir, and I can tell her that—allegedly, apparently—he has had a negative test, and I do not know quite why he is not here. But 89% of those who have in-person tests get them the next day, and we are working very fast to turn around all the test requests that we get. I think that most people looking at the record of this country in delivering tests across the nation will see that that compares extremely well with any other European country. We have conducted more testing than any other European country, and that is why we are able to deliver tests and results in 80% of cases where we know the contacts.
The hon. Lady asks about care homes, and I can tell the House that today we are launching the winter care home action plan. She is right to raise the issue of care homes, and we are concerned about infection rates in care homes, but we will do everything we can to ensure that care homes and their workers are protected.
On the hon. Lady’s final point, I am proud that it is this Government who have instituted the national living wage to ensure that every worker in this country, including care home workers, is paid substantially more, thanks to the care and the work of the people of this country.
Boris listened attentively and responded sensitively to all the points that Angela Rayner raised until this point, which came several minutes in, when she said:
Infections are rising. The testing system is collapsing. When you are the Prime Minister, you cannot keep trying to blame other people for your own incompetence. We have the highest death toll in Europe, and we are on course for one of the worst recessions in the developed world. This winter, we are staring down the barrel of a second wave, with no plan for the looming crisis. People cannot say goodbye to their loved ones. Grandparents cannot see their grandchildren. Frontline staff cannot get the tests that they need. And what was the top priority for the covid war Cabinet this weekend? Restoring grouse shooting.
I suppose that is good news for people like the Prime Minister’s friend who paid for a luxury Christmas getaway to a Caribbean island and funded his leadership campaign, and just so happens to own two grouse moor estates. So Prime Minister, is this really your top priority?
The Prime Minister answered:
While the Labour Opposition have been consistently carping from the sidelines throughout this crisis and raising, frankly, issues that are tangential, if not scare stories about what is going on, we are getting on with delivering for the British public. We are not only massively ramping up. She has not contested any of my statistics today about the extent to which this country is now testing more than any other European country.
She has not disputed the massive acceleration in our programme. [Interruption.] I will answer the substance of her question, thank you very much. We are getting on with delivering on the priorities of the British people: getting us through this covid crisis; delivering on making our country safer, bringing forward measures to stop the early release of dangerous sexual and violent offenders, which I hope she will support; strengthening our Union, which in principle Opposition Front Benchers should support; and building more homes across this country and more affordable homes across this country, which she should support. That is in addition to recruiting more doctors and more nurses, and building more hospitals.
I do not think anybody is in any doubt that this Government are facing some of the most difficult dilemmas that any modern Government have had to face, but every day we are helping to solve them, thanks to the massive common sense of the British people, who are getting on with delivering our programme and our fight against coronavirus. It is with the common sense of the British people that we will succeed, and build back better and stronger than ever before.
If only.
That day, news of an upcoming curfew in London emerged.
Apparently, the British people don’t have much common sense, after all.
Currently, London has some of the fewest new coronavirus cases (i.e. positive tests, little hospitalisation):
Guido rightly wrote (emphases in the original here):
If this afternoon’s splash from the Evening Standard is true, it is a step too far. The London director of Public Health England (yes, the organisation is still limping on for now, despite the Health Secretary announcing its abolition back in August) has issued a “curfew alert” to the capital through the newspaper, saying residents could face a mandatory curfew if Covid cases continue to rise. A ridiculous suggestion that should be forcefully opposed.
Shutting pubs, bars, restaurants, and just about everything else at an arbitrary hour will obviously do nothing to stop the spread of coronavirus. If anything, the move will be counter-productive – compressing the same number of customers into a shorter time and making social distancing harder still. Or pushing social gatherings into homes not bars, which are thought to be more likely to spread the virus. This no doubt ineffective PHE [Public Health England] nannying should have been dumped when the organisation was. The government need to remember there is a limit to people’s compliance. This might just hit it.
As I write early on Tuesday, September 22, Boris is planning to bring in an England-wide curfew for pubs and restaurants on Thursday. As if the virus will know the difference between a 10 p.m. closing time versus the usual one of 11 p.m. The mind boggles.
Thursday, September 17
Matt Hancock appeared again with another update on coronavirus.
This time, it was about measures taken on lockdown in the North East of England. This includes strict adherence to household bubbles, table service only in hospitality venues and a curfew between 10 p.m. and 5 a.m.:
Once again, he was straining every sinew, an expression he has been using since March:
The battle against coronavirus is not over, and while we strain every sinew to spring free of its clutches, with winter on the horizon we must prepare, bolster our defences and come together once again against this common foe.
Then he announced upcoming plans to make everyone using A&E (Accident and Emergency) departments to make a booking! Good grief:
… we are working to get patients the right care in the right place, by expanding the role of NHS 111. During the peak of this pandemic, we saw millions of people using NHS 111, on the phone or online, to get the best possible advice on coronavirus, helping them to stay safe and, where possible, to stay out of hospital, where they could have unknowingly spread the virus. It is crucial that, ahead of winter, we use this window of opportunity to seek out what worked and build on it, so we provide a better service for patients and protect the NHS. Of course, no one will ever be turned away from our emergency departments in the most serious of cases; however, we have worked with the royal colleges, the NHS and others to develop a better, quicker and more clinically appropriate service for patients by using NHS 111 first.
This is how it works. We will invest £24 million to increase call-handling capacity and to make sure there are more clinicians on hand to provide expert advice and guidance, and we will build on our trials to make NHS 111 a gateway to the emergency care system, providing a first port of call for patients. In future, rather than having to queue in an emergency ward, we are testing that people should call NHS 111 first to book an appointment with whoever can give them the most appropriate care, whether it is a GP, a specialist consultant, a pharmacist, a nurse or community services. Of course if they need to go to the emergency department, NHS 111 will be able to book them into an appropriate time slot. We want to see this approach lead to shorter waiting times and better availability of appointments for patients. We will consult on how its performance is best measured, and, with successful pilots, we will roll out NHS 111 First to all trusts from December.
This is the bit that galled me the most:
The purpose of 111 First is to improve access, including in terms of inequalities in the NHS, by ensuring that people get the right treatment in the right place and easier access if they do need to go to an emergency department, because the emergency department will know that they are coming. It is commonplace now in almost every part of our life to let people know that we are coming. If we are going to do something as important as visit an emergency department, it will help both the patient seeking treatment and the NHS to let them know that they are coming first. That is the principle behind 111 First. It sits alongside 999, which anybody should call in a serious incident.
‘People’s government’, my eye.
Nor is the NHS the people’s health service.
If you have a serious injury, you or your loved ones could be losing life- or limb-saving time by calling 111 or 999.
Based on what I read during the March lockdown, calling 111 was life-threatening. Children calling on behalf of elderly parents were told, ‘If your relative is not turning blue, do the best you can.’
Calling the ambulance service on 999 generally produced this result: ‘We’re overloaded. If you can take your relative to hospital yourself, please do so.’
Over the past few months, I have heard NHS senior executives give testimony to Select Committees. They do not want patients coming in to a hospital, to a GP surgery — anywhere on NHS property.
An absolute shower!
Speaking of absolute showers, Baroness Harding — Dido Harding, a former jockey and failed business consultant/corporate director — gave testimony to a Select Committee, the Commons Science and Technology Committee, led by Greg Clark MP (Tunbridge Wells, Con).
Wow. It was car-crash television on BBC Parliament.
Baroness Harding is, inexplicably, the director of NHS Test and Trace programme.
Greg Clark is no slouch. He pressed and pressed the same question. Did she not anticipate the increase of demand for tests after lockdown lifted?
Finally, she gave the answer.
The Independent reported:
Demand for coronavirus tests is three to four times the number available, the director of NHS test and trace has admitted.
Baroness Dido Harding, who told MPs there was capacity to carry out 242,817 tests a day, said the “sizeable” rise in demand had been unexpected.
Boris Johnson has pledged to raise capacity to 500,000 by next month – but Baroness Harding’s estimates suggest that even that figure would not be enough to satisfy demand.
Even then:
despite images of queues outside Covid-19 drive-in centres, the testing tsar said: “I strongly refute that the system is failing.”
She put the blame on SAGE …
Baroness Harding insisted current capacity had been based on modelling provided by the government’s Scientific Advisory Group for Emergencies (Sage) and suggested that around a quarter of those seeking tests did not have symptoms.
… and the testing laboratories:
Quizzed by the committee chair and former Tory minister Greg Clark on the current issues in the system, she said that the “constraint” in the testing was in processing and laboratories.
On Friday, Sir Jeremy Farrar, a SAGE member and director of the Wellcome Trust, hit back.
The Telegraph reported:
Sir Jeremy Farrar, the director of the Wellcome Trust, who sits on the Government’s Scientific Advisory Group for Emergencies, said the body had given “clear advice” that a fully functioning test, track and trace system should be in place …
Responding to her comments on social media, Sir Jeremy said he had personally warned that a growing testing crisis was looming.
“Interesting to be blaming Sage,” he wrote on Twitter. “Has been clear, and in the advice, that the UK faced an inevitable increase in community transmission and cases after the summer and needed a fully functional and trusted test, track and trace in place.”
Sir Jeremy posted his comments from a BBC interview with Andrew Marr in June, in which he warned of a “nasty rebound” if steps were not taken to improve testing. He also re-posted an article from May in which he warned that lifting restrictions was difficult even with a fully working testing programme in operation.
The testing crisis deepened on Friday when it emerged that children at four out of five schools are staying at home because they cannot get a test …
This coronavirus business will only get worse. Watch and wait.
Part 2 concerns the Brexit-related Internal Market Bill.
Churchmouse Campanologist 