According to Einstein, the definition of insanity is to do the same thing repeatedly and expect a different result. Therefore, I present you with this.
Stoke-on-Trent, Coventry and Slough will move into a Tier 2 lockdown on Saturday, Matt Hancock revealed today amid fears Nottinghamshire’s restrictions will be toughened up.
The Health Secretary’s announcement in the House of Commons means another 745,000 people will be stung by tighter restrictions, including a ban on socialising with loved ones indoors. Nearly 40million people across Britain will be living under lockdowns, when all the measures are fully enforced.
And this will achieve what, exactly? Other than more job losses, more livelihoods ruined, more people dying of unrelated conditions due to delayed diagnosis. Other than that, what? Buying more time? Buying it for what?
The hypothesis that lock-downs are effective has been demonstrably proven false. The hypothesis is wrong, yet here we are with the cretins in government repeating the exercise in the forlorn hope that things will be different this time, that nature will bend her will to the wishes of an incompetent health secretary who does not understand the limit of his powers, let alone his intellect.
At the end of this we really need to be seeing some scaffolds built.
Nobody actually knows what to do. I think that politicians all over the world are following the principal of “It is better to be seen to do something, however ineffective, than to do nothing, and get blamed if it all goes wrong.” A lot of the blame lies with the mainstream media, who are always demanding that something be done, no matter how useless it may be.
The media is objectively evil.
I completely agree with you on the subject of the mainstream media creating a panic and causing govts to feel that they need to be seen doing something, even if that ‘something’ is utterly wrong and completely destructive. I expected better of those who currently mislead us than to be led by the nose by the MSM. Something will need to be done when this is over.
I would like to see a ‘Nuremburg Trial Mk II’ for all those in government who have allowed this disaster to occur over a virus that appears to be less virulent and dangerous than the 1968 Hong Kong flu outbreak. I’d like to see Hancock, Johnson, Whitty and others called to account but we will not see this if people continue to vote for the Establishment parties. The only way to get justice and redress and better representation is to send alternative parties to Parliament and flush out and cleanse the Commons of those who have done little but destroy this nation and its people.
Don’t understand why there are any restrictions at all in the Cornish peninsula. Cases are that low (or were when I looked last) that it looks a reasonable place to try complete removal of restrictions.
They should all be dead by now anyway after most of the UK went on holiday there. If they die it’s not a problem.
” The only way to get justice and redress and better representation is to send alternative parties to Parliament and flush out and cleanse the Commons of those who have done little but destroy this nation and its people.”
That wouldn’t work either. Brexit should have taught us that we only have an illusion of democracy nowadays. Even if the public voted in a completely new majority ruling party, with MPs drawn completely from outside the political class, normal people in other words, it would make no difference because all the actual levers of power are help by the political elite class. The ones who fought for 3 years to stymie Brexit, which was a as slam dunk a case of ‘We the people tell you to do this one particular thing’ that you could imagine. They nearly managed to succeed as well, it was only their own over-reach and refusal to accept even a slight compromise that meant they failed. If they could nearly overturn the clear democratic decision of the entire country on one specific policy, how much easier would it be for them to thwart a new political party trying to enact a wide range of differing policies, not all of which meant as much to people voting as Brexit did?
We have seen that the civil service, all State employees, all the media, all the judicial system, basically anyone in a position of non-elected power are all clones cut from the same cloth. And they will do everything they can to stop anything that would change that, or introduce policies that they personally disagree with, regardless of how many of the great unwashed have voted for it. They have no belief in democracy, we see the distain in their attitudes to those who vote for things they don’t like, like Brexit, and UKIP.
Lets say the new winners of a landslide election won on a manifesto of ending all immigration, stopping all foreign aid and introducing the death penalty. Do you really think that the likes of the Supreme Court would allow those policies to be enacted, even if over 50% of the entire electorate had voted for them? Not a chance.
We are ruled by the Common Purpose elite now, who are throughout the entire State apparatus, plus the media and education/charity sectors. They move easily from one job to another, regardless of how much they screwed up the one before, or how little they know about their new role. They ruthlessly ensure that no-one from outside their caste ever get a position of power, and if someone slips through the net somehow, they soon manage to cut them down to size or force them out.
Voting cannot change this now, they have control of the entire governing process underneath the nominal democracy.
Wow, great post Jim – the starkness of it makes me think twice about what I posted just a few minutes ago on a different thread.
Whilst I recognise that there are immense problems with the ‘permanent state’ and it’s ‘uni-thought’ policy and how senior civil servants and special advisors go over the heads of the electorate, I disagree that voting doesn’t change anything. IIRC during the Brexit vote aftermath while there were obviously senior members of the civil service who are loyal to international law and international agreements instead of the elected government, most of the sneering objections to Brexit came from Parliamentarians themselves. It was Parliamentarians, such as Anna Soubry who set aside the views of her own voters to push for Remain and the likes of Chuka Umana who prioritised his own pro-EU ideology above the decision of the electorate. Former MP’s who are Remainers who had been enobled have also been a factor in dragging out the Brexit process for so long.
Maybe a way out of this is to adopt some aspects of the American system where senior administrators change with each new administration and to create a new class of peers picked at random from the voters register to serve a ten year period?
The Left has indeed had a very successful long march through the institutions but there are ways and means to hamper their aims and to counter them. However for politicians to be able to counter them they need to be aware of them and their devious ways. For example: One of the biggest political failures of my lifetime was Margaret Thatcher’s failure to reform education. She and her education ministers could have succeeded had they not relied as much as they did on educational experts approved of by the Dept of Education and dealt more effectively with the delaying methods and obfuscation of the DoE’s civil servants.
I believe in change via the ballot box and not revolution, this is because revolution’s invariably destroy far more good than they create.
The thing is that changing the system is too big a job for one Parliament, when the entire apparatus of the State + Media are aligned against you, it would be impossible for any new government to ever have any effect on it, within the 4-5 years of a Parliament. The Deep State would obfuscate and use legal warfare against the new government, safe in the knowledge the judiciary are on board as well, as we saw with the Supreme Court decision over Boris’s prorogation of Parliament. They invented an entire new constitutional basis for the UK in order to stymie Brexit. That wasn’t them interpreting an existing law it was them creating a new one. And as they are the Supreme Court who can gainsay them? No one can vote them out. And while the public might vote for iconoclasts once, their interest and enthusiasm will wane over time as nothing happens. So such a government would probably lose the next election, or at best fail to gain a majority and the Deep State wins again.
I really cannot see how voting will change this. Like so many things we see now, the vested interests are so deeply entrenched that democratic change has been made impossible.
Which is why it will devolve, as is happening in the US, to violence.
I suspect that even if you did have the answer, you will be shouted down, ridiculed and sidelined. The whole things a planet-sized clusterfuck.
The first thing to be changed should be the media. The BBC is lost at the moment, but the privately owned media can be changed. If enough like minded multimillionaires get together and buy control of one or two media outlets, they can choose the editors, and the political stance taken. It could be done, but whether it will or not remains to be seen.
I don’t know if the Covid arrived naturally, accidentally or deliberately but lockdown measures are not going away anytime soon because too many parties are using it to further their own agenda.
1. As mentioned above Common Purpose using it to cement their control of the public sphere.
2. Big business in many fields see their independent rivals and start up challengers go to the wall.
3. The greens loving the fact that because of shifting quarantine rules few hoi poli will have the confidence to fly anywhere soon.
4. Alcohol Concern have jumped on the bandwagon to use lockdown as a concerted attack on the licensed trade who themselves have in turn have demanded the end of off-sales (in Wales). The latter was to be expected but not from that direction.
5. The media who have become hooked on Tsunamis of government Covid advertising.
6. Those in the public and private sectors who have found working from home very nice thank you.
7. Self important experts and advisers not least the 100 members of SAGE.
8. Public Health officials police and now Covid marshals find their power to boss people about hugely enhanced.
I expect there more but it’s early/late.
Nearly forgot
9. Scots Welsh Nats deliberately imposing different lockdown measures in pursuit of their aims for independence.