There’s a really interesting and thought provoking post over at CapX by Christopher Snowden about the Government’s punitive Covid policy. In this piece he outlines where we are now and compares it to where we were earlier in the year.
Interestingly he appears untroubled by the ever increasing punitive and tyrannical nature of Boris Johnson’s Covid rules and sees the ramping up of threats, fines and restrictions as a sign of Governmental weakness rather than strength. Let’s hope and pray that Mr Snowden is correct in his assumption.
Mr Snowden said that the hectoring and bullying and tyranny is a sign that the government is truly losing it. He said that consent for these rules from and by the public are ‘slipping away’.
The most important part of the article, which I will quote in full below but should be read in the context of the full article is this:
Bien pensants scoffed at the idea of ‘lockdown fatigue’ because there was no hard evidence that it existed. How could there be? We were in uncharted territory. But, to greatly paraphrase Orwell, only an intellectual could believe that locking people up for months while their jobs evaporate won’t make them lose patience and flout the rules. People went into lockdown more out of fear of the virus than fear of punishment.
As fear diminishes, particularly among those who are at least risk, so does consent. The increasing severity of the punishments is a sign that the authorities are losing their grip. People can see that the 10pm ‘curfew‘ is creating the unintended consequences that every bar-stool epidemiologist predicted. The laws are becoming more preposterous, the threats – such as keeping students prisoner over Christmas – less credible.
The Prime Minister seems to think that he can keep this up for “perhaps six months”. We shall see.
Mr Snowdon’s article does raise a number of important issues such as we now know more about Covid and that it is not an analogue for the Black Death, far from it. Maybe now that we understand that Covid is clearly not the mass killer that many of us once supposed it could be, it is time for common sense from HMG and a return of the liberties that have so disgracefully and unnecessarily stolen from us?
You can read the entirety of Mr Snowdon’s article via the link below:
https://capx.co/ever-harsher-covid-laws-are-a-sign-of-weakness-not-strength/
@FH
Christopher Snowden has been sceptical for many months, not “untroubled”. I believe mistake made is concluding public growing rebellion means Boris correct to keep digging, Chris implies it’s correct only in it fuels faster and greater rebellion to end school bullly Hancock autocracy
My thought is the imprisoned Uni students may be a turning point – paying to be in prison – many in solitary, starved and abused. Their mummies won’t like it
However, maybe mummies glad to be rid of the wastrels
The entire Gov’t response has always been a sign of weakness, not strength. From accepting blame for PPE to now accepting blame for Flu vaccine shortage, lying about PCR test reliability and refusal to admit mistakes
Some very good points there. Whilst there are indeed a lot of morons out there who believe everything they see on the BBC, the rebellion is growing. I suspect that it will grow further as unemployment grows. With a potential four million unemployed (far worse than was the case under Margaret Thatcher) there will be many more people who feel that they have a lot less to lose by speaking out. The students are in my view correct to complain. It’s one thing to pay £9k for a fully featured course, but quite another to pay that amount of money to get something worse than they could have got from one of the private online course providers.