Apart from the issues of vaccine development and rollout Boris Johnson’s government has seriously mishandled the matter of the Coronavirus pandemic. From the start there was chaos in Downing Street with Ministers and advisors going sick left right and centre and no solid chain of command nor any clear guidelines about the power of succession where decision making was concerned should the Prime Minister or senior cabinet members die or be otherwise incapacitated by covid.

Chaos, poor communication with the public and treating the public like dirt has been the hallmark of how Boris Johnson’s government has managed this whole affair, with the obvious exception of the vaccine rollout. There was confusion over the issue of masks for example and the validity and efficacy of them which meant that the government was issuing one sort of advice on this issue one day and completely different advice the next. There was the debacle over the issue of the Nightingale emergency hospitals which were built at great public expense but were not used as no thought by government had gone into considering how these hospitals were to be staffed. Then there is the ongoing scandal about contracts for PPE which were either allocated with too little oversight, to take a charitable view, or thoroughly corrupt if you take the less charitable one. On top of that there was the granting of the police extra powers to deal with the effects of this national medical emergency but no consideration of what effect such extra powers would have on the relations between police and public if the police, as they most obviously did, use these new powers either over-zealously or politically selectively. I should also add in that the government did themselves no favours and fed the sometimes ‘out there’ counter narrative that the government was ‘hiding something’ by heavily restricting post mortem examinations of those who were suspected of dying from covid. This was something that was not even brought in when HIV/AIDS was first detected in Britain decades ago. Post mortem examinations of those who had died of AIDS gave doctors a much better idea of how HIV damages the body and contributed to the future treatments that have made AIDS, at least in the West, a chronic disease. It’s quite possible that allowing post mortems for those who were suspected of having covid as a contributory factor in their deaths might have shed more light on covid’s damage to the human body.

Epidemics and pandemics are difficult for any government of any political shade to manage but Boris Johnson’s government have taken a bad situation and made it all infinitely worse by mismanagement, confused messaging and treating the people who voted this government into power like crappy ill educated and stupid plebs. There is no greater example of how the government has treated the people of this country as crappy, ill educated and stupid plebs than the recent announcement of vaccine passports to enter nightclubs and other high capacity venues. This has the capacity to be Boris Johnson’s ‘Poll Tax Moment’ and might just be the policy that will bring him down via the Tories backbench 1922 committee as there’s no other way, apart from a vote of no confidence in the House of Commons, or a difficult to arrange leadership challenge to remove an errant Tory PM. This is a massive scandal in the making especially as the government’s own vaccines minister stated earlier this year that domestic vaccine passports were not going to be introduced creating a situation where a government minister has been made to look a man who lies to the public by his own boss. The government’s own report into the situation regarding vaccine certification has said that this was not a policy that should be followed, yet the government has gone ahead with it anyway.

This is a deeply unpopular policy from what I can gather reading around the various comment boards and the more I read of them the more convinced I become that we are building up to some sort of Poll Tax Moment of the sort that eventually brought down Margaret Thatcher’s government. Back then Mrs Thatcher was warned that changing from an admittedly problematic Rates system to a Poll Tax would create massive numbers of people who were financially disadvantaged because of the change and that it would be massively unpopular. She was warned that nothing good would come of having a Duke pay the same amount as a dustman for local authority services, but she went ahead anyway and it not only destroyed her government but also caused massive civil disorder in London and elsewhere.

Mrs Thatcher’s decision to go ahead with the Poll Tax despite its obvious flaws and the financial burdens imposed on those on low incomes and the other negative effects such as prompting Britons, including myself, to temporarily remove themselves from the voters register, helped to cement in the public’s collective mind the idea that the Tories were ‘the nasty party’, a party hostile to the poor. It took decades before the Tories shook off this image and Thatcher’s successor John Major only won the 1992 General Election because Labour was in such a bad state.

There are a lot of parallels with Boris Johnson’s internal vaccine passports and Thatcher’s Poll Tax. Both are unpopular policies that are or were designed to tackle an obvious problem but are the wrong way to go about tackling such problems. Back then there was the issue that not enough people were contributing to local services but voting for councillors that would dish out freebies paid for by the minority who paid Rates. Today the issue is with younger people who need to be vaccinated to increase herd immunity to covid but who are not getting vaccinated either because they have not been given sufficient access to the vaccine because the staged roll out was carried out on an age and vulnerability basis rather than an all population basis or because like many young people they consider themselves invincible and not at any risk from covid. The answer to the issue of local government finance during the Thatcher period would have been local sales or income taxes not a Poll Tax almost guaranteed to be seen as unfair. The answer to today’s problem of not enough 18 – 35’s being vaccinated is not to bring in a policy which will have massive negative effects and which will create serious secondary problems (of which more later) but by using education and maybe fiscal incentives to people in this cohort to get vaccinated.

Boris Johnson despite giving the impression that he is well versed in historical knowledge doesn’t seem to understand that in Britain we’ve been here before with the issue of mandatory vaccination and it didn’t work out well at all. In the 19^th century because Smallpox was a significant public health issue, vaccination against Smallpox was made mandatory and this fed the narratives of the anti vaxxers of that time. It made martyrs of those who refused to be vaccinated against a deadly disease with a 30% death toll and caused riots in the English midlands. The controversy was so great that in the late 19^th century there was a Royal Commission on vaccination which solved the issue of conflict over vaccinations by making them entirely voluntary with the Vaccination Act of 1898.

Coercing vaccinations for covid so that people could enter nightclubs might end up like the 19^th century furore over Smallpox vaccinations but much much worse. Not only would it create martyrs where there was no need to create them and public disturbances similar to what I saw in London during the Poll Tax Riot, but it will also be a boon for the criminal element. This is because it will end up being criminals who will feed people’s desire for entertainment by re invigorating the rave scene and they will make so much money from selling tickets and drugs to the attendees that they will be able to well afford to abandon PA equipment to seizure and easily be able to pay the fines of any low level employees caught by the police during raids on such parties. The legitimate night clubs really don’t want covid certification as they don’t want their doorstaff having yet another thing that will bring them into conflict with punters on top of age ID and checking for drugs and weapons. As one doorman said I think on Twitter that covid certification is going to end up with punters getting angry with sharp pointy things, something no doorman wants to see. They want the punters to be on the side of the door not working against it. The criminals on the other hand are not going to be bothered with checking covid certification and this will further hamper the economic recovery of an already battered night time economy sector as people shift away from legitimate nightclubs and towards illegal parties.

The best way to get increased take up of vaccines whether for covid or any other disease is with the willing cooperation of the public and also by educating the public as to the safety and efficacy of vaccines. Such education about vaccines is why there is such a massive difference with regards to attitudes to infant vaccinations and vaccinations in general between France and the UK. In the UK the number of people who are hard core anti vaxxers is about the ten percent mark but in France it’s in the forty percent range. Britain has built up a good reputation for vaccine coverage over the last century but it has done it with voluntary action not coercion and a 2016 article in The Conversation magazine backs up the idea that voluntary vaccination has been extremely successful in the UK whereas compulsion has been an utter disaster.

When faced with a national emergency whether it be war or natural disaster or even a novel disease, the best way for a government of a nation to get through the emergency is to encourage unity. It was national unity encouraged by government that allowed Britain to prevail at such times as if it looked as all would be lost such as with World War II. It could also be argued that voluntary unity such as self isolation when required has also been seen with regards to covid and may have helped to limit spread. However with compulsory covid certification this government is not bringing unity but instead division and that’s not good. It will divide the old from the young, the selfish from the selfless and those who gain a benefit from the policy from the many who will not.

This creation of division was also a feature of the implementation of the Poll Tax by Margaret Thatcher’s government. This policy divided the old in large houses who ended up paying less in Poll Tax than they did in Rates from the young living in bedsits, it divided those who selfishly welcomed the savings that they made from Poll Tax from those who suffered from it and divided a minority who gained from the policy from the vast majority who did not.

Poll Tax was defeated by those who gained from it and those who lost out from it joining forces and making the system unworkable whether that was by joining the ranks of the ‘Don’t Pay and Don’t Collect’ groups or by protesting or by just dropping off the voters register and doing their own thing. The massive riots didn’t ultimately kill the Poll Tax, but instead mass civil disobedience of various forms, open public hostility and the failure of local government to cope with the organisational changes did.

In another similarity between Boris Johnson’s covid passports plan and Margaret Thatcher’s Poll Tax we have a situation where a Tory government loses the support of its natural supporters over one particular issue. I think that it is extremely interesting and notable that Boris Johnson’s plans for vaccine passports to get into nightclubs is being harshly criticised by below the line commentators over at the Daily Mail. If I recall correctly I seem to remember back in the day that the Daily Mail letters page had similar objections from readers on the grounds of fairness to either the Poll Tax per se or aspects of it. The Mail has also in recent years been quite willing to publish stories about how divisive the Poll Tax was when it was being planned and implemented, stories based on documents released by government under the Thirty Year Rule. This Conservative government has lost the Daily Mail reader over the issue of vaccine passports and the government should really worry about this. When a Tory government loses the support of the Daily Mail readers then something is very much amiss. It is a similar situation at other conservative leaning outlets such as Guido Fawkes where opinion is soundly against the idea of vaccine certification being used in order to enter nightclubs. The Tories have lost their base on this and should reconsider this policy in order to get their base back on side.

The way I see it is that there are more risks than benefits to mandating vaccines in order to enter nightclubs. Not only are there the increase in risks of criminality both for door staff at legitimate nightclubs and the growth of the illegal rave scene but they risk creating self styled vaccine martyrs who will attract an awful lot of publicity. It will also further divide the people from those who govern them and make heroes of the monsters of the anti vax world by giving them a form of undeserved victim status. When faced with the moonbats of the anti vaccination world the last thing any government should do is impose a policy that gives said moonbats ammunition which is what internal covid passports would do.

Some commentators, such as Old Holborn have raised the possibility that Boris Johnson’s announcement of vaccination passports is a ploy to get more of the nightclub aged cohort to get vaccinated. He believes that the government may ‘reverse ferret’ on this at at a later date. He may well be correct and this is a vaccine take up ploy, but if he is correct then it’s a pretty low trick to play on the public and one that will further erode trust between the British people and the British government. Some credence to Old Holborn’s view can be found in the views of the House of Commons Public Administration and Constitutional Affairs Committee that lambasted plans for internal covid vaccination passports by calling them ‘discriminatory’. The Committee also raised very pertinent questions about data security with covid passports and they are in my view right to do so. It’s also likely that because the take up of covid vaccines has not been evenly spread across different racial and communal groups then the imposition of such covid passes will be challenged on racial and religious grounds. If the Government does go ahead and introduce a covid passport that might not bring about any appreciable benefit to infection rates then they are storing up for themselves a whole world of political and legal pain for not much gain. There will be the inevitable legal cases brought on the grounds of discrimination and the prospect of angry young people remembering what Boris Johnson’s government did to them re covid passports and a damaged economy at General Election time which is only four short years away. Although Labour is in deep shit and the Conservatives lead in many opinion polls, there’s the distinct chance that the 1992 result might not be repeated and that people will vote Labour out of sheer disgust at what Boris Johnson’s government has done despite Labour’s glaringly obvious handicaps.

Boris Johnson likes to make a big deal of his admiration of Winston Churchill and makes sweeping speeches that he likes to think are Churchillian but are really little more than bluster and bullshit. If there is a Tory PM who Boris Johnson resembles because of dishonesty about public policy or implementing policies that end up harming Britain then that resemblance is with Edward Heath who took Britain into the EU but who failed to tell the British people about any potential downsides of his government’s decision. Heath has gone down in British political folklore as being a traitor, a man who surrendered Britain’s economy to an unelected supranational body, who presided over a time of poverty, chaos and misery. Heath’s government was also one where because of his government’s continual conflict with Trade Unions, every family had to make sure that they had a box of candles to light their homes with because coal miners would not dig the coal that kept the power generating stations going. Heath’s failed government was not one that any Conservative PM should be emulating but the way that Boris Johnson’s government has handled the coronavirus pandemic it seems to be creating a situation where his government will be seen by voters as Heath Mk II.

The British people have put up with a great deal of inconvenience and disturbance over the last 16 / 18 months and the proposal for vaccine passports will be for many the final straw. Although many people from both the Left and the Right accept the idea that some form of covid certification will be needed for international travel, the idea that such certification should be used internally will be seen as a step too far for many and will have a whole host of really negative consequences. It remains to be seen whether Boris Johnson’s government will be as unwilling to listen to sensible advice to not proceed with vaccine passports as Margaret Thatcher’s government was with regards the Poll Tax.

To conclude I would strongly counsel readers who object to this vaccine passport policy to write to their MP stating not only their own objections to this proposed policy but also the negative view taken towards it by the Public Administration and Constitutional Affairs Committee. Vaccination is the only way out of the covid problem but how vaccination is managed and whether it is seen as voluntary or coerced will determine whether the vaccination programme is a success or a divisive failure. Point out to your MP that vaccine compulsion has been tried before and failed dismally and because of the threat of covid we cannot afford to repeat the failures of the past.