End the Lockdown
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PETER HITCHENS: The dictators have taken over - and we didn't even notice
By Peter Hitchens for The Mail on Sunday
01 Nov 2020
There was once a famous Chinese executioner so skilful with his razor-edged sword that crowds would pay to watch him behead criminals.
One day he came to a small provincial town where the authorities had given him a large fee to do away with a notorious killer.
He entered the arena and made several elegant and delicate passes with his weapon.
The condemned man sat gloomily before him, looking unimpressed with all this fuss. ‘Just get on with it!’ he growled.
The executioner bowed politely, smiled and said softly: ‘Kindly nod, please.’ The murderer did so and his head, already parted from his body by a stroke of incredible swiftness, tumbled from his shoulders.
I think we in this country are like that condemned man. A terrible thing has been done to us but we have not yet realised it.
It may even be that the British Revolution, a horror that this country has repeatedly escaped by good sense and natural conservatism, has actually taken place.
In a lecture of astonishing power and force last week, the former Supreme Court judge, Lord Sumption, revealed in sad detail what has happened to our country in the name of Covid.
I have placed a copy of it and a recording on the Peter Hitchens blog and I strongly advise you to read and watch it.
It says that Parliament has been elbowed aside by Ministers who rule by decree.
Now, Jonathan Sumption is not just a brilliant lawyer. He is also a distinguished historian.
Last year he gave the BBC’s Reith Lectures, and they were the best for many years. If he has any politics I have no idea what they are, but he uses language with immense care.
If he says this ‘has been the most significant interference with personal freedom in the history of our country. We have never sought to do such a thing before, even in wartime and even when faced with health crises far more serious than this one’, then you may be sure that this is so.
When he says ‘Ministers are accountable to no one, except once in five years at General Elections’, you may be sure that this is true. This a complete breach with centuries of law and tradition, and who can say where it might end?
When he points out that laws, backed by tyrannical, ruinous fines, are now made at televised press conferences and enforced by bluff by police forces operating far beyond their authority, then it is happening.
He accuses the Government of showing ‘a cavalier disregard for the limits of their legal powers’. This, he says, is how freedom dies.
And behind it lies an astonishing, previously unnoticed seizure of economic power, which has made the entire Covid panic possible.
In a lecture of astonishing power and force last week, the former Supreme Court judge, Lord Sumption, revealed in sad detail what has happened to our country in the name of Covid. I have placed a copy of it and a recording on the Peter Hitchens blog and I strongly advise you to read and watch it
By long tradition, Parliament has had ultimate control over the Government’s purse strings. It must permit major spending specifically. Without this power it is just a mascot or a toy.
That power has been abolished. Back in March, unnoticed by almost everyone, Parliament vastly increased the Government’s freedom to spend what it liked. The old limit, for emergency spending, was increased from a mere £11billion to almost £270billion a year.
I cannot say where or how this will end. It is my own growing belief that Johnson and Hancock do not understand what they are doing.
Their decision to strangle our struggling economy once again in an alarmist shutdown is one of panic piled on panic and is visibly destroying the NHS they claim to be saving, as well as laying waste to those jobs and businesses they have not yet ruined or obliterated.
I see them as two schoolboys on the footplate of an old-fashioned steam locomotive, clattering into deepening twilight, too scared to call for help, too vain to admit their error. They started it moving by accident, foolishly pulling and pushing at levers whose functions they did not know. Now they cannot find the brakes. The safety valves are blocked. The whistle screams, the pace gathers.
Alas, the rest of us are trapped in the lurching, bucketing train behind them, unable to reach or influence them, let alone stop them.
A needless stampede towards the abyss
The oddest thing about the Panicdemic is that nobody would know it existed if the Government and its mouthpiece the BBC did not constantly seek to terrify us into a state of servile fear.
It does not help that they all presume the truth of the unproven belief that shutdowns control the disease.
In many years, comparable numbers of people die from respiratory ailments. Quite normally, 1,600 people die every day for all kinds of reasons, though it has become almost sacrilegious to say so. Most of them do not die from Covid.
Many die from other diseases whose treatment has been halted or reduced by the Panicdemic.
All such deaths are rightly mourned by the bereaved. Except that, thanks to the Panicdemic, they cannot hold proper funerals.
How long will it be before the realisation sinks in that we have been stampeded, quite needlessly, into poverty and darkness?
https://www.dailymail.co.uk/debate/article-8901637/PETER-HITCHENS-dictators-taken-didnt-notice.html
By Peter Hitchens for The Mail on Sunday
01 Nov 2020
There was once a famous Chinese executioner so skilful with his razor-edged sword that crowds would pay to watch him behead criminals.
One day he came to a small provincial town where the authorities had given him a large fee to do away with a notorious killer.
He entered the arena and made several elegant and delicate passes with his weapon.
The condemned man sat gloomily before him, looking unimpressed with all this fuss. ‘Just get on with it!’ he growled.
The executioner bowed politely, smiled and said softly: ‘Kindly nod, please.’ The murderer did so and his head, already parted from his body by a stroke of incredible swiftness, tumbled from his shoulders.
I think we in this country are like that condemned man. A terrible thing has been done to us but we have not yet realised it.
It may even be that the British Revolution, a horror that this country has repeatedly escaped by good sense and natural conservatism, has actually taken place.
In a lecture of astonishing power and force last week, the former Supreme Court judge, Lord Sumption, revealed in sad detail what has happened to our country in the name of Covid.
I have placed a copy of it and a recording on the Peter Hitchens blog and I strongly advise you to read and watch it.
It says that Parliament has been elbowed aside by Ministers who rule by decree.
Now, Jonathan Sumption is not just a brilliant lawyer. He is also a distinguished historian.
Last year he gave the BBC’s Reith Lectures, and they were the best for many years. If he has any politics I have no idea what they are, but he uses language with immense care.
If he says this ‘has been the most significant interference with personal freedom in the history of our country. We have never sought to do such a thing before, even in wartime and even when faced with health crises far more serious than this one’, then you may be sure that this is so.
When he says ‘Ministers are accountable to no one, except once in five years at General Elections’, you may be sure that this is true. This a complete breach with centuries of law and tradition, and who can say where it might end?
When he points out that laws, backed by tyrannical, ruinous fines, are now made at televised press conferences and enforced by bluff by police forces operating far beyond their authority, then it is happening.
He accuses the Government of showing ‘a cavalier disregard for the limits of their legal powers’. This, he says, is how freedom dies.
And behind it lies an astonishing, previously unnoticed seizure of economic power, which has made the entire Covid panic possible.
In a lecture of astonishing power and force last week, the former Supreme Court judge, Lord Sumption, revealed in sad detail what has happened to our country in the name of Covid. I have placed a copy of it and a recording on the Peter Hitchens blog and I strongly advise you to read and watch it
By long tradition, Parliament has had ultimate control over the Government’s purse strings. It must permit major spending specifically. Without this power it is just a mascot or a toy.
That power has been abolished. Back in March, unnoticed by almost everyone, Parliament vastly increased the Government’s freedom to spend what it liked. The old limit, for emergency spending, was increased from a mere £11billion to almost £270billion a year.
I cannot say where or how this will end. It is my own growing belief that Johnson and Hancock do not understand what they are doing.
Their decision to strangle our struggling economy once again in an alarmist shutdown is one of panic piled on panic and is visibly destroying the NHS they claim to be saving, as well as laying waste to those jobs and businesses they have not yet ruined or obliterated.
I see them as two schoolboys on the footplate of an old-fashioned steam locomotive, clattering into deepening twilight, too scared to call for help, too vain to admit their error. They started it moving by accident, foolishly pulling and pushing at levers whose functions they did not know. Now they cannot find the brakes. The safety valves are blocked. The whistle screams, the pace gathers.
Alas, the rest of us are trapped in the lurching, bucketing train behind them, unable to reach or influence them, let alone stop them.
A needless stampede towards the abyss
The oddest thing about the Panicdemic is that nobody would know it existed if the Government and its mouthpiece the BBC did not constantly seek to terrify us into a state of servile fear.
It does not help that they all presume the truth of the unproven belief that shutdowns control the disease.
In many years, comparable numbers of people die from respiratory ailments. Quite normally, 1,600 people die every day for all kinds of reasons, though it has become almost sacrilegious to say so. Most of them do not die from Covid.
Many die from other diseases whose treatment has been halted or reduced by the Panicdemic.
All such deaths are rightly mourned by the bereaved. Except that, thanks to the Panicdemic, they cannot hold proper funerals.
How long will it be before the realisation sinks in that we have been stampeded, quite needlessly, into poverty and darkness?
https://www.dailymail.co.uk/debate/article-8901637/PETER-HITCHENS-dictators-taken-didnt-notice.html
"Government by decree - Covid-19 and the Constitution".
The disputes over Brexit last year saw an attempt to make the executive, not Parliament, the prime source of authority in the Constitution. The coronavirus crisis has provoked another attempt to marginalise Parliament, this time with the willing acquiescence of the House of Commons. Is this to be our future?
Lord Sumption is an author, historian and lawyer of note. He was appointed directly from the practising Bar to the Supreme Court, and served as a Supreme Court Justice from 2012-18. In 2019, he delivered the BBC Reith Lectures, "Law and the Decline of Politics", and is now a regular commentator in the media. He continues to sit as a Non-Permanent Judge of the Hong Kong Court of Final Appeal. Alongside his career as a lawyer, he has also produced a substantial and highly-regarded narrative history of the Hundred Years' War between England and France (with volume V still to come).
More information about this lecture, including a transcript, is available from the Private Law Centre website: https://www.privatelaw.law.cam.ac.uk/
https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=amDv2gk8aa0&t=1211s
NO TALKING! Chatting Caused Spike in Cases, Apparently | Carl Vernon
We can't even talk now. It is clear they are picking on ordinary human behaviours.
According to the BBC, families chatting in homes caused another spike in Wales causing it to be lockdowned again. Do they want family members to just communicate with each other via sign language?
What's going on?
https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=XZ3ytLNdrN0&t=51s
No Way Out 
For Months & All Alone @ Christmas 
Good Morning.. this Lockdown is killing me..
Leaving Calgary this morning, heading to Laredo, Texas.. might skip across into Mexico or go down to Corpus Christi, Texas and run along the beach..
Last time was fun..
But Im sure going to enjoy my lockdown.. :lol:
While in the USA I will be getting another serology test, make sure my antibodies are still high. (Being Soviet Canuckistan doesn't offer this)
Leaving Calgary this morning, heading to Laredo, Texas.. might skip across into Mexico or go down to Corpus Christi, Texas and run along the beach..
Last time was fun..
But Im sure going to enjoy my lockdown.. :lol:
While in the USA I will be getting another serology test, make sure my antibodies are still high. (Being Soviet Canuckistan doesn't offer this)
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I couldn't be arsed with all that travelling. Even just five minutes in the taxi to work everyday is a chore for me.
The fall of Britain
We must reclaim our freedom before it’s too late.
LAURENCE FOX, actor and founder and leader of the Reclaim Party
3rd November 2020
Spiked
Imagine a country where the borders between its constituent parts are shut down, travel between them forbidden and enforced by the police. Supermarkets have shelves roped off and the state decides what goods are essential. Right of assembly, not just in public places but also between families and households, is under legal constraint. Neighbours are encouraged to inform on anyone who might be in breach.
Pubs, restaurants, concert halls, theatres, cinemas and sports stadiums, if they operate at all, do so in a desultory fashion, with limited numbers, curfews and everyone tracked and traced.
The state broadcaster keeps the population placid with a diet of fear – fear of an unseen enemy from which only the state can protect them, as long as they obey the rules. Travel to other countries is difficult, if not impossible, and the state must be allowed to track you on return.
The economy is being rendered moribund. A bankrupt state provides in its absence.
But beyond the physical constraints, the constraints of the intellect are more sinister. A remorseless doublethink is required. We are invited to believe, worse, it is insisted that we believe, that men can have periods. Women are now ‘people who bleed’. It is insisted that we believe that one section of the population is inherently discriminatory, oppressive and wicked and that it traps another in a permanent state of victimhood, unable to contribute, devoid of agency, forever disadvantaged, always second place.
Schools and universities slowly dismantle the great thread of Western achievements and the notion of nationhood. Historical figures are either airbrushed from history or their names traduced. ‘Who controls the past, controls the future.’
The population divides into three camps: those who just shrug their shoulders and determine to ‘wait it out’, a few active dissidents and a chunk who welcomes the situation. The final group wants the certainties of the state, an end to the tyranny of choice, a fairness of mutual poverty where everyone is equally miserable, the streets grey, the shelves empty and a penniless state is the only employer.
And yet I’m not writing about the Soviet Union, before the fall of the wall, when a red-star state was presided over by a paranoid dictator who had to keep his population pinned in fear. I’m talking about the United Kingdom. Here. Now. And under a Conservative government.
Locked down and lucked out. A state of dependence. And in case you think the opposition is any better, Andy Burnham, Manchester’s Labour mayor, wants to keep his city open. Sadiq Khan, London’s Labour mayor, to shut his city down. Labour leader Keir Starmer wants to support Burnham while shutting the whole country down. In Wales, Mark Drakeford has done just this.
In Scotland, the SNP’s Nicola Sturgeon willingly trumps any authoritarian measure in England and does so on the back of a leadership cult with which Eastern Europeans would surely be familiar. Any minute now, a new broadcast to the nation.
Incoherent, opportunistic, bereft of principle, ideology or clue, was there ever a lower ebb for British political leadership than we face now?
The very essence of what we are as a nation is being destroyed. From the pub to the Union to the principle of free speech. Our native sense of irreverence and good-humoured scepticism has been replaced by a dead-handed fear of saying the wrong thing for fear of cancellation – the equivalent of having your party membership revoked, meaning no job and no access to the GUM store.
I make one simple plea. Reclaim. Reclaim your freedom. Reclaim what it used to mean when people said, ‘It’s a free country!’. And reclaim it before it’s too late.
We all know this has gone too far. All know that somewhere this rollercoaster ride has to stop and that the country needs to get off. In terms of liberty, in terms of economy, in terms of our way of life, in terms of wider health, both physical and mental, screaming towards catastrophe.
As a great man once said: ‘Freedom is never more than one generation away from extinction. We didn’t pass it to our children in the bloodstream. It must be fought for, protected, and handed on for them to do the same.’
https://www.spiked-online.com/2020/11/03/the-fall-of-britain/
We must reclaim our freedom before it’s too late.
LAURENCE FOX, actor and founder and leader of the Reclaim Party
3rd November 2020
Spiked
Imagine a country where the borders between its constituent parts are shut down, travel between them forbidden and enforced by the police. Supermarkets have shelves roped off and the state decides what goods are essential. Right of assembly, not just in public places but also between families and households, is under legal constraint. Neighbours are encouraged to inform on anyone who might be in breach.
Pubs, restaurants, concert halls, theatres, cinemas and sports stadiums, if they operate at all, do so in a desultory fashion, with limited numbers, curfews and everyone tracked and traced.
The state broadcaster keeps the population placid with a diet of fear – fear of an unseen enemy from which only the state can protect them, as long as they obey the rules. Travel to other countries is difficult, if not impossible, and the state must be allowed to track you on return.
The economy is being rendered moribund. A bankrupt state provides in its absence.
But beyond the physical constraints, the constraints of the intellect are more sinister. A remorseless doublethink is required. We are invited to believe, worse, it is insisted that we believe, that men can have periods. Women are now ‘people who bleed’. It is insisted that we believe that one section of the population is inherently discriminatory, oppressive and wicked and that it traps another in a permanent state of victimhood, unable to contribute, devoid of agency, forever disadvantaged, always second place.
Schools and universities slowly dismantle the great thread of Western achievements and the notion of nationhood. Historical figures are either airbrushed from history or their names traduced. ‘Who controls the past, controls the future.’
The population divides into three camps: those who just shrug their shoulders and determine to ‘wait it out’, a few active dissidents and a chunk who welcomes the situation. The final group wants the certainties of the state, an end to the tyranny of choice, a fairness of mutual poverty where everyone is equally miserable, the streets grey, the shelves empty and a penniless state is the only employer.
And yet I’m not writing about the Soviet Union, before the fall of the wall, when a red-star state was presided over by a paranoid dictator who had to keep his population pinned in fear. I’m talking about the United Kingdom. Here. Now. And under a Conservative government.
Locked down and lucked out. A state of dependence. And in case you think the opposition is any better, Andy Burnham, Manchester’s Labour mayor, wants to keep his city open. Sadiq Khan, London’s Labour mayor, to shut his city down. Labour leader Keir Starmer wants to support Burnham while shutting the whole country down. In Wales, Mark Drakeford has done just this.
In Scotland, the SNP’s Nicola Sturgeon willingly trumps any authoritarian measure in England and does so on the back of a leadership cult with which Eastern Europeans would surely be familiar. Any minute now, a new broadcast to the nation.
Incoherent, opportunistic, bereft of principle, ideology or clue, was there ever a lower ebb for British political leadership than we face now?
The very essence of what we are as a nation is being destroyed. From the pub to the Union to the principle of free speech. Our native sense of irreverence and good-humoured scepticism has been replaced by a dead-handed fear of saying the wrong thing for fear of cancellation – the equivalent of having your party membership revoked, meaning no job and no access to the GUM store.
I make one simple plea. Reclaim. Reclaim your freedom. Reclaim what it used to mean when people said, ‘It’s a free country!’. And reclaim it before it’s too late.
We all know this has gone too far. All know that somewhere this rollercoaster ride has to stop and that the country needs to get off. In terms of liberty, in terms of economy, in terms of our way of life, in terms of wider health, both physical and mental, screaming towards catastrophe.
As a great man once said: ‘Freedom is never more than one generation away from extinction. We didn’t pass it to our children in the bloodstream. It must be fought for, protected, and handed on for them to do the same.’
https://www.spiked-online.com/2020/11/03/the-fall-of-britain/
WORST Infection Rate 
Been In Lockdown 2 Weeks 
*
Merthyr Tydfil
Go and live on the Pitcairn Islands.
I could do that easily, because even though they are in the Pacific Ocean they are still British territory and they are all Brits.
And it'd be cool living amongst the descendants of the mutineers on the Bounty.
I'm destressing right now after work by sitting in my gardens, even thought it's just gone midnight. It's not even cold. I've got a beer, of course. I've kept the kitchen door open and I keep getting fragrant wafts of chicken tikka masala that is cooking in the oven.
Well it'd be a lot less stressful living on a tiny group of islands with just 43 other people slap bang in the middle of nowhere between New Zealand and Chile.
| Carl Vernon
That's a good point. We don't want them undertaking a mutiny like their ancestors did and doing to you what they did to William Bligh.
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