Sir,

I sent the following letter to my MP and hope you can reproduce it so that other readers might be taking up this issue and write to their MPs as well:

“Dear ***,

Completely by chance, I recently came across the ‘Consultation’ document relating to Vaccine Passports put out by the Department of Digital, Culture, Media and Sport.  The closing date was given as 11th March.  Yet when I passed the link on to another person on 6th March they replied to tell me that the ‘Consultation’ was ‘closed’! This is outrageous!  Not only has this consultation closed earlier than expected, it was obviously not widely publicised.  The Government has spent huge sums of money on full page advertisements in the papers and also on television advertisements.  These advertisements all implied the same message….”Be afraid!  Do as you are told! Don’t break the ‘Rules’! Stay locked away!”  

If Government is considering imposing ID/Vaccine Passports upon the people of the UK, the democratic thing to do would be to have made the ‘Consultation’ known so that all could have the opportunity to participate!  Surely it could not be that Government has deliberately masked the existence of such ‘Consultation’ for purely political purposes?!  That would be a heinous act indeed!

Why are these passports even being considered?  They are an absolute violation of privacy and freedom!  If there was any firm indication that vaccination would actually confer complete immunity and ‘non-infectiousness’ on those vaccinated, there might be some small logic.  But as there is no evidence that this would be the case, it is authoritarianism for its own sake to impose such an imposition on the people of this Country  

The ********  (into which publication you, yourself have a regular input) carries a quotation from the, chief nurse at ************ Clinical Commissioning Group saying “It is vitally important to get the vaccine, as we know it prevents serious disease, reduces deaths and will relieve the pressure on the NHS but…..unfortunately we don’t yet know if it prevents transmission of the virus.  That means people who have been vaccinated could be carrying the virus without having any symptoms and they could pass it to others”. 

This make a complete nonsense of the proposition for imposing any kind of vaccine or ID passport. Such documentation cannot confer any real validation of safe interaction with other members of the public at any time!

My own view is, I do not believe that there is any quantifiable basis for a vaccine passport or any digital identity.  It violates so many aspects of personal freedom and rights to privacy, that the imposition of such an ID would border upon tyranny!  We have already seen during the last year, the manifestation of ultra-authoritarianism.  This has often been taken to the extreme by over-zealous and brutally inclined police officers.  Britain has always boasted of its free and libertarian credentials.  It has lauded its record of promoting democracy and freedom.  The proposal for this intrusive and unnecessary ID reduces Britain to the level of the totalitarian and repressive governments that it has always abhorred.

The petition against the roll out of Vaccine Passports (started on 20th January) now stands at over 273k signatures and still rising.  There is to be a debate on this petition on 15th March.  I respectfully instruct you (as my representative in Parliament) to vote against any imposition of vaccine passports or digital ID of any kind.  It is undemocratic, divisive and against all the tenets of a free society!

Yours truly, Frederica”

Thank you for reproducing my letter,

Respectfully, Frederica

 

~~~OOO~~~

 

Sir, 

I sent the following letter to the Daily Telegraph, in response to Kate Hoey’s article on the NI Protocol therein (link):

“Kate Hoey, former MP for Vauxhall and Labour minister, and now an unaffiliated peer, accuses the EU of jeopardising the Belfast Agreement with their vexatious application of the Northern Ireland Protocol, which was actually ‘devised to avoid a so-called “hard border” between Northern Ireland and the Republic of Ireland, and to protect the EU’s single market’; while Brussels insisted that there be no hard  border between the two jurisdictions, they made the ‘draw-jopping decision to invoke Article 16 of the Protocol’ – an emergency measure allowing ‘for the restoration of the land border in extreme circumstances’ – in order to prevent supplies of the AstraZeneca vaccine crossing the border from the Republic to Northern Ireland. 

This decision was hastily overturned after attracting widespread condemnation, but since then the EU has imposed ‘[r]idiculous rules’ such as ‘not being able to move soil from Birmingham to Belfast’; a border ‘has been imposed down the Irish Sea’, creating ‘a situation for business and the residents of Northern Ireland that is growing increasingly untenable’, with ‘[e]xtra paper work, increased costs, delays and bureaucracy’, leaving the people of Northern Ireland short of basic supplies.

Baroness Hoey notes that ‘[d]uring the Brexit process, Brussels was at pains to give the impression of being concerned for the people of both Northern Ireland and the Republic’, but thanks to their obstructive approach post-Brexit,  ‘[g]raffit proclaiming betrayal has appeared on walls all over Northern Ireland’, and the Loyalist Communities Council has now ‘withdrawn its support for the Belfast Agreement.’ 

She says that the LLC – a legal body set up by Tony Blair’s Government ‘to give the former loyalist paramilitaries a voice and a pathway to peaceful political action’ – is no longer so ‘powerful’, but its letter to the Prime Minister  ‘is a significant sign of growing anger’, and along with the leaders of the three main Unionist parties, and Lord Trimble and Ben Habib, she has ‘launched a legal challenge against the Protocol on the grounds that it contravenes the Act of Union and the Belfast (Good Friday) Agreement’. She concludes that ‘no Conservative who believes in the Union’ could ‘possibly continue to support’ the Protocol – that it ‘must go’ (‘The EU is jeopardising the Belfast Agreement’, Telegraph, March 5, 2021).

Boris Johnson needs to get a grip on the situation in order to avoid the collapse of the Good Friday Agreement, but so far his track record of defending the interests of Northern Ireland is not good; most notoriously, last year, his Government imposed abortion and same-sex marriage against the wishes of the majority of Northern Irish (see here and here).

As the violence of the Troubles receded, he forced upon Northern Ireland another sort of violence against the innocent, and in similar fashion, as Baroness Hoey points out regarding the Northern Ireland Protocol, ‘[n]o consent was sought from the people of Northern Ireland’ to the ‘change in the constitutional settlement’.

Despite maintaining that they were concerned to avoid a re-run of the discontent and violence that characterised the Troubles, the EU is shamelessly trampling on the interests of the Northern Irish people in order to punish the UK for their presumption in wanting to leave the fond embrace of Brussels. In trying to turn the UK into a disunited Kingdom, they are holding Northern Ireland hostage to ensure that we can never really leave, while administering a ‘punishment beating’ to Northern Ireland – all in the cause of peace, unity and friendship, naturally.”

Respectfully, Ann Farmer

 

 

 

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