A blast from the past – sadly, this is not what pubs will be like today

 

Today our cousins across the Big Pond celebrate Independence Day. It’s the day on which the Declaration of Independence was ratified by Congress. That was in 1776. For us over here today has become a sort-of ‘Freedom Day’ because the pubs are allowed to open, on the 103rd day of Lockdown. Alright, restaurants and hairdressers can also re-open their businesses, provided they ‘keep the rulz’. 

So what do we find on the home pages of our priceless MSM this morning? The DT, after headlining stuff on Ghislaine Maxwell’s arrest, has reports on eating out ‘for the first time, an ‘exclusive’ (link): ‘I had the first CV-19 free haircut’ (yes, really!) and a stern admonishment by Priti Patel (paywalled link) to be ‘responsible’ and all that jazz. 

The Times offers a similar menu of ‘advice’, leading with an appeal by Rishi Sunak to ‘Eat out to help out’. This comes under ‘can they really be that idiotic?’. It seems they can:

“Britain needs to start spending in pubs and restaurants again to prevent a generation of young people being “lost” to coronavirus, the chancellor has declared. Rishi Sunak suggested […] that it was the nation’s duty to “relearn what it’s like to go out again” to avoid a jobs meltdown that will hit the young and low-paid hardest. With figures showing that savings grew five times more in May than on average before the pandemic, Mr Sunak called on people to start spending in the hospitality industry, which opens up today. The chancellor said that he was “worried about a generation that is scarred by coronavirus”.” (link, paywalled)

Words fail me! “We” must ‘relearn’ what it’s like to go out? Really? Do take note however of the typical Treasury ‘advice’ on ‘spending’. I recall many instances where we plebs were told not to save because it’s our civic duty to spend to ‘save the economy. So here it is again.

Worse though is Rishi’s second point, namely that this’ll help ‘the youngest’ – a nice little twist on the long-running saga that “The Old” are sitting on pots of money which they are too mean to hand over to “The Young”. And there’s the hint about a new victim group in the making: ‘a generation scarred by CV-19’. Well, yes – the generation of CV-19 victims who happened to be old have died: the dead can’t be ‘scarred’ any longer.

Meanwhile Labour’s cold dead hand in the form of the Welsh First Minister is still strangling the Welsh people. Welsh pubs aren’t allowed to open until July 13th – which happens to be a Monday. The travel restrictions (‘no more than five miles from home’) are still in place until Monday 6th July so Welsh police are ‘urging’ people not to cross the border to England for a sneaky pint (link).

What a heady feeling of power it must be for Mark Drakeford (Lab) – for it is he – to be able to keep everybody in the Principality under lock and key, just to show that devolved Wales is different! While Sunak tells the English to go and spend to support the economy, the Welsh government couldn’t care less – after all, their early moans about a ‘ruined Welsh economy’ have already led to demands that Westminster ought to hand over more money. 

Not all Labour tinpot dictators are the same though. In Leicester, they do things differently – albeit accusing the Tory government is par for the course. There’s an ‘In Depth’ article in The Times which is of interest not because of some factual information but for the way they twist and turn to report those facts. First we read:

“Health officials identified the Leicester neighbourhood at the heart of a surge in coronavirus cases at least six days before they told residents. The delay in disclosing that a ward central to the city’s Asian community was the focus of the spike was because the local authority was not confident in the government data it was receiving, an MP said. The drastic step of ordering a local lockdown was taken after national health experts, accustomed to tackling emergencies in Africa, were sent to the city and reported widespread flouting of social-distancing measures.” (link, paywalled)

Keep in mind that bit about ‘Asian community’ – we know which community that is – and then read this:

“On Leicester’s “golden mile”, usually the heartbeat of Indian culture and business, signs saying “Great to have you back in Leicester” were being replaced by “Stay safe and healthy” warnings. Among the cluster of jewellery stores, sweet shops and fashion boutiques is Bobby’s, a vegetarian restaurant that has served the Gujarati community since 1976. Enna and Dharmesh Lakhani, who run the business, had been making preparations to reopen this weekend.” (link, paywalled)

Note the reference to ‘Indian culture’ and the naming of names! Reporting on the attitude of the Leicester Mayor (Lab) and some MPs (Lab) that they ‘didn’t’ trust the data and didn’t sign the privacy protection forms demanded by government, we are told next that the spike might have been caused by ‘young men defying lockdown guidelines’. Ah! Savour this and ponder what this next quote implies:

“A rapid support team of specialist doctors was sent by PHE to Leicester last Friday night. They were alarmed by the number of young men congregating with little to no social distancing. The results were presented to the mayor by Chris Whitty, England’s chief medical officer. Sir Peter complained that he was being “bounced” into action.” (link, paywalled)

The Mayor, not exactly a well-known Lockdown sceptic, is playing the typical Labour blame game, that ‘Teh Toreees’ are the root of all their own failings. Note also that The Times is happy to talk about the Indian community, even naming names, while being more than nebulous about those ‘young men congregating’, those young men being presumably of that ‘Asian Community’. Perhaps that Mayor needed to be ‘bounced’ into action because he didn’t want to incommodate a huge number of his clientele, those who keep election Labour in good old ‘Asian Community’ fashion and never mind about that ‘spike’?

For actual news from Leicester I highly recommend you take a look at the letter a Leicester doctor has sent to Lockdown Sceptics. The points he raises are of course overlooked in that Times ‘In Depth’ analysis, demonstrating yet gain that ‘Our MSM’, intent on keeping ‘Fear & Hysteria’ alive, are reporting selectively, leaving out important facts while obscuring others which certain groups might deem to be ‘offensive’.

Meanwhile, the eyes of the nation or rather: the eyes of ‘Our MSM’ are turned towards today’s pub openings, in expectation of drunken mayhem caused by all those pub goers who are bent on flaunting rulz in order to get their pints, bent on drinking themselves into oblivion – as if they hadn’t been able to do this safely at home during Lockdown.

Government and MSM are still determined to treat us, the electorate, the people who keep this country going, like irresponsible, unruly children who must be told how to behave and what to do. It’s time to remind them that they serve at our pleasure, that we voted for them and can send them back, that we can stop buying their papers and watching their TV programmes.

The 103 days of ‘guidance’ have been enough. The time of ‘fear & hysteria’ has run its course. We’re adults, we don’t need to have our minds made up for us, not by government and certainly not by “Our MSM”!

 

KBO!

 

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