I was hoping for a quiet day, not having to put fingers to keyboard and easing out gently from writing this daily column. Three news items however forced me to slip back into the daily Cassandra-mode. She, as we all know, kept warning the Trojan king about the impending doom for the city, inflicted by the Hellenes She was not listened to.
The first of my ‘alarm tripwires’ pinged when I saw the result of yesterday’s vote on the Foreign Aid Bill. The next one was a snippet of information hidden in a report on vaccine passports. The final one pinged when I read the latest ‘vaccine nudge’ article.
Let’s start from the top with that first tripwire ping. Briefly, the demand by Tory ‘rebels’, to ‘keep the lock of the aid budget at 0.7% of GDP’, was defeated, even though all previous PMs, from Major down to May, lamented this decision:
“Under the terms of a compromise, the government agreed to reinstate the aid target of 0.7 per cent of GDP when two conditions were met: when the Office for Budget Responsibility confirms the government is no longer borrowing for day-to-day spending, and when underlying debt is falling.” (link, paywalled)
Surely this is excellent news! Isn’t it the commonsense success we hoped for? Not really. This has created a precedent for Sunak who needs to decide on the state pension. This has a ‘triple lock’, namely that the annual payment would rise by whatever is higher: inflation, average earnings, or 2.5%.
Thus the removal of the lock on the foreign aid budget and the conditions for the reinstatement means that Sunak can now use this precedent, this same reasoning, to impoverish pensioners even further. Let me remind you that Sunak has frozen the tax-free personal allowance until 2026, so any rise in state pension payouts would be clawed back anyway (link).
We’ve seen a climate of increasing anger at ‘the old’, promoted in the MSM for quite some time. The state pension question is fuelling this anger which is now coming from the young who are given space in our MSM to bemoan that the old are ‘protected’ by vaccines so why should the young be locked down while the old are given more money. Don’t expect any pity for pensioners.
The next tripwire pinged when I saw a snippet of a jaw-dropping information in yet another nudge-article aimed to make us accept vaccine passports. Yes, I’m afraid they’ll come because this covid government has been asking ‘focus groups’ about acceptance, for months. Disregard the overweening desire to control every aspect of our lives as the question for those focus groups document, see what outraged me (my emphasis):
“Government commissioned research on the vaccine pass, seen by The Telegraph, also shows that focus groups were asked about the possibility of them being used for weddings, funerals and work events. In the December focus group conducted by Zühlke Engineering, a Swiss company involved in the contract tracing app which has staff working within the Department of Health, participants were also asked about it being used for builders attending their home.” (paywalled link)
I’m sure we’re all extremely relaxed to learn that outside contractors with vested interests are working inside our ministries, influencing decisions which this covid government will make to justify a further encroachment on our civil liberties! And nobody says a word, never mind raising an eyebrow, not even when vested interests are already promoting the spectre of a national ID cards:
“Security experts warned that in order for the passport to be linked to an individual and avoid fraud they would also have to show identification.” (paywalled link)
Will ‘Smartphone, please’ become the ‘new normal’ for ‘Papiere bitte’? Are our liberties held so cheap by the covid lemmings that they’ll sacrifice them happily?
And so to that last tripwire – the latest ‘nudge’ article to pressurise BJ to drop his ‘criminal plan’ to lift lockdown on Monday. It’s not the howl of outrage by 1,200 ‘scientists’ faithfully reported in the DM (link). That was something we could take for granted, just as we can trust more of the covid emperors and their henchpeople to populate the MSM in the coming days with warnings of impending apocalypses. No, this is about a wail in The Times:
“Intensive care staff are finding it tough to see younger people on their wards who could have been vaccinated, a senior doctor has told The Times. There has been a rise in Covid-19 admissions at hospitals across the country, particularly among under-50s who are less likely to be fully vaccinated, such as pregnant women and patients without pre-existing conditions.” (link, paywalled)
It used to be a cardinal medical error to vaccinate pregnant women. Covid and the Big Pharma driven campaign to jab all seems to disregard this. Has the Thalidomide scandal already been forgotten? The aim is of course to drive more young people below the 30+ age groups to get that jab – and to prepare the way for ministers to rescind their stance against jabbing children.
One wonders if ‘staff’ from vaccine producers are also working within the DHSC, conducting focus groups, nudged to demand ‘moar vaccines’ for everybody. A Pfizer booster jab is already talked about after all.
I leave you with the question of who actually advised those ‘young’ patients to go to hospital. Can it possibly have been their invisible GPs? Can it possibly be because there’s still no protocol for treating covid at home, outside hospitals?
I ask because there’s a finding, by an ‘international group of experts’, no less. They found that treating cancer had such bad results in this country because:
“people in this country were much more worried about worrying their doctor or wasting the doctor’s time than they were in other countries”.” (link, paywalled)
See – it’s all our fault for not seeing a doctor! But when you do you’ll be sent to hospital because: “covid”, fuelling the campaign of the covid tyrants to keep our civil liberties locked away. After all, ‘people’ want it. It’s what they say in ‘focus groups’ and in government polls, don’t they!
Apologies for having had to warn you, Cassandra-like, of decisions this government will make in the near future. In consolation there’s news that some of us will see some sunshine today.
KBO!
Photo by jean louis mazieres 
Thank you Viv, for another incisive and prescient article. Any chance of you getting a job on GB News?
Why am I the only person who agree with almost all these things. Why am I the only one who believes a protest party would encapsulate all these appalling moves by the malevelant, or just wrong. These moves are all wrong but all get accepted because of no concentration of power from every one disillusioned into the hands of a party that can do something. There is no believable party.
I understand most just want to get along with life. But also nearly everybody has a protest in them.
Why Not ?
The left wingers are terrified of hate.and have done their best to suppress it first before its policies will naturally arouse a normal emotion.
As a normal 20 year old army conscript a hate session was a normal evening occupation. We didn’t actually hate anybody , anything or organisation or procedure. Just mindlessley chanted ” Hate, Hate ” Just we knew we weren’t happy. Hate sessions werea focus. And by god the organisation was frightened and took notice. On almost a weekly rota, I had some young officer catch me and explain. Nice little lads usually. They didn’t get it and they thought it was me or that I was a focus or summat And that’s what all this shebang is about
This was Catterick in the 1950 ‘s A dozen regiments of a couple of thousand or so. It makes a lot of noise. It was not mutiney just singing. and carrying the message. ” We are not happy “
Ceri -Do really think that a petition to the hired help will achieve anything? I, too, am spitting feathers and I don’t like the taste.
Perhaps Swayne, or one of the handful of decent MPs may take it up. We could take to the streets as thousands have across France today over Macron’s vaccine passport announcement yesterday. Or we could stick our heads in the sand and do nowt.
A propos of nothing in particular:
Please join me and email supermarkets asking them to keep ditch masks in store beyond 19th July:
https://tinyurl.com/yjvr87ez
This pro-forma email asks them to keep masks – but you can overwrite and change the message 🙂
Turn their weapons against them – Spread the news.
Sadly most people today will think Cassendra is a character from Only Fools and Horses
I thought Cassandra was the pen name for William Connor who wrote a column for the Daily Mirror 60 years ago.
“the howl of outrage by 1,200 ‘scientists’”
Perhaps if the 60,000+ medical practitioners and scientists, and the almost 800,000 citizens who have signed the Great Barrington Declaration, had howled, rather than being reasonable and expecting a reasonable response, it would have got some where.
But I am guessing most of our media and politicians would say, “The what?”
I work on the dementia side or a large Care Home. I had my second Moderna jab last week. It upset my stomach a lot but am hoping it will ease off soon. I do suffer from IBS now and then. This is worse. Anyway a lot of the staff there come from a wide variety of countries from Romania to the Phillippines and India and the majority concensus is, vaccine, no thanks. Dont trust it. Most establishments are short staffed anyway, Ours would fall over if none of them could work anymore. So what happens if or when the Government says you must and they say we wont I wonder.
HEZ – That’s when the fight began, m’lud.
Well said HEZ. Unfortunately the residents will suffer. The Government have now said ‘you must’. So I hope there is a mass walk out.
Viv. Yesterday MPs voted 319 to 246 on mandatory covid vaccinations for care home workers. When was the Nuremberg code repealed?
I think it was when common sense, ethics, genuine science and many aspects of domestic and international law, were all repealed 18months ago.
Phil O’Sophical. You are right. I am spitting feathers at the latest example of the contempt in which we are held. A rushed through debate of just 90 minutes that caught most people on the hoof. It is absolutely morally and ethically bankrupt to coerce care workers with the no jab, no job threat. I do hope that the 319 MPs who voted for this abomination will step forward bed pans at the ready when hundreds of care workers decide to be sacked rather than take an experiment medical procedure leaving the care home residents with inadequate staffing. Here is a petition that needs to be signed and shared widely.
https://petition.parliament.uk/petitions/577842
How many actually voted and how many used a proxy? You can find the answers at https://votes.parliament.uk/Votes/Commons/Division/1078#ayes
These treacherous people are taking taxpayers money under false pretences.
And don’t tell me it is ‘because of covid’ when what is really meant ‘because of the way we have chosen to respond to covid.’ which is a whole different matter.