Westminster’s ‘bête noir’ has been at it again

 

I’ve got to hand it to our dear MSM: wave a red rag in their collective faces and they’re off – eventually, after having been given their marching orders. That red rag was a twitter thread by Cummings which he tweeted out on the 17th May but it took a whole day for the MSM to get cracking on this. More on that below.

First though a delightful little item which illustrates that Our dear MSM are happily in the business of forelock-tugging when it suits their agenda. That agenda is of course to keep their covid Fear Campaign going, to sow confusion and to force us to accept the SAGE commands who are forcing BJ’s hands, to keep lockdown going in perpetuity.

It’s all about the permission to travel, with confusion being created about the ample scheme (red is bad, don’t go there!). The statement in question comes from a proper Lord, the hereditary peer Lord Bethell, therefore it’s proper ‘news’:

“Lord Bethell – who is close to Matt Hancock, the Health Secretary – told peers that people should “stay in this country”. He said: “Travelling is dangerous. That is not news to us or to the people who get on those planes in the first place. We do ask people, particularly as we go into the summer, travelling is not for this year – please stay in this country.” (paywalled link)

There you are – don’t travel, a Lord ‘close to Hancock’ has spoken, refuting both George Eustice who said that travelling even to ‘amber’ countries was ok, and the Foreign Office which also advised that it was safe to do so (paywalled link). Perhaps the lord felt he needed to support his PM who had ‘advised’ not to go?

While the DT is gleefully describing the chaos in the Tory ranks, there’s one more paragraph which made me bounce off the walls in fury. That remark however was buried underneath the swathe of ‘Tory MPs’ outrage’ quotes:

“Speaking at Westminster, Lord Bethell, a Harrow-educated hereditary peer […] also praised a suggestion that people who were in quarantine could be made to wear electronic tags of the kind used to monitor criminals. The suggestion was made by nursing academic Baroness Watkins of Tavistock, who called on the Government to consider a scheme similar to that used in South Korea to contain the spread of infection. Lord Bethell said he was grateful for the “creative” idea.” (paywalled link)

Words fail me! The mindset of those people – both in the HoL and in our MSM – is appalling. Even thinking, never mind saying out loud, that it’s ok to treat those who are in quarantine as if they were criminals is indicative of their disdain for us. That the fearless writers in our MSM who are always so proud to ‘speak truth to power’ are not up in arms over this proposal demonstrates that they’re ‘in it together’, inside that cosy Westminster bubble, but certainly won’t bite the hands of the various Westminster ‘sources’ which feed them.

Mind you, there’s a little bit of subversion going on. A report in the DM on the spread of that oh-so-gruesome ‘variant of concern’ has some lovely maps of ‘incidence’ – just scroll down a bit here to find them. Clearly, we’re all gonna die! Also, scroll down further to look at the latest ‘scare graphs’ in that report – these are all ‘models’, they’re not based on actual ONS data. These are the ‘data’ allowing BJ to dither about giving us back our freedom which he so proudly promised. Given his past history, I’m not sure that he’ll listen to these warnings:

“Tory ministers and MPs have been warning the PM against changing course, complaining that curbs must not be extended to protect people who are refusing vaccines – which are believed to be effective against the Indian variant. One Cabinet minister said missing the June 21 milestone could become Mr Johnson’s ‘Theresa May moment’ – a reference to her failed Brexit deadline.” (link)

And so to Cummings who will be grilled by a HoC Select Committee on May 26th. On the 17th May however he posted a lengthy thread on the covid measures taken by BJ and his cabinet. This has our covid correspondents all atwitter, from the DT and The Times to the DM and even Lockdown Sceptics. Here’s an odd thing though: the tweet which caught their attention had already been deleted by Cummings and isn’t part of the original thread.

More interesting is the question why it took our intrepid MSM reporters until yesterday afternoon to get cracking on this twitter thread. Usually they’re very quick off the mark when it’s about using tweets by ‘persons of interest’ to pad out their ‘reports’. I can’t help but think that perhaps they were waiting for ‘guidance’ from Downing Street and Whitehall to tell them if they should just disregard that twitter thread or pay attention to it. 

If you’d like to read the entire thread tweeted by Cummings, go here. You don’t have to be a twitteratus to do so. Be warned, it’s full of esoteric abbreviations and government shorthand which I find hard to untangle and which might have prevented the MSM writers from delving into it.

However, the uproar is about one tweet which Cummings himself removed shortly after tweeting. Someone must have kept a screenshot of that tweet. The DM was first out of the starting blocks, thus you can see that deleted tweet here (scroll down a bit). In the usual fashion the broadsheets were lagging behind somewhat, but they did get there, eventually. The Times for example told its readers that “Cummings […] deleted the tweet after about 45 minutes, saying he had “botched options like idiot”.” (link, paywalled).

Cummings will now present this document to the HoC Committee, but the DT was suddenly hot on the trail, writing:

“He said he would donate the proceeds from any such sale to the families of Covid victims, before later deleting the post and then confirming that he would give the documents to a Parliamentary committee inquiry he is due to appear before next week. However, The Telegraph understands that as of Tuesday night he had not done so.” (paywalled link)

Oh dear! See how treacherous Cummings is: he tweeted that he’d give that document to the HoC committee – and by Tuesday night he ‘hadn’t done so’ … no, don’t ask if conceivably it was lingering in someone’s in-tray, that someone having stopped working at 5pm.

I leave you with two significant tweets from Cummings’ thread to which the MSM and LockdownSceptics should have paid proper attention:

“24/ The public inquiry will at no point ask: how does the deep institutional wiring of the parties/civil service program destructive behaviour by putting the wrong ppl in wrong jobs with destructive incentives? It will all be about relatively surface errors 

25/ If SW1 wanted to ‘learn’ there wd already be a serious exercise underway. The point of the inquiry is the opposite of learning, it is to delay scrutiny, preserve the broken system & distract public from real Qs, leaving the parties & senior civil service essentially untouched” (link)

Exactly – but these points are clearly ‘forbidden territory’ for our Westminster MSM reporters who know full well that biting the hands of their ‘sources’ in Whitehall and Downing Street means they’ll not be fed those precious government titbits with which they fill their pages.

For me, this latest instalment in the ‘Cummings Saga’ demonstrates yet again that the MSM are all part of the government propaganda enterprise. They do not ‘speak truth to power’, they ‘speak government truth’ to us peasants. Who needs a “Ministry of Truth” when all the Westminster MSM sing from the same government hymn sheet …

 

KBO!

 

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