SAGE – off to the Left …

Is the Lockdown starting to unravel before our eyes? Are the reasons for the Lockdown, for the rules, becoming threadbare? Johnson and his cabinet surely cannot be unaware of what is going on outside the Westminster Bubble and indeed of what has been going on inside said bubble!

If there’s one thing which makes us angry then it’s the blatant disregard of “Them” for the “Rulz” they have set for all of us. ‘Do as I say, not as I do’ has never played well in Britain. Last evening the news made the rounds that ‘Professor Lockdown’ took his own diktat of ‘social distancing’ so seriously that he and his lover – married to someone else – had met for bouts of rumpy-pumpy (link, link paywalled). He’s now resigned.

It’s an important piece of news not because of its salaciousness but because of the excuse “Professor Lockdown” gave. He ‘thought he was immune’ after first testing positive and then going through two weeks of isolation. If that’s what he thought then surely, at the very least, all those who have tested positive and suffered said two weeks of isolation can be released? Or does his ‘science’ work for him but not for us?

Then there are the thousands of people who have come here, via flights to Heathrow – before and after the Lockdown (link, link paywalled). The ‘scientific advice’ for allowing this to happen simply beggars belief. Firstly, here are some numbers:

“Figures provided to the home affairs committee by the Home Office show that between January 1 and the end of March 18.1 million people entered the UK without any health checks including from coronavirus hotspot countries. Of these, just 273 were quarantined. Even by conservative estimates of prevalence, this would have meant 20,000 being infected. The arrivals were only asked to self-isolate if they had symptoms unlike other countries like New Zealand, Singapore, Canada, Australia and Italy which closed their borders, quarantined or introduced supervised self-isolation.”(link)

Ah – but we’re not racist like all those other countries, right? Funny that ‘Our MSM’ weren’t up in arms about this, just as funny as their complete silence about the “refugees” coming to our shores from war-torn France.

There, the police of the wannabe Napoleon harasses and fines Frenchmen for daring to go shopping for victuals without presenting a receipt, but ‘allows’ those “refugees” get to the Channel coast, letting people traffickers move them to The UK. Watch this video from Nigel Farage, who afterwards received a visit from Plod about having travelled to the coast to film it. Yes, Sirree – we do have our priorities spot on!

As for those coming here legally but unchecked: the ‘explanation’ from SAGE on which government acted … well, words simply fail me, again! For example:

“Ministers have maintained they acted on the scientific advice of SAGE that tougher restrictions would have a “negligible” impact given the domestic transmission rate then and the dramatically-reduced number of passengers now entering the UK.” (link)

Ought ‘Ministers’ not have listened to SAGE advice? I think that, instead of using their common sense they were scared stiff of doing so by the “Fear&Hysteria” campaign in ‘Our MSM’. The explanation given by one of the top SAGE scientists had me reaching for my coffee mug to smash against the wall:

“Sir Patrick Vallance […] told MPs the UK got “many, many different imports of the virus from many different places…particularly from European countries with outbreaks. And so we see a big influx of cases, probably from Italy and Spain looking at the genomics of the virus in early March, seeded right the way across the country,” he told the health and social care committee. “Whether that was people returning from half-term, whether it’s business travellers or not we don’t know, but a lot of the cases in the UK didn’t come from China and didn’t come from the places you might have expected. They actually came from European imports and the high level of travel into the UK around that time.” (link)

‘European imports’ – by people from Italy, France, Spain – countries whose dramatic situations were splashed across ‘Our MSM’ … and this was negligible for SAGE?

It should now be obvious to even the most scared of Brits that this Lockdown has become non-viable. One simple question is: why are we native peasants kept under lock and key as we ‘import’ virus strains by allowing others to come and go unhindered?

Regarding SAGE, I’m indebted to Lockdown Sceptics’ daily emails for this observation:

“The Government has published a cache of documents produced by the Scientific Advisory Group for Emergencies (SAGE), although they’ve been heavily redacted. […] One thing that jumped out at me when reading these advisory papers is how political much of the advice is, containing judgments about how public announcements are likely to be received, what the Government should avoid doing if public confidence is to be maintained, etc.”

Toby Young – for it is him writing – then observes that there’s one sub-group made up of sociologists and behavioural scientists labelled “SPI-B” whose advice seems to have been influencing government decisions:

“Given that left-of-centre academics in the social sciences and the humanities outnumber right-of-centre academics by a ratio of at least 10:1, what’s the betting that several members of this group turn out to be hard left supporters of Jeremy Corbyn?”

Perhaps that’s why Labour has been so very quiet about the whole Lockdown: money from taxpayers for all who declare they need it, rules for us peasants enforced by police or local council coercion, now that tracking app … what’s not to like if you’re a modern-day stalinist!

As for that tracking app … here’s an article about how it works, compared to the Google and Apple Apps. In contrast, have a look at this article in The Register: a bit more technical but it explains the reasons why any freedom-loving Brit should resist. I hope some of our more technically-minded readers will read the whole thing and write an article about it!

And then there are the others – EU countries, that is, whose ‘success’ in battling the CV-19 virus are regularly slapped around Johnson’s head. Germany especially is supposed to be a shining example. So I for one am a bit surprised when I read that in Germany, where the Lockdown has been eased, there’s no sign of that dreaded 2nd wave which, according to the now discredited SAGE advice, we are all supposed to fear:

“There was no sign of a second wave of coronavirus infections in Germany as the first reliable data on the effects of lifting the lockdown emerged on Tuesday. Two weeks after shops were allowed to reopen, the rate of new infections continues to fall, the government-funded Robert Koch Institute (RKI) announced.” (link)

Of course German scientists are hedging their bets, declaring that there might be a 2nd and even 3rd wave. Given the situation here in the UK it begs the question though why the Lockdown must continue when we let people into the country unchecked, people who might be spreading that virus.

It also begs the question why we must keep shredding our economy. Even Sunak is now ‘working’ on reducing the hand-outs (link, paywalled) because they are unsustainable, with the Treasury spending nearly as much on those as they are spending on the NHS – we wrote about that yesterday. This quote shows perfectly how our ‘betters’ see us:

“People are addicted to the scheme,” a senior government source said. “We’re not talking about a cliff-edge but we have to get people back to work.” Matt Hancock, the health secretary, said yesterday: “We’ve got to wean off it.” (link, paywalled)

Gawd – ‘weaning off’, ‘addicted’ – but no ‘cliff edge’: what are these people like? Have these phrases been suggested by those scientists in that SAGE subgroup?

Instead of taking advice and then making political decisions, the government seems to deliver, from a great height, political, lefty advice from those SAGE ‘scientists’, drinking wine while telling us peasants to be content with drinking water. Hello, Professor Ferguson: rules are rules but not when they irk me personally, right?

Today I’m left with the question why our government, from Johnson down, is addicted to advice from the now discredited SAGE, advice which was not strictly scientific but political, driven by lefty academics as Lockdown Sceptics explain above.

Perhaps we might be permitted to ask if their self-isolation, if their CV-19 infections, light or severe, has somehow affected their ministerial brains? Are they scared of losing face? Perhaps Johnson, that great admirer of Churchill, is afraid of being kicked out of office after ‘winning’ the ‘Corona war’ – just as that great man was in the 1945 GE. Is that why he’s clutching at unscientific straws, to keep ‘The Corona War’ going?

As for us peasants – keep kicking your constituency MPs. It’s the only weapon we have at the moment. Perhaps we might also do as ‘Professor Lockdown’ did: if he can get away with disobeying the rules why should we stay indoors? Why should we not go out, observing ‘social distancing’ a bit more strictly than that professor …

KBO!

Photo by USFWS Mountain Prairie