A Journey of a Thousand Miles ...

How we must learn the true lessons of the pandemic response

Introduction

Any significant public health threat from Covid was over in the early part of 2021, as my colleague and I have previously argued. However the administrative classes - politicians, MSM, ‘public health experts’ and so on - kept the charade going for another two years to serve their various agenda-driven purposes.

Now, though, most of these people have decided that it is expedient for the insanity to be over politically. As usual, the details we discuss in this article relate to the UK, but it is a similar story across the western world. So why now?

The disastrous fallout has finally begun to dawn on the same apathetic middle-class liberals who took their furlough money to enjoy an extended sabbatical at home - in the halcyon days when “lives were more important than the economy”. Apart from the most dedicated acolytes of the Covidian cult, reality can no longer be denied: The socio-economic fabric of Western society is crumbling, as was so obviously predictable, and predicted, by ourselves and others.

Inflation is rampant in many countries. France is in flames because the populace refuses to accept the undemocratic imposition of a reduced state pension age. Israel too is in turmoil because of the undemocratic behaviour of its PM. There is no apparent exit route from the madness of the escalating proxy war in Ukraine - which threatens to accelerate the realisation of a ‘new world order’, but perhaps not the one envisaged by the globalist fanatics of the UN, the WEF, or the deranged oligarchs of Western ‘charitable foundations’ and ‘think tanks’ such as the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation and Tony Blair’s Institute for Global Change.

Politicians, ‘journalists’ and celebrities are beginning to concede that “mistakes were made”. Those who got everything wrong are being wheeled out to issue insincere non-apologies because “we got some details wrong”. Depressingly, far too many ‘Team Reality’ sceptics are falling for the nonsense: Fatigued after 3 years of fighting the madness, they are ready to forgive and forget at any sign that some of the criminal perpetrators of this global atrocity are ready to repent - in return, naturally, for a full and unconditional amnesty.

The number of phoney expressions of remorse grows daily, and it would generally be unfair to name the guilty here with limited rights of reply. One topical example does merit being called out however; since it’s already been done far more ably than we could ever manage we simply provide this link for the reader to judge for themselves whether Piers Morgan deserves a pardon from anyone.

In parallel with the unofficial inquest now gaining momentum across social and mainstream media, and in private conversations across society, the official UK enquiry into the pandemic is finally getting underway - or maybe not, bogged down as it already is in the usual bureaucratic navel gazing and ill-conceived recriminations. Chaired by Baroness Hallet, supported by an army of expensive lawyers, the official enquiry is guaranteed to fail (with hundreds of £millions wasted in the process).

The critical point here is that, if we are to truly learn anything from the utter calamity of the pandemic response, we must avoid making exactly the same mistakes as those of the past 3 years (and more) and face some fundamental truths:

1. Judges and lawyers are completely unqualified to investigate and assess what was ultimately a catastrophic failure of democratic politics and management.

2. The very last people who should have a voice in assessing the shambolic response are those who got it all wrong but now claim to have “seen the light”.

3. We need to heed those who got it right from the beginning, because they are the ones who understand the basic truth of things.

4. We must recognise the pre-existing environment in which the Covid hysteria was allowed to spread.

5. Critically, we must acknowledge that the madness is not over - it continues completely unabated with the ‘Climate Emergency’ madness, and its ‘Net Zero’ corollary.

We have already addressed point 1 to some extent in a previous paper: Pandemic Preparedness in the UK. We, and others of our professional background, could expand significantly on this were we to be given the chance in a genuinely impartial, independent enquiry process.

On point 2, the vociferous fools who got everything so wrong were not ‘unlucky’ or deceived by evolving ‘science’ - as many now claim. They got it wrong precisely because they were predisposed to jump to erroneous, populist conclusions, and they have no analytical or management skills. To listen to their opinions at this stage would be the height of folly.

It does seem appropriate however, with reference to point 3, to recognise a few from the small group of those who got most things right from early on:

• Legal: Jonathon Sumption and Francis Hoar

• Medical Science and Public Health: John Iaonnidis, Michael Levitt, Carl Heneghan, Anders Tegnell, and the GBD authors

• Independent Analysts: Ivor Cummins, Joel Smalley and Norman Fenton

• Media: Allison Pearson and Liam Halligan

• Politics: Rand Paul, Kristi Noem and Desmond Swayne

The above above have impressed throughout the past 3 years and it is right to acknowledge their contributions, with apologies to those omitted.

Now we get to points 4 and 5; still contentious but the most critical items to understand.

How and why the World Went Mad

In early 2020, the scene was already set for what many have called an episode of global Mass Hysteria, Mass Psychosis or Mass Formation. These terms are not inappropriate; many on Twitter were describing the Covid tyranny as a cult very early on and this video from the Academy of Ideas is excellent.

Critically, though, the outbreak of global insanity was not spontaneous; it came at a time when two key factors had shifted the Overton Window dramatically to the left over many decades:

• Creeping Health and Safety regulation had provided a seemingly benevolent rationale for the ever-expanding reach of the state into everyday life.

• Increasingly influenced by ‘Long March’ ideology, multiple generations had been processed through an education system seemingly as concerned with indoctrination with ‘Woke’ social justice concerns as with formal learning.

The ever greater encroachment of health and safety regulation into the work environment began in the early 1970’s, in the UK for example with the Health and Safety at Work Act 1974. Whilst it is fair to say that this was received with scepticism, even some derision, at the time by blue collar workers, it is hard to argue with some of the basic tenets which it encoded - for example the ‘duty of care’ imposed on employers and employees for the safety of themselves and others.

Over time though, the impositions of the Health and Safety (and, later, Sustainability) coterie became ever more bureaucratic and disproportionate. Incoherent terminology such as ‘Zero Harm’ came into vogue, requirements for work-place PPE and inappropriate risk assessments escalated beyond all reason (how many times do we see politicians touring sterile ‘work sites’ sporting totally unnecessary hard hats, high-vis jackets and such?). The obsession with accident statistics, ‘near miss’ reporting and the rest became an end in itself.

When opportunities for the self-serving expansion of H&S regulation in genuinely risky field environments and industrial work places were pretty much exhausted, the bureaucratic parody that the Health and Safety industry had become turned its attention to the office environment: Now we saw the introduction of rules and regulations regarding the use of computer screens, adjustable chairs, ‘hold the handrail’ tyranny and more - including the encouragement of workers to ‘call out’ any violations of the infantile nonsense.

The social environment has witnessed a similar process of ever-growing and surreal nanny state interference. Sensible speed limits were followed with mandatory seat belts, crash helmets, speed cameras, smoking bans, sugar taxes and the rest. We now have incoherent ‘hate speech’ legislation, low traffic networks, low emission zones, calls for the banning of billboard advertising, homework and who knows what else.

Finally, the culture of increasing risk aversion merged with the Long March mind-set of younger generations to usher in the ultimate madness - fear of being ‘triggered’, safe spaces for all, the right not to be offended, and all the rest of today’s incomprehensible social ‘rules’.

Elon Musk has adopted the phrase ‘Woke Mind Virus’ and that is as good a phrase as any to describe the sickness with which the world is now afflicted. Covid itself never grew exponentially for more than a few days or weeks before natural immunological factors intervened - but there was no such brake on the growth of the mental disease.

We must then combine all of the above with the ‘social justice’ ideology of the Long March neo-Marxists - seeking out ‘oppressed’ or otherwise wronged minorities wherever they can find (or imagine) them, and inventing new corruptions of language on a daily basis; ‘institutional racism’, ‘cisgender’, ‘climate denier’, ‘birthing parent’, ‘chest feeding’, ‘white privilege’ and dozens more.

Little wonder then that, when Covid appeared, words like ‘infection’, ‘case’, ‘safe’ and ‘effective’ held so little real-world meaning that they were hijacked by ‘public health’ charlatans pushing a far-left activist agenda, and social media personalities looking to monetise, or otherwise leverage, their growing follower counts.

The end result of all this madness is illustrated at figure 1. Mainstream media reporting was so far unbalanced in favour of the alarmist narrative, and any ‘sceptical’ voices so severely censored, both by the MSM and on social media, that public discourse was utterly distorted in favour of the apocalypse. We never had a chance at a rational response.

Figure 1: How the Covid19 was portrayed in the media

When the snowflakes of the Long March generations - conditioned to fear their own shadows - were instructed by their governments to sanitise their hands against contaminated surfaces, maintain six feet distance from unclean fellow humans, and don ridiculous face coverings to protect against plague-laden air, there was only ever going to be one outcome; overwhelming compliance.

In short, none of the lunacy of the past three years would have been possible without decades of increasing risk-aversion and a population primed with Long March neo-Marxist ideology. Some still baulk at what they see as a simplistic, reductionist take on the politics. They point at examples of deranged statements or behaviour of obviously right-wing individuals: “Trump locked down the US, he’s hardly a Marxist”; “This is a case of authoritarian extremism, both left and right”.

It’s true of course that some people not burdened with neo-Marxist ideology have nevertheless made serious mistakes, or even fully embraced the madness through personal fear. But the overall phenomenon is absolutely neo-Marxist, which by its very definition deals with classes (groups of people), not individuals.

Communist dogma places collectivism at the centre of everything - vesting authority in instruments of the state, governed by regulated systems, rather than personal judgment and the empowerment of individuals. To an extent, some degree of collectivist ‘rule of law’ is inevitable in a civilised society, with shared facilities and amenities, where selfish or reckless behaviour can endanger others; very few would argue for the abolition of drink-driving laws for example.

Unquestionably, relinquishing some personal freedoms is the price we pay for being citizens of modern society - until 2020 we used to call it the “Social Contract” and most people didn't give it a second thought.

But excessive state power, always wielded in practice by individuals in positions of authority, is a denial of human nature. Whenever someone has too much authority, whether bestowed by the state, corporate position or personal wealth, there is the risk of abuse - “power corrupts, absolute power corrupts absolutely”, and it is for just this reason that in modern capitalist democracies authority should always come with accountability.

Communist apparatchiks are just as susceptible to psychological flaws as anyone else; once in positions of state sanctioned authority in bureaucracies, with accountability in short supply, they are prone to corruption, nepotism, and inhuman cruelty. Precisely as we’ve seen during the last three years.

In the US, the Constitution was of course designed to prevent such outcomes, incorporating careful checks and balances to ensure that individual freedoms were not subverted by State or, worse still, Federal administrative bureaucracies. The unwritten Constitution of the UK, founded on principles of precedent and custom, should - in theory - provide similar safeguards.

But constitutional freedoms have been largely ignored during the last 3 years, with Executives, Legislatures and Judiciaries behaving almost as one - within nations and internationally. Supranational bodies, in particular the WHO, have acted in a complete vacuum of democratic accountability. Again, this was possible only because almost every branch of the state in almost every country was already aligned to a common left-wing perspective of ‘big state’ government. Such was the ‘success’ of the Long March.

How Many Unscrupulous Parties Profited

It is important to acknowledge that the disastrous worldwide response to the pandemic was not only because of far-left political dogma and bureacratic incompetence. The influence of many corrupt actors, who saw a pandemic as a heaven sent opportunity to benefit, financially or otherwise, must be recognised - and the guilty made to pay.

First to appear in the court room must be the ‘big pharma’ executives, and the corrupt politicians and public health ‘celebrities’ who colluded in the lie that mass house arrest and rushed vaccines were necessary to save the planet, along with their globalist backers such as Gates, Blair and Schwab.

My colleague and I have already discussed the motivations of the various immoral, self-serving factions behind the pandemic response scam, so I will not revisit that subject in detail here.

The Lessons

The UK has become increasingly proficient at national self-delusion, and prone to learn the wrong lessons from every failure. We are now a bureaucratic, moribund country unable to complete the most straightforward of national infrastructure projects - railways (HS2), new roads, nuclear power stations, house building programs? All bogged down in red tape and escalating cost over-runs. We can't even fix pot holes in a timely and effective manner. Yet we always address the wrong questions: “Can we afford HS2; is it the best use of our money?”, not “Why in heaven’s name is the damn thing so expensive in the first place?”.

Take the national ‘smart metering’ programme, with a latest (now 4 years old) official cost estimate of £13.4 Billion - almost certainly higher in reality. With approximately 28m households in the UK, that equates to almost £480 per household, yet we have all been deceived by the propaganda that smart meters are ‘free’. How have a couple of replacement meters - in some cases, just a single meter - cost every home in the country that kind of money? It’s obscene, but it’s typical of bureaucratic ‘big state’ spending - and that was before we descended into full far-left lunacy.

Another example which should give every one of us food for thought is the tragic tale of Grenfell Tower. All the administrative regulations and fire safety protocols in the world didn’t prevent the disaster, but our response? It wasn’t to immediately and urgently address similar risks in countless urban high-rises up and down the country, but to point fingers in all directions before dreaming up yet more meaningless and costly red tape.

By early 2020, what had previously been dangerously underestimated as the ‘nanny state’ was perfectly primed to develop into something far more sinister - a fully fledged police state. But the transformation is not yet complete, and there may still be time to halt the disastrous slide into tyranny if enough people can be made to understand what is happening, and why.

Because the UK populace was pre-conditioned by risk-aversion and left-wing indoctrination as described above, a relatively minor pandemic, which caused around 90k deaths in the UK, including many iatrogenic deaths, as we have previously described, led to a panicked, herd-like response out of all proportion to the actual threat.

The direct death toll would almost certainly have been less without the panicked response - excessive ventilation of patients, seeding the virus into care homes, isolation and rush to ‘end of life care’ for care home residents, and more. In reality however, the overall number of deaths, including the indirect toll from lockdowns and rushed vaccines, is actually much higher - around 200k excess UK deaths in the last 3 years.

However, disastrous as the pandemic folly has been, the impact was always going to be relatively transient. It may take us a generation to recover from the madness, but recovery is possible. The same is not true of the real threat to the continuing advance of Western civilisation - the imagined climate emergency, or to be more precise, the escalating cult of Net Zero, where we now have a familiar situation as far as the media narrative is concerned.

Figure 2: How climate change is portrayed in the media

The Net Zero agenda existed before the pandemic, but the febrile state of the national psyche described above has been massively amplified since 2020. The UK, in common with so many other countries around the world, really has now gone mad. If not rapidly reversed, the NZ lunacy will complete and make permanent the socio-economic destruction of the West. The financial cost to the UK would be something in the region of £2.5 Trillion, and the societal damage would be terminal.

So what can we do - what fundamental lessons should we take away from the dystopian pandemic fiasco?

• Our Covid response was primarily down to the infiltration of UK institutions with neo-Marxist ideology, allied to the natural tendency of civilised societies to veer towards increasing state interventions ‘for safety’.

  We need to recognise this truth and work proactively to undo the damage of decades of Long March indoctrination. We then need to put in place robust constitutional safeguards to manage the risks of a renewed “social contract” in a civilised, partially collectivist, society going forwards.

  Though to a certain extent inevitable in the modern world, ‘Big State’ interventions are not generally a good thing.

• Our current politicians are morally bankrupt and intellectually deficient. We need to completely rethink how we elect and reward those we trust to serve/rule us. This may involve limiting the power of political parties, demanding greater independence of thought from politicians, and more ‘direct democracy’ in the form of referenda for any decisions with constitutional implications.

• The monarchy has all but abandoned its constitutional role of political impartiality, and the situation will continue to deteriorate under the woke activist King Charles and then William. We need a serious national conversation about the position and role of Head of State in future.

• The mainstream media has completely lost its way. making absolutely no attempt to “hold power to account” on either the pandemic response or Net Zero.

  The fragmentation of the print media into partisan factions has been happening for decades, and the similar long term fate of the broadcast media is probably now irreversible - and, to a large extent, harmless enough.

  But the BBC is, and must be, an exception. Its descent from our public service broadcaster into a neo-Marxist activist propaganda-fest has been a national disgrace. The BBC must be disbanded.

• Even ahead of the BBC, our education system bears the greatest responsibility for the neo-Marxist indoctrination of an entire generation. Neo-Marxist Activists in our schools and Universities must be rooted out and dismissed from their positions.

• Finally, the NHS is broken. We need to start again from scratch.

Will any of these things happen? Certainly not as a result of the official pandemic enquiry, and not at the behest of any existing politician.

For the UK to recover from this terminal illness, we are going to need a miracle. Those who understand the truly parlous state we are in need to unite in a single movement, find truly visionary leadership (a genuine team, not one individual), then work tirelessly to achieve political power in order to begin the task of mending our country and our world.

It won't be easy but, as per the old Chinese proverb, “a journey of a thousand miles begins with a single step”. And we certainly have a very long journey ahead of us.