Lord Jonathan Sumption – Mail on Sunday June 21, 2020
Lord Sumption. Click to enlarge
Does the Government have a policy for coronavirus? Indeed it does. In fact, it has several. One for each month of the year, all mutually inconsistent and none of them properly thought through. Sometimes, governments have to change tack. It shows that they are attending closely to a changing situation. But this crisis has exposed something different and more disturbing: a dysfunctional Government with a deep-seated incoherence at the heart of its decision-making processes.
The root of the problem is the uncomfortable relationship between the Government and its scientific advisers. The Government has repeatedly claimed to be ‘guided by the science’. This has in practice been a shameless attempt to evade responsibility by passing the buck to scientists for what are ultimately political, and not scientific, decisions. Scientists can advise what measures are likely to reduce infections and deaths. Only politicians can decide whether those measures make sense in economic and social terms too.
Sage, the committee of scientists advising the Government, has been very clear about this, as the minutes of its meetings show. They are not willing to become the Government’s human shield, or the fall-guys for its policy misjudgments.
Ministers press them for the kind of unequivocal answers that will protect them from criticism. Scientists cover themselves by giving equivocal answers, which reflect the uncertainty of the science. The Government responds by avoiding any decision for which it would have to take political responsibility, until the pressure of events becomes irresistible, when it lurches off in a new direction.
Plan A was published on March 3. It concentrated on ensuring the provision of medical and other essential services. It relied on advice and guidance to the public, not coercion. The Government stood out against the authoritarian and indiscriminate measures which were being applied in Italy, and later in other European countries.
Plan B was an abrupt U-turn. On March 18, the Government announced the closure of schools. On March 20, pubs, cafes and restaurants were added. Finally, it announced the full lockdown on the evening of March 23.
That was a last-minute decision made that afternoon, for which the Government had made no preparations at all. It had not included a lockdown power in the Coronavirus Bill which was then going through Parliament.
Instead, it was forced to make legally questionable use of public health legislation designed to control the movements of infected people, not healthy ones. Even then, it took another three days to prepare the regulations, and meanwhile pretended that they were in force when they were not.
Judging by its minutes, Sage was unenthusiastic about closing down the hospitality industry, forbidding large gatherings or closing schools. From an early stage, it had pointed out that the real threat was to people over 70 and those with serious underlying medical conditions. Since March 5 they had been advising the Government to ‘cocoon’ those people, and others who either had the disease or lived in the same household.
Sage appears to have envisaged guidance rather than compulsion. ‘Citizens’, the behavioural scientists advised, ‘should be treated as rational actors, capable of taking decisions for themselves and managing personal risk.’ If this advice had been followed, it would have left almost all the economically active members of the population free to earn their livings and sustain the economy.
Professor Neil Ferguson. Click to enlarge
Indiscriminate lockdown was a panic response to the now-notorious statistical model produced on March 16 by Professor Neil Ferguson’s team at Imperial College. Panic responses leave little room for reflection. No serious consideration appears to have been given to the potentially catastrophic side effects. In fact, the Imperial team did identify the main problem about a lockdown. In an earlier report to Sage, they had pointed out that once a disease had taken hold in a population, ‘measures which are too effective merely push all transmission to the period after they are lifted, giving a delay but no substantial reduction in either peak incidence or overall attack rate’.
They repeated this view when they recommended a lockdown on March 16 and said that to be effective, it would need to be maintained until a vaccine was available, ‘potentially 18 months or more’. They pointed out that this would involve ‘enormous’ social and economic costs which might themselves have a significant impact on health and wellbeing.
The Government justified its Plan B as a temporary measure designed only to delay the peak until the NHS’s intensive care capacity had caught up.
But when it came to Plan C, which was unveiled on May 10, they forgot all about that. By then the NHS had caught up, mainly as a result of the Government’s one undoubted achievement, namely the rapid increase in the country’s critical care capacity. The Government dropped ‘Protect the NHS’ from its slogan. The NHS was saved.
But instead of lifting the lockdown, it merely nibbled at its edges, announcing that its essential features would remain in place for weeks or months. No rational explanation was ever offered. But the logic of its position was that the lockdown would have to continue indefinitely.
‘Christ!’ the Prime Minister is reported to have said when Chancellor Rishi Sunak and Business Secretary Alok Sharma explained the economic consequences to him three weeks later on June 2. We were heading for an economic catastrophe: gross domestic product down by more than a fifth and falling; 3.5 million jobs set to be lost in the hospitality industry alone; unemployment already up to two million; several million businesses snuffed out; job openings for a generation of young people extinguished.
Why was the PM so surprised? What did he expect to happen if he closed down the economy for several months and conducted a scorched-earth campaign against the rest of our national life? The only plausible explanation was that he had never properly thought about it.
So we moved to Plan D, announced on June 10, which involved a general return to work. But in many areas the return was stymied by the Government’s two-metre physical distancing rule. The rule never had any rational basis. Very few other countries have it. The World Health Organisation recommends one metre.
Experiments by the Department of Health (reviewed by Sage) indicate that the risk of airborne transmission is low outside a healthcare setting. It is being maintained because the Government wants scientific cover and Sage cannot rule out some risk that prolonged face-to-face contact at less than two metres might cause some infection. No one in government was grown-up enough to confront the real issue: does a low risk justify a huge economic cost?
Finally, there is the ultimate absurdity of the quarantine recently imposed on incoming travellers, which the Government has admitted was not based on any scientific advice, but simply (it seems) on the mistaken belief that the public would applaud it.
The Government is now trying to backtrack by negotiating ‘air bridges’ with other countries. But it does not need to negotiate anything. This is a problem of our creation. We can simply lift the restriction at our end. Like so many of the Government’s measures, it is being maintained simply in order to avoid admitting that it was a mistake.
I have had no political allegiance for many years. I have observed the coming and going of governments of one party or another with equal indifference. But it is hard to be indifferent to what is happening now. You have to go back to the early 1930s to find a British Cabinet as devoid of talent as this one.
The Prime Minister, who in practice makes most of the decisions, has low political cunning but no governmental skills whatever. He is incapable of studying a complex problem in depth. He thinks as he speaks – in slogans.
These people have no idea what they are doing, because they are unable to think about more than one thing at a time or to look further ahead than the end of their noses. Yet they wield awesome power. They are destroying our economy, our cultural life and our children’s education in a fit of absent-mindedness.
I always wondered why government did nothing fr the people except lie and harass them for more and more taxes, i thought they were just idiots
But a statement by Greville Janners bodyguard/driver said our politicians are just puppets controlled by the Board of British deputies, who take their orders from rothschild and the jews
This is the only rational explanation of why they are so incompetent,
a classic case is a university dropout failed rent boy failed solicitor failed pop musician failed politician Tony Blair,, said by experts to be the biggest failure since Winston Churchill
but they are all failures
So what is to be done? Governments are failing across the world. Leadership qualities are sadly lacking with the only stand out global leader being the West’s arch enemy Vladimir Putin. It seems clear from the multitude of comments I see on alt media sites, that Putin has a growing level of support from all quarters. Why is this? Maybe it is because rational people are comparing what he says and does with what other world leaders say and do. There is no comparison. The world which Putin is calling for, is the world the majority of people across the world want to see. Traditional values, an underlying cultural spirituality, mutually agreed cooperation with all countries being treated with respect, and finally a planet where war is the last resort, not the first thing on the agenda for self interested reasons.
The world needs more like leaders Putin who put their country, their people, and the good of the planet as their priority.
Another “plausible” explanation is that Johnson knew exactly what he was doing……and all this stuff is connected to building up conditions “suitable” for creating another war…..
Either way,give it a decade or so and we will know the answer to that.
Post ww3 and the conditions should be ripe for Israel to invade Lebanon and secure further water resources…..of course “the Jews will STILL be acting as victims”.
Another country were 23 March was a big thing. Remember, the WHO started this farce at 30 January.
30 January 1933 was the day Hitler came to power and on 23 March, with the enabling act, he came to absolute power.
In the Netherlands we saw the lockdown law come into force on the 23rd as well.
This is all scripted by the same fascists who brought Hitler to power, a puppet.
I can’t help it but smile after finishing reading the above article. All the observed actions of the British politicians managing the covid19 mirrored exactly here in my country. In the same sequence as well! Except for the 2m social distancing, where we are asked to maintain 1m social distancing.
I am making an early conclusion@observation that modern day politicians, regardless of country of origin are certified nincompoops and certainly, qualified to be labelled as politicians.
I disagree. The people behind the Covid psyop know exactly what they are doing.
The psyop is in fact the cover for the rolling out of their New World Order as announced by the World Economic Forum on June 3, in the forum of speakers featuring Forum Chairman Klaus Schwab, Prince Charles, UN secretary General António Guterres, and IMF Managing Director, Kristalina Georgieva.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pfVdMWzKwjc&t=58s
They called that session “the launching pad of the Great Reset”. To know what is going on and why you have to listen over and over again to the words from various points of view in that session without getting brainwashed, you will find that one point of view which these people and our governments have all consented to, is for a “greener, smarter, and fairer” world, remaking us and everything we touch according to their designs, and to halt what they call “runaway climate change, unsustainable levels of inequality, and the lawlessness of cyber space”. (Look out TS, you may be next.)
They want to rebuild the world for more “social cohesion, fairness, inclusion, and equality”, and to rid it of nationalism and all obstacles to their globalist and socialist plans, and that is precisely why they cannot tolerate any real individualism, or individual opposition, including “FAIRNESS”, “INCLUSION”, and “EQUALITY” especially with such things as free speech, criticism, and opposition. That is why they have to shut down one internet site after another for fear of exposure of their machinations. That is why they have to manufacture one fake crisis after another from CO2 climate peril, 9/11, to the Covid Plandemic. That is why we are not included in their elite inner circles, because not only would we oppose the corrupt and heinous means they use to bring about their changes, but we would also continue to challenge the veracity of their assessment of the problems and the efficacy of their solutions. That is why this new order cabal is essentially made up of modified Marxists, ruthless oligarchs, puppet politicians, and all sorts of dreamers who feel that they are unable to build their utopia without completely demolishing the present order, as they did in Russia and in China when they introduced communism.
Bozo the clown, otherwise known as Boris the Downing Street monkey, does whatever Rothschild tells him, but even the satanic Rothschild went too far this time.
Where’s this deadly plague that nobody has any immunity to and that’s going to remain a threat until Bozo’s party finally gets thrown out? I haven’t seen it. Nobody I know has had it.
The truth is that IT DOESN’T EXIST.
If we ignore the lies of “so many deaths from cause A, so many from B” and just look at the the total deaths from all causes, we find it’s just a normal ‘flu season. Old people in poor health die all the time, to be replaced by an equal or greater number of births. It’s called life and death, and it comes to us all sooner or later.
If there really was a “new” disease, deaths would have increased significantly, but they haven’t. As someone said on another site, a new deadly disease would be “as well as” and NOT “instead of”.
Take note of a recent speech by Pwince Charles….this nincompoop insists mass alien immigration enriches countries….he says this against all the accumulating evidence…..it is totally bizarre!!.
Unless of course there is something else at work here….AND THERE IS.
For example just yesterday six Scottish people had their lives enriched by being violently stabbed by one of these enriching illegal invaders (called “asylum seekers” by the elites Daily Mail).
SO IT IS NOT A COINCIDENCE THAT THIS HALFWIT was circumcised by a Jewish rabbi…..not at all.
It is rather like the “Let them eat cake” scenario….The idiot Charles is so far out of touch that he can say that the alien invasion is “enriching”….
AND HE GETS AWAY WITH IT……the fawning media allows the idiot to get away with it without a shred of criticism…..
These Windsors have got to go and a new dynasty established if people wish to retain the monarchy.
Just to cap it all off….A TRANSVESTITE is routinely featured in the press (“Lady Campbell” or something like that) as a qualified royal watcher.Not surprising is it…when you consider the fact that the Marrano SATANIST pedophile Jimmy Saville was a regular at Buckingheim Palace…..
THAT event was a victory for the internet because without it….THE MSM would STILL be covering things up.
Every single cause has its’ effect. The cognitive dissonance is amazing, but even that wears thin as people (all of us) catch on. The human race is (by definition) discriminating and racist. OMG!!!
Laugh or cry, ladies choice.
“I disagree. The people behind the Covid psyop know exactly what they are doing.”
Agree.
The Mail is party of the faux opposition. The “right” of the “right”/”left” dialectic.
I wish British people didn’t defer to titled “sirs”, lords”, “Nobel laureates”, establishment awarded PhDs, and Uncle Tom Cobley…
How true Barney. They made news of the common death. And as people doesn’t contemplate their own death, only others in crime-drama, they get shit scared when something invisible could reach them, arbitrarily. And invisible it was, yes so invisible no one have seen it. One can say they made people conscious of their own eventual death, and then handed them the solution. Its almost like posed a problem, and then there is a reaction, on which a solution was already prepared, people just went along, like any business proposal. The thing is just, that what they have been sold, isn’t gonna save them, cause physically, they dont need to be saved. But as they now live on, after death has taken its usual toll, they think themselves saved by the measures, and praise their government in stoppning death!
Ditto to comments by Fred B, Barney, Simon Smith, and others who see that bankster Jews behind the Covid psyop know exactly what they are doing.
The evils aren’t the result of politicians being stupid. It’s the result of politicians being used as puppets by bankster Jews. Banksters use front men, front groups, and puppets so that the puppet gets blamed instead of the bankster pulling his strings.