Do you remember the Tory party of old? The one that really loved the idea of individual freedom and a smaller state taking less of your money in tax and not telling you what you should or should not do. I rather forget when the rot set in but today the Tories have abandoned the idea of a small state and as for individual liberty, this Government revels in destroying it. On the basis of no hard data whatsoever, we are, on the one hand, ordered to mask up and not meet more than five friends. But on the other hand, we are “strongly encouraged” to go back to working in offices (without masks and in groups of whatever size) whether we like it or not.
I refuse to wear a mask. My anger rises when it is suggested that I must applaud the NHS or that my Mrs must go into work to do tasks she can happily do from home. I do not want to have to admit that my name is Anthony Blair and hand out my mother-in-law’s mobile when I go into a pub. And I do not want to have to pay more in tax to pay for all of this nonsense including the ludicrous new Covid Marshals. But if one complains about these pointless restrictions on our liberty, we are slated.
Tory MP Simon Hoare, a little man who spends most of his time trying to de-rail the Brexit he was elected to push through, said of those who have civil liberties objections to Covid restrictions: “They are the sort of people who would probably say at the height of the Black Death, it is perfectly reasonable to keep wild rats as pets.” Hoare was at Oxford so dare one point out to a man who must be a bit of an intellectual that at the time of the Black Death no-one thought that the disease was transmitted by fleas on either rats or, as is thought by many historians now, on humans? Back in 1350, they blamed the disease on planetary alignment or viewed it as a punishment from God. The idea that a rat flea might be to blame only gained traction in the later nineteenth century. So Simon lets score you a Delta minus on your historical imagery.
The Black Death killed c45-50% of Western Europeans and almost 60% of those in London. In the village in which I live now, the population fell from 650 to 300. The UK has one of the higher Covid death rates in Europe – that is to say c0.06% of the population. Hoare’s imagery grows ever more ludicrous. Mr Hoare really is not a very bright spark.
But does he really think that questioning whether we must wear a mask or social distance on a train or support the lockdown is that insane? The Covid death rates in Sweden are far lower than in Spain, France or Britain yet it had almost no lockdown and had curtailed basic liberties far less than we have. There seems no correlation between the severity of lockdown measures and death rates anywhere in the world. Yet those of us who choose freedom, and less economic carnage, are slammed by pathetic Tories like Mr Hoare as almost welcoming mass deaths. How odd.
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