Ten ways Britain has gone mad in 2020

It bruises the brain to catalogue the terrible and crazy actions of the British government in 2020, but here are just a few of the bizarre episodes in this year of hysteria and mind-boggling incompetence:

1 ‘Professor’ Neil Ferguson’s predictions

Professor Pantsdown is one of the main villains of 2020. It was his computer modelling, out by a factor of 10, as Nobel Laureate Stanford Professor Michael Levitt pointed out at the time, that was more responsible than anything for Joker Johnson’s disastrous lockdown (instigated after infection rates had started falling). Sheep-murderer Ferguson’s CV should have meant he wasn’t listened to within a country mile of SW1. This is a man who said in the past:

50,000 would die from mad cow disease. 

The final UK toll was 177.

150 million would die from bird flu.

In eventuality, there were 282 worldwide. 

There would be 65,000 swine-flu fatalities.

There were 457. 

2 Nightingale hospitals

Seven ‘Nightingale’ hospitals were quickly set up at enormous expense… and never used. Well, the London one saw about a dozen patients but that was it. All they did was create alarmism.

3 Travel quarantines

These were introduced by the government three months after the peak of the pandemic, when Covid deaths were below another 15 things more likely to kill you. They were based on the notion of punishing countries who had more than 20 in 100,000 people infected. So you’d have to go there, meet that 1 in 5,000, get infected by them, then become symptomatic and come back and spread it around. While none of these things is impossible, the chances of all happening are absolutely tiny. And for many months, Britain actually had a higher infection rate than many of the countries on the quarantine list! The result of the quarantines has been the destruction of the airline industry, and many thousands of jobs attendant to it.

4 Local lockdowns 

As Ivor Cummins and many others point out till they’re blue in the face, lockdowns do not work. Compare town by town, US State by US State or country by country, death rates are no lower if there is a lockdown - in fact they’re usually higher. As Keir Starmer observed, 19 out of 20 English areas subject to local lockdowns saw their infections rates go up! Bolton saw a particularly big rise in rates (largely because of more tests, most of which are asymptomatic or mild cases) and false positives. All they do is shatter minds and businesses.

5 Masks 

Our crackpot government decided to make masks mandatory months after the peak of the pandemic. Thousands of non-masked shop workers had been serving customers, mostly not masked either, for months, and at the height of the pandemic. Virtually no shop workers became unwell! Masks make no difference to controlling Covid anyway, as the WHO previously said, and just like lockdowns, travel quarantines and social distancing, do almost nothing to alter the long-term death rate. They just make the world look diseased and scary.

6 Covid patrols / send the army in

Johnson seemed to lose more of his marbles the longer the year went on. Last month he introduced the idea of Covid marshals, stupid little jobsworths designed to sow social division and make your life even worse than it is now. And then, under his Svengali Cummings’ command, he threatened to send the army in to enforce restrictions! This is how dictators do things.

7 Rule of six

Another repugnantly anti-human instruction from bloodless robots like Michael Gove, this magic number was arrived at because it was deemed understandable. The mind boggles. Even Nicola Sturgeon, the tartan totalitarian, said that this should not include young children, but Westminster said no, children must be included in it too. Never mind that there was zero scientific evidence for it anyway, they went ahead and introduced it.

8 Blaming hospitality for infections

This government has declared all-out war on hospitality. Not content with shutting it down for three months, soon after it began to struggle into some sort of life, burdened with all sorts of expensive and unnecessary rules and regulations, it was hit once again, despite data showing that less than 5% of infections were being picked up in pubs and restaurants. Then there was the 10pm curfew which simply meant that masses of people piled out at the same time - and wrecked the income of pubs and restaurants.

9 Imprisoning students

Young people almost never get a bad dose of the virus, they shrug it off and often they don’t even know they’ve got it. It would be a good thing if thousands of students got Covid because this would build herd immunity, the only sure way to fight this bug, and once they’ve had it they can’t get it again and they can’t pass it on, thereby ensuring their grandparents can be confident that they can hug them. Instead, many are subject to draconian restrictions and locked up in their halls on punishment of fines or being thrown off their course. 

10 The national debt

The eye-watering national debt is added to, week by week, by this blundering, profligate administration, ploughing incredible amounts of money into the economy purely because of the calamitous mistakes they have made due to their relentless scaremongering and failed strategies. This stores up gargantuan problems for the future: growth will be slower, and taxpayers will be paying the bills of Rishi Sunak long after most of us have gone to our graves. Paying interest on debt will continue to dwarf what we spend on defence and education.

It’s difficult to see how the government could have reacted any worse to this problem. It is almost surreal how every decision at every point of this crisis has not so much been totally wrong as completely laughable - were the results not so tragic. In a year of madness, it’s the British people who have been sent especially mad by their irresponsible, witless, pitiful rulers.