Cassandra Voices

Tag: Aneurin Bevan

  • The Importance of Public Debate

    At a recent debate organised by the English-Speaking Union (ESU) at its HQ, Dartmouth House in London, we considered whether the British government’s response to Covid placed too great a priority on security rather than liberty. Naturally I took the liberty side of the argument.

    I expressed the fear that such a public forum as the ESU had convened could represent an interregnum, or lull in the storm, but hope springs eternal.

    A central hallmark of a democracy is freedom of speech. In terms of the First Amendment to the US Constitution, Anthony Lewis argued free speech should act as a search engine for the truth. Ronald Dworkin argued that free speech is a condition for legitimate government, and a counterweight to hysteria and unreason. Stephen Sedley, an eminent English judge, called it the lifeblood of a democracy. Freedom of speech also opens government and private enterprise to intense scrutiny. Above all, it encourages diversity and tolerance.

    Christopher Hitchens.

    Right to Ridicule

    It is not for the faint of heart. Christopher Hitchens remarked that freedom to speak inoffensively is meaningless, while Dworkin insisted on a right to ridicule.

    The overarching argument for speech rights was expressed beautifully in extremis by Hitchens when he said, ‘if you disagree with me that is your prerogative, so stand in line while I, rhetorically, kick your ass.’

    Conflict is resolved best through argument with the truth sacrosanct, ideally via open-ended public debate.

    This should not merely be rhetoric, but include arguments of substance. And the ESU provides, or can provide, that forum. Perhaps uniquely so. Indeed, it was heartening to encounter a multi-generational debate that included insightful youthful interventions.

    In retrospect, Hitchens represents the tail end of a tradition beginning with his hero Thomas Paine, mediated through his other great hero George Orwell, and culminating in him through a rich tapestry of public intellectuals and journalists, who fundamentally believed the pen to be mightier than the sword: that speech and words matter.

    Alas today speech has degenerated in the popular press into public titillation and gossip. It is also noticeable that the great traditions of investigative journalism, evident during the golden era of the Washington Post under Katherine Graham and The Times under Harold Evans, is in serious decline. Today most investigative journalism is a sham. The intellectual culture of the press has been degraded beyond belief.

    Social media is now a form of speech-driven pornography, where legitimate and illegitimate expressions of speech are proving impossible to disentangle. Character assassination and casual defamation have become the order of the day. The Internet may be a force of liberation in some respects, but also permits public display of ever more bizarre and outlandish commentaries. Mark Zuckerberg has unleashed a Promethean conflagration that remains untamed.

    Today’s emphasis on brevity and soundbites in politics conceals how the truth often requires explanation, as it is often nuanced.

    Aneurin Bevan talking to a patient at Park Hospital, Manchester, the day the NHS came into being in 1948.

    Like paying a visit to Woolworths…

    Aneurin Bevan, as good an orator as Churchill, once remarked that listening to a speech from Labour leader Clement Atlee was like paying a visit to Woolworths: ‘everything was in its place, but nothing was above the value of sixpence.’ To be convincing speech should have the necessary brio to rouse an audience.

    From Jeremy Bentham’s Speech Acts, Jürgen Habermas, develops the crucial idea of Ideal Speech or Communicative Action. This is an idea that speech should be formal, and not tainted by an unthinking recourse to ideology. He also suggests that such dialogue in the tradition of the Enlightenment salon will provide technical outcomes that are also morally purposeful.

    In Communicative Action he wrote: ‘Speakers coordinate their action and pursuit of individual (or joint) goals based on a shared understanding that the goals are inherently reasonable or merit worthy.’

    It succeeds:

    insofar as the actors freely agree that their goal (or goals) is reasonable, that it merits cooperative behaviour. Communicative action is thus an inherently consensual form of social coordination in which actors “mobilise the potential for rationality” given with ordinary language and its telos of rationally motivated agreement.

    Although not all speech should have to be taken seriously, it is important that a forum such as Dartmouth House is maintained for popular shibboleths to be dismantled in public debate.

    George Orwell.

    Doublespeak

    So, propaganda should not be taken seriously, nor modes of advertising, without close and detailed inspection. The opinions of many putative experts fall under the same category. Certainly, a little knowledge is a dangerous thing.

    The use of language – however cloaked in notional expertise – to undermine freedoms is a very worrying development. The employment by officialdom of complex legal discourse and manipulation of language may represent the onset of what George Orwell referred to as ‘doublespeak’. This can be exposed in civilised public debate in a neutral forum.

    A certain degree of puff and blow will always be found among business-people. Advertising lubricates the wheels of commerce, but when almost non-existent standards permit multinational corporate entities, including the pharmaceutical sector, to fabricate, falsify and frankly lie, thus precipitating financial and environmental collapse, this may represent a return to the dark ages.

    Sadly, mainstream political debate has disintegrated. Notably, Donald Trump and Hilary Clinton engaged in a travesty of a public debate before the US Presidential election of 2016. It was more like a staged reality TV show. Its nearest equivalent was the format of a farcical game show, such as the Jerry Springer Show.

    Thus politics has become part of the entertainment industry. Despite his Classical education, Boris Johnson invokes Peppa Pig before business leaders.

    So, an unconditional respect for freedom of speech should be offset by an understanding that certain speech does not warrant protection. Nonsense is best resolved by forensic debate – cutting through crap in common parlance.

    Surveillance Capitalism

    The criminalisation of unpopular opinion is a worrying feature of our times, and it is ‘subversives’ such as Julian Assange – along with those who dared to hold a referendum in Catalonia – that are accused, prosecuted, and convicted of treason. It is these dissidents that need protection.

    Under the Facebook and Google dispensation people become products to be profiled and mined, a point made brilliantly in Shoshana Zuboff’s The Age of Surveillance Capitalism.

    Moreover, political correctness has also led to the intensification of extremism. I would argue that this includes attempts by the transgender lobby to ban esteemed academics from the airwaves or campuses. ‘No platforming’ undermines public debate, as do unsubstantiated complaints to academic authorities that lead to the removal of a radical professor.

    So, when in Georgetown University certain radical professors indicated they were far from unhappy at the death of the arch conservative Judge Scalia, their conservative colleagues sought their removal on the basis that the ‘snowflake’ generation of easily upset students would be offended at the disrespect.

    We must maintain a right to protest, engage in civil disobedience and crucially – in an increasingly controlled and technocratic age – the right to offer truth-bearing, fearless and independent criticism.

    KKK rally near Chicago in the 1920s.

    The Limits of Freedom of Expression

    Speech has its outer limits, where there is a clear and present danger of imminent lawless action. This tension is explored in Snyder v Phelps, where a fundamentalist Christian group demonstrated outside a gay serviceman’s funeral.

    Upholding speech rights, the Court concluded that:

    Westboro believes that America is morally flawed; many Americans might feel the same about Westboro. Westboro’s funeral picketing is certainly hurtful and its contribution to public discourse may be negligible. But Westboro addressed matters of public import on public property, in a peaceful manner, in full compliance with the guidance of local officials. The speech was indeed planned to coincide with Matthew Snyder’s funeral, but did not itself disrupt that funeral, and Westboro’s choice to conduct its picketing at that time and place did not alter the nature of its speech.

    Speech is powerful. It can stir people to action, move them to tears of both joy and sorrow, and—as it did here—inflict great pain. On the facts before us, we cannot react to that pain by punishing the speaker. As a Nation we have chosen a different course—to protect even hurtful speech on public issues to ensure that we do not stifle public debate. That choice requires that we shield Westboro from tort liability for its picketing in this case.

    Moreover, in Brandenburg v Ohio 359 U.S 44, the Court went so far as to protect even racial abuse at a Ku Klux Klan ‘rally’ held at a farm in Hamilton County.

    One film showed twelve hooded figures, some of whom carried firearms. They were gathered around a large wooden cross, which they burned. No one was present other than the participants and the newsmen who made the film. Most of the words uttered during the scene were incomprehensible when the film was projected, but scattered phrases could be understood that were derogatory of African-Americans and, in one instance of Jews.

    The Supreme Court concluded that this was speech protected under the First Amendment on the principle that the constitutional guarantees of free speech and free press do not permit a State to forbid or proscribe advocacy of the use of force or of law violation, except where such advocacy is directed to inciting or producing imminent lawless action and is likely to incite or produce such action.

    In contrast, the ECHR will not protect either racist speech or Holocaust denial. And even the ESU may feel the Americans went too far.

    But the detailed US decisions show how far the US courts are prepared to travel to protect speech. It is an important point that it is the speech we most dislike and most disagree with that needs the most protection.

    Village stocks in Bramhall, England c. 1900.

    Enemies of the People

    Whistle-blower legislation protects those who want to expose official corruption and protects speech. However, as I have found, the spectre of criminal prosecution under Official Secret’s legislation is always a suspensive and possible threat. Anyone blowing the whistle must evaluate the risk of prosecution, including the almost inevitable consequence of job loss and ostracism.

    Henrik Ibsen’s Enemies of the People – perhaps uniquely in his oeuvre – was overtly political. The premise is simple: a prominent and well-connected local engineer whose brother is the town mayor is asked to conduct a survey of the waters of the town. The town in question has become famous as a spa resort attracting a great deal of tourism, but when he tests the waters, he finds that they are polluted and informs the town and indeed his brother.

    It is the reaction to this that is interesting. Rather than lauding him and complimenting him for his finely attuned sense of ethics and correct analysis, they turn on him with ever-increasing ferocity. A storm of hatred is unleashed.

    He will destroy the local economy. Their livelihoods will be affected. The industry of the town will be negated. He is shunned, ostracised, victimised. His family is torn apart, and he becomes an ‘Enemy of the People’. The mob descend in all their unfettered glory. Sound familiar?

    Thus, we must protect freedom of speech as it vitalises a democracy, but we must also recognise the rules of civic discourse.

    Yet I fear that a great tradition of oracy, public communication, rationalist discourse and generalist interest is in decline: usurped by the purveyors of false information, false speech acts and blandishments.

    If the English-Speaking Union can revitalise the young with a passion for genuine public communication, it will be performing a great service, training a new generation of professionals in the essential and transferable skills of advocacy, public communication and, above all, respect for the truth.

    Feature Image: Presidential debate between John F. Kennedy and Richard Nixon for the 1960 election in the United States.

    The English-Speaking Union (ESU) is an international charity and membership organisation underpinned by Royal Charter working to give all young people – regardless of background – the speaking and listening skills and the cross-cultural understanding to enable them to thrive.  

    Our programmes are underpinned by over 100 years’ expertise in the field of debate and public speaking delivery, policy and research. 

    Founded in 1918 by the author and journalist Sir Evelyn Wrench, the ESU brings together and empowers people of all cultures and nationalities by building confidence and shaping communication skills, so that individuals can realise their full potential.  In our 36 branches in England and Wales and 54 international branches, the ESU carries out a variety of activities such as: competitions, debating, public speaking and student exchange programmes, teacher training, classroom outreach, research and scholarships. All of these encourage the effective use of the English language around the world.

    To find out more about our work, please go to: https://www.esu.org/ and so consider joining the ESU: https://www.esu.org/support-our-work/become-a-member/.  Please contact Matthew Christmas, Head of Engagement, if you would like to know more or to volunteer with us: matthew.christmas@esu.org.

    Dartmouth House, in the heart of Mayfair, is our International Headquarters and, as Covid recedes, we are delighted to be re-starting our regular public debates where we encourage civil discussion and informed debate where all ages can get involved. 

    The next Dartmouth House Debate is on Monday 09 May 2022 at 1830 hrs to debate the motion that “This House believes that cryptocurrency and NFTs are a hyped-up fad.” 

    We hope that will want to find out more and get involved with the ESU.

  • Covid-19: Unanswered Questions

    Confusion and fear are to be expected in novel situations where experience is limited; this should fade as understanding grows. Such is the natural cycle. When governments employ behavioural psychologists to induce fears in order to control and coerce the population, however, we have to question their motives and methods.

    Initially we were advised that a zoonotic virus crossed species: horseshoe bat to pangolin and then to humans, via the food chain. Ghastly images were shown nightly of a range of exotic creatures that Chinese people – portrayed in somewhat xenophobic terms because of their, to us, foreign tastes – supposedly enjoy consuming. This outbreak witnessed sagacious, and wealthy, heads knowingly saying ‘I told you so.’

    And apparently we can expect much more, and worse, in the future because of the ways in which we live and eat. Last year any question of whether it could have come from any other source was shot down as absurd by dubious fact checkers, and freighted with conspiracy theory fairy dust.

    This despite Wuhan containing a level 4 BSL laboratory, and three members of its staff being hospitalised in November 2019 with coronavirus-like respiratory symptoms. Furthermore, this same laboratory was conducting gain of function research into coronaviruses, through a grant form EcoHealth Alliance, an organisation funded by U.S. National Institutes for Health. This type of research using viruses was banned by the Obama administration as being too risky.

    Weaponising

    This same research is not far removed from the process of weaponising a pathogenic organism. So why did NIH fund this laboratory to carry out this type of research, and who else knew of the potential risks, and incentives, for finding a novel infective agent and researching possible treatments and vaccines?

    The first we in the West learnt about any of this came from the videos on TV and social media of people dropping dead in the street – in hindsight clearly not coronavirus cases – and the Chinese locking down it citizens. Next there was Italy, with coffins being carted away by military trucks.

    These were all carefully orchestrated publicity stunts, but who was responsible? Who decided to broadcast uncritically these sensational images? The world took note, a pandemic was declared and governments around the world, almost uniformly, imposed harsh and unprecedented restrictive measures on their citizens.

    In Britain the initial plan was to protect the vulnerable, through cocooning, whilst awaiting herd immunity in the young. But there followed a swift turnaround in the face of public outcry. In Europe only Sweden resisted the clamour to lockdown and was pilloried in the international media. ‘Sweden has become the World’s Cautionary Tale’ declared The New York Times in July, 2020.

    The British government’s approach was strongly influenced by the epidemiological modelling of Imperial College’s Professor Neil Ferguson, of previous forecasting fiascos. For example, he predicted three to four million deaths from Swine Flu in 2009, which ultimately resulted in less than 300,000 global fatalities.

    Ferguson’s Imperial paper predicted 500,000 deaths in the U.K. in an unmitigated scenario, and on March 20th, told the New York Times that the ‘best case outcome’ for the U.S. was a death toll of 1.1 million, rising to 2.2 million in a worst case scenario. As of June, the U.S. has seen just over 600,000 deaths, and the U.K. 127,945, in circumstances where the attribution of death to Covid-19 is often deceptive.

    Further doom and gloom laden scenarios was provided by Professor Christian Drosten, head of the institute of virology, Charite university hospital, Berlin, while alternate modelling provided by Professor Michael Levitt, Stanford University and Nobel laureate was ignored.

    PCR Testing

    Dorsten’s main contribution to this story is his paper ‘Detection of 2019 novel corona virus by real time RT-PCR’ outlining the basis for the widely used Drosten-PCR test that has been criticised for multiple errors, and the haste with which it was published. This test is now the most widely used diagnostic test for Sars-CoV2.

    This is despite its invenor Kary Mullis’s – Nobel laureate for chemistry for his work with PCR – stating unequivocally ‘it doesn’t tell you if you are sick’.

    https://twitter.com/zaidzamanhamid/status/1384873889591873536

    There are a number of criticisms of the Drosten method in that he reportedly developed it using partial genetic sequences provided by the Chinese, in conjunction with sequences from other corona viruses. Furthermore, the test which according to Kary Mullis is a quantitative test, is not reported to clinicians this way.

    Instead a qualitative result ‘detected’ or ’not detected’ is reported without giving the cycle threshold, even after the WHO suggested physicians should be given this figure. The significance of the cycle threshold harks back to Kary Mullis’s ‘it doesn’t tell you if you are sick.’ Even Dr Anthony Fauci of the NIAID (National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases) has stated that at ct values of greater than 35 it is unlikely that any live virus is present in the patient.

    https://twitter.com/jimgris/status/1326518250386063361?lang=en

    Why then did Irish laboratories use ct values as high as 45? And why did we go from testing inpatients with PCR, knowing the false positive rate, to the community setting and especially the asymptomatic, given asymptomatics are often ‘false positives’, leading to an inflated ‘case’ count.

    One has to wonder if the state’s spending of an estimated €400 million on PCR testing has been a case of noses in the trough not wanting to avoid the public smelling the coffee. Who were the people with vested or conflicted interests in this issue?

    Churchillian Speeches

    Most Western governments, including Australia and New Zealand, paraded their respective Prime Ministers before the cameras to make speeches of Churchillian gravity, implicitly likening the threat of Sars-CoV2 to World War II. Leo Varadkar even paraphrased Churchill in his first speech to the nation -’never will so many ask so much of so few,’ before imposing unprecedented draconian lockdown measures, based on fear.

    Along the way we have heard words of caution from notable academics including Stanford Professors John Ioannidis and Jay Bhattacharya, as well as Professor Sunetra Gupta of Oxford University. But these voices were hardly ever heard on Irish mainstream media.

    These authorities cautioned that measures would disproportionately hurt the poor and vulnerable; that severe illness was mainly confined to a recognisable cohort, and that there was no evidence for the efficacy of lockdown measures.

    Nobody listened. Instead the government closed schools, prevented people from earning a living, stopped all cultural and sporting activity, prohibited religious worship and confined travel to within five kilometres of home.

    For months elderly people languished alone in nursing homes and hospitals, some dying alone; women gave birth without their partners; funeral rites were severely curtailed, as basic civil rights were completely ignored in response to an illness with an estimated infection fatality rate of 0.05% for anyone under the age of seventy years.

    Every night the state broadcaster became the government’s harbinger of doom with the recitation of nightly death tolls. What purpose other than ratcheting up of fear did this serve?

    Through the diligent questioning of Michael McNamara TD, however, we know that the reported mortality figures included anyone testing positive in the previous twenty-eight days with a PCR test, no matter what their underlying condition. Deaths unassociated with Sars-CoV2 were obviously irrelevant.

    They turned out to be very relevant as the CSO annual death figures of 6.4 per 1000, which were little different to previous years, and even less than 2013. Why then, when death figures dropped, did reporting switch to the spurious concept of ‘cases’, defined by a positive PCR test? Why did the Irish government shamefully enlist the services of RTE in terrifying the nation, and why did the state broadcaster acquiesce? Answers on the back of a postcard…

    Disproportionately Affected

    The message ‘we are all in this together’ was a big lie. The disease disproportionately killed people over the age of eighty, especially those in nursing homes, many of whom were needlessly infected after being transferred to hospitals with testing withdrawn at the height of the pandemic in spring 2020. The obese, those with diabetes, chronic heart and lung diseases are also disproportionately affected.

    These pre-existing morbidities are more prevalent among lower socioeconomic groups in society. So we were clearly never all in this together.

    Civil servants, including politicians and the medical profession, those working in IT and for media corporations, could easily work from home, but nearly half a million people had to stop work for the duration, especially those in the tourism and hospitality sectors. These are mainly young people, and like children, most would only have been mildly effected by the virus. So why were they forced to suffer unnecessarily?

    Moreover, why did small retail outlets have to close for months on end, while off licenses and fast food chains were deemed essential services?!

    States of Fear

    The kind of Propaganda devised by Sigmund Freud’s grandson Edward Bernays who infamously made it fashionable for women to smoke, was evident in the government’s manipulation of the figures, and the media’s delivery. Bernays wrote in Propaganda (1928) ‘The conscious and intelligent manipulation of the organised habits and opinions of the masses is an important element in democratic society.’

    A host of celebrity scientists appeared, many with Conor McGregor levels of empathy, only better elocution, a gentler demeanour and less tattoos. Trite experiments were undertaken on popular TV shows, where we found dour funereal forecasts from infectious disease experts, who were invariably wrong in their predictions, and inane squeaking from a misplaced neuroscience.

    All of these ‘experts’ sang in unison. Dissenting voices were heard briefly and infrequently. Some lost their jobs merely for disagreeing with the bull-in-a-china shop approach taken by the HSE/NPHET/government.

    In her new book States of Fear Laura Dodsworth outlines how the UK government used behavioural psychologists, probably via their Nudge unit, to control the population through the deployment of carefully selected ‘experts’ and repetitive messaging on news broadcasting.

    This was substantiated in the recent testimonies by Dominic Cummings, the former chief adviser to Boris Johnson. ISAG were also familiar with scaremongering techniques, as intercepted emails highlight their tactic of targeting and discrediting individuals, and keeping fear ramped up as a tool in their ZeroCovid campaign.

    To quote Bernays again ‘there are invisible rulers who control the destinies of millions. It is not generally realised to what extent the words and actions of our most influential public men are dictated by shrewd persons operating behind the scene.’

    Using this sinister playbook, between them NPHET, ISAG and the government managed to sow a level of fear, suspicion and division in society that may take years to unravel.

    Flatten the Curve?

    Despite all the hype around flattening the curve to save the health service at the beginning of the pandemic, and the use of draconian measures to do so, alas nothing was done to treat patients at home.

    Several readily available, cheap and relatively safe products, were hypothesised to have positive benefits in the early stages of a Sars-CoV2 infection, but there were systematic efforts to steer physicians away from these.

    The ICGP guidelines for GPs on the treatment of early Sars-CoV2 amounts to do nothing, and wait for patients to get better, or if they fall really ill send them into hospital. Some doctors in the USA lost their licenses for prescribing these medications, and others in Ireland faced censure by the Medical Council.

    According to physicians like Peter McCullough, Professor of Medicine at Baylor University, Texas in conjunction with AAPS (The association of American Physicians and Surgeons), and separately Dr Pierre Kory of FLCCCA (Front Line Covid Critical Care Alliance) Sars-CoV2 was empirically treatable, especially in that first week before the patient became very unwell.

    https://vimeo.com/560523610

    So, despite a concerted effort to vilify them, they treated their patients. Why did Irish GPs, save for a few, fail to do so?

    In doing nothing did many patients needlessly died? With our widespread application of lockdowns and our disregard for focused protection measures, as advocated by the Great Barrington Declaration (which has garnered 850,000 signatures, including 43,000 from medical practitioners) coupled with our refusal to at least try and treat patients, have we done a great disservice to our patients?

    Silencing of Dissent

    Sweden did not adopt anything like the same draconian measures, and their economy and society has not been disrupted to anything like the same extent as Ireland’s. Yet their mortality figures compare favourably, especially when adjusted for the relative age of each population.

    Perhaps one of the main reasons for the concerted campaign to ensure that no other treatments were deemed suitable for the early treatment or prevention of the disease was the FDA criterion for an EUA (emergency use exemption).  No such exemption would have been granted to a product in such an early stage of development, without animal or human study data, except in what are deemed to be extraordinary circumstances.

    €26 billion – the amount Pfizer expects to earn this year after producing the first Covid-19 vaccine – might buy a lot of scientific validation, and political influence.

    The undue haste with which these vaccines have been rolled out demands sceptical enquiry, especially in relation to two particular cohorts: pregnant women and children. As clinicians we generally exercise extreme caution in these groups.

    So why is it that for a condition with an overall IFR of 0.15% have we discarded this caution? Linking vaccination status to the right to work, travel, attend cultural and sporting events is divisive, coercing those who wish to exercise a degree of caution and/or exercise autonomy over their health.

    Without the questionable concept that is asymptomatic spread, there is no justification for vaccinating anyone in low risk groups, and certainly no justification for using bully tactics.

    Despite all these glaring questions, there has been a deafening silence from the medical profession in Ireland, and those that have spoken out have been quickly silenced. Is this how we are going to deal with complex issues in future? Adopting binary, categorical approaches without nuance leaves no room for debate.

    RTE have paid lip service to the notion of an informed debate, hosting Martin Feeley and then later pitching Professors John Lee and Sunetra Gupta into debate with hand-picked stalwarts.

    Moneybags

    In Ireland today scepticism is viewed as a contagion to be eradicated, with compliance seen as the perfect state of health. As a nation we must ask: why have so many been so quiet; why has fear replaced reason, and groupthink taken over once again?

    One must question the role of doctors ‘stuffing their mouths with gold’ as Aneurin Bevan put it in relation to British doctors at the inception of the NHS. A quick look at the 2019 PCRS payments to GPs shows a healthy €85 million in government expenditure. This, however, mushroomed to over €200 million for the same period in 2020.

    Some were clearly making a killing during the pandemic. And whose idea was it to advise doctors not to see patients face-to-face during the pandemic? If a doctor won’t see you who will?

    Further to this windfall will be vaccination payments at a cool €60 per patient. Is it any wonder GPs want everyone vaccinated?

    There may even be boosters for variants required for everyone on the planet! The media should be asking the question: who is benefitting from this Monty-Pythonesque situation?

    Certainly any government with the slightest authoritarian bent, which it transpires appears to be most Western ‘democracies’. It really is worrying how little opposition there has been to Chinese-inspired lockdowns, with opponents dismissed as a far right fringe – even by the apparently left-wing opposition – despite the obvious damage these policies have done to the poorest, who were also least protected by the measures.

    Why did so many European governments fall into line so quickly, when even a passing familiarity with EU politics would indicate that it can take years for Member States to agree on the number of legs that the average cow possesses?

    If you intuit that something is just not right, and baulk at jingoistic phrases like ‘the new normal’ and ‘build back better’ ask yourself cui bono or ‘who benefits’, and don’t let the fear of being labelled a ‘conspiracy theorist’ dissuade you from asking reasonable questions.

    Feature Image: Daniele Idini