“LOCKDOWNS” –
CLUELESS PANIC OR CUNNING PLAN? THE
EVIDENCE STACKS UP!
With the British
Government’s latest doubling down on Lockdown it is worth remembering that back
before the 13th March this Government was making reassuring noises
that Coronavirus was not going to be unmanageable. There was talk in the media
of “herd immunity” and of taking the minimum precautions necessary to make sure
that we can carry on as much as possible just like Sweden has done.
Boris was then reported
as having had a row with Priti Patel, Home Secretary, because she wanted to
have genuine quarantining measures to stop people coming into the country from
destinations where the Coronavirus seemed to have become quite widespread (such
as Northern Italy and Wuhan Province!).
Boris was reported as angrily refusing to agree to any quarantining
measures.
Later the Guardian
reported that between the 1st January and the 23rd March,
the Government had allowed over 18 million international travellers to come
into the country without any checks or restrictions and also without being
tested.
Then also the
British Government was saying that big public events, like the Cheltenham Horse
Racing Festival and football matches and other sporting and musical events,
could carry on. That was all up to the 13th March. On that Friday the
thirteenth the Government publicity went from don’t panic to full panic!
As I explained in
my speech on the 19th September at the rally in Trafalgar Square,
there are a number of inconsistencies with the narrative that the Government
panicked rather than planned.
You could have found my
speech here >>> https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bm2PzxD-MiU&feature=emb_logo but it looks like the soundtrack has been censored!
Here is another recording >>>
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aQZzRBNQoc8&t=1s
In particular I was
saying, in that speech, that the persistent discrepancies between what was
being publically announced about restrictions and what the law said, began on
Day 1 with Boris’ announcement, on the 23rd March, that he was locking
down the country with immediate effect, when he had no legal power to do so at
all.
The Government then
produced a nearly 370 page draft Bill (which must have taken weeks to write),
which became the Coronavirus Act 2020.
They rammed it through Parliament, without Parliament having a chance to
scrutinise it.
Almost immediately
after getting the Coronavirus Act through, with its extraordinary wide-ranging ‘Enabling
Act’ powers, allowing Ministers, by diktat, to re-write the Law, the Government
produced its Regulations under the Public Health (Control of Diseases Act)
1984.
Therefore they
clearly didn’t need to panic Parliament into passing the Coronavirus Act!
They also did not
need to get Parliament to pass that Act for an even more striking reason. There was already an emergency powers act on
the Statute Book! The Civil Contingencies Act!
They could have easily activated these powers simply by declaring a ‘State
of Emergency’. The consequence of that
however would have been that Parliament retained the right to supervise what
the Government was doing. There would
therefore have been public debate on what regulations and rules the public were
being subjected to.
There are other discrepancies
from the Government’s narrative which is that they were panicked into last
minute panic measures in order to tackle the global pandemic. This narrative now
appears increasingly threadbare, given the glaring lack of huge numbers of
deaths caused by the Coronavirus. This has caused the Government to need to try
to bump up the figures by providing figures for deaths from “Causes associated
with Coronavirus”, rather than deaths caused by it.
The British
Government also hugely increased the numbers of dead by NHS England on the 19th
March by ordering the elderly “bed-blockers” to be discharged from hospital and
compulsorily put into old people’s homes, even if they were known to have
Coronavirus, thus deliberately or recklessly spreading the disease to our old
people’s homes in England!
The narrative of
panic (rather than cunning plan) was also undermined by the fact that the
Government got Ofcom to order the mainstream media not to report “contrary
narratives”. The Free Speech Union is
bringing a Judicial Review of this, which you can read about if you follow this
link >>> https://lockdownsceptics.org/2020/06/23/latest-news-63/
Now we have a
further piece of the jigsaw (which adds to the idea that the Government was
planning not panicking).
It has now come out
that the Government entered into the largest advertising deal ever entered into
by a British Government. This was signed off on the 2nd March and
was to manage the Government’s communications strategy to sell Lockdown to the
public.
In my view it is
highly significant that this deal was signed off on the 2nd March,
as anyone familiar with Government contracting processes would know that
negotiations would have started many weeks before. It follows that the Government was planning
much of what it has since done with Lockdown, by the latest in the middle of
February, and probably at least six weeks earlier – ie in mid January - despite
telling us the opposite!
There are still big
pieces of the jigsaw puzzle missing to fully understand what the Government was
up to, but as time goes on more will become known. I suspect that when
awareness of what has happened, and what destruction to our economy, liberties and life chances, becomes widespread then public anger will grow
into an unquenchable rage!.
Below is the
Telegraph article giving us this highly significant fact.
I would observe
that I think the Telegraph writer misunderstands the significance of his
information. He thinks it reflects on
whether the UK was too slow to enter the national Lockdown, rather than of it
being strong evidence that the Government was implementing a “cunning
plan”.
What do you
think? Here is the article:-
Government struck £119m Covid advertising deal
weeks before first lockdown
The Cabinet Office signed the lucrative contract
with London-based OMD Group as the Government began to gear up its response to
the crisis
BySimon
Foy25 October 2020 • 7:33pm
Ministers struck a deal worth up to £119m
with one of the world's biggest marketing companies for a Covid campaign
three weeks before the country went into a national lockdown, official filings
show.
The Cabinet Office signed the contract with
London-based OMD Group, a subsidiary of US ad titan Omnicom, on March 2 -
the same day Prime Minister Boris Johnson attended his first pandemic-related
Cobra meeting - as the Government began to gear up its response to the
crisis.
Although the UK did not go into lockdown until
March 23, the outline of its communications strategy appears to have been
agreed weeks in advance.
The agreement referred to three “tiers” of
messaging that the Government wanted to get across to the public, including
telling people to “Stay Home, Stay Safe”, reminding them to wash their hands
regularly and promoting healthy lifestyle habits during periods of isolation.
It also referenced marketing campaigns to
communicate emergency economic measures.
The price tag of the pandemic information campaign
dwarfed the £46m the Government spent on its “Get Ready for Brexit” campaign at
the end of 2019, which it billed at the time as its biggest advertising blitz
since the Second World War.
According to details published on the Government's
website, the contract said: “The outbreak of Covid-19 in the UK requires a
significant communications effort including through mass marketing channels to
provide clear instructions to the public about actions to take to protect
themselves and their communities."
OMD was tasked with buying media space regionally,
nationally and internationally across a range of different platforms, including
in print and broadcast and on social media sites such as TikTok and
Snapchat.
Despite the huge outlay in anticipation of a major
push of health and economic messages, the Government still had not closed
schools or banned mass gatherings at large events, such as football matches, to
control the infection rate at the time the deal was struck.
This heavy spending on advertising weeks
before politicians moved the country into lockdown could be used as ammunition
by critics who claimed Britain was too slow to follow its European neighbours
into a full shutdown.
More than half of Britons believed the UK was too
slow to enter a national lockdown, according to an Ipsos poll published in
April. Critics have since claimed that acting earlier would have
allowed restrictions to be loosened more quickly, ultimately boosting
the economy.
The Government is under mounting pressure to disclose details of billions of pounds handed over
to private companies for contracts related to its pandemic
response with campaigners threatening legal action if it does not improve
transparency.
Vast sums have been spent on contractors tasked with securing PPE,
helping to build the Test and Trace system and delivering emergency lending programmes for
businesses. and there are calls for ministers to
show that taxpayers got value for money.
Click here for link
to the original>>> https://www.telegraph.co.uk/business/2020/10/25/government-struck-119m-covid-advertising-deal-weeks-first-lockdown/
