Find out more about Ben Irvine at benirvine.co.uk

Monday 5 February 2024

The March 2020 Attack on Democracy

[This is the script for a video, which can be viewed here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=d-gGQYuo2QY]

Hi folks, this is an essay [/video] about something extremely important that many people are completely unaware of. It’s about the events that led up to the March 2020 lockdown in Britain. Sadly, the British public have shown very little interest in what caused the lockdown. I urge you to listen carefully to what I’m about to say. What happened in March 2020 was an attack on our democracy. The attack was initiated by the Chinese Communist Party, then carried forward by unions, mostly from the British public sector. Marxist unions unilaterally tried to impose a lockdown on Britain, and then the government caved in, in a desperate attempt to retain power and deliver Brexit.

In other videos and in my Pandemic Trilogy of books, I’ve already divulged a huge amount of detail about what happened in March 2020. In this video I am going to summarise that information, while sharing some incredible new findings. Most incredible of all, I’ll reveal that the March 2020 attack was not only an attempt to force our elected government into the lockdown. The attack also targeted the very heart of our democracy – the electoral process itself. Nobody in the media has seen fit to tell the British public anything of what went on during this most scandalous time.

Let’s cast our minds back. Britain’s Covid debacle began with events 5,000 miles away, when the Chinese Communist Party, the CCP, sent Wuhan into lockdown. The date was January 23, 2020. Around the world, pretty much everybody immediately made a false assumption: that the Wuhan lockdown was some sort of health measure. In fact, the Wuhan lockdown never had anything to do with health. In my book The Truth About the Wuhan Lockdown, I’ve revealed what really went on in China. The CCP initially played down the threat from Covid 19 – because the virus was mild. But the public in Wuhan didn’t trust the authorities and became hysterical. The city’s inhabitants wanted the government to do more to protect them. People were spontaneously self-isolating, undermining the government’s stay calm approach. Indeed, an open mutiny was brewing. On January 22, the day before the Wuhan lockdown, a journalist working for the region’s main newspaper did the unthinkable – he called for a change of political leadership. In a post on Chinese social media, he blazed that the region ‘must immediately change out its commanders.’ The post was shared wildly online, accompanied by furious mockery of the Chinese Communist Party. Xi Jinping, the president of China, responded by slamming Wuhan into lockdown. The decision was a no brainer for him. He was trying to regain control, by squashing the unrest and giving the city’s inhabitants what they wanted. 

From day 1, the Wuhan lockdown was a fake health policy based on mass hysteria and political cynicism. So how on earth did the policy spread worldwide? Well, obviously one reason was that the mass hysteria that began in Wuhan soon spilled out of China, engulfing almost the whole world during February and March 2020. It was the first ever episode of global hysteria.

Another reason why lockdowns spread worldwide was that the Chinese Communist Party promoted the policy abroad. When the international community placed travel restrictions on Chinese people, Xi became angry. In an act of demented retaliation, he bombarded the world with fearmongering and pro-lockdown propaganda. The bombardment was an info-attack, aiming to inflict economic damage on China’s rivals by bludgeoning them with lockdowns. To this end, Xi leveraged China’s overseas investments in the media, academia, politics, and more. Meanwhile, CCP bots stormed social media, calling for lockdowns and shaming anyone who disagreed with the policy. Covid hysteria surged worldwide fanned by a hurricane of disinformation. 

A third reason why lockdowns spread was that the global panic triggered a tsunami of union unrest. International union federations agitated for Covid restrictions. The agitation then cascaded down to national union federations, then down to specific unions. As unions took the law into their own hands, trying to close down workplaces all over the world, politicians responded by caving in and implementing lockdowns, just as Xi had responded to the civil unrest in Wuhan. Lockdowns were a political spin operation by governments desperate to maintain an illusion of control while countries were spontaneously being closed down by unions.

Nowhere was this dynamic clearer than in Britain, my own country. The British government’s initial plan was to pursue herd immunity, allowing the virus to spread harmlessly through the young and healthy population. The idea was for the public to build up mass immunity as quickly as possible while vulnerable people stayed out of harm’s way for the shortest possible time. On March 3, Prime Minister Boris Johnson boasted that he had shook hands with everybody in a hospital where there were coronavirus patients. He wanted Britain to keep calm and carry on.

Unfortunately, Britain’s unions had other ideas. As I’ve disclosed in my book ‘The Coronapanic Debacle’, unions waged a nationwide assault on our government in March 2020. Health unions demanded PPE in hospitals, with one major union warning that staff would strike over the issue. In at least one hospital, staff are known to have participated in a walkout. Rail unions were threatening to take action to protect their members. The main academic union was formally calling for universities to close. Legal unions were staging numerous actions, trying to unilaterally shut down courts. The union for professional footballers was agitating for matches to be cancelled; the footballing authorities caved in and postponed all forthcoming matches, against the government’s advice. Education unions were agitating for all schools to be closed. The civil service union was demanding the right to work from home. Unite, the largest union in the country, with over a million members, was calling for a lockdown. The TUC, a federation of 48 unions, was encouraging its members to hand in section 44 letters to the effect that the workplace was unsafe, thereby stoking a massive work from home migration against government advice. Later, the TUC boasted that they “forced” the government into the furlough scheme. The National Union of Journalists was also involved in lobbying for furlough. And it is likely that unions were trying to shut parliament down too. Labour, the political party which represents Britain’s unions, was demanding a lockdown. 

The government’s capitulation came in four phases. First, on March 13, came the ban on mass gatherings. Johnson openly admitted that there was no scientific reason for the ban. He said the only reason for the U-turn was that he wanted to relieve a burden on the public sector – a public sector that we know was agitating against the herd immunity policy. Furthermore, we know that numerous public events were already being unilaterally cancelled by the organisers in the second week of March. The government was losing control.

On March 16 came an even bigger capitulation – Johnson abandoned the herd immunity policy and started advising social distancing, a complete nonsense policy made up on the spot. Neil Ferguson’s dodgy research was wheeled out to spin the U-turn. In the process, Chris Whitty and Patrick Vallance, the government’s chief science advisors, reversed their previous advice, which they had spent months preparing.

At this point, there was still no legal lockdown. Johnson was merely advising social distancing – the same as Sweden’s policy. He also stated clearly that the British government wanted to keep schools open. Unfortunately, the largest education union in Britain, the National Education Union, was determined to defy the PM. In an open letter, the NEU’s leaders Kevin Courtney and Mary Bousted warned of unilateral schools closures if the government didn’t close every school in the country. Courtney has since boasted that the NEU participated in what he called a “big action” in March 2020. The NEU has also boasted that their stance in March 2020 was, and I quote, “that schools should be closed before March 23 at the latest, and if not, that NEU members should refuse to return to work”. Let us be very clear about this: the NEU blackmailed the government. 

On March 18, the government capitulated and announced that all schools would close. We know the reason why. A Dominic Cummings Whatsapp message on March 17 spoke of headteachers defying the government by unilaterally closing schools in London. Cummings issued a warning to his colleagues: ‘we must get ahead’. Those four words are damning. Let me repeat them: We must get ahead. The government pretended to lead schools closures that were happening anyway. And it was the same throughout the economy. Unilateral closures driven by unions, with the government getting out in front of the parade and pretending to lead it.  

The day the schools closed, March 20, Johnson asked other public venues to close. He could hardly endorse the idea of adults continuing to congregate when children were being deprived of the same right. With the schools closed and most of the economy shut down, Britain was, in effect, in lockdown. Indeed, the economy could hardly have functioned anyway, without the schools open. Someone had to look after the kids. The extraction of so many working parents from the economy would have made life very difficult for most workplaces, with or without a lockdown.

But there was still no legally enforced lockdown. Johnson was still forlornly saying he hoped he would see his mum on Mother’s day, which fell on March 22. Alas, on the day of March 22, Johnson’s own cabinet turned on him. According to reports, he faced a full-scale cabinet mutiny if he didn’t lock London down. He caved in again, announcing on March 23 that the whole of Britain would go into a legally enforced lockdown.

Within three weeks, Johnson had gone from boasting about shaking hands in a hospital where there were coronavirus patients to banning an entire country from leaving the house.

People often accuse me of saying that Britain’s lockdown was driven solely by unions. But I have never said that. Unions couldn’t have forced the government into a lockdown unless the public supported the policy. No government is going to commit a ludicrous communist crime to cover up an assault by unions – unless the public wants the government to commit the crime. Sadly, 93% of the public wanted a lockdown.

The same global panic that caused lockdowns around the world was rampant in Britain. And so was the CCP lockdown propaganda that stoked the global panic. For example, when Johnson was pursuing herd immunity, his Twitter feed was besieged by CCP bots calling him a butcher, a murderer and a fascist. The same happened to me too. When I was defending freedom in March 2020, warning Britain not to lockdown, creepy little anonymous bots came crawling over my account, vilifying me for wanting to stay a free man.

Britain’s mainstream media was also pumping out Covid fearmongering – a fact that is doubly concerning when we know that the CCP was flexing its muscles in the overseas media. In fact, there is evidence that the CCP was paying for lockdown propaganda in the most astonishing of outlets: Britain’s leading conservative newspaper. In early 2020, the Telegraph is alleged to have published more than 50 articles paid for by the Chinese Communist Party. Many of the articles have now been deleted from the newspaper’s website. I don’t know about you, but I remember being dismayed that the Telegraph was promoting communist barbarism in my country when our freedom was hanging by a thread.

Throughout Britain’s so-called free press almost nobody defended freedom. Journalists, writers, media personalities and other influencers either kept their heads down while our rights were being annihilated, or worse, they actively demanded the atrocity. Some prominent media figures raged against the herd immunity policy, relentlessly blitzing the public with predictions of doom. I find it very difficult to believe that these media figures weren’t being paid by Britain’s enemies, whether by the Chinese Communist party or other hostile regimes such as Putin’s in Russia. Among the ranks of the media traitors there were many trusted conservatives – journalists and writers who had made a living out of defending freedom, but who were now trying to destroy our way of life.

After the herd immunity U-turn, there was another wave of media fearmongering. This time, it seems, the mainstream media was paid by the British government to promote the lockdown. Flocks of journalists suddenly started shrieking their support for the policy. The Telegraph participated in this new outburst too, for example with Allison Pearson shrieking at people for going to the pub, and Camila Tominey shrieking at people for going to the park. The Telegraph’s cartoonist Bob Moran is another who was enlisted in the outburst, helping to promote the lockdown by drawing cartoons that made social distancing seem patriotic.  

The British media behaved absolutely disgustingly in March 2020. They failed our country, they failed our democracy, and they failed their profession.

The British government U-turned, abandoning the sensible scientific policy of herd immunity, thereby plunging the entire country into a pointless communist nightmare, without a single UK journalist explaining why the U-turn had happened. Instead the journalists were paid for their complicity.

And their complicity lasted for the whole two years. Yes, I realise that some of the journalists who supported the lockdown in March 2020 went on to become “lockdown sceptics”, weeks or months later. But, as I’ve explained in my book ‘My Road to Freedom’, none of them ever told the truth about what had happened at the start. None of them ever explained that the lockdown was a fake health policy which communist China had wanted to inflict on us to destroy our economy. None of them explained that unions had defied the government’s advice by unilaterally shutting Britain down. None of them explained that Johnson’s own cabinet had betrayed him in March 2020. None of them explained that the herd immunity U-turn was a spin operation to cover up the union unrest. None of them explained that they themselves or their employers had been paid to support the lockdown at the start.

The public were terrified and bewildered. They needed to hear the truth. They needed to be told exactly what had happened in March 2020, that the lockdown was not only completely pointless but an act of deliberate vandalism against our country, led by a government that was desperately clinging onto power by paying for lockdown propaganda in the media. Instead, the lockdown sceptic journalists withheld the full truth from us. And in the process they had the nerve to pretend they cared about our freedom. They were like Ian Huntley, the murderer who covered up his own crimes while pretending to help search for the victims.

And it’s worse. After March 2020, unions continued blackmailing the British government for two years while the fake lockdown sceptic journalists continued covering up what was going on. In summer 2020, the leading rail union threatened to strike if the government didn’t mandate masks on trains; the government caved in. Shortly afterwards, the leading retail union fought for masks to be mandated in shops; the government caved in again. Meanwhile, the largest union, Unite, was demanding masks and other lunatic Covid measures as a condition of reopening workplaces; the government caved in again. Later that summer, the government announced that all shielding advice would be paused and the furlough scheme would be scrapped. However, in the autumn the TUC responded by orchestrating another nationwide campaign of union unrest, spearheaded by the civil service union threatening to strike if they weren’t allowed to continue working from home. The NEU was running amok again too, and ultimately Johnson was pushed into the second lockdown. Then, over Christmas 2020, the British Medical Association pushed the government into a new raft of restrictions. Throughout this whole period, not one of the so-called lockdown sceptics in the media saw fit to tell the public about the campaign of union unrest that had been boiling since March 2020.

On January 4, 2021, came the most scandalous episode of the whole debacle. The NEU orchestrated an illegal strike, which stopped the government from reopening England’s primary schools. Later that evening, the government suddenly announced a new lockdown, to cover up the strike. Again, not one of the so-called lockdown sceptics in the media saw fit to tell the public what had happened. Our freedom was being abolished, again, because some Marxist teachers were refusing to do their jobs, but, instead of telling us what was going on, the fake lockdown sceptic journalists helped the government cover up the strike, otherwise the events of January 4 would have led like a trail back to what happened in March 2020. Even Peter Hitchens and Laura Perrins, the sole media figures who had been against the first lockdown, were now helping the government cover up January 4, presumably because their employers had been paid to help spin the first lockdown and no one involved in the crime wanted to have an honest discussion about what had happened.  

As a result of the January 4 cover up, the children remained at the mercy of their Marxist teachers, who then refused to return to school unless the children wore masks in the classrooms. The government caved in again, sending the kids back in March to be abused for three months by their psychotic teachers. Meanwhile, the fake lockdown sceptic journalists wrung their hands about the fate of the kids without telling the public that the teachers were still blackmailing the government. The campaign group UsForThem, which is closely associated with the Telegraph, also joined in with the cover up, pretending to care about the kids while in fact helping the Marxist teachers get away with the January 4 strike and the ensuing child abuse.

As the year wore on, Britain was gripped by vaccine mania, with the government attempting to spin their way out of the whole debacle by using mass vaccination to reassure the public. When teaching unions pushed for a vaccine rollout in schools, the government abandoned the official scientific recommendation against the policy, and the schoolkids were vaccinated for no reason other than to continue appeasing their deranged Marxist teachers. Meanwhile, the fake lockdown sceptic journalists including UsForThem continued covering up the January 4 strike and the rest of the union assault on Britain.

And still it went on. In the winter of 2021, there was another flurry of lunacy as unions again pushed for masks on public transport and in shops, and the government caved in again. There was also pressure from the BMA and NHS Confederation to bring in mandatory Covid passes in public venues, and – yep, you guessed it – the government caved in again. Then, in the new year, the schoolkids were forced into masks in classrooms again because the government feared another mass walkout by the teachers.

Mercifully, at this stage the whole debacle was juddering to a halt. Johnson had threatened to jab the entire NHS workforce. If the threat had been carried through, the health service would have been decimated, because so many members of staff would have quit rather than take the jab. Johnson’s threat worked; it spooked the NHS. Suddenly doctors and nurses were telling us that the vaccine wasn’t necessary for them. And so the rug was pulled out from under the unions – they could hardly continue running amok when the NHS was, in effect, telling us Covid wasn’t so bad after all. The kids were unmasked, the Covid Passes were scrapped, and in February 2022 our freedom was restored in full.

I repeat: for the entire two years, the fake lockdown sceptic journalists covered up the union assault that was being waged on Britain. They covered up the assault because it had been going on since March 2020, and no one in the media wanted to talk about March 2020. No one wanted to talk about the CCP-funded lockdown propaganda that was published in the media, for example in the Telegraph, or the unions unilaterally shutting workplaces down, or the government abandoning herd immunity, or Whitty and Vallance selling their souls, or Neil Ferguson’s research being wheeled out to spin the herd immunity U-turn, or the media being paid by the British government to spin the U-turn, or Johnson’s cabinet going into a full on mutiny which finally drove Britain into a legally enforced lockdown. The entire media was complicit from day 1. One word of honesty from any of them and the debacle couldn’t have lasted five minutes, never mind two years. If the public had understood what was going on, our rights would instantly have been restored in full, or never confiscated in the first place.

Stop fawning over the fake lockdown sceptic journalists who got you locked up, were paid for it, and then pranced around like Ian Huntley wringing their hands about freedom while in fact covering up what had happened. Stop fawning over the fake lockdown sceptic journalists who covered up January 4 and helped the NEU abuse kids. The fake lockdown sceptic journalists were never on our side. Start facing up to the attack that was committed against our democracy in March 2020, an attack that lasted two years, with the participation of the entire media from day 1 until the very end.

The idea that the Chinese communist party, the media, the Labour Party and unelected unions could force our elected conservative government into a two-year communist atrocity is bad enough. However, I’m sorry to say, the crime was even more profound. At the start of this video, I noted that our democracy was attacked in March 2020 in the most direct way possible – the electoral process itself was attacked. You may not remember, but in May 2020 we were meant to have local elections and mayoral elections. The conservative government was riding a wave of popularity. They had won a landslide in the general election in December 2019, and then, on January 31, they had formally withdrawn Britain from the EU, pending a transition period of one year. The withdrawal came three years after the British public had voted for Brexit. Those three years had been fraught, with many remainers disgracefully trying to overturn the 2016 referendum result. The Labour Party, the Lib Dems and the Greens, plus a sizeable cohort of conservatives, had formed a remain block in parliament, seeking to undermine the Leave vote by any legal means possible.

When January 31 came, Britain breathed a sigh of relief, because the practical process of leaving the EU could finally begin. The local elections in May 2020 were an opportunity for the national government to consolidate its agenda at the local level, with a strong conservative performance likely given the recent general election victory and the confirmation of Brexit. The emergence of Covid was unsettling, but government policy in early March ought to have provided reassurance: the pursuit of herd immunity would have meant life carrying on normally for the vast majority.

But diehard remainers and socialists had quite another agenda. They spied an opportunity too. By causing as much disruption as possible during the Covid pandemic, they could not only damage the government and thwart the practical process of Leaving the EU, there was also the prospect of thwarting any conservative gains in the local elections. And what better way to thwart those gains than by getting the elections cancelled.

So that is what remainers and socialists did. What I am going to recount to you is, in my opinion, one of the most shocking episodes of the entire Covid debacle. When the union assault on Britain was gathering steam in the second week of March 2020, the upcoming local elections were targeted too. Despite the government pursuing herd immunity, there was a concerted attempt by numerous factions to cancel the local elections so that socialists and remainers could retain power at the local level. We have elections in this country so that the public can decide who governs us. If people start trying to cancel elections so that they themselves can retain power, those people are waging a coup against our democratic system and against the British public.   

That is what happened in March 2020, a drastic escalation of the preceding three-year assault on democracy. Against the advice of the government, remainers and socialists in key institutions agitated for the postponement of the local elections. The assault on your right to vote was spearheaded by a body called the Electoral Commission. Set up by Tony Blair in 1997, the stated purpose of the commission was to ensure that political parties stuck to the rules around campaigning. However, conservatives soon started accusing Blair’s new quango of being in bed with the Labour Party. And later, after the EU referendum, one of the leading Leave campaign groups accused the commission of a “grotesque anti-Brexit bias”. When you look at the board of the Electoral Commission at that time, the accusation hardly looks far-fetched. Out of ten board members, six of them were publicly pro-EU, and, of the other four, three were Labour-appointed bureaucrats and the other was a member of the SNP. One newspaper reported that nearly half of the commission’s board members criticised the Brexit campaign or called for the referendum result to be overturned.

And then came March 2020. On March 12, the Electoral Commission called on the government to cancel England’s upcoming local elections. The commission’s chief executive wrote to the government urging them to rethink the existing strategy of continuing with the polls. Obviously, it’s quite a big deal when an independent body whose remit is to protect the integrity of elections is suggesting that a vote should be postponed. At the same time, two other bodies involved in the local elections were backing calls for a postponement: the Association of Electoral Administrators, and the Local Government Association. These unions were significant voices because the local elections couldn’t be run without administrators, or without the participation of local authorities, who provide venues and staff. If the people involved in running the elections didn’t want to run the elections, Johnson’s government was obviously under significant pressure.

And there was more. The Labour Party was likewise calling for a postponement of the local elections, and indeed the party was taking matters into its own hands. The General Secretary of Labour at that time was a lady called Jennie Formby. Formby describes herself as a ‘socialist’ and ‘trade unionist’. On March 13, she wrote to local party branches advising them to suspend campaigning ahead of the polls. Let me clarify that: the Labour Party unilaterally withdrew from the May 2020 local elections, trying to force through a postponement. Furthermore, Labour also cancelled its own special leadership conference which was scheduled for April 4, and meanwhile four political parties are known to have cancelled their spring conferences: the Lib Dems, Plaid Cymru, the Green Party and Welsh Labour.

All this was happening, I repeat, while the government was trying to pursue herd immunity. And it was happening in parallel with the wider union assault that was gathering steam in Britain, an assault that was being spearheaded by Labour. We can reasonably assume that behind the scenes the Local Government Association and the Association of Electoral Administrators were threatening to mutiny. Perhaps the Electoral Commission was making threats too. The Conservatives were faced with the prospect of participating in local elections that were run by no one and contested by no other mainstream parties. Elections without administrators and without the full spectrum of contestants are elections without democratic legitimacy and therefore are not really elections at all. In effect, your right to vote in May 2020 was unilaterally confiscated by remainers and socialists who knew that the British public didn’t want them to retain power.

On the morning of March 13, the government was still insisting that the local elections would go ahead in May. However, by the end of the day, the government had caved in, announcing that the elections would be postponed for a year. The evening of March 13 was also when Johnson announced the ban on mass gatherings. The reason he gave for that ban – relieving a burden on the public sector – might as well be said about the postponement of the local elections too, in more ways than one. The burden of an upcoming electoral defeat was lifted from the shoulders of socialists and remainers throughout Britain’s local government. And for good measure, the government even promised to compensate the local authorities for the preparatory work that they had already done around the elections. I guess it was a case of: no bad deed goes unrewarded.

What happened in March 2020 is an absolute outrage. Not only was the public deprived of our right to leave the house thanks to a deranged attack by the Chinese Communist Party, the Labour Party, unions, the media and a conservative government that caved in, we were also deprived of our right to vote in the local elections. As it turned out, the Conservatives still made gains when the rescheduled elections were held in May 2021. But the gains were moderate, and whatever happened a year later does not excuse the outrage of a public sector trying to overturn the advice of the nation’s chief scientists in March 2020. Furthermore, in the wider picture, we have to reflect on what we missed out on as an electorate when Britain’s public sector refused to cooperate with the herd immunity policy.

We voted for a conservative government that would secure our borders, boost our economy, uphold common sense, promote conservative values, enhance our freedom, and protect our democracy. Johnson was going to oversee a massive programme of infrastructure spending and housebuilding. And we would have handed the Conservatives the same resounding mandate in the local elections in May 2020. We may even had had a conservative mayor in London. Instead we had two years of demented Covid restrictions triggered by two years of unchallenged union unrest, shaking our country to ruin. Two years of economic destruction and human rights violations, with the future of Britain stifled in the most visceral way: young people deprived of an education and forcibly masked by communist nutters. We had illegal immigrants pouring across our borders, while the existing population languished at home and the housing crisis worsened. Almost nothing was built, almost nothing was achieved, except a transfer of free money to people who stood in their front gardens banging their pots and pans and spouting communist slogans. Serious health conditions went untreated, so that for years to come the young will die in greater numbers than they would have done. We ran up a 400 billion pound bill as a country, and an inflation crisis too. And all of this thanks to a Covid debacle that never should have happened. Boris Johnson was a hostage PM, hemmed in by mutineers in his own party and throughout the public sector. In the end, he was ousted, chased out by the same forces that chased him into the Covid debacle. Unions then went on to launch a further wave of disruption, to secure pay rises that would protect them against the economic consequences of their own actions during Covid. A disgusting campaign of socialist malevolence, from March 2020 to the present. And the final insult? Labour are poised to win a landslide in the next general election. Socialist nutters who hate our country stand to be rewarded for waging a coup against our democracy.

I do not accept any of this happening, and nor should you. I do not think the British public would vote for socialist governance if they knew the full truth about what happened in March 2020 and beyond. And I do not think they would accept the role played by the conservative establishment either. No one in the conservative party or the media stood up to the socialists, even as the socialists trashed our economy and abused kids. A monstrous two-year uniondemic covered up by fake conservative scoundrels. Without exception, Conservative politicians were dire, a disgrace to the party of Margaret Thatcher. And without exception, the conservative media were dire, helping the politicians capitulate to the socialists, and then having the nerve to lecture us about freedom even as they helped cover up the capitulation, which was ongoing and lasted two years.

Let us remember that the Telegraph not only took money from the CCP to promote the lockdown while the British government was pursuing herd immunity. The Telegraph also helped the British government spin the herd immunity U-turn, and then the Telegraph covered up the entire two-year uniondemic, including the Jan 4 attack on kids. The Mail newspaper helped the government promote the lockdown at the start and then covered up the entire uniondemic, including the Jan 4 attack on kids. The Conservative Woman helped the government promote the lockdown at the start and then covered up the entire uniondemic, including the Jan 4 attack on kids. Usforthem, the fake campaign group which was launched in May 2020 in close association with the Telegraph, covered up the entire uniondemic, including the Jan 4 attack on kids. Unlocked, the fake campaign group which was launched in summer 2020, covered up the entire uniondemic, including the Jan 4 attack on kids.

And what about the two biggest so-called alternative conservative political parties? Well, Reclaim waved the lockdown through at the start and then covered up the entire uniondemic, including the Jan 4 attack on kids. And Reform waved the lockdown through at the start and then covered up the entire uniondemic, including the Jan 4 attack on kids.

And what about everyone’s favourite conservative broadcaster, GB News? Even though GB News didn’t exist until the summer of 2021, every single one of their presenters existed, and they either zealously supported the lockdown at the start or they waved the policy through. And now, of course, one those presenters is Boris Johnson himself.

A notable fact about GB News is that one of its main investors is a man called Paul Marshall. Marshall also owns the conservative website UnHerd. Unherd helped the government promote the lockdown at the start and then covered up the entire uniondemic, including the Jan 4 attack on kids. If Unherd took money from the British government to help spin the herd immunity U-turn, that would explain why Marshall’s new vehicle GB News hasn’t gone near the whole topic with a bargepole. Like every other major conservative media outlet in Britain, GB News has steadfastly avoided discussing what went on in March 2020, including the union assault, the herd immunity U-turn, the media’s role in spinning the U-turn, and the two year uniondemic, including the January 4 attack on kids.

An absolutely dire showing from the entire conservative establishment including politicians and the media. How dare they let Marxists get away with steamrolling our country and abusing kids. No – get away with it is not strong enough a phrase. The conservative establishment actively colluded in Marxist crimes. We now have a Chancellor, Jeremy Hunt, who agitated for all three lockdowns when he was head of the Parliamentary Health and Social Care Committee. We have a Prime Minister, Rishi Sunak, who oversaw the ruinous furlough scheme and supported all three lockdowns. And we have Boris Johnson back in the media helping cover up a demented Marxist assault which they all colluded in. They and their media mates preach to us about conservatism while, in effect, handing power to a Labour Party which successfully waged a coup against our democracy. The coup began in March 2020 and is now almost complete.   

I urge decent people in Britain to demand justice. I know that some of you supported the lockdown at the start. Perhaps you even supported it for two years. I hope that what I have now told you will make you realise that you made a bad mistake. We all make mistakes. Your responsibility now is to acknowledge your mistake and make amends. Tell people what really happened. Tell the kids what really happened. The kids are the future of our democracy. Let them grow up in a country where people know that the lockdown was never anything but a fake health policy cynically imposed on Wuhan by the Chinese Communist Party and then cynically exported to the rest of the world by the Chinese Communist Party. Let them grow up in a country where unions don’t get to hijack the government when there’s a virus, demanding free money to hide while imposing lunatic restrictions on other people’s lives. A country where no government capitulates to such an attack, spinning the demands into policy and pretending it’s for health reasons. A country where an elected government is given the grace to govern instead of being assailed by Marxists or their accomplices, such as the remainers who likewise ran amok in March 2020. A country where mobs of political agitators can’t cancel local elections because they think they might lose them. This is Britain, for goodness sake, the home of democracy, a country where democratic values are cherished, not buried in lies. 

The Truth About the Wuhan Lockdown: http://tinyurl.com/y5r8h8mk The Coronapanic Debacle: http://tinyurl.com/53xewbf4 My Road to Freedom: http://tinyurl.com/mrxw89k6

Monday 4 December 2023

Jan 4, 2021: When Marxists Attacked Britain's Schoolchildren, Unopposed

The following is an excerpt from my latest book My Road to Freedom, in which I reveal how the media covered up the real causes of Britain’s Covid restrictions. The book is available from amazon.


Chapter 9

After I had finished my book on Wuhan, I spent the rest of 2022 refocusing on what happened in my own country. I began looking into the second lockdown, which I soon discovered was caused by another TUC-coordinated campaign of union unrest, with the NEU central to the campaign. I was now sure that the NEU had played a decisive role in all three lockdowns. My new findings grew into a 50,000-word essay called ‘Boris versus the NEU: The Second Lockdown Explained’. In the essay, I painstakingly recounted Johnson’s two-year long battle to keep schools open in the face of relentless opposition from the NEU. The essay, indeed the entire topic, has been almost completely ignored.

Recently I unearthed the most devastating piece of evidence yet, the holy grail: the full-length footage of the January 3 NEU zoom meeting, the meeting that precipitated the mass teaching walkout on January 4. I already knew that the NEU leadership had advised the union’s members that it would be unsafe for them to return to work, and I knew that the NEU had provided a model section 44 letter and advised the members to hand it in to their employers, but I was unprepared for the sheer zeal and persistence with which the message was delivered in the zoom call. Watching the call, I counted 16 times that the NEU leadership mentioned their advice about the schools being unsafe, and 24 times that they mentioned the section 44 letter. The impression I got from the meeting was of a communist struggle session, people being brainwashed. ‘Listen to the union’s advice. Make the right decision, based on the union’s advice’, Kevin Courtney intoned. Robin Bevan said the letter ‘needs to be sent’, and, when taking questions towards the end, he noted that the questions had been carefully chosen because he was ‘making sure that the key points of the message today are heard’. They were heard alright.

The footage makes clear that the events of January 4 were not just a token gesture by the NEU, not some sort of flailing protest with no object to it. The leadership knew exactly what they wanted to achieve, and they were determined to achieve it. Bevan said the purpose of the zoom call was ‘to explain the reasoning behind the decisions made by your National Executive’. Bousted said ‘We’ve called this meeting because we want to update you on the NEU’s position about members’ health and safety during the pandemic’. The explicit intention of the NEU leadership was to encourage school staff to defy government policy on January 4. Bevan explained:

We found ourselves in a position where the Secretary of State for Education... announced the reopening of schools to all pupils in our primary and early years settings into overcrowded classrooms with no additional protection. The view of the union is that it is time for each and every one of our members individually to say no. And to be quite honest, that is the reason why you have joined this call today. Because you know that it is in the best interests of the communities you serve, the children you teach, to say ‘we are not proceeding in the way the government has recommended’.

He reiterated: ‘Today is the day to say “no” to the proposals that the Secretary of State has put in front of us’. And again: ‘Now is the time to trust both your professional instincts and your professional ethics. It’s time to say “no”.’

The NEU leadership anticipated – and hoped – that encouraging the membership to submit section 44 letters would cause a change in government policy, that is, a reversal of the decision to reopen the schools. Bousted used the phrase ‘if the government does U-turn…’. Courtney explained that ‘Because the government isn’t coming up with sensible definitions of what is safe, your union is coming up with a sensible definition’. He noted that ‘There’s an element of this where we have to persuade the government politically about it’. He left no doubt as to the leadership’s aim:

We believe that a snowball effect could be created. There are an enormous number of people on this call... [and] watching on social media. If those people agree with us that it is unsafe for schools to be open, and then if they take the step of sending the letter, which they can find in their email, or on our website, then there will be consequences of lots of people individually doing that, and we will turn quantity into quality.

That last phrase is extremely telling, and damning. When members of a union collectively refuse to attend the workplace with the intention of changing a government policy, most people would describe the action as a ‘strike’ – especially when the intended outcome is qualitatively different from anything the members could achieve by acting alone.

And here’s the thing: if the NEU’s mass walkout on January 4 was a strike, then it was illegal, because, by law, unions must ballot their members before orchestrating a strike.

The NEU leaders were entering a legal minefield, and they knew it; they were anxiously trying to stay on the right side of the law. Bousted, slightly flustered, insisted: ‘This is emphatically not a strike… We have not held a ballot. We are not taking industrial action.’ Well, the part about the ballot was true. Courtney similarly declared ‘This isn’t strike action’. At one point, he clarified what was being proposed: ‘Right now, your union’s advice… is that schools are not currently safe. And so we’re urging you to act on that.’ He inserted into those words the following reassurance, perhaps to himself: ‘We are really confident that this would withstand all challenges.’ Clearly the NEU leadership had given some thought to the legal issues.

There were two bases on which the leadership believed that the January 4 action was not a strike. The first was the emphasis on individuals submitting section 44 letters (for instance Courtney talking about ‘lots of people individually doing that’, or Bevan saying ‘it is time for each and every one of our members individually to say no’). The idea, supposedly, was that the action on January 4 would be a bunch of individuals who just happened to be doing the same thing, whereas a strike involves collective action. The distinction was highly spurious. The whole point of the legal requirement for unions to ballot their members before striking is to ensure that a minority of radical union members acting in concert can’t take matters into their own hands and disable a workplace.

Moreover, the NEU leadership was very much open to the idea of teachers handing in section 44 letters collectively. ‘There is no reason why a school rep couldn’t gather a group of those letters together’, Courtney ventured. He even noted, manipulatively, that individuals may ‘worry’ about sending the letter, that they may experience a ‘feeling of isolation’, and that ‘there is a way of collecting them [the letters] together that will help to overcome that’. Courtney was cleverly trying to parlay the contribution of individuals into a collective act, but at the same time he was emphasising that ‘it doesn’t stray away from the fact that this is an individual right you have’. It was though he was saying: the responsibility for this action is on you as an individual, and if you’re concerned about that, we will even exploit your concern, by encouraging you to coordinate your action with others. Bousted went further, noting that group letters could be submitted, but, like Courtney, she caveated the point by insisting that individuals must make the decision to sign the letter. Bevan agreed: ‘[it’s] an individual right we’re exercising here but of course it can be done by a group of people who all individually agree’. You can see that the NEU leaders were tying themselves in knots here. I am no lawyer, but surely ‘a group of people who all individually agree’ is the same as a group agreement. And, by law, there can only be a group agreement for a union to do a walkout if there is a ballot first.

The second way in which the NEU leaders were trying to avoid the charge of illegality was even more iffy. Supposedly the action on January 4 wasn’t a strike because – in Bousted’s words – ‘You are not withdrawing your labour. You are saying that you will work differently’. She clarified the point: ‘You are not withdrawing your labour, because you are saying… that you will work from home, and you will go into school... to look after and care for and teach the children of key workers and vulnerable children.’ The idea of ‘working differently’ was farcical. Any teacher who insisted on working from home, or working in a near-empty classroom, was, in effect, withdrawing their labour. Imagine a football manager who suddenly insisted on working from home or working with only five players. The ‘labour’ that he is expected to provide involves interacting physically with a full squad of players. By refusing to do that, he withdraws his labour. Likewise, the government explicitly expected teachers to turn up to work on January 4 in full classrooms, as per the job description of a school teacher. Any school teacher who suddenly announced that they would work ‘differently’ was literally refusing to perform the labour they were being paid to do and, instead, trying to do something else, something that the government didn’t want them to do. If you pay me to mow your lawn but, halfway through, I start performing a song for you on my acoustic guitar, I have withdrawn my labour. Bousted told teachers on January 3: ‘What you’re not doing is saying that you’re not working. You are not, by sending in a section 44 letter, saying you are not working.’ Now imagine me insisting I was still ‘working’ as I strolled around serenading you in the long grass.

My firm belief is that the NEU mass walkout on January 4 was illegal, and the people who orchestrated it should be in jail. Indeed, I think the NEU’s leaders know that what they did was illegal, because they never did it again.

There were several other revelations in the zoom meeting, each of which further demonstrates that the NEU’s intention was to scale up the impact of January 4 by involving as many people as possible in the mutiny. For example, the NEU leadership reported that the main headteachers unions were onside. Courtney explained: ‘We have also spoken to NAHT and ASCL and they are giving advice to their members that is sympathetic to the stand that we’re taking, not hostile to it’. Indeed, he said, the headteachers’ unions were cascading similar advice out to their members: ‘We know, from our conversations with NAHT and ASCL, that that’s what they’re telling their headteacher members as well. They are saying that if you say to them it’s not safe, that they don’t have a legal basis for telling you that it is safe.’ Bousted further disclosed: ‘We have written to every employer and headteacher, giving this same advice and asking them to make preparations for moving to remote learning instead.’ It’s important to note what was happening here: by making these ‘preparations’, headteachers would be setting the agenda, not the government. And that wasn’t the only way in which headteachers were setting the agenda. Incredibly, Courtney disclosed in the zoom call that ‘School leaders have done the work that should’ve been done by the public health service, to operate tracking for pupils, working throughout the weekend, late into the evening’. In other words: headteachers had been beavering away like detectives, ensuring that as many pupils as possible would be barred from attending classes due to contact with a Covid case; apparently the public health service was not doing the job. 

The zoom call also revealed that the NEU was encouraging ‘support staff’ to hand in the model section 44 letter on January 4, and noting that teachers who weren’t members of a union could do the same. Finally, towards the end of the call, there was a question about whether teachers in other schools, e.g. secondary schools, could use the letter. Courtney emphasized that the union was currently focused on primary schools but he noted that the letter ‘does have more general application’; ‘you can amend that letter’, he added, by way of confirmation. These comments were ominous, because the government was planning to reopen secondary schools over the coming weeks. All the indications were that the NEU January 4 mutiny was set to grow, engulfing the entire school sector. The government threw in the towel immediately. 

Kevin Courtney’s boast – which I mentioned earlier – that ‘hardly any’ primary schools opened on January 4 came in 2023, in a gloating Twitter thread which was one long smoking gun. In the thread, he recounted that Gavin Williamson ‘wanted schools open under all circumstances’ and that ‘Johnson supported Williamson’. He noted that ‘By Monday evening, Johnson changed tune and said schools were vectors of transmission and had to close’. The NEU ‘won the change in Govt policy’, Courtney insisted. He elaborated: ‘Our mass zoom meeting on Sun 3 Jan 2021 – 40k in the meeting, 400k watching, was possibly the biggest political meeting in UK history. Our advice to use Section 44 to refuse to attend work made the difference. Hardly any schools opened; Johnson was forced to make the choice.’ He concluded: ‘We should all be proud. I’m incredibly proud of the union’s actions over those days, and my role in them. We should all be proud of the stand we collectively took.’ (So it was a ‘collective’ stand. It wasn’t just a bunch of individuals who happened to be doing the same thing.)

Courtney is well aware that the NEU’s collective stand on January 4 triggered the third lockdown, which the government brought in solely to cover up the illegal teaching strike. Courtney has elsewhere spoken of ‘the lockdown… which the PM had to be forced into on January 4’, indicating that the NEU anticipated the consequences of the mass teaching walkout. Without schools supervising the children of working parents, the economic damage was such that, in the circumstances, the government was bound to manage the situation by issuing another stay home order. Of course, that’s not to say the government was right to do so, only that Courtney knew that the government would do so. Indeed, he’s not the only socialist who has bragged about the NEU driving the third lockdown. An article published on the World Socialist Website on January 7, 2022, noted: ‘Last January, the threat by tens of thousands of workers to utilise Section 44 of the Employment Rights Act to assert their right not to work in unsafe conditions forced the Johnson government into closing schools and imposing a lockdown.’ Actually, there was more than a ‘threat’; by the morning of January 4, some 6,000 teachers are known to have submitted section 44 letters. But, yes, the action brought the entire country to its knees.

And here I am, over two years later, still frantically trying get to my fellow citizens to acknowledge what happened on January 4. As far as lockdown sceptics go, I remain the only public figure who has ever even mentioned the events of that day. Only a handful of my followers – who are regular members of the public – will openly discuss the subject with me.

It’s an extremely strange and disturbing situation. Recently I re-read George Orwell’s masterpiece, Nineteen Eighty-Four. The book, a work of fiction, depicts life in England under a totalitarian socialist regime led by a tyrant named ‘Big Brother’. Orwell’s dystopia anticipated much that happened for real during the coronapanic debacle. In one passage, the book’s protagonist, a man called Winston Smith, who secretly yearns for freedom and truth, realises with horror that the regime could contradict its own pronouncements with complete impunity:

It appeared that there had even been demonstrations to thank Big Brother for raising the chocolate ration to twenty grammes a week. And only yesterday, he reflected, it had been announced that the ration was to be REDUCED to twenty grammes a week. Was it possible that they could swallow that, after only twenty-four hours? Yes, they swallowed it.

Winston asks: ‘Was he, then, ALONE in the possession of a memory?’

I have asked myself the same question many times in the last few years, and not just about January 4, but about all the union unrest, and the herd immunity U-turn which was driven by union unrest. The virus was mild… and then we were all in lockdown. Masks were ineffective… and then they were mandatory. The schools were safe… and then they were closed 24 hours later, and we were back in lockdown. Why have all the union-driven U-turns been ignored? Why did people swallow the government’s lies? Like Winston, I too have felt like ‘a lonely ghost uttering a truth that nobody would ever hear’. The predicament, I readily admit, has been disgusting, loathsome. At times, I have felt tormented on an existential level. The intellectual isolation has given me a sense of solipsism, like being in a mental cage – a cruel blow for someone like me, someone who had tried to escape from philosophical hypochondria, from all that unhealthy navel gazing. I tried to reassimilate to real life, to embrace my freedom, to stop fretting about being me. It turns out I couldn’t escape – not fully. The educated elites moved heaven and earth to keep me in the orbit of their lunacy. At their behest, the free society in which I had sought refuge reared up like a gigantic mechanical alien, locked me up, enslaved me, and then buried the truth about what happened, leaving me feeling like a glassed-in freak because I still insisted on facing reality.

I take solace in Winston Smith’s words: ‘Being in a minority, even a minority of one, did not make you mad. There was truth and there was untruth, and if you clung to the truth even against the whole world, you were not mad’. I am not mad. And I have no intention of remaining in a minority. We need to talk about the mainstream media.


To read the rest of My Road to Freedom, and find out how much else you have been lied to about by the British media, please buy the book.


Friday 1 September 2023

Deliverance

There is a ‘culture war’ taking place, and I am on the side of the people who do not want to fight. Patiently, focusedly, resolutely, we will keep making the arguments in the face of a grotesque level of manipulation and intellectual bullying. Will we prevail? I do not know. But I do know that we are apt to be blamed whatever happens. I fear that a national meltdown is on its way. I fear that people like you and me will be caught up in a wildly aggressive showdown that we didn’t deserve, even though we ourselves provoked it by insisting on being reasonable. 

– Ben Irvine, ‘Intellectual Obesity’

 
When I wrote those words, in September 2019, I knew that a nightmare was brewing. I just didn’t know the exact form it would take. I had no idea that a new coronavirus was circulating in the Hubei region of China. And, more importantly, I had no idea that this mild virus, Covid-19, would soon trigger a demented global panic that would plunge almost the entire Western world, including my own country, into an economic and social catastrophe.

But I was right that I would be caught up in the showdown. Boy, I was right.

This book is a chronicle of the two-year period of Covid restrictions in Britain, seen from the perspective of someone who was on the ‘front lines’, in more ways than one. I am a writer who has spent the last 14 years working most evenings as a delivery driver, to fund my creative work. When Britain went into lockdown, I continued doing my delivery job. I also continued doing my job as an intellectual who believes in freedom and personal responsibility. As the lockdown approached, I warned of the folly of placing everyone under an arbitrary mass house arrest, an absurd quarantine of the fit and healthy, and I never stopped raging against all the Covid restrictions until every single one was abolished. Both my jobs were punishing and exhausting; they took their toll on me.

Like most people, I found myself glued to the internet in March 2020. Reduced to communicating electronically, we were like astronauts orbiting our old lives. I was already a regular user of a social media platform called Twitter, using it to promote my books. As the coronapanic debacle unfolded, I increasingly relied on Twitter – for contraband information, for connecting with likeminded people, and for disseminating my own ideas. I started out tweeting my objections to the lockdown, but soon I was also sharing anecdotes about my delivery driving. The two topics were intertwined, because the job brought me face to face with the dismal reality of the lockdowns; day after day, I saw scores of people languishing in their houses. Not to mention the dismal reality of my own enslavement. Apparently, I wasn’t deemed worth protecting; I was being worked to the bone, to protect others. With all the resentment in my soul, my delivery driving anecdotes were often scathing and mocking; many, I am told, were quite funny. These moments of humour were all blended in with my earnest campaigning against the lockdown; we were all trying to keep our spirits up. When the ordeal was over, I realised that the various observations that I had shared on Twitter comprised a sort of diary of the entire debacle. I figured that publishing this diary might be worthwhile; perhaps some insights could be gleaned from it in future.

The prospect appealed to me on a personal level too. Anyone who has spent a lot of time on Twitter will know the sinking feeling you get when suddenly you fear that you have been wasting your time, screaming into the void. The feeling is even worse when your own country actually has been turned into a void! I wanted something positive to come from my Twitter usage, especially given everything I had personally gone through. So, yes, the diary is basically a bunch of tweets. But my dignity, maybe even my salvation, is bound up in these pages.

Reading my tweets back now, I get a sense of someone peering out of a little porthole onto a mad, mad world. Sometimes the scenes that I could see through the porthole weren’t fully captured in the tweets; there were things that we could all see at the time, and I was commenting with this shared knowledge in the background. When I was compiling my tweets, I added in a few comments in brackets, explaining the context – known facts and events that were implicit in my words.

However, since this diary is being presented in retrospect, I figured that the content could also be enhanced by including some information that no one, including me, could see at the time. There was much that was not visible through our little portholes. For long periods, we were in the dark about what the hell was going on. The media were useless and corrupt, so we had to do the investigating ourselves. We knew that the restrictions were not in the slightest bit ‘scientific’, but we didn’t know why they were being imposed on us. Gradually I started to figure it out, with the help of a handful of my Twitter followers. I did a lot of thinking out loud on the platform, groping towards the truth. Now that I can reflect on what I didn’t know then, another dimension can be added to the pages that follow.

In this long introduction, which comprises seventeen chapters, I will reveal the hidden context that surrounded my tweets, including the reason we locked down in the first place, the reason we were subjected to the other Covid mandates such as masks, the reason the media were so useless, and the reason the entire debacle dragged on for so long. In the process, I will look to myself, identifying the mistakes I made when trying to come to terms with what was happening. I didn’t make many mistakes, but I was always telling other people to learn from theirs, so it is only fair that I try to learn from mine. In turn, I will reflect on why I was able get things right where others didn’t, and I will discuss the unbelievable amount of abuse I took for telling the truth. You cannot see the abuse amid my tweets, but the barrage of hate was unrelenting. Finally, I will also reveal something else that was hidden: what it was like for me, standing behind my little porthole. Although many of the tweets in this book are quite personal, I was fundamentally talking about the situation I was in, rather than me being in that situation, including how I came to be in it, and how I felt about being in it. Truths that are hidden are often the most painful. For me, the coronapanic debacle was the last straw. I carried on anyway.      

*

If you want to continue reading 'Deliverance', the whole essay is part of Ben's new book 'My Road to Freedom', which is available from amazon