On 25 March, 2020, at the height of the Covid pandemic, a single piece of paper, a directive signed by Andrew Cuomo, then the governor of New York, brought about thousands of deaths in nursing homes and similar care facilities. …
How lockdown created Starmerism
Naff; garish; tedious; mandatory; much hyped at the time; discrediting to many; ending with a large damages bill and a collective pact of forgetting — lockdown was an office Christmas party on a national scale. Five years on, almost nothing …
Beware the lockdown generation
Here and there you can still see evidence of the collective madness of the Covid era. Some “social distancing” markers still linger on pavements or shop floors. Occasionally I find a face mask in a coat or handbag I haven’t …
China’s stooges: the real Covid conspiracy
The World Health Organisation ended 2024 by reminding us that it is five years since it discovered a virus was sweeping through the Chinese city of Wuhan. These were the first signs of the pandemic that went on to destroy …
Rishi Sunak, defeated millennial
Rishi Sunak is a borderline millennial and the salient characteristic of Britain’s millennials has been defeat. Few generations have been so ceaselessly battered by events; by 2020, their time on the stage of history had ended in total rout: financial, …
The bankrupt Queen of the Third Way
Five summers ago, 11 Labour and Conservative MPs quit their parties to form a breakaway faction in parliament. To the then Independent Group, then Change UK and latterly the Independent Group for Change, the motivating issues were Jeremy Corbyn’s leadership …
Why did Germany lockdown without cause?
Originally published in Daily Sceptic
The recent publication of thousands of pages of minutes of the COVID-19 “crisis team” of Germany’s Robert Koch Institute (RKI) has caused a buzz in social and even some traditional media, since they appear to …
The Dashboard that Ruled the World
There are multiple events that happened in January 2020 that are, to put it mildly, peculiar. One of them is that only 23 days after China reported that they had found a few cases of an “unknown pneumonia” in the …
The plot against Britain’s children
Last year, the Financial Times reported from the village of Ichinono in Japan. In common with a lot of Japanese villages, Ichinono’s population is small, old and vanishing: just 53 people, most of them over retirement age. In Japan as …
The false prophets who doomed Nigeria
Five years ago, economists prophesied a prosperous future for Nigeria, and the rest of the continent. Yet today, the country is facing what one leading Nigerian academic recently told me is its “biggest crisis since independence”. The devaluation of the …
The false prophets who doomed Nigeria
Five years ago, economists prophesied a prosperous future for Nigeria, and the rest of the continent. Yet today, the country is facing what one leading Nigerian academic recently told me is its “biggest crisis since independence”. The devaluation of the …
Revisiting China: Did a Pandemic really start in Wuhan?
Nearly four years ago, on 11 March 2020, the World Health Organization (WHO) officially declared that “Covid-19 could be characterised as a pandemic.”[1] The series of events leading up to this remarkable statement began only ten weeks earlier (December 31, …
Why children are skipping school
Lily was among the growing number of so-called ghost children — the ones who aren’t in school. I never met her; I only met her mother, Jane, because Lily didn’t feel ready to talk to me. Lily had been off …
Anders Tegnell’s lesson for the Covid Inquiry
After thousands of hours of political inquisition and motivated reasoning, the UK Covid Inquiry has finally allowed mention of the single most important control group in the global lockdown experiment: Sweden. A written submission by former State Epidemiologist of Sweden …
Jonathan Sumption on Gaza, lockdown and the ECHR
Jonathan Sumption is a difficult man to define: revered historian, esteemed lawyer and one of Britain’s greatest public intellectuals. He came to greatest popular prominence during the Covid pandemic as one of the most lucid opponents of the Government’s lockdown …
