Niall McCrae
At my local Stand in the Park yesterday, everyone was optimistic that the covid narrative was crumbling, with cracks appearing across mainstream media coverage. Notably, Sky and BBC both broadcasted the King’s College Hospital doctor who challenged Sajid Javid on mandatory vaccination of NHS staff. Are we seeing a careful, controlled volte face? I’m not so sure.
I bought the Sunday Times after our gathering, and found little evidence of a shift from propaganda to truthful reporting. For example, a double-page feature on NHS hospitals stated that many older patients cannot be discharged because of staff shortages in care homes, without any mention of the sacking of forty thousand workers for refusing the jabs.
Elsewhere, Guardian columnist Gaby Hinsliff, whose ‘patience with anti-vaxxers is wearing thin’, described tennis star Novak Djokovic and a minority of Premier League footballers as stubborn, selfish and stupid. Unlike the online Daily Mail, where comments below the line are now 95% against the covid regime, the Guardian moderators allow no criticism at all. Hinsliff’s brazen assault on the bodily autonomy of superfit sportsmen was cheered by readers, whose remarks were reminiscent of 1930s Germany.
Two days previously, Emily Sheffield, sister of David Cameron’s wife Samantha, penned a despicable piece in the Evening Standard, titled ‘it’s time for London’s unvaccinated to pay with their freedoms, not ours’. This was the latest of an apparently coordinated series of state-sanctioned incitement against people who want the right to choose what is injected in their bodies. But a change in public mood is palpable, and Sheffield’ article was savaged on social media. A common theme was racism: Sheffield must know that the black communities of London are disproportionately unjabbed, and she wants them locked down.
Back to the Sunday Times, I was particularly interested in the thoughts of Rod Liddle. Like Douglas Murray, Jon Gaunt, Charles Moore and other critics of woke ideology, Liddle has been a major disappointment on covid-19. He has promoted the vaccines at every turn, and his latest column did not suggest any light bulb had flashed in his head. This, however, was a game of two halves.
In the opening paragraphs Liddle lambasted the people who criticise his acquiescence to covid tyranny: –
‘The legions of them are obsessive in their fury, unshakeable in their certitude that as a consequence of me receiving a booster jab, I am henceforth under the control of Bill Gates, Big Pharma, the Jews, the one-worlders, the commies, the Chinese and even good old Satan himself.’
Accusing all vaccine sceptics of mental illness, Liddle was no better than Emily Sheffield, Andrew Neil, Andrew Pierce and other hacks who push a blunt message that everybody must be vaccinated or nobody is safe. This manifest nonsense is expressed with no regard for medical contraindications or for people who experienced a debilitating reaction to a previous dose.
Yet Liddle is wary of excessive baiting of people who through their own bad decisions will end their lives on a ventilator begging for vaccine mercy. He understands that French president Emmanuel Macron, who warned that the unvaccinated would lose their citizenship, has gone too far. He saw the same theme at home, albeit less aggressive: –
‘Our own politicians insist that nobody will be compelled to have the jab, but their noses grow a little longer with each such pronouncement and they drift closer and closer towards that very denouement as the antivaxxers are coaxed, and then bullied, and then subjected to differential, punitive treatment.’
Denial of human rights, Liddle opined, may persuade many to roll their sleeves up, ‘but I am far from sure that it is morally right in a democracy, even one that faces a threat (which, in the case of Omicron, is some distance short of being existential)’.
So maybe Toby Young was right when he told me ‘Rod will come round eventually’. But will it be too late when journalists and other public figures tell us that they never really agreed with the draconian regime? Will we by then have arrived in a ‘new normal’ of digital identity, cashless society and a successful global corporate coup?
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