The Progressive Death Cult & the Silencing of Lockdown Sceptics

By Niall McCrae:

Lockdown sceptics have ‘blood on our hands’, according to the propagandists of Covid terror. The supposedly liberal intelligentsia, the same people who tried to defy democracy after the EU referendum, are now putting the plebs in their place. They must stay at home, muzzle themselves, and forego their leisure pursuits of football, shopping and the pub. Anyone failing to fully comply is recklessly spreading germs and contributing to the daily death toll. 

Yet the sceptic need not leave the house to be accused of endangering lives. Toby Young, for example, sits indoors at his computer all day long, but his Lockdown Sceptics website makes him a pariah figure. Lockdown zealots such as Observer writer Nick Cohen and Tory MP Neil O’Brien smear him as a Covid denier. 

Under fire this week was Lord Sumption, who got into a futile debate on the BBC television show The Big Questions. The value of life, he said, is not equal, but measured by rational criteria. Health economists use QALY (quality-adjusted life years) to assess the impact of services and treatments. The retired Supreme Court justice wasn’t saying anything radical: in a dilemma between saving a healthy young child and an octogenarian with a debilitating disease, who wouldn’t choose the former?   

But Lord Sumption was challenged by a woman with advanced cancer, who accused him of saying that her life is ‘worthless’. Against such raw emoting, no amount of sophisticated ethical reasoning could prevent him from being characterised as callous – thus a typical lockdown sceptic. 

Another illustration was in the Mayor of London’s question time on Thursday, when David Kurten probed Sadiq Khan on his promotion of Covid vaccines as safe.  They have not been tested on pregnant women or children, Kurten said, but according to the mayor he was categorically wrong. Faced with further contrary facts, Khan resorted to virtuous grandstanding of no relevance to the question, suggesting that Kurten go to a NHS hospital to hear from staff about their heroics. Severe adverse events are likely to be either ignored or accepted as a collateral price worth paying. 

While lockdown sceptics get a bad press, the administrators of the Covid regime should be confronted on their own attitudes to the sanctity of life. Tens of thousands of older people were discharged into care homes after the outbreak last spring, condemning not only themselves but also cross-infected residents to untimely demise. ‘Do not resuscitate’ signs are put on patient’s notes without their consent. And official statistics confirm that restricting access to hospital caused unnecessary deaths from cardiac disease, among several other conditions, while delaying cancer screening and surgery is a mortal time-bomb. Lockdown kills. 

Those who pontificate about their compassion are not so humane when you scratch below the surface. The educated middle class is suffering least from lockdown, on secure salaries and nice homes with space for an office. They are politically drawn to state intervention, ostensibly to help the disadvantage, but also to bolster their privilege by maintaining a professional bureaucracy and progressive hegemony. George Orwell disparaged this self-serving class, dripping with snobbery and contempt for lesser mortals.  They care little about livelihoods destroyed on ‘the road to Wigan tier’. 

The liberal lie has been thoroughly exposed by Covid as a façade for an authoritarian impulse. But not for the first time. The Soviet Union was lauded by many of the British professoriate, despite knowledge of Stalin’s slaughter of the kulaks and the consequent famine in the Ukraine. About 150 million died in the Marxist experiments of the twentieth century, but to the bitter end the progressive Left saw a means-to-an-end virtuosity. 

Amid the latest controversy, Lord Sumption was smeared as a ‘eugenicist’. The eugenics movement is often blamed on the Right, following the Nazi horrors, but it mainly drew support from the Left of the political spectrum (and let us not forget that Hitler’s party was National Socialist). Unlike the statues being toppled for revelations of past links to the African slave trade, the plaque celebrating playwright George Bernard Shaw remains on show at the London School of Economics. A Labour activist, Shaw was first o propose gas chambers for social misfits and other useless beings. 

The liberal Left has an instrumental stance on life and death, as shown by its strident support for euthanasia and abortion. Perhaps Lord Sumption, in responding to media attacks for his relative life assessment, should have asked whether a baby in the womb has as much value as his critics. The progressive government of New Zealand, led by Jacinda Ardern, has legalised abortion at the cusp of birth.     

Harsh utilitarianism is more prevalent on the progressive Left, because that is where Godless ideology thrives. Instead of the likes of Toby Young, Peter Hitchens, Laura Perrins, Clare Craig and Mike Yeadon being the culprits, it is the lockdown puritans who wreak carnage. It is they who are destroying livelihoods, driving people to despair and misappropriating the NHS to deprive non-Covid patients of vital care. But don’t expect any remorse.