BY JAMIE FOSTER Liz Hodgkinson’s My Covid Diary is a bold and thought-provoking reflection on the unprecedented times of the Covid-19 pandemic and the societal, political, and personal upheavals that accompanied it. Through her candid and unapologetic lens, Hodgkinson challenges mainstream narratives, arguing that the pandemic’s true purpose lay not in public health but in financial gain and societal control. Written in an engaging, personal … Continue reading My Covid Diary
BY MICHAEL HURLEY One of the unexpected gifts of ageing is time. Just when I have so much less of it, I seem to have so much more of it. Time to think. Time to relax. Time to pray. One of the best uses of my leisure, since I jilted that jealous mistress known as the practice of law, has been reading. I revel in … Continue reading Dostoevsky’s Dream
BY MICHAEL HURLEY When I came to Europe from the United States in 2015 to walk the Camino (the 500-mile ancient pilgrimage through northern Spain), I had the good fortune to fall in with a genial group of Brits. I was planning to visit the UK after my pilgrimage to finish a novel and explore the world left behind by my grandfather. He was born … Continue reading Land of Fear and Loathing
BY STEWART SLATER New Zealand does not, let us admit, get much attention. Too small, too stable (Mark Lawson started his excellent travelogue All the Safe Places there) and just too distant, it is a far-off country of which we are content to know little. It is a land which enters our consciousness mainly as a source of wine and film locations and as the … Continue reading A Global Rorschach Test
BY ROGER WATSON The analogies between membership of the Branch Covidian cult and true religion have been drawn before. Other cults with religious parallels exist such as Extinction Rebellion and the general cult of ‘wokery’ described by Andrew Doyle in his book of the same name as ‘The new puritans’. Just as in any religion, including Christianity, there are splinter groups and sects with some … Continue reading The 7 Sacraments of Public Health
BY RACHEL NICOLL Roger Watson’s article ‘Terrain Theory Terrorists’ is disappointingly emotive, labelling terrain theory as nonsense and quoting Wikipedia’s opinion that terrain theory is an ‘obsolete variation’ of ‘germ theory denialism’. Just because one article in Wikipedia says something is a fact, does not make it so. Roger Watson also makes some very sweeping, but unsubstantiated, statements such as ‘But the….doctors who adhere to … Continue reading Response to Roger Watson’s Article: Terrain Theory Terrorists
BY ROGER WATSON I recently introduced readers to a minority movement, described as ‘virus deniers’. They prefer to describe themselves as ‘virus sceptics’ and quickly enact Godwin’s Law (that eventually all arguments end up with someone being compared to Hitler) when the term ‘denier’ is used. For evidence of this see the comments that greeted another similar piece published in The Daily Sceptic. However, they … Continue reading Baileys’ Quoque
BY ROGER WATSON During the lockdowns, I encountered a group of people who were new to me. These were the ‘virus sceptics’; in fact, it would be more accurate to call them the ‘virus deniers’, a label they hate as it smacks of Holocaust denial. Remarkably, they do not believe that viruses exist. Scratch deep enough and they do not believe in any aspect of … Continue reading Virus Deniers
BY NIALL MCCRAE Kicked out of a pub in Brighton – what ignominy! This is not a tale of drunken misadventure, but a troubling encounter in the ‘new normal’ of Covid World. Although most restrictions have been relaxed, the government’s behavioural psychology campaign has had lasting impact, marginalising and demonising sceptics in a moral crusade. Five of us had attended a small freedom rally, protesting … Continue reading They Walk Among Us
BY QUENTIN PIGG To lockdown-weary ears, the word ‘safety’ now takes on a rather dark, draconian ring. Such ears, upon hearing Nadine Dorries’ hopes for the UK to become ‘the safest place in the world to go online’, are attuned to decipher that to mean the least free. Safety was, after all, the pretext for which our freedoms were so casually thrown away. According to … Continue reading Overcoddling Safetyism
BY JENNY RICKSON The world we live in today is more connected and accessible (outside of covid restrictions, but we can avoid that topic for now) than it has ever been before. The rate of technology progress is faster than it ever has been but slower than it ever will be – could you have imagined just five years ago that virtual meetings would be … Continue reading Social Media During the Pandemic: the Good, the Bad, the Trolling
BY NIALL MCCRAE AND ROGER WATSON Protests and protestors do not have a good reputation in the mind of the public, being characterised by self-righteous agitators pursuing marginal and possibly subversive causes, while causing disruption to others. This image suits the authorities, but it is not always sustainable. People attending massive demonstrations, like that against war in Iraq in 2002 and 2003, could not be … Continue reading Covid Rule Sceptics & the Countryside: Different Battles, Same War?
BY ALEX STORY Sajid Javid, Health Secretary, said during a Downing Street Press Conference last week: “We must learn to live with Covid in the same way we live with flu” The vaccine of common sense was thus injected into England’s veins. In so doing the country stepped out of the COVID tsunami and climbed to sunnier and clearer peaks. With the skies ahead clear … Continue reading The Common Sense Vaccine
BY QUENTIN HOGG One journalist has revealed what many have long suspected: that the advice given by SAGE is anything but sage. I refer to the scandal which now surrounds the government body’s endless modelling of questionably high death figures – not since Kate Moss’ party days has a modelling scandal involved so many illicit highs. Through a series of well-placed questions, the Spectator’s Fraser … Continue reading Informed By Policy
BY QUENTIN PIGG The past two years have seen so-called ‘green’ and ‘egalitarian’ politicians attempt to ward off that most green and egalitarian thing: death. The pitiless debt collector for whom our every heart murmur, every latent lump, and every shadow-ridden scan serves as a reminder of our outstanding balance. When it came to Covid, politicians thought they could write this debt off, but in … Continue reading Proscribing Death
THE CITY GRUMP The dictionary defines a delinquent as someone who “is failing in or neglectful of a duty or obligation”. The conduct of your MP in 2021 almost certainly fits that bill. Why? Because on just about every single important domestic issue, be it Covid, the NHS, energy, inflation or education your MP has done the square root of nothing in holding the Government to … Continue reading Your MP is a Delinquent
BY DOMINIC WIGHTMAN I’ve had enough of this Covid rubbish. It’s so tedious. One cannot buy a paper these days without Covid stories contaminating it. Fear permeates even the pages of the FT (which, in the opinion of many amongst its dwindling readership, has been rather too pink a paper for at least a decade now). Covid stats gallingly distract one’s gaze from the commodity … Continue reading Covid Ennui
BY JIM WEBSTER I went down to London the other day. First time for a couple of years, so I was quite intrigued to see what things were like down there. On the train and at the stations, masks were optional. Pretty much the same proportion of people were wearing them as wear them round here. Once in the big city it did feel quiet. … Continue reading What Shall the Future Bring Us?
BY GREGORY SAMS Have we been here before? We see unprecedented use of ‘unprecedented’ today. Yes, it applies to putting entire nations under house arrest. Yes, it applies to the near-universal wearing of masks (more accurately muzzles). Yes, it applies to needing a certificate to join society. But perhaps the entire phenomenon we are experiencing is not unprecedented. Let us look back in time to … Continue reading The Covid Catholic Parallel
BY QUENTIN PIGG To whom does a child belong, the parent or the state? The government seems to have quietly dropped the inane maxim which once concluded their every demand, ‘follow the science’ – perhaps because the science stopped following them. According to the JCVI, the potential benefits that the Pfizer vaccine offers 12-year-olds are too minimal to justify exposing them to its risks. Still, … Continue reading A Vaccine Too Far
