To be fair, it could be worse. We could be in the Southern Hemisphere. We could be in New Zealand, listening to St Jacindra declare ‘Take all non-government information with a grain of salt…dismiss anything else. We will continue to be your single source of truth.’ Or we could be in Australia. You’ve got to feel some sympathy for the Aussies; they’ve had a rotten eighteen months of it. The terrible, devastating bushfires at the end of 2019 were bad enough; and barely had the country had time to recover before it was placed under house-arrest as the government pursued a ‘Zero Covid’ policy that turned the nation into a sealed-off police state – and as things stand, the situation is not getting any better. If cases rise again and one man in his 80s dies with coronavirus symptoms, a whole city can be plunged into fresh lockdown. In fact, even the police state label doesn’t entirely suffice now; perhaps a militarised zone would be a better description, with 300 troops dispatched to the streets of Sydney as five million people who’ve already been confined to quarters for five weeks face extended imprisonment, legally required to wear masks outdoors and unable to venture farther than three miles from their front doors. Who thought Australia would come full circle, eh? Once a penal colony…
We’re not there yet, but who knows? It often feels like the wildest nightmarish scenario one could envisage is not beyond the realms of possibility anymore. After all, democratically-elected governments across the Western world have belatedly realised their totalitarian potential and are having the time of their lives. Not so far from here, Napoleon Macron has pushed through Covid passports as a requirement to enter bars, cafés, restaurants, theatres, cinemas and (probably) brothels; Monsieur President also plans to extend this to shopping centres. It doesn’t take a great stretch of the imagination to picture certain overnight Francophiles gazing across the Channel with envious eyes and taking notes. ‘It’s a little bit of coaxing and cajoling,’ says the Cabinet’s resident Alpha Male, Foreign Secretary Dominic Raab, of the French approach to vaccine blackmail – with barely-concealed admiration.
Raab’s Cabinet colleague Michael Gove weighed-in this week with the kind of brazen comment that only those who’ve already gotten away with murder feel confident enough to say in public free from fear of comeback. And it even had a strangely moralistic tone to it. Receiving lectures on morality from a coke-snorting, wife-cheating, back-stabbing, self-serving little creep like Michael Gove is a bit like hiring Ian Brady and Myra Hindley as babysitters – I mean, you just wouldn’t, would you? Yes, the Chancellor of the Duchy of Lancaster branded those who have chosen not to submit to the vaccine as ‘selfish’. Sorry, wherever you stand on the vaccination issue, drawing the line at Gove as moral oracle should be a must for anyone with their head screwed on. It’s perhaps testament to his ego and chronic lack of awareness as to how disliked he is that he imagined airing such an opinion would somehow provoke a rush to the nearest vaccination centre rather than having the opposite effect. I’m reminded of the old Bill Hicks routine on celebrities telling the public not to take drugs. Yeah, the First Lady says ‘don’t do it’; what’s the first thing you want to do?
Besides, there’s no real need for ‘Govie’ to intervene; the authoritarian administration he proudly belongs to has effectively introduced Covid/vaccine passports through the back door, anyway, so he should be a happy man. The infamous NHS app has now had a ‘domestic’ section added to it, one that reads ‘You may need to show your NHS Covid Pass at places that have chosen to use the service’. This new addition to the mobile surveillance machine in your pocket enables businesses to use it as a means of finding out if anyone crossing their threshold is double-jabbed or unclean – a voluntary option at the moment, though the threat in the air is of mandatory use come the autumn, when it will be a necessity to gain access to nightclubs and the like. Health Secretary Sajid ‘Double-jabbed’ Javid – fresh from self-isolating, funnily enough – has gushed, ‘As we cautiously reopen society, vaccines will allow you to get back to the things you love and have missed during the pandemic.’ As long as you provide your papers, of course – which means we’re not going back to the things we love and missed during the pandemic.
Dominic Raab has issued the strongest hint yet that passports will be required as of September where certain venues are concerned. Who seriously thinks it will end there, though? In the latest phase of the shameless operation to coerce and bully some of society’s least-vulnerable-to-Covid citizens into being jabbed, Raab also hinted passports may be compulsory in order for students to attend in-person lectures and even reside in halls of residence. Lest we forget, very few students attended any in-person lectures at all last year, yet were still charged the full extortionate whack for receiving online tutorials they could’ve probably found on YouTube for nothing; and many halls of residence were transformed into effective prison camps during the first lockdown. The threat of taking all that away from them hardly serves as a great incentive to get vaccinated. At the same time, however, I’m surprised all students haven’t been jabbed by now, for the most dedicated mask-wearers and seemingly susceptible subjects of Project Fear to my eyes are that very demographic.
When Raab was asked if similar proposals would apply to the workplace, he’d already been pre-empted by the likes of Amazon, whose enlightened and benign treatment of their workforce is world-renowned. They’ll apparently be required to be vaccinated once all their warehouses are fully up and running again. Meanwhile, considering care homes were the major casualties of the Government’s initial botched approach to combating the coronavirus, perhaps it’s not surprising staff in such environments were the first to fall under the mandatory vaccine edict, even if it does feel a bit like locking the door of an empty stable. For months, Ministers have repeatedly emphasised passports for domestic use would not be introduced – and evidence via their screen-grabbed Tweets is a regular fixture of social media at the moment; but they’re led by a serial liar, so any statements of that nature mean jack shit.
If jabs become a compulsory requisite in all workplaces, it will sum up this post-lockdown faux-freedom in a nutshell; after being forced out of the workplace and left with little choice but to do their job from home (regardless of whether this was a conducive environment), many workers now being suddenly ordered back to a set-up they’ve become utterly detached from are informed that this joyous return will also come with a caveat. Yet, it seems one could be jabbed a dozen times a day every day till the end of time and that still wouldn’t prevent the pingdemic disrupting the workforce. The current noticeable gaps on the supermarket shelves uncomfortably reminiscent of the panic-buying phase of Lockdown I are apparently due to the rising number of workers self-isolating courtesy of being pinged into exile from polite society by the Covid NHS app – 600,000 alerts were aimed at users in just one week a fortnight ago.
Anti-vax 5G fruitcakes aside, fear of the vaccine can be viewed as an unforeseen side-effect of the panic propaganda that has been pumped into the collective bloodstream over the last year-and-a-half as much as all the opposite manifestations of illogical paranoia can be. But however ridiculous to opposing camps the other side’s fears may appear, those fears are real to those who feel them – and this is the legacy of the mess we’re in. Terrifying people into compliance and then adding to the myriad divisions that were already in place thanks to the likes of Brexit and Identity Politics may make running countries easier from the perspective of governments; but what all this is doing to a way of life that world wars were fought to preserve is incalculable.
© The Editor
Website: https://www.johnnymonroe.co.uk/
Patreon: https://www.patreon.com/user?fan_landing=true&u=56665294
I suppose it’s somewhat characteristic that when the BBC is onto a winner it has a habit of buggering it up. The 2012 Olympics in London saw the coming of age of the ‘Red Button’ system, enabling viewers to receive a more comprehensive coverage of events than they’d ever previously enjoyed. Not being an especially eager follower of most Olympic disciplines, I nevertheless found myself sucked-in by the hype and ended up on the edge of my seat watching – of all things – bloody show-jumping. I hadn’t even been aware of the sport since the childhood days of Harvey Smith and his two fingers, but wall-to-wall TV events like the Olympics often shine a spotlight on pursuits that receive little attention the rest of the time – just think of when curling became a national talking point during the 2002 Winter Olympics as a Scots-dominated side captured women’s gold for Great Britain. My experience in 2012 is one routinely repeated across the country whenever an occasion of this magnitude has television’s red carpet rolled out; a similar thing tends to happen during the World Cup – people who never normally take notice of football suddenly become hooked for a fortnight.
Even without the distracting drink and drugs, it’s hard to imagine a character such as Amy Winehouse being an active artist in 2021; the woman wore her heart on her sleeve and didn’t give a f**k if that fact made some a little queasy – qualities guaranteed to ensure cancellation, ostracism and grovelling public apologies in this illiberal era. She’s precisely the kind of figure contemporary music sorely lacks and badly needs; and, astonishingly, she’d still only be 37 if she hadn’t passed away 10 years ago today. Whenever someone dies young, whether famous name or personal friend, we often find ourselves imagining what their response would have been to events occurring in the years since their passing; and when one looks at the bland, banal and utterly inconsequential generation of musicians to have risen without a trace in the wake of Amy Winehouse’s death, I think Amy would have been an even more contentious cat amongst the timid pigeons now than she was then. After all, this is a time when a member of a highly successful mainstream band (Mumford and Sons) is forced to quit simply because he’d tweeted a thumbs-up to a book exposing Antifa as the nihilistic thugs anyone without Woke blinkers can see they are.
Scent – that was what hit me yesterday. The scent of fruit and the scent of veg; the scent of freshly-baked buns and bread; the scent of girls walking past with their perfume reminding me what women smell like – indoor odours I haven’t inhaled on foreign soil for over a year. My sinuses weren’t even smacked by any unseemly B.O., which has long been a traditional and unfortunate by-product of venturing into a supermarket during a Great British heat-wave. To set foot in an interior outside of my home and not have the ability to smell my surroundings utterly constrained by a bloody mask was intoxicating as I became reacquainted with a sensation I’d been denied for too long; what a relief it was to expose this neglected sense to something other than my own breath. In fact, it’s frightening how quickly and effectively I had forgotten the aroma of freedom of choice; like the sudden restoration of so much we’ve been deprived of since the first lockdown, being reunited with such a simple gift it’s so easy to take for granted is something worthy of celebration – even if the awareness that this particular democratic right will probably be taken back with the same speed it was stolen in the first place remains uppermost amidst the celebration.
Ah, technology. Where would the pandemic have been without it? Across the pond, the sinister clique that routinely reanimates the cadaver of Joe Biden and periodically wheels him out before the cameras of the subservient charlatans masquerading as journalists is hard at work. Sleepy Joe’s team are currently conspiring with their big tech paymasters to ensure anyone banned from one platform for spreading ‘misinformation’ – particularly of the coronavirus variety – will be banned from all of them; what constitutes misinformation, of course, is (in these oh-so polarised times) utterly subjective; one man’s truth is another man’s fake news and all that. But for judgement to be in the hands of the privileged few controlling the flow of media traffic, both social and mainstream – a cyber star-chamber to whom we have no right to reply – is an extremely worrying scenario where those antiquated freedoms involving speech, thought and expression are concerned. In today’s doublethink society, misinformation essentially translates as opinions those on the ‘right side of history’ disagree with – and they are the people with the power to cancel any dissenting voices far more effectively than any fanatical serial censors starting another petition.
Perhaps it’s a comment on both the limited online attention span and just how momentary sensation has now become. When the striking images of the first global lockdown – all those eerie photos of the world’s most famous capital cities deserted of people – went viral just over a year ago, reaction swiftly shifted from open-jawed shock at how these landmark locations now resembled the set of a Hollywood movie about the apocalypse to jaded shoulder-shrugging, suggesting everyone ceased to find the imagery remotely strange with 24 hours. Yeah, whatever, seen it. Yet what those empty tourist spots inadvertently highlighted was how a persistent headache for certain beleaguered world leaders had been unexpectedly resolved overnight. It’s almost hard to recall now – because life before Covid seems so distant and unreal – but prior to the coronavirus, many of those streets now devoid of a human presence had been teeming with people who hadn’t come to take selfies in the shadow of an iconic monument. Pre-BLM street protest was geographically localised and concerned with issues that concerned the majority; remember all that trouble in Hong Kong? China at least had something to thank its clumsiest scientists for there, for sure. And what about Paris?
The Bank Holiday Monday that never was – not unlike the airport that never was or the garden bridge that never was; it’s not as if Boris Johnson doesn’t have a history when it comes to grandiose promises he fails to deliver on. I suspect his numerous wives and mistresses could testify to that. Mind you, in this particular case his promise proved to be wishful thinking, probably made when he slipped an England football shirt over his normal clothes – as you do. This was a promise dependent upon England winning Euro 2020 and, as everyone no doubt knows by now, we didn’t. I suppose it could be seen as an addition to the ‘we’re all in this together’ narrative that has run through the government response to the pandemic ever since the PM’s historic television address to the nation. Incidentally, that particular broadcast famously gatecrashed the long-held list of most-watched TV broadcasts ever in the UK when it was seen by almost 28 million viewers in March last year, and it’s now been joined in the top ten by the Euros final, coming straight in at No.4 with only the 1969 ‘Royal Family’ documentary, Diana’s funeral and (of course) the 1966 World Cup Final ahead of it. Seems the boys of ’66 will forever be the unsurpassable yardstick.
The manner in which occupying superpowers exit foreign soil usually depends upon the circumstances surrounding their presence in the first place. European withdrawal from overseas territories in the post-war era was often prompted by the economically challenging strain of running Empires in the wake of global conflict; fighting for the mother country in WWII gave colonial subjects an extra bargaining chip in the clamour for self-determination, and most imperial overlords were too exhausted, broken and bankrupt to resist for much longer. Moreover, independence movements were rarely conducted in a non-violent fashion, and warring factions that placed the colonial masters in the unenviable role of permanent peacekeepers could lead to an ignominious flight from the colony in question. Palestine and India were not exactly dignified departures on the part of the British, and the less said about what happened in the Congo when the Belgians bolted the better. The painfully protracted battle for Algerian independence almost provoked civil war in France, with rebel French-Algerian generals pointing their warheads in the direction of Paris at the height of the crisis.
For years, sport in the summer months was an annual (or bi-annual) exercise in national humiliation for either England or the UK as a whole. How many Ashes defeats? How many Wimbledon whimpers? And how many deflating exits from either the World Cup or the European Championships? Most of us were raised in the shadows of legends and were taught that once upon a time we used to be the best at sports we invented, before the colonies and other countries we exported those sports to at the end of the Imperial era gradually overtook us and turned the teacher/pupil relationship upside down. A decline on the playing fields we’d laid out in the first place appeared to mirror a decline in our overall global standing, as though one was inexorably related to the other, and the past was somewhere we’d always been world champions. For endless decades, the last Brit to have won the men’s singles crown in SW19 had been before the Second World War; the name Fred Perry was once an ubiquitous yardstick TV viewers grew tired of being referenced year-after-year, yet it seemed he’d always be mentioned to remind us of our collective ineptitude at a game we become obsessed with for a solitary fortnight whenever June bleeds into July.
I guess the extent of wartime rationing was belatedly brought home to me when I read ‘War and Peace’ a few years back. Naturally, this doorstopper of an epic requires a lot of pages – 1,334 the number my own copy can boast. But the edition in question was published in 1943 – indeed it has one of those lovely handwritten dedications inside it (‘To Ronald, from Auntie Nina, 25.XII.45’), the kind that always prompt me to ponder on the identities of these mystery people and what became of them. However, what really makes this volume unique amongst the many old books I’ve picked-up over the years is that the thickness of each page is so flimsy you can almost see through the paper. I’d been aware of paper rationing on top of everything else rationed during the Second World War, but I’d never encountered the realities of it before. Newspapers, comics and magazines were hit more or less as soon as hostilities broke out, reduced to 60% of their pre-war strength, and when the rationing of paper was tightened even further as of 1942, George Orwell looked at the way in which paper supplies were distributed from the perspective of the author.
winegumtelegram 