Delingpole: Boris Goes Full Fascist Against Lockdown Protests – But Not BLM or XR

LONDON, ENGLAND - SEPTEMBER 10: The statue of Sir Winston Churchill is seen vandalised wit
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James Delingpole

Here is some footage of the Metropolitan Police charging into action against demonstrators in London’s Trafalgar Square.

How much braver, more confident — and aggressive! — they look than the hapless colleagues caught on camera in June fleeing from a BLM demonstration, pursued by a jeering mob chanting ‘Run, Piggy! Run!’

Is this a sign that car crash Prime Minister Boris Johnson and his Home Secretary Priti Patel have finally got a grip on law and order in the United Kingdom?

Sadly not. It’s a sign, rather, that under Johnson’s disastrous premiership Britain is enforcing a bizarre and unjust authoritarianism where genuinely malign forces such as Extinction Rebellion and Black Lives Matter — who even managed to blockade Oxford Circus on Sunday — get treated with kid gloves, while peaceful lovers of liberty like the anti-lockdown, anti-mask demonstrators in Trafalgar Square on Saturday are maligned, misrepresented and ruthlessly crushed with arrests, brutality and swingeing fines.

The economic damage inflicted on Britain by the spoiled hard-left, anti-freedom, anti-prosperity cry-bullies of Extinction Rebellion has run into the tens of millions. This deeply unpleasant outfit has brought cities to a standstill, preventing commuters from getting to work, ambulances reaching hospitals, families from seeing their dying relatives. It has wasted many hours of police time. It has vandalised statues, dug up the lawns of a Cambridge college, even threatened the safety of airports. That’s why Richard Walton — former head of the Metropolitan Police’s Counter Terrorism Command — has argued that they are dangerous extremists who should be put behind bars.

The same can be said of the Black Lives Matter demonstrators who have vandalised public property (including a number of statues), attacked passers-by and injured numerous police, including the police rider thrown from her bolting horse after it was startled by BLM activists.

Compare and contrast this aggressive, relentlessly provocative behaviour by XR and BLM with the peaceable crowds which have gathered on occasion to protest against what they see as the British state’s overreaction to the Chinese coronavirus. They believe that lockdowns, compulsory masks, and proposed curfews are ineffective and a needless assault on freedom; they are worried that this is all leading to the imposition of a vaccine which they believe may be unsafe — and also unnecessary for healthy people with an uncompromised immune system.

About the worst you could say about these people is that some of them — the anti-vaxxers and the anti-5G protestors in particular — are at the eccentric fringe of the debate. But they’re not damaging property, hurting anyone (except possibly in self-defence) or causing economic damage or disruption.

Why then, is it one rule for the nasties, bullies, thugs, saboteurs, and economic terrorists in the first two groups but another for the fundamentally decent, law-abiding freedom-loving members of the public in the third group?

The answer, I fear, may be even worse than cowardice.

Note the massive sucking up by the authorities and the Establishment towards both Extinction Rebellion and Black Lives Matter.

A number of policemen, senior ones included, have been filmed ‘taking the knee’ to Black Lives Matter. Politicians have bent over backwards to show how totally down they are with BLM’s supposed war on racism and its allegedly noble objectives.

The same is true of Extinction Rebellion. As I argued last year, every credulous pillock in the public eye has leapt on the XR bandwagon from Stephen Fry and the rock group Radiohead to useful idiot Conservative MPs such as Mark Garnier, Zac Goldsmith, and Geoffrey Cox.

Essentially, depressingly, Boris Johnson’s supposedly Conservative administration is far more closely in tune with the politics of Black Lives Matter and Extinction Rebellion than it is with the freedom-lovers of the anti-lockdown movement. The government may deplore BLM’s and XR’s more extreme tactics but it most certainly doesn’t treat either organisation like full-on Enemies of the State (even though that is what they are).

But the government do, very obviously, want to crush and destroy the anti-lockdown/anti-mask movement — despite the fact that its ideals (liberty, limited government, evidence-based policy, freedom of choice, personal responsibility, etc) are actually much closer to where any genuinely Conservative administration ought to be.

What’s more, the government — and the police — are getting much more unpleasant and authoritarian in their approach towards a group of people who by any sane standards ought to be treated with respect and sympathy as natural allies. That police charge at the demonstrators on Saturday — together with the use of service dogs — was fairly clearly designed to intimidate and perhaps provoke retaliation. At least one demonstrator was badly injured, which would surely never have happened if the police had merely maintained a respectful distance, observing but not attacking.

There was an example of this dangerous new authoritarianism in parliament last week when MP Tobias Ellwood proposed “greater use of our military in tackling this pandemic”:

Ellwood — an ex-soldier, now a reservist Lt. Col. for the military’s propaganda arm 77th Brigade — even talked about putting the country on a “war footing”.

What exactly does he mean here? We know that the military has already been involved in simple, practical schemes like the building of all those ‘Nightingale Hospitals’ for the expected glut of Covid-19 patients that never materialised, leaving the Nightingales almost totally empty.

But that was six months ago. What, exactly, has happened since to justify putting Britain on a “war footing”?

On the contrary, as Carl Heneghan, Professor of Evidence-Based Medicine at Oxford University, forcibly argues in the Mail on Sunday, coronavirus no longer justifies the radical measures being used by governments to try to stop it:

Dialling down the rhetoric and putting the available Covid data into context would be a useful start. (There are many more registered deaths from influenza and pneumonia than Covid at present, yet the public is only given a daily diet of Covid.)

There might come a time when we need more stringent rules for the population, but that time is not right now. If we do need a national shutdown of some sort, remember there is a ready-made opportunity in the week after Christmas when many of us take an extended break in any case.

But for now the only ‘circuit break’ we need is an end to the current cycle of bad data, bad language and shockingly bad scientific advice.

But Boris Johnson’s Chicken Licken administration isn’t “dialling down the rhetoric and putting the available Covid data into context.”

Rather, it is now completely in the grip of the “must do more now” faction — headed by overgrown school prefect and authoritarian control freak Health Secretary Matt Hancock — whose response to dissent is not to listen but brutally to silence it with tougher policing, stricter rules and ever more expensive fines.

Here he is in full bully mode:

The health secretary told the BBC’s Andrew Marr show the country was facing a “tipping point and we have a choice”.

“If everybody follows the rules then we can avoid further national lockdown.”

The prime minister is understood to be considering a ban on households mixing, and reducing opening hours for pubs.

Asked if England could face another national lockdown, Mr Hancock said: “I don’t rule it out, I don’t want to see it.”

For the last few weeks, the world has been looking aghast at the state of Victoria in Australia, wondering how a region of a relaxed, freedom-loving, prosperous, sensible Western nation like Australia could suddenly embrace such fascistic measures.

But it looks like the United Kingdom is heading that way too. And anyone who wants to protest against this assault on liberty ought to be ready for the worst: the police are now a political instrument and they’re not afraid to send in the dogs and the riot police thugs to enforce this authoritarian regime’s iron whim.

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