Mark Dolan: Don’t let them cancel Christmas, New Year or the rest of our lives

The government are drawing up proposals to roll out so-called Plan C measures after Christmas; this according to The Times newspaper.

Measures would include pubs and restaurants being limited to outdoor drinking and dining – good luck with that in January – no social mixing indoors and a rule of six for outdoor gatherings.

Happy New Year everyone.

Where do we start with this? It's been almost two years folks. We socially distanced, we masked our faces, the vast majority had the vaccines, myself included, people gave up their jobs or businesses, our kids gave up their education, we relinquished our liberties, we worked out to Joe Wicks, we baked banana bread, we drank wine on Zoom and we protected the NHS.

And yet, here we go again, the same old script. Lockdowns, masks, work from home orders, arrows in supermarkets and the new fresh hell of Covid vaccine passports, which links your health status to certain services and freedoms.

As we enter 2022, we can't sign up for another year, two years five years, ten years of this. Never before, has a single disease, one non-fatal to the vast majority and for which a third of people have been told to pretend they've got, ever shaped a society and it's wider public policy. Just on the money alone, we haven't borrowed on this scale since German bombs rained over London. And I don’t think the national threat is remotely comparable.

We've never stopped the world for a disease before, and yet further ruinous measures beckon for the Omicron variant, which appears to be on a par with a bad cold. This according to the medic who discovered it and Tim Spector from the respected Zoe Covid data app.

In any difficult winter season two to three hundred people can very sadly die a day from colds and flu. So why, having always accepted that, have the rules suddenly changed? The latest YouGov polling suggests for the first time that a majority of the public are against further measures.

It's clear that the British people are starting to have enough and I’m clear WE need to shape the narrative in the New Year, not our leaders. Because if we leave the government and doomsday scientists in charge, which has smashed our economy and society, brought about unspeakable and unquantifiable human damage and a colossal non-Covid death toll, none of this will end.

I fear that policymakers around the world want to change society forever and they see this as their opportunity. And it's only us the people, that can say no. And I think the tide is turning.

The big day, the 25th of December, is a week away. Don't let them cancel Christmas, don't let them cancel New Year. And don't let them cancel the rest of our lives. We're only here once, very briefly.

Right now, this isn't living, it's existing. And life, without the freedom to lead it as we see fit, isn't worth living at all.