It's April 1st, but we are all fools today. Over not one day, but rather two years, this country has been pranked into a disastrous overreaction to a virus and it's no laughing matter.
We are entering what many in the media are now calling Awful April, with a 50% increase in energy bills, and inflation running at over 6%.
According to the British chambers of commerce, more UK businesses are preparing to raise prices, than at any time since the 1980s.
And don't get me started on the cost of petrol.
It would be cheaper to fill your car with Chanel Number 5.
Don't be fooled by the spin doctors, who will have you believe this is due to Vladimir Putin's appalling invasion of Ukraine.
Of course that invasion is not great news for the world economy – sanctions and constraints on the supply of oil and gas are a problem - but our problems long pre-date old Vladimir and his imperialistic ambitions.
The Russian bear is indeed digging its claws into the West, but the elephant in the room is Covid, and in my view, measures failed to control it.
Paying people to stay at home, locking up the healthy, stopping people from getting out to work and providing to their family, closing schools and spending 2 billion quid a month on testing, all for a potentially nasty disease, yes, but one non-fatal to most.
Spending 34 billion on a test and trace system, that also failed, because any immunologist worth their salt, will tell you when numbers get to a certain level it’s useless, as the Germans discovered in winter 2020.
Russian President Vladimir Putin attends a meeting with the head of the Republic of Ingushetia Makhmud-Ali Kalimatov at the Kremlin in Moscow, Russia March 30, 2022. Sputnik/Mikhail Klimentyev/Kremlin via REUTERS
SPUTNIK
If you look at the explosion of cases in countries like Australia and New Zealand, who pursued Zero Covid, it's pretty clear to me that this virus can't be stopped and was never going to be.
Thank god the free covid tests end this week.
They weren’t free at all and were fuelling this monolithic obsession with one illness.
So we printed billions, we impacted supply lines, we indebted the country to the tune of over 2 trillion quid and that's why where we are today. It's got nothing to do with the topless, horse-riding icon that is Vladimir Putin.
Boxes of NHS Covid-19 rapid antigen test (lateral flow self test) kits. Picture date: Tuesday January 18, 2022.
Jane Barlow
Russia's answer to Frankie Dettori.
God knows we hate this virus and it has been extraordinarily dangerous for some, and NHS frontline workers have been heroic beyond words, and we have lost too many.
But after two years in which we have caused such widespread damage, including creating a non-Covid death toll that will dwarf that of the virus, the bills are now starting to come in.
We have seen the colossal human price – mental health, a divided society and undiagnosed other diseases - but as we enter Awful April, we are now paying the financial price too, like I've been warning, since the spring of 2020. People thought you could just borrow money ad infinitum.
I was told by supposedly clever economic experts, that borrowing is effectively free at the moment. I've had boffins with letters after their name, telling me the borrowing is literally cost neutral.
That it almost pays us to borrow.
Well they may have letters after their name, but I’ve got some four letter words for them now.
In fact the cost of servicing our debts, has quadrupled since the start of the pandemic.
80 billion quid a year just on debt interest alone, as pointed out by the Chancellor Rishi Sunak.
Who doesn’t actually drive a Kia by the way. But he has driven the economy into a brick wall. Not something I’d recommend with a Kia.
So you’d think that those who called for this disastrous and unprecedented policy of lockdowns, would be keeping very quiet.
Quite the opposite. The ultimate cheerleaders of lockdown, which has caused this economic catastrophe, have been complaining about this economic catastrophe.
Could it be anything to do with the fact that the NHS closed its doors to the public for two years and became the Covid health service.
Don't take my word for it; some predict the waiting list for untreated patients could reach 12 million. Society locked down, the economy locked down, schools locked down and the NHS locked down.
And now the country is down and out. But the authorities haven’t learnt their lesson.
The Independent report that people are being advised to stay at home if they've got a bloody cold. I couldn't agree more with the entrepreneur Luke Johnson who tweeted the following.
Meanwhile the Crown Prince of lockdown, Professor Patrick Vallance has said the following.
Chief scientific adviser Sir Patrick Vallance, during a media briefing in Downing Street, London, on coronavirus (Covid-19). Picture date: Monday July 19, 2021.
Alberto Pezzali
"A Covid variant with the ability to 'escape immunity' could take the world by surprise."
Are we seriously going to worry about variants of a virus that doesn't even exist yet?
Have we not had enough mental torture for two years?
What do you think this baseless pessimism does to the economy?
And to our collective mental health?
I've got a simple question for Patrick Vallance and all of these characters, who don't understand the link between the economy and public health, and who are insulated from it with their jobs for life and gold plated pensions. Did you not catch the Chancellor’s mini budget last week?
Have you not seen the day to day borrowing, the interest payments, the inflation, the national debt? How many more of these expensive and ruinous measures do you think we can afford? What is too much debt? 3 trillion? 4 trillion? 5 trillion?
From a cursory glance at the books, it seems to me that we are three or four lockdowns away from having to decide which of our children to eat first.
The madness has to end, even with cases sky high, as they are. Virus gonna virus. Luckily omicron, the current variant, is milder than a night out with Alan Titchmarsh.
Love Alan, he gives me green fingers.
I personally don't think this is a conspiracy; I think it's a cock up.
But we are making the same mistakes over and over again.
Surely the colossal economic pain we are now feeling, which I predicted, is enough to wake the public up, and wake up policymakers, and help them understand that the war on Covid must end completely.
Masks are another sick joke. The Mail’s Ross Clark reported this week that we are poisoning the planet, with 129 billion plastic face coverings, not recyclable of course, being discarded every month.
But the authorities are being urged us to bring these wretched things back, even though they are clearly about as useful as a eunuch at an orgy.
If you think things are bad now, take my word for it, things will be twice as horrific in a year’s time. We are led by generation of politicians and so-called public health experts who have wrecked the country and wrecked public health.
But given their huge mistake, it's too late for a U-turn.
They can only continue to tell us that the Emperor's got some really fancy new clothes.
But the naked truth, is one that can't be escaped.
The measures failed, which is why it’s beyond a joke that there is even a suggestion we will carry on regardless.
It was Albert Einstein the genius physicist, who said the definition of madness is doing the same thing over and over again and expecting a different result.
And that’s exactly what the scientific establishment are doing with calls for more measures and dire warnings about the future.
It's time for the government to get out of the way, so we can get back to normal, contribute to the economy that pays for everything that we value so highly and begin to rebuild this great country of ours, one brick at a time.
If we put up with any more of this nonsense, the biggest April fool will be us.
