The United Kingdom’s dystopian COVID-19 police state is threatening to become even stricter, including limiting people to one “exercise” outing per week, even as those making and enforcing the rules get caught violating them.
The U.K.’s socialist healthcare system is allegedly being stretched to the breaking point by the emergence of a mutant form of the coronavirus; and, as always, the common man, not the virus itself, is being blamed.
“Vaccines minister Nadhim Zahawi this morning suggested that shops are in the firing line, stressing the need for everyone to wear masks and follow one-way systems in supermarkets,” wrote the Daily Mail. “He appealed for people not to stop and chat to friends they bump into while outside their homes — and also made clear that sitting on park benches during ‘exercise’ sessions was not recommended.”
“Don’t go out and sit or have that opportunity of social interaction because you’re helping the virus and that’s what we want to avoid,” he said.
Another government source told the paper bluntly, “There is a feeling that people have just gone back to doing whatever they want” — anathema to the ruling class.
Zahawi refused to rule out further restrictions, and another senior government advisor, Professor Peter Horby, said that if two weeks pass and the coronavirus situation hasn’t improved, “we’re going to have to be even stricter.”
One restriction being considered is allowing people only to leave their homes once a week for exercise. Currently, they are permitted to exercise outside the home alone or with one other person once per day, and they are not allowed to meet others socially at all. Officials think people are taking advantage of the exercise exemption to get together with friends, and such effrontery must, they believe, be stopped.
Closing nurseries (i.e., day cares) is also a possibility even though children are at practically no risk of death from COVID-19. Labor Party leader Sir Keir Starmer — who, being a leftist, thinks the authoritarian Conservative government hasn’t been “tough enough” — said nurseries “probably should be closed.”
Enforcing limits on the number of people in stores and possibly cracking down on “nonessential” purchases, shuttering churches, mandating masks outdoors and in offices, instituting a curfew, and banning “support bubbles” (in which one adult who lives alone may visit the home of another) are also under consideration.
Of course, as usual, these rules only apply to the “little people.”
Prime Minister Boris Johnson, for example, was caught Monday morning riding his bicycle in a park seven miles from his Downing Street residence. While Johnson was wearing a mask, he was also clearly violating the directive that individuals “should not travel outside [their] local area.” Later in the day, he traveled to a vaccination center in Bristol, well over 100 miles from his home. According to the Daily Mail:
Justifying his own trip from London to Bristol, Mr. Johnson said it was “essential that I explain to the public what we are doing to roll out the mass vaccination centers.”
He added: “Everybody should be asking themselves whether they need to be leaving home, whether they need to be doing something that could actually end up spreading the disease.”
Meanwhile, a member of the public whipped out his cellphone in time to record video of four unmasked police officers drinking coffee at a table inside a restaurant, something that is forbidden to the people who pay their salaries. When the man challenged the officers on their breach of Johnson’s edict, they told him to “grow up” and approached him, still barefaced. Their only explanation for flouting the rules: “We work really hard.”
Other U.K. officials — most notably Dr. Neil Ferguson, inventor of the “spaghetti code” COVID-19 computer model — have also been found wanting when it comes to lockdown compliance. While Ferguson publicly resigned after getting caught, he has continued to advise the government behind the scenes and played a “key role” in convincing Johnson to “cancel” Christmas, the Daily Mail reported.
Thus, one can be fairly sure that while the powers that be will have no qualms about imposing even more draconian restrictions on their citizens in a futile attempt to arrest a relatively harmless virus, they themselves will hardly be inconvenienced at all.
