Anthony Blair acolyte and former Labour cabinet minister David Blunkett has written in The Telegraph recently that “to incarcerate people solely on age grounds is an outrage”. This, from a man who once described civil libertarianism as “airy fairy”, was given in response to suggestions that UK lockdown restrictions might be eased for the general population and re-applied in a targeted manner towards those most vulnerable.
I am not suggesting that we incarcerate the elderly either, but I do believe, here in New Zealand, that what is more outrageous is to incarcerate the entire population instead. It is interesting to see illiberal people from both the left and the supposed ‘right’ coming together to support this.
What we know about COVID-19 is that it affects certain groups more readily – the old, those with pre-existing conditions, and the obese. People meeting these criteria should be informed of the risk and, should they wish to self-isolate, be given assistance. COVID-19 is more of a risk amidst higher population densities, and at temperatures of between 5 and 11 degrees Celsius. We haven’t seen that temperature range this season yet – though we will – and when we do we had better make sure that the lockdown doesn’t start all over again.
King Corona’s main achievement to date has been to instil unwarranted global panic. Red Radio (aka RNZ) announced on Sunday morning that the number of deaths attributed to COVID-19 globally has exceeded 200,000. This sounds terrible, which of course it is to anyone directly affected, but the statistic must be placed in context. Around the world some 55 million people die annually, equating to roughly 150,000 people per day. The average daily mortality rate for COVID-19 over the period of its known existence is around 1,300 or 0.9 percent of total deaths – and this assumes that those attributed to have died with the disease also died from it.
By contrast, the World Health Organization advises that there are more than one billion people infected with influenza annually, resulting in between three and five million severe cases, and between 290,000 and 650,000 deaths.
New Zealand’s annual death rate (from all causes) is around 35,000, equating to 95 per day. Of these, quite a number die from the effects of influenza. Shockingly, we lose on average one person a day through car accidents, and two per day through suicide. We don’t lock up the population to prevent accidents – nor should we. Are we doing enough to prevent suicide? Most definitely not. And we have yet to see what effect the loss of people’s livelihoods and dignity brought on by the lockdown(s) will be.
We lose 13,000 lives per year, or 35 per day, through abortion. The effects of our recent abortion-on-demand legislation are yet to be seen. Abortion is already one of our leading causes of death. The more ‘choice’ there is in this regard, the better, the left says.
COVID-19 is creeping up into flu territory in terms of its impact on the death rate and, as I wrote in The BFD at the start of this ‘crisis’, the overall effect could be no worse than that of flu. New Zealand’s corona numbers are certainly minuscule. I have to pinch myself every time Miss Ardern and Ashley Blomfield address the nation with daily statistics such as: one elderly death and three new people ‘infected’. Imagine if this were to carry on after the ‘war’ is over, the PM appearing on lunchtime television and requiring us to down tools because somebody’s Aunt Beryl, aged 87, had passed.
Countries which haven’t locked down – such as Sweden – are believed to be on the brink of achieving herd immunity. Studies in Stockholm – which has not been subjected to the loss of liberty as us – show that between 25 and 40 per cent of the population have had the virus. Many people around the world have been found to be asymptomatic, or to have suffered only mild symptoms. Professor John Ioannidis and other dissenting scientists say it is possible that many more people have had the virus than have been tested for it. This implies its spread is statistically greater, and its effect much less significant, than was at first supposed.
We appear not to know how many New Zealanders have in total been infected, and we are not even asking the question. Nor have we asked how many New Zealanders will die as a result of treatments for other illnesses such as cancer, heart or neurological disease, which were deferred (voluntarily or otherwise) during the lockdown.
The way in which most western governments have responded is out of all proportion to the level of threat, be it through incompetence, group-think, or a fear for their own positions should health services fail. Protecting the health service was a key reason given for our home detention. Rather than being stretched, it appears to have been on holiday for a month.
Whilst death by other means outside the public eye is fine, it is forbidden to succumb to the public scourge which is corona. The social psychology behind this seems to be that we have abolished from our lives not only the concept of death, but also of old age.
Death is the one certainty which we all face but don’t, apparently, wish to contemplate. Neither can we countenance the idea of growing old. The ‘baby boomer’ generation (comprising those individuals born between 1946 and 1964 in the post-war ‘baby boom’) seems insistent that age seventy is the new forty – or something equally ridiculous. Dressed in jeans and baseball caps, blue-dyed hair and crumpled tattoos, they strut around imagining themselves to be Mick Jagger. No one is ‘old’ any more. No one dresses old. Nobody thinks that they are old or wishes to participate in anything so morbid as reflecting upon lives which have largely passed and often been well lived. The once-elderly have instead got their rock’n’roll and their ‘medical’ marijuana and their alcohol abuse to occupy them.
Laurie Graham asks in The Spectator, ‘Why are so many of my elderly friends in denial about death?’ She says that death is now viewed by those over 70 as an ‘impertinence’, despite the fact that they have already completed their biblical three score years and ten. More than half of UK ‘boomers’ will die intestate, unable to face putting their affairs in order, or writing a will. This is unsurprising. Cities here are strewn with ‘modern’ rest homes which more closely resemble theme parks, whose occupants inhabit ‘wine cellars’, ‘gastro-lounges’, and discos. Many of them operate as little more than glorified swingers’ clubs. The residents are far too busy rockin’ to think about dying.
Himself a ‘boomer’, born in 1953, Anthony Blair once said: ‘I am a modern man. I am part of the rock and roll generation – the Beatles, colour TV, that’s the generation I come from.’ And with this he defined New Labour, which in turn was to define Britain for a generation. Labour people are ‘modern’ people. ‘Boomers’ are ‘modern’ people. And Miss Ardern, a follower of Blair – though to his political left – also worships ‘modernity’.
With the Boomers in such a key electoral position, and in many cases determining the outcome of elections, it’s little wonder that governments are reluctant to inconvenience the once-elderly by reminding them of their own mortality. Shutting down the country appears to have been safer and more palatable even if, in the words of Sir Robert Jones writing recently in The BFD, it is “completely unnecessary”.
The legality of the lockdown remains the final question to be answered. The New Zealand government is relying on the Epidemic Preparedness Act 2006, the Health Act 1956 and the Civil Defence and Emergency Management Act 2016 to restrict civil liberties using ‘special powers’. Attorney-General David Parker is refusing to release Crown law advice about the decision. Public statements by the government and by police are the only means by which we can test the ‘legality’ of restrictions on our social, civic and business lives.
Parker’s behaviour in refusing to justify his actions via the release of Crown legal advice is fascist, and his boss Miss Ardern’s behaviour, in shutting down the country, is dictatorial.
Parker says he is “satisfied” that the Bill of Rights Act 1990 has not been breached (News Hub). This is arguably not the case with the act providing “unqualified rights” to freedom of association, expression, assembly and movement. Parker’s legal team has no doubt sought to place ‘qualifications’ around these things, in effect saying that we are a ‘free’ people – but that freedoms may be ‘proportionately’ reduced in line with circumstances. That there are things of ‘greater consequence’ than freedom. In effect, there is now a sliding scale of freedom, operated upon by ‘freedom levers’ which the government can pull at will, in the same way, that it acts upon the economy using monetary and fiscal ‘levers’.
This seems ridiculous, because you cannot bestow upon people a ‘proportionate freedom’ or a ‘partial right’. Actually, you can. Singapore does it. But Singapore has a history of imprisoning political opponents – sometimes for life – and governing by means of ‘out-of-bounds markers’, where citizens who cross political ‘markers’ – by doing or saying a forbidden thing – are arbitrarily punished. Singapore has been ruled by the same political party continuously since 1965 – sometimes without opposition. So let’s not go for ‘partial rights’.
What is seldom mentioned in relation to our statutory rights – which are ‘complete’ or absolute rights – is that both the Bill of Rights Act, and its sister legislation the Human Rights Act 1993, are a nonsense foisted upon us by successive left-wing governments, which justified their need through the false claim – taken up with some enthusiasm by an unwitting public – that New Zealand does not have a constitution.
New Zealand in fact inherited the United Kingdom’s unwritten constitution, which operates under habeas corpus, Magna Carta (1215), and the Bill of Rights established after the Glorious Revolution of 1688. By these things, every Englishman and his heirs are inherently free. Our freedom is total and only modified by operation of law in areas such as crime and tort, inferring entitlements which are then reciprocated by us owing similar obligations towards our fellows.
European ‘human rights’ law, with which the left is obsessed, is completely un-British and in fact Napoleonic, operating from the opposite premise. Under French law the citizen is a captive of the state, having no inherent rights at all except those which the state confers upon him. While European-type legislation sets out to liberate the individual from a starting position of servitude, human rights legislation here merely acts to re-impose ‘freedoms’ which already exist. In fact, by codifying our freedoms in this way, we limit them – as Parker is doing using secretive Crown law advice to act upon and modify what is bound to be seen by his team as ‘imperfect’ civil rights legislation.
Furthermore, the operation of the British/New Zealand constitution – as explained to me by people who care about these things – comprises a hierarchy which is never taught in schools owing to its inherently Judeo-Christian, and moralistic, nature. Although it should be. The nation resides under God. From God we receive God’s law. Reigning gloriously in accordance with God’s law we have the monarch. Below the monarch, beholden to her and in turn to God we have our parliament, serving the people – which is, as I have mentioned, a free people.
It is now, more than ever, imperative that we do not legislate our way out of our freedom and liberty. This, ironically, is what ‘rights-based’ legislation is designed to do.
By accepting firstly that parliament can confer upon us freedoms which we don’t already have, and secondly, that those freedoms can be modified at will, we have effectively moved into the house of tyranny and allowed the door to be latched behind us. Are we now living in a fascist state? Probably. Do we care? Not according to One News.
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