Dear Mr Johnson
Due to the destruction of our lives, liberties and livelihoods in your foolish attempt to control Coronavirus by lockdown measures I can no longer remain a member of the Conservative Party.
There is no evidence that lockdown, social distancing or masks work. Pandemics follow a bell shaped curve regardless of government action, thus now we are somewhat unlocked “cases” (actually positive tests) have fallen 40% in a week. There is no reason you could not have dealt with Covid by “focussed protection” on the elderly and vulnerable who were the ones under threat from it.
Instead, you have locked the elderly in their rooms in care homes where many turned their faces to the wall and died without seeing relatives again, you have prevented people attending the funerals of these victims, you have imprisoned students in their halls of residence even though that age group is literally more likely to be struck by lightning than die of Covid, you have withheld education from the young for months on end, you have destroyed the country’s fiscal position (it’s our money Prime Minister) for a generation to come by absurd measures such as paying people not to work, you have blown a hole in our liberal democracy and long-established rights from which we may never recover and treated parliament with contempt by announcing policy at press conferences not in parliament; not that parliament is allowed to function and scrutinise legislation both due to so-called “social distancing” so most MPs are not even present and because you have passed laws by diktat under the Coronavirus Act and 1984 Public Health Act without any scrutiny at all. Meanwhile, businesses, culture and jobs and mental health and fitness are destroyed (locking people up in their own homes is not good for people’s health). Quality of life is as or more important than quantity of life.
These measures have been ineffective, counterproductive and in many cases downright bizarre. How is sitting outside in the cold supposed to protect against a respiratory virus (pubs only open outside 12/4/21 to 17/5/21), how is wearing a mask when standing up but not when sitting down supposed to help, how is turning everyone out of a pub at 10pm, so they mingle on the street supposed to promote social distancing?
Meanwhile, we can see what those in power actually think of these measures as you behave normally, maskless and unsocially distanced, at the G7, in Downing Street, with Ferguson ignoring the stay at home advice to carry on an extra- marital affair, with Dominic Cummings popping up to Barnard Castle when we were told to “stay local” or with Hancock up against a wall with his mistress whom he appointed to a lucrative sinecure in the Ministry of Health.
The terms of getting rid of this nonsense have consistently been changed. Three weeks to “flatten the curve” has turned into a year and four months so far, cancelling Christmas we were told would be “inhuman” a few days before it was cancelled, freedom once the vulnerable were vaccinated was quietly dropped in favour of freedom once the over 50s were vaccinated which in turn became a “roadmap” of opening on 21/6/21 which was cancelled in favour of 19/7/21 which in turn has been effectively cancelled by continued urges to “caution” and this self-inflicted “pingdemic” of the absurd and ineffective track and trace system. Still we continue with warnings of further lockdowns, vaccine passports (which you have explicitly ruled out several times and is now government policy) and now attempts to control journalists via an updated Official Secrets Act.
What are we supposed to make of a Conservative government that is advised by a Communist (the Communist Party being openly committed to the overthrow of liberal democracy) – Susan Michie – and a known charlatan – Neil Ferguson – whose absurd modelling predicted 500 000 deaths in March 2020 (wrong), 50 000 deaths if we reopened this Spring (wrong) and 100 000 cases a day if we went ahead with unlocking measures in July (wrong, actually cases are around 30 000 a day and falling). This is a man with a track record of being wrong. In 2000 Ferguson predicted 136 000 cases of Creutzfeld-Jacob disease in the UK (wrong there were 178), in 2005 he predicted 200 million deaths worldwide from bird flu (wrong) and that 2 700 prisoners would die of Covid (wrong 47 did).
You have terrified a proportion of the British public with false data (dying within 28 days of a positive Covid test does NOT mean you died OF Covid), last Spring and early Summer if you died at any point having tested positive for Covid you were put down as a Covid death yet still the false numbers are trotted out. Increased testing of the healthy is not factored into the number of positive tests (if you test 700 000 people a day you will get more positives than if you test 100 000 people a day) and the data shown on these dreadful news conferences would not gain a pass at GCSE Maths if students were still allowed to take such a thing.
You talk to us as if we were ignorant peasants or backward children – “hands, face, space” with a picture of said hands, face and space in case we don’t get it, we are told not only to wash our hands but how to do it, and we have constantly been urged to “save the nan” (don’t we care about grandad?) while said nans are prevented from enjoying their last few years and are prevented from seeing their loved ones and if in care homes imprisoned in their rooms. “Protect the NHS” – a health system Prime Minster is supposed to protect the public not the other way around!
In 1916 Milyukov warned in the Duma that the Tsarist war effort was so dire that it could only be explained by either “stupidity or treason”. Which is it in 2020 and 2021 Prime Minister?
I will always be a Conservative, a Liberal (in the widest sense of the Whig tradition) and a Libertarian; as you are no longer any of these things and are leading our country down an authoritarian road I cannot remain a member of the Conservative Party whose government you lead. Thus, I return my party card and, as you / your office has had neither the courtesy nor the organisation to reply to the many letters I have previously sent I will be sharing this letter with anyone I can think of.
Keith Brown