An essay by Tom Penn

The latest Covid-19 Winter Plan is a canard: a stratagem by which to dupe the masses once again into believing normality lies just around the bend. It reeks of fear.

Content aside, even the title is portentous. It is not the Winter Plan at all, but the Autumn and Winter Plan. Mainstream media must be confused: it was the previous year’s, published November 23 named the Winter Plan. 2021’s incarnation, published a full ten weeks earlier than the last cold season risk assessment, is a clear sign that Government have set out their stall nice and early this time.

It centres around vaccination as the first line of defence yet with virtually all other measures able to be reinstated at will depending on the emerging data, so as to protect the Nightingale Hush-up Society, the NHS.

With potentially tens of thousands of care home workers and NHS staff soon to either resign, be sacked or redeployed due to vaccine refusal, and with a heavy flu season anticipated due to a notable suppression, the deck has already been stacked to favour the political agenda. Government are the casino, the pit manager and the croupier all at once in this rotten gamble with our lives.

The paradox of how a controversial, subpar medical product can so casually be touted an impenetrable bulwark against the impending travails of winter should be taken as a warning sign, and we’ll likely only receive but a handful more.

If the vaccine worked wonderfully and had an exemplary safety record, there would be no need for coercion to drive uptake, and all mandates and suffocating restrictions would be redundant. If the vaccine didn’t work in the slightest and was totally unsafe, then the entire ruse would collapse, as a perpetual lockdown – the only plan left – would equate to domestic and geopolitical suicide, and natural immunity would swiftly put paid to any further necessity for tosh such as roadmaps and traffic lights.

We unfortunately find ourselves trapped however in the very worst predicament of all: that of persistent submission to interventions hung upon the efficacy data of a vaccine that only works ‘a bit’, hence can neither liberate us through total efficacy, nor likewise through total failure; oppressive restrictions therefore endless in scope.

To say this was born of coincidence and not design, is to have one’s head so far buried in the sand one is now drowning in the waters struck.

In effect we have been herded into a vaccine no man’s land, where we now mooch around grazing on the meagre pastures of insecurity and the regurgitated cud of a placebo, awaiting instruction. The Autumn and Winter Plan is validation of this: a dust bowl of ‘ifs’, ‘buts’, ‘howevers’, ‘hope nots’ and ‘can’t be entirely ruled outs’ – the naked, thorny bushes of our new social diet. The document may just as well contain one line only: ‘You know the drill.’

Former, supposedly more draconian measures are merely being replaced piecemeal with more insidious ones, designed to create the illusion of ordinariness, but yet which sustain the shape-shifting narrative all the same. This is called normalisation, and is not to be confused with normality.

Collective gullibility aside, public approval for these measures must regardless be peddled, and part of Government’s ‘winter’ pitch is to recommend the expiry of some of the Coronavirus Act provisions, such as those necessary to shut down sectors of the economy and schools, or to apply restrictions to events and gatherings.

Vaccine passports meanwhile, are an unequivocal form of restriction upon the freedom to gather in large numbers, and despite all the ballyhoo in the mainstream press, the Autumn and Winter Plan indicates they are still very much in the toolbox despite recent flip-flopping, with the chillingly worded:

‘For now, the NHS COVID Pass will continue to certify individuals based on vaccination, testing or natural immunity status. If Plan B is implemented, at that point the NHS COVID Pass will change to display full vaccination only.’

Fundamentally, Government retain the legal and technological infrastructure with which to immediately invert a citizen’s social status and thus curb their freedoms with a simple app notification: a Chinese take-away. A cute little quip were the far-reaching implications not so dire.

Not such a big deal one might shrug, if one is not fond of large gatherings and hasn’t even the app. I wouldn’t hold one’s breath however, as:

‘The Government hopes that it would not be necessary to mandate vaccine certification more widely than these settings (indoors: 500+ attendees, outdoors: 4,000+ attendees) though this cannot be entirely ruled out.’

We are still inching our way it seems, toward mandatory scanning of QR codes to enter supermarkets.

All that guff about Freedom Day – I don’t hear road crews filling in the potholes and laying the asphalt of Johnson’s roadmap to normality. All I hear are jackhammers and the erection of blockades at every available off-ramp.

All this trading in liberty and uncertainty set to nauseating wartime rhetoric is merely a corrupt form of bartering in which the schmoozed shopper – the public – ends up walking away from all transactions with a pre-ordained purchase: an unwanted Moroccan rug which they shall pay over the odds for, persuade themselves aesthetically pleasing, but which the crooked salesman can thenceforth pull out from under their feet at any moment, remotely.

This is not freedom. This is the hyper-standardisation of coercive social-control: a process which if not halted in the ensuing months, shall retain the capacity to endure well into the coming decades.

‘The Integrated Review of Security, Defence, Development and Foreign Policy’ is the disquieting vision for Britain in 2030 and beyond, and scrutinising thoroughly that mother of all plans, it is not difficult to see that Johnson is pulling no punches in accomplishing the ethical groundwork involved to manifest said vision at breakneck speed.

The Autumn and Winter Plan is a mere continuation of the now 18 month long campaign of fear-based interventionist policy designed to crush self-determination, alongside the rebranding of both the medical product and its enforcers around which this domestic Humanitarian Intervention revolve – from vaccine to juvenile antidepressant; vaccine minister to education secretary respectively.

Prime Minister, it appears you are feeling far more concerned for our wellbeing than usual these days, so may we please also have the Half-term, Christmas and Spring plans? It’s just that some of us unvaccinated folk would quite like to have one final fling with an already synthetic normality before your Dignity-for-Food Programme is fully established.

The latest Covid-19 Winter Plan is a canard: a stratagem by which to dupe the masses once again into believing normality lies just around the bend. It reeks of fear.

Content aside, even the title is portentous. It is not the Winter Plan at all, but the Autumn and Winter Plan. Mainstream media must be confused: it was the previous year’s, published November 23 named the Winter Plan. 2021’s incarnation, published a full ten weeks earlier than the last cold season risk assessment, is a clear sign that Government have set out their stall nice and early this time.

It centres around vaccination as the first line of defence yet with virtually all other measures able to be reinstated at will depending on the emerging data, so as to protect the Nightingale Hush-up Society, the NHS.

With potentially tens of thousands of care home workers and NHS staff soon to either resign, be sacked or redeployed due to vaccine refusal, and with a heavy flu season anticipated due to a notable suppression, the deck has already been stacked to favour the political agenda. Government are the casino, the pit manager and the croupier all at once in this rotten gamble with our lives.

The paradox of how a controversial, subpar medical product can so casually be touted an impenetrable bulwark against the impending travails of winter should be taken as a warning sign, and we’ll likely only receive but a handful more.

If the vaccine worked wonderfully and had an exemplary safety record, there would be no need for coercion to drive uptake, and all mandates and suffocating restrictions would be redundant. If the vaccine didn’t work in the slightest and was totally unsafe, then the entire ruse would collapse, as a perpetual lockdown – the only plan left – would equate to domestic and geopolitical suicide, and natural immunity would swiftly put paid to any further necessity for tosh such as roadmaps and traffic lights.

We unfortunately find ourselves trapped however in the very worst predicament of all: that of persistent submission to interventions hung upon the efficacy data of a vaccine that only works ‘a bit’, hence can neither liberate us through total efficacy, nor likewise through total failure; oppressive restrictions therefore endless in scope.

To say this was born of coincidence and not design, is to have one’s head so far buried in the sand one is now drowning in the waters struck.

In effect we have been herded into a vaccine no man’s land, where we now mooch around grazing on the meagre pastures of insecurity and the regurgitated cud of a placebo, awaiting instruction. The Autumn and Winter Plan is validation of this: a dust bowl of ‘ifs’, ‘buts’, ‘howevers’, ‘hope nots’ and ‘can’t be entirely ruled outs’ – the naked, thorny bushes of our new social diet. The document may just as well contain one line only: ‘You know the drill.’

Former, supposedly more draconian measures are merely being replaced piecemeal with more insidious ones, designed to create the illusion of ordinariness, but yet which sustain the shape-shifting narrative all the same. This is called normalisation, and is not to be confused with normality.

Collective gullibility aside, public approval for these measures must regardless be peddled, and part of Government’s ‘winter’ pitch is to recommend the expiry of some of the Coronavirus Act provisions, such as those necessary to shut down sectors of the economy and schools, or to apply restrictions to events and gatherings.

Vaccine passports meanwhile, are an unequivocal form of restriction upon the freedom to gather in large numbers, and despite all the ballyhoo in the mainstream press, the Autumn and Winter Plan indicates they are still very much in the toolbox despite recent flip-flopping, with the chillingly worded:

‘For now, the NHS COVID Pass will continue to certify individuals based on vaccination, testing or natural immunity status. If Plan B is implemented, at that point the NHS COVID Pass will change to display full vaccination only.’

Fundamentally, Government retain the legal and technological infrastructure with which to immediately invert a citizen’s social status and thus curb their freedoms with a simple app notification: a Chinese take-away. A cute little quip were the far-reaching implications not so dire.

Not such a big deal one might shrug, if one is not fond of large gatherings and hasn’t even the app. I wouldn’t hold one’s breath however, as:

‘The Government hopes that it would not be necessary to mandate vaccine certification more widely than these settings (indoors: 500+ attendees, outdoors: 4,000+ attendees) though this cannot be entirely ruled out.’

We are still inching our way it seems, toward mandatory scanning of QR codes to enter supermarkets.

All that guff about Freedom Day – I don’t hear road crews filling in the potholes and laying the asphalt of Johnson’s roadmap to normality. All I hear are jackhammers and the erection of blockades at every available off-ramp.

All this trading in liberty and uncertainty set to nauseating wartime rhetoric is merely a corrupt form of bartering in which the schmoozed shopper – the public – ends up walking away from all transactions with a pre-ordained purchase: an unwanted Moroccan rug which they shall pay over the odds for, persuade themselves aesthetically pleasing, but which the crooked salesman can thenceforth pull out from under their feet at any moment, remotely.

This is not freedom. This is the hyper-standardisation of coercive social-control: a process which if not halted in the ensuing months, shall retain the capacity to endure well into the coming decades.

‘The Integrated Review of Security, Defence, Development and Foreign Policy’ is the disquieting vision for Britain in 2030 and beyond, and scrutinising thoroughly that mother of all plans, it is not difficult to see that Johnson is pulling no punches in accomplishing the ethical groundwork involved to manifest said vision at breakneck speed.

The Autumn and Winter Plan is a mere continuation of the now 18 month long campaign of fear-based interventionist policy designed to crush self-determination, alongside the rebranding of both the medical product and its enforcers around which this domestic Humanitarian Intervention revolve – from vaccine to juvenile antidepressant; vaccine minister to education secretary respectively.

Prime Minister, it appears you are feeling far more concerned for our wellbeing than usual these days, so may we please also have the Half-term, Christmas and Spring plans? It’s just that some of us unvaccinated folk would quite like to have one final fling with an already synthetic normality before your Dignity-for-Food Programme is fully established.