by John Ward
As with most things involving Whitehall, it looks as though the Great Test Drive is somewhere between anarchic and shambolic. Nevertheless, the role of the Secret State is clear enough in the carte blanche powers apparent in the 2020 Coronavirus Act.
Provision 24 of the Act is clear evidence of, at the very least, using the excuse of Coronavirus to collect yet more ID information on all of us.
In accordance with any unnamed security situation (and anti-terrorism acts going back 35 years) DNA profiles may be retained indefinitely……’before being destroyed’. But as the only time-limit is “indefinitely”, GCHQ or whoever can always drum up an excuse and hang on to them. This is the thin edge of a very fat wedge. Indeed, sub-section 2 adds ‘The Secretary of State may make regulations extending, for up to six months, the period for which the fingerprints and DNA profiles may be retained’. The Minister can of course keep renewing it….as without-trial clauses are already used in National Security investigations and trials.
Sub-section 3b leaves it up to the Minister to keep the ID data indefinitely ‘in the interests of national security’ – unspecified. But Sub sections 4 and 5 then attempt some reassurance involving ‘a total of 12 months’ – which makes no sense if there is no control over the Secretary of State’s opinion in the first place.
Finally – all the way down at Sub-section 8 – the original Section 2 is granted absolute power with this suitably bureaucratic phraseology:
‘Regulations under subsection (2) may—(a) make different provision for different purposes; (b) make consequential, supplementary or transitional provision.’
Or if I can just translate the mealy-mouthing into plain English, “The Secretary of State can do anything he likes for as long as he likes”.
As the Act is one of those wonderful EU inventions The Statutory Instrument, it can in theory be annulled ‘in pursuit of a Parliamentary resolution’. I’d like to know who is going to wrest the ID information back from MI6/GCHQ, and I’d like to know which 326 MPs would have the bottle to annul such an Act in the current Holier-than-thou hysteria.
If you want an idea of where this kind of State Power grab can end, then take note of today’s widely covered news that Women who have only a single glass of wine in their first week of pregnancy are to have it noted on their child’s medical records if NICE – The National Institute for Health and Care Excellence – gets its way (and it usually does).
Not only does this pernicious quango (I speak from personal experience) want all alcohol consumed by expectant mothers recorded, regardless of whether they consent, this would include women who have a drink before knowing that they are pregnant.
Don’t whatever you do show any personal responsibility for your health, because that would be a sure sign that you’re an uppity danger to the rest of the obedient masses, and must be made to wear something that marks you out as anti-social. For example, a Star of David.
“Comparisons to Nazi Germany in the 1930s are risible” is a mindlessly smug insult that’s been thrown at me more times than I care to think about over the last fifteen years. Such people smirk in disbelief when one tells them that Hitler created one of the nastiest, most inhuman régimes in history without breaking a single codicil in the Weimar Constitution. But is is absolutely true.
Our rights, freedoms and privacy are being undermined, threatened or casually removed without the merest peep of opposition. And a large number of them have been invaded using the excuse of a “global killer virus”.
Let’s review how the virus did yesterday in the UK. This is the chart the Covidiots love to show you:
Oh my God oh my God oh my God – look, it’s The Second Wave. Er, no it isn’t. More tests mean more cases have presented. We are recording more Covid19 cases, and even so the trajectory hill is less than half of what it was in March.
This is the one I always show, because it makes a nonsense of the Deadly Killer Virus narrative:
Yesterday in Britain, 27 people died with Covid19 on board. Only four countries in the world had fewer deaths per million. The ‘with’ word there is absolutely central to the debate, because both PHE (and the CDC in the US) have long-series data that shows around 80% of deaths complicated by other pathogens.
Thus, deaths from Covid19 in the UK yesterday were probably around 4-6 in number. And of those, only 1 will have been economically active.
Covid19 is a Patsy, period: a lettre de cachet for MI6, a fall guy for Wall Street, and a test run for total control post the Great Reset.