The Road to Lockdown: How Unions Drove Covid Policy
We’re publishing a long read today by philosopher and activist Dr. Ben Irvine, formerly an Honorary Fellow in the Philosophy Department at the University of Durham and now a writer, philosopher and campaigner. In it he sets out his thesis that over-cautious unions drove the country into lockdown as they ratcheted up their demands in the spring of 2020 and repeated the performance on subsequent occasions. Here’s an excerpt.
The first lockdown happened in March 2020 after the NEU threatened the Government with unilateral schools closures. The masks on public transport mandate in the summer of 2020 happened after the RMT, the rail workers union, threatened to strike. The masks in shops mandate in the summer of 2020 happened after USDAW, the retail workers union, lobbied the Government and allegedly threatened industrial unrest. The second lockdown happened in November 2020 after the NEU called for a ‘circuit breaker’. Christmas 2020 was heavily restricted after the British Medical Association (BMA) furiously lobbied the Government to tighten the Covid rules. The third lockdown happened on January 4th 2021 after the NEU orchestrated a massive teaching mutiny to stop the Government from reopening schools; the Government panicked and locked the whole country down later that evening, to cover up the mutiny. The first and the third lockdowns lasted as long as they did because the teaching unions refused to go back to work as normal. The masks in schools mandates, as well as other deranged measures in schools, including testing, bubbles, isolating, and more, were all driven by teaching unions, with the NEU centrally involved. And Covid vaccines were rolled out in schools, against the advice of the JCVI, because teaching unions demanded the measure.
Overall, the picture is clear, albeit incredible: the whole coronapanic debacle has happened because the Government has repeatedly capitulated to demands and threats made by unions. If those demands and threats hadn’t been made, Britain would have remained free.
Worth reading in full.
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In a real emergency, unions would have been suspended, and media managed to AVOID fear and panic.
The gov probably used the unions’ stance as a fait accompli to justify whatever they wanted to do.
It’s unlikely that one of them came into the Cobra room with tattooed arms and a northern accent and said “Righ’, yer soothern Tory poofs, it’s gunna be like THIS, naa, like. We want a toootal lockdoon ba t’marra, like, ootherwise we’re ganning on strike” – however much such scenarios may have featured in poor Ben Irvine’s dreams ever since mater told him not to play with rough kids because they’re unhygienic.
The unions took a stance BASED on gov propaganda. They were duped like most of us by lies of 70-100 million global death prophecies!
Didn’t take much duping.
They’d already been told what to do, and promised vaxxes no …../1..
Just look at the pitiful, fear driven comatose state of the Starmer Labour party and weep – perhaps they were the “proto-vax ” mass experiment’?
Lockdown is communist and Keir Starmer is essentially Jeremy Corbyn with better grooming and dress sense.
They’re two peas in a pod, are they not?
The same creeping accumulation of power and control, for its own sake. In this case the two sides meet on common ground, a pretend confrontation, with phoney concerns and arbitrary justifications, but the unspoken carveup creeps onwards.
…in a real emergency there would be no home deliveries of take-aways, trivial retail, and groceries, no supermarkets would be open so that everyone could work from home. I past a deliveryoo-cyclist guy the other morning after he had delivered a croissant and coffee to a house about 50 meters from several designer coffee shops and a little waitose, in leafy wealthy west london, and I said “if you could work from home like them they would have to come to your house to pick up the coffee” – “too right mate, bloody toffs!”
Now, there are only two classes in London these days, the lap-top class and their servants.
Oh Maggie, why can’t we have you back?
Or Churchill or Cromwell.
Ernie Bevin would be better than any of them.
Good point.
I thought Cromwell was the original lockdowner. Puritanism and all that.
Good point.
The Chuckle brothers would do a better job than any of those cited and one of them is dead.
She died of Covid, true?😉
British labor unions drove the policy? All over the world? Wow! And if “their demands and threats hadn’t been made Britain would have remained free?“
Yes – it’s embarrassing to hear about the thoughts of this guy the “philosopher”, even if I’m sure he doesn’t realise there’s anything he should be embarrassed about. I mean seriously what score would we give this dickhead out of 5 for basic logic?
If his ludicrous ideas ever encountered a person standing at a bus stop, who’d have more wisdom in their little finger than he’s got in his whole body, what score would they give him?
Here‘s his website. He writes
You’re not on the front line of anything, Ben, and you don’t know what “front line” means.
Not the brightest and best make it in academe.
Just become a Common Purpose graduate.
He may be well-intentioned, but the ‘philosopher’ and ‘front lines’ brags would sit better on someone from the other side of the Pond, given their meaninglessness.
Not embarrassing, factual, except that unions were more receptive to the Marxist ideology behind lockdown than anyone else.
Unions are never innovators but they do reflect the dominant ideology of the left.
Exactly and I have made similar points elsewhere on DS on precisely this topic.
The guy has certainly managed to blow his own trumpet. Shame he’s completely out of tune.
This claim is nowhere in the text. If you want to argue against it, argue against it. Ob balance, British labour union influencing the policy of the British government, especially considering that they were certainly trying to, is a much more likely theory than all this conspiracy fallout of the past US election.
The Unions may well have lobbied government into lockdown, though why anyone pays them any attention these days is anybody’s guess.
Thousands of individual teachers from Heads to Classroom Assistants kept many schools open throughout Lockdown Proper, Lockdown Lite, the Tiers bollocks and into 2021 so clearly they did not support the lobbying of the Unions. While they continued to get paid whether they worked or not some staff fiercely lobbied their superiors to get more than the share of shifts allotted to them (typically just one or two days per week).
This was to provide education for the children of Key Workers (who otherwise would have been unable to do their key work) and children deemed ‘at risk’ because of the nature of Lockdown. (proof in itself that this had always been long thought out).
The real culprits here are Social Services who at one stage only managed to get 10% of ‘at risk’ children out of ‘risk’ and into the classroom.
USDAW, who represent a minority of shopworkers, might indeed have lobbied for mask mandates in shops but it was shopworkers themselves that were the most hostile and abandoned masks as soon as they were able to.
I disagree, the unions probably did push for these things, but so do they for many other actions which they don’t get, plus if these actions had been specific to the UK the unions could be blamed, but, these actions were repeated by other Governments in the western supposedly democratic world, and the Government is the body that sets laws etc, not the unions. In conclusion there is no other body responsible for the past 2 years, not even the virus, the damage and cruelty inflicted has been done to us by politicians and their advisors led by Boris Johnson. Never forget that.
In the absence of any Opposition from the Starmer stooge MPs, the Unions could have been a vital centre of resistance – instead they pushed for Lockdowns and totally enforced compliance…. and still do!
They cannot escape their heavy responsibility.The fault – as ever- is with the apathy of the membership and the devious, personal and fringe political motivation of those who climb the greasy Union Pole to the top and who in no way represent the views of the majority of members – too many deranged Marxist Feminist PC Globalists in High Places!
Not many Union members want to see the UK turned into a Technocratic, Stalinist, Lockdown Police State – modelled on the PRC…. only their psychotic leaders have this dark ambition.
I firmly believe the teaching unions leaderships have been bought but to suggest that they coordinated worldwide lockdowns simply belongs in the box labelled conspiracy theory.
Too daft for words.
It seems many on the Daily Telegraph forums share my view that Zahawi has caved again to the demands of the extreme left wing teaching trades unions.
There is also quite a groundswell of demand to reinstate Bob Moran.
But we must stop reading the ‘Telegraph’ – $3.4 million from Gates to advocate his “World Health Agenda “( ie mass injection with an experimental mRNA Gene Therapy that causes fatal myocarditis in young men ) !
I don’t read a great deal of the DT’s increasingly left-wing propaganda. But I DO subscribe and comment a great deal. Unfortunately, comment pages like these are now the public sphere …. and you need to be in their, arguing your case.
FWIW I disagree – but wish the above were true.
Policy, in all “civilised” countries is driven solely by The Real Powers That Be. Their goal is the New World Order ie control, via the deliberate hysteria generated by covid, leading to the desired and ultimate goal of its bastard child, Digital ID. – for all.
Only then will the “medical emergency” be declared, by them, to be over.
England is a bit of an outlier at the moment, that is all.
Our Great Leaders will soon soon conform.
This graphic by Iain Davis neatly shows who is deciding, driving and implementing policy here and elsewhere (through the Global Public-Private Partnership). Essential reading.
https://www.ukcolumn.org/article/the-uk-new-normal-dictatorship
Good graphic. The only addition I would make is to reference the Rothschilds where the banks are concerned at the very top of this fraud.
Yes – hiding behind Black Rock and Vanguard.
HIs book ‘Pseudo Pandemic” is also an essential read!
Academic philosopher opines that it was the trade unions that made the Tory government (against no opposition in Parliament) lock us all down. Has it been a slow month for colloquia at “work”?
So it wasn’t Big Pharma after all. Phew. It was the principle of proletarians being able to organise collectively. “Worth reading”, lol. I wonder whether hatred wells up in the “honorary fellow” (great job, that sounds) whenever he sees working class people on public transport or drives past a Lidl?
In other news, ducks can swim.
Pure red communism, ticking all its boxes to push its agenda whilst getting paid by our government. Teachers who wont teach, nurses who wont nurse, doctors who wont heal, civil servant who won’t serve, all richly rewarded, pensioned, and given full holidays.
Root and branch reform needed.
it would have been a sensible disease response if it wasn’t for those meddling unions…
Yeah right, not like the global response was in ‘lockstep’ driven by the WHO/WEF/BIS et al
k
Kafka-esque response.
Isn’t it strange the the inventor of Zero COVID, the strategy, namely, the Chinese president never appears in these lists of shady powers seeking to … ?
So there was no conspiracy à la the Great Reset. No cabal directing traffic. There was no mega-corporate entity combining Big Pharma, Big Tech, Media and the Captured Regulatory Bodies. There was no 10,000 year secret government. No, no, no, all of that that would be conspiracy thinking. Which is bad, uneducated, kind of low-status. That’s not what we do here at Daily Sceptic, where it’s cockup 1 conspiracy 0 all the way. But now, wait, what’s this? There was an evil all-powerful group who were co-ordinating the entire thing and responsible for the pickle we find ourselves in? Ah yes, girls and boys: it was the unions. The labour unions of the British Isles. Turns out they were responsible for the ‘whole coronapanic debacle’. Well, now we know.
They were nor responsible – but they did nothing to resist it and in fact cheered it on! Where was the outcry at the Globalist Capitalist Corporatist Banker bid for a hegemonic Global coup?
Mussolini defined Fascism as the combination of Corporatism and he State – do today’s Pseudo Left even understand the real nature and manifest evil of Globalised Corporate Capitalism and its Fascist love child? Or are they still too busy calling old fashioned traditionalists and Conservatives “Fascists” and debating how many genders there are and who can use which toilets?
Could you please at least go as far as looking up corporatism in Wikipedia before believing the term must mean would you want it to mean, namely something about mulitnational corporations. It doesn’t.
Quoting from there:
Corporatism is a collectivist[1]political ideology which advocates the organization of society by corporate groups, such as agricultural, labour, military, business, scientific, or guild associations, on the basis of their common interests.[2][3] The term is derived from the Latin corpus, or “human body“. The hypothesis that society will reach a peak of harmonious functioning when each of its divisions efficiently performs its designated function, such as a body’s organs individually contributing its general health and functionality, lies at the center of corporatist theory.
In essence, this is how civil society was organized in Europe in the middle ages.
Go away!
I know the contemporary meaning of Corporation as extended from “Corporate” and “Corporatist” without any lectures from you- thanks.
We are past the middle-ages by the way – although some “Corporatists” seek their return!
No, you post Marxist drivel
Fascism is a form of socialism, Mussolini’s economic policy was identical to the Labour party’s theory of guild socialism.
Your post pretends exact opposites are the same thing.
The Governments big mistake was at the start of this when they tried to cover their arse’s with ” we’re following the science ” and being flanked by useless idiots at press briefings. This led to the lazy MSM putting the views of special interest groups out as fact and giving people like the unions a soap box.
The hard left’s hatred of the tories should not be under estimated and they will do anything to damage them.
You just have to look ant Sturgeon and Drakefords antics to confirm this.
This is a great read to understand the Great Reset and the “philosophy” and demons behind it
Klaus Schwab and his great fascist reset
https://winteroak.org.uk/2020/10/05/klaus-schwab-and-his-great-fascist-reset/
Mistake? It all worked perfectly according to plan! Where was the mistake?
How about, the govt decided to make teachers believe that contact with their students would kill them, or maim their family and friends. The headteachers held up their hands and said there was nothing they could do until the govt told them what to do. So they went to the trade unions instead.
Also – one could take the view from the article that if people band together and demand the same thing (ie organise), they might just be able to influence the govts direction….
Then they injected them all with something that genuniely does kill and maim them. To keep them safe of course, its always about keeping people safe.
To be told”It’s to keep you safe” should now sends chills down the spine- “the grave’s a safe and private place, but none I think do there embrace ( with thanks to Andrew Marvell and “His Coy Mistress”.
I don’t believe this. The unions were bought by state cash just as they were in Australia where union-hired thugs beat up their own members during demonstrations.
Employers and trade associations have over time gone even more fascist though.
One strong point in favour of restrictions being driven by unions is of course Wales.
Mark Drakeford is owned by the unions, politically. They’re the most important ‘stakeholders ’ of Welsh Labour. And restrictions in Wales …well, just look at the news. Pointless, petty, bureaucratic restrictions that haven’t kept infection rates down, but have induced panic, destroyed small businesses, and created misery.
The unions’ creature in Wales has done his work well.
So turning Wales back into being a medieval backwater then….oh wait!
Limited Hangout – look it up, you’re going to be seeing it daily as they circle the wagons to protect themselves.
https://en-academic.com/dic.nsf/enwiki/3065176
One error that needs correction, the GMB does not represent either nurses (RCN or Unison) or doctors (BMA + others). The RCN certainly has a no strike policy.
What about the influence on the unions by the Peoples Republic of China or other communist states?
So what you’re saying is unions have power over a Tory government?
That I’m afraid isn’t credible. The unions had no control over the treasury, that was entirely down to Sunak @ #11.
No furlough, no stay’s at homezees, This is just another deflection Tories looking for scapegoats, it was bozos lockdown he owns it & middle class liberals enjoyed it.
https://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-2442202/Boris-Johnson-says-ban-burka-classrooms-schools-right-make-pupils-faces.html
Great find.
I confess I didn’t do the ‘long read’ but the gust of this argument is simply a none-starter.
If it was only the unions barking orders and demanding restrictions/jabs, I’d give pose for thought.
This has been a highly coordinated campaign across the board. The scale of this crime is biblical.
*pause
If you did the long read you would better understand his argument …… not that that means I am convinced by it.
Nothing can excuse the unions’ exploitation of Tory inclinations. It was simple, short-sighted and self-defeating opportunist political tactics – coupled with the genuine fear mythology developed by government.
But it was the government that drove this – unions just jumped on the band waggon.
The Unions had the opportunity to cover themselves in glory by understanding the science and ensuring as many people as possible stayed at work e.g. teachers, and worked with the government to keep as many small, unionised business open.
But they didn’t, the temptation to throw their particular spanner in the works of British ‘industry’ was just too strong.
Strangely, instead of working in defiance of the government, as is usually the case, they worked hand in glove to ensure the country shut down almost entirely.
The blame can’t possibly be laid at their feet entirely, but they were/are willing and enthusiastic participants desperate not to be labelled as antivaxxers.
The fear most people have of that term is astonishing.
I repeat, the union leaderships have been bought. They are grotesque failures and wholly complicit in the destruction and coming depopulation of this country.
I disagree.
Tories have never listened to Unions.
It was the media that set the narrative from day one.
A media paid for by a Global Elite who also “own” science, Big Pharma and politicians to further their agenda.
This has been a fake PCR test/ Media scamdemic from day one- devised principally to force the mass injection of the Global population with a Gene Therapy experiment.
Seems to have gone very well so far .
Not a gene therapy experiment exactly. They know exactly what’s in the injections, the unknown, probably, is how long before the mass deaths and injuries kick in.
Yes it is indeed just that …an mRNA Gene Therapy Experiment – no less!
The results will be all around us with ADE and progressive Immune Deficiency (certainly ‘acquired’ and certainly a ‘syndrome’).
Regardless of whether or not the unions played a significant role in the disastrous policy decisions of the past couple of years, it’s good to see that the blame game has begun – I suspect that in a few years time it will become difficult, if not impossible, to find anyone who thought that ‘lockdowns’ were a good idea.
Not a ‘disaster’… if you are sitting in Davos.
As an aside, the idea of a “deep clean” of a building to exterminate a respiratory virus is as ridiculous and insane an idea as any of the others that have been floating around for the last two years.
Indeed. They can’t even keep the ducting systems clean that carry the air to breathe. What chance the rest of the building?
It’s clearly correct that the unions played a huge and disgraceful role in pushing the panic, and Irvine has collected a lot of hugely important evidence that, if properly minded, would reinforce the lesson that this country learned in the mid-C20th, but too many have forgotten since – trade unions are mobs exploited as power vehicles by sociopaths, that should should never be allowed any political power or influence whatsoever. The teachers’ unions in particular have been especially contemptible and fascistic in their approach. But in the end the responsibility still rests with the government and with Johnson. Not in the childlike sense that the lefties in denial seek to apply it (“Johnson/Trump Bad. Johnson/Trump Fascists. Johnson/Trump cause everything Bad!”) Rather in the sense that they were in office and they had full responsibility for the actions they took, and a duty to govern. “People often say that Boris has failed to stand up to the unions because he is weak. I don’t know.” Clearly he was weak, and they were weak. They never even tested their strength. In the end, the radical evil and lunacy of lockdowns was something no PM or government should ever have accepted responsibility for… Read more »
I mostly agree with that, but the nagging doubt I have with the theory that Johnson was merely weak is that it doesn’t explain the Tories’ repetitive use of the Build Back Better slogan. Why and how do the unelected members of the WEF wield so much power over our elected politicians?
Influence rather than power, mostly, I suspect.
It’s a fashionable collection of hugely powerful and wealthy people and organisations. How could it not influence the power-hungry?
As for the slogan, just a snappy slogan and a way to smarm up to the aforementioned hugely wealthy and powerful people and organisations, I think.
Does it really need to be more than that? (Though that’s bad enough in itself, when you consider the consequences of the undue influence these types wield, and the causes they push).
Well either way the Tories are alienating a lot of their core supporters with everything they have been doing since 2020. They must know by now that using this particular slogan is helping to increase that alienation, yet they keep on using it.
I believe “alienating their core support” in order to pander to soft leftists has been core Tory strategy for decades. And the senior figures in the Party are largely unabashed Blairites.
That’s why we have had repeated Tory election wins and governments, but not a sniff of conservative governance.
They can do this because they face no challenge from the right – there is no significant actually conservative party to which conservatives can decamp, and fptp means it is very hard for such a party to arise. so the initial consequence of abandoning the “Conservative” Party would be Labour governments.
It’s a problem, but the only solution is to grasp the nettle.
That all makes sense until the point where people on the left also start to wake up to the activities of the WEF and the Gates Foundation etc., at which point the Tories will start to lose support from the left as well as the right.
“Fact Checking The Fact Checkers – You Will Own Nothing”
http://participator.online/articles/2021/12/fact_checking_the_fact_checkers_you_will_own_nothing_20211202.php
Of course there will be a section of people on the left who want to accept the new totalitarian world order because they already have nothing so they feel they have nothing to lose. However the powers that be are going to wreck the economy which will affect everybody (I suspect severely), prices will go up, people will be unable to afford to heat their homes, food will become expensive.
Have a read of Iain Davis’ excellent essay on the pseudo pandemic. It’s on the UK Column website.
Extremely interesting but highly speculative. There might be some truth to the theory of union influence but the essential task of joining the dots requires a lot more work from Dr Irvine.
Really Will?
So the likes of Fauci Collins and Farrar and the massive campaign against the formulators of the Great Barrington Declaration were as nothing compared to a few strikers in the UK who, for context, the Tory Government has deliberately ignored for the last decade along with trades unions in general.
I fear that Toby has been influencing you too much.
[NB son and daughter-in-law both teaching throughout the last 2 years panic].
All the unions are, just like the professions, conspiracies against the public. Whenever Westminster/Whitehall identify a body capable of channeling dissent, they plant operatives in them to disrupt or take them over and control them with Common Purpose moles. Thus the people are controlled from the centre.