Matt Hancock Ordered Aides to Debunk the “F***ing Sweden Argument”
Matt Hancock was enraged by what he called the “f***ing Sweden argument” and told his aides to “supply three or four bullet [points] of why Sweden is wrong”, leaked WhatsApp messages from the Lockdown Files have revealed. Fraser Nelson in the Telegraph has more.
Sweden was doing pretty well, in spite of having kept schools, pubs and restaurants open. Rather than ask what there was to learn, Hancock became enraged by what he called the “f—–g Sweden argument” and wanted it quashed. “Supply three or four bullet [points] of why Sweden is wrong,” he asked of his aides. Not whether it was wrong: why it was wrong…
It’s a classic study of groupthink, but decades of study into so-called cognitive dissonance in political leadership shows we should expect this. The bigger the stakes, the stronger the denial. At a certain stage in a high-stakes drama, the politician starts to see their policies as not just correct but heroic and their critics as confused, malign or ideologically-motivated. A poor backdrop for error correction.
Public opinion also exerted a huge gravitational pull. The original pandemic plans imagined ministers being guided by science but did not envisage a situation where panic would see people demanding lockdown, as they saw happening in other countries, and resisting any relaxation of rules. The temptation to follow public opinion even led to the collapse of parliamentary opposition, as Sir Keir Starmer rubber-stamped every decision. Just a handful of voices were asking difficult questions or arguing for restraint: a small enough number to be easily dismissed as cranks.
There are signs of Boris Johnson growing alarmed at the lockdown machismo of his advisers. To Hancock’s horror, he ended up taking advice from two academics, Raghib Ali and Carl Heneghan, who spotted that the graphs used to sell the second lockdown to the public were based on out-of-date data. “If this illustrates anything,” Johnson says, “it is that red teams can work, but need to be formally established.”
He was right. An effective “red team” was the missing element in Britain’s pandemic response: a unit of experts to identify and flag up flaws in the government’s argument. This was the only way of getting through what had become, by then, a powerful clique of pro-lockdown ministers and officials out to rubbish minority reports. If decisions are made in secret with the Cabinet left in the dark and the opposition having abandoned its post, there is no one to scrutinise. The whole democratic apparatus was suspended. So nothing to stop big mistakes from becoming bigger.
The problem with ignoring all lockdown questions until the official Covid Inquiry reports is that no lessons are learned and nothing will get fixed – leaving the country vulnerable to repeating the same mistakes. The new pandemic response needs to factor in not just the behavioural response of the public but of politicians – especially if they think no one is looking.
Worth reading in full.
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Is the idea to execute Hancock a thousand times and let the rest get off scott free?
Each deserves their own comeuppance. Hancock is getting his. Let the others get theirs.
Is he though? Like that other treacherous, narcissistic sociopath Tony Blair, he is still walking around scott free. Last I saw he was making allegations against Andrew Bridgen.
Is that you Tony?
It’s a pity Fraser Nelson couldn’t have been a bit more astute and outspoken during the shit show of the last three years instead of leaping aboard as the pile -on gets going.
Dr Will, what on earth are you thinking:
“The new pandemic response needs to factor in not just the behavioural response of the public but of politicians – especially if they think no one is looking.”
This “new pandemic response” must be forcefully and comprehensively thrown back in the faces of the WHO and all other Davos Deviants pushing it. If this is adopted this country becomes a slave nation. Literally.
Exactly! The first question to be asked when a pandemic is declared by government-appointed “experts”:
“Is it really a pandemic?!”
Exactly. One of the biggest myths we face is that the world is peridically hit by deadly pandemics and it is getting worse. The last one of any particular significance was in 1918 and that was only as severe as it was because the world was recovering from WWI. Prior to that you have to go back to 1855 (the Third Plague) and before that 1520 (smallpox).
The so-called 1918 pandemic wasn’t of particular significance anywhere outside of the USA. That’s where everybody went hysterical about it and where it reportedly caused a lot of deaths for an unknown reason. The German general staff history work I keep quoting on this still states that
Generally, the sick became again fit for duty in 4 – 6 days and hospitalization wasn’t necessary for more than 85%; nevertheless, it took some time until they had fully recovered.
Deaths from this supposed killer epidemic aren’t even being mentioned, ie, it’s strongly implied that everybody who became sick also again recovered, presumably except some very rare case which don’t get mentionend because they were so rare.
Weren’t there actually two Spanish ‘flu epidemics back to back, each involving a different strain?
And another thing…is it the WHO which has said there were three notable “pandemics” in the 20th century, the Spanish ‘flu of 1918, the ‘flu of 1958 / 59 and the Hong Kong ‘flu of 1968 / 69? Absolute nonsense.
I have spoken to relatives who lived through the last two. None of them remember them. In other words, nothing remarkable.
I certainly caught both as a young ‘un. Most unpleasant, I assure you. Not just “Man Flu”.
But i was back at school / University after about a week. Don’t remember any one I knew pegging it, although some certainly did.
Respective Governments essentially did bugger all (except polite expressions of sympathy) and both times it went away with only minor disruptions.
I started work in September 1968, visiting GPS and hospitals just as Hong Kong flu hit the country. Its IFR was much higher than covid. The country did not grind to a halt and the NHS was not closed. After all it was “just flu”. The government did not spew out alarmist propaganda, there was no nudge unit and social media did not exist. Happy days!
I l’évêché through both of them, age 7 and 15. I was diagnosed with HK ‘flu but don’t remember being any worse than the usual Cold.
I don’t remember much about them either, as things just carried on as normal.
To be honest Marcus does the question “Is it really a pandemic” need to be asked?
Given that even the origins of the Spanish ‘flu epidemic of 1918 are now mired in controversy I would maintain the last pandemic, certainly in Europe, was the Black Death of the 17th century.
Dr Mike Yeadon has already stated that respiratory diseases cannot become epi or pandemics – the bloody word is puke inducing. And as I have posted on here many times, “pandemics” don’t turn up like number 9 buses. So, any mention of a “pandemic” within the next 500 years should be met with:
Oh, do F#ck off.
And the answer is probably invariably NO!
Not until disease is widely spread throughout a population (over 50%) over a large geographic area is it pandemic, otherwise it is an epidemic. Epidemics have three distinct phases: slow ‘smouldering’ spread of infection, hardly noticeable; sudden exponential rise to a peak, then gradual decline to near zero activity. The CoVid epidemic – in Europe – started towards the end of 2019 and entered its exponential phase around mid-January 2020, peaked in early February then began its decline through the rest of that month into March, petering out in April. There was no ‘pandemic’. Summer was clear, but a second smaller epidemic came in Winter 2020 tapering off in February 2021, smaller still epidemic in Winter 2022, tapering off in February 2023. There never was pandemic, just a series of seasonal epidemics – like ‘influenza. This we have every year but we don’t say we have a pandemic – we say it is endemic, as is CoVid. So lockdowns were put in place after the epidemic. Vaccination in 2021 was too late to prevent the 2020 Winter epidemic, and clearly as we know from data made the epidemic of a much weaker variant worse and symptoms more serious in many.… Read more »
Actually there’s a song about Davos (or there is now):
“Then stick your lockdowns up your a***
Labour betrayed the working class
Those Davos crooks – the people sneer
Cos Labour are the traitors here”.
(“The temptation to follow public opinion even led to the collapse of parliamentary opposition, as Sir Keir Starmer rubber-stamped every decision”).
No doubt songs could be arranged for other members of the uniparty coalition too…
And speaking of “groupthink” (article atl), one wonders what the late, great Christopher Booker (who I recall wrote a book on this subject) would have made of this shambles.
Unless I see people dropping dead around me, anyone talking to me about a “pandemic” will be told to f off.
Exactly tof.
“This “new pandemic response” must be forcefully and comprehensively thrown back in the faces of the WHO and all other Davos Deviants pushing it. If this is adopted this country becomes a slave nation. Literally.”
Absolutely trouble is I’ve written to my MP about this several times but he still doesn’t get it. It’s very very frustrating and frightening.
Matt Hancock has become ,to me, the most hideous uncaring immoral empty shallow excuse for a human being I’ve ever believed could exist!
Before now I wouldn’t have thought it even slightly likely that a person of such low order was a possibility, let alone be in charge of ‘the health service’
Throughout your life you meet such wonderful selfless people in the NHS, but to think it was headed by this piece of scum beggars belief
I think he needs to leave the country, move to Mexico or somewhere remote. He’ll probably just do a Blair and go to ground for several years then make a slimy come-back with a new Gates-funded project up his sleeve in an attempt to reinvent himself, complete with obligatory nasty David Icke mullet. These turds are hard to flush and know the sheeple have goldfish memories.
Argentina?
He could start his own Junta and invade the Malvinas!
Governor of the South Sandwich Islands as a reward for his efforts.
I don’t know, Tony Blair would give him a run for his money, and he’s still at it, years later.
You have to admit, he makes for a wonderful scapegoat though, doesn’t he?
Yes. And his “girlfriend” must have had a grudge against her girly bits.
Hancock is a monster, but this seems to be a plan to make him carry the can. I want him and many others tried in court and jailed. I don’t want one man ‘monstered’ and driven to suicide when he was one evil cog in a Moloch factory machine!
Suicide, if only! This git would and did, throw us all under the bus and then climbed up on our bodies to further his career!
I hope him and his kind suffer whatever fate they have coming because one thing is for sure, they will never be of any benefit to their fellow man!
Suicide? I wonder what it would cost to ask Bliar for a price on a David Kelly style suicide?
“never be of any benefit to their fellow man!”
Midazolam would poison the soil even as he was becoming compost.
I wouldn’t mind if he did the decent thing, but I still want to see the other players (because that’s what they clearly area) held to account, found guilty and locked away forever. Or the law changed to allow a short sharp shock in the best traditions of Gilbert & Sullivan’s Mikado.
Well, we all remember being taught that in the last years of the Roman Empire, Nero, Caligula etc kept the lid on by ensuring the proles had their bread and circuses.
Certainly there is still some Warburtons still to be found if you like that, and BBC, ITV, Ch4, Sky etc supply ‘circuses’ in the form of a mixture of unbelievably pathetic programmes liberally laced with lies.
My proposal would be to round up all Uniparty MPs, Lords and their Civil “Servants” and reintroduce some proper circuses. Gladiators, folk shot from canons, wild beasts, the whole show.
The very few people who attempted to restrain their Beloved Leaders could organise some elections where candidates were competent, honest, knew how to ask questions and be sure they got proper answers. Bullies, perhaps.
Hancock is emphatically not a monster. He’s a completely average jerk thrown into a situation way above his abilities to handle anything. And IMHO, that’s the really scary bit: The average jerk next door who keeps complaining to anyone of authority for perfectly normal behaviour or the average jerk in a police car who stops and searches people he happens to know because he’s feeling bored would – put into the same situation – behave exactly as monstrously as Hancock did.
I am so glad that Sweden took a different more liberal route and that it annoyed Matt Hancock. Obviously they were right, but under the WHO’s proposed pandemic treaty Sweden will not be able to do that next time. The WHO will be in charge of their health policy same as everyone else’s. The treaty states that they want to “prevent contrary approaches” They do not want any data that could prove them wrong.
Unless Sweden declines to sign up to the treaty; I don’t think it’s obligatory. What would the WHO do to them – get the UN to drop a bomb on them or impose sanctions?
I hope that Sweden does decline. However the 2022 US National Defence Authorisation Act includes wording concerning adherence to IHR and actions concerning countries that are uncooperative. So possibly sanctions yes.
(From a WHO article on here yesterday)
It isn’t a surprise — this is what politicians are like.
Their mindset is that it isn’t important whether you’re right or wrong, but to ensure that people think you’re right and never find out you’re wrong.
What does surprise me is that people never seem to pick up on this.
It might be vaguely interesting to see what happens to the turnout at elections, if confidence in any of them is lower than it used to be.
Lower, I think it’s non existent!
Voting will become a pastime rather than a democratic need, there is no party or leader atm that is prepared to change the status quo, so, why vote?
This leads to a conclusion no one is very happy to reach: When politicans are selected for popularity, one ends up with people whose only talent is becoming popular and whose sole concern is remaining popular. Put into other words: So-called representative democracy is BS which cannot ever work sensibly. Parliament as organ for representing the people in organisational opposition to a government which exists outside of it might make sense. But as soon as parliament becomes the government, it looses any real function it might ever had had and leads straight into disaster.
I tried speaking to people in spring & summer 2020 that the lockdowns were unwarranted, masks and social distancing not supportable by evidence and that PCR tests were not robust. Most would reply: “So, you know more than the government?” or “so, you know more than the BBC?”. History would suggest that I just might have (which is a sad reflection on both). 3 years later and those same people will still defer to the “authority” of the politicians, BBC and Guardian / Times / Telegraph.
“the “F***ing Sweden Argument”Good god, the Arrogance makes you gasp doesn’t it?
So that the same mistakes are not repeated when the next pandemic comes along. Which in theory shouldn’t be for another century. But once the WHO treaty is signed it will be along in a matter of weeks.
When the facts change I change my mind and most genuine people do, but ofcourse politicians are not genuine people, which is why when the facts change they want to change the facts rather than their mind.
That’s true, because they’ll need to test their new powers and a century is far to long to wait, like a kid wanting Xmas to hurry up!
So, create a reason😉
“Public opinion also exerted a huge gravitational pull. The original pandemic plans imagined ministers being guided by science but did not envisage a situation where panic would see people demanding lockdown, as they saw happening in other countries, and resisting any relaxation of rules. The temptation to follow public opinion even led to the collapse of parliamentary opposition, as Sir Keir Starmer rubber-stamped every decision. Just a handful of voices were asking difficult questions or arguing for restraint: a small enough number to be easily dismissed as cranks.”
Sorry I think this is a crock. The fear and panic were deliberately created by the state and other institutions with state approval/encouragement, and if they had just wanted to placate people they would not have enforced anything vigorously or published the fear porn every night, press conferences etc. Manufactured consent.
Not that your point hasn’t been made many times already. But it seems as if this is how it’s going to have to be. Every time someone tries to rewrite the history to their liking we’re just going to have to keep reminding them of what really happened.
Tedious but necessary.
Agreed. Piers Morgan was on TV shouting ‘STAY AT HOME!!’ The mainstream media pushed the panic button, presumably at the behest of their owners, many of which include BlackRock and others who receive money from Pfizer and the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation.
Lockdowns are the all-or-nothing behaviour of children. Regardless of what Toby thinks, this was a scam dreamt up by supranational players and relied on the idiocy, greed, power-hunger and incompetence of politicians whose only thought is the five-year election cycle.
Agreed.
By and large I do not think the general public were initially in fear. Once the Nudge unit got going and HMG started throwing taxpayers cash at the MSM the fear campaign was let rip.
I went to Sweden in autumn 2020 – sure there were fewer tourists and a lot of locals were working from home, so it was quieter than usual, but I didn’t get much impression of a general sense of fear or panic – hardly any masks, certainly not much in the way of social distancing, people shaking hands with me and hugging me. It could have been like that here.
But it is a feature of “public opinion” that it’s manufactured by propaganda, and then the propagandists actually believe it’s genuine public opinion and are, in turn, guided by it. And thus the whole nation/world becomes victim of the lie.
“and then the propagandists actually believe it’s genuine public opinion”
Perhaps some might. I struggle to accept that they all do. I’m sure some of them know exactly what they are doing, and why.
Joseph Goebbels was right
More confirmation that in the main the political instincts of senior players in the Conservative Party are anything but conservative. You’d expect people who supposedly believe in the freedom and responsibility of the individual and small government as opposed to the nanny state to be actively looking for evidence to support their instincts, not the opposite. Of course, the initial reaction was indeed laissez-faire, and then something suddenly changed. The revelation we want is how exactly it changed.
Tony Bliar probably did exactly the same thing. “Find me a reason to go to war with Iraq. I don’t care whether it’s true or not.” He was more skilled than the present bunch at doing things secretly.
I still think this “leak” is highly choreographed and stage-managed; there is a reason why it’s coming out now, bit hy bit. There is most definitely a reason for leaking the bit about cats. Stay alert.
Hancock telling his aides to “supply three or four bullet [points] of why Sweden is wrong” proves that it was megalomania and naked politics, not health concerns, driving these outrageous policies that trampled on individual freedoms.
A rational person with the right concerns about our health would have been asking for more information about Sweden and how their policies were working, to see what could be applied here to keep as much normality as possible. It was clearly the last thing on Hancock’s mind.
Hancock not only looks like an overgrown 8-yr-old, but clearly has the same immature mentality and self indulgent petulance.
Remember these lies:
“Freedom Loving Boris”
“Boris’s Near Death Experience”
Stand in the Park Make friends & keep sane
Sundays 10.30am to 11.30am
Elms Field
near Everyman Cinema & play area
Wokingham RG40 2FE
What is a “red team”? Putin?
Something like the HART group
Fascinating insight for two reasons; first, that anyone in a position of power should need to resort to crude swear words, and secondly that BJ for all his faults considered the concept of a red team. If only… I offered myself, as someone versed in the management of hyperimmune syndromes (who had incidentally read the textbook) and retired, so with time to devote. I also suggested a number of colleagues with similar clinical expertise. Response? None.
Sweden now enjoying the benefits of multiculturalism (NOT) forced on them by inept leadership.
The House of Lords is now urging the Government to adopt the Covid-19 authoritarian playbook to implement Net Zero. There’s barely a STEM subject in sight when you look at the degrees studied by those in the highest offices of state, the department of energy, PRASEG and the various lobbyists and pressure groups. They urge everyone to Follow The Science, yet they have no scientific understanding. Yes, it is time for a Great Reset. Time to reset Net Zero.
https://davidturver.substack.com/p/covid-lockdown-files-lessons-applied-net-zero
The furore over Hancock speaks to me, perhaps more than anything, of how weak and poor a judge of character Boris is.
Where’s the Net Zero/climate change scam ‘Red team’?