Wokery has taken over much of Westminster, corporate culture, academia and the media. Dissenting from the woke establishment brings upon you flame and fury.
It is not that unlike the fervour and rage that you might face if you were to blaspheme or commit some sort of “sin” in the eyes of an extreme Islamist terror group like ISIS or the Taliban. Of course, the punishment is not the same, but the outrage and hysterical response is uncanny. People are struggling. They are frightened of voicing perfectly natural moderate views about life, but are losing their jobs and livelihoods in the court of social media and very little is being done by the Government to support those whose only crime is to dissent from the screaming minority who dominate social media.
We have also had this Government deciding to bring in increased restrictions on the freedom to protest.
The so-called caveat that will determine the new police powers to ban protests will be defined by the highly subjective and dangerous condition of “unjustifiably noisy protests that cause harm to others or prevent an organisation from operating.”
I am certain that this could be abused by a future government or minister to crack down on legitimate political protest. We have become complacent when it comes to our freedoms. These are freedoms that many have fought for – whether that was on the battlefield, on the streets or in the courts. To meekly accept ever increasing restrictions of our liberties does those that came before us the greatest disservice and also highlights a lack of concern for our children and future generations.
Next up is the decision to introduce vaccine passports. An emergency three-week lockdown turned into almost two years of lockdown and now, at the end of this tunnel, the Government wishes to continue with policies that make little sense. A vaccine passport will have no meaningful impact on the spread of the disease and is hardly a measure that inspires confidence in government claims of no more lockdowns.
The Covid crisis is meant to be over and yet these passport plans are still going ahead, despite the Prime Minister and ministers saying at various points that vaccine passports were not being planned and would never be implemented. That is not the only pledge that has been abandoned this week.
The Government has now openly done away with its conservative ideals and manifesto commitments and decided to raise a new tax. Make no mistake – this new levy is a poor choice for many reasons – most of which will have been covered in great detail by the end of the week. For me, the most egregious is simply that Boris Johnson is once again going back on his word.
A Conservative government should have core principles that define what the party stands for, e.g. – low taxation, consistent and effective governance, and economic stability.
This Government appears to lack all of those three. Naturally, we must take into account the extraordinary circumstances of the pandemic but that is not enough of an excuse for what this Government has become. Nor is the Prime Minister’s “emotional commitment” any guarantee against further tax rises.
Driving up taxes at a time when we should be encouraging people to have confidence in their salaries and backing businesses to rebound from Covid is a terrible decision. This tax grab can only backfire.