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March 27, 2020 - The Delingpod - James Delingpole
44:32
Delingpod 64: Peter Hitchens (Special)
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Welcome to the Delling Pod.
This is a special edition brought to you with my friends from Ricochet and my very special guest, back after only a couple of weeks, Peter Hitchens.
Peter!
Good evening.
Now, Peter.
I'm so glad to have you on this show in response to, not least, all the flack you've been taking this week for a piece you wrote in the Mail on Sunday.
Do you want to just tell us roughly what you said?
I said I thought we were making a grave mistake.
I thought that we were shutting down the country.
And at the time I wrote this, I didn't know how bad it was going to be, but I predicted unprecedented curbs on liberties.
And I thought that this was not actually either a proportionate or an intelligent or an effective answer to a threat which undoubtedly exists from the coronavirus, but which simply is not as great as is being claimed.
And therefore, let's say the action was both disproportionate and wrong.
And I was very interested when I wrote this.
The Mail on Sunday published it, which is very good news.
And Talk Radio then took me up on it and asked me to talk about it, which many people can listen to.
I put it on the web.
But apart from that, it got no coverage and no response from most of the media.
What I actually found was that I got a huge number of responses from people on my blog and on Twitter and elsewhere saying how glad they was that somebody had voiced their own doubts about this.
I then got, from the other side, a whole load of abuse, first of all, telling me that I was posing as an expert, when I wasn't.
In fact, what I do repeatedly is I quote other experts, such as Professor Ioannidis of Stanford University, and the fascinating work of Professor Dr.
Sukhred Bakhti, who is a very distinguished academic infectious medicine specialist in the University of Mainz in Germany, And who has given interviews there, which have rocked Germany, which are largely unknown outside that country.
And also, of course, as from today, a growing number of journalistic reports, and as from today and yesterday, the statements of Neil Ferguson, the original begetter of this panic, saying that actually, no, 260,000 people are unlikely to die.
He's revised his I think I think I think I think The whole estimate of what was going on would be misunderstood because it was very likely that huge numbers of people in this country had already had the coronavirus and were therefore probably immune to it.
Almost all the science that comes in now undermines the government's policy.
And what leaves aside here the basic knowledge of economics, which most of us have who can count, which is that shutting down a largely service-based economy For an indefinite period of time is catastrophic, especially at a time when the stock markets of the world are falling and the pound sterling is falling precipitately.
And we are facing what in general is a major economic crisis, which, curiously enough, although it's the biggest one since 2008, barely troubles the surface of the media at the moment because everyone is so obsessed with the coronavirus.
Yes, I've noticed that.
Everyone obsesses about cases like the young woman with no underlying health conditions, and they say, look, this woman, she was 21 and she had no underlying health conditions.
What do you say to that?
Do you want the deaths of people like that on your...
Exactly.
But what one says to that is, of course, one is grieved by any death.
It seems to me to be premature for any...
I think we're good to go.
Some basic failures of understanding.
What Professor Ioannidis of Stanford, who's a brilliant skeptic of scientific bunkum, pointed out very early on is that estimates of 4%, 5%, and 6% mortality among people who caught the coronavirus were absurd because we simply have no idea how many people have actually been infected by it.
Many people have the virus without even knowing they've had it or they have it very mildly.
They don't record it.
They've never been tested.
Then you get the news from Italy that huge numbers of people are being recorded as having died from the coronavirus who actually have died with the coronavirus.
Their real problems were major heart problems, major lung problems or high blood pressure or the other things.
Plus, of course, in almost all cases that they were very old.
And it's been pointed out as well by Sissure Bakhti that northern Italy is perhaps the most polluted region of Europe and is nearly as bad as China in the levels of pollution.
So it would not be surprising if large numbers of people, particularly old people, had serious respiratory problems.
So there are many, many reasons why we should be skeptical about the attempts to panic us.
I'd also add that it's still demonstrably so that Neither Japan nor Sweden, two very well-governed countries run by largely intelligent people, have followed the route which we have followed.
You can still go out for the evening in Sweden to a restaurant.
You can still have gatherings of up to 500 people.
They've closed some schools, but not all.
They're doing some reasonable measures to prevent people from transmitting the virus one to another.
And they have, as far as I know, still lower death and infection rates than we have.
And in Japan, it simply has not been the level of panic.
Again, it's open for business, and the virus is not spreading with any particular seriousness.
And I believe in Latin America, there is a very much lower instance of it.
They're mostly keeping their borders closed as much as they possibly can to keep out whatever's coming, but they have a very lower instance of it.
And Singapore as well.
But it's quite interesting that, as an article in, I think, the Washington Post points out today, that the treatment of the disease in both Hong Kong and Singapore is quite different.
And yet, in both cases, the numbers of people infected and the numbers of deaths declined after those measures were taken.
So it's hard to attribute this decline to the measures.
And here's the other problem.
And if I may, I'm going to bother you with a small...
Metaphor or parable.
Is that alright?
Yes.
Well, take it like this.
Imagine that Al Boris Johnson is a doctor and the country is a patient.
Well, the patient goes to the doctor and says, look, I've got pneumonia.
And the doctor says, look, this is terribly serious.
Something must be done.
What I'm going to do is I'm going to amputate your leg.
And the patient is so convinced by the seriousness of the doctor that this must be done and that also this will deal with the pneumonia.
So the doctor goes ahead and amputates the patient's leg.
The patient recovers from the amputation.
Sometimes afterwards he recovers from the pneumonia.
And the doctor says, well, that's marvelous.
My amputation of your leg has cured your pneumonia.
Unfortunately, the patient still only has one leg.
And this seems to me to be pretty much a description of what's going on.
Whatever happens now, if the instance of the disease, if its seriousness diminishes, as I think Neil Ferguson obviously accepts that it is now going to do, it will be claimed that the ludicrous measures imposed by the Johnson government of crashing the economy and forcing people to stay at home were the cause for that decline.
And I think that that seems to me to be a highly questionable claim.
And those of us who have answered this folly need to be on guard for the next episode of it, and one of the ways in which we have to do this is to ruthlessly analyze the figures after it's all over and demand a proper inquiry into what happens, to see what the causal relationship actually is or was between the government's action and the apparent decline of the disease which a couple of weeks ago was going to kill us all.
Yes, well indeed, it's a bit like the US where you've got, say, low-tax Texas doing better than high-tax California.
In the same way, we're conducting a massive global experiment as to which country has got the best solution and which has made a complete pig's ear of it.
And you mentioned Hong Kong.
My eldest son is in Hong Kong, so I've been getting reports on Hong Kong.
How the Hong Kongers have been responding to this.
And they were much more quickly on the case than we were because they had the experience of SARS, which was a much bigger killer in Asia.
I don't think the actions that they took, although they were intelligent and directed, could conceivably have achieved Yes.
Yes.
between SARS and the coronavirus, and there could well be cross immunity.
But many people obtained immunity from coronavirus as a result of the SARS outbreak.
And this could be one of the reasons why quite a lot of Asia has actually been very slightly affected by the coronavirus.
That's interesting.
But a lot of it has not been.
You look at the map of it, you see an awful lot of it has not really been very much affected by it.
Yeah, that's an interesting theory.
Also, they're probably more self-disciplined because they're used to this kind of thing.
I mean, they're much keener to wear a mask.
Whether that makes any difference or not, I don't know.
It makes some difference, I think.
But here's the difficulty.
My own impression is, and I'll give you an anecdote here, which is quite interesting to me.
A lot of people, when I started saying, it seemed to me that this coronavirus had probably been loose in this country since December.
A lot of people wrote to me and said, well, I had something very similar to the pronounced symptoms in December and January.
And I also, I go, I did, before I was put under house arrest, travel daily to London from Oxford, to Oxford Station, where I'm on fairly good speaking terms with the staff.
And I put this theory to them.
A couple of them said, well, yes, well, a lot of us went down with this disease because an awful lot of Chinese students are now studying in Oxford.
And when they came back from China, The beginning of the year.
They were coming through in very large numbers and a lot of us were suffering from some disease we hadn't really had identified.
I think there's probably been a very large number of people in this country who've already been infected by The coronavirus and have either not noticed it or thought it was just another form of flu and quite possibly have immunity from it already.
But no one's bothered to think in that direction until the Oxford report in the FT. It hasn't really even been considered as a possibility, but it ought to have been.
And it may well be heavily influencing the course of the virus.
Now, I haven't heard today, I'm afraid.
I've been away from my desk.
I haven't heard what the latest figure for infections and deaths is.
But what interests me about this is the way in which the number of infections is portrayed as if it's disastrous.
You could be infected with coronavirus and you barely feel anything at all.
Infection is not in itself particularly threatening.
And then there was the other problem, which I have to go around again and again and again.
The problem of people are being classified as having died with coronavirus correctly, but then other people are taking this to mean they died of coronavirus, which is a completely different thing, as you know.
Very large numbers of men die with prostate cancer, but they don't die of it.
It's not the thing that kills them.
And what is, I strongly suspect, largely going on, and Italy very much features this as well, but I'm sure it's the case in this country, is that people who are old and ill have suffered from coronavirus and they've died.
But I think the only way we can establish whether this has led to a serious increase in deaths is to wait for the figures, which obviously will take some time to collate, of the actual numbers of avoidable deaths which have taken place in this period.
Because the unavoidable deaths which take place happen at a rate of 1,600 a day in the United Kingdom.
This is because life is a fatal disease.
As soon as you're alive, you're bound to die, and people will die, and they die pretty much at a rate of 1,600 a day in this country.
And what the Department of Health lists very interesting is avoidable deaths.
And many of these are things such as suicide or motor accidents or heart disease or high blood pressure.
I think we're good to go.
A catastrophic virus infection.
Whether during that time, the numbers of deaths actually did rise above the normal level and above the normal level for the year, because again, the annual average is 1,600 per month, but obviously it will vary and the winter months will be worse anyway.
I think the jumping to conclusions that's been taking place, the something must be done, this is something attitude, which I spoke of in my parable, has been really quite damaging.
Yeah.
Have you been surprised?
I'm guessing no, but it surprised me just how few media figures on our side of the argument have rushed to your cause.
Quite a few people have been really sort of standing up for this authoritarian response.
And also...
It's been interesting, quite a lot of lefties who six months ago regarded Al Johnson as a semi-fascist buffoon...
I'm now defending his government.
It's really quite interesting how the left have more or less lined up beside him.
I could go into the possible reasons for this, but one of which is, of course, that he is, in my view, much more of a man of the left than people realize.
Among journalists, I've not been surprised, but I've been dispirited.
One hopes, one always hopes, that one has certain people who, in one's head, one thinks of as intelligent and questioning.
But actually, there hasn't all been all that much questioning.
Some of it's been, there have been one or two people who've subtly suggested that they think something's wrong.
But I felt very much alone in, particularly in Fleet Street newspapers and in mainstream broadcasting, in actually being prepared to say that I think this is a mistake.
Yes, you're kind of used to that.
I could have done with some allies, but in the end, I've always taken the view that if you have to do it alone, then you have to do it alone.
Ultimately, you might make it easier for others to follow later, but somebody always has to take the first step in any kind of revolt against conformism.
I've got a theory on this.
I think it's partly that people have had their brains warped by fear.
I'm lucky because last month I had the coronavirus.
I caught it in a hotel.
Yeah, I caught it in a hotel.
I went up to London for two days for the Brexit celebrations.
I had two dinners and I went with the wife and we stayed in this hotel.
And there were a large number of Chinese tourists staying there.
And I'd been reading up about coronavirus, so I was very conscious of it.
And then four days later, four days later, I went down with the most incredible fever, where I drenched my T-shirt at night in bed.
And I had the cough and everything.
Wife got a much, much milder version than me.
But One thing I'll say, because like a lot of people, I had been worried about, oh my goodness, there's this disease looming and what effects will it have on me?
Will I be one of the unlucky ones who has to be hospitalised?
Once you've had it...
Would it be fair to say, James, that you don't treat your body as a temple?
Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, absolutely.
No, I don't.
You're among the most wildly super fit people, I think.
Oh, I'm actually...
I am super fit, but...
I've got underlying health conditions, but I am pretty super fit.
I mean, I am a bit of a gym bunny.
I go running every day and stuff.
I apologise, I withdraw.
No, no.
But nevertheless, yeah, I had it.
I thought it was a sort of bad cold.
I didn't think it was as bad as flu.
It was only later on I realised what it was.
But the point I'm making is that lots of people are...
Normally rational people have been unhinged by this.
And I think it's created this climate of anxiety and fear where...
The journalists who might normally have been robust and ridden to your defence and agree with me, because I agree with you, have been sort of cowering behind the parapet, unwilling to stick their heads above it.
I also think it's hard to break consensus, but it's true.
There is a lot of fear.
I mean, I had a bizarre incident in an Oxford supermarket yesterday.
Well, I just bought a packet of smoked trout.
And I was peering at it to look at the sell-by date.
And as I was looking down to do so, because we old people, we need to put our glasses on and look down.
I looked down.
As I looked down, I saw a pair of feet and a pair of shins, a pair of knees, a pair of thighs gradually getting closer and closer to me.
And then I saw that they were attached to a pair of arms which were making violent swatting gestures like someone beating away a mosquito.
I was standing still during this period, and I looked up, and it was a person in some considerable state of rage.
I'm afraid I did smile, and she more or less shouted at me, don't you realize it's a government instruction that you should get?
And I thought, well, yes, I do.
And indeed, on an earlier visit to another supermarket, I actually got in there like Zorro with a scarf wrapped around my face, not for my own Not out of my own belief, because I thought it might comfort other people to see me doing it.
And it was just extraordinary how furious she was.
One could only sympathize, because these people have been told incessantly that a terrible death is stalking the land, which they can either catch themselves or may pass on to somebody else.
I do find it very, very hard to crack.
In discussion, this fear by pointing out that actually the statistics and the facts don't really back it up.
But there it is.
Once you unleash fear, I think where everybody remembers, though I have noticed no one has referred to it during the past four nights, Franklin D. Roosevelt's remark during the beginning of his presidency that we have nothing to fear but fear itself.
Because actually no one says it because currently I think fear is a tool of the government.
Yes.
Do you remember in the good old days, Peter, before this pandemic, we used to occasionally have discussions about What it would be like, what it would have been like if Britain had been occupied by the Nazis.
Who would have collaborated and who would have resisted?
And actually what I've learned from this experience is that there would have been an awful lot of collaborators, a lot of snitches.
I've always been sympathetic about that.
Until you've been in the skin of somebody in an occupied country, it's all very well imagining you'd have been a great resistance fighter out in the marquee with your submachine gun and watching out for British parachute drops.
But the truth is, Most of us, especially any of us with family responsibilities and children, would have tried very hard to stay out of it.
OK, let me take that from a different angle.
Honestly, to speak out against this is not a comparable risk to the ones that are resistance fighters.
OK, fair enough.
But have you seen the tweet today put out by Derbyshire Police?
Yes, I have.
Isn't it extraordinary?
The other one, the day before, put out, I think, by or about the Metropolitan Police, with some people being shouted at on Shepherds Bush Green.
On both occasions, I responded by quoting large chunks of John Gaunt's dying speech, This Earth, This Realm, This England, AD 2020.
Yes, indeed.
It's so completely un-English to me, this sight of police ordering people to go home to their houses because the government says so.
The Derbyshire one is particularly because you only need to think about it for a moment to see that these people have done nobody any conceivable harm.
What do they mean?
If you live in a house with somebody, you travel with them in a closed car.
To a remote location, you get out of that car, keeping your distance from other people, and you go for a walk on the high hills, you haven't actually done any harm.
The government regulations may not allow for people going to the peep district.
But actually, they weren't designed to prevent people from going to the Peak District, really, and no harm is done by them.
So for the police to send out drones and publish videos saying it's a terrible thing to do is just an example of the point that I made, that once you cede your freedom to authority, there is no end to it.
Absolutely.
There's a real clash there between the spirit of the law and the letter of the law.
If you say law, I've been trying for the past couple of days to get out of what's left of the government machine, after they've all gone self-isolated, an actual explanation of the laws on which all this is based.
And the vagueness of the answer that I've been getting is quite startling.
Nobody says, well, it's under such and such an act, 1984, section 17.
It hasn't been that precise.
And my own guess is that the Monday announcement, the Monday night announcement that you must do this, that, and the other had no basis in law at all.
It's pill bluff.
Right.
I think it probably has a basis in law now because the Coronavirus Acts went through Royal Assent.
Yesterday evening, I think.
So whatever it is, it's now law, and I think it's pretty vague and extensive and would allow them to take practically any powers they'd like.
But it is remarkably vague, if you ask.
And as I believe very much in the rule of law, I do tend to ask on what authority a police officer acts.
And I can't see that anybody's taken much care to find out what it is.
It is, amongst many other things that are wrong with it.
It's a move away from the rule of law and it's replaced by the unencumbered rule of power.
But it is very disappointing, isn't it, that somebody at Derbyshire Police actually sat down to make a video using their drone unit and then actually had pictures of people really on remote...
Remote moors, where they couldn't possibly infect anybody else.
Now, what would be the rationale of stopping people wandering along remote moors with their dog?
The result for them is that they are defying their authority.
Right, yes.
I think for a lot of people this is really a matter about power worship.
The authority has said that this should happen, therefore it must be done.
Yeah.
It must be questioned, it must be challenged, no one must subvert it in any way.
And even if you can't establish any actual harm from the action, what we now have established is we live in a country under authority rather than under law.
And you'll jolly well do what you're told.
And what worries me about this is I don't know what's going to happen next.
Ferguson started backtracking on the figures.
I thought that what would probably happen was that we would have a number of intensive media coverages this weekend of people failing to observe the latest restrictions.
We would then go French with bans of people leaving their homes for more than 20 minutes and having to print out forms saying what they were leaving the house for in much more intense Police activity, which may still happen.
I'm not ruling it out.
But I begin to think that the government themselves are getting embarrassed by it and tiring of it and would like to get it over with and are looking for an excuse.
I very much hope so, because, like everybody, I long to see it over.
But the problem, once you start following a bad policy and once you've made a mistake, if you're a normal human being, the last thing you're going to do is to admit there's a mistake.
What you're going to do is double down on it.
So it could be worse.
And what really scares me is the possibility that we could come to the point where the new powers could be used to say, well, you, Peter Hitchens, are not allowed to write this anymore because you're spreading alarm and despondency and undermining the government's fight against disease.
And I don't think people might snigger at that now, but then again, if we'd had this conversation a week ago and I had said, as I sort of did, that travel restrictions and things like that were possible, You might have laughed at that then, but you're not laughing at it now.
So I would say rule nothing out.
Once you've started to use the weapon of state authority to try and control the spread of a disease, there really isn't any limit on what you might do.
Well, I was thinking, actually, we should be probably grateful to Derbyshire Police for that ridiculous video, because actually they've helped expose the lunacy.
The officers involved will be in the least bit embarrassed about it.
I'm sure they will still think, whatever anybody says, that what they did was right.
I can guarantee you that.
That's the way that the modern police force thinks.
Isn't the biggest problem with all this, Peter, that you and I can see, and a few others can see, that this is going to do enormous damage to the global economy, which is going to cause massive misery.
It'll probably ultimately lead to more deaths, particularly perhaps in the developing world through people, through the jump in food prices, etc.
Well, it's not just that.
I mean, one of the most interesting things that I keep referring to, and this is a long article on my blog which contains links to the video of the interview, which is in German but has English subtitles, and actually a transcription, which my wife very kindly did, of the interview.
But one of the things that he says towards the end of the interview is that he believes that the restrictions on civil society are terribly damaging to the healthy old.
Because they're deprived of all the activities that make their lives worth living.
And he reckons that it will have long-term, very dangerous effects on their health.
He says, our elderly citizens have every right to make efforts not to belong to the 2,200.
That's the German weekly average, German daily average of deaths.
In normal times, the 2,200 who daily embark on their last journey.
Social contacts and social events, theatre and music, travel and holiday recreation, sports and hobbies, all help to prolong their stay on Earth.
And then he said this extraordinary thing, the life expectancy of millions is being shortened.
And he then also says the horrifying impact on world economy threatens the existence of countless people.
The consequences on medical care are profound.
Already, services to patients who are in need are reduced, operations cancelled, practices empty, hospital personnel dwindling.
This will impact profoundly on our whole society.
I can only say that all these measures are leading to self-destruction and collective suicide because of nothing but a spook.
And this is not just some guy.
As I say, this is Professor Dr.
Susharit Bhakti, an infectious medicine specialist, I had a former head of the Institute for Medical Microbiology at the Johannes Gutenberg University of Mainz, which happens to be one of Germany's most distinguished seats of learning.
This is a real guy.
This is an expert.
I'm not just saying this off the top of my head.
So all those people who say, oh, you don't care about the old dying, it's the reverse.
I mean, of course I care about the old dying.
I am old.
Every death is a grief.
Every man's death diminishes me.
I'm with John Dunn on this.
So, of course I do.
But if you're really worried about this, you should be more subtle about it than to imagine that just by trying to cram back into its boxes an infectious disease, which seems to me to be less dangerous than advertised.
That you can achieve a total defeat of death itself.
In fact, many of the measures being taken will lead to the premature deaths of people now healthy and alive.
I just think people should think much more carefully about it and be so much more willing to listen to criticism and dissent.
What I found, I'm used to being abused.
It is dispiriting, and you do sometimes just want to go and take a walk in the woods afterwards, which of course you can't do now.
I'm not complaining about the penalties of speaking out on your own.
But what is dispiriting is that people actually turn to this method of abuse.
And accusation and misrepresentation rather than saying, oh, do you really not agree with this?
Can you give me any evidence?
Instead, people like Dom Jolly just use four-letter words and the ridiculous John Sweeney shouts at me on the Internet and all kinds of other people join in with this sort of thing.
And it isn't civilized or adults to deal with dissent in this way.
If I'm so wrong, it should be very easy to establish it.
A free society is a confident society which is quite prepared to listen to criticism.
And if I'm prepared to make it, after all, if I'm wrong, it is going to damage me terribly, isn't it?
I can't.
That corner's already been turned.
Can I give you two brief anecdotal examples which support what your German professor said, which is that my dad is 84.
He recently had heart valve surgery, so he's obviously in an at-risk category.
He was speaking to his doctor's surgery the other day, and they said, and are you self-isolating?
And he said, no.
He said, I take a walk, a four-mile walk on the Malvern Hills every day because it's the best way of recovering from my heart operation.
It makes me feel much, much better.
And he was determined.
He knows what's good for him and he's more frightened of not getting his exercise than he is of coronavirus.
My mum...
My mum, she had breast cancer, she had a lot of her lymphs taken out, so she has a very poor immune system.
But she, until recently, was playing golf.
Golf is what she loves to do.
Now, the golf club originally had this arrangement whereby they removed all the flags, removed all the pins, they removed all the rakes from the bunkers, And they filled in the holes with sand so that you could play up to the hole, you know, and you wouldn't touch any equipment that other people could...
It was a perfectly fine arrangement.
Now, of course, they can't even use the golf course.
It's just counterproductive.
It must be incredibly easy on a golf course to keep a distance from people if you want to.
You would have thought, yeah.
Exactly.
The church that I attend, I mean, let's face it, it's not...
It's sparsely attended.
There aren't many others.
It's a small village church which still uses the Book of Common Prayer.
There are very many of us.
And the church warden went to the authorities and said, look, we could usually stand quite far enough apart not to infect each other without in any way discomforting ourselves.
There's plenty of room.
Oh, no, they said, you've got to stop holding services.
That's it.
There wasn't any wit or flexibility.
It was just a complete shutdown driven by, I'm afraid, fear and panic.
And I'm just looking back at what I wrote on the 14th of March.
Yes, you're right.
We've gone quite mad.
I know many people are thinking this, but dare not say so.
And I then predicted I'll be accused of all kinds of terrible things for taking this fear.
But that's another aspect of how crazy things are.
Yes, I suppose there's a risk.
No, our response to it is not intelligent or useful.
And I actually said...
But the moment might come when I would not be able to travel freely around the country.
I said, no doubt, it will soon become impossible under some frantic emergency powers raging to make this point.
I'll be accused of giving aid and comfort to the virus and spreading alarm and despondency.
But before the roadblocks go up and you need a pass to go to work, I thought I'd say it anyway.
It was on the 14th of March.
I'd seen it coming.
It was obvious that this is what the government were favoring.
And when Al Johnson went on the television on Monday, when I heard he was going on, my heart sank because I thought something of his kind was coming.
It's what they reach for.
Some day or other there will be a reckoning here.
This man likes to think of himself as a new Churchill.
He writes biophys of Churchill.
I think he has fantasies about being a new leader.
And yet, Churchill, I think, was completely wedded to English liberty and indeed to English history.
He knew that the history of this country was a history of liberty.
I think he would have been Do you think that this is being done because of the optics?
That the government would rather avoid having bodies piling up in our beloved NHS? Then face...
Then acknowledge that actually many more people will die sort of off-camera.
In other words, it was done because the National Health Service is our national religion, and they couldn't face the public backlash of a sort of Northern Italian-style situation where overwhelmed doctors...
More credit to them for thought than they deserve.
I do find some of what's going on in Italy quite disturbing, because I think...
Can it never have been so before in the modern history of northern Italy that there have been large numbers of people dying, and the hospitals being heavily under pressure by it, and quite a lot of people in coffins?
How is it that we get these melodramatic pictures of coffins piling up or being transported by army lorries?
How has that happened?
If any relative of mine were in one of those coffins, I would myself feel I feel rather distressed by that.
It seems to me, and again, the coverage from within intensive care units.
When did you ever see this before?
If journalists are covering intensive care units, you'll get in the way, guys.
We don't need people poking around with cameras and microphone booms in this extremely difficult and dangerous and busy place where we haven't got all that much room.
Even without you being here, and yet now they're being allowed in.
That I do find disturbing.
But in terms of this government, I think that generally they're just small men who, faced with the frightening situation, were far too easily persuaded by, how shall I put it, forceful experts to follow a particular course.
And I think some of them may have felt that they might look good as a result.
They might look as if they were the saviour of the country.
I don't know.
But I think basically it's because we're governed by teenagers.
Yes.
As I was talking to you, a friend of mine texted me.
You know Aidan Hartley?
Yes.
Aidan was actually at Balliol with Boris when I was in another college.
And he writes to me, it's very sad, he says, James, Africa is tanking.
The economy has been destroyed and it will take years for it to recover, if ever.
These guys, Boris and our leaders, they can't get away with this in light of the increasing realization we have all been taken for a ride.
I think that so many of the people now who are lambasting people like you and me for our outrageous lack of caringness for the NHS and for the people who are gonna die of coronavirus, they are completely ignoring The wider economic consequences in the places that normally their hearts bleed over, like Africa.
But suddenly they don't give a toss about Africa.
They don't give a toss about all the people that are going to be affected by this and are going to suffer for many years to come.
No, there seems to have been a complete failure to consider any other subject than this or any other implication.
It comes as it comes always, from a lack of experience, a lack of historical knowledge.
Actually, I was thinking the other day of major politicians of our era and if they had been in charge during this.
I suspect, for instance, that if Kenneth Clark, with whom you and I have many disagreements, had been in charge, he would have very much hesitated to follow it.
I think Willie Whitelaw likely would have rejected it, and Hailsham as well, and I thought Robin Cook would have been pretty unwilling to swallow it, and a number of other senior labor figures one can think of.
The people who we now have in senior levels in government are people who are far less experienced and knowledgeable than I am, and this must alarm people, surely.
Do you think any good can come out of this?
For example, do you think that this will finally put paid to the green nonsense?
Or do you think they're going to double down after this?
I don't think it'll have any effect on that, no.
I think you're engaging in what you're thinking there.
Well, no, I wasn't.
Do you know what?
What I'm really worried about is that when it's over, people will believe the government's claims that they fixed it by locking us down.
Well, I think we shall make sure they don't get away with that.
Well, we try, but as I said over the Syrian business, what has struck me over the whole Duma chemical weapons allegations and what's happened over my discoveries there, is that what the governments of the West learned from the Iraq war was not that going to war in Middle Eastern countries was stupid and dangerous,
But the next time it happened, if there were any doubts about the WMD or whatever the pretext was, then they would make damn sure that those doubts were never publicized.
If the right will happen now, most of the media would not touch the fact that the WMD were never found.
It would be a fringe piece of knowledge.
That's how bad it is.
Because once the modern left came to power in most of the Western world, which it did, The old spirit of oppositional journalism, which used to be one of the best things about the left-wing press, went, and they became effectively a state press.
And alas, a lot of the conservative press has also been penetrated by some neoconservative stuff, which again makes them much, much less critical than they should be of these adventures, and indeed of government in general.
I think this is one of those moments when the fact that I'm a former Marxist is really, really important.
I'm a genuine survivor of the 1960s, I remember, and I can't help remembering the Pentagon Papers and things such as that.
There was only one lesson to be drawn from the Pentagon Papers and Watergate, and that was do not trust government.
And if you were alive and thinking during that period, Then there were only two views you could take.
One was do not trust government, the other was become part of the government.
And yet and yet, Peter, I hate to...
I hate to rain on your misery, or put sunshine on your misery, but...
But, here's a thought.
Lots and lots of people are going to listen to this podcast.
They've been yearning to hear you say these things and hear us talk about these things.
I know there's been a massive demand for this.
And this opportunity would not have been available to us even five years ago, really.
So now we can reach an audience.
But the thing is, the trouble is that it's no substitute.
For serious criticism of government policy in the mainstream press.
It's a relief that it exists.
It means that we're not in a totally unanimous society.
And I'm completely in favor of it.
I do it with a light heart because it's obviously well worth saying.
But it simply doesn't have the same effect as a leader in the Times or even the Guardian saying, hey, look, what are we doing here?
Yeah.
Yeah.
And one brief question.
I wish it were otherwise, but it isn't.
How does it feel, Peter, having me in the foxhole next to you?
Well, I'm very glad to be there.
On a fight such as this, one has to be reasonably fussy about one's allies, but I'm not so fussy as to reject you.
Ultimately, this is a friendship breaker for me.
If people really think that a government which can order us all to stay in our homes and put the police on the streets to enforce this isn't one which has moved way beyond the proper powers of the government in a free society, then I'm afraid they're lost to me.
I can't consider them human, I'll still be civil to them, but they can't be my friends.
Yes.
Yes.
I suspect we may lose a few more yet.
But there we are.
It's terrible.
I said goodbye forever to somebody this morning.
I just thought, I can't.
This is someone I liked, but I thought, if we ever meet again, I mean, never glad, confident morning again.
There would be doubt, hesitation and pain, as Robert Browning.
Said in that wonderful poem, The Lost Leader, which I used to know a lot better than I do now.
But it's true.
It's just you can't do it because it's so profound for me.
And the emotions which I felt on Monday night were even to me unexpected.
Yes, that England that was wont to conquer others hath made a shameful conquest of itself.
That's where we are.
Yep.
Well, on that note, thank you.
It was really great to be able to talk to you, albeit...
I'm very grateful to you for having the initiative to...
To do it and being patient enough to...
No, well, we were going to...
Let's just tell our listeners briefly how we were going to do it.
We discussed this morning, didn't we, whether I was going to come over to you illegally in Oxford and brave the police.
And we thought, well, it's not really worth it, is it?
I couldn't condone that.
Ultimately, I'm a rule of law person.
And there are things you can and can't do.
And I just think we had to do it this way.
I hope people don't mind the reduced sound quality of the results, or at least will understand the necessity for it.
Yes, exactly.
Okay, well, thank you very much.
You're listening to Peter Hitchens on the Delling Pod.
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