Britain implicated in murder of Gaza doctor sponsored by its Foreign Office

BY KIT KLARENBERG · THE GRAYZONE · NOVEMBER 14, 2023
The UK government refused to condemn Israel’s targeted murder of Dr. Maisara Alrayyes, a Palestinian alumnus of the British Foreign Office’s prestigious Chevening scholarship. Meanwhile, London has instructed media outlets to keep silent about its direct involvement in the Gaza slaughter.
Since the beginning of Israel’s military assault on the besieged Gaza Strip, the British government has remained unflappably silent on the carnage inflicted on Palestinian civilians with one notable exception.
On November 8th, the Foreign Office announced the death of Dr. Maisara Alrayyes, a Palestinian alumnus of its prestigious Chevening scholarship scheme, under which “outstanding emerging leaders from all over the world” can pursue all-expenses-paid master’s degrees at prestigious British universities.
The Foreign Office refused to state the cause of Alrayyes’ death, provoking a wave of condemnation.
Meanwhile, King’s College, where in 2019 Alrayyes studied Women and Children’s Health, issued a brief statement stating he and his family were “killed,” though it refused to name the perpetrator. The college noted that his work had been published “in a number of high-profile journals… and he was well respected and known among his colleagues for his dedication to improving healthcare for women and children in low-income and war-affected regions.”
Colleagues of Alrayyes subsequently revealed that he and his family had been murdered as a result of Israeli airstrikes after spending 30 hours trapped under rubble.
In the days leading up to their deaths, the physician texted his former classmates at King’s College, telling them:
“In the last few days, I’m starting to feel more terrified than ever. I imagine myself underneath the rubble, and I have a great fear of staying alive under the rubble.”
His worst nightmares were realized thanks in no small part to the British government sponsors of his Chevening Scholarship.
Britain’s Cleverly meets Alrayyes, signs off on Israel’s killing spree
The Chevening Scholarship is considered something of a crown jewel in Britain’s soft power arsenal, and a vital mechanism for promoting her interests abroad. Over 15 Chevening graduates have gone on to become heads of state, and London is keen to promote the success of alumni the world over. A leaked Foreign Office report on improving public perceptions of Britain in the former Yugoslavia found London was “favourably associated with education (universities, schools, the Chevening scholarship programme).”
A Chevening Journalism Scholarship was therefore made available in every country in the region, to “improve the perception of the UK with participants, who are influencers in the Western Balkans.”
As Alrayyes met his fiancee, also a Chevening scholar, while studying in Britain, London was particularly enamored with his example. In September, he was among a select group of graduates granted a meeting with Foreign Secretary James Cleverly in Jerusalem.
These British leaders failed to provide Alrayyes with even the slightest measure of protection when the brutal bombardment of Gaza began this October. While sleeping in his home with his family, he became a target of the Israeli military. In death, he has become a public relations problem for the British Foreign Office that once sponsored him.
Cleverly has repeatedly dismissed calls for a ceasefire in Gaza while insisting Britain fervently supports Israel’s right to “defend” itself – a euphemism for backing Israel’s crushing assault. When grilled about Alrayyes’ murder by ITV, the Foreign Secretary half-heartedly mumbled:
“Every loss of life is heart-breaking. And there are people both Palestinian and Israeli who have lost their lives. That is why we are so focused on getting humanitarian aid into Gaza.”
Britain implicated directly in the Gaza slaughter
In every way, Alrayyes’ horrific death is a nightmare for London, not least because the British government itself may be somehow implicated. Analysis by Declassified UK indicates that since October 7, 33 military transport flights have traveled to Tel Aviv from Britain’s vast airbase in Cyprus. The outlet could not find records of similar journeys before the attack on Gaza began. A Ministry of Defence spokesperson denied the planes were ferrying “lethal aid”, but supported “diplomatic engagement.”
This explanation is rendered all the more dubious given that in late October, the Defence and Security Media Advisory (DSMA) Committee wrote to the editors of major British news outlets to demand they not report on British special forces “deployed to sensitive areas of the Middle East.”
DSMA is a Ministry of Defence body that imposes a very British form of censorship on the press. It brings together representatives of the intelligence and security services, military veterans, high ranking government officials, press association chiefs, senior editors, and journalists. Together, they decide what issues related to national security can be reported on, and how. It creates a situation in which the overwhelming majority of British national security journalism is directly influenced by the state.
The Committee’s recent intervention was spurred by media reports of the SAS being stationed in Cyprus to assist with hostage rescue operations. This was almost certainly designed to explain the presence of British special forces in the region while concealing their involvement in the assault on Gaza, where Alrayyes was murdered.
‘Israel controls the Foreign Office’
The Foreign Office’s handling of Alrayyes’ death reportedly sparked outrage even among its own staff, who were already outraged at Whitehall’s refusal to acknowledge, let alone condemn, the spiraling civilian death toll in Gaza. Historically, the department was pro-Arab. Its conversion to the cause of Zionism is a relatively recent development, although sympathy for the Palestinians endures in certain quarters.
This is somewhat remarkable, given British politicians who dare speak up for the Palestinians are routinely targeted for reputational destruction by the Israel lobby. Both Labour and the Conservatives have highly influential “Friends of Israel” clusters within parliament, which operate in close, clandestine concert with Tel Aviv’s embassy in London.
In 2017, undercover Al Jazeera journalists caught Israeli embassy representative Shai Masot on tape in meetings with Conservative Friends of Israel (CFI), discussing a “hit list” of parliamentarians to “take down” due to their support for Palestine. This included MP Crispin Blunt, a longtime critic of Israel, and Foreign Office minister Alan Duncan. Masot expressed a desire to “destroy” Duncan, to ensure he wouldn’t receive a top post within the department.
In response, Duncan telephoned Mark Regev, then-Israeli ambassador to Britain, who alleged Masot was a junior “local hire” with no formal diplomatic status. In reality, Masot was an Israeli Defense Forces veteran who had served as the embassy’s senior political officer since November 2014, acting as chief point of contact between the Israeli embassy and the Foreign Office.
Israel returns to kill Alrayyes’ family
On November 8, friends of Maisara Alrayyes learned that his two brothers were also murdered by the Israeli military as they dug through the rubble of his home to extract his dead body. They had survived the attack on their home two days prior, but became targets when they returned in an attempt to give their brother a proper burial.
Having whitewashed the murder of Alrayyes, the British Foreign Office has been silent about Israel’s targeted killing of Alrayyes’ family. Meanwhile, UK Rishi Sunak continues to reject calls for a ceasefire between Israel and Palestinian factions in Gaza.
Violent Pro-Israel Counter-Protesters Clash With Police At Palestine Solidarity March In London
RT | November 11, 2023
At least 300,000 people marched in the British capital on Saturday demanding an immediate ceasefire in Gaza. London Metropolitan Police reported at least 126 arrests amid clashes with counter protesters in which nice officers were injured.
The largely peaceful crowds were chanting “free Palestine”, “ceasefire now” and “from the river to the sea, Palestine will be free,” as they marched through the streets of London. The largest to date demonstration coincided with the annual Armistice Day commemorations.
Ahead of the pro-Palestinian march, a group of right-wing protesters, mainly consisting of football hooligans from across the UK, arrived in central London on a pretense of protecting monuments, but “were already intoxicated, aggressive and clearly looking for confrontation,” assistant commissioner Matt Twist said in a statement.
The violent crowd, chanting “you’re not English any more” hailed abuses at the officers, who were protecting the Cenotaph and preventing them from confronting the pro-Palestinian activists.
“Nine officers were injured during the day, two requiring hospital treatment with a fractured elbow and a suspected dislocated hip. Those officers were injured on Whitehall as they prevented a violent crowd getting to the Cenotaph while a remembrance service was taking place,” police said, adding that “the extreme violence from the right wing protestors towards the police today was extraordinary and deeply concerning.”
The Palestine Solidarity Campaign (PSC) march, which the organizers themselves estimated to be at least 500,000 strong, “did not see the sort of physical violence carried out by the right wing,” according to police, although a fringe group of some 150 masked people was intercepted while firing fireworks. Several arrests were made “after some of the fireworks struck officers in the face,” police said.
The unrest follows the debate earlier this week whether the pro-Palenstian protest should be permitted on Armistice day, that is traditionally observed in the UK by a two-minute silence during the 11th hour of the 11th day of the 11th marking the end of WWI in 1918.
Home Secretary Suella Braverman was accused of fuelling the tensions by branding pro-Palestinian demonstrations as “hate marches,” while accusing the police of bias for letting the rally go ahead.
London Mayor Sadiq Khan said that the clashes were “encouraged and emboldened” by senior politicians “like the Home Secretary” and were a “direct result” of her words.
The Prime Minister, Rich Sunak condemned the violence and hatred from both sides and called for the nations “to come together” to remember “those who fought and died for our freedom.”
US sabotaged Ukraine peace plan – Orban
RT | November 10, 2023
US lobbying was instrumental in stopping Ukraine from signing a peace deal with Russia, shortly after the conlfict between the two countries escalated last year, Hungarian Prime Minister Viktor Orban claimed on Friday.
Speaking with the national Radio Kossuth, Orban agreed with former German Chancellor Gerhard Schroeder that it was the US that scuttled the Istanbul peace talks in March 2022.
“What the former German chancellor said is a well-known fact in the world of diplomacy,” Orban said. “And we also know this from all kinds of reports and intelligence sources, that indeed in 2022 in Istanbul, where all kinds of covert negotiations took place, there was essentially an agreement, which – so says the diplomatic rumor – the Ukrainians did not sign on American instructions.”
The Ukrainians “were not allowed to” make peace, because they “first had to ask the Americans about everything,” Schroeder had told the newspaper Berliner Zeitung in an interview last month.
Speaking with Kossuth Radio on Friday, Orban pointed out that Europe tried to contain the Ukraine conflict starting with the Crimean crisis of 2014, through things such as the Minsk agreements.
“The Americans entered this game, and since then the direction is not isolation and localization, but expansion. More and more people are getting involved, more and more weapons are being delivered, more and more money is being spent, the Europeans are taking out more and more loans and sending them over to Ukraine, so I have to say that the conflict is becoming globalized,” the Hungarian prime minister said. “The Russian-Ukrainian war is destroying Europe. What we are doing now is unsustainable.”
Since the failure of the Turkish-hosted talks, bullets and bombs have done most of the talking between Moscow and Kiev. Ukraine has ruled out any negotiations with Russian President Vladimir Putin and insists on a set of demands that the Kremlin has dismissed as absurd.
The Kiev-based Ukrayinska Pravda reported in May 2022 that Boris Johnson, who was the British prime minister at the time, acted as a messenger for the West when he visited Kiev the month prior, “almost without warning.”
Johnson allegedly told President Vladimir Zelensky that there can be no negotiations with Putin and that even if Ukraine was ready to sign some kind of agreement with Russia, the West was not. Within two months of that visit, Johnson lost the premiership and later even his seat in the House of Commons, ostensibly over a scandal related to Covid-19 lockdowns. Last month he was hired by the Center for European Policy Analysis (CEPA) – a Washington-based think tank funded by the US government, NATO, and Western military contractors – on account of his “commitment to Ukraine’s victory.”
Protesters shut down UK arms factory to ‘disrupt Israeli war machine’
Press TV – November 10, 2023
Hundreds of trade union members have blocked the entrance of Britain’s largest weapons maker, calling for an immediate end to arms supplies to Israel amid the regime’s brutal military campaign in the Gaza Strip.
Demonstrators gathered outside the gate of the BAE Systems site in Rochester, Kent, on Friday.
They were holding Palestinian flags and chanting slogans like “Stop Arming Israel,” “ceasefire now,” and “How many kids have you killed today?”
One organizer said more than 400 trade unionists were involved in the action at the site.
Union members were calling for “an end to the UK government’s complicity in war crimes being committed in Palestine”, which includes an end to arms sales to the occupying regime and support for an immediate ceasefire.
A teacher and member of the Nation Education Union, who took part in the protest said, “As a teacher, seeing 185 schools and other educational institutions in Gaza bombed is utterly heartbreaking.”
“We’re here today to disrupt the Israeli war machine and take a stand against our government’s complicity and we urge workers across the UK to take similar action in their workplaces and communities,” she added.
The factory, run by BAE Systems, claims it does not directly export equipment to Israel. Activists say the company – which includes the site being blockaded – “provides 15% of the components in the F-35 fighter jets that are currently being used in the bombardment of Gaza.”
The value of components supplied by BAE Systems to Israel could be worth more than £300m since 2016, according to campaigners.
Similar protests were also held outside Israeli-owned factories in Britain.
Two of Israel’s biggest weapons factories, Elbit and Rafael, both have operations in the United Kingdom.
The governments of the UK, the United States and the European Union member states have been providing Israel with weapons and military assistance, since the regime launched its genocidal campaign in the Gaza Strip on October 7.
Palestinian officials in the besieged Gaza Strip say the Israeli regime has dropped more than 32,000 tons of explosives on the territory in its ongoing war of aggression.
Israel’s ongoing bombardment of the besieged enclave has now killed and injured more than 40,000 Palestinians, most of them women and children.
Grooming our children, Part 1: Getting parents out of the picture
By Belinda Brown | TCW Defending Freedom | November 2, 2023
Are parents aware of what children from four years old are being taught about sex in our schools? Belinda Brown thinks not. In a series of articles she makes the case that, with the agreement of the Department for Education, our children are being exposed to what is tantamount to a national grooming programme. The first step of this successful sex educators’ coup, she explains today, was to get parents out of the picture, to take over their role, and then deny them any access to lessons. Miriam Cates is one MP who is fighting back.
IN JUNE Conservative MP Miriam Cates introduced the ‘sex education transparency’ Private Members’ Bill, putting Rishi Sunak under pressure to give schools a legal duty to publish materials used in sex education lessons. Backed by 70 Conservative MPs, the aim of the Bill is to secure parents’ rights to see their children’s Relationships and Sex Education (RSE) lesson plans: rights which parents thought they had, only to find them being denied.
Cates had already called for an urgent Government review into what was being taught in RSE since this programme was rolled out in September 2020, of such concern were the materials and lessons parents gleaned from their children. RSE, it emerged, was the brainchild of the ‘progressive’ independent Sex Education Forum, a busy organisation with a stipend of £200,000 a year and a clear ‘beyond biology’ agenda. The Prime Minister responded to Cates’s call and ordered the review last March. Unaccountably, his Secretary of State for Education, Gillian Keegan, refused to publish the findings and has no plans to do so. Why, we do not know. MPs had claimed the Department for Education’s (DfE) most recent relationships and sex education guidance, produced in 2019 in consultation with the LGBT+ charity Stonewall, had allowed ‘activist groups’ to overly influence teaching materials. The guidance does not set age limits on what can be taught.
In the meanwhile, the position of parents has not changed. One story catalysed Cates’s most recent initiative. Two years ago, Clare Page found out that her daughter had been taught at school that ‘heteronormativity’ (preferring the opposite sex) was a bad thing and had been told that she should be ‘sex positive’. Like any decent mother, she wanted to know more. Her request to see the material used in her daughter’s classroom was turned down, first by the Information Commissioner’s Office and then by a first-tier tribunal. She was not even allowed to find out whether her daughter had been taught by the ‘master fetish trainer’ who worked for the School of Sexuality Education (SSE) employed by her daughter’s school.
Page’s case marks another step in the long march through the institutions whereby parents are being excluded from once personal and family-based aspects of their children’s upbringing, now inappropriately and dangerously taken over by schools.
Her experience is far from exceptional. In Wales, where children are being exposed to a mandatory diet of explicit and highly ideological sex education, parents are not allowed to remove their children from these classes. Attempts to do so are repeatedly turned down.
Likewise, parents such as those trying to protect their children from sexual extremism in the London Borough of Redbridge are portrayed as religious fundamentalists and radical homophobic Islamists.
Some schools and local authorities even have a policy of not informing parents when a child expresses what the school categorises as ‘feelings of gender distress,’ a study found, though this flies in the face of safeguarding rules. More recent research indicates that it could be that the school’s teaching that is the source of distress.
In theory, parents do have rights in law. Under the European Convention of Human Rights, ‘the State shall respect the right of parents to ensure such education and teaching is in conformity with their own religious and philosophical convictions’. The 2002 Education Act Guidance repeatedly emphasises the role of parents. ‘Teaching must be done with respect to the backgrounds and beliefs of pupils and parents . . . All schools should work closely with parents when planning and delivering these subjects. Schools should ensure that parents know what will be taught and when, and clearly communicate the fact.’
Yet this is not happening. Any criticism that teaching places insufficient emphasis on the value of traditional marriage between a man and a woman, for example, is ignored.
When the School of Sexuality Education complained that the Department of Education’s guidance gave ‘problematic credence’ to long-term relationships and marriage, they had the government’s ear (p10). These sex education activists ‘provide in-school workshops on consent, sexual health, porn and positive relationships’. Their approach, they say, is rights-based – whose rights they do not say. They proclaim themselves as ‘sex-positive, non-binary and trauma informed’.
When they criticised the guidance section that suggested that primary schools should only teach pupils about LGBT when it was ‘age appropriate’ rather than from reception, these phrases were obligingly removed by the DfE.
Gillian Keegan should ask herself who these sex education providers are and why they want the material they are pushing at our children to be unrestricted by age.
This contempt for parents was expressed early on in an ‘Educate and Celebrate’ guidebook foisted on schools. Their proposal was that rather than get parents’ permission for children to attend LGBT events, they would organise LGBT events in the school (p24). When parents tried to protect their children from all this, they were told they were breaking the law.
The result of the government’s inadequate guidance, Cates says, is ‘a permission slip for teaching almost anything that is loosely associated with gender, sexuality or sexual practice – often with an assumption of the earlier, the better’ (p71).
Without providing any apparent curriculum, and without parents able to monitor what was being taught, these so-called specialist sex ‘educators’, heavily funded by the government, with clearly articulated curricula and political agendas, have zealously filled the gap.
Foremost of these is the ideology of queer theory that asserts that ‘heteronormativity’ – the natural biological sex preference for the opposite sex, should be ‘smashed’. It rejects all ‘binaries’ including distinctions between homosexuality and heterosexuality, male and female, and even more disturbingly, between adult and child.
This is the ideology that’s the foundation of the RSE curriculum that a Conservative government has sanctioned. It will be explored in greater depth in the rest of the series. Parents have a right to know, reject it and protest.
To be continued.
Now Andrew Bridgen takes on the power-hungry World Health Organization
By Kathy Gyngell | TCW Defending Freedom | October 30, 2023
Hard on the heels of his excess deaths debate last Tuesday, the admirably energetic and purposeful Andrew Bridgen MP has been granted leave to bring in a Parliamentary Sovereignty (Referendums) Bill under the Ten Minute rule (which allows a backbench MP to make his or her case for a new Bill in a speech lasting up to ten minutes).
The purpose of this Bill is ‘to prohibit Ministers of the Crown from making or implementing any legal instrument which is not consistent with the sovereignty of the United Kingdom Parliament, unless it has been approved by a referendum; and for connected purposes’. It is directly relevant to the sweeping powers which the World Health Organization’s Pandemic Treaty threatens to grab from us.
(The second reading of this Bill, set for November 24th, is crucial. Supporters should put massive pressure on their MPs to attend, and include in their emails, the powers the Treaty will give the WHO over us).
You can watch Mr Bridgen delivering his succinct but detailed explanation for why we need such a Bill here:
Here is the full text from Hansard:
I beg to move,
That leave be given to bring in a Bill to prohibit Ministers of the Crown from making or implementing any legal instrument which is not consistent with the sovereignty of the United Kingdom Parliament, unless it has been approved by a referendum; and for connected purposes.
This Bill does what it says on the tin. The point of it is to uphold the integrity and sovereignty of this great House and this great nation. It would, for example, prevent a future Government from overturning the democratic will of the British people by taking us back into the European Union without consulting the public in a referendum. Indeed, it would stop the Government from taking us into any union without public consent, and it would move power closer to the people.
However, the Bill would also stop something that threatens the people of our great nation right now. It would stop the Government from blindly accepting the World Health Organization’s amendments to the International Health Regulations and the so-called Post-Pandemic Agreement, which they appear intent on doing without even consulting this House, never mind the public. The Government signed up to the WHO pandemic preparedness treaty negotiations without a single word being uttered in Government time. The only time we have even mentioned it in this Parliament was on 17 April this year in a Westminster Hall debate forced by over 156,000 members of the public signing a petition. A further petition to reject the amendments to the IHR has closed, having reached over 116,000 signatures, but no time has yet been allocated for a debate.
Those two instruments, if followed, will control how future Governments can prepare and respond to emergencies. In my view, that would amount to making this House redundant. If allowed to progress, that treaty and the amendments to the IHR will fundamentally change the relationship between citizen and state, moving away from a parliamentary democracy that has been the envy of the world for centuries to an autocratic dictatorship led by the unelected and unaccountable director general of the WHO. That same organisation has been accused of undue Chinese influence, as well as of severely mismanaging and covering up the spread and origin of covid-19. That same organisation is mostly funded by commercial and private interests and has diplomatic immunity for its employees and families. What could possibly go wrong?
My North West Leicestershire constituents voted to leave the European Union in 2016—indeed, I campaigned for it, too—but they did not vote in their tens of thousands to leave the EU only to be subjected to an even more autocratic and unaccountable body that takes sovereignty away from this House and from our people. We voted to leave the European Union to take back control, not to give it away to the WHO or anybody else. We are all elected by our constituents to represent them and speak on their behalf, so when it comes to the matter of their sovereignty and protecting their freedoms and rights, surely it is our responsibility to defend those rights and privileges. We are custodians of that power and sovereignty only for a brief period, after which it must be returned intact to the people at the next election, so that they can again decide who will represent them for the next parliamentary period.
When it comes to giving sovereignty away, that decision must always go back to the people, and it requires a referendum. The people should decide whether they wish to give their sovereignty away, and, in this case, whether they want the director general of the WHO controlling their life, rather than the Government of the day. To give those powers away would be nothing short of a dereliction of our duties.
The WHO would like to paint a picture of the treaty and the amendments being all about nation states working together in harmony to fight deadly pathogens, when they are in fact a power grab by an unaccountable elite. They do not want a debate on that; they would quite happily see it passed through the back door without a word being mentioned. That is not my idea of an open parliamentary democracy. The director general of the WHO will have the ability to call a public health emergency of international concern—the acronym is PHEIC, Madam Deputy Speaker—and take absolute powers to control the lives of all citizens of our sovereign nation. That is a power grab not just in this nation, but in all nations around the globe who sign up.
The new powers that the WHO will gain include the freedom to declare a pandemic—or even the potential for a pandemic—at which point all decision-making powers fall under the control of the WHO. The powers would also include the ability to call an emergency owing to human pathogens, animal pathogens, a perceived environmental threat or even the risk of any of the above; and the freedom to impose lockdown restrictions on all individuals in member states and make vaccinations or other medications mandatory, such as vaccines made in 100 days by skipping human trials and shaving safety and efficacy testing down to the bare bones. Furthermore, the WHO would seek power on the right to specify the use of certain medications in medical emergencies, and ban others—to decide healthcare for every person, with local doctors being forced to follow WHO edicts. The power to require a global health passport to be carried would also be given to those unelected bureaucrats in Geneva. Nations would be required to surveil and censor the press and social media so that no dissenting voices can be heard. The removal of the clause relating to human rights is unforgivable.
The recommendations that the WHO issued during the covid-19 pandemic were exactly that: recommendations. They were advisory, and it was up to sovereign Governments and sovereign Parliaments to implement or ignore them—Sweden bravely and successfully chose to ignore them. This treaty would make the WHO’s recommendations mandatory without a debate in this House or, indeed, any other elected Chamber of nations that sign up to these flawed agreements.
As George Santayana said, those who fail to learn the lessons of history are doomed to repeat them. I have some severe worries that the lessons of the last pandemic have not been learned by the WHO itself, as it will not even have a review of its recommendations during the pandemic, so sure is it that its advice was absolutely perfect—when, in fact, we know from independently conducted reviews that it was a litany of disasters, lockdowns, mandatory experimental vaccines and masks, all of which caused our population and economy huge harm. We are in danger of giving this organisation even more powers to overreach itself and repeat those catastrophic mistakes.
Do we really want a repeat of the measures recommended by the WHO that resulted in £400 billion on the national debt, which has caused ravaging inflation, not to mention the huge NHS waiting lists, one million young people in need of mental health support and the damage to our children’s education and development? That begs the question, why on earth would anyone be willing to give away our sovereignty without consulting this House or the people? That is something I am not content with, and I suspect many colleagues here today share my concerns—or perhaps some of them think, rather like those who were deciding the regulations at the last pandemic, that the rules would not apply to them. I can assure hon. and right hon. Members that they will.
The very democracy that we have taken for granted all our lives is now under threat, but it is not under threat from invading armies hailing from hostile nations. No, our democracy is under threat due to the apparent corruption and decay of our own Government institutions, which are allowing this power grab to happen. Members in this Chamber should never forget that we are the servants of the people, not their masters, and the servants should never sell out their masters.
In my opinion, anyone who supports either of these WHO instruments—I refuse to call one of them an agreement, because I have not agreed to it, and neither have the people of North West Leicestershire; indeed, I think the majority of my constituents would never agree to these instruments—and any Member of this Parliament who would hand over these powers to a such discredited organisation as the WHO does not deserve a seat in this Chamber or any elected Assembly around the world.
In conclusion, to even contemplate giving away these sorts of powers to this sort of body, which affect not just the democratic rights but the human rights of every single man, woman and child in our nation, without a referendum would be quite simply catastrophic. People have said that this would lead to one world government. In fact, it is rather worse; it will be a one world dictatorship. Signing up to this treaty and binding ourselves to the WHO without a single debate on it, a single vote on it or asking the general public what they think would make being a member of the European Union look like a democratic paradise by comparison. That is why we need this Bill. I am aware that, with the looming prospect of Prorogation, even if the House supports my motion today, the Bill will fall in a few days’ time. However, as the phrase goes, I will be back.
Question put and agreed to.
Ordered,
That Andrew Bridgen and Mr Philip Hollobone present the Bill.
Andrew Bridgen accordingly presented the Bill.
Bill read the First time; to be read a Second time on Friday 24 November, and to be printed (Bill 377).
Now that the dust has settled on the Covid-19 pandemic, what should we learn for the future?
Dr Scott Mitchell shares his personal view of how the situation was handled
Guernsey Press | October 9, 2023
The impact of the Covid-19 pandemic was unprecedented in most of our lifetimes. Not since the Second World War has anything had such a major and widespread negative impact on humanity.
In early 2020, the world was alerted to a novel coronavirus causing severe pneumonia in Wuhan, China. Initially, I was not overly concerned, as the previous coronavirus outbreaks in the last 20 years (Sars and Mers), although with reported high lethality, had been largely restricted to geographic regions. In fact, I had travelled to China towards the end of Sars in 2003 and recall being held up following an internal flight while the authorities checked travellers’ temperatures. Fortunately, I was released and allowed on my way once they were satisfied I had no signs of infection.
However, I became very concerned once the new disease hit north Italy, with media reports of hospitals being overwhelmed. There was no known proven treatment, and later, when it afflicted New York City, sadly 88% of those ventilated died.
In Guernsey, the CCA promptly convened. Although I don’t have any intimate knowledge of their discussions, I suspect the modelling from Neil Ferguson at ICL, which suggested that as many as 500,000 people could die in the UK if no action was taken, had a great influence on their decision making, and as a result the Bailiwick entered a full lockdown on 25 March 2020 – the day after the UK.
Guernsey’s Strategic Pandemic Influenza Plan, having only just been drafted in January 2020, has no mention of lockdowns. Although this was expecting influenza, that type of virus can potentially cause an even more fatal disease, such as that which occurred in 1918. No doubt the CCA were put in a difficult position, potentially having to face something much worse than ever envisioned.
In addition, Guernsey is geographically isolated and has limited healthcare resources, such as personnel and hospital/ICU beds, so deviating from a pre-determined strategy to quarantine the island while the threat could be fully evaluated was a reasonable initial approach.
Lockdowns went from ‘two weeks to flatten the curve’ to extended periods of months or more. Doing nothing was clearly not an option, however the prolonged closure of society brings with it undeniable collateral damage, including mental health problems, delayed diagnoses of serious diseases such as cancer, and a significant economic burden. Those who were able to work from home were less affected by the latter, but those with manual jobs were prohibited from working and earning. This resulted in significant cost – with most of the States’ pandemic expenditure of nearly £100m. spent on income and business support. Although Guernsey was able to return to relatively normal life on-island with fewer restrictions than the UK, travel was far from normal, requiring up to 14 days of quarantine for those arriving on the island. It could never be a long-term solution to essentially be cut off from the rest of the world.
So, was there any alternative strategy? Professor John Ioannidis of Stanford had published early on that the infection fatality rate was around 0.2%, and later found it was under 0.1% for those under 70 years of age. Increasing age beyond this was well documented to be the single greatest risk factor for severe Covid-19 and hospitalisation/death, and people with conditions such as obesity, diabetes and high blood pressure were also at higher risk.
In October 2020, three professors of medicine (Sunetra Gupta of Oxford, Martin Kulldorff of Yale and Jay Bhattacharya of Stanford) suggested a different approach; the Great Barrington Declaration – targeted protection of the vulnerable, while allowing the rest of society to continue relatively normally. Would this have been a better strategy?
Mandated non-pharmaceutical interventions were later brought in. These included masking, social distancing, and hand-washing. Early on, a number of health officials stated there was no recommendation for masks in the community, yet later this advice was reversed, despite a Danish randomised study and later a Cochrane review concluding there was little or no evidence for mask effectiveness.
The advice was also inconsistent – one would have to enter a pub or restaurant wearing a mask but could sit for hours without one. Social distancing may have reduced spread by larger exhaled droplets, but spread by aerosols (smaller particles), which can remain in the air for longer periods, was under-appreciated.
The strategy had become one of varying restrictions while waiting on the proposed solution – a vaccine. Several pharmaceutical companies produced candidates which quickly entered trials. In late 2020 results of these were published from three companies, all claiming efficacy rates over 90%, albeit these were relative risk reductions. They were proposed to be safe, although there was no medium- or long-term data.
The mass vaccination programme started in late December 2020, beginning with the elderly, the most vulnerable and front-line healthcare workers. Undoubtedly Covid-19 could be a severe and fatal disease, so on a risk-benefit analysis, offering such an investigational therapy to those at risk could be justified. However, they were subsequently offered to younger and younger age groups. The Joint Committee on Vaccination and Immunisation met and decided there was insufficient benefit to offer them to 12-15-year-olds. Despite this the chief medical officers in the UK decided they should be, and soon after Guernsey followed suit (then later offered them to children as young as five years old). This was especially perplexing given that it was a disease of negligible risk to children and there was a known risk of myocarditis (heart muscle inflammation), especially in teenage males. A study analysing the original trial data reported an overall serious adverse event rate of one in 800.
Although the vaccines were never mandated, there was coercion to take them. I frequently heard that individuals were only taking them in order to travel. While some of this was outside Guernsey’s control, local people who had not taken the vaccines were subject to isolation requirements on-island. At the same time visitors and tourists who had taken them could enter without any restriction or testing. There were some studies at the time showing similar viral loads in people whether vaccinated or not, suggesting limited impact on infection and transmission. Real world data supports this. The last figures published by the States on 28 March 2023 shows over 95% of reported cases of Covid-19 had taken at least a primary course of vaccines. In addition, a recent Cleveland Clinic study suggested that with cumulative doses, one was more likely to get Covid.
Even if the vaccines were proven to reduce infections and transmission, would it have been ethically right to impose conditions on those who had chosen not to have them?
So how effective are the vaccines at preventing death? Data just released by the ONS shows that between 1 April 2021 and 31 May 2023 in England there were 8,850 deaths involving Covid-19 in the unvaccinated and 52,000 deaths in the vaccinated. Between January and May 2023, 95% of deaths were in the vaccinated.
Is the widespread use of a vaccine that does not significantly impact on infection and transmission helping to promote variants?
Why wasn’t a more holistic strategy adopted, such as promoting weight loss, exercise and maintaining a sufficient level of vitamin D? Deficiency of the latter was correlated with worse outcomes in several studies, while being a safe and inexpensive intervention.
Repurposed drugs with an established safety profile such as hydroxychloroquine and ivermectin were vilified. Both are inexpensive drugs known to work on more than one condition. The data from human studies remains mixed (and fraudulent negative data was published in the Lancet on the former), but at the same time expensive drugs such as remdesivir were approved – it didn’t reduce mortality in hospitalised patients and increased the risk of kidney failure, at a cost of £2,000 per course.
An inexpensive pharmaceutical intervention that did become proven for severe Covid-19 were corticosteroids – showing a significant reduction in mortality in patients requiring oxygen or ventilatory support. Unfortunately, the WHO had recommended against them from the outset of the pandemic. Dr Pierre Kory went before the US Senate in May 2020 to testify on their use, based on existing published data on acute respiratory distress syndrome and reports from doctors using them as being a ‘game changer’. Two months later, they were adopted as a standard of care when Oxford published the results of their recovery trial.
Data from the Greffe shows there was no increased mortality in 2020 and 2021, yet Guernsey experienced the most deaths for at least a decade in 2022. This echoes similar excess ongoing mortality in the UK and multiple other countries. What is this due to?
The States’ recent Covid Review was a missed opportunity to properly evaluate the response to the pandemic.
I ask, how much of the disruption to our lives was due to the virus, and how much from the response to it?
Was it all proportionate, and what should we learn for the future?
Keir Starmer: Hostage, or Accomplice to Rishi Sunak?
Why is the current Labour leader in complete lock step with the ruling Tory party, with unfettered support for Israel’s war crimes in occupied Palestine?
By Peter Ford | 21st Century Wire | October 30, 2023
The leader of the Labour Party is just as much a hostage as any of the Israelis held by Hamas. Only in his case he wasn’t kidnapped: he delivered himself, bound and gagged, to Prime Minister Rishi Sunak and Netanyahu.
Keir Starmer, basking in media acclaim just a week ago after yet another spectacular by-election win for his party, is now probably the most reviled politician in Britain, a pretty contested field.
This turnabout has come about because over the last three years Starmer has staked his all on extirpating from the Labour Party all traces of his allegedly anti-semitic Hamas-friendly predecessor Jeremy Corbyn and his barbaric followers (does this kind of operation sound familiar?). He has been largely successful in this endeavour and earned in consequence the favour of important elites well represented in the media. In so doing, however, he has made himself a hostage to fortune, or more specifically to the behaviour of Israel.
Starmer could not afford to let daylight over Israel emerge between himself and Rishi Sunak, otherwise all his good work shoring up his credentials as scourge of the Labour anti-semites could start to crumble. This was fine as long as even the Arabs seemed to be ditching the Palestinians by making their separate Abraham Accords with Israel.
But what if it all blew up in the faces of the architects of these Accords and Israel turned out to be behaving barbarically? Well, Starmer is now finding out. Following as he thought the Sunak line, in a notorious radio interview he stated as clearly as he ever states anything (that is, not very much) that Israel had the right to withhold food, water, electricity and fuel from starving Gazans. Desperate backtracking failed to stem the avalanche of protest that followed, mainly from representatives of the Muslim community. Labour councillors started resigning.
Starmer compounded his error by failing to support calls for a ceasefire, just as British TV screens were filling with horrific pictures of Palestinian children being pulled bloodied from rubble. The trickle of resignations at local level became a flood and panicking senior Labour figures started to distance themselves from him. That many of them depend on Muslim votes to get re-elected has of course nothing to do with this welcome if tardy appreciation that genocide is, well, overdoing it a bit.
Starmer is in a massive bind. If he caves in to pressure and starts to let daylight emerge between himself and Sunak he will immediately be assailed from all sides for being the treacherous, cynical, unprincipled flip flopper he is, if not as an actual anti-semite. And if he stands firm he will gain poisonous praise from the Right and not much else.
Meanwhile Sunak is having a ball at Starmer’s (and Gaza’s) expense. However outrageous Sunak’s pro-Israeli stance he knows Starmer can only distance himself at his peril and the longer this goes on the more Starmer impales himself on this hook of his own foolish making. At a stroke Starmer has lost millions of potential votes, even if he now zigzags, while Sunak’s fortunes, a moment ago worth less than Sam Bankman-Fried’s investments in crypto, rise correspondingly. And with Netanyahu promising that his Gaza campaign is going to be long, hard and painful (for Gazans) the hostages, including Starmer, look set for a lengthy ordeal.
Rarely will a comeuppance have been more richly deserved. By cynically sacrificing Palestinians to his own electoral calculus Starmer has brought the rubble from his crumbling edifice of a Middle East policy cascading down on his own head.
Eventually of course public opinion will force Sunak to change course. Even if Starmer beats him to it the shift will come too late to rescue his reputation. Whatever he does from now on Starmer will be remembered by many as the man who condoned the vilest Israeli war crimes.
His party if it has any sense will ditch him for someone with slightly less filthy hands before voters have a chance to express their revulsion at Tories and Labour both by not voting at all.
Copyright 2023 by Richard C. Cook. Comments are welcome and will be read at monetaryreform@gmail.com.