‘CCA should apologise for suffering caused by Covid strategy’

I READ with astonishment the recent report in the Guernsey Press about the ‘review’ conducted by the civil service – ‘under the direction of Policy & Resources and Home Affairs’ – into the Civil Contingencies Authority’s handling of Covid.

One cannot but note that the roles of president of P&R and chairman of the CCA were, from the election in 2020, held by the same person. Where there should of course have been a full independent inquiry outside the control of anyone locally – as has happened/is happening in almost all other democracies – what we have here is something that looks alarmingly like setting the questions and then marking one’s own homework, which is never a good look in a democracy. Because it does not display a vestige of independence, it can have no credibility, and for that reason, in my opinion, it is a waste of taxpayers’ money.

Such a ‘review’ brings to mind John McEnroe’s famous words ‘you cannot be serious!’.

I wrote an article for the Jersey Evening Press in March this year, and I have asked the editor of the GP to publish it now with some small edits because it is pertinent to the subject matter. It offers a counter argument to the rather self-satisfied mutual back slapping that the ‘review’ seems to have engendered in some of those involved in it. That couldn’t be more inappropriate at any time given the massive collateral damage that was caused in Guernsey, especially when one reads – very topically it has to be said – the forensic scientific report into lockdown restrictions that has just been released by John Hopkins University in the US and Lund University in Sweden, the former institution being one of the most respected medical schools in the world.

The authors wrote, among many other very critical comments, that their findings showed that the draconian measures had ‘a negligible impact on Covid mortality and were a policy failure of gigantic proportions’. They concluded with this statement: ‘The science of lockdowns is clear; the data are in; deaths saved were a drop in the bucket compared to the staggering collateral costs imposed’.

I do suggest that people read the main findings in the report as I have done, and alongside that they may find the sense of complacent, inward-looking self-congratulation in the local ‘review’ rather misplaced to say the least.

During Covid I wrote a number of articles for the JEP comparing and contrasting what in my opinion was happening in Jersey with what we were being subjected to in Guernsey.

Where the JEP showed independence expected of a free press, and published commentary that questioned what was happening in Guernsey during Covid, the Guernsey Press sometimes refused to publish letters critical of the CCA (which ran the island with an iron fist and brooked no dissent for two years), or if they did agree, it came with the caveat that the CCA had the right to put their response alongside the letter. It reminded me of what I saw in China on my many business visits there over the years – where the media toes the party line.

If a letter critical of the CCA’s actions and decisions was published, the response from the top tier of the CCA was immediate, hostile and contemptuous of the criticism. An ad hominem attack was not uncommon, presumably to try to belittle those with the audacity to point out the dangers of lockdowns, of shutting schools, of locking the people and the island away as if they were prisoners in Alcatraz, and of depriving people of proper exercise or social engagement for long periods of time, and in the case of children of much of their education as well.

Together with a few others in Guernsey prepared to put their heads above the parapet, I raised issues of concern that independent studies (and now the ‘Lockdown Files’ as well) and all the data is showing to have been correct. This included about the long-term calamitous effects on children’s mental and physical health, and on the stunting of their emotional development and education (children were never at any statistical risk of death from Covid – ISO mortality risk is one in a million). For the first time in history children were expected to suffer, in many cases grossly, to protect adults.

I also questioned the wisdom of locking up entire families for 14 days, often in small flats with no outside space, and of depriving children of a proper education for two years – especially those from deprived backgrounds who did not have the equipment or the space to learn online. I pointed out that this would put social mobility into reverse and that its repercussions would last for years – and evidence for this is now coming through in droves from various studies. I also warned about the catastrophic impact it would have on the economy. In fact I warned about the madness of sacrificing everything on the altar of Covid. It became a binary world in the CCA’s Guernsey – Covid wins, everything else loses. No questions to be asked.

Future generations will not look kindly on those responsible for the blitzkrieg of collateral damage caused, to a large extent needlessly. It will be left to them to try to sort it all out. Data in the UK shows that up to 100 times more money has been spent on preventing each Covid death than on preventing each non-Covid death, and I imagine that in Guernsey it will be little different.

The direct correlation between lockdown restrictions and the longest hospital waiting lists in history, with the associated suffering, and also to long-term excess deaths from other causes not treated properly or at all for two years – and in time which will be well above actual deaths from Covid – is now crystal clear. That includes in Guernsey as well of course, as one of the standard bearers for the harshest of lockdowns and associated restrictions that could be dreamed up and foisted on a small population – with in my opinion no proper consideration given to the collateral damage it was all causing.

In Guernsey we now see the irony of some of those who drove the Covid lockdowns with such zealotry, and who inflicted unprecedented economic damage through profligate spending over two years as if money was confetti – all done with no cost/benefit analysis – now trying to bulldoze through the introduction of GST to fill the gaping hole in the island’s finances that they were to a considerable extent responsible for. That is the ‘elephant in the room’ in that debate. What a terrible legacy. Sadly, it will be the most deprived in our society who will continue to be hardest hit.

Totalitarian regimes are normally built on three pillars designed to control the population and to quell dissent: fear, punishment and propaganda. In my view all of these tools were applied by the CCA. Fear was stoked relentlessly, including with children, by constant talk of death from Covid lurking around every corner and from every unmasked face, and by actively encouraging neighbour to snitch on neighbour. Punishment was a year in prison or £10k fines if (often arbitrary and pettifogging) rules were broken even in error. Propaganda was exercised primarily by the oh so clever conceit of ‘Guernsey Together’, with the inference being that you either agreed with everything that the CCA did or instructed you to do, or you were a traitor of some sort and subjected to abuse and vilification.

In Jersey there was at least some debate. People were permitted to express views and they were listened to, normally politely, and there were some establishment figures and politicians who asked questions and challenged and probed what was going on.

In Guernsey, by contrast, with just a couple of brave exceptions, there was no opposition at all in the States of Guernsey to anything the CCA did, however draconian and disproportionate it was. The democratic underpinnings of proper checks and balances and transparency were more or less completely dispensed with. People who should have known better forgot that tribal groupthink – that is very often wrong – can set in when there is no scrutiny or transparency.

In Jersey the Chief Minister during Covid behaved with decorum, politeness and humility, and their director of Public Health shunned the limelight, as a public servant should do. They should be applauded for that.

The CCA became the de facto government for two harrowing years. I believe this carte blanche freedom to do exactly as they wished, unimpeded by any real debate or constraints, emboldened them to enforce even more extreme restrictions and controls over such a prolonged period of time. This has left the island in a terrible mess in myriad ways and it has mired it in a mountain of debt. Even with that inglorious record, certain people who were responsible for the damage have had the gall to try to blow their own trumpets over what they did.

In the end some of those at the top of the CCA and some advisors met their day of reckoning in the aptly named ‘Gatland-gate’ scandal. It was a disreputable affair that besmirched Guernsey’s reputation on a national stage, with the Chief Minister and the director of Public Health being awarded ‘2021 Hypocrites of the Year’ by Private Eye, the UK’s biggest readership current affairs magazine. There was of course indignant huffing and puffing, but they pipped the likes of Boris Johnson, Matt Hancock and Dominic Cummings to the post as far as that magazine was concerned.

Given the lack of transparency from the CCA about their decisions and actions, and the absence of any proper functioning democratic oversight of what they were doing, I believe that it is not an unreasonable assumption that at least some elements of the revelations seen in the shocking ‘Lockdown Files’ expose in the UK were replicated in Guernsey.

Those files show how often the cruel and overbearing diktats were in reality just political guesswork masquerading as ‘science’. From what I saw during Covid, the CCA took their lead unquestioningly and slavishly from what we now see in the files was often highly dubious ‘science’. The files show that a gung-ho, pro-lockdown culture set in, manipulating people into compliance using fear more than anything to do with reliable science, and suppressing dissent. In my view Guernsey followed suit, the fear factor was pushed to the forefront to control the population, and the restrictions and controls imposed – including those enforced on children – were in my view then taken to even more excessive, lengthy and damaging levels.

And do you know, after all the collateral damage and suffering that was caused in Guernsey – as I saw it by effectively following the Chinese totalitarian model, a rehash in fact of how the authorities responded to the Black Death in 1666 by locking everyone up with no proven science to back it up because it was effectively just an experiment – the detachment from reality of those who subjected the island to that treatment is on such an epic scale that they won’t even countenance an independent inquiry. However, as Edmund Burke observed so wisely in the 17th century: ‘those who do not learn from the past are doomed to repeat it’. That universal truth sums up why independent inquiries are taking place/have already taken place in almost all Western democratic countries, including in Jersey, with their much to be applauded independent inquiry into Covid.

An independent inquiry is in my view of critical importance in Guernsey as we survey the economic and societal wreckage caused by the CCA’s Covid lockdown restrictions over here, and from apparently glibly riding roughshod over basic human rights.

The exemplar is Sweden. Their government and advisers didn’t panic, they behaved proportionately, they kept schools open every day, most businesses were allowed to function, there was no mandatory mask wearing because they decided (correctly) that the ‘science’ wasn’t clear, and in the end Sweden had excess death rates 60-70% below those jurisdictions that crushed their populations under a great weight of regulations and restrictions. Sweden recorded only a minuscule 1% reduction in GDP during Covid.

So the Swedish example is another compelling reason why there should be a proper independent inquiry into the CCA’s handling of Covid. There was, after all, a nuanced and proportionate approach – something that was pointed out to the CCA many times by me and others – that could and should have been adopted. It was shown in Sweden to have been much less damaging to society (including, most importantly of all to children), and to the economy, than the heavy-handed brute strategy applied to the population living in ‘Fortress Guernsey’.

Is it now the time for the CCA and their principal adviser to at least show humility and to apologise for the acute suffering that was caused unnecessarily to so many people, and most importantly of all, to apologise for the lifelong damage that has been caused to so many local children’s mental health and for the curtailment to their life opportunities?