Mr Farage reminded Britons during a YouTube broadcast on Wednesday that he had warned the government was “taking far too much power” and eroding Britons’ liberties for several months, but that “all of this went a step too far” following Hancock’s “diktat”, saying the health minister had become “completely drunk on his own power”.
“We are fast becoming a police state,” Mr Farage later remarked.
Former Supreme Court Justice Jonathan Sumption had also warned that government ministers’ ability to force through new measures and police expanded powers to enforce it made Britain increasingly look like a “police state”.
This is nothing new. Britain has been a police state since the smoking ban of 1 July 2007. Current plans are simply for the extension of this police state in response to the vastly exaggerated Covid pandemic.
But nobody ever points this out. Not even Nigel Farage or Laurence Fox.
Perhaps a police state was always inevitable once vast amounts of data on everybody started being stored on computer. It became a police state when the state set out to control its own people’s customs. This first applied to smoking, but soon it will apply to everything else – e.g. diet, clothing. religion
Britain will remain a police state until people can once again sit in a pub and drink a pint of beer and smoke a cigarette.
Frank Davis 
State of fear: how ministers ‘used covert tactics’ to keep scared public at home
2nd April 2021
“One of the key pieces of evidence cited by those who have complained about “covert” tactics comes from a document prepared for the Scientific Advisory Group for Emergencies (Sage) at the beginning of the pandemic a year ago.
Dated March 22, the paper written by the Scientific Pandemic Influenza Group on Behaviours (SPI-B) stated: “A substantial number of people still do not feel sufficiently personally threatened; it could be that they are reassured by the low death rate in their demographic group, although levels of concern may be rising … the perceived level of personal threat needs to be increased among those who are complacent, using hard-hitting emotional messaging. To be effective this must also empower people by making clear the actions they can take to reduce the threat.”
https://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/2021/04/02/state-fear-ministers-used-covert-tactics-keep-scared-public/
Well it wasn’t called the Smoking Ban Experiment for nothing.
Exactly the same as the war on smoking. Exaggerate, shame, and regulate. Thanks to The Telegraph for reporting this. Many outlets wouldn’t.
Happy days, just round the corner, sitting in a non smokey pub socially distanced except from the people you have been hanging out with for a year, with a mask on. Will depression be a legitimate reason to report oneself to the yellow card reporting database as an adverse reaction. Happy Easter🐰
On the tangent of computers making our lives an …open book, I just got a new ipad and learned, when attempting to install Kindle that the terms of agreement now include Amazon’s right to track all my browsings and my contacts. (I did not install Kindle.) Then Apple offered me some (forget what) app with tne same terms of surrender. Not that we’re not under surveillance just for going online at all, but it’s going way too far.
And the new inspiration about vaccine passports is a strong motivation to skip the whole thing. And it’s all the same story as it was of instilling the fear and hatred of smokers as now of the unvaccinated. I just read reader comments on an pro-passport article in the Kansas City Star where the fearful haters were out in force, eager to create a new class of lepers who, naturally, for their selfish stupidity “deserve to die but shouldn’t be allowed to kill innocent people.” Sound familiar?
Very
So, I’ve just registered for the online meeting mentioned at
http://taking-liberties.squarespace.com/blog/2021/3/30/im-a-smoker-get-me-out-of-here.html
It’ll be 5 am here in NZ, and I’m not sure if I’ll make it, it’s only a few hours away, but we’ll see.
Going to bed without dinner now, after a few drinks. Luxury … soon to awaken again!? ;=}))
Setting the alarm …
And made it;- interesting, but a pity there was no chance to chat and mingle afterwards…