Dear Harriet Harman…

Lockdown Sceptics reader Hugo Stolkin copied us into his email to Harriet Harman, his MP. We thought we’d share it with you.

I write to you as a constituent, born in King’s College Hospital, who campaigned in his childhood in the Lane Ward for the Labour Party, helping my father through the grim 1980s, canvassing for hours each evening against Bowden and Thatcher. I remain broadly left wing and liberal. I hate Brexit. I support the Rule of Law. And I still listen to my father, who continues, in semi-retirement, to teach medicine, as he has done for his whole career, originally at King’s London, and more recently at Guy’s/Thomas’s. I insisted that my children be vaccinated against MMR. And I have never forgotten two fundamental tenets of medicine that my father drummed into me from an early age: “first, do no harm”; and “damaging the economy damages people’s health”.

Lockdown is an obscenity. It will kill around 250,000 Britons in the coming years, from cancelled or delayed diagnoses and treatments and economic damage. Globally, the economic consequences will kill twice as many people as the number of those who died from violence in the whole of the twentieth century. Those people will die horribly, from hunger, poverty, cold, lack of shelter, and the inability to afford medical treatment.

Unpleasant as it is to recognise, on a normal day, in the UK, about 1,700 people die. Sometimes it’s 100 or 200 more. Sometimes it’s 100 or 200 less. But, roughly, it’s 1,700. In a week, it’s roughly 12,000, give or take a thousand, depending on the week in question. In a year it’s roughly 600,000, with a variation of five to ten percent. This has been the position for very many years.

2020 was no different. No more people died last year than in 2008. Yet, for no reason, and flying in the face of all the research and planning for pandemics done, over years, before Covid, we have destroyed the economy and the lives and livelihoods of millions.

No political party is speaking out against this. No mainstream media outlet is giving publicity to the absolutely rational position that lockdown must stop immediately, if far greater harm is to be prevented.

Please will you look at the objective data, that lockdown has saved few, if any, lives, and threatens to kill many more than will ever die with, or from, Covid? Please speak out against this government, which is cynically using Covid to hide decades of NHS underfunding, as well as the catastrophic economic impact of Brexit?

I think of myself as a resilient individual. I run regularly over the hills of South East London. I live in a large house, with a garden, in Peckham. There are parks all around. My children’s home-schooling is irritating but manageable. And, most importantly, the business I work in has continued to do well through 2020. But the moral obscenity of lockdown, the harm it is causing, and, perhaps most terrible of all, the failure of those in positions of authority to speak out against it, leave me shattered and despairing.

Please speak to Keir Starmer and your party and begin a new movement to bring down this murderous government and turn this catastrophe around.

https://lockdownsceptics.org/