Unending Government authority has led to a dystopian Easter parable
From the Easter shutdown of a church service in London to the endorsement of Vaccine Passports, the authoritarianism exhibited by the Government over the Easter weekend knows no bounds, argues Alexander McKibbin.
The word "shocking" has had its currency devalued through overuse. Yet having seen the footage broadcast from the Good Friday service held at Christ the King – Polish Roman Catholic Church in Balham, there is inadequate terminology to express disgust at the astounding events that took place.
Good Friday, one of – if not the most – significant date in the Christian calendar is a supremely sacred day, with Worshippers gathering to express sorrow and piety. For an outside party to feel justified intruding into such an assembly, would, one would like to think, be well thought through in advance.
For many, the recent late-night visit from the police to admonish a woman in her eighties for having had two people round for tea in her garden marked a new nadir in state interference. Yet, Friday's fiasco marked a new, depressing authoritarian low.
The Police, for their part were notified and had (to be fair) to be seen to act, but the most disturbing aspect of this and the "tea" incident, is how easily society has become a nation of sycophantic quislings. From a largely tolerant and respectful population, in the space of little more than a year we have become a censorious state of curtain twitchers and informers. People have been turned against each other, in no small measure by the Government's sanctioned use of psychological trickery to bend people to do its bidding.
One can only wonder what sort of society we are, where individuals feel quite content to sneak on one another. "Live and let live" as a maxim to travel through life, has been killed off, smothered in a blizzard of officialdom and hypocritical cant. Online articles are festooned with comments from angry keyboard warriors – all equally sure of their right to condemn in intemperate prose larded with invective. There are now no grey areas, life is lived in HD black and white.
Niemoeller's famous post-war poetic confessional "First they came for…" took aim at the intellectuals and clergy for the tacit acquiescence that allowed the Nazi's to achieve power. One cannot help but feel the world has turned full circle and what we are witnessing today is history grimly repeating itself. It is all too easy to accept at face value what the Government spoon feeds us -because sadly there is no plausible counterweight.
In the same way, Keir Starmer's recent positing that "Vaccine passports" are not British and alien to "our way of doing things" reached – even by his standards, hitherto unattainable levels of chutzpah.
Having supinely agreed to virtually every draconian piece of legislation that the Conservative Party recently introduced, Starmer now emerges from his shady hollow, blinking in the sunlight to express concern at the Government's overbearing authority. Once again, anyone with a modicum of intellect could foresee as a consequence of granting the Government such unchecked power.
As Leader of the Opposition, the first paragraph of his job description should read "to hold the Government to account, to examine and question policy put forward". Starmer has completely failed at this – and every subsequent hurdle. His now feeble, complaining rhetoric, sounds like the parents who gave their child some petrol and matches and wonder why the house burned down.
The lesson that many people will take away from Friday's disrespectful, authoritarian, illiberal invasion of the Church and dispersal of its congregation under threat of fine or arrest, is one that the Government and its agents have finally "lost the plot".
A truly dystopian Easter parable.
