The following is an excerpt from my latest book My Road to Freedom, in which I reveal how the media covered up the real causes of Britain’s Covid restrictions. The book is available from amazon.
Chapter 9
After I had finished my book on Wuhan, I spent the
rest of 2022 refocusing on what happened in my own country. I began looking
into the second lockdown, which I soon discovered was caused by another
TUC-coordinated campaign of union unrest, with the NEU central to the campaign.
I was now sure that the NEU had played a decisive role in all three lockdowns.
My new findings grew into a 50,000-word essay called ‘Boris versus the NEU: The
Second Lockdown Explained’. In the essay, I painstakingly recounted Johnson’s
two-year long battle to keep schools open in the face of relentless opposition
from the NEU. The essay, indeed the entire topic, has been almost completely
ignored.
Recently I
unearthed the most devastating piece of evidence yet, the holy grail: the
full-length footage of the January 3 NEU zoom meeting, the meeting that
precipitated the mass teaching walkout on January 4. I already knew that the
NEU leadership had advised the union’s members that it would be unsafe for them
to return to work, and I knew that the NEU had provided a model section 44
letter and advised the members to hand it in to their employers, but I was
unprepared for the sheer zeal and persistence with which the message was
delivered in the zoom call. Watching the call, I counted 16 times that the NEU
leadership mentioned their advice about the schools being unsafe, and 24 times
that they mentioned the section 44 letter. The impression I got from the
meeting was of a communist struggle session, people being brainwashed. ‘Listen
to the union’s advice. Make the right decision, based on the union’s advice’,
Kevin Courtney intoned. Robin Bevan said the letter ‘needs to be sent’, and,
when taking questions towards the end, he noted that the questions had been
carefully chosen because he was ‘making sure that the key points of the message
today are heard’. They were heard alright.
The footage
makes clear that the events of January 4 were not just a token gesture by the
NEU, not some sort of flailing protest with no object to it. The leadership
knew exactly what they wanted to achieve, and they were determined to achieve
it. Bevan said the purpose of the zoom call was ‘to explain the reasoning
behind the decisions made by your National Executive’. Bousted said ‘We’ve
called this meeting because we want to update you on the NEU’s position about
members’ health and safety during the pandemic’. The explicit intention of the
NEU leadership was to encourage school staff to defy government policy on
January 4. Bevan explained:
We found
ourselves in a position where the Secretary of State for Education... announced
the reopening of schools to all pupils in our primary and early years settings
into overcrowded classrooms with no additional protection. The view of the
union is that it is time for each and every one of our members individually to
say no. And to be quite honest, that is the reason why you have joined this
call today. Because you know that it is in the best interests of the
communities you serve, the children you teach, to say ‘we are not proceeding in
the way the government has recommended’.
He
reiterated: ‘Today is the day to say “no” to the proposals that the Secretary
of State has put in front of us’. And again: ‘Now is the time to trust both
your professional instincts and your professional ethics. It’s time to say
“no”.’
The NEU
leadership anticipated – and hoped – that encouraging the membership to submit
section 44 letters would cause a change in government policy, that is, a
reversal of the decision to reopen the schools. Bousted used the phrase ‘if the
government does U-turn…’. Courtney explained that ‘Because the government isn’t
coming up with sensible definitions of what is safe, your union is coming up
with a sensible definition’. He noted that ‘There’s an element of this where we
have to persuade the government politically about it’. He left no doubt as to
the leadership’s aim:
We believe
that a snowball effect could be created. There are an enormous number of people
on this call... [and] watching on social media. If those people agree with us
that it is unsafe for schools to be open, and then if they take the step of
sending the letter, which they can find in their email, or on our website, then
there will be consequences of lots of people individually doing that, and we
will turn quantity into quality.
That last
phrase is extremely telling, and damning. When members of a union collectively
refuse to attend the workplace with the intention of changing a government
policy, most people would describe the action as a ‘strike’ – especially when
the intended outcome is qualitatively different from anything the members could
achieve by acting alone.
And here’s
the thing: if the NEU’s mass walkout on January 4 was a strike, then it was
illegal, because, by law, unions must ballot their members before orchestrating
a strike.
The NEU
leaders were entering a legal minefield, and they knew it; they were anxiously
trying to stay on the right side of the law. Bousted, slightly flustered,
insisted: ‘This is emphatically not a strike… We have not held a ballot. We are
not taking industrial action.’ Well, the part about the ballot was true.
Courtney similarly declared ‘This isn’t strike action’. At one point, he
clarified what was being proposed: ‘Right now, your union’s advice… is that
schools are not currently safe. And so we’re urging you to act on that.’ He
inserted into those words the following reassurance, perhaps to himself: ‘We
are really confident that this would withstand all challenges.’ Clearly the NEU
leadership had given some thought to the legal issues.
There were
two bases on which the leadership believed that the January 4 action was not a
strike. The first was the emphasis on individuals submitting section 44 letters
(for instance Courtney talking about ‘lots of people individually doing that’,
or Bevan saying ‘it is time for each and every one of our members individually
to say no’). The idea, supposedly, was that the action on January 4 would be a
bunch of individuals who just happened to be doing the same thing, whereas a
strike involves collective action. The distinction was highly spurious. The
whole point of the legal requirement for unions to ballot their members before
striking is to ensure that a minority of radical union members acting in
concert can’t take matters into their own hands and disable a workplace.
Moreover,
the NEU leadership was very much open to the idea of teachers handing in
section 44 letters collectively. ‘There is no reason why a school rep couldn’t
gather a group of those letters together’, Courtney ventured. He even noted,
manipulatively, that individuals may ‘worry’ about sending the letter, that
they may experience a ‘feeling of isolation’, and that ‘there is a way of
collecting them [the letters] together that will help to overcome that’.
Courtney was cleverly trying to parlay the contribution of individuals into a
collective act, but at the same time he was emphasising that ‘it doesn’t stray
away from the fact that this is an individual right you have’. It was though he
was saying: the responsibility for this action is on you as an individual, and
if you’re concerned about that, we will even exploit your concern, by
encouraging you to coordinate your action with others. Bousted went further,
noting that group letters could be submitted, but, like Courtney, she caveated
the point by insisting that individuals must make the decision to sign the
letter. Bevan agreed: ‘[it’s] an individual right we’re exercising here but of
course it can be done by a group of people who all individually agree’. You can
see that the NEU leaders were tying themselves in knots here. I am no lawyer,
but surely ‘a group of people who all individually agree’ is the same as a
group agreement. And, by law, there can only be a group agreement for a union
to do a walkout if there is a ballot first.
The second
way in which the NEU leaders were trying to avoid the charge of illegality was
even more iffy. Supposedly the action on January 4 wasn’t a strike because – in
Bousted’s words – ‘You are not withdrawing your labour. You are saying that you
will work differently’. She clarified the point: ‘You are not withdrawing your
labour, because you are saying… that you will work from home, and you will go
into school... to look after and care for and teach the children of key workers
and vulnerable children.’ The idea of ‘working differently’ was farcical. Any
teacher who insisted on working from home, or working in a near-empty
classroom, was, in effect, withdrawing their labour. Imagine a football manager
who suddenly insisted on working from home or working with only five players.
The ‘labour’ that he is expected to provide involves interacting physically
with a full squad of players. By refusing to do that, he withdraws his labour.
Likewise, the government explicitly expected teachers to turn up to work on January
4 in full classrooms, as per the job description of a school teacher. Any
school teacher who suddenly announced that they would work ‘differently’ was
literally refusing to perform the labour they were being paid to do and,
instead, trying to do something else, something that the government didn’t want
them to do. If you pay me to mow your lawn but, halfway through, I start
performing a song for you on my acoustic guitar, I have withdrawn my labour.
Bousted told teachers on January 3: ‘What you’re not doing is saying that
you’re not working. You are not, by sending in a section 44 letter, saying you
are not working.’ Now imagine me insisting I was still ‘working’ as I strolled
around serenading you in the long grass.
My firm
belief is that the NEU mass walkout on January 4 was illegal, and the people
who orchestrated it should be in jail. Indeed, I think the NEU’s leaders know
that what they did was illegal, because they never did it again.
There were
several other revelations in the zoom meeting, each of which further
demonstrates that the NEU’s intention was to scale up the impact of January 4
by involving as many people as possible in the mutiny. For example, the NEU
leadership reported that the main headteachers unions were onside. Courtney
explained: ‘We have also spoken to NAHT and ASCL and they are giving advice to
their members that is sympathetic to the stand that we’re taking, not hostile
to it’. Indeed, he said, the headteachers’ unions were cascading similar advice
out to their members: ‘We know, from our conversations with NAHT and ASCL, that
that’s what they’re telling their headteacher members as well. They are saying
that if you say to them it’s not safe, that they don’t have a legal basis for
telling you that it is safe.’ Bousted further disclosed: ‘We have written to
every employer and headteacher, giving this same advice and asking them to make
preparations for moving to remote learning instead.’ It’s important to note what
was happening here: by making these ‘preparations’, headteachers would be
setting the agenda, not the government. And that wasn’t the only way in which
headteachers were setting the agenda. Incredibly, Courtney disclosed in the
zoom call that ‘School leaders have done the work that should’ve been done by
the public health service, to operate tracking for pupils, working throughout
the weekend, late into the evening’. In other words: headteachers had been
beavering away like detectives, ensuring that as many pupils as possible would
be barred from attending classes due to contact with a Covid case; apparently
the public health service was not doing the job.
The zoom
call also revealed that the NEU was encouraging ‘support staff’ to hand in the
model section 44 letter on January 4, and noting that teachers who weren’t
members of a union could do the same. Finally, towards the end of the call,
there was a question about whether teachers in other schools, e.g. secondary
schools, could use the letter. Courtney emphasized that the union was currently
focused on primary schools but he noted that the letter ‘does have more general
application’; ‘you can amend that letter’, he added, by way of confirmation.
These comments were ominous, because the government was planning to reopen
secondary schools over the coming weeks. All the indications were that the NEU
January 4 mutiny was set to grow, engulfing the entire school sector. The
government threw in the towel immediately.
Kevin
Courtney’s boast – which I mentioned earlier – that ‘hardly any’ primary
schools opened on January 4 came in 2023, in a gloating Twitter thread which
was one long smoking gun. In the thread, he recounted that Gavin Williamson
‘wanted schools open under all circumstances’ and that ‘Johnson supported
Williamson’. He noted that ‘By Monday evening, Johnson changed tune and said
schools were vectors of transmission and had to close’. The NEU ‘won the change
in Govt policy’, Courtney insisted. He elaborated: ‘Our mass zoom meeting on
Sun 3 Jan 2021 – 40k in the meeting, 400k watching, was possibly the biggest
political meeting in UK history. Our advice to use Section 44 to refuse to
attend work made the difference. Hardly any schools opened; Johnson was forced
to make the choice.’ He concluded: ‘We should all be proud. I’m incredibly
proud of the union’s actions over those days, and my role in them. We should
all be proud of the stand we collectively took.’ (So it was a ‘collective’
stand. It wasn’t just a bunch of individuals who happened to be doing the same
thing.)
Courtney is
well aware that the NEU’s collective stand on January 4 triggered the third lockdown, which the government brought in solely to cover up the illegal teaching strike. Courtney has elsewhere spoken of ‘the lockdown… which the PM had to be forced into on
January 4’, indicating that the NEU anticipated the consequences of the mass
teaching walkout. Without schools supervising the children of working parents,
the economic damage was such that, in the circumstances, the government was
bound to manage the situation by issuing another stay home order. Of course,
that’s not to say the government was right to do so, only that Courtney knew
that the government would do so. Indeed, he’s not the only socialist who has
bragged about the NEU driving the third lockdown. An article published on the
World Socialist Website on January 7, 2022, noted: ‘Last January, the threat by
tens of thousands of workers to utilise Section 44 of the Employment Rights Act
to assert their right not to work in unsafe conditions forced the Johnson
government into closing schools and imposing a lockdown.’ Actually, there was
more than a ‘threat’; by the morning of January 4, some 6,000 teachers are
known to have submitted section 44 letters. But, yes, the action brought the
entire country to its knees.
And here I
am, over two years later, still frantically trying get to my fellow citizens to
acknowledge what happened on January 4. As far as lockdown sceptics go, I
remain the only public figure who has ever even mentioned the events of that
day. Only a handful of my followers – who are regular members of the public –
will openly discuss the subject with me.
It’s an
extremely strange and disturbing situation. Recently I re-read George Orwell’s
masterpiece, Nineteen Eighty-Four. The book, a work of fiction, depicts life in
England under a totalitarian socialist regime led by a tyrant named ‘Big
Brother’. Orwell’s dystopia anticipated much that happened for real during the
coronapanic debacle. In one passage, the book’s protagonist, a man called
Winston Smith, who secretly yearns for freedom and truth, realises with horror
that the regime could contradict its own pronouncements with complete impunity:
It appeared
that there had even been demonstrations to thank Big Brother for raising the
chocolate ration to twenty grammes a week. And only yesterday, he reflected, it
had been announced that the ration was to be REDUCED to twenty grammes a week.
Was it possible that they could swallow that, after only twenty-four hours?
Yes, they swallowed it.
Winston
asks: ‘Was he, then, ALONE in the possession of a memory?’
I have
asked myself the same question many times in the last few years, and not just
about January 4, but about all the union unrest, and the herd immunity U-turn
which was driven by union unrest. The virus was mild… and then we were all in
lockdown. Masks were ineffective… and then they were mandatory. The schools
were safe… and then they were closed 24 hours later, and we were back in
lockdown. Why have all the union-driven U-turns been ignored? Why did people
swallow the government’s lies? Like Winston, I too have felt like ‘a lonely
ghost uttering a truth that nobody would ever hear’. The predicament, I readily
admit, has been disgusting, loathsome. At times, I have felt tormented on an
existential level. The intellectual isolation has given me a sense of
solipsism, like being in a mental cage – a cruel blow for someone like me,
someone who had tried to escape from philosophical hypochondria, from all that
unhealthy navel gazing. I tried to reassimilate to real life, to embrace my
freedom, to stop fretting about being me. It turns out I couldn’t escape – not
fully. The educated elites moved heaven and earth to keep me in the orbit of
their lunacy. At their behest, the free society in which I had sought refuge
reared up like a gigantic mechanical alien, locked me up, enslaved me, and then
buried the truth about what happened, leaving me feeling like a glassed-in
freak because I still insisted on facing reality.
I take
solace in Winston Smith’s words: ‘Being in a minority, even a minority of one,
did not make you mad. There was truth and there was untruth, and if you clung
to the truth even against the whole world, you were not mad’. I am not mad. And
I have no intention of remaining in a minority. We need to talk about the
mainstream media.
To read the rest of My Road to Freedom, and find out how much else you have been lied to about by the British media, please buy the book.
