Anna's March

by Anna Wright

I was born and grew up, on and off, in London. Throughout my teenage years I was aware of an annual event called “The Notting Hill Carnival” that took place on the last weekend of August. I knew it to be a very dangerous event. People got stabbed there. There were violent riots. No one was safe. I knew this because the BBC told me so. I saw images of police being attacked and arrests being made. So I was astonished when, at the age of 21, my first serious boyfriend announced that he was “excited” about us going to “Carnival” together. I questioned his sanity. He laughed at my irrational fears and assured me that it was the safest event on earth, full of love and joy. Holding his hand tightly, I embarked on my first Carnival. He was right. It was incredible. I danced, I laughed, I loved and I felt loved. It was the greatest celebration of humanity I had ever known... until recently.

The other live events I avoided, growing up, having been warned, by the BBC and the majority of national newspapers, that my life would undoubtedly be at risk, were live football matches. Hooligans dominated these events, I was told. Fighting always broke out between fans. I would probably get crushed to death. The worst fans were Liverpool FC supporters because... Hillsborough. But I loved Liverpool. I had a schoolgirl crush on Michael Owen and always felt a great sense of pride when – as was so often the case in the 1990s and 2000s – our lads played for England. When I was first invited to a game at Anfield, I was nervous. I had sleepless nights worrying about being caught in the crossfire of raging thugs. I almost lost my bottle. Well, you could have knocked me down with a feather any minute of that beautiful day. It was magical. I had never felt surrounded by such love and passion and solidarity... until recently.  

Since March 2020, my personal views on the UK government’s response to the Covid pandemic have not only been unrepresented, they have been co-opted as signifying a nasty, selfish, brainless attitude. I am not nasty, selfish or brainless. I have a huge heart, I think about others all the time, and I consider myself well educated and worldly, having travelled extensively and lived in many countries. I approach everything in life with an open mind and a generous spirit. When people started obsessively distancing, chemically sanitizing their hands and wearing masks, I was deeply alarmed. When they accepted enforced isolation and quarantining, I was horrified. Distancing is not healthy in any way, shape or form. I did not need any “scientific proof” to tell me that wearing masks was unhygienic and damaging on many levels. I had been raging about the ill-advised practice of using hand sanitizer in place of hand washing for years. Then it got worse. The government passed legislation that gave them the power to force businesses to close, to forbid people from seeing their loved ones, and to stop children going to school. I was enraged. But I was a lone voice. I felt as though a hypnotic spell had been cast over the whole world and I had been left alone, yelling at people to wake up and stop acting in such an inhumane way. However, my voice was silenced.

As the weeks and months rolled on, I eventually found a few courageous voices echoing my thoughts. The relief I felt when I read Dr John Lee’s first article questioning lockdown policy in the Spectator was palpable. When I read Mike Yeadon’s brilliant, meticulous, astute explanation of how we’d made a huge mistake in our assumptions about SARS-CoV-2, first published on Lockdown Sceptics, I felt the tide would turn. When he urgently appealed to be connected to Keir Starmer, and to be given a chance to explain the errors that had been made, I assumed we would soon be home and dry. But nothing changed. And soon I began to suspect that something deeper was amiss. It got harder and harder to believe that this was all a big “fuck up”. Slowly, I found friends and family who agreed with me. But we were confused and scared. The BBC told us that only Trump supporters (which we were not) and people from something called QAnon (I still don’t know what this is) questioned the official Covid response. These people were so dangerous that, when they gathered to protest in London, in the summer of 2020, riot police had to be called in. I saw some disturbing pictures of people being restrained and arrested.

As things seemed to go back to normal in September, I tried to put the worst experiences (like being denied entry to a shop because I refused to use sanitizer and being told by a café they would only serve me outside because I was mask exempt) behind me. The November lockdown was a bit of a joke. Shops were open for “call and collect” and no one paid much attention to the “rules”. But then the MHRA gave emergency use approval for a couple of “vaccines” and my blood ran cold. Firstly, because I had dismissed hysterical cries for “vaccines before Christmas" as I knew no vaccine could be given to the general public without several years of trials (I confirmed this on the NHS website) so what on earth was going on, secondly because I had just read that the pharmaceutical companies making these drugs (the very companies that have historically paid the largest fines, sometimes amounting to billions of dollars, for criminal activity, most notably defrauding the population over safety data for drugs) had been indemnified against legal liability by the government, and thirdly because we knew – by then – that medications such as HCQ and Ivermectin were being successfully used to treat Covid in other countries, meaning that no emergency approval should ever have been given to these "vaccines". (Emergency use approval for a new drug can only be given if there is no other known treatment available.)

Nothing could have prepared me for the hysteria that then ensued.

Cut to April 2021 and suddenly we had celebrities posting live “vaxies” (photographing and filming themselves being “vaccinated”) on Instagram, manic “vaccinators” trawling residential areas looking for likely targets to stick needles into, MPs calling for “vaccine passports” and half the general public calling for the “unvaxxed” to be rounded up and cast aside, having been goaded by the mainstream media into calling these people “antis” (short for anti-vaxxers – the new untouchables). The pinnacle of this pantomime was Edwina Currie, a woman raised as an Orthodox Jew, saying she wanted to be sure she never had to “sit next to an unvaccinated person on a bus”. The irony of a Jewish person demanding the segregation of people based on a delusional completely false and twisted belief that they were somehow diseased and unclean is astounding, and should never be forgotten.

And the BBC lapped it all up. Young reporter Marianna Spring was hired to investigate the mad conspiracy theorists who were warning young healthy people not to be coerced into taking these hastily approved, experimental “vaccines”. More pictures were circulated in March of the crazy “alt right” protesters endangering everyone’s lives (unlike the kind and caring mourners at the vigil for Sarah Everard, or the Black Lives Matter protesters, or the XR campaigners). This was getting weird. Okay, if some really anxious elderly people wanted an emergency-approved experimental drug being offered as a “vaccine”, let them have it, but why this frenzy? Why the desperation to be jabbed as if it was baptism into a cult? Why this hysterical coercion by the NHS, and manic threats of “no jab, no job” and “no jab, no travel” and... and... what the hell is Tony Blair doing on our TV screens telling everyone they MUST GET VACCINATED?!

https://youtu.be/TLHOjsuy7FY

When I heard there was another protest planned for 24April 2021, where people fighting for the full restoration of civil liberties and the right to bodily autonomy were coming together to voice their objections to lockdowns and restrictions and coerced “vaccines” and “health passports”, I knew I had no choice. I was more scared of not speaking out than I was of any angry “alt right” mob.

And what do you know? The BBC – through the trembling tones of a terrified Marianna Spring – had done it again! They’d tried to dupe me, and millions of others, into believing anyone who challenged the Covidian ideology – of lockdowns and masks and mandatory jabs for all – was somehow dangerous. Nothing could be further from the truth. I can attest to this because... I was there. I waited in Hyde Park enveloped by hoards of peace-loving, passionate, humane, joyous people. I set off up Park Lane... one in half a million people. Don’t believe any report to the contrary. This was undoubtedly a crowd larger than a 200,000-strong Glastonbury (another event I was scared off attending for years before I discovered it was not a cesspit of thieves) and close to the size of Notting Hill Carnival, which attracts around a million per day. To give you an idea of the size of this protest, I stopped at a pub just off the route to spend a penny and have a rest. When I re-joined the march, half an hour later, the crowd was still going strong and I couldn’t see the back of it. A few police officers walked amongst us – some of them chatting pleasantly with protestors – but for the most part we were left to police ourselves. I didn’t see any heavy drinking, there was less littering than any music festival I’ve attended, and there was not even much swearing. I spoke to many people who’d never been on a march before but shared my feelings of exasperation at being silenced. We were united in our need to be heard and our desire to preserve humanity. There were children. There was dancing. There was singing. There was love. There was joy. I felt safe. I felt happy. I felt heard. This was no angry mob, this was no “alt right” rally. I doubt the majority of people in that crowd had any clearer idea of what “QAnon” is than I do. (Note to Marianna Spring who sounds obsessed with this organisation. Perhaps she could enlighten us.)

As we came down Victoria Embankment, approaching Big Ben and the Houses of Parliament, I wept.    

None of us choose to be born. None of us choose to be born within a particular country. But by virtue of being born we have a birthright to live on the land of our unintended nation. We have the right to breathe freely and work honestly. We have the right to assemble in public spaces and we have the right to speak. We have the right to learn, the right to love, and the right to liberty. No man or machine has the right to take those rights away from us. We have the right to life until God, or whatever you want to call the power of nature, calls time on our existence.

The “Coronavirus Act” should be revoked immediately. Every politician who enabled this totalitarian nightmare we are living in should be given an amnesty period to come forward and speak the truth to a reconciliation commission. Because they know; they know what they have done is wrong. No matter what they have been told or bullied into believing about things that are necessary for “the greater good”, they know what they are enabling is wrong. If they do not speak up now, if they do not use their right to speak up now, there may come a time when they find they no longer have the power to determine people’s liberties, but the people will have the power to determine theirs.

Anna Wright is a guest writer for The New Era. Note: all TNE guest posts represent the views of the authors.