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I find it impossible to look at the world now and not conclude that the West is firmly in the grip not of a virus, but of delusional madness.

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Among much else, that virus seems to have made people blind to the madness that should otherwise have been obvious to all.

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So much madness is evident, in fact, it's hard to know which way to look to see the worst of it.

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But I'll start with the madness, a plan that I consider madness anyway, that scares me most.

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Health Secretary Sajid Javid has told the NHS to prepare to give COVID-19 vaccine injections to children over 12.

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There's talk as well, terrifying to me, inexplicable and appalling to my mind, of setting aside parental consent for that medical procedure.

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I say this is worse than madness, that it is wickedly wrong.

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Over and above the safety or not, the efficacy or not, of experimental injections rolled out under the terms of emergency use authorisation,

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and for which we have no long-term data, I am scared to the pit of my stomach by any government that seeks to come between parent and child.

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Any competent adult wanting the vaccine should go ahead, absolutely, 100%, no question.

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I am not in the business of telling anyone what to do or not to do with their own body, to each his own and all that.

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But in the only world that makes sense to me, parents decide what does and does not happen to their children, to their flesh and blood.

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Governments, if they know what's good for them, stay the hell away from law-abiding parents and their kids.

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Down through history, one totalitarian regime after another, one ideology after another, has identified the family as the fundamental building block of society

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and thereby the most stubborn stumbling block on the road to establishing their brave new worlds.

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Those ideologies and regimes that seek total control over the lives of populations always seek to undermine the family.

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Give me the child until he's seven, as the saying goes, and I will show you the man.

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As I say, I call that madness, wickedness, and I say that it scares me the most.

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But there's so much more. I could list the madness for hours.

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In New South Wales in Australia, a council took the decision to shoot dead 15 dogs, including 10 pups,

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to stop volunteers from an animal shelter elsewhere in the state, travelling to collect them.

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The action was taken, the council said, to stop the risk of spreading COVID.

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At the other end of the world, in Afghanistan, while bullets flew and suicide bombs were detonated amid crowds of desperate human beings,

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a British marine chartered a plane to rescue 150 dogs and cats.

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We are a strange species, mired in contradictions.

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Afghanistan, madness over and over again.

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In the fourth century before the birth of Jesus Christ, Alexander the Great said it was easy to march into that country, but very hard to march out.

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In spite of those words of ancient wisdom, outsiders have been marching into Afghanistan and leaving behind a charnel house on the way out ever since.

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The Pashtun people make up the largest single ethnic group, between 40 and 50 percent of the population,

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although no census worth the name has ever been taken in Afghanistan.

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To Alexander the Great and everyone else since, the Pashtun have made it clear they have no wish to see a centralised state in their country,

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that they will fight to the death to keep at arm's length any who would boss them around, tell them what to do and collect hated taxes from them for the privilege.

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The Pashtun, or their ancestors at least, have been saying as much for thousands of years and no one has ever listened

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and instead the bodies keep piling up, madness.

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US President Joe Biden is only the latest to leave bloody footprints on the way out of Afghanistan.

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His country's exit has destabilised the world, made it more dangerous than before.

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Another horror show will play out in their absence, madness.

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Back home in the US on the southern border, President Biden's policies have created another and quite different humanitarian disaster,

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one made of unchecked immigration.

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It's been unfolding for months.

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Even mighty America is rocking on her foundations.

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On and on we go, madness everywhere.

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France has been using pepper spray on its dissenting citizens.

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In Australia they're using the same, and rubber bullets and galloping horses.

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They're building quarantine camps in Queensland, with balconies and a view right enough, but camps just the same.

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In Canada, Prime Minister Justin Trudeau promises to spend a billion dollars paying provinces in his country

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to set up and operate vaccine passport schemes to keep the unvaccinated, the unclean, out of businesses.

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In Scotland, my homeland, the SNP government has decreed four-year-olds can choose their gender,

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take on a new name and use whichever toilets they want,

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and mummy and daddy don't need to hear a word about it.

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Which brings me back to where I started.

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Worrying about governments that want into the sacred space,

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the erstwhile safe space made of parents and children together in their homes.

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Not content with interfering with families, the SNP have now wed themselves to the Scottish Greens,

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Marxist dinosaurs opposed to business, the oil business especially,

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to capitalism, to individual freedom, to wealth, to economic growth,

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even to the United Kingdom.

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The late great historian Kenneth Clark made a television series in the 1970s and wrote a book.

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Both were called Civilisation.

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Within its pages, he noted that Civilisation, that great and beautiful edifice,

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falls for several reasons, and not all of them obvious.

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It's not always about the strength of the enemy without.

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Just as often, the rot starts inside the walls.

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Part of it is fear.

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Fear of war, he wrote.

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Fear of invasion, fear of plague and famine.

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That makes it simply not worthwhile constructing things or planting next year's crops.

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He said empires fall not just to barbarians and other external enemies,

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but on account of exhaustion and loss of confidence within.

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Clark warned of the feeling of hopelessness,

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which can overtake people, even with a high degree of material prosperity.

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More than money and houses and cars and smartphones and foreign holidays,

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people need confidence in the society in which they live.

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They need to know, to understand and believe in that society's philosophy and laws.

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They need to believe and trust in something.

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But how are we to trust and to believe so much that makes no sense whatever,

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or at least no sense to me?

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I say it's not a virus that will be our undoing.

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We will be undone, our being undone right now, by madness.

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So many of us know that what's happening is wrong and leads to a dark place.

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Yes, we are shouted down for saying so,

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but that's not the excuse to be quiet.

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On the contrary, that must be the inspiration to speak.

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We will fix this.

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We can fix this.

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If enough of us simply stand up and say we know it's madness

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and that we're not going to take it anymore.