Susan Michie shows that lockdowns, climate alarmism and communism fit together

"And the third thing is people’s behaviour. That is, the behaviour of social distancing, of… making sure there’s good ventilation, or if there’s not, wearing face masks, and [keeping up] hand and surface hygiene. We will need to keep these going in the long term, and that will be good not only for Covid but also to reduce other [diseases] at a time when the NHS is [struggling]… I think forever, to some extent…"

These words said recently on Channel 5 News by Susan Michie, who sits on the ill named SAGE, a committee of scientists that advises the British government on scientific questions, suggested that she saw social distancing and mask wearing as never coming to an end. 

She is a "health psychologist", by the way, not a hard scientist, still less a medic.

She says her words were taken out of context. 

As Enoch Powell said, all quotations are taken out of context.

What interests me is that she is apparently a member of the Communist Party of Great Britain. 

Imagine - a card-carrying member of the Communist Party! - almost as old fashioned as a Jacobite, but unlike Jacobites, very malign.

This seems to make things a little clearer.

(By the way, she says her politics are irrelevant and mentioning them is Macarthyism. The left have always complained about Macarthyism, starting in Joe Macarthy's day, while they cancel people of whom they disapprove. Were she a member of the BNP, do you think she would remain on government committees?)

In a recent interview with Freddie Sayers of Unherd she said

“What I do hope is that this brings countries together more and there’s a more global way of looking at travel. Because actually, there’s an existential crisis around the corner, which is much greater than pandemics. And that’s the climate crisis. And air travel is one of the big contributors to global warming, and the kind of problems we’ve already been seeing......

"We [on SAGE] never talk about each other’s politics; I assume there’s a very broad range. But everybody’s unanimous about wanting a more equal society. And in order to get a fairer and more just society, it does require [that] the government has… policies that reduce rather than increase inequalities.”

It used to be that conservatives did not bother about a more equal society and just wanted one that was free, but I think that is no longer the case. 

Certainly most academics are committed to equality rather than freedom. In 1964 a third of British academics voted Conservative and about a third voted Liberal at a time when Liberals too esteemed freedom. 

Now Liberal Democrats, as they call themselves, like equality and regulations. Only 10% of academics vote Conservative and they keep quiet about it until they approach retirement.

This explains what she went on to say.

"I think there is an ideological difference with Public Health science taking a more population-wide view of things… that is a different kind of emphasis to… the media you mentioned who would have much more emphasis on individual freedom, individual rights, rather than taking a more collective population approach."

Freddie Sayers: 

"One good reason in your view to have less international travel is that it also helps the Global Warming question?" 

Susan Michie: 

"Absolutely."

The restrictions on liberty to combat Covid were implemented because of advice from experts who are by philosophical outlook disposed to like collectivist solutions, not individual freedom, equality not liberty. This is important to know.

Most academics in the West are collectivists and globalists.

This even goes nowadays for epidemiologists.

Ronald Reagan said universities were islands of totalitarianism in a sea of freedom, but the islands have over decades badly polluted the sea.

Susan Michie's Communism, I hope, is not something she shares with other members of SAGE, but her politics, her ideas about climate change and about fighting epidemics all fit together.

It reminds me of how Whittaker Chambers described Communism. I have quoted this more than once before, I know, but it comes to my mind often when I try to understand the reasons for and meaning of the Covid crisis.

“It is not new. It is, in fact, man's second oldest faith. Its promise was whispered in the first days of the Creation under the Tree of the Knowledge of Good and Evil: "Ye shall be as gods." It is the great alternative faith of mankind. Like all great faiths, its force derives from a simple vision. Other ages have had great visions. They have always been different versions of the same vision: the vision of God and man's relationship to God. The Communist vision is the vision of Man without God. 

"It is the vision of man's mind displacing God as the creative intelligence of the world. It is the vision of man's liberated mind, by the sole force of its rational intelligence, redirecting man's destiny and reorganizing man's life and the world. It is the vision of man, once more the central figure of the Creation, not because God made man in his image, but because man's mind makes him the most intelligent of the animals. Copernicus and his successors displaced man as the central fact of the universe by proving that the earth was not the central star of the universe. Communism restores man to his sovereignty by the simple method of denying God.”