Have you had your fourth Covid booster shot yet? They are being very quiet about it these days. I used to be bombarded with injunctions to attend my local clinic, but not any more. This is a shame because a new study suggests that unless I am properly up to date with my injections, I may soon be involved in a serious car crash.
The research, published in the American Journal of Medicine, shows a very strong correlation between someone’s Covid vaccine status and the probability of them being involved in a very bad road accident. The correlation suggests that those who have not been vaccinated are 72 percent more likely to be involved in some kind of awful smash-up — a remarkable finding, but one I am prepared to believe. The greater road safety which pertains to the fully vaxxed is not, of course, a direct consequence of Pfizer’s miraculous elixir, but because those who have not had their jabs are more “reckless’ and “anti-authority” than those who, like me, did as they were told by the government. Therefore they ignore speed limits and perhaps even have no regard for the median strip, instead hurtling headlong into incoming traffic laughing maniacally and screaming: “To hell with you, Bill Gates, 5G and the Zionist occupation government. I do what I want when I wa…”
As I say, this seems to me a reasonable proposition. But then so would a proposition that states if the government told us all to jump off a very high cliff, people who eschewed taking the vaccines would be 72 percent more likely to continue living by the simple expediency of not actually jumping off a cliff. Or maybe 100 percent. The study I quoted was clearly intended to show anti-vaxxers as being perverse and stupid — and perhaps they are. But there are health benefits, as well as deficits, in telling authority to get stuffed, surely.
Everything is cut and dried — a world in which some people are right and others not merely wrong, but evil
Meanwhile, I am forced to return to a question which I find myself asking at least three times each week: should we intern all the lawyers on vast narrenschiff moored in the middle of our great estuaries, and force them to make the kind of plastic tat the Chinese churn out for western markets? Or just intern the majority of them? Britain has so many, after all — they are bred like lilacs out of the dead ground. Indeed, we have roughly ten times the number of lawyers per head of population than Japan, and more than any other country except for the USA. They have been our big growth industry these past forty or fifty years, and there seems no end in sight to their fecundity and malign involvement in how we should run the country.
The latest lot to have done something genuinely malign call themselves “Lawyers Are Responsible” — which they most certainly are, for all manner of wickedness. These 120 largely high-born liberal bellends have signed a “Declaration of Conscience” which they say will prevent them ever having anything to do with the prosecution of anti-oil protesters such as Extinction Rebellion and JustStopOil. They also say they will never represent any branch of the oil industry. Among their number is the obnoxious Jolyon Maugham — famous for his hopelessly failed legal actions designed to stop or reverse Brexit and also for bragging about clubbing a fox to death.
There’s also Sir Geoffrey Bindman and Tim Crosland (who should have been jailed when he released the Supreme Court decision on the Heathrow Airport extension, in direct contravention of the law). I wonder if their collective antipathy to the oil industry enjoins them to exist in chambers — and of course private homes — devoid entirely of light and heat? Betcha it doesn’t. And if it doesn’t, what does it say about their supposed principles?
But that is not the main issue, of course. Lawyers are duty-bound to represent whoever needs representation, regardless of whether the lawyer in question is in agreement — the so-called “cab-rank rule.” The essence of the point, then, is that their own views should not come into the matter — they are there to advocate from a position of neutrality, according to the law of the land. They are not there to pick and choose. Do these “responsible” lawyers believe that BP and Shell are more wicked than serial killers, rapists, kiddie fiddlers? Or are these last named occupations things of which they approve and would be happy to represent? Why single out the oil industry? Similarly, do they believe the protesters should be allowed to cause whatever havoc they wish on the streets of our cities, with no recourse to punishment whatsoever? Even when they are stopping ambulances from reaching hospitals, or simply preventing key workers from getting to work? It is a standpoint of almost unfathomable imbecility.
However, it does highlight the mindset of the modern left. There is no debating with these people: they have no capacity for it. Everything, for them, is cut and dried — a bizarre Manichaean world in which some people are right and others are not merely wrong, but evil. It is the same Stalinist certainty you will hear when Labour MPs tell you that debate mustn’t be “fetishized” and can be harmful. The same impulse which leads them to insist not merely that people can use whatever gender pronouns they feel appropriate, but that the rest of us must, on pain of legal redress, be forced to follow suit. It is the certainty which kept the Tavistock Clinic open for business for too many years and which insists that all white people are racist and there’s an end to it. A totalitarian mindset which is utterly intolerant of opposing views.
Then there is the magnificent, overweening narcissism. These lawyers believe that their personal opinions are more important than the legal system they have been expensively trained to serve. Nothing is more important than their own ridiculous views. Disbar the lot.
This article was originally published in The Spectator’s UK magazine. Subscribe to the World edition here.
