Dan Wootton: The broadcast media in this country is broken

I am so bloody angry. I can’t hide it tonight. I can’t try and put a positive spin on it.

I’m sorry, even though I predicted this exact scenario, I find it impossible to comprehend how we’ve ended up here.

Surely at some point, common sense and personal responsibility must prevail in a free and democratic society over draconian and authoritarian government controls dictating the way we live our lives and run our businesses?

Twenty months into a pandemic, with over 90 per cent of the adult population estimated to have Covid antibodies, including 80 per cent double jabbed and 25 per cent triple jabbed, the march from the mainstream broadcast media and politicians to lock down the country again is well and truly on.

Of course, it’s as a result of the Omicron scariant. Without any firm evidence that this new strain will definitely evade or even weaken our vaccines, Boris Johnson went into full on panic mode.

Saturday night emergency press conference unleashed mask mandates punishable with hundreds of pounds in fines, ten-days self-isolation for perfectly healthy folk, and new day two PCR testing and isolation requirements for anyone re-entering the country that sound the death knell for the tourism industry.

And then immediately following the awful announcement who did the BBC drag out to comment: The lockdown obsessed, Professor Susan Michie, who sits on the Government's SAGE committee as a health psychologist and is a self-declared Communist party member. Honest, I'm not making that up.

She said she was talking in a personal capacity, and wanted an immediate set of new control measures enforced on us all, just like she has wanted every single moment since March 2020.

The broadcast media in this country is broken. Today GB News launched our first national advertising campaign where we promise to ask the questions the BBC won’t.

Is there any evidence the Omicron variant evades existing vaccines or increases hospitalisations or deaths?

Of course, the delightful usual Be Kind trolls in the left-wing media are determined to take away personal choice on whether we live our lives muzzled. Like LBC’s resident hate preacher James O’Brien, who equated those who question the logic of wearing masks to the Ku Klux Klan.

Of course, it was only last year that the so-called experts were trying to assure us all that the use of face coverings was completely futile.

So much more madness is making me fume tonight. There’s the World Health Organisation deciding not to call the new variant Xi to protect the blushes of the Chinese communist leader Xi Jinping whose regime unleashed this entire Covid catastrophe on the world.

There’s the fact usual democratic processes are being railroaded with these measures coming into force at 4am tomorrow without any sort of debate or vote in Parliament. That’s Chinese-style democracy for you.

And there’s the government and its scientists telling us an extension of the Covid vaccine booster programme is the answer to the Omicron problem, even though all the hysteria is over the fact the scariant might evade the vaccine.

As I concluded in my column for the MailOnline today: “If we cannot open the country and restore all our civil liberties 20 months into this pandemic, then I fear we never will. If we keep compliantly allowing our freedoms to be stripped on the whim of a poll-driven government, then don’t be surprised if they never fully return. A dystopian nightmare looms and it’s time to speak up and stand up.”