Neil Oliver: The way our leaders are going about things reminds me of the behaviour of toddlers

If you didn’t laugh, you’d cry – so sometimes the only thing to do is laugh. These are difficult times, made more difficult by the manufactured fear and lies we are force fed around the clock.

There are issues that must be addressed with the utmost seriousness. But, as I say, sometimes you just have to laugh.

The way our leaders and their attendants are going about things – not just recently but for months and years now – reminds me of the behaviour of very young children, toddlers really. Sometimes a toddler will screw his eyes shut in the belief that since he can’t see you, it must follow that you can’t see him.

If our leaders weren’t applying this strategy in times where decisions make the difference between life and death, their antics would only be hilarious.

Peek-a-boo, presidents and prime ministers.

They spent two years on lockdowns – spraying money around like white foam in an ‘90s nightclub – all the while lavishing multi-million-pound contracts on friends and acquaintances, thinking we wouldn’t notice all the new millionaires, generating unimaginable, unthinkable mountains of radioactive debt that will be glowing red hot for generations to come. We saw you.

They ignored the alarm calls from all manner of reasonable people – from economists of the highest professional standing to just members of the public armed with no more than the experience of running their own households and bank accounts – and piled the debt mountains higher and higher. Some of us told them it was a disaster waiting to happen, and they told us we were cranks and conspiracy theorists who didn’t understand how money and economies work.

And what are they doing now? In the short term, they are attempting to launder the consequences of their lockdown idiocy through the tragedy in Ukraine. A shameful sleight of hand. The spiking cost of energy, inflation, the threat of shortages of food and all manner of necessities – apparently had nothing to do with the financial incontinence of the past two years, nothing at all to do with shutting down economies around the developed world. All of it, we are supposed to accept, now, is down to Putin’s hellish invasion of Ukraine.

Like that toddler screwing his eyes shut to make the approaching adult disappear, our leaders seem genuinely to think we can’t see them, can’t see what they’re doing, all that they’ve done these years past. Either that, of course, or they just don’t care that we can see them, because our seeing and knowing no longer matters – not when they think they’ve got us where they want us.

If you didn’t laugh, you might cry.

Chancellor Rishi Sunak’s wife, Akshata Murthy, is a shareholder in her billionaire father’s IT and consultancy business Infosys, with a personal stake worth hundreds of millions of pounds. Infosys continues to do business in Moscow.

In the past two years alone the chancellor’s wife has apparently been enriched by nearly 12 million pounds of dividends from Infosys.

Mr Sunak has urged businesses to sever their ties to Russia – the better to strangle Mr Putin’s ability to wage war. This advice apparently does not apply to people in Mr Sunak’s own home. Exactly how stupid, and/or blind, does Mr Sunak think we are?

Mr Sunak is also among those of our leaders and senior politicians on both sides of the House of Commons who either genuinely do not know what a woman is – which is to say, an adult human female – or else cannot bring themselves to say as much when asked to define a woman. Here’s a starter for ten: if you’re a living human being, you were grown inside a woman.

This inability or self-preserving refusal to stand up with and for women – a little over half the population of the country – would be laughable, hilarious if it didn’t have tragic consequences, leading as it does to the erasure of women as the living, breathing reality that they are.

For me it’s increasingly hard to avoid drawing the conclusion that our leaders and their little wizards are laughing at us. I say it is high time we pointed out that they are the joke.

Remember when they said the Covid vaccines were a hundred per cent effective at stopping a person catching Covid, spreading Covid? Remember when they said those vaccines were absolutely safe for everyone from toddlers to centenarians? Remember when they said we had to wear masks when standing and walking inside a restaurant, but not when seated? Remember when they said we had to keep our distance from each other, even from loved ones?

Now we can take refugees of war into our homes. This is a fine and noble act, of course it is, but why could we not invite our loved ones into our homes then, if it is safe to welcome strangers from thousands of miles away now? A person might be tempted to think it was a fiction all along, a nonsense circulated to make us behave.

That question is, anyway, redundant, because Covid no longer matters, apparently. Not as far as I can see. Covid is yesterday’s cause of fear, and therefore no longer required – not now that there’s a war on. It seems safe to predict that once the war is over, the next thing to fear, and for which sacrifices will have to be made upon the public altar, will be along as promptly as an efficiently run bus. My money’s on Lockdown for the Climate. The outriders for that stunt are already there, of course, with yet more calls to work from home rather than driving into work, and leaving the car parked all day Sunday – for the good of the planet.

War in Ukraine is not the only cause of the mess we’re in, but it will bite us all soon enough. I can tell you something to fear soon, and that may already be unavoidable, and that’s a shortage of food, if not for us then for millions of others. Russia and Ukraine grow 30 percent of the world’s wheat and 20 percent of the world’s corn.

Developing countries already face shortages on account of sanctions. The developed world might have tried to compensate for the short fall – grown more food elsewhere – except for the double whammy provided by the West’s dependence on Russia as a key source of fertilizer. Western sanctions on Russia’s exports of potash, ammonia and urea, along with other nutrients needed for fertile soil, threatens the growth of wheat, corn, rice and soy around the world.

The price of fertilizer is spiking. Fewer fields may be planted, meaning smaller harvests. And that’s on top of the dizzying hikes in the price of diesel. By the other end of the year, farmers may not even be able to afford the fuel necessary to bring in their crops. As the cost of commodities continues to rise in the months ahead, as hunger bites, there can only be more unrest and suffering to come.

Of course, those comedians running our country insist we don’t need carbon fuels anymore, anyway – all that filthy, dirty gas and oil. And yet European countries have bought 19 billion dollars’ worth of Russian oil and gas since the 24th of February alone. We see you. Out of one side of their faces they talk about the need for sanctions to throttle Mr Putin and his henchmen, the need for us all to make sacrifices. Out of the other side of their faces they say, “Thank you, kindly, Mr Putin, for keeping the lights on.”

The upshot of it all is that Mr Putin’s war is paying for itself. He’s even demanding the bills be paid in Russian Roubles instead of American Dollars. Other currencies are on the rise for dealing in crude oil, so that the sun may be setting on the petro-dollar after all this time.

There’s tragic comedy all over the place. Once you see it, as they say, you can’t not see it.

Klaus Schwab and his World Economic Forum talk about happy plebs owning nothing – while the richest of the rich hoover up everything of value in the world. I think I know who’s planning to be happiest. They plan to take away our money as well and replace it with food stamps – what they call Central Bank Digital Currency. Once that’s in place, it’s up to the banks what you spend, when you spend, what you spend it on, and where. If the bank has reason to think you shouldn’t buy that bottle of wine, or book that train ticket, then you won’t be able to.

Then there’s the little things, like French president Emmanuel Macron.

Ukrainian president Volodimyr Zelensky appeared on tv in a workman-like green t-shirt and khakis and, quick as flash, Mr Macron had shed his bespoke suits and sent someone to buy some jeans and a hoodie from the boy’s section of his local haberdashery. Then he had a photographer follow him around at work all day, looking butch and mean. Such antics, such pantomime designed to attract attention to self, while real women and real children are dying, is nothing less than pitiful.

Misinformation and manipulation of the truth has been going on for years now. In 2016 the Clinton campaign said Donald Trump had colluded with Russia in order to secure his election.

The FBI duly investigated and found nothing – and yet the story of Mr Trump buddying up to the Russians persisted throughout his presidency courtesy of the Democrat-fawning MSM in the States. This week, Mr Trump announced he was taking legal action against the Clintons and their allies.

Before the 2020 election the NY Post broke the story about Hunter Biden’s laptop – the one left in a Delaware repair shop allegedly containing emails linking Biden junior to bungs of money from a Shanghai-based company linked to China. It's claimed there was mention of 10 percent of the profits for, “the big guy”. Hunter was already in receipt of 50k dollars a month from a Ukrainian energy company for doing … well no one is quite sure what Hunter was doing.

And what did the compliant US media do? They rubbished the report. Big Tech shut down the NY Post’s Twitter account and banned anyone from sharing the story. More than 50 US security “experts” stood up to say it was all Russian disinformation.

And guess what – the story about Hunter’s laptop and those emails? Last week the NY Times admitted the emails had been verified.

The technocrats of Silicon Valley just didn’t think American voters should know such things in the run up to an election that their man Joe Biden simply had to win. They call such tactics the Noble Lie. They’re lying, but it’s for our own good. But as I say, once you see it, you can’t not see it.

The truth came out about how Trump had not colluded with the Russians. The truth came out about Hunter Biden’s laptop. The truth came out about the Wuhan lab leak. The truth is coming out about vaccine safety and efficacy. What are they telling us this week, that will be overtaken by the truth, sooner or later? The truth seems to be moving faster and faster.

As I say, if you didn’t laugh at their audacity – at their seeming conviction that we can’t see them – you’d have to cry. So laugh, I say, but pay attention to the truth. There’s more truth every day. And the truth, as they say, will set us free.