Mark Dolan: We must stand up to Covid bullies who try to dictate our lives

Another day another media figure rams home the cozy Covid consensus. This time alleged comedy actress Jennifer Aniston, famous for the sitcom Friends, a movie called We’re the Millers and the sitcom Friends, has said that she has cut off anybody in her life that hasn't had the vaccine. So the woman from friends, loses friends, unfriending friends.

Well I would say, that those former friends, have had a lucky escape. Because anybody that cancels you, based upon your vaccine status, your view on lockdowns or indeed any other moral or political issue, shouldn’t be in your life. This week it's been reported that the American news network CNN have fired three of their staff for going to work unvaccinated.

All of which means that the agenda of forced vaccination, sorry heavy encouragement, is now at state level, at corporate level and with Miss Aniston's intervention, at personal level too. Even your closest buddies are now keen to get a needle in your arm.

The medical status of my friends and indeed colleagues and fellow citizens is none of my business. I couldn't care less and I never will. I'm pro vaccine, I've had both jabs and I’d say go for it, but ultimately what you do with your own body is your affair.

In which they announced that only vaccinated citizens will be allowed to go into their venue. Thereby denying the human rights of the unvaccinated to attend their Museum. You couldn't make it up. We've got to learn to live with this virus and the only way in which we will do that, is to accept that some people will not have the vaccine. Just as we will never achieve zero Covid, we will never achieve 100% vaccination.

Why we roll the dice for example with young people, for a virus that poses the vast majority of them precious little physical threat, is inexplicable. And blackmailing young adults with things like the right of entry into a nightclub, is unforgivable.

Meanwhile Mayor Khan in London wants to make mask wearing the law, even though the evidence they have any effect is debatable. So why would you impose a measure, that doesn't definitively work? Because it's all about control. The state wants to control you, big business wants to control you and your meddling neighbour next door, wants to control you.

Have the jab, stay at home, wear a mask. What is the recurring theme of all of this? We are being bullied. And dissenting voices are shouted down, unfriended and vilified. Well you know as well as I do, there's only one thing you can do with a bully, and that's to stand up to them. If you don’t want the jab, don’t have one. And in places where masks are not mandated, and you don’t want to wear one, don’t wear one.

Personal choice - remember that? And if standing up to the bullies, and asserting your fundamental human rights causes you to lose friends, then count your lucky stars. Because they weren't your friends in the first place.

The governor of the Bank of England has clashed with former colleagues in the house of lords who have said that quantitive easing is something to which the bank are addicted. Too right it is.

All too often in the course of this pandemic I have regretted our relative wealth and triple A credit rating. Because it has allowed us to bankroll this ruinous 17 month lockdown experiment. I have looked with envy at countries that didn't have the resources with which to pay people to stay at home and inflate their national debts.

They were left with little option but to protect their most vulnerable and get on with life. Strange how many of those countries have a lower per capita Covid death toll than us.

Crumbs, it's almost like the measures didn't help. Notwithstanding damaged lives and a land grab of our civil liberties, the money is the other great scandal of this pandemic. National debt has topped 2 trillion for a nasty virus yes, but one non-fatal to the majority of the population.

And when my youngest son was very small, we were talking about money and he said “it's fine - you just take your credit card and money comes out of the machine”.

Well it seems the Bank of England take the same view as my then six year old - that there is such a thing as free money. But there isn't. Because the endless printing of cash depletes our future economic firepower, depresses confidence in the UK economy from the international bond markets, to whom we may have to go with our begging bowl in the years to come, and it's inflationary.

You know as well as I do there is no such thing as free money. So it's time to get on a path to recovery, to stimulate the economy and to begin to live within our means. Debt is essentially economic quicksand, and if we don’t change course soon, we will sink to the point, where we don’t return.