'​Who watches the watchers? Who guards the guards?', asks Neil Oliver

Who watches the watchers? Who guards the guards?

The question was posed by the Roman satirist Juvenal 2,000 years ago, but it has never been more relevant. It’s applied now to remind us of the need to keep a watchful eye on those in power.

This should be our paramount concern now, when lies and liars are everywhere.

This week, former PM Boris Johnson told the House of Commons privileges committee he had not lied when he told the House that his own Covid guidance was being followed in No.10.

Note the word guidance – made especially interesting by the fact ordinary members of the public were, as I seem to recall, arrested, charged and fined for sitting together on park benches or on the beach. I’m not sure that’s how guidance normally works.

In any event, I honestly don’t care whether he lied or not to parliament. I don’t care if they were having cake or coke. This is a red herring, a sleight of hand, a tactic to distract the gullible. The point that must neither be overlooked nor forgotten is that neither Johnson nor anyone else at those gatherings was demonstrably afraid of Covid.

We know that because we have seen the photos of them standing together without masks. Standing apart and wearing masks was for the little people. We might also assume that we were being laughed at by those who knew there was nothing to fear and therefore no reason not to party.

Keir Starmer’s Labour party was the same – we saw those pictures too. He and they called for earlier, longer, harder lockdowns and all the rest, and then met for curry and beer and cosy chats.

Fear was for the little people and so Left and Right, Blue and Red and all positions and team colours in between laughed up their sleeves as the nudge units and the paid propagandists told us anyone breaching the regulations – sorry, I mean guidance – was a granny killing Covidiot and Pandemic Denier.

Look me in the eye and tell me it wasn’t so.

So, who guards the guards, who watches the watchers?

Let’s notice, among much else, that this is the Commons sitting in judgment on the Commons, which is to say politicians sitting in judgement on politicians. This is the guards, judging the guards. This is the same Commons whose inhabitants worked together in unquestioning lockstep to impose policies that ruined lives, wrecked livelihoods and upended the economy. This is the same Commons that, far from accepting responsibility for the carnage, is actively seeking to have us look the other way while they get about the business of doing nothing more than playing politics, all they’re fit for, fiddling while Rome burns. The is the same Commons that empties when one of their own stands to speak up on behalf of people killed or harmed by medical products pushed as vaccines. And trust me, I’ll get back to that safe and effective nonsense they pushed in a moment.

We never quite got to mandated jabs for all, but people all over the world were sacked for opting to live by the ideal of my body my choice, the notion enshrined in the Nuremberg Code that states that a person should at all times: “Have legal capacity to give consent; should be so situated as to be able to exercise free power of choice, without the intervention of any element of force, fraud, deceit, duress, overreaching or other forms of constraint or coercion …”

We didn’t quite get to mandates for the jabs for the general population, but I say it was a damned close-run thing. I say they were itching to mandate the vaccines. I say mandates weren’t pushed across the line in the end because enough of us made plain it would mean civil disobedience if not full-on civil war. I maintain that while they’ve gone quiet about lockdowns and face-masks, it can only be a matter of time before that playbook is brought out for the next crisis they can cook up. More and more are queuing up to distance themselves from the harms done during the last three years, while still priapic on account of all that unbridled power over the everyday lives of the tax-paying public.

Who watches the watchers, who guards the guards?

There are calls for a war crimes trial for Putin. What about a war crimes trial for Tony Blair while we’re at it? We hit the 20th anniversary of his unlawful war in Iraq last week – that unlawful war that led to over a million deaths, that destabilised the entire region to this day and gave birth to Isis. Wouldn’t the moral way to mark that birthday be a war crimes trial for all the people who took us there? And while we’re considering war crimes trials, shouldn’t we look again at precisely what successive United States administrations did in Korea, in Vietnam, and more recently in Libya, and in Syria and in Afghanistan and other sovereign nation-states too numerous to mention? Shouldn’t we look at what was done, and by whom?

US libertarian think tank the Cato Institute recently looked again at the behaviour of successive US presidents in relation to the Saudi Arabian horror show in Yemen. They reported, and suggested the appropriateness of war crimes trials for Barack Obama, Donald Trump and Joe Biden:

“Whose administrations serviced the US-provided warplanes, supplied munitions used to bomb weddings, funerals, schools.

“Whose administrations serviced the US-provided warplanes, supplied munitions used to bomb weddings, funerals, school buses and other civilian targets, gave intelligence used for targeting and for a time refuelled Saudi and Emirati aircraft.”

“US officials could not claim to be surprised at their culpability,” they added. “The state department warned that they could be held responsible for war crimes.”

“George W Bush is another good candidate for a trial on his aggressive unjustified attack on Iraq based on manipulated and fabricated intelligence. His war ended up killing hundreds of thousands of civilians as well as triggering years more of conflict. Former UK Prime Minister Tony Blair today spending his golden years profiting after acting as Bush’s poodle would be an appropriate co-conspirator.”

Who watches the watchers, who guards the guards?

We are trained to fear Global warming … the warming of the planet … while that world burns still on account of the fire Tony Blair helped light in the Middle East with UK taxpayer-funded missiles and bombs.

Who watches the watchers, who guards the guards?

Let’s look again at the banks and the simmering chaos there … in that world in which banks are secretive, privately owned businesses, in which central banks have the power to create money out of thin air and lend the same sums over and over and over again while growing fatter and fatter on more and more interest and debt. Another former PM, Gordon Brown traded on and perpetuated a myth of being a safe pair of hands when it came to money matters. This is the same Gordon Brown who sold off half of the UK’s gold reserves at a knockdown price so low it was remembered ever after as the Brown Bottom and one of the worst deals in recorded history.

In 2008 Brown bailed out the banks with billions and billions of pounds worth of our money and those banks duly stayed open, the bankers kept getting their bonuses and nothing changed when it came to stopping their reckless games with fantasy money. We were sold down the river and now the banks are shaking on their fantasy foundations once again and for more of the same reasons.

Who watches the watchers, who guards the guards?

The MHRA – the Medicines and Healthcare products Regulatory Agency is supposed to monitor the information we get about health and the safety and effectiveness of the drugs we are offered. But the MHRA gets 86 percent of its funding from the pharmaceuticals industry. Is that the recipe for unbiased behaviour always and only in the interests of the people? I’m only asking.

It’s the same the world over: 65 percent of the US Federal Drugs Administration comes from Big Pharma. Between 2006 and 2019, nine out of 10 FDA Commissioners went on to secure jobs with pharmaceutical companies. 89 percent of the European Medicines Agency funding comes from Big Pharma. 96 percent of the funding for the Therapeutic Goods Administration in Australia comes from Big Pharma. In Japan, the relevant agency gets 85 percent of its funding from Big Pharma.

No lesser publication than the British Medical Journal asked, in a headline over a recent article:

“From FDA to MHRA – are drug regulators for hire?’

Obviously, I couldn’t possibly say one way or the other. A recent report from Australia’s TGA – the Therapeutic Goods Administration – equivalent to our MHRA – a report made available only by a Freedom of Information Request – makes plain that in January 2021 it was known to anyone privy to Pfizer’s own data that the lipid nanoparticle was widely distributed all around the body.

All of this was known before the so-called vaccines were approved for injection into billions of human beings, from babies up. Those entrusted with our health care knew, in advance, that the tiny oily bubbles carrying the making of the toxic spike protein could and would go to brains, hearts, livers, ovaries, testes, everywhere, and they went right ahead and did it anyway.

Safe and effective they said, over and over and over. Misinformation, anyone?

If they were doing their jobs and reading reports like this, then Chris Whitty would have known, Patrick Vallance would have known, Antony Fauci would have known.

This information is out there now, in the public domain, though heavily redacted – and God alone knows what remains redacted – and so why isn’t this front page and main TV news all around the world? Why not?

Who watches the watchers, who guards the guards?

The answer is as stark as it is depressing:

Westminster awards itself the power to make laws, enforce those laws and decree the punishment for any transgressions of those laws. This is a textbook definition of the tyranny that our constitution, enshrined in Magna Carta 1215, was specifically shaped to prevent. And yet here we are – with the watchers watching the watchers, the guards guarding the guards.

It is as obvious as Boris Johnson’s estrangement from the truth that this tyranny should never have been allowed to evolve and that, since it has, we must not tolerate it a moment longer.

Decisions of importance must be made by those with skin in the game, but with no means to profit either directly or indirectly from the decisions they come to.

Who guards the guards is a 2,000-year-old question. Older by 500 years is the Tao Te Ching, The Book of the Way, by Laozi, the Old Master.

Last week a friend reminded me of words that sound as though they might have been written this morning:

“When rich speculators prosper while farmers lose their land. When government officials spend money on weapons instead of cures. When the upper class is extravagant and irresponsible while the poor have nowhere to turn. All this is robbery and chaos.”

Robbery and chaos – that’s what our leaders and their little wizards have inflicted upon us. It was true two and a half thousand years ago and it’s still true now.

That old book also warns us about:

“Those who try to control, who use force to protect their power … They take from those who don’t have enough and give to those who have far too much.”

This is how we will beat them, how we will win – by remembering what our ancestors learned long ago and finally, finally doing something about it.

Here’s the thing: it’s long past time to watch the guards. What we need, all over the West and once and for all, is a changing of the guards.