Five years on, the memory still tastes metallic: the empty streets, the taped-off playgrounds, the police drones barking at solitary dog-walkers, the funeral processions limited to ten masked mourners, while Amazon delivered dog toys without restriction. The Daily Sceptic's remembrance on 28 November 2025 is not nostalgia; it is a war crime dossier. We must never forget, because forgetting is how tyrannies are normalised.

They told us it would be two weeks to "flatten the curve." It became two years to flatten the human spirit.

In Britain, a nation that once boasted of abolishing slavery while the rest of the world still practised it, old people were denied visitors and died alone, clutching nurses' hands through plastic gowns. Grandchildren watched grandmothers expire on iPads because "non-essential" human contact had been outlawed by a government that deemed B&Q an essential retailer, but a daughter's embrace a biohazard. Care-home residents were given Do Not Resuscitate orders en masse; some were sedated into oblivion with midazolam and morphine cocktails politely described as "end-of-life care pathways." The protocol was so efficient that excess deaths in care homes in April 2020 exceeded the Blitz.

Children, whose statistical risk from the virus was lower than from seasonal flu, were locked out of schools for the longest period in Europe. They lost a full year of education, socialisation, and play. The poorest lost the most: laptops never arrived, kitchens became classrooms, domestic abuse spiked behind closed doors. Suicide attempts among teenagers doubled. A generation was sacrificed on the altar of a disease that barely touched them, all so politicians could be photographed in high-visibility jackets looking "decisive."

Basic liberties, once thought inalienable, were cancelled by ministerial fiat. You could not visit your dying parent, attend a funeral, or leave your house without a "reasonable excuse" defined that morning by a 26-year-old SpAd on Twitter. Police broke into homes to stop birthday parties. A woman in Northumberland was arrested for sitting on a bench. In Scotland,Covid police set up roadblocks to stop people driving to beauty spots; in Wales, Mark Drakeford banned the sale of "non-essential" items and had supermarket aisles cordoned off with crime-scene tape so you could not buy a kettle or a pair of socks while you were allowed to buy vodka. The same government that forbade you from seeing your mother deemed lap-dancing clubs essential.

Churches were closed while abortion clinics stayed open. You could kill your unborn child but not receive Communion or sing a hymn. In Quebec, priests were arrested for holding Mass; in London, the police filmed worshippers through the windows of a Polish Catholic church and shut it down for the crime of praying while Polish. The right to worship, fought for by martyrs from Tyndale to the Covenanters, was declared non-essential by civil servants who had never missed a paycheque.

Free speech was collateral damage. Scientists who questioned the models, Sunetra Gupta, Carl Heneghan, Jay Bhattacharya, were smeared as "Covid deniers," a phrase deliberately designed to evoke Holocaust denial. Their papers were rejected, their reputations trashed, their Wikipedia pages vandalised in real time by teenage hall-monitors with admin privileges. The BBC became a state broadcaster in the most literal sense, running government propaganda framed as news. Dissenting voices were throttled on social media under direct pressure from White House and Downing Street officials who bragged about it in leaked emails.

And the economic carnage? Small businesses were ordered to die so that Tesco and Amazon could thrive. Entire sectors, hospitality, arts, aviation, were put to the sword. Trillions were borrowed to pay millions to sit on couches watching Netflix, while self-employed musicians lost everything and were told to retrain as contact tracers. The national debt doubled in eighteen months; the bill will be paid by the very children they locked indoors.

Worst of all was the cowardice of the public. Neighbours grassed on neighbours. Mask zealots screamed at unmasked toddlers in parks. France, the same country that once refused to show identity papers to Nazi occupiers, dutifully printed off "permission to exercise" passes and QR-coded itself into stadiums. Britain, a nation that endured the Blitz with two fingers raised to Hitler, cowered before a virus with a 99.97% survival rate for the under-70s.

We now know, beyond any serious dispute, that lockdown did not work. Sweden, Florida, South Dakota, places that kept schools open and refused to imprison their populations, had lower excess mortality than many of the most authoritarian regimes. The Great Barrington Declaration, mocked as genocidal granny-murder in October 2020, has been vindicated in every particular. Lockdown was the greatest policy calamity in peacetime history, a grotesque overreaction driven by panic, flawed models, and the narcissistic terror of leaders who could not bear to be blamed for a single death.

So let 2025 be the year we swear "Never Again." Never again will we surrender our ancient liberties because a computer model predicts doom. Never again will we let public-health bureaucrats suspend the Magna Carta by press conference. Never again will we allow police to patrol how many minutes we sit on a park bench or how many households gather at Christmas.

Burn the QR codes. Tear down the perspex screens. And if any politician ever again utters the words "in line with the latest scientific advice" as cover for stripping away your birthright, remember the empty swings, the solitary funerals, the masked two-year-olds, the padlocked churches, and the old people dying alone behind plastic. Never forget.

https://dailysceptic.org/2025/11/28/we-must-never-forget-the-horrors-of-lockdown/