Rare scenes of civil liberty unity on Question Time last night as every panellist came out against domestic covid passports, and a forced requirement by employees for workers to have the vaccine; with the far-left Nadia Whittome, hardline-centrist Layla Moran and CRG chair Mark Harper all opposing the floated measure for different reasons:

• Layla Moran: “Out of the question”, citing people being able to take time off to get the vaccine; “I am a liberal and my view is you can trust individuals to do the right thing, and in this case actually what you’re asking them to do is divulge medical data as well. I don’t think that’s right”
• Mark Harper: “It’s particularly ironic that I’ve heard it being argued as a way to get the economy re-opened, well the reality is younger people will be the last people to be vaccinated, they’re the ones that have been damaged most by the economic dislocation from Covid, we’d be in a ridiculous position where  we’d be re-opening the economy, and younger people would be the people shut out as older people were able to go back out again”
• Nadia Whittome: “What the government has actually said on ‘no jab, no job’ is that’s up to employers – now this is absolutely wrong… they need to intervene to legislate against this, we cannot have a situation where employers are able to have a blank cheque to exploit workers in this way”

The founder and CEO of the Oakman Inns chain, also on the panel, said he would be “deeply uncomfortable” with enforcing the principle of ‘no jab, no job’ for his employees. It seems Covid has met a rival pandemic that’s spreading even more rapidly: common sense…

China says it will not allow the broadcast of BBC World News in Chinese to the mainland after the broadcaster supposedly did “a slew of falsified reporting on issues including Xinjiang and China’s handling of Covid 19″ to “send a clear signal that fake news is not tolerated in China.” Nothing to do with the Chinese Communist Party controlled CGTN losing their licence in the UK last week.

On balance Guido thinks the open societies of the West can better withstand state-backed propaganda than closed one-party states. It is not a sign of strength to block their propaganda broadcasts. Confident societies don’t need to ban foreign propaganda…

Readers revelled in Guido’s coverage of the BBC’s harebrained decision to introduced restriction-enforcing bracelet tags for employees to keep them two metres apart. Not only did the BBC introduce the enforcement measures, Guido can reveal the BBC’s invested in 2,250 such devices.

The corporation tried dodging an FoI request to know how much money was spent, however the Manchester Evening Gazette last year reported the devices from Tended “is expected to be between £8-£12 per user per month“, meaning licence fee payers could be forking out £27,000 per month for the devices. Evidently the public sector has not had to tighten its belt during this pandemic…

The main BBC News at Six last night rightly focused on the number of deaths during this pandemic. It featured an interview with Professor Christina Pagel, Professor of Operational Research at UCL. She was introduced as such rather than as a Labour member and supporter, before she launched into a tirade about how the majority of deaths were avoidable, blaming the PM. How very BBC…

Guido took a quick look at her tweets, they reveal she is passionately anti-Boris, was a fanatical remain campaigner and re-joined the Labour Party only to get rid of Corbyn and get Starmer in. She claimed hysterically that a WTO Brexit would kill Britons. She claims that Boris hates women, the poor and immigrants. The first claim seems manifestly contrary to the evidence. Guido has highlighted the covert communists the BBC uses as expert talking heads, the closet Tories, and now the hardline centrists cloaking their prejudices under “academic expertise“. The BBC needs to consistently introduce these “experts” noting their partisan leanings or else it is deceiving the viewers about the impartiality of their sources…

UPDATE:  Pagel is a member of the phoney “Independent SAGE“.

Yvette has figured out what to do during the pandemic in isolation…