Ian Gallagher and Peter Hitchens have written a couple of good pieces in today’s Mail on Sunday about Susan Michie, Professor of Health Psychology at UCL and a leading member of SAGE. She is one of the most zealous advocates of lockdown, believing restrictions should remain in place long after the U.K. population has been vaccinated. Most readers of Lockdown Sceptics will be aware that Prof Michie is a member of the Communist Party of Great Britain, but Gallagher has uncovered some interesting tidbits.
There are some things that Prof Michie – whose first husband was Andrew Murray, once a key adviser to former Labour leader Jeremy Corbyn – is rather less inclined to discuss, including money. Perhaps because she has so much of it. Indeed, she is the blue-blooded descendant of an earl who, along with her brother, sold a family heirloom – a Picasso painting called L’Enfant Au Pigeon – to Qatari royals for £50 million in 2013. This didn’t stop her once urging fellow Communists to support Jeremy Corbyn at a presentation with the words: “We, the working class…”
Peter Hitchens also has some interesting details:
The super-rich Communist Susan Michie is so militant that her fellow Marxists once searched her baby’s pram for subversive literature.
They lifted the tiny infant out of the way, to check that the future Professor of Psychology was not smuggling ultra-hardline propaganda into a crucial conference.
No wonder that fellow students at Oxford a few years before had called her “Stalin’s nanny”.
Why is this woman advising a Conservative Government?
Both pieces are worth reading in full.
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Lockdown? She should be locked up.
“Why is this woman advising a Conservative Government?”
Simple – they share the same basic political philosophy on power and control – which supersedes left/right distinctions.
Wrong – they are on almost exactly the same place on the political spectrum: hard left!
You may wish. But that is all it is – fodder for the dim blinded by arthritic prejudice.
Yes, right/left is now meaningless; totalitarianism or libertarianism are now the descriptions. You can be both hard left and/or hard right and want totalitarianism. If you add in the marriage of corporatism and the state, you describe fascism as the type of totalitarianism which is where we are at/heading.
This woman and many in Johnson’s inner circle have much in common, including his paramour.
As above, so below.
Commie thing aside (this was known a year ago, no idea why it’s only news now), the main issue is she’s constantly commenting on public health policy and covid *despite having no qualifications in public health, epidemiology or any related field*.
She’s a behavioural psychologist and that’s it.
Time and time again the media portray her as a COVID expert because “she’s on SAGE” without mentioning which BIT of SAGE.
Her training, experience and qualifications make her as much of an expert on public health and COVID as my local florist.
Her entire job role is to enforce compliance through psychological techniques. She’s nothing at all to do with any of the disease related fields.
She naturally enjoys this free publicity and complete and utter lack of scrutiny from the media and uses it as a platform for her political views. The media are to blame here for allowing it.
I’d far rather listen to your local florist.
Me too…
And the cabinet for allowing her onto SAGE, and for listening to her.
Personally, I’d listen to her advice and then probably do the opposite.
“Why is this woman advising a Conservative Government?”
Because they’re not really conservative?
It’s becoming clear that ‘lockdowns’ were a CCP ploy, eagerly adopted by the fifth column in the west.
But his drip-drip LDS rehabilitation goes on apace nevertheless.
Peter made his own decision about getting vaxxed and that’s his business, it does not invalidate his views on lockdown or the boso Junta.
Wrong. Hitchens got well paid by the Daily Mail to make it everybody else’s business, so as a propagandist and self-appointed pro-vaxx influencer he’s fair game for criticism. If he’d shut up and just got on with life then you would have perhaps had a point, but he didn’t and you haven’t. If you failed to read it, here it is: PETER HITCHENS: I’ve had the Covid jab – and all it cost me was my freedom I will summarise: “Weren’t my fault Guv, I ‘ad to do it. I mean, I need to go abroad see the kids, so there’s nothin’ I could do about it, that’s gawd’s honest truth! Not that I’m going soft, or scared or anything, but, you know they twisted me arm they did, and there weren’t nothin’ I could do about it..!” (..keep looping in ever decreasing circles…) Opposition to government lockdown IS opposition to all aspects of this unprecedented repressive C19 policy, and above all when the exit strategy is predicated on coercive experimental gene therapy to regain basic civil liberties, such as the freedom to socialise in a pub or travel. Hitchens the arch U-turner (this isn’t the first time) is a… Read more »
I know that Toby never wastes an opportunity to have a dig at the ‘left’ and at Jeremy Corbyn in particular but by concentrating on her Communist leanings, the article ignores the fact that most of Prof Michie’s work on behavioural science which is influencing government policy originates not in communist China but in America and she is listed as a ‘Distinguished International Affiliate of the American Psychological Association.
Much of academia in the U.S. is somewhere between left-wing and radical Left, and sympathetic to communist China. China sends a lot of students, and the money that goes with them.
I don’t believe they’re actual CCP sympathisers, but your point about financial dependence on Chinese students is even more pertinent when it comes to UK universities.
You can always tell a dimwit by their tendency to attribute everything they don’t like to an irrelevant political label.
I don’t really care about her being a Communist, although it doesn’t sit well with her wealth. She doesn’t flounce around in a mink coat or otherwise flaunt her moolah.
These reason I hate her is because of the sinister nature of her calling and the fact that wants to ‘normalise’ mask- wearing for young children. ?(also, she had the temerity to hold forth on a medical matter above Dr John Lee on GMB, I think it was..)
Vile creature.
Dam. I didn’t know she was so rich. Boris could have wangled some money out of her for the wall papering.
Toby – you are finally catching up.
This was raised in your comments section more than once since the start.
Sage is predominantly made up of left-leaning types. Susan Michie is a hard line communist and Neil Ferguson’s German mistress Antonia Staats is apparently a senior officer in the British Communist party, so Ferguson himself may well be similarly inclined.
God save us. Why are any of them advising a Conservative Government?
You are surely not referring to the current opposition free Lab:Con Corona Coalition?
Neil Ferguson’s mistress is a hard left activist, and on that basis alone I’d say he was of a similar view. Most hard left activists are not known for their tolerance of centre right views, which they regard as extreme right wing.
Some of us were asking last summer as to why she’s advising the government.
It’s taken long enough for LS to catch up.
You know, i am in favour of free speech. I believe that anyone has the right to be stupid, and everyone else has the right to tell them that they are. But i do have to admit that i probably would outlaw communism. I would make it a criminal offense to spread communist propaganda.
Indeed, it is easily in the same league as Nazism.
Communism is worse than Nazism in almost every metric imaginable.
Nazism was cruel and inhumane by design, Communism becomes cruel and inhumane by necessity.
If the Nazis had defeated the Soviet Union and implemented Generalplan Ost, their body count would have dwarfed Stalin’s.
At least I’m confident that they wouldn’t have profited in the end: if the Nazis had triumphed in Russia I strongly suspect that the US would have ended up carpet-nuking Germany in the late 1940s (much as Stuart Slade depicted in The Big One).
More likely the US would have sued for peace. Plenty of people in the US would have been more than happy to deal with the Nazis and go isolationist again. Many would even have been happy to ‘Nazify’ the US from within.
I douby there was much of a constituency for Nazism in the US, outside of unassimilated German immigrants (German-American Bund!) and Britain-hating Irish-Americans, and I suspect the latter would have had second thoughts when it came out just what the Nazis were doing in the East.
The South was one of the most racist parts of America at the time of course, but it was also the most strongly anti-Nazi. It wasn’t until the recent rise of the “alt-right” that the mainstream US racist right turned into apologists for Hitler.
All 8 of them.
Carpet nuking. I like that.
As a phrase, obviously. Less so as an experience
Prescott Bush was full on Natsoc
Nazi scientists were welcomed with open wallets
Then I’m afraid you aren’t in favour of free speech…
Rather like “I’m not a racist but…”.
Well… Calls for violence are not considered free speech. And since communist ideology invariably ends in calls for violence and then in actual violence (as we can see all around us), I would say communism is not free speech.
Calls for violence are not always morally unjustifiable depending on the situation, nor are they always frowned upon even in this society. Calls for judicial or military violence are common. Do you want a state that can determine precisely what you can think and defend yourself from? You are sounding rather like a communist.
Apart from that I’d say the assertion that communist ideology always leads to violence is another one of those vacuous assertions like “all war is because of religion” or “white people are inherently racist”.
Defending oneself is not violence. Calling for the police to forcibly remove an attacker is not a call for violence. So you’re wrong. Calls for violence are always morally unjustifiable.
Name one instance where communism hasn’t led to violence.
“I’m the government and I say that your organising and struggle for equitable and just treatment is violence. You’ll understand when we dock your social credits.” Sometimes, if someone makes someone’s life intolerable and nobody will listen a bloody nose results. That’s history’s lesson. Your question isn’t a valid question, it’s an absurd decontextualised generalisation with absolutely no awareness of history’s struggles. There are more adherents of communist thought than there have ever been empowered communists, so how about start looking there? In any case, ‘communism’ proper has never even existed as it has always heavily incorporated capitalist monetary policies especially on the world stage. You’re just another knee jerk “oh let’s ban it because we’ve not a clue what we’re looking at” reactionary. Rather like covidians actually. Even more like covidians when you consider just how irrelevant the classic concept of “communism” even is in this society. It’s not even an easily definable thing you want to ban. Having the police push a lockdown protest into dispersal is violence. Unjustifiable but accepted violence. Are the scenes we’ve seen in France and Chile, for example, where protesters respond in kind to this sort of behaviour also unjustifiable? Often the response… Read more »
I wouldn’t – best to leave free drainage to the poison – but I consider it a criminal offence to let this poisonous hag influence government policy.
So basically, this country has been a pseudo-Communist state since March 2020… Never, really..?
What to be done about it though? Johncock and co., seem to be enjoying their power a bit too much for my liking.
I think I’ll start by saying “NO” a lot more often.
They put this scrawny hag on the telly and people listen to her ?
A hardline communist advising a conservative government, incredible isn’t it. But what is even more incredible is that this is only just making the news … the fact that a communist party member of forty years is giving advise to the PM and his cabinet on lockdowns and restricting freedoms was well known last year – in fact this was doing its rounds just before the Christmas lockdown ….
“A hardline communist advising a conservative government”
A convergence of basic interests. The tankies are just more honest 🙂
I’m fascinated at the way in which there is so much focus on mad Michie and so little on the issue of the crisis in mental health in another article.
I smell a diversion from the hard fact that the totalitarian state in the UK has grown from the free market right.
If you want to debate in left/right terms – that’s just the hard political facts.
Personally, I’ve always argued against that politically senile and simplistic framework.
Few people give a **** about mental health until it affects them or someone very close. I honestly believe most people, covidians and lockdown sceptics alike, secretly think someone is weak and should sink if they have such an affliction.
“Communist” / “right winger” all myths. It’s long been established that both groups co-habit. Communists infiltrate conservative establishment to push agendas; conservative establishment sponsors communists (especially fanatical and violent ones) to meet real politik goals at home and abroad.
The Tories are riddled with Communists shock horror
Why are so many of the filthy-rich hard-left communists? Why are they against the aspirations of the working-class, whom they hold in the utmost contempt? Why is there a determination to keep down the working-poor (“don’t put a bath in their council house, they’ll only keep coal in it”) and keep them in their place?
The Labour party, of course, despises them for having fought and worked their way out of poverty, thereby negating the need for a Labour party at all (hence they needed to destroy the Grammar Schools – too many politicians worked their way up into public life via the Grammar School). That’s why so many MPs today are from more privileged backgrounds, frequently public schools, and very far removed from the people they claim to represent.
This dreadful woman is so typical of her class: a communist-tyranny denier and an “I know best because I’m educated” illiberal-liberal. Off with her head!
It wasn’t exactly a secret she’s a communist. Nor is it relevant. It does though once again divert focus on the wrong thing. She is a behaviouralist and unlike most of the “experts” on SAGE good at what she does. The important question shouldn’t be why is the UK Government employing a commie, but why does the UK Government have experts whose job is to lie to the UK electorate on it’s payroll!