It seems to me that present evidence makes plain that far from irreplaceable treasures, too many children are treated as disposable.

Closer to home, we have altogether different damage to contemplate. All parents hear and share anecdotal evidence of harms caused to children during the Covid years.

In lockdown, the response to the neighbourly question ‘how are you all doing’ was met first with a cheery ‘fine’, time spent digging deeper, however, invariably revealed struggles, anxieties, real concerns about youngsters.

We must now conclude that as a society, we will be dealing with the poisonous consequences of lockdown for years to come, if not forever. A consensus on the number of so-called ghost children, those who fell off the radar of schools and social services during the Covid debacle and haven’t been heard of since is hard to come by, but tens of thousands is certain.

And the think tank Centre for Social Justice says 100,000. The CSJ tries to keep a spotlight on the poorest and most disadvantaged in society. And as early as 2021, they were warning: “Covid 19 has wreaked havoc in our schools. Young people’s life chances have been laid waste by successive school shutdowns and interruptions to the learning.

“The damage caused by lockdowns could not be clearer than in the case of school attendance. The pandemic has given rise to a generation of ghost children. If we’re not careful, we’re creating an Oliver Twist generation of children exposed to significant safeguarding hazards”.

Over the years here at GB News, I’ve spoken specifically about children. My primary motivation for speaking out at all in any context from the beginning three or four years ago was, as a parent, fearing for my own children, what lockdown and the rest of the madness would do to them.

How it would affect their futures by fundamentally altering the fabric of society. When it came to the product pushed as vaccines, my number one focus was on making sure no needle touched any of my children. And so from time to time on a Saturday night, I made children the focus of what I was talking about, including asking questions about harms caused to so many by the malignancy of the lockdown policies that kept families apart, closed schools, delayed learning to speak, compromised normal emotional and psychological development, delayed the learning of social skills left unknowable numbers isolated in dangerous domestic circumstances.

But the truth is that the viewing figures for those monologues, were always conspicuously lower than those on other subjects. Maybe when it comes to children, too many people just don’t want to know, just don’t want to think about it. But here we are in 2024 and our world made different.

All parents know that if their children were hooked on phones and the rest of the tech before lockdown, that time of enforced isolation only cranked up the addiction. We all hear the stories about spikes in the number of children self-harming with eating disorders, simply struggling with day to day life, referrals for children needing mental health treatment spiked along with the rest.

All the time children were shut up at home, all the time we were told children are resilient, it was wine time Friday in Downing Street, a maskless free for all who had access to the data, plainly reassured those ruling our lives, restricting our lives that there was nothing at all to fear. We know where we are. Hardly any child can report a peer that died of Covid.

Plenty more have seen youngsters, often the fittest of the fit youngsters, dropping dead on the field of play for reasons that are never made plain, never discussed, like so many of us have certainly known family members, neighbours, parents of friends succumbing to unexpected heart attacks and strokes.

More of those who feature in the spiking figures of the excess deaths were not supposed to notice, far less mention. A generation of our youngest, at crucial times in their education knew they were let down by teachers, by university lecturers, let down by the authorities that closed the schools and the gyms and the rest of the venues making up the fabric of their lives, that they were pressured into accepting medical interventions even when they’d had Covid and so had natural immunity from an illness that posed them no meaningful threat anyway, so they could get into pubs and nightclubs.

They look on the adults, those who wielded power over them and find no reason to trust those so-called grownups ever again. It’s no exaggeration whatever to say that on the altar of save Granny, children’s well-being was knowingly sacrificed, and many of them know it. I remember seeing at the time that a society standing behind a shield made of its own children, that forces children to risk their lives by being injected with products that were demonstrably neither safe nor effective, and that, most important of all, they never needed, is no society at all.

Here’s the thing. Society sought to put children’s lives on hold, to shut them indoors, to sacrifice their education, to turn a blind eye to the hobbling of the natural development of the very youngest and most vulnerable.

I ask again, where are we as a society? Who are we as a species if we don’t put children first at all times as parents? Our gut reaction should be to nurture and care. So why do we so often look the other way, while so much is inflicted on the innocent by those guilty of putting profit and ideology before the wellbeing of our youngest?

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