IN the week in which calls have been made for “freedom day” to be delayed in England, and in the wake of pausing of easing of restrictions in Scotland, archeologist and television presenter Neil Oliver has called the continued lockdown “the world’s biggest mistake”.
Speaking in an interview in the Herald magazine tomorrow, ahead of his debut as live show host on the new television channel, GB News, he said, “I think it’s been mishandled from very early on.
“I think it’s the biggest mistake in world history. I’m not suggesting evil or malicious intent. I just think it’s a mistake.”
With a Herald subscription you can read our exclusive interview with Neil Oliver, where he talks Scottish independence and GB News.
He described how over the past year, it was finding his voice as a commentator, both on Talk Radio and in his Sunday Times column, led to him voicing the kind of views that he felt were otherwise unspoken – and landing the GB News job.
“I’m apolitical, but over the lockdown I have had opinions. I think it is the biggest single mistake in world history, and I’m just horrified by the damage that has been done.
"Whoever lockdown has saved, I think by an order of magnitude others have been hurt.”
Seeing the footage coming out of Italy, he and his wife, he said, accepted the first lockdown as probably a good thing.
“But then it became clear to me the damage that was being done to the economy, and I became aware of the number of people I know personally that have been ruined by it, self-employed people that were getting no help, nothing for furlough.
"People who have had no support, no help, lost businesses, lost livelihoods and all the rest of it.”
The period of the pandemic, he said, has seen a “stymying and silencing of debate”. “People talk to me all the time – people that I know quite well, but also people who come up to me for the first time.
"And they whisper. On the dog walk, miles from anywhere, people come up and they lower their voices, because they want to say that they think things are wrong.”
The letters he received over the past year, and these conversations he had, and his sense that these "views were not being reflected in the established media" were what, he said, had made him "interested in being part of GB News".
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