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One of the more sane and refreshing voices on TV over the last year has come from Neil Oliver. For those of you not in the UK, or for those of you who have not heard of him before, Neil is a Scottish archaeologist and author who has been presenting on TV for around 20 years now.

His fascinating TV programmes have been revealing the secrets of ancient Britain, as well as showing the wonders of the British, Australian and New Zealand coast lines. However, it wasn’t until 2021 that we got to hear some of Oliver’s great monologues, revealing his thoughts on global politics and current affairs, when he began presenting on GB News.

GB News launched in 2021, predominantly as a backlash to the one narrative main-stream media news. People were fed up of being told they were idiots for voting for Brexit or against lockdowns and sensing an opportunity, GB News was launched. GB News is not without controversy, however, especially when it’s lead presenter, Andrew Neil, quit a few weeks after the channel launched. Whatever criticisms it gets, it still produces some ‘breath of fresh air’, alternative news pieces and great open discussions and debates.

Neil’s latest monologue is a great summary of where we are so far. I’ve transcribed the beginning and if that tempts you in to wanting more, the full video is below. I recommend watching Neil’s appearances on GB News and if you have time, his old history programmes.

Remember 2019. Cast your mind back to that year, that oh so recent time when everything was different. 2019 was not a perfect time or a perfect world but it was very different from this one of 2022. In 2019 the rights and freedoms we'd had for years and shamefully taken for granted were still broadly intact or so it seemed. The idea that we might not be free to be with loved ones, to hold the hand of a dying parent, to earn a living, to leave our homes for more than an hour a day, that taking a holiday abroad would be for a time illegal would surely have been unthinkable. As long as we could afford the necessary ticket we had been free to travel the world.

Surgical masks were a novelty then, worn in places of work by medical professionals and by occasional visitors from Asia, where altogether different cultural norms prevailed.

Across the pond Donald Trump was in the White House. The US were energy independent then and hadn't got involved in any new wars all the time he was in residence. European states even sneered when he warned against their reliance on Russian gas.

The list of things that were different about here and the US and the rest of the west in 2019 could be so much longer of course, almost endless in fact but I don't have enough time.

So where are we now, where to begin? For one thing, by now there is a whole new definition of haves and have-nots. Society is split across the divide of the vaccinated and unvaccinated. A large majority of the population of the UK and of the rest of the West have been vaccinated against a disease many now believed to have been made in a Chinese lab, that had been funded by the US. It leaked from there in 2019 to the wider world.

The have-nots, who chose not to take the vaccine, who are increasingly glad they turned down the multiple offers of multiple jabs but now metaphorically bruised and battered as a consequence of their resistance to the regime are still vilified and called anti-vaxxers. Anyone questioning the vaccines and or lockdown is still branded a conspiracy theorist. There are many other consequences of the advent of the disease and those vaccines but again I don't have the time now.

I will note that there are widespread reports that young athletes at the peak of their games and fitness have died of heart attacks and blood clots in the last two years and that youngsters from all walks of life have been diagnosed with myocarditis and other serious conditions during the same period but as I say, no time to get into that now.

Among the most eye-catching revelations has been the rabid enthusiasm displayed by governments from one side of the European continent to the other and in Canada Australia New Zealand and many more places besides, for high-handed curtailing of citizens rights. The pressure to submit to the experimental vaccines for example was almost unbearable to resist. In one country after another the lives of the unvaccinated were made more and more uncomfortable, impossible. Unvaccinated Canadians still cannot travel within their own country, far less leave their country. The Australian government has only just relented and allowed, I say allowed as though such control was ever right and proper, allowed Australians to flee the prison island.