This is an archive of a series of Tweets by Bob Moran, cartoonist for The Telegraph. It has been formatted for readability but otherwise kept intact.
Bob Moran is an award-winning cartoonist. He has worked for The Daily Telegraph since 2011. In 2017, Bob was named Political Cartoonist of the Year by the Cartoon Arts Trust and in 2018 became The Telegraph’s lead cartoonist.
Header image by Bob Moran.
The choice we have been presented with from the beginning is a false one. The government says – and most people seem to believe – that we must choose between sacrificing freedoms and livelihoods or letting thousands of people die.
This is not, and has never been, the choice. The reality has always been that a lot of people were going to die this year (though possibly no more than any other year). The choice we had to make was between two groups of people; if we let one live, the other would possibly die.
The first group of people is, almost exclusively, very old people who are already very sick, with an average age which exceeds the average life expectancy. The size of this group is around 20,000 – that is the number we hope to save, although in this context, ‘save’ really means delaying their imminent death by a few months.
The second group of people consists of all ages with a much, much younger average age and contains children and newborn babies. This group numbers at least 200,000 but is probably a lot bigger. The loss of life, therefore, is huge.
Every decision taken has been about making this choice, between these two groups. As a society, we were presented with an opportunity to demonstrate our understanding of the value of life, the preservation and protection of the young and our adherence to moral principles.
And we chose the wrong group. We chose to let the much larger group of much younger people die and, just to make it even more wicked, we did it without any certainty that we would ‘save’ anybody in the first group.
This decision shames us all. It will scar us for generations.
We have made the wrong choice and now, we’ve done it a second time. The people who support lockdown, who wear masks, who download the app, who get tested, who strain every sinew to make this virus seem frightening, they are declaring that this choice was the right one.
They want this undeniable evil to be the new moral philosophy on which our society is built. There is no longer room for hindsight, no excuses for not understanding what we were doing. It has been clear since April.
This is what I am standing against. The good, kind, decent people who oppose all of this are not whingeing about their own freedoms being taken away, they are not moaning about the ‘inconvenience’ of it all, they are desperately trying to protect our collective sense of good.
Unless you want our children to grow up in a world based on wickedness, stand up to this. Fight it. Reject it. Say, “No.”
At the very least, don’t let there be any doubt as to which side you are on.
Read the original Tweet here.
