Opposition politicians have awakened from their slumber and are demanding, ‘financial and criminal penalties for social media companies that fail to censor posts promoting anti-vaccination content’.

Anti-vaxxing is nothing new, along with anti-everything. That’s democracy for you. But just let these calls sink in for a moment. Not in terms of whether you agree with jabs but of the underlying message regarding freedom of speech.

Anti-vaxxers are like anti-maskers. Anybody slating a vaccine before it has passed through all the checks and balances is simply denying facts and science.

The corollary of that is of course the pro-spritz brigades, who throw all their chips in behind any jab, irrespective of fact.

The drum that potential supporters of the proposed vaccine should be beating should be, ‘vaccines that work without horrendous side-effects are great, and if this one turns out to meet these criteria, we will support it.’

Not as snappy as either ‘for’ or ‘against’, but it is founded on fact-based logic, not emotions or self-righteous bandwagonning.

The vociferous pro-maskers and anti-makers are cut from the same ineffective cloth. ‘Masks that prevent the spread of COVID’ are great, but not any masks, and particularly not the crappy ones fashioned from old t-shirts.

In fact, you can blow the argument for mandatory masks right out of the water when you consider that the NHS has rejected ‘substandard PPE’ that would still be many times more effective than the makeshift crap that people routinely affix to their faces in shops. If public mask-wearing were effective, it would be obligatory for mask standards in public to match those of the medical environment.

It is, of course, nothing to do with preventing the proliferation of the bug, but that is another story.

But back to the vaccine. Everybody has the right to state an opinion, even if that is ultimately proved to be inaccurate. In fact, you might argue that incorrect perspectives are an indispensable factor in the process of sound argumentation.

Just win the argument. Don’t cry about ‘disinformation’ – up your game and crank up the valid ‘information’, strung together in a cohesive rationale. Apply punitive sanctions to contrary opinions, and we will be teleporting directly to totalitarian hell.

I will however be uncharacteristically charitable to Labour because this stab at thought-policing is likely not with an intent to oppress. They are gagging for relevance and are merely too lazy and too thick to make their case. Just as whinging and entitled social democrats let go of the reins of the Remain campaign, here they go again, demanding our blind acceptance to their point-scoring agendas.

Pretty sobering to think that these clowns are the official opposition to Johnson’s Poundland brownshirting and enabling law-making.

It’s enough to give anyone the needle.