This is my final week at Nub News.

Sometime this month, I will be leaving Grantham to head back home to family in North Yorkshire.

I joined Nub News at the start of March 2020 and what a tumultuous time it has been.

It's not just the pandemic, but more importantly how we all responded to it.

We really do need to have an open conversation with ourselves and the politicians both locally and nationally.

The much-needed healthy debate needs to look at the role of government and how much we let it and politicians interfere with our lives. The state v the individual.

As I have said before, the pandemic and its lockdowns have seen government interfere in our lives to a level never seen before- and this could just be the start of it.

Yes, we had to stay home, we could not go to the office, we could not have visitors, dating was forbidden, and yes, casual sex was banned too!

Businesses were forced to close, often at great expense to themselves as compensation schemes were inadequate or did not apply to them, like millions of freelancers. Furlough alone cost £70Bn.

There was an epidemic of hypocrisy, with the most notable of offenders being Dominic Cummings driving to Barnard Castle to test his eyes, the philandering government scientist Neil Ferguson and most hypocritical of all, former health secretary Matt Hancock.

And as government gathers evidence on vaccine passports, , despite telling us earlier this month , plans for them were dropped, the Conservative Party Conference did not mandate their use this week, as David Davis MP commented, so how's that for hypocrisy!

Incidentally, being jabbed twice (or three times) does not stop you getting Covid, nor does it stop you from passing it on, so there is no justification for vaccine passports, as I have mentioned earlier.

Now, our politicians tell us lockdown was done to save lives, but still 136,000 have died with Covid-19. Yet, millions have had the virus, and whilst we cannot downplay its seriousness, we cannot overplay it either. It must be set into context.

The UK government itself now estimates the Covid mortality rate is now similar to flu - 0.096 % about one-in-1000.

And whilst 100 or so dying daily is too much, or whatever today's figure is, that too must be set into context with the 450 or so who die of cancer every day, a similar from heart-related conditions, and other causes too numerous to mention.

It is clear our politicians are not fountains of knowledge and neither are the economic and medical experts they choose to take advice from. The have a range of opinions and the science is never settled.

Did they get their priorities right? Was it correct to turn the NHS into a National Covid Service?

Clearly our lockdowns did not work, and most certainly lockdowns don't work if you need three of them, with talk of a possible fourth this autumn. How many do we need?

Other countries like Sweden had no national lockdowns and did better than we did in terms of lost lives adjusted for population. Relatively free Florida did better than relatively restricted California.

We need to look at the impact of lockdowns on health. We have the missed cancer and other treatments. Mental illness has rocketed, including amongst children. Hospital waiting lists now run into the many millions, so how many more will die whilst they are waiting, when quicker treatment could have saved so many?

We also see the excess deaths at home, more than 60,000 in England and Wales alone from non-covid conditions. Staying at home to 'protect the NHS' did not work for them.

And then we have the hit taken by the economy, down 20 per cent at one stage, the highest in the developed world. It still has to recover totally, but poorer countries have poorer health, so the impact of lockdown on the economy will also deliver more fatalities.

And we need a stronger economy to pay for the NHS, which locking down the country has made that much harder.

We have just seen National Insurance and other taxes will soon go up, supposedly to cover social care. But the reality is the hundreds of billions frittered on lockdown means the money has to come from somewhere, as there's none left, the country is now ever so deeply in debt.

Expect more tax rises too, not just to cover Covid, but the Prime Minister's ambitions, or is that his wife's ambitions, for the Zero Carbon economy.

Replacing those boilers won't come cheap, wind turbines have already added to our energy bills, electric cars are more expensive as well, and they rely on rare earth metals produced in the most environmentally-unfriendly way possible. Those wind turbines are notorious bird killers too.

No wonder the UK's tax burden is at its highest in many decades, making the Tories, or is it 'Con-socialists' now, the party of high taxation, with their only saving grace being that Labour would be even worse.

But when hundreds of billions have been spent on lockdown, just think if instead that money had gone on helping develop alternative technologies and energy sources, as well as better insulation, to give us that cleaner and greener Carbon Zero economy. Lockdown is certainly bad for the planet.

And now, after we have seen so much government folly, we have even more.

We have our politicians rejecting the advice of their own JCVI advisers and calling on 12-15 year old to be vaccinated, when there is much evidence to suggest the vaccine offers no justifiable benefits to them.

Indeed, the Guardian has just reported of the risks the vaccine presents to boys especially.

And the government's own Yellow card reporting system reports more than 1600 people overall have died from taking the vaccine.

Government still talks of vaccine passports, when the vaccine does not stop you catching covid, nor does it stop you passing it on. It just, we're told, lessens your risk of hospitalisation and death. Yet ten times more are dying of Covid right now, than at this time last year when there was no vaccine.

Israel is vaccinating heavily and its Covid-19 case numbers are rocketing. Australia is in severe lockdown and its case numbers are rocketing too. Isolated New Zealand is not the lockdown poster child it used to be and its PM Jacinda Adern finally accepting 'Zero Covid' is an unattainable dream . Making mask wearing compulsory, both in the UK and elsewhere, didn't stop numbers from rising either.

Talking of Australia, I am horrified at the oppression shown by its authorities, the brutality shown by its police . They charge like stormtroopers out of Star Wars at people and protesters, women have their throats grabbed by officers for not wearing masks outside , and violent arrests happen in front of their crying children too. They use pepper spray and rubber bullets at crowds too. It's all over twitter, go and have a [L] https://twitter.com/MaajidNawaz?ref_src=twsrc%5Egoogle%7Ctwcamp%5Eserp%7Ctwgr%5Eauthor [L+] look.

If this was happening in China to its minority muslims, rather than the State of Victoria being dictatorial against its own people, Rutland MP Alicia Kearns would be writing and complaining about it. She really does need to ask questions at the highest level about the oppression in once-free Australia, our new partners in Aukus. Fortunately, Polish MPs, who will have memories of living in a tyrannical dictatorship, have made a start.

Once the 'lucky country', a care-free part of our Commonwealth, its people now live under a yolk as bad as anything Beijing can deliver and considering the many months I spent living and visiting there, it pains me to see what is happening there today. Take a look at the You Tube video above.

Could it happen here? Well, vaccine passports are being introduced in Europe, with Lithuania a prime example where you need to show the right papers to enter the shopping centre, attend an event, go to a café, etc. You may even be suspended from your job without pay. Yes, it's no jab, no job.

Whatever happened to free choice? If the vaccine was totally safe and effective like the vaccines for other conditions, like those we readily take when born or when we go somewhere exotic, there would not be the same opposition. And if we believe in the vaccine, we should not not be afraid of those who haven't had it!

Branding such people 'anti-vaxxers' is just a plain and simple smear and don't use it against me. I have been vaccinated twice. I just believe in free choice over one's own body, like with a 'A Woman's Right to Choose'.

Scotland has only just delayed the imposition of its own vaccine passport scheme and our own government is working on what it calls Plan B, should case numbers rise as feared, or some predict. Not that the doom-laden SAGE advisors ever get their forecasts right.

So we need to have that conversation about the role of government. At best, the politicians are doing it for our own good, to save lives, not that their interventions have worked. At worst the 'conspiracy theorists' with their talk of a dystopian Great Reset have it right.

How free should we live our lives? Do we make our own risk assessments or have government dictate and decide for us? Is it better to trade freedom for the promise of security. That was a theme of the excellent film 'V for Vendetta', one of whose main characters said: "People shouldn't be afraid of their governments. Governments should be afraid of their own people!"

I could not agree more!

• This is an updated and amended version of Friday's 'exclusive' article in our FREE weekly newsletter. To subscribe to our FREE weekly newsletter, which contains a round-up, please enter your email address in the coloured box.