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It’s difficult to know precisely when the censorship and the oppression really began, and it’s always been difficult to know who was behind it. But there has been no doubt in my mind that it has for a long time been very real.

In the 1970s and 1980s, I wrote and campaigned a good deal about animal experiments (of which I always heartily disapproved on scientific grounds as well as on humanitarian grounds) and the police in general, and special branch in particular, started taking a close interest in my work from that time on.

Whenever I went to speak at an anti-vivisection rally, I would have my own video cameraman. He would follow me around and film me and everyone I spoke to.

Robin Webb was the Animal Liberation Front’s official press officer and he had his own police cameraman too. When we met and talked, our two devoted cameramen would stand beside us filming us both. I photographed a bunch of policemen who were following me once and wrote an article about them in the Sunday People. One of the photographs was captioned `The Hand of Plod’.

On one occasion, I was prevented from travelling to a demonstration by a police sergeant who threatened to arrest me simply for driving on the road. I sued the Chief Constable. The judge didn’t like me suing a policeman.

The son of a dear friend of mine worked for Special Branch and told me (via his father) that although they followed all my activities closely, they did not regard me as dangerous in a physical sense. “Following my activities closely” meant that they tapped my telephone, sucked messages off my fax machine and every time I moved house, someone arranged for one or two plainly marked telecom vans to sit parked outside my gate for days at a time. Whenever I asked what they were doing, the men inside the van replied that they were just making sure that my telephone line worked well. And this without my ever making a complaint about a dodgy line.

Another MI5 operative confirmed what I had been told.

The oppression was very heavy in those days because animal rights campaigners were pretty much the only reason for the existence of MI5, GCHQ and Special Branch. My phone and fax machine were constantly tapped.

After that, other campaigns attracted the attention of the various branches of MI5, Special Branch and GCHQ.

My successful campaign to force the government to issue controls on benzodiazepine tranquillisers resulted in my phone not working and my mail disappearing.

And then there was AIDS.

AIDS was the first attempt to control the world with a pandemic. And it was the similarity between the way AIDS was promoted and the way the coronavirus hoax was being promoted which helped me understand the truth about covid right at the beginning – in February and March 2020.

In the 1980s, I wrote a good deal about AIDS. I did a great deal of research and wrote a number of articles for The Sun (for which I was the medical correspondent for ten years), and in a number of them, I explained precisely why the Government and the medical establishment were creating entirely false fears. It was clear from all the medical literature that AIDS was not going to kill us all. (The official line, supported and promoted with great enthusiasm by the British Medical Association and the rest of the medical establishment, was that by the year 2000, everyone in the world would be in some way affected by AIDS.)

For the first months of the scare, I appeared a good deal on television and radio to debate the whole AIDS scare.

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