Philip JOHNSTON

The PM’S relaxation of the restrictions will still leave us chained by unnecessary and pettifogging rules

When a rattledlooking Boris Johnson popped onto our television screens on March 23 to announce the most significant restrictions on British life and liberty in peacetime, he promised a review within three weeks.

Few would have guessed that three months later many of the measures would still be in place. At the time, there had been 350 deaths from Covid-19 in the UK. Today there have been close to 40,000. That grim figure explains why the Government has retained the controls over social interactions, albeit with modifications as the pace of contagion has slowed.

Now that it has almost halted, Mr Johnson is emboldened to relax the restrictions further and, in delivering better news, he certainly looked far more chipper in the Commons than he has done for a while, back to the old Boris.

But listening to his statement about what we are now permitted to do was to appreciate in the starkest terms what it is that we have lost. For a country that is defined by its love of freedom to be told that we can go to the pub, though only if we supply our names and addresses to the innkeeper; or can get our hair cut, though only if our coiffeur dresses like a nuclear power plant worker; or we can have a dinner party but must not embrace or kiss our guests, these are hard orders to take, even if they are dressed up as “guidance”. As a law-abiding nation, we take these things seriously even when they are not actually the law of the land as many of these “rules” are not, including two-metre distancing.

Many restrictions seem arbitrary. Why, for instance, is professional football allowed but not cricket when the former involves much more close contact. Mr Johnson said the ball in cricket acted as a “vector” for disease, but on that basis the game will never restart.

We were promised Independence Day on July 4 but remain in chains, even if they are looser than before. Even when we are freed, which will not happen this year because of the Government’s fear of a second wave, much will have changed.

Looking through my wallet yesterday was like a Proustian journey into a past life. Photo-passes to offices I no longer visit; an oyster card for trains that I no longer use; a library card for books no longer borrowed; and even some cash – remember that? These may well be the detritus of a world never to be regained. Will those of us able to work at home ever be allowed back into the office or even want to go for that matter?

I had thought that once this nightmare was over, we would all be commuting into cities again, eager to return to the camaraderie and woke minefield of modern office life, but I have my doubts now.

Parents whose children have been at home since March and face another two months with the little darlings cannot wait to get back to the office but once the schools have returned they might think differently. Home working by millions will be an abiding legacy of this time with all the implications that will have for the viability of public transport, commercial property management and businesses like cafes, restaurants and taxis that rely on commuters for their livelihoods, especially in London.

Foreign travel will change even when the 14-day quarantine for all arrivals is dropped. While there are many people desperate to get back to the beaches of the Med, there are others who find the thought of a masked four-hour queue at the airport intolerable. Eating out, going to the cinema, attending the theatre – all these activities are to reopen but their pleasures constrained by pettifogging rules; and for how long?

What else will change? The BBC has been running a series of podcasts called Rethink in which leading figures in their fields consider what might happen. One contributor, Lady Hale, the former president of the Supreme Court, suggests that we might reconsider how we use juries in criminal trials.

This has been a theme recently among jurists alarmed at the growing backlog in the system. One proposed “temporary measure” is for judges to sit alone or with a couple of lay assessors rather than with a full jury in order to get through the mountain of pending trials. But it would not be a temporary measure. Once introduced it would be hard to get rid of it. Do we want the “new normal” to erode our ancient juridical rights?

Or what about Parliament: when will it go back to proper functioning? Now that voting is carried out remotely or by proxy, do we ever see the old system returning or a full complement of MPS allowed back to Westminster? What will that mean for the scrutiny of legislation which was never especially well done and has been almost non-existent in recent weeks?

Research by the Hansard Society think tank found that more than 90 pieces of legislation, including significant restrictions on people’s freedoms, were pushed through without parliamentary scrutiny. We have lost a great deal in the past few months. We cannot dispense with our democracy as well.

Do events like a pandemic create a new reality or accentuate changes that were already lurking beneath the surface? Notwithstanding the death toll, this has not been the catastrophic plague that some had feared and has mercifully spared the young almost entirely, unlike past contagions. Moreover, when Mr Johnson announced what he acknowledged to be an unprecedented curtailment of individual freedom, he said the aim was to prevent the NHS being overwhelmed.

That justification passed some time ago and yet the Government still thinks it should dictate how we conduct our lives, including our most intimate contacts. Provided the people most likely to succumb to the virus are protected, then everyone else should be allowed to carry on and assess the risk (low for most) to themselves.

Our freedoms cannot continue to be restricted by a fixation on R numbers or assumptions that there will be a “second wave” of the virus which, as Liam Fox said in the Commons, is merely the continuation of a disease that we cannot get rid of and have to live with. The “new normal” is a world devoid of light and liberty. I want the old normal back, please.