Our ‘stay safe’ society treats grown adults like accident-prone children

From hot weather to the coronavirus, officialdom’s endless exhortations to ‘take care’ only feed fear

‘Phew, what a scorcher!” used to be the tonguein-cheek tabloid headline of choice to mark a hot day. Now they are more likely to reflect official warnings of heat stroke, sunburn, skin cancer and death. Indeed, I am not sure how I survived yesterday after ignoring all the advice proffered me by weather forecasters and sundry health experts. I did not carry a bottle of water, did not stay out of the sun, did not apply factor 50 lotion, did not wear a wide-brimmed hat and left the curtains open on my way out. I had been given a clear amber warning. What was I thinking?

Actually, I was thinking: who began this nonsense? How did mankind persevere for millennia without colour-coded heat-health and UV warnings? When did the Met Office take it upon itself to become the national nag, telling us that direct exposure to the sun can burn and hot weather is uncomfortable at night “so sleep under a sheet”? It is not that these observations are untrue; we already know them to be true, and do not need to be constantly reminded by a bunch of semi-official, self-appointed fusspots.

We are now being assailed by the latest addition to this litany of weather warnings: thunder and lightning. Alerts are already rumbling across the land as the storms often associated with a breakdown in hot weather in Britain make their presence felt. Who knew? Well, George III did, since he described the British summer as three hot days and a thunderstorm. In fact, most of us know all of this and do not need our hands held.

The Met Office website informs us that their full list of warnings comprises rain, thunderstorms, wind, snow, lightning, ice and fog. “We can also now issue dual warnings, such as rain and wind, if the impacts are likely to be from two weather types.” Double amber! I can’t wait.

While many people find this irritating (well I certainly do), officialdom in whatever guise feels it necessary to exhort us everywhere, and especially at railway stations, where at some point it was decided that we should not only receive basic passenger information but a lecture on how to stay alive. I heard my all-time favourite on a station platform one October Sunday after the clocks went back. “Here is an announcement. The hour has changed this weekend which means that it may be darker than usual when you return home at your normal time. Please take care.”

“Take care” has become an inescapable verbal tic in the lexicon of modern life, along with “stay safe”, two phrases I hardly ever heard growing up. It is not that people in the past did not want to stay safe or take care but our entire world did not revolve around these notions.

The gradual infantilisation of society that is exemplified by weather warnings helps explain the overreaction to the coronavirus. Public policy is driven by a concept known as the precautionary principle, whereby everything is done to avert an immediate risk while medium to long-term threats are ignored.

Governments in thrall to this nefarious doctrine persuade people that risk can be eradicated when it can’t be. Confusion and fear are understandable when those in power suggest they can “defeat” Covid if certain activities are banned, only to allow them – even encourage them – when the virus is still extant.

Such is the dilemma the Government faces in trying to reopen schools. The country has been so spooked that even scientific studies showing that children and schools play a “minor role” in spreading the virus are not trusted sufficiently to ease concerns.

Those who insist on “following the science”, like teachers’ unions, are still determined to thwart the return of children to the classroom even though Professor Russell Viner, president of the Royal College of Paediatrics and Child Health and a member of Sage, the government advisory group, said: “There is very little evidence that the virus is transmitted in schools.” He added: “The risks to children from Covid are very low and the risks of school closures we know are very serious.”

If truth be told, safety can never be guaranteed because a child can always pick up an illness that will cause greater harm than coronavirus, such as meningitis, sepsis or even flu.

Mercifully, and unlike past plagues, Covid leaves children pretty much alone though you would not know it from the paranoid debate surrounding the reopening of schools. I can see that teachers may be worried about their own health but they can take the same precautions everyone else who has to interact with others is already taking.

Parents, however, are a different matter. Many want their children to go back for the benefit of their education but also so they can return to work. But some, maybe quite a few, will be reluctant to do so for as long as the virus is in circulation – even though it poses less of a risk to their children than many other aspects of life.

If there is an infection spike it is more likely to be caused by large gatherings of parents at school gates as they drop off their children, a relatively recent trend that is itself emblematic of the “stay safe” society. Children are no more at risk of abduction or being hit by a car than when I was young yet we always made our own way, even to primary school, either walking or by public transport. Nowadays, most are driven. Just when we want children to be fitter and thinner, walking should be encouraged.

But the main reason they are driven, sometimes just a few hundred yards, is because parents are unreasonably anxious about their children walking to school, just as many will be about sending them back in the midst of a pandemic, however small the demonstrable risk.

The ONS figures for excess deaths published yesterday show that fewer people are dying than is usual at this time of year and more are succumbing to flu and pneumonia than to Covid. Yet governments across the globe have managed to make this virus uniquely resistant to rational thought and decision-making.

Perhaps in a world in which every weather phenomenon comes with a warning attached and winter gales are given a name, this neurosis is hardly surprising. Stay safe.