Time to stop the advance of the Covid state

We need conservative ideas for how free society can flourish in an age where the virus is endemic

In this terrifying new Covid dystopia, the unthinkable is already blurring into the banal. While women are banned from buying tampons in Tesco, and Scottish pubs are barred from selling alcohol, cancer becomes a disease of second-rate concern. The danger is that, as insanity morphs into normality, we will accept what is coming next with a shrug: the total re-engineering of normal life, in order to suppress “endemic” Covid over the long term.

Sir Patrick Vallance’s warning, that we will have to learn to live with Covid even if a vaccine materialises, was the biggest clue yet that the Government is mulling its long-term strategy should Covid prove ineradicable. But the vice-grip of epidemiologists on policy, and No 10s own track record, hint at a statist solution, based on dependency and control. Seasonal circuit breakers, and semi-permanent shutdowns underpinned by an Orwellian test-and-trace regime and a bloated welfare state could soon become the norm.

The first irony is that this could happen under a Conservative government. The second is that there has never been a better time to be conservative than this pandemic era. The only way to manage endemic Covid without devastating the rest of society is through centre-right policies. Lockdown-sceptics urgently need to start pointing this out.

That means coming up with a sensible short-term alternative to lockdowns. With the fading of test-and-trace idealism, Britain is crying out for the conservative’s dreary pragmatism – from improved ICU capacity and better primary care for Covid patients to isolation hotels in overcrowded neighbourhoods.

But lockdown sceptics also need to articulate what a free, capitalist society in which Covid is endemic looks like – with a better functioning health system, less obesity, towns suited to social distancing, and the poor liberated from the welfare state.

It’s time for lockdown sceptics to start thinking the unthinkable too. As the full horror of what “protecting the NHS” has cost care homes and non-Covid patients is laid bare, the health service has lost its untouchable sheen. It will still be difficult but, suddenly, arguing for a reformed NHS no longer seems like a complete pipe dream.

And as the scientists seeking to abolish Christmas and make maskwearing a way of life have delightfully discovered, cultural self-improvement is no longer taboo, either. For conservatives who have for years struggled to explain why social deficiencies are as pernicious as economic injustices this is, in a warped way, quite a breakthrough.

It no longer seems outlandish, for example, for Tories to argue for an obesity strategy that focuses on forcing behavioural change rather than sugar taxes and junk food bans. In Japan, unlimited cake buffets may be an obsession, but being full has negative connotations stemming from a childhood of being made to eat everything on one’s plate. Perhaps this should be rolled out in schools, as part of the Tory U-turn on free school meals. And what about a new slogan to nudge families to their own dining tables, rather than the nearest Mcdonald’s on a Friday night? Perhaps “Dine In To Get Slim” could be accompanied by subsidised healthy recipe boxes rather than state-sponsored burgers.

Counter-intuitively, in this moment of unprecedented hardship, by cutting taxes and benefits in the right way, Tories can also make sure the poorest working families are better off. The welfare state both infantilises and tricks the poorest, giving the appearance of showering them with benefits, while requiring them to pay almost all of this back in taxes that bankroll public-sector jobs. Benefits culture has achieved what slavery and the industrial revolution never could: annihilating both the black and white working-class family, by usurping fatherhood. As the poorest are not swing voters, politicians have never bothered to point out this social barbarism. But as virus-spreading poverty becomes a security threat in the pandemic era, perhaps the political equation has changed.

This may all seem a bit far-fetched, but an alternative to Covid socialism is sitting under our noses. Experts said this week that Milton Keynes, inspired by the sunny individualism of the Sixties’ Californian suburb, is the perfect conurbation to withstand a pandemic through the practice of social distancing. Even before the dawn of the computer, the city’s architect, Melvin Webber, predicted that electronic data processing would bring forth a new decentralised society linked through a “web of communications”.

In contrast, Covid has exposed the collectivist Blairite nirvana of dense cities connected through public transport as both alien to how people aspire to live and a health hazard. Instead, the future of urban planning is conservative: mini Milton Keyneses peppering the suburbs, and onceneglected towns blessed with plentiful housing, good roads and green space, from Wakefield to Preston, flourishing.

Time has run out to win the argument against a second lockdown. And now it is running out to win the argument against permanent Covid statism. The task is to argue that the antidote to the socialist dystopia is a conservative utopia. In such dark times, such optimism may seem absurd. But perhaps the best time to start dreaming is the middle of a nightmare.