‘Liberals’ are now the new authoritarians

That the permissive Dutch are reaching for lockdown measures highlights one of the paradoxes of Covid

Amsterdam. The most liberal city in the world. Tourists flow down its bicycle lanes and canals looking for a taste of the cannabis and sexual freedom that mark the Netherlands’ permissive approach to government. The Dutch brand of liberalism is not limited to social issues – a love of free markets goes back centuries, to their days as a world power in trade and finance.

So at first glance it might seem surprising that the first call for lockdown of the post-vaccine age (at least in Western Europe) should come out of the Netherlands. The country’s official “Outbreak Management Team” has recommended the reimposition of restrictions to combat a dramatic rise in case rates. The next set of measures could include cancelling events, closing theatres and cinemas and reintroducing curfews, on top of the mask mandate and “green pass” certification system they have already introduced.

Welcome to the new liberal paradise, friends: enjoy your marijuana cookie, but masked, socially distanced, not after 8pm, and not without your state-approved paperwork.

It’s one of the paradoxes of the Covid era that political scientists will no doubt be arguing about for decades: why have the most nominally liberal governments consistently reached for the most illiberal interventions?

Look closer, and perhaps it shouldn’t surprise us. The Dutch prime minister Mark Rutte took office in the same year as David Cameron, on a similar political platform that combined social and market liberalism. In this they were both heirs to Blair. (Unlike Cameron, Rutte is still in power, but it’s no accident that the last remaining true Cameroon Tories such as Matt Hancock and Jeremy Hunt have been among the most enamoured with lockdowns).

This type of politician has always tended towards technocracy. If you believe that the “big values” questions over how society and the economy should be run have all been answered, what’s left is a narrow competition over who can better manage the execution. Measurement, efficiency and “smart” political techniques become the central project; politics becomes a science.

In this mindset Covid is just another neat policy problem: a single end goal (to minimise cases, hospitalisations and deaths) which can be tracked and forecast in thousands upon thousands of charts and complex models, all backed by the easy virtue of saving lives. Just another case study at Harvard Business School or Sciences-po.

Ideals that don’t show up on these charts – quality of life, for example, or the sacred importance of children playing unencumbered with their friends – become easy to dismiss as pie-in-the-sky, or even dangerous. The status of freedom itself gets diminished. Self-described liberals end up with something approaching scorn for a value that they increasingly see as the kooky obsession of backbench Tory MPS and cranks.

That is why the coming winter matters so much. As the first following the vaccine rollout, what happens next will create a precedent for years to come. Having successfully offered the vaccine to everyone who wants it, and even followed up with booster shots, most Western governments have now done everything they can short of long-term curtailments to the freedom of their societies.

Many European countries have already crossed the Rubicon – Italy’s draconian vaccine passports are seeing workers banned from offices and students from universities, and the massive street protests each weekend showcase their bitterly divisive effect. The UK (or England, to be precise, as both Scotland and Wales are already going further) now stands almost alone, alongside the Scandinavian countries, in resisting this step change to the way we live.

That we are in this position has more to do with luck than heroism. The UK’S latest case wave started before most of Europe, because we vaccinated earlier and so encountered the drop-off in immunity earlier. And the chance replacement of Hancock with Sajid Javid seems to have shifted the attitude inside Government just in time.

For now, there are reasons to be hopeful: cases in England are trending down, even as cases across Europe are shooting up. If we can show that living with Covid can be done without destroying our free society, we will have done the world a profound service and might even reacquaint lost liberals with the value of liberty.