We appear to be blindly accepting an insidious denial of our liberties

The obsession with the Dominic Cummings saga has deflected attention from more serious issues

When you think about it, there is something very odd about the farrago of the last week. Endless numbers of MPs, many of them Conservative, and a similarly vast array of media outlets received outraged demands for the sacking of the prime minister’s adviser because he allegedly transgressed the rules which have damaged the quality of life of ordinary people. Those who complained said that the deprivations and sacrifices which they have endured at such cost to their personal happiness and welfare were mocked by Dominic Cummings’s actions.

But wait a minute – I thought that the great majority of people were not bothered much at all by the lockdown restrictions? According to almost every opinion poll that has been published over this extraordinary period, a clear message has gone out from the country: No, we’re really not fussed about having to stay under house arrest, locked away from our beloved families and closest friends. It’s pretty nice, actually – an extended break from the pressures of work and social demands. So we are quite content to sign away our rights as freeborn Englishmen and women to move about and associate with whomever we wish (even the right to a family life which we grant unreservedly to asylum seekers) for the indefinite future. We’re not even particularly worried about how much education our children are losing – certainly not missing the early morning school run, ha ha. Give us a shout when it’s over but we personally will be sad to see it end.

That’s been, overall, the resounding sentiment, hasn’t it? So which is it? Are most people quite unbothered about the unprecedented restrictions to which they have been subjected (in which case, the possible infringement of those restrictions would be of little interest) or not? Of course, the obvious answer is that these are not the same groups of people: the ones who tell the opinion pollsters that, as far as they are concerned, this can go on forever are living quite different sorts of lives from those who are aggrieved by how much they have had to give up.

But is this necessarily true? Many of the former lot could be public sector employees who are currently enjoying a holiday on full pay but whose political orientation is likely to incline them to attack the Tory Government at every opportunity. So they could easily have it both ways: saying, quite honestly, that they are having a lovely time under the present dispensation, but still joining in the media chorus of condemnation of the Government when it suits them.

Then there are those innocents who are now pleasantly “furloughed” but who are about to discover when their firms are made to pay a proportion (even on the Chancellor’s gradualist scheme) of their wages, that they are, in fact, unemployed. They could easily have fallen in with the happy-to-be-locked-down brigade when their actual interests should properly be with the furious squad whose prospects in the immediate future have been pretty much wrecked by the economic shutdown.

This is all very confusing but I think there may be one safe conclusion. That the people who are expressing genuine (as opposed to confected) rage have been angry about the conditions of lockdown for a long time but were being bullied into silence by the apparent quiescence – indeed contentment – of such a large proportion of the population. Ashamed to admit they were not gladly adhering to these unnatural, dehumanising prohibitions, they were silent – until faced with what they saw as an affront to their own forbearance.

In other words, the lockdown has been much more destructive of public goodwill than the Government may have been led to believe by superficial surveys. The only really informative thing about the events of the past week – and the media obsession which prolonged it – is that it has given us a sense of the extent of public discontent over lockdown that has been hidden for the duration. The serious debate in which the country should have been engaged has been almost entirely drowned out by phoney, self-serving political noise.

So let’s have the proper argument, shall we? We can start by asking the right questions – which is to say, the ones that journalists at the Downing Street briefing did not bother to ask at last week’s launch of the test and trace system that is now proposed as the only way out of lockdown.

Should a free society tolerate the introduction of a witch finder surveillance system in which anyone who happens to test positive for a virus is permitted to trigger the incarceration of any other person for 14 days, possibly in solitary confinement if he or she is the sole member of the household, simply by naming them, without any fear of being identified as the “accuser”? Will the person doing the naming automatically be believed? Will there be any conceivable defence for those so named against such an allegation – considering that it is not possible to learn who has made it? What power will it put into the hands of, say, a malicious, or just mischievous, seeker of revenge against a professional rival or an estranged sexual partner?

But even assuming that there is no gratuitous or deliberate misuse of this awesome capability, what kind of precedent does it set? Is it acceptable, on principle, for any unvetted individual to have the authority, simply by his unsubstantiated testimony, to inflict what would generally be regarded as punishment without trial on any number of other citizens? Even someone accused of a major crime has a legal right to know the identity of his accuser and to defend himself against the charge.

Maybe under the circumstances of a public health crisis, this suspension of normal civil rights is justifiable and legal. But surely we should be discussing its ramifications – which are profoundly disturbing. As it is, we seem to be walking blindly from one devastatingly comprehensive denial of our liberties to another more subtle and insidious phase. And we know now that a public that had seemed cheerfully obliging in the first stage was actually quietly furious. Wait till they experience the next one.

Is it acceptable for any unvetted individual to have the authority to inflict what would generally be regarded as punishment without trial on any number of citizens?