This generation of Tories doesn’t value freedom
Why do I feel so queasy about the idea of mandatory masks? Yes, they’re uncomfortable and impersonal, whether you’re sporting a fancy patterned silk number or a disposable face-napkin. There’s the questionable timing, the impact on shopping habits, the risk of mission creep and the sheer normalisation of something deeply abnormal.
Still, I’m prepared to wear them, albeit temporarily – in a choice between full lockdown and a mask, the latter wins hands down. Easily the biggest cause of my unease is the Government trying to enforce them. Had a freedom-lover like Mrs Thatcher mandated masks, we’d have known beyond doubt it would be a proportionate, strictly time-limited measure. Not this administration.
Little by little, Boris Johnson’s Government has sidelined free markets and personal responsibility, a phenomenon most evident in the current obesity crusade, with measures likely to include sin taxes and tight advertising restrictions. The latter, though billed as targeting “junk food”, are in fact incredibly far-reaching; applying to anything high in fat or salt (including – unforgivably – cheese, a food no sane person could describe as “junk”). How depressing that we voted for Cavaliers and ended up with a bunch of Puritans.
The definition of madness is doing the same thing repeatedly and expecting different results. Why, then, is the Government treating the NHS (sorry, “Our NHS”) with the same misplaced reverence as any Labour administration? Why are teachers, many of whom dismally abandoned their pupils during the pandemic, receiving an above-inflation pay rise when the economy has shrunk by a fifth and private sector workers are being furloughed and laid off in their millions? No government can bar people from their livelihoods and refuse to support them, but where is the free market plan for ending lockdown?
True, there are glimmers of hope in the sensible deregulation measures introduced by the Ministry of Housing, Communities and Local Government, which should stay in place for as long as “temporary” taxes normally do (take income tax – supposedly a short-term levy to fund the Napoleonic Wars, which we appear to have won some centuries ago). But the lack of co-ordination between departments is palpable and at times, faintly ridiculous. While Robert Jenrick is allowing restaurants to operate as takeaways without a licence and Rishi Sunak is subsidising the nation’s Nando’s outings, the same Government is compelling eateries to enforce complex rules on masks and restricting their ability to advertise.
When the PM appointed his Cabinet, it was hailed as the most capitalist ever. Guardian op-eds prophesied a terrifying vision of deregulated Britain, noting, with horror, that several Cabinet members had contributed to the free-market pamphlet, Britannia Unchained.
What happened to that Government of disrupters, with its 80-seat majority, and a Cabinet supposedly stuffed to the rafters with swashbuckling free marketeers? Sadly, I fear the mask has slipped.