It is dangerously misleading to talk about the ‘war’ against Covid-19

Wars come to an end, usually definitively. But the virus is not an enemy that will eventually surrender

Alot of people are likening the measures for coping with the Covid crisis to the experience of the last world war. This analogy has met with what appears to be the enthusiastic – if not quite explicit – support of the Prime Minister. This is a national emergency in which we are all being told to make sacrifices of personal liberty for the greater good, and the population has responded for the most part with stunning alacrity.

Not only have British people accepted extraordinary limitations on their private behaviour, but they have displayed much the same spirit of communal responsibility and national commitment as that famous wartime generation. This willingness to comply has even extended to the criminalising of activities that were once regarded as essential parts of normal life, like family gatherings and physical contact with loved ones (which were never prohibited during the Blitz).

Some letter writers to this newspaper have pointed out, with great generosity of spirit, a similarity between today’s requirement for mask wearing, with its threat of prosecution and fines, and the legal enforcement of wartime blackout, the suggestion being that this is a quite small inconvenience, which we should not begrudge. The experience of all-out war has been implicitly reinforced by Government ministers, with their description of the virus as a “silent enemy” that must be “defeated”.

This metaphor, useful as it might be to politicians who love the image of themselves leading their countries into battle, is seriously misleading. It is a good example of what an earlier generation of Oxford philosophers called a “category mistake”. Wars eventually come to an end – usually definitively. One side is defeated, the other victorious. Sometimes the outcome is ragged and there is residual fighting on disputed borders or guerilla resistance to occupation. But with the great global wars of the last century (to which this pandemic is being compared) there was a defined, identifiable finality of outcome. The losing side not only submitted to public humiliation – and, in the case of Nazi Germany, to prosecution by a world court – but generally sacrificed its right to re-arm or wage any form of military aggression for the foreseeable future: an edict that could be policed by international law. This was the objective to which all those civilian sacrifices were dedicated, and there was no question of what counted as the ending.

Presumably you can see the difference between that sort of struggle, which was a literal confrontation with a knowing enemy, and the present “battle” with a virus that cannot decide to surrender – because it cannot decide to do anything. Covid is not a sentient being: it has no malign intentions or devious tactics, even though politicians often talk as if it did, thus adding to the air of superstitious fear. Like any virus, it has only the evolutionary imperative of all living organisms to survive and replicate.

There can never be a truce, or even an agreed temporary ceasefire with this adversary. There will be no signing of a great document at the 11th hour of the 11th day of the 11th month. There can be no settlement or retribution if its terms are breached, no reparations, no diplomatic entente. So the question that more and more people are asking – how do we know when this is over? – is unanswerable. Or rather, it can only be answered by a unilateral decision from the “side” that is under attack. Except that there are no “sides”. This is just one more natural phenomenon – like a volcano or an earthquake – with which humanity must come to terms, even if it does have the disconcerting ability to change its form (mutate) and present fresh dangers.

It is precisely this capacity to change that brings such urgency to the demand for a definition of the “end”. Everybody has heard the scientists say that viruses mutate indefinitely: this one may have been stopped or slowed by vaccines (the discovery of which, you will recall, was originally designated as the promised “end” to the crisis), but it will remain in our midst pretty much forever. On the one hand, we are told to accept this as an inescapable fact of our future existence. But on the other, we must be prepared at any given moment to relinquish whatever aspects of normal life the authorities choose, if one of those mutant variants, like omicron, gives rise to particular alarm among experts. What exactly does this mean? That our traditional expectations of freedom of movement, privacy and normal social life in a democratic society can be suspended at any moment – forever?

Even supposing that omicron turns out to be a more transmissible but less dangerous form of the virus, allowing the new restrictions to be rolled back pretty quickly, the precedent has been established. Personal liberty is no longer a right. It is a conditional privilege that can be recalled whenever current circumstances – which are (unlike aerial bombardment by a military enemy) hazily defined, uncertain in their effect and only barely understood – seem to indicate a possible need.

In the true spirit of national emergency, members of parliament – with a few honourable exceptions – have accepted this shift in our constitutional arrangements with scarcely any resistance. The Government is now permitted to seize powers that would have been unthinkable even during a war. If it’s any consolation, European Union member states have gone much further. But the whole point of the EU was to install benign oligarchy in place of chaotic, potentially irresponsible democratic government, so that should come as no real surprise.

We thought we had escaped from all that – and to be fair, the UK Government has responded to the omicron development in much more restrained ways than many EU states. But there are sinister undercurrents lurking in those confusing official messages. “Is your social gathering really necessary?” is a question that should only arise under the most unambiguously dangerous circumstances – and there should be no ambiguity at all about when governments stop being entitled to ask it.

READ MORE at telegraph.co.uk/ opinion

The Government is now permitted to seize powers that would have been unthinkable even during a war