Our acceptance of a mass lock-in is more dangerous than any party

How did this extraordinary transformation of our values occur so swiftly and with so little examination?

Both of the following statements are true. 1. On May 20 2020, the Prime Minister appeared at a companionable office drinks party and offered staff his personal thanks for their efforts in what had been an exceptionally difficult working period.

2. On May 20 2020, the

Prime Minister participated in a gathering which was prohibited by regulations set down by his own Government and which was, in the terrible circumstances of the time, unforgivably callous and arrogant.

Let us put aside for the moment the immediate furore over Boris Johnson’s future and the further flood of Downing Street festivity stories which may not be finished yet. We need to ask the question that must, given what has prevailed in our lives for the past two years, be most serious. How on earth did we get to a point where events and decisions which would once have been regarded as commonplace, even virtuous – an employer expressing good wishes to staff at a party, a child embracing elderly grandparents, a relative making regular visits to a dying hospital patient – became illegal?

In fact, worse than illegal: immoral and irresponsible. How did the most natural, admirable and generous behaviour come to be both technically criminal and anathematised as selfish and antisocial? And, further, how did this extraordinary transformation of traditional values occur so swiftly and with so little examination of its ramifications? Why was the public acceptance of it so crushingly unanimous that even raising doubts about its soundness or logic was seen as a kind of sedition?

Of course there are some provisional answers to this, most of which fall into two broad categories. The first is fear. The prospect of a fatal plague which might be unstoppable simply blew every other consideration – personal freedom, the need for human contact, even familial intimacy – out of sight. But there is something rather odd in the historical progress of events.

At the beginning of this story, the scientific experts (and the government authorities who were so religiously following their advice) were telling us explicitly that most people who contracted Covid-19 would not become seriously ill. That, in fact, they would very possibly not even know they had the virus. (I recall Sir Chris Whitty, among others, stating this clearly at one of the early Downing Street briefings.) And this was being said before the arrival of the vaccines or even any reliable treatments.

Yet somehow this virus, which had been described as a threat largely limited (as it was then and still is) to those with other comorbidities, transmogrified into a national emergency justifying measures that were, in the literal sense of the word, inhuman: restrictions that, if rigorously followed, would dismantle many of the most fundamental, instinctive forms of social and emotional life. Yes there was some resistance. But the general assent to all of this in principle was overwhelming. The justification for the mass house arrest of the population was a blur of two issues: protection for those who were actually susceptible to the most severe form of the illness – those with predisposing health conditions – and the need to protect the NHS from collapse, which was a separate but not unrelated problem.

The public discourse was dominated by the dissemination of constantly escalating terror. The broadcast news became a relentless succession of the most pessimistic possible analysis and statistical prediction, much of which we now know to have been mistaken and which, even at the time, was more contentious than the official messaging (relayed unchallenged by the broadcast coverage) acknowledged. But what was worse – much worse – was what happened when government and NHS authorities discovered that instead of legally prohibiting the behaviour they wished to suppress, they could use psychologically coercive techniques to manipulate public attitudes.

Did the events of the last century teach us nothing about the terrible consequences of using fear to control a population and about the peculiarly sinister force of a fear that cannot be questioned or debated? Whatever disquiet there may have been in governing circles about this flight into totalitarian technique, it was clearly outweighed by the appalling consequences that NHS leaders, and their unions, predicted were imminent.

There must be an answer eventually to the obvious query: why did virtually all of the healthcare systems in the developed world react to this pandemic with such unprecedented panic? The Hong Kong flu epidemic of 1968, which took far more of the young and healthy, did not evoke anything like this response. (Is contemporary healthcare now so stretched because it has taken on much wider responsibilities for treatments and conditions than it did a generation ago?)

Then there was that other, more salubrious pressure that led to this mass surrender of the norms of life and liberty: the introduction of an alternative set of virtues. We were enduring very special conditions that required an entirely new set of social responses. The old understanding of societal connection depending on physical contact had to be replaced by a sense of communal responsibility in which concern for people meant avoiding them.

By ironic extension, the basic principle of a national healthcare system – compassion, which in its most natural form involves physically comforting those you care for – had to be suspended. It was perverse and completely alien to all the natural impulses that human beings possess and yet, with the aid of an exceptionally forceful advertising campaign and, again, the enthusiastic complicity of the broadcast media, it succeeded. Each of these ingredients – the promulgation of fear and the creation of a new moral order by psychological manipulation – would have been powerful alone. Together they were unbeatable.

The confusion was understandable and the concerns were genuine, but something very dangerous happened to our political culture during this horrendous time. The significance of it really should not be lost in the sound and fury of party power games.

The public discourse was dominated by the circulation of constantly escalating terror. The broadcast news became a relentless succession of the most pessimistic possible