AFTER SO LONG RULED OVER BY ‘THE SCIENCE’, FREEDOM DAY CANNOT COME SOON ENOUGH

HAVING spent 60 years observing the world, but always as a crow on the stadium roof, watching everything but never intervening, I have reached a number of certainties. One is the accuracy of Lord Acton’s dictum that power tends to corrupt and absolute power corrupts absolutely. The example of that truism is in front of all our eyes every day.

When Covid struck over a year ago our establishment saw a miraculous chance and took it.With our panicked concurrence, almost all the rights and freedoms for which our forefathers struggled and fought over centuries were transferred to officialdom.

We accepted we were not allowed to leave our homes, meet each other, kiss our loved ones, travel, eat out, drink at the pub, attend church, visit a cinema or theatre or even argue.

Those like this writer arguing that these draconian rules were wildly excessive to the actual level of lethality posed by Covid-19, except to the very old, were told that “science” over-ruled all and our politicians were “following the science”.

Yet there is a flicker of hope still burning bright. It comes not from the triumphs of our cricketers and footballers but from the growing conviction among the British people that we have had enough and from the brilliant vaccines our scientists created.

In many nations the spark of freedom, once extinguished, never re-ignites. But we go back a long way and our freedoms, so hard won and defended so many times, are simply not to be stolen. Hence the slowgrowing but unstoppable revival.

We know that the daily Covid death toll is now a tiny fraction of the all-causes figure. We have had enough of being told we cannot cuddle our grandchildren. Five years ago, asked if we wished to leave the EU despite the fanatical opposition of the jobsworths who adored Brussels’ vast jungle of regulations, we replied simply: we want our country back.

Well, we want it back again.