The state has stolen our right to family life

If it is safe for clothes shops to reopen, the Government should not deny us the freedom to visit loved ones

Did your heart leap when the Government told you that more shops would soon be opening? No, I thought not. Shopping won’t fill the aching void left by the inability to see our children and grandchildren, our brothers and sisters, our parents and grandparents. All those people who may not live under the same roof with us but whose lives are entwined with ours, and make life worth living: in other words, our families.

Of the many freedoms we have surrendered over the last 10 weeks, the loss of the freedom to spend time with our families as we wish has been the hardest to bear. Perhaps you have a new grandchild, born during lockdown, who you are longing to see and to hold in your arms? Or maybe you are a new mother, desperate for your own parents to come and hold the baby and share your joy?

More prosaically but just as importantly, you might be the grandparents who pick the children up from school once a week, or take them to the park on Saturdays, or have them to stay in the school holidays. You probably accepted that lockdown was a painful necessity to get past the point of maximum risk to the NHS and to your own health, and so for 10 weeks you stayed at home, kept your distance and avoided all unnecessary human contact.

But now, before going out into the wide world again, your first desire is to spend time with your family, knowing that they, like you, have been in lockdown. What could be the danger in that? Yet the Government will not allow you to trust your judgment and exercise this basic right, and so you can only meet your loved ones individually, six-feet apart, in a park or stretch of woodland – no hugs, no touching.

Maybe, if no one is looking, you let your grandchild’s little hand creep into yours. But you feel like a criminal as you do so. For a moment, you think that this is how it must feel to be hiding from the watchful eye of a hostile neighbour in a totalitarian state. And you drop the child’s hand and move away. The emotions stirred by such encounters are the most atavistic, for the denial of contact with our loved ones strikes at the heart – literally – of what it is to be human.

When Winston Churchill argued for an international convention to protect human rights after the last war, he had in mind those fundamental freedoms Britain had fought so hard to protect – among them the right to family life. The Human Rights Act, in large part derived from that convention, provides “the right to enjoy family relationships without interference from government”. The Act also provides for this right to be restricted, for the sake of public safety, health and security – but only where government can show that the restriction is “lawful, necessary and proportionate”.

With the NHS no longer in crisis, and infection rates so low that vaccine trials are struggling to find people exposed to the virus, it is surely time to question the proportionality of the Government’s restrictions? If it is judged safe to have a cleaner or a nanny in your home, for children to return to school and for clothes shops to reopen, isn’t it time to trust families to make their own judgments about their ability to mingle safely?

Much has been said about “bubbles” allowing two households to meet at some point in the next month. But the Government insists that such encounters must be outdoors and that no physical contact can take place; we are even to be given guidance on how to walk through a house to reach the garden without touching anything. This kind of micromanagement is becoming ridiculous.

We have grown accustomed to being told what to do these past months and we have, for the most part, swallowed orders without complaint, believing them to be for our own good and for the health of our nation. But there must be limits on the Government’s ability to intervene in family life. Only we can know the precise circumstances, home life and health risks to which our nearest and dearest have been exposed, and we should be trusted to act accordingly.

A Prime Minister who cannot understand the importance of this basic freedom shows a woeful lack of understanding of what makes us human. If we are forced to invoke the Human Rights Act to remind him, it will be a sorry moment for Boris Johnson and the Government he leads.