New etiquette: plastic is good, hugging is bad

It wasn’t so long ago that a ministerial boast suggesting that the Government had burned through more than one billion items of disposable plastic in two months would have been met with horror and disgust. How dare they? Don’t they know it’s killing fish? Didn’t they see that Blue Planet with the baby albatross?

But the clarion call today is very different. “A billion!” they cry. “Where’s the rest?”

Coronavirus has taught us that a lot of things we thought were bad might be good and a lot of good things might be bad. Single-use plastic, big pharmaceutical companies, face coverings and vaccines all had a rather bad name in some circles a few months ago, decried respectively for destroying the oceans, addicting the vulnerable to painkillers, covering up devout Muslim women and (at least among a certain sort of crank) filling our children with dangerous chemicals. Isolation and social distance were more likely to be labelled a “mental health crisis” than a public duty.

On the other hand, we were meant to laud all sorts of other things we now deplore. Hyper-competitive, global, “just-in-time” supply chains for critical goods have proven to be a dangerous liability. Hugging, kissing or shaking hands were thought to be rather nice customs. Overvigorous cleaning was being blamed for child allergies. The scarcity of close contact between generations was lamented. Flexible friend: in the hygieneconscious age of Covid-19, plastic is back in fashion

And we still thought of Communist-ruled China more as a market than a menace.

Whenever this period fades away, some of our preferences will have changed forever, while others will ping right back to where they were beforehand. In the meantime, many of us will have amassed a truly terrifying stockpile of supermarket plastic bags. What are we meant to do with them?

For those yearning to leave lockdown but worried about government surveillance, it will be a comfort to know that the woman put in charge of the UK’S “world-class” track and trace system has a record of abysmal failure on data protection.

Dido Harding was chief executive of telecoms company Talktalk when it was fined a record amount for failing to follow “the basic principles of cyber security”, allowing a teenage hacker to uncover a vulnerability from his bedroom and resulting in the exposure of 157,000 customers’ personal details.

I can only salute the dutiful 65 per cent of citizens on the Isle of Wight who have volunteered to be the guinea pigs for us all and download the NHS’S new tracing app. If anyone calls offering to sell them cheap broadband, I suggest they hang up.