PM must lead us closer to normality
For many Britons, yesterday’s press conference will have been a crushing disappointment. The Prime Minister didn’t look happy either. It felt as though we had been heading in a positive direction – opening up, going back to business.
Then came some reversals: tourists in Spain suddenly faced 14-day quarantine on return. On Thursday, residents in parts of northern England, many of them looking forward to celebrating Eid, were told a few hours before midnight that they couldn’t meet with people outside their households. And now further easing has been postponed and face masks made mandatory in even more walks of life, including places of worship. These are decisions with real-world consequences: some wedding parties, for instance, will be cancelled. Anyone with a holiday booking is probably thinking twice about going.
According to polls, the public broadly favours caution and no one can second-guess the data or the scientific advice the Government has acted on; the Office for National Statistics reports that the number of daily cases has indeed increased since last week. As for the Labour opposition, it questions the messaging but few of the details.
Controlling the pandemic was always going to be a stop-go operation, and as Professor Chris Whitty, the chief medical officer, said at the press conference, administrations across the world could only judge the effects of easing after they had tried it. Reversals were almost inevitable.
One could argue that the glass is half full, that we are in fact proceeding two steps forwards and only one step back. The total lockdown of spring is over, the Government wants as many people to return to work as possible and the goal is still to reopen all schools come September. The implication of the PM’S remarks is that local lockdowns and the regulation of leisure and culture are the price paid to revive business and education – and what the PM wants to avoid more than anything, as he told The Telegraph last weekend, is a second, countrywide lockdown.
There was a palpable difference between the tone of the PM’S presentation and that of the chief medical officer. Prof Whitty is a doctor. It’s the nature of that profession to tell us the facts and prescribe the safest course of action possible, which has produced a most sobering prognosis: “We have probably reached near the limit or the limits of what we can do in terms of opening up society,” he said. “If we wish to do more things in the future, we may have to do less of some other things.”
This may well be true and most people will trust what he says, but it is still demoralising. The PM, on the other hand, was rather keener to stress progress made – and that’s because, as a politician, he has to think not only about infection rates but also schools, jobs and holding the country together.
The Government keeps reassuring us that it has chosen to defer to “the science”; Mr Johnson, however, understands that we need a bit of vision as well, something to look forward to. Honesty has to be mixed in with positivity, not only for the sake of boosting morale but because we all need a sense of what it is we’re working towards. Is the goal to normalise these restrictions to liberty? Or to create the circumstances under which they gradually become redundant?
The coming debate will concern how far the UK is prepared to go to prevent a second wave. In an ideal world, a second total lockdown would be completely taken off the table and policy would flow from that decision. Mr Johnson will not, and cannot, do this. Nevertheless, we can surmise that his instinct tells him that another lockdown would be a complete economic and social disaster – which is accurate – and that Britain cannot countenance shutting down society yet again. This leads one logically to the argument that Covid-19 is something human beings have to come to terms with. Capacity in the NHS must be built up and everything must be thrown at finding a vaccine – and Britain is a leader in that field.
Until an effective treatment is discovered, restrictions may well be necessary. Nevertheless there are those who argue that the balance should come down on the side of allowing the maximum liberty rather than the minimum, that the most vulnerable should be shielded for their own protection and those who are less vulnerable should be given as much information as possible and then left to make decisions for themselves.
Trusting people is in the PM’S DNA. It’s one of the explanations for his popularity with the Tory grassroots. While remaining understandably cautious, Mr Johnson needs to fashion a message that reassures the public that the leviathan is not here to stay and this is all part of a plan to return to something much closer to normality as soon as we can.
One could argue that the glass is half full, that we are in fact proceeding two steps forwards and only one step back
This leads logically to the argument that Covid-19 is something human beings have to come to terms with