The cure to irrational Covid fear is a healthy dose of conservatism
The Tories have done far too little to challenge the welfare state assumption that nanny knows best
Iam going to suggest something controversial: this Conservative Government should try a bit of conservatism. Radical, I know, but desperate times call for desperate measures. At the start of the pandemic, some said: “We’ve got to eliminate the coronavirus, whatever it takes.” Others said: “It’s bad, we should do what we can, but we’ll have to learn to live with it.” The Government went with a bit of both, and the policy today might be described as: “We’ll try to live with the virus as much as possible but if there’s a spike, we’ll shut things down.” The more data we have, the more sophisticated we can be – hence the latest idea of “differential shielding” whereby vulnerable groups are asked to stay at home while the rest carry on as normal. This fits what we have learnt about Covid-19. It is horrible but not nearly as deadly as we feared, and the risk increases significantly with age and ill-health.
The problem is that a stop/go policy that treats demographics and regions differently is bound to generate confusion and anger, especially after the clarity of “stay at home”. The Government has not helped. It is madness that on the eve of the Muslim festival of Eid, people in parts of the North were suddenly told they could not visit each other’s homes but they could go to the pub. And while churchgoers must wear a mask – even though the pews are half empty – I can go to a restaurant, breathe, chew, talk and cough to my heart’s content.
On the other hand, some of the confusion is down to fear. A lot of people are terrified of Covid-19, not always rationally, and are uncomfortable with being asked to make decisions for themselves. It suits the opposition parties to tell them that the Government’s messaging is unclear even when most of it is common sense, and parts of the media have been just as disingenuous. At a time when we needed facts and balance, we have been fed punditry and alarmism.
But deficiencies in our response to Covid also reflect the deficiencies in our political culture. I’d hazard that there would not be such a receptive audience for emotive guff, or such a desire to be led by the nose during lockdown, if the Tories had done a better job over the past decade of encouraging people to think for themselves – to promote reason and self-reliance, to challenge some of the infantilising philosophy of the welfare state and our technocratic elite.
It is the old conservative conundrum: conservatives are elected to conserve, but sometimes you have to change the direction of society in order to keep things the same. The Britain David Cameron took charge of in 2010 was a country in transition: New Labour did not build socialism but it did push our culture towards the liberal-left and Cameron, far from reversing that trend, went along with it. This was a global phenomenon. We thought the Right was winning the battle of ideas because governments stopped nationalising stuff, but a new model of social organisation was emerging: therapeutic authoritarianism.
In the past few years, individuals have given away their freedom to states and corporations in exchange for the promise that they would look after us better than we could look after ourselves. This process is justified by convenience; if you complain about it, you are labelled irrational. With the advent of a pandemic, you can also be called “dangerous”.
Emergencies tend to accelerate trends, and this one has laid bare the full consequences of the Tories’ failure to challenge New Labour’s therapeutic consensus. We now know exactly where we stand: the NHS is a god. Culture can go to the wall. Small business is expendable. We are told that we “must not sacrifice health for the economy” – yet health and economics are inextricably linked, and don’t assume that every florist or toy shop is a wicked exercise in greed. People set up businesses because they love them. Work is fulfilling; serving people is a virtue. Yet for 10 years the Tories have failed to make the moral case for capitalism, or even for the idea of a vibrant private sphere that exists beyond politics. Politics has invaded that sphere, which is why even corporations, as rich as Croesus, pretend to be obsessed with equality.
How about trying something new? Try being honest. Oh, for a minister who said: “We can’t outlaw death.”
We can take the measures we need to stop the spread; we can invest in protective equipment and research. But we cannot lockdown for ever and the public cannot reasonably expect 100 per cent protection from Covid-19. “It’s over to you now. We’ll give you good information and we’ll do our best to help, but we are all going to have to step outside and navigate a situation that countless generations have faced before because – you know what? – disease is a fact of life.”
Telling people what they do not want to hear is one of the sad duties of conservatism. Many people did not want to hear that socialism might lead to tyranny and poverty or the sexual revolution to unhappiness, yet from the collapsing birth rate to devastated economies, countless conservative predictions have been proven accurate – in large part because conservatives did not do anything about them. They yielded the floor to the Left. The Tories are repeating that same, eternal error. Does anyone seriously think that the society that will emerge from Covid-19 is going to be self-confident and free?
It is never too late: the conservative affection for the past is balanced by concern for the future, in the belief that we are only here fleetingly, so we have to make a difference. The Government should set ambitions for liberty, as part of its exit strategy from Covid. It should set a goal for how small it wants government to be in five to 10 years’ time, for financial independence, stable families, thriving high streets, great art, sporting achievement and ecological harmony – challenges for which the state is not always the solution but, on the contrary, the solution might be the state honestly saying “we can’t help here” and getting out of the way.
Another mistake of modern conservatism, however, is to have become as materialist as the Left, to measure its success in house prices or tax cuts. Covid has brought home the importance of spiritual necessities like friendship, good food, travel or faith. The Tories should put themselves firmly on the side of those things and become, unashamedly, the party of joy.