Return to freedom cannot be fudged
Theresa May’s intervention in the debate on lockdown restrictions this week stood out because it is not what we have come to expect of her. As prime minister, she was pragmatic rather than philosophical, prone to fudge and deferential to Civil Service advice. Yet in a forensic address to the Commons on Thursday, she questioned expert consensus and hammered home a point of principle: how can Britain sell itself as “global” at the G7 while it is closed off from the world? How can we call ourselves a leader when America and much of Europe are reopening and we are dragging our heels, threatening, even, to push back the June 21 date for ending restrictions?
These are the kind of points, one suspects, that Boris Johnson would be making if he was still on the backbenches. It is exactly the kind of profreedom, bulldog spirit he used to channel when Mrs May was prime minister.
Mrs May failed in government because she sought a compromise on Brexit, one that her advisers said was necessary and she probably believed would bring the country together. Mr Johnson finds himself in a similar trap. As he mulls over the June 21 timetable this weekend, he might be tempted to delay, given concern about the spread of the new Delta variant. He might think there is a compromise to be struck between the advice of Sage scientists, one of whom has said some social distancing measures and masks might stay in place forever, and the desire of businesses and private citizens for freedom.
But some things cannot be fudged. Mr Johnson must have reflected upon this when Mrs May was in charge, as he watched her make endless concessions to Brussels and the Remainers that, by surrendering the basic principle, failed to satisfy either side and destroyed her premiership.
Mr Johnson replaced her because he saw straight to the heart of the matter, that one was either in the EU or out, and by sticking to his guns despite the warnings of countless experts, he secured a real Brexit. The consensus in Westminster is that one can only get things moving by giving in; the leaderships of Margaret Thatcher and of Mr Johnson, in his first year at least, prove that you only get somewhere by refusing to be diverted.
Freedom is as clear an issue as Brexit, and just as unpopular among the technocratic elite. Failure to unlock on June 21 will have real-world implications: for the businesses that cannot work at full capacity, or even reopen. For the NHS, which has a backlog of millions to work through. For people who want to travel to reunite with their family. And for those whose mental health, an issue Mrs May always championed admirably, cannot take much more of pettifogging rules.
It also matters on a philosophical level: it is not normal, not British, for the state to order its citizens about, invading their privacy, or for it to hold the threat of lockdown over them to exert control over their behaviour. This ought to horrify parliamentarians; it ought to be totally antithetical to most Conservatives – and it probably is to Mr Johnson, who must now decide what he stands for. Freedom or the nanny state?
No one is denying that this is a hard decision, arguably much greater than anything associated with Brexit. And cases are rising again – though hospitalisations are not rising nearly as fast as they did at a comparable moment late last year. The key difference between now and then is the vaccine, which ought to have transformed the debate around Covid yet does not seem to have altered the narrative much at all. How can the Government legitimately prevent double-vaccinated people from doing things that carry little-to-no risk? Does the finding that eight in 10 of us have antibodies not radically alter the calculation of odds?
The public might well be anxious about June 21; recent elections indicate that the Government is quite popular. How tempting it must be to throw freedom to the wind and adopt caution yet again – but while the consequences of losing freedom are far less visible than ill-health, they are there. They will be felt in time.
If restrictions are not lifted on June 21, with the vaccine doing so well, then when will be a safe time to do it? There is a very real threat that the architecture of control stays in place permanently, that we live, even if not under full lockdown, on tenterhooks under the watchful eye of a jittery state. And in such a scenario we risk losing the culture for which Mr Johnson has long been an eloquent champion: the culture of freedom that encourages individuals to take risks and aspire to do great things, to make history rather than be swept along by it.
Delay to unlocking endangers everything that lies at the heart of Brexit, everything that has made Britain a leading nation.
Returning to normality is as clear an issue as Brexit, and just as unpopular among the elites
In such a scenario we risk losing the culture for which Mr Johnson has long been an eloquent champion