Opinion Matrix: Modern dictatorship and U-turns
AMODERN dictatorship, indiscriminate lockdowns and why policy is being formed around disputed facts were the issues discussed by columnists and contributors in the newspapers.
The Daily Mail
Janet Street-porter said Britons were facing double anxiety – not only is England about to go into lockdown, but the UK has now been put on the highest terror alert.
“Shoppers are roaming the streets clutching jumbo packs of toilet rolls and Xmas presents they won’t be able to afford because their employers will be going bankrupt,” she said. “The twin boffins of Doom have finally managed to push us over the edge. We’re living in a modern dictatorship where a couple of Brainiacs (Chief Scientific Officer Sir Patrick Vallance and Chief Medical Officer Chris Whitty) devise the justification for the strict rules which now control our lives.”
She said the Prime Minister was adrift, baffled by incomprehensible graphs, confusing statistics and contradictory predictions.
Both the public and politicians were confused by “catastrophic theories” from academics who live in hermetically sealed labs, she added.
“The pandemic is crying out for someone who talks Normal,” she said. “Even Tony Blair sounds like a man who could kick this crisis into shape and take the nation with him. In contrast Boris increasingly seems like a pantoturn who’s past his see-by date.”
She said she was going for a drunken dinner on the last night of freedom.
“And afterwards I’ll order a nice, fresh mint tea,” she said. “I’ve got more chance of predicting the future by reading the leaves than I have listening to Whitty and Vallance.”
The Guardian
Author and former judge Jonathan Sumption said lockdowns were ineffective, indiscriminate and carried social and economic costs that outweigh any benefits.
“Lockdowns are indiscriminate because they do not distinguish between different categories of people whose vulnerabilities are very different,” he argued. “Some are young, some old. Some have had the disease and enjoy a measure of immunity while others do not. Some live alone and are
starved of company, others have their families around them.”
He said allowing people to make their own judgments, based on their own circumstances, was a more humane and rational response.
“This one-size-fits-all approach is irrational,” he said. “The result is to inflict an appalling injustice on the young, who are unlikely to become seriously ill but are bearing almost all the burden of the counter-measures.”
He said the victims of lockdowns were the young, the poor, the badly housed and the precariously employed.
“Poverty, depression, loneliness
and insecurity all kill. And when they do not kill, they maim. Many will feel the effects for years,” he said.
“The politicians think that the public will overlook the blighted careers, mental illness, bankruptcies, joblessness and destitution. They are less direct, less immediate and sometimes less measurable. The terrible thing is that they may have judged public opinion well.”
The Daily Express
Ann Widdicombe said Boris Johnson had performed another U-turn.
“Here we go again. Flip. Flop.
One day Boris doesn’t want to penalise Cornwall for the prevalence of the disease in Manchester and next day he does just that,” she said. “One day Keir Starmer’s proposal for a short, sharp lockdown is pointlessly damaging to the economy and the next day a full lockdown is unavoidable.”
She said scientists were divided about projections and reactions and the only fact that had never been disputed is that 95 per cent of deaths have occurred in people of advanced old age or suffering from underlying health conditions.
“Nor is there any dispute that the young are barely at risk, nor that four out of five people who get Covid will either not notice at all or suffer only very mildly,” she said. “So why on earth is Boris not devising policy around undisputed rather than disputed facts?
“The BBC does not help. Below each government graph of deaths is the truthful statement that the figures include those who have died for any reason after testing positive for Covid within the last 28 days, but newsreaders always miss out those vital words.”