Some people may call this security . . . I call it misery
MILLIONS have been vaccinated against Covid – mainly the most vulnerable. Millions more will be soon. But do not be surprised if this does not in fact lead to liberation from the strangling of the country which began almost 11 months ago.
This is what always happens when you give up real freedom for what is usually fanciful safety. Officials and politicians dare not relax the measures they took in a panic, in case they are blamed if anything ever goes wrong afterwards. And millions genuinely believe they are safer as a result.
I have grumbled for years about the airport surveillance and searches that followed the September 2001 hijackings. I’d happily fly on any airline that dispensed with them, as the locking and securing of flight- deck doors makes them obsolete, and I’m unconvinced that anyone could really mix liquid explosives in the loo. I’m ready to take a chance on it, honestly. It’s far more dangerous riding a bicycle in London.
But if I voice these views, people turn on me angrily, and tell me I’m irresponsible. They have actually come to like the servile shuffling, the partial undressing and the X-raying of their private parts.
The best example of this mania is Downing Street, which used to be open to anyone, and quite right too. Many years of terrorism of various kinds led first to tinny metal barriers and then to the elaborate and embarrassing baronial gates, guarded by scowling men with tommy-guns, which now protect our Premier from the people. In the meantime we have given in to all the terrorists involved. The gates look like something from a banana republic, whose junta is afraid of its people, and undermine our claim to be a democracy. And in my view they change the characters of those who lurk and work behind them. But nobody will ever dare take the decision to pull them down. Because whoever does that will be screamed at and pilloried and driven from public life if anything ever happens afterwards. Which of course it might do. But then again, it might not, and is the risk really worth it?
That last question is the key one. If you lose all sense of proportion, and decide on safety above all things, you gradually create a society that is very secure indeed, but miserable to live in. And that is what we have chosen.