We’re in the Age of the Curfew – and there’s no escape
PREPARE to be confined to your home again. Prepare to be prevented from working and put on a state dole. Prepare to have your education trashed. Prepare to be banned from travelling and required to show wads of paper or permit intrusive apps to be installed on your phone.
I can’t say when this will be. But after last week’s parliamentary report on the Covid panic, you may be sure it will happen. Next time it may well not be Covid. But that does not matter. A terrifying principle has been established, that shutting down society is a wise and proportionate response to disease.
If you want to know how bad this can get in a supposedly free country, look at what has being going on, over and over again, in the Australian state of Victoria and
ON A rare trip on the London Underground, I suddenly realised that a public address announcement had just told me to make sure my shoelaces were done up. I braced myself for a maternal voice telling me to tuck my shirt in, or perhaps a mechanical arm reaching out to wipe my nose for me.
I’ve never really been keen on the expression ‘Nanny State’, as it’s unfair on nannies, who often do a good job. But the era of the facemask and of hand sanitiser has reduced us to infancy and given the authorities some pretty weird ideas about what is now their business. especially the once-delightful city of Melbourne. A bullying and overbearing police force has allowed itself to be used to enforce the orders of a not very intelligent head of government. Life has been miserable, confined and under surveillance. And nobody knows when this will stop or whether it will start again.
I mention this because I am pretty sure that the next time our country goes for a national shutdown, it will be much better prepared and have many fewer loopholes than it had last time. Those who like this sort of thing will have been watching carefully and they will have noticed how some people managed to stretch the rules a bit to make life more bearable. There will be none of that. Show your papers, get scanned, or else.
And all on the basis of what? Parliament’s Science and Technology Committee and the Health and Social Care Committee simply assume that shutdowns work.
This belief is now the conventional wisdom, the groupthink which these MPs weirdly claim that others suffer from.
Evidence from around the world does not support this at all. From Japan to Sweden, nations which instead used light-touch restrictions did not do significantly worse than those which put their people under rigid house arrest.
And the hardliners did not do particularly well. Take the Czech Republic, to begin with much praised by shutdown enthusiasts. It ‘locked down’ on March 16, 2020, slammed tight controls on its frontiers and issued Europe’s first mask decree. Yet that autumn the disease returned in force, leading it to shut down again – and the process was repeated in December. It currently has the sixth-highest number of deaths per million, 2,860, compared with relaxed Sweden’s 1,451. And that is despite the fact that Sweden, like us, badly mishandled its care homes.
Studies from around the world show there is no obvious link between shutdowns and the containment of the disease. What’s more, this is the first time in human history in which the healthy, rather than the sick, have been quarantined. What we need is better MPs and a more vigilant media. But without them, we’ll be back before long to the days of the Sunbathing Squad, the Picnic Squad, the Front Garden Squad, and drones flying over remote moorlands, tracking hikers trying to get away from it all.
This is the Age of the Curfew. I wonder which other bit of the Middle Ages they will reintroduce next?