Have Cressida’s Cake Squad joined the drama because they too hate us being free?
NOW at last we can see what the whole shutdown frenzy has really been about. The BBC last week interviewed the Chief Commissar of the Welsh People’s Republic (I think this is his title), Mark Drakeford. They asked him about the sharp difference between Welsh Covid policy and England’s currently more relaxed view under Johnson.
He replied: ‘In Wales we still have a greater attachment to collective ways of doing things... We don’t have the same attraction that you see Conservative politicians having for that sense of individual freedom trumping everything else.’ I thought this was pretty remarkable language – but that might be because I am a teeny bit prejudiced against zealots like Mr Drakeford.
Yet it wasn’t just me. The broadly Leftwing and pro-lockdown commentator Janice Turner said of the outburst (for such it was): ‘What struck me was the way he spat out “individual freedom” – like the very concept was unconscionable, even repellent. The pandemic’s political axis is hardening.’
How right she is. I have seen this from the start as part of a decisive and possibly final battle between collective authoritarianism and freedom under the law. And the current attempt to overthrow Johnson is a key part of that battle. His enemies are also the enemies of freedom as we have known it.
All these things run together – the sour restriction of free speech at universities, the cancellation of authors for breaking rules they didn’t even know existed, the growing police involvement in patrolling the boundaries of speech (I’ll come to the police), the use of the law to bludgeon the law-abiding rather than punish the wrongdoer. It’s been seething just beneath the surface of our national life for years now. But in March 2020 it went nuclear. And Johnson’s belated decision to prefer common sense to collective bossing and nosey-parker regulation has badly scared the Covid Hezbollah.
If he gets away with this, their whole achievement – getting the country to give away real freedom in return for an illusion of safety – will crumble.
And now the police, who as we all know are totally bored by actual crime and disorder, have come tumbling into the drama. The Met Police Cake Squad, waving handcuffs and truncheons and donning the baseball caps they now wear for all the biggest inquiries, are hurrying to act. Has the Metropolitan Police, whose chief Dame Cressida Dick is as useless as she is radical, joined in this because, like Drakeford, they much prefer ‘collective solidarity’ to human freedom?
What do you think? I expect they miss the days in 2020 when they could arrest people for sunbathing or walking in the park, and shout at them to go home. Their attitude is shocking. Dame Cressida and Sir Keir Starmer, a former Director of Public Prosecutions, must both know that a police inquiry is not a conviction and that everyone is innocent until presumed guilty. Yet in the Commons on Wednesday Sir Keir snapped and snarled at Johnson as if the police involvement was itself a finding of guilt. To do so he used Dame Cressida’s shocking words in which she suggested there was ‘little ambiguity’ around the ‘absence of any reasonable defence’. That simply is not for the police to decide.
The involvement of the police in politics is always wrong whichever side you are on. Fifteen years ago I said on this page of the arrest of Anthony Blair’s aide Ruth Turner in the pursuit of the supposed ‘cash for honours’ scandal: ‘Silly people are rejoicing over the arrest of New Labour’s Ruth Turner. This is wrong, dangerous and short-sighted.
‘Just because this creepy totalitarian method has been used against someone you don’t like, it doesn’t mean it’s right.’
We are being shoved down a very nasty slope, towards a society I don’t fancy living in. And in this case it is Johnson’s enemies who are doing the shoving.