Curtailment of our freedom must not go on indefinitely
The UK is enduring restrictions of liberty that three weeks ago were unthinkable. A rapid return to normal life is vital
Adecade of painstaking fiscal repair-work was undone within the first few hours; and that was just the start. The direct cost of Britain’s stimulus package is £70billion which, as Alok Sharma, the Business Secretary, confirmed on Friday, is considerably higher than in other countries.
The indirect costs are harder to assess, but will surely be gargantuan. The first nine days of the crisis pushed half a million more people onto the dole, wiping out five years of rising employment. With every day that our shops remain shut, the benefits bill will rise – just as tax revenues dry up.
I don’t think we yet understand how vast a hit we are taking. It has become commonplace to compare the coronavirus to the Second World War, but our domestic economy continued to function even at the height of the Blitz. Shops, pubs and schools stayed open, and cinemas were closed for only two weeks.
We also had full employment: in 1943, 76 per cent of working-age people had jobs, a peak not reached again until 2018. Even so, the debts we took on during the war were a drag on our economy for decades. As this column noted last week, the final instalment of our loan from the United States was not repaid until 2006.
This time, the damage is more concentrated. Every hour that these closures remain in force is adding months to our eventual recovery. My three-year-old, who is playing obliviously at my feet as I type these words, will be working off the debt for the rest of his life.
At the same time, we are curtailing freedom of contract, of movement, of worship, of assembly, of ownership – restrictions which, three weeks ago, were utterly unthinkable.
If the opinion polls are to be believed, 90 per cent of us support the clampdown. It is worth dwelling, for a moment, on that figure. Obviously, we should be prepared to mothball the economy if that is the only way to save hundreds of thousands of lives. But is it? No one really knows.
Michael Levitt, a Stanford biophysicist and Nobel Prize winner, correctly forecast the course of the outbreak in China by analysing the acceleration rather than the number of fatalities. Applying the same method, he now thinks that the outbreak is peaking elsewhere.
An Oxford University study suggests that the infections began much earlier than is currently supposed, and that many of us – possibly most of us – have already had the bug, either mildly or asymptomatically.
Obviously, we can’t yet say whether either of these hypotheses is correct. The number of high-profile people who have experienced only slight symptoms – including the Prime Minster, the Health Secretary and the Prince of Wales – anecdotally supports the notion that the virus is widespread.
The authors of the Imperial College report that suggested 250,000 deaths now say that the fatalities will be around 5,700 – less than a year of winter flu. But none of this amounts to proof, and we can hardly blame ministers for erring on the side of caution.
Boris Johnson is breaking all records for popularity. Polls show an extraordinarily high percentage of the public support the way he is handling things. Small-government types give him the benefit of the doubt. Jeremy Corbyn, they know, would be using the crisis to impose state control for its own sake. Theresa May would be indulging her authoritarian streak. But everyone can see that the Prime Minister imposed these restrictions only as a last resort.
When Steve Baker, the most libertarian MP in the Commons, read out some of the emergency powers being granted to the Government, his voice kept cracking but, even Steve conceded, that such powers were needed in the very short term.
Among statists, there is no such ambiguity. They were calling for the shutdown long before it was imposed.
People who crave the smack of firm Government become more numerous at times like this. Fear changes our brain chemistry. We become warier and less tolerant of dissent. Never mind the police in Derbyshire and their idiotic filming of solitary Peak District walkers. Far nastier, in my book, is the website established by Humberside cops inviting people to snitch on neighbours who venture outside too often. Yet, instead of chiding our chief constables for their pettiness, our tabloids are demanding greater police powers – as well as rationing and price controls.
Ministers understand that they will be judged by the number of coronavirus fatalities – even if reducing that number pushes up the mortality rate elsewhere. Longevity correlates with wealth and, as resources are misallocated, there will be more needless deaths. One study suggests that, if the economy shrinks by more than 6.4 per cent, Britain will suffer more fatalities than are caused by the virus itself.
But no one will blame the Government for unidentifiable losses. It is a version of what the nineteenthcentury economist Frédéric Bastiat called “the seen and the unseen”. And so, whatever the rights and wrongs of the lockdown, there will be pressure to keep it in place for longer than is justified by the science.
“You can’t be too careful,” we will be told. “Let’s leave things as they are until we are absolutely sure. After all, lives are worth more than money.” But this isn’t about lives versus money; it’s about lives versus lives.
A total shutdown is literally lethal. Loosening the restrictions as soon as possible is not just a question of freedom or of economic growth; it is a question of basic welfare.