The restrictions are still paralysing Britain. We must back the jabs and reopen on time
The lingering lockdown has demonstrated, with pitiless clarity, the difference between the private and public sectors. Small businesses treat the remaining restrictions as a challenge to overcome. Several state agencies and big charities, on the other hand, treat them as an excuse to do less.
I was struck by the contrast during the half-term holiday when I visited an English Heritage site. Everything had been made as awkward and stilted as possible. The queue for ice-cream stretched 500 yards as waitresses enacted various recondite rituals between each scoop. Afterwards we ate at a nearby café, where the atmosphere could not have been more different. Here, the emphasis was on serving as many people as quickly and as cheerfully as the guidelines allowed.
The difference was in the structures, not the staff. I can imagine several local teenagers having applied for jobs in both places. But the café, being privately run, had taught its employees that social distancing protocols were intended to reassure customers, not to keep them at arm’s length. It was a small example of a big productivity gap. And it convinced me that we cannot afford to let the June 21 reopening date slip.
Until recently, I was of the view that the lockdown was over. In all its essentials, I thought, life had returned to normal on May 17, when hotels, theatres, gyms, cinemas and sports stadiums reopened. Yes, there were still some irksome prohibitions. You can’t hold a big wedding, enjoy a fortnight on the Spanish costas or sit unmasked on a train. But these things, it seemed to me, hardly merited the name “lockdown”, and I was relaxed about the precise date on which they would be phased out. I have since come to realise that, as long as the Government mandates socialdistancing rules of any kind, a certain kind of bureaucrat will see it as an allpurpose licence to cancel services.
An example – telling precisely because it is trivial and typical. For several months, I have been trying to apply for a shotgun licence. My local constabulary has a standing notice informing me that “due to the ongoing impact of the Covid-19 pandemic, we are unable to process new applications for the grant of firearm, shotgun or explosives certificates ... We hope to resume the service for grant applications as soon as we safely can.”
Now that was fair enough before April 12, when shops were closed and we were meant to stay at home. It was arguably justifiable even until May 17, when unnecessary journeys were discouraged. But now? On what possible grounds are basic day-to-day services being withheld? What is the connection between restaurant tables having to be spaced out and coppers not bothering to process forms?
Of course, the failure of the police to do their job in full is not, in itself, holding back our recovery. The trouble is that a similar work-to-rule is being followed across large chunks of the public sector. Given that the state already accounted for 35.4 per cent of the economy before the lockdowns (the proportion will be higher now) that has serious implications for national productivity. As long as restrictions of any kind remain in place, some officials will insist on staying at home on full salaries.
What’s that? You’re worried about the new mutation, the so-called Nepal variant? You think it’s worth waiting a couple more weeks, just to be sure?
Oh, come off it. We go through this little dance every time restrictions are eased. Lockdowners leak extreme scenarios to the newspapers, which then get reported as central expectations. Yes, there are new variants. There are always new variants: that’s how viruses work.
That assumption was baked into the original plan.
That hubbub of gloom and fear that you’re hearing? It’s the noise of Sage’s most pessimistic and illiberal members yet again moving the goalposts.
When the roadmap was agreed, Sage published various predictions. It offered a range of five different scenarios for how many people would be in hospital by now, depending on what policies were followed and how the virus behaved. The actual number, as I write, is lower than any of the five forecasts. Since the sole justification for the restrictions was to prevent the NHS being overwhelmed, that is the measure that matters.
If we abandon the timetable on the basis that some unexpectedly bad thing might happen in the future then, by definition, we are giving up on ever reopening. It is necessarily true that some unexpectedly bad thing might happen, but we need to deal with the facts as they stand. The most salient of those facts is that the vaccine works. The increased number of infections is not translating into increased numbers of hospitalisations or fatalities. If we allow the reopening to be deferred on grounds that you can’t be too careful, then we’re abandoning the principle of proportionality, and we’ll probably still be wearing masks in 2025 because we can’t be absolutely certain about the Ulan Bator variant.
As for the “just a few more weeks” argument, have we lost all sense of normality? How would you have reacted in February 2020 if you had been told that big meetings would be banned, foreign travel restricted and dinner parties of more than six strangers criminalised for several weeks? I suspect you would have wanted clear evidence that these prohibitions were proportionate. The idea that we should shut down just on the off-chance would have struck you as absurd. The fact that we have been through 15 hellish months does not affect that logic in the slightest.
A two- or three-week delay would mean the loss of school sports days and end-of-term celebrations. It would mean the cancellation of a number of parties that have already been scheduled – in many cases, precisely to mark the lifting of restrictions. It would signal a national loss of nerve.
And all for what? As a country, we made a calculated bet on vaccination. That bet paid off spectacularly. As far as we can tell, our vaccines work on every identified mutation. Let’s have some confidence in ourselves, for Heaven’s sake.
A two- or three-week delay would signal a national loss of nerve – let’s have some confidence in ourselves