The imposition of bans should upset us more than the flouting of them
When I was campaigning for Brexit, I learnt to keep my criticisms of the EU on a human scale. If I told people that Brussels was squandering billions of pounds in Common Agricultural Policy fraud, they would express perfunctory disapproval. But if I told them that, as an MEP, I could have kept my wife on my payroll to the tune of £11,000 a month, they would become incandescent. Few of us can conceptualise billions; but we can all imagine what we’d do with £11,000.
For similar reasons, there is far more anger about staffers attending a cheese-and-wine event in Downing Street than there is about what now looks like a permanent curtailment of our liberties.
Our brains are not designed to reckon with the gargantuan sums wiped off our GDP, to compute infection rates or to understand vaccines. But they are very good at resenting perceived unfairness.
Nonetheless, I am going to try to persuade you that rows about parties are trivial. Vastly more worrying is the precedent now being set. The lockdown, instead of being a one-off, is becoming the handiest weapon in our rulers’ armoury, almost their first resort.
If ministers are going to impose restrictions every time there is a new Covid variant, we will never break the cycle. And if the rest of us let it pass because we are too busy wagging our fingers about illicit gatherings, we shall be complicit in the surrender of our freedoms.
I am well aware that, in the present mood, the only permitted reaction to the (alleged) party is rage. Express any other view, allow for any nuance, and you are placing yourself in the path of a lynch mob.
Still, before we get too carried away, let me ask you a question. Can you tell me, hand on heart, that you stuck rigidly to every regulation and stricture through each lockdown? That you never had a surreptitious cup of tea in your garden with a neighbour, never lowered your mask when your glasses were steaming up, never cut short your hand-washing after 10 seconds, never met a friend under the cover of taking outdoor exercise?
Whenever there is any alleged breach of the rules by people in politics, the rest of the country furiously complains that It’s One Rule For Them And One For Us. But this isn’t true; or, if it is, it is true in
Are columnists demanding that all the Black Lives Matter demonstrators be prosecuted? Of course not
precisely the opposite way from that intended.
I’m pretty sure that most people, at one time or another, have interpreted the rules flexibly. But, unless they are in the public eye, they don’t expect to be condemned. Think, for example, of the massive Black Lives Matter protests over the summer. They were, by any definition, illegal. Are columnists demanding that all the demonstrators be prosecuted? Of course not.
Most people treat the lockdown rules rather like the Highway Code. They occasionally break the letter of the law in what they see as safe and proportionate ways. But this does not prevent them from condemning infractions in others – especially types of infraction that they happen not to commit themselves.
In every locked-down country, politicians proved themselves human. Some attended gatherings, some had haircuts, some travelled after testing positive. In Ireland, several public figures had to resign after a dinner in a golf club.
In every case, the One Rule For Them line was trotted out regardless of how harshly the politicians were punished.
Here, Labour MPs have been found to breach the rules by, among other things, attending big funerals, having an affair and (in the case of Jeremy Corbyn) having dinner with too many guests.
My point is not that they are hypocrites; it is that the rules are wrong. Laws that no one follows are, by definition, asinine laws. By all means blame politicians. But blame them for imposing these absurd prohibitions in the first place rather than for behaving like everyone else.
Which brings us to the latest set of restrictions, the so-called Plan B. I believe they are a mistake, but not for the facile reason given by cynics. The idea that they are a distraction from bad headlines about the Downing Street gathering does not stack up. If the PM wanted to move the conversation on from breaches of the rules last Christmas, he wouldn’t have started a conversation about rules this Christmas. In any case, the notion that chief medical officer Chris Whitty, chief scientific adviser Patrick Vallance and the rest are playing along with a dead-cat diversionary tactic is too silly for words.
No, ministers are responding to the advice they are getting from officials. They have been told that, unchecked, the omicron variant will cause between 25,000 and 75,000 deaths. They have also been told that, while two vaccine doses provide a low level of immunity, a third dose massively increases our resilience. Their strategy is therefore to slow things up while dispensing as many boosters as possible.
The trouble is that, yet again, they are reversing the burden of proof. If they want to apply the full coercive force of the law, it should be up to them to demonstrate that their bans are proportionate.
In the case of omicron, we don’t yet have any reason to think that restrictions are needed. We know that the mutation makes the virus easier to catch – some studies say three times more transmissible than delta. But there is no evidence that it is lethal.
Indeed, early data give grounds for optimism. The World Health Organisation has so far not documented a single recorded death from the variant. The South African doctor who discovered it says its effects are mild, a view shared by both the European Medicines Agency and the US Centres for Disease Control.
If these early findings are confirmed, we may be witnessing the end of the epidemic, the moment reached by almost all viruses, when their transmissibility increases and their virulence subsides. Covid, like the Spanish flu before it, will become one of the many seasonal respiratory diseases that we call “a cold”. Omicron will be its Omega.
Yes, of course this is a big “if ”. Things may change. But, to repeat, the burden of proof should always rest with those wishing to curtail our elemental liberties. It is not up to opponents of further prohibitions to show that they are not needed. Freedom should be our default.
That is why we should be so concerned about these pre-emptive measures. They suggest that, from now on, we will respond to any putative threat by sending people home. And that road, once taken, will not be easily abandoned.
There will surely be more Covid mutations. And there will surely be more diseases as yet un-encountered by our doctors. Are we seriously going to start banning things every time, just in case?
True, the measures so far announced are relatively light. To be honest, I thought that face masks were already required in theatres – certainly they have been worn in all the theatres I have attended since they reopened.
But as long as there are any restrictions at all, they allow a chunk of our public sector to sit on its hands. Civil servants refuse to come to the office, local councils fail to process forms, schools cancel events – and, of course, there is a commensurate knock to our national output.
My worry is that these restrictions are being imposed, not because of bad headlines, but because ministers know that, even if the rate of hospitalisation is very low, a small percentage of a big number is still a big number. They don’t want to be accused of having acted too late, and would rather slow our recovery and diminish our civil rights than run the slightest risk of appearing complacent.
Again, why should that logic be any different in the event of a future threat, however notional, to public health? Before 2020, government advisers believed that people would not put up with a lockdown for more than a few weeks.
In the event, it turned out that we have an almost unlimited tolerance for authoritarianism. Yes, there are some outraged libertarian dissidents. But, though their outrage has increased, their numbers have not.
No, we are doing this to ourselves. Having fought the two world wars and the Cold War in the name of individual freedom, we seem to have lost all interest in the concept. We are upset, not at the imposition of bans, but at others flouting them. What a servile lot we have become.