Finally, the Coronavirus lockdowns in Europe are slowly being eased. Britain is a laggard, but even here it seems that by the end of July we will have seen the back of most of the restrictions on our lives caused by the government response to Coronavirus. We have been critical of the lockdown from the beginning and still believe that the final reckoning will reveal it to be a monumental policy error. But what is also likely is that no one will care, because despite the evidence against it continuing to pile up, there is very little mainstream debate about the merits of the biggest government intrusion in our personal and economic lives in modern peacetime history. It is, broadly, believed to have saved lives and been the only responsible policy response to the threat of Coronavirus.
It wasn’t always thus. When, in mid-March, the lockdown in Italy quickly moved the Overton window towards methods previously thought to be suited for authoritarian societies like China only, Boris Johnson’s government and their scientific advisers were reluctant to immediately implement a full lockdown as they believed it could only be effectively enforced for a relatively short period, so they were concerned about going too early. They needed not worry: the obedience of the British population was breath-taking.
Rather than being a cause for raging debate about the assault on our long held civil liberties and the catastrophic impact on the economy, lockdown proved so uncontroversial and, in fact, popular, that a majority now don’t want it to end. The generous government-funded furlough scheme, which has held a hand under employees who would otherwise have been laid off by business struggling to survive as they were forced to shut, is surely partly to blame. A poll showed that 33% of Britons feel they are better off economically as a result of lockdown, versus 29% who feel worse off. It helps explains why the majority are against any easing of lockdown: why would you want the holidays to end if your private finances would suffer as a result? But what is also clear is that people simply do not care about the dystopian nature of the government’s response to Coronavirus. We have been conditioned to do as the government says.
So, we don’t question the policies, instead we participate in rituals like the weekly clapping for the NHS, helping to reinforce the impression of the benevolent state looking after its subjects. It is a strange spectacle to watch people who claim Boris Johnson to be a far-right authoritarian clamour for ever more draconian policies from the government he leads. The reverence for the institution of government runs so deep that it overrides any concern about who wields its mighty power.
As a result, criticism is never of state overreach, but reserved for individuals in government – never better illustrated than with the saga of Boris Johnson’s adviser, Dominic Cummings, who drove to his parents’ house some 270 miles from his London home to isolate when he was hit by the virus. The media, who basically haven’t challenged the government on the dystopian nature of lockdown at all, provided wall to wall coverage, and people were suddenly professing to be angry and made to look like fools – not by the lockdown that turned their lives upside-down and threatened their livelihoods, but by a government advisor going for a drive.
The media must be singled out for special derision. The bloodhounds in the British press are hooked on gotcha journalism, so their version of holding government to account consists almost exclusively of obsession over minor discrepancies between official statements and on-the-ground reality or, as with Cummings, making hay over any hint of hypocrisy. They have also been affected by the malaise of their American brethren and veered heavily away from objective journalism and into social commentary and outright activism. Then there is social media: Facebook and Google have been censoring content which challenged the mainstream narrative of social distancing and extreme caution, and by “fact checking” tweets, Twitter have begun to subjectively referee the veracity of users’ posts.
Echoing the mantra of the climate hysteria, we have been told to “follow the science,” but the science that underpins lockdown is highly controversial, though predictably, it has never been meaningfully challenged in mainstream debate. The accepted narrative that lockdown was based on scientific recommendations is also not clear cut, more likely the change in public mood in the middle of March forced the government’s hand to move quickly. The people effectively asked government to lock them down.
And that, perhaps, is the worst aspect of lockdown: how it has turned fear into a virtue and revealed the terrifying extend to which most people are happy to outsource their personal risk management to government. The herd mentality of a supposedly informed population is spectacular. Officials are marvelling at how it was easier to take people’s freedoms away than to give them back: witness the outrage when Boris Johnson made the first tentative moves to ease lockdown by relaxing rules and encouraging people to think for themselves – the people were not keen; happy to trade freedom for safety, they preferred to stay locked down. In the age of helicopter parenting, people want a paternalistic government to make the big calls on their behalf. And that’s a lot scarier than a virus.