Covid: the price of freedom…

By Pete North - March 31, 2021

Though Twitter isn’t much of a public mood barometer, I am detecting a rise of lockdown scepticism and I think that is probably reflected across the country. It’s a combination of complacency and exhaustion. People aren’t meant to be shut away – especially young people. And small businesses can’t take much more of it.

This presents a serious dilemma for the government. The problem with Covid is that it’s just deadly enough to be a very serious problem, but not quite deadly enough for everyone to take it seriously.

Moreover, the debate has evolved. In the beginning there was an unknown virus, the government didn’t have a clue what it actually was and the only sources of data were the WHO and China. This is against a backdrop of rising deaths and mass panic in Italy. In many cases the public took their own precautions long before the government made a decision. University campuses had already asked their staff to work from home.

In that period, the government set up makeshift hospitals and temporary morgues in anticipation of Covid being far worse than it actually was. We got lucky. The purpose of the lockdowns, then, was to ensure the NHS could cope in the event of a surge in cases. If everyone had been free to roam and caught the virus we’d have had people dying in hospital corridors. More so than usual.

This doesn’t stop critics drawing false equivalences with Sweden and New Zealand, neither of which are useful comparators, and there are conflicting narratives coming from Sweden. You pays your money, you takes your choice.

With the winter months now behind us, and deaths declining to manageable levels, there is an expectation that things can and should get back to normal. We can expect to see more anti-mask activity, and more public disobedience. At this point I think it should be a matter for individual conscience.

With half the public now having antibodies, either through having had the virus or the vaccine, the rationale for more lockdowns looks weaker by the day – but that’s on the working assumption that the vaccine is effective against most strains – being that there are almost certainly multiple mutations of it now. If then we see a third wave (if we can call it that) of a new strain for which the vaccine is not effective, then the government has to think carefully about another winter lockdown.

The big question is whether the public will wear it. I suspect they will. They will loudly protest but meekly obey when the time comes. But then the government is going to have to decide how harshly it deals with refuseniks. It does not seem particularly right that outdoor protests face restrictions, and the double standards applied between them is probably more corrosive than anything else in this whole mess.

At this point it should not be forgotten that a vaccine in conjunction with functioning, localised test and trace should in most instances make lockdowns unnecessary. Test and trace, though, has been an expensive flop, and it’s partly why lockdown was more stringent than it ever, in my view, needed to be. I don’t think there was any epidemiological value in closing outdoor visitor attractions, and small businesses which had already equipped for social distancing.

The success of the vaccine rollout though, particularly while the EU has lost the propaganda war, has saved the Johnson administration form being held to account over the test and trace flop. To a very large extent, it lets him off the hook for a bungled Brexit. With Labour giving us every reason not to vote for them, the worst prime minister in living memory looks safer by the day.

There is something quite perverse about this. Institutional incompetence on Brexit and Covid is bringing about the largest economic contraction since the war, yet the Tory poll lead looks solid. Labour utterly failed to capitalise on the test and trace fiasco and with procurement corruption essentially normalised, the public don’t seem to care that the Tories have their hands in the till.

If anything does turn the tables on the Tories, (and that’s a big if) my money is still on anti-lockdown protesters as they grow in number, especially if the next lockdown is largely precautionary. The public expects to see a vaccine dividend, and by the end of the summer the second does should be well under way. If that then does not moderate lockdown policy we can expect more serious pushback because an economy, culture and politics in a perpetual state of limbo simply isn’t sustainable.

With so much Covid news now just a hum of background noise, and the public and the media largely losing interest, and with public memory being so short, Covid complacency will take root on such a scale that the authorities are powerless to challenge it.

I have never bought into the right wing paranoia that we are losing our basic liberties forever, or that wearing a mask around Morrisons for twenty minutes is any great sacrifice, and I don’t particularly buy the hype that we are losing our democratic right to protest. The government is just being too cautious and the police too clumsy – but vigilance is necessary all the same. Government seldom give up powers.

In the beginning there was a certain novelty to all of this, with many a long suffering commuter welcoming the change of pace, but after a year of creeping social isolation, inactivity and confinement, that novelty could soon wear off. Those who welcomed the new normal may live to regret it.

How long the public will endure this is anyone’s guess. The nation endured both wars over a span of years, and the public is more resilient, and more compliant than we give them credit for. We may end up reluctantly trudging through years of this without serious complaint, with protests and riots becoming an annual safety valve fixture, much like France.

With so many indeterminate factors, and such a barrage of conflicting, contrary and competing narratives, it feels like the sane thing to do is to simply switch off, and I get the feeling that a great many have done exactly that. It’s whatever else the government might do to us while no one is looking that we should be concerned about. At the local level councils are closing roads and choking off cities while central government is lining us up for its notionally transformative green revolution.

It would seem that we are so used to limping from one fiasco to another that fiasco has become the new normal, and nobody expects or demands better – much less resists it. The new normal could simply be patiently waiting for some semblance of sanity to return. Not something I would bet the farm on. We’ll be waiting a very long time.

The one thing we proved with Brexit is that our whole political system is not fit for purpose and MPs simply aren’t up to the job. They had one job in the last parliament and that was to agree upon a mode of departure and demand it of a weakened prime minister. They were all agreed that Brexit should be a softer affair, but in the end they put Johnson in change and delivered the hardest possible Brexit short of no deal.

There is no reason to expect they will handle Covid any better or be any more informed or worthy of the trust placed in them. If that same weapons-grade incompetence is still endemic, but without the presence of an engaged and vigilant public, then there is no telling what sort of mess they could make of it. Now is the time to be watching them like hawks.