by Lionel Shriver
The vast majority of Brits have complained only when they haven’t been controlled enough. The prospect of a return to managing their own health risks is anathema.
What was once the land of “keep calm and carry on” could now be the “most frightened nation in the world.” So says Laura Dodsworth, author of A State of Fear: How the UK Government Weaponised Fear During the Covid-19 Pandemic. Data seem to bear her impression out. According to an Ipsos MORI poll conducted in July, an impressive 27 percent of Britons want to impose a government-mandated nationwide curfew of 10 PM—not then in force—“until the pandemic was under control worldwide,” which might be years from now. A not-inconsiderable 19 percent would impose such a curfew “permanently, regardless of the risk from Covid-19.” Presumably, these are people who don’t get out much. While 64 percent want Britain’s mask mandate in shops and on public transport to remain a legal requirement for the duration of the global pandemic, an astounding 51 percent want to be masked by law, forever.
There’s more: some 35 percent want to confine any Briton who returns from a foreign country, vaccinated or not, to a ten-day home quarantine—permanently, Covid or no Covid. A full 46 percent would require a vaccine passport in order to travel abroad—permanently, Covid or no Covid. So young people today would still be flashing that QR code on whatever passes for smartphones in 2095, though they might have trouble displaying the device to a flight attendant while bracing on their walkers. Likewise, the 36 percent who want to be required to check in at pubs and restaurants with a National Health Service contact-tracing app forever. A goodly 34 percent want social distancing in “theatres, pubs and sports grounds,” regardless of any risk of Covid, forever. A truly astonishing 26 percent of Britons would summarily close all casinos and nightclubs forever. Are these just a bunch of fogies who don’t go clubbing anyway? No. In the 16-to-24 age bracket, the proportion of Brits who want to convert Ronnie Scott’s jazz club in London’s Soho into a community lending library, even after Covid is a distant memory, soars to a staggering 40 percent.
Far from yearning for their historic liberties as “free-born Englishmen,” eight out of ten of the British, according to a Southbank/Kingston University survey, were “anxious” about lifting any of their benevolent government’s copious pandemic restrictions. I’m not sure that you can call it Stockholm syndrome when captives don’t fall in love with their captors but with the state of captivity itself.
A U.K. resident for over three decades, I now discover that before March 2020 I didn’t really know the British. Though the U.K. has imposed some of the most stringent and long-lasting pandemic constraints in Europe, the vast majority of Brits throughout have complained only when they haven’t been controlled enough. The prospect of a return to managing their own health risks is anathema. When preparing his wards for “stage four” of the sedulous pandemic-exit “road map” arriving on July 19—an ominous juncture, already mercifully delayed a month, at which legal edicts would convert to official “expectations”—Prime Minister Boris Johnson dared to suggest that the citizenry should act in accordance with “personal responsibility.” In concert, the media, the scientific community, and the populace recoiled in horror.
We’ve all been through our own Covid hell, so I thought I’d share with my fellow Americans what it’s been like across the pond. As I’m a writer, my daily routine in London hasn’t been all that crimped by lockdowns. Instead, the most painful aspect of the pandemic for me has been having my opinion of my adoptive country radically transformed for the worse. It’s tempting to reach for my mother’s most lacerating verdict when I was a kid: “I’m so disappointed in you.”
I’m loath to pile on to the New York Times’s long-standing hate campaign against Boris Johnson, whom the left-wing American media have conflated with Donald Trump, if only because of a similarly disheveled hairstyle. I’m one of those freaks who don’t see Brexit as the end of the world, and Boris may have been a suitably inspirational choice for shepherding his country out of the European Union. But such a chronically indecisive and easily influenced politician has proved a far less competent national custodian through Covid. For 18 months, the British press has alluded incessantly to the PM’s “libertarian instincts.” What’s dominated his policies, however, are authoritarian instincts.
Granted, at the end of March 2020, Johnson found himself stricken with Covid and spent several precarious days in intensive care. That he almost died must have scared the bejesus out of the guy, obviously helping move him to embrace the precautionary principle that has guided his administration ever since (though no receding trauma excuses political panic indefinitely). While the PM’s survival was still touch-and-go, I was on tenterhooks, and not because I was so personally fond of the man. Losing the country’s recently elected leader to this new plague would have jacked up the national coronavirus narrative to a mythic plane, and the lockdown levied only the week before would never have been lifted in my lifetime. Even with Boris pulling through, it’s been bad enough.
Mind, with no written constitution and no bill of rights, Britain has been drifting in an illiberal direction for years. Elaborate hate-speech statutes apply to “protected” groups, such as sexual and racial minorities, the list of which grows ever longer, in defiance of the democratic principle of equality under the law. A mere claim is sufficient to make something hate speech, so guilt depends only on some touchy member of the public pointing a finger. Even posting a droll limerick on Twitter to which trans activists take exception has qualified as a hate crime, as has bannering the dictionary definition of “woman.” Police also lodge the oxymoronic-sounding (or straight-up moronic-sounding) “non-crime hate incidents” in citizens’ criminal records. Now numbering 120,000 over the past five years, non-crime hate incidents have included whistling the theme tune of Bob the Builder at a neighbor and leaving a hamburger bun in a Portuguese national’s driveway “due to their ethnicity.” Britain has imported wholesale the poisonous critical race theory / cancel culture package from the U.S., and its universities are as corrupted with this stuff as America’s. “Health and safety gone mad” is a British tabloid cliché. Thus, the U.K. was already primed for social control when Covid hit.
Public-health authorities have subjected England to three full-scale lockdowns. (Scotland, Wales, and Northern Ireland, with independent authorities, have, on average, been even more restrictive.) Meant initially to last three weeks to “flatten the curve” of hospitalizations and keep the health service from being overwhelmed, the first lockdown, beginning in March 2020, lasted three months instead. Some regions continued to be subject to repressive measures throughout the summer. In the autumn, a complex “tier system” attempted to link local infection rates to levels of restriction, but this fluster of different strokes for different folks gave way to another monthlong national lockdown in November. More regional suppression followed, until Britons were allowed a single day to celebrate Christmas. The government urged that families insisting on marking the holiday gather outside in the chill of winter, or at least seat elderly grandparents beside an open window.
In early January—wham!—the party was over altogether, and this lockdown only began to moderate incrementally almost four months in. Since July 19, originally a watershed of liberty that was steadily diluted to a trickle of “Mother, May I,” a bevy of “expectations” have continued to apply. The government and its stern, killjoy scientific advisors, who never suffer any loss of credibility when their repeatedly extremist forecasts hit absurdly wide of the mark, are already preparing the way for more severe restrictions or even restored lockdowns this autumn. You’d never infer from this record of serial social imprisonment that the U.K. has had one of the earliest, fastest, and most universally subscribed Covid vaccination programs in the world. (See “A Cure for Government Incompetence,” Summer 2021.) Nor, from this extended antidemocratic hysteria, would you imagine that it was in reaction to a disease with an infection fatality rate of about 0.23 percent, according to the CDC. (For context, Ebola’s IFR is 50 percent; the Black Plague took out about a third of Europe’s population.)
In styling their propaganda, health authorities have relied on the sledgehammer subtlety of World War II posters. Indeed, political rhetoric has consistently portrayed the pandemic as a war, called upon Britons’ “Blitz spirit,” and anthropomorphized the virus into an enemy with devious intentions to evade the country’s defenses. The most heavy-handed of the government’s several advertising campaigns—which together have constituted the real “blitz”—was “Look them in the eyes . . . and tell them you’re doing all you can to stop the spread of Covid-19.” Posters showed rheumy patients staring into the camera looking soulfully woeful while muzzled by oxygen masks. These images alternated with exhausted nurses in full PPE regalia. (Their dark, resentful expressions could perhaps explain why, for over a year, so few Britons have sought even urgent non-Covid health care from a service they fund.) This happy company greeted riders at nearly every bus shelter.
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Read more here - Source: www.city-journal.org
Lionel Shriver is an American author and journalist who lives in the United Kingdom. Her most recent book is Should We Stay or Should We Go.
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