The PM has apologised after being accused of breaking lockdown rules. Fine. But will anyone apologise for setting them? Some were clearly impossible or unnecessary, or why else would Downing Street staff have ignored them? I assume these people aren’t suicidal, although buying wine from the Co-op implies a certain recklessness.
My fear is that we’ll become so obsessed with the breaking of rules by Westminster party animals that we’ll emerge from this pandemic without a proper assessment of how much damage the restrictions regime did – to our society, health and economy.
Action was needed in March 2020. We could’ve been tougher: the borders stayed open too long and care homes were poorly protected. But last week, when Labour MPs in the Commons painted the PM as a libertine, they listed rules affecting their constituents that were petty and cruel. Someone unable to visit a brother with stage 4 throat cancer. A son forced to sit outside a hospital while, inside, his mother died. And, most preposterous of all, a funeral conducted behind a barrier at which mourners weren’t even allowed to place flowers on the coffin. What was the worry here? That the deceased might catch Covid?
It wasn’t just the words of the MPs that struck me as surreal, but the tone. They seemed blissfully unaware that what they were describing was objectively insane: on the contrary, by furiously attacking government employees for disregarding the code, they reinforced the narrative that the rules were basically sound and it was our civic duty to obey them without question. But at what cost?
I have in front of me the prisons inspectorate report for England and Wales, 2020/21. No MP quoted from it. Why would they? Prisoners don’t vote. But they do feel pain.
The report says: “keeping the worst excesses of the virus at bay has been achieved at significant cost to the welfare … of prisoners, most of whom have spent the pandemic locked in their cells for 22.5 hours a day” – with limited ventilation and (sometimes) blocked toilets. “Prisoners waited for hours to be let out, often resorting to urinating or defecating in buckets or bags”. One man held in isolation was allowed to leave the cell just once a week for a 15 minute shower.
Some inmates didn’t see friends or family for over a year; some preferred not to because physical contact was outlawed, even with children who didn’t understand the rules. “We came across one case where a prisoner was banned from visits for a month and sent into quarantine because his toddler came and sat on his lap.” If you read this in an Amnesty International report on prison conditions in Cuba, you would shake your head at the savagery of foreign regimes. Sadly and a little smugly, because we all know that couldn’t happen here.
“But if it happened here, Tim,” comes the reply, “it did so for a reason”: an unknown disease that took us by surprise and demanded a rapid and radical response. To this I give three objections. First, even if you do something wrong for the right motives, you still say sorry. If someone slapped my face because he thought he saw a mosquito on my nose, I’d appreciate the thought, but I’d still expect an apology.
Second, many restrictions defied common sense at the time, and anyone with a brain in their head, let alone a first in PPE from Oxford, could see it. Why did the police ask people to stop swimming in the sea?!
Third, we now realise that policymakers themselves weren’t obeying all the measures they set for us, despite insisting that the situation was deadly serious. More than that: they slapped down anyone who suggested the rules were illogical, or who argued in favour of a focused protection strategy (the Great Barrington Declaration) or pointed to countries that relied on voluntarism rather than solely edicts (Sweden, which emerged from 2020 with a smaller increase in its overall mortality rate than most European countries).
The paranoid style of the lockdown, with its demonisation of dissent and fear of “fake news”, fuels my suspicion that this was the establishment’s sub-conscious version of Take Back Control.
Remember we had been through several years of political turmoil in which democracy was said to be broken, not because of low participation but because the people kept voting the wrong way. Lockdown reasserted the authority of the experts, of the bureaucrats and academics stung by Brexit – the Power Elite identified by C Wright Mills who aspire always to be “the Ones Who Decide.”
They reordered the polity by locking us in our homes. Executive government was strengthened; the primacy of data re-established (no matter how inaccurate its predictions). The new priorities involved the revivification of the state (even if it was private industry that fed us or helped invent a vaccine), with the NHS repositioned as the centre of all political discourse. In short, politicians – Tory and Labour – will probably never properly account for the worst of the rules because they waved them through parliament and because there is no political gain from denouncing them now, only an institutional loss of face and moral authority.
The rules were an expression of power, and no one gives that up easily. Just ask Boris Johnson.
