Why do I feel a sense of impending doom?

I am finding it hard to shake off a sense of impending doom. This has nothing to do with my personal circumstances, just a generalised sense, which I know others share, that more is going wrong than right at the moment and that we, collectively, are failing to find the answers.

The three main items making news headlines in the past week all contain the threat of repetition. They could happen again or go on getting worse. The risks are still there; will we just have to go on living with them?

The vicious killing of Sir David Amess was a manifestation of the great specific risk now run by all MPs and others in public life who become attainable casualties in the toxic crossfire of social media. 

Coronavirus is a threat to the health of all. Each of us must calculate the risk we run, rightly or wrongly, and the changes in behaviour that we are willing to take to protect ourselves, our nearest and dearest, and other people. 

Finally, there is the active threat of climate change brought into sharp focus by the COP26 international conference which Boris Johnson will host in Glasgow in a week or so. 

This risk could be existential. If we cannot contain carbon dioxide emissions and subsequent increases in global temperature, some believe we face deadly weather catastrophes or even extinction, like the dinosaurs, but this time humanity and all life on earth.

The Home Secretary has now raised the official assessment of the threat level to MPs to “substantial”. This means that they should expect another attack on one of their number. This seems entirely credible given the various attacks on MPs that have killed four people in the last twenty-one years – David Amess, Jo Cox, Police Constable Keith Palmer and Andy Pennington, aide to Nigel Jones MP – and severely injured Stephen Timms. Violent plots against other MPs have been foiled. 

Aggressive crowds of demonstrators now routinely picket and attempt to intimidate any MP they recognise. Last week, an anti-vax protester brought along a gallows and shouted threats as Members went into parliament, and a man was subsequently arrested.

Broadcasting on important parliamentary occasions from Abingdon Green, we have become used to people doing all they can to shout us down. We have to provide security for ourselves and for any guests brave enough to meet us. They, in turn, risk facing abuse, jostling and being spat at. 

When politicians turn up for interviews, the police have often stood by ineffectively, reluctant to intervene against those menacing them in defence of the bullies’ right to free speech. The Speaker Sir Lindsay Hoyle wants to ban future “tent cities” springing up across the road in Westminster on health and safety grounds. His concern is appreciated, but the inevitable consequence will be making reliable communication of useful information to the electorate more difficult. 

The Palace of Westminster – bombed numerous times during the troubles – is now surrounded by a ring of steel. 

Electronic passes or escorts are required to move around the precincts. But such is the low level of respect for parliamentarians, perhaps triggered by the expenses scandals a decade ago, that MPs are vilified for looking after their own security. 

They are reluctant to take precautions when they are away from Westminster meeting their constituents. Individual MPs, who face particular threats because they are women, black, Asian or Jewish, quietly take precautions of their own. 

The overwhelming response of MPs to the killing of Sir David, after personal tributes to him, was to shrug and insist that, despite the risk, they would continue to meet people at surgeries as before. Some suggested that they would no longer advertise the precise locations in advance but to demonstrate their defiance other MPs immediately tweeted where they can be found.

Similar nonchalance has been carried over into the government’s response to Covid. The early success of the vaccination programme in preventing many severe infections and deaths has been seized on by Conservatives as a free pass not to do anything else in the face of rising case numbers and fatalities, which are at a higher level than in many comparable countries. 

The flag of bravado is raised by the absence of a mask on almost every face gracing the government benches. Labour MPs mostly wear masks in the chamber and accuse their opponents of not following their own advice to cover up in crowded indoor spaces. 

When challenged, the Leader of the House, Jacob Rees-Mogg joked, against “the science”, that masks are not required because his MPs are all “good friends”. With justification, the Conservatives accuse Labour of hypocrisy because the party didn’t bother with masks at the conference in Brighton a few weeks ago. Bragging rights for mask piety go to the SNP and LibDems who held infection-free virtual conferences.

But no party is bold enough to echo the medical experts and NHS staff arguing that implementing “Plan B” rules must start now to prevent another deadly wave. The unspoken consensus is that “we” can live with a Covid death rate of around a thousand lost lives a week, although this is, contrary to what pro-economic recovery MPs imply, around four times greater than the toll in a typical flu year. 

The Brexit ERG (European Research Group) of hardline Tory MPs has morphed into the CRG, the Covid Recovery Group, with many of the same members bravely prepared for all of us to take some knocks to achieve the nirvana which their dogma is bound to deliver. 

In this country, though not the United States, nobody is yet prepared to advocate a “herd immunity” approach to climate change – that there is not much we can do about it, so we might as well let it rip and live or die with it. The Prime Minister has pinned a blue planet badge to his lapel, “green is good”, he told Sun readers, and the problems can be fixed without pain. The private sector will come to the rescue with technological innovation. 

Alas, there is no comprehensive strategy for clean energy supply, so the use of fossil fuels is set to go up. Smug owners of electric vehicles will be charging them from dirty power. Nor do the proposed mitigations, most notably replacing boilers with fuel pumps, really work. They will not provide an equivalent replacement service, let alone at an equivalent cost. 

Perhaps this is the human condition: to live with risk, especially once our ingenuity has produced remedies that reduce the scale of the threat without removing it altogether. After all, no one gets out of here alive. But that is not the same as denying a decent future to the next generations. We are not quite there yet. 

Man-made threats to man are still growing. That cloud is thickening over our democracy, our health and – even – our existence.