Shut the pubs and ignore Tory lockdown sceptics

“Tyranny”, “repression”, “crushing of liberties”, “1984” – a whole thesaurus of synonyms for totalitarianism is screaming from the headlines, in print and online, as a Grande Peur grips Britain, in the belief that our freedoms are being destroyed. And indeed they are; but not as a consequence of necessary – and inadequate – precautions being imposed in a half-hearted attempt to stop the Covid-19 pandemic raging out of control.

Conservatives and right-wing commentators are indulging in the kind of hysteria normally associated with the left: to put it in shorthand, they are behaving like diehard Remainers. The context of this hysterical reaction, it should be remembered, is a lethal pandemic that has already killed more than a million people worldwide (a statistic known to be a significant underestimate), more than 43,000 of them in Britain (again, almost certainly an underestimate) and is currently gaining increased impetus.

Are we supposed to sit on our hands and do nothing in response? Do we not, through the agency of our elected government, owe a duty of care to those sections of the population known to be particularly vulnerable?

Yet every government intervention directed at reducing risks of transmission is vociferously denounced as a sinister intrusion of state authority into citizens’ lives. This comes all the more incongruously from a supposedly conservative constituency that has spectated passively while freedom of speech and ancillary liberties have exponentially been snuffed out in Britain over the past two decades.

What makes the self-styled libertarians’ claims so derisory is the patent inadequacy, rather than efficiency, of the government’s coronavirus response.

Closing pubs at 10pm is the epitome of Boris Johnson’s Janus-faced pandemic strategy. We should take our heads out of the sand and face stark reality. It is beyond outrageous that a single pub between Land’s End and John o’ Groats should open for one minute during the present emergency.

You do not need a degree in epidemiology or a dozen peer-reviewed research papers to establish the self-evident fact that large crowds of people assembled cheek-by-jowl are going to spread infection. So, why have pubs been allowed to open? Because of fears for the survival of businesses and a surge in unemployment. Then, if it is at all possible, let the government find the money (scrapping HS2 would be an appropriate source) to mothball pubs and keep their staff furloughed.

Ditto restaurants, if necessary. If adequate financial support is not a practical possibility, if the pandemic lasts a long time, then that would be deeply unfortunate; but it would not cancel out the fact that losing one’s job, though a horrible experience, is not as bad as losing one’s life.

If we are living under a regime of health fascism, why were greedy university authorities allowed to cause a migration of some three million students across the country, provoking super-spreading consequences, to fleece them of rents for halls of residence that have now become Covid hotspots? All the students interviewed in the media have testified that their course work is entirely online and, with the exception of a small minority requiring laboratory facilities, they could have maintained academic progress from their bedrooms at home. The government was warned that their allowing the reopening of universities would produce a massive spike in the epidemic: they did and it did.

The petulance of the vocal, high-profile minority that prizes a free-range lifestyle over sensible precautions is downright infantile. Despite a thousand competing claims about the characteristics and behaviour of the coronavirus, demonstrating our uncertainties, one thing is clear: its principal route of transmission is person-to-person. The fewer people one is in contact with, the less likelihood of transmission. That is why lockdown makes sense, but only if it is a proper lockdown and not a cosmetic political exercise.

The government has followed a disastrous course of implementing one half of the most credible scientific advice available to it, while simultaneously permitting large loopholes, to appease the business lobbies besieging MPs and ministers. Enough: the choice is between saving jobs and saving lives. What part of that equation do they not understand?

“I feel so sorry for young people,” is the mantra constantly rehearsed by hand-wringing adults. Yes, we all feel sorry for youngsters, especially those imprisoned in university halls of residence where the virus is running rampant. But it is surely not morally deranged, while feeling sympathy for young people unlikely to be seriously stricken if infected but increasingly bored with Netflix, to feel even more compassion for older people gasping away their lives on ventilators. We need to find a more focused perspective on this crisis.

We will not acquire that objective, sobering perspective from those commentators, sometimes doctors, who complain that lockdown prevents the population from being exposed to the virus (er – yes, that is rather the idea) and consequently frustrates the development of “herd immunity”. That is the mentality of statisticians and computer modellers, far divorced from people. The smallest credible percentage for a population acquiring herd immunity is a 60 per cent rate of infection. How many corpses would such an exercise pile up in British morgues? We need to contain infection until a vaccine is developed or the pandemic weakens.

There is an overarching irony to all these complaints and denunciations from conservative or libertarian (quite a different ideology) commentators. Everything that they claim – and more – is accurate and justified, if transposed from pandemic precautions to the “woke” aggressions against established freedoms, notably of speech and expression, that have been imposed upon Britain over recent decades.

Worried about freedom, are they? Where were they when the hate laws spread like a dark stain over British liberties? Where were they when the bakers and Christian preachers were hauled into police stations and courts? What are they doing now, when those who knelt before rioters are now persecuting journalist Darren Grimes for the non-existent crime of sitting opposite David Starkey when he said something tasteless (so, no change there) that offended the woke brigade?

Are they demanding the immediate resignation of Cressida Dick and the radical reform of Britain’s out of control and heavily-politicised police forces? Are they demanding repeal of the hate laws?

Where has this army of freedom fighters been, all these past years, when the defenders of our traditional liberties were so few and isolated? Suddenly they find themselves part of a Cecil B DeMille crowd scene – provided they are willing to advance the intellectually demeaning thesis that imposing a 10pm curfew on pubs is the ultimate negation of Magna Carta.

If conservatives want to be taken seriously ever again, they need to think very carefully about the logic and integrity of their latest posture, to re-read Edmund Burke on conservatism and community relations, and recall their moral obligations to their fellow citizens in a time of pestilence.