Why didn’t more people resist lockdown?

Last week’s Spectator interview with Rishi Sunak conveyed the anti-science ‘science’, the paucity of even fag-packet cost-benefit analysis and the ideological lockdown of Boris Johnson’s cabinet that brought forth calamitously extensive lockdowns of everyone else. Ever since, numerous politicians and institutions implicated in this rash experiment have had a vested interest in maintaining the myth that putting whole societies into standby mode, as if countries are mere flatscreens that can be benignly switched on and off by governmental remote, saved many millions of lives.

As it will take years for culpable parties to retire, I once feared that a full generation would need to elapse before we recognised lockdowns for what they were: the biggest public health debacle in history. Yet everywhere I turn lately, still another journalist is decrying the avoidable social, medical and economic costs of this hysterical over-reaction to a virus, while deriding lockdown zealots for having vilified sceptics of a policy that may well end up killing more people than it protected. The Covid revisionism is welcome – though it’s a good deal easier to publish these opinion pieces now than it was two years ago, and I speak from experience.

I’m all for holding officialdom accountable for mistakes from on high that continue to generate dire consequences, not least today’s soaring inflation. Yet it’s worth pressing more uncomfortably: should the public not also be held accountable? After all, the professional naysayer Neil Ferguson notoriously assumed that democracies would never ‘get away with’ lockdowns in Europe – ‘and then Italy did it. And we realised that we could.’ What facilitated sending entire populations to their room like naughty children? Not merely draconian laws, but widespread public eagerness to obey them. Johnson’s heavy hand was forced in part by British opinion polls.

What was wrong with people – individual people, and in many instances this means you, reader – yes, you – who’d never even heard of a ‘lockdown’ outside a prison or an American school-shooting drill, yet who overnight embraced as inevitable a method of suppressing communicable disease never before tried at scale, never recommended in public health literature and first used to ‘successfully’ quell Covid by lying, authoritarian China? Why didn’t more independent thinkers say: ‘Hold on a minute. Have you thought this through? Might nationwide house arrest be just a tad over the top? And have you pols never heard of unintended consequences?’ Why didn’t more enterprising citizens hit the internet and note: ‘Wow! We’ve had pandemics before’ – and some older folks would have lived through the contagions of 1957 and 1968 themselves – ‘and we didn’t close so much as a betting shop. Why can’t we be trusted to act like grown-ups and behave in our own self-interest?’ Why didn’t more members of the public get angry?

In the UK, a resistance did emerge, but we were few and roundly traduced. Chillingly uniform journalistic cheerleaders for government restrictions on all the major networks might at least claim to have been intimidated by coercive Ofcom ‘guidelines’. But under no such regulatory pressure, most regular shmoes in whose faces interviewers poked microphones still obligingly spouted: ‘No ruination of our lives is too extreme!’ With nary a whimper, the British public abdicated every civil right they’d imagined the very week before to be inalienable: the right to assembly; to free association; to family life; to travel, even the right to leave the country; effectively, too, the right to free speech. Worse, a substantial volunteer army became the state’s enforcers, ringing the police when neighbours dared to go running twice in a day.

If we step back to gain a modicum of perspective, what’s most disturbing about the past ten years is a different kind of climate change: a sequence of social manias that have swept the world like back-to-back sandstorms.

In 2012, a rare mental illness entailing estrangement from the sexual signifiers of one’s own body suddenly snowballed into an international obsession, until now we have thousands of women lopping off their healthy breasts with the blessing of both the medical establishment and the state.

In 2017, a movement energised by legitimate consternation over a sexually predatory Hollywood producer’s abuse of power exploded into a worldwide female grudge-fest, until no woman could hold her head high in public without a personal story of sexual victimisation, which ambitious females carried with them everywhere like bespoke handbags. Some of the men destroyed by this frenzy surely deserved their fate, but others didn’t. In the process of conflating rape and a disappointing date while demonising commonplace flirtation and courtship, we must have lowered the birth rate in multiple countries by several babies per thousand.

In 2020, we all moaned cosily, ‘Here we go, another lockdown,’ as if the state barricading us in our homes for months on end were a time-honoured tradition like Christmas. With the populace primed for hysteria, that summer massive marches all over the world poured into the streets after a single unjustified murder of a black suspect by a white policeman in Minneapolis, issuing in an era consumed by race that is, alas, still with us. It never appeared to enter the heads of indignant protestors in Seoul that, gee, they didn’t really have any black people in South Korea.

Swept up in this succession of manic social waves, everyone gets exercised about the same thing, mindlessly repeats the same empty phrases and eagerly adopts the same branding (with its implied chiming in, the coinage ‘MeToo’ was pitch-perfect). Trans women are women! Believe women! Protect the NHS! Black lives matter! Yet once a mania begins to subside, we never hear any sheepish self-examination. Say, something like: ‘Hmm. I do feel badly about that Floyd chap, but why did I find myself shouting on a London street “Hands up, don’t shoot!” when our constabulary is unarmed?’ Members of the throng never seem to notice that none of these passing intoxications was their idea, or to wonder what this blowing-in-the-wind suggestibility says about their vulnerability to, er, you know, fascism. So you’ve really got to worry what comes next.