March 28, 2024
A year of lockdown has had dire consequences for liberty and public life.
We need so many reckonings with the past year. The key reckoning must be with the foul idea that ordinary people have nothing of value to say or contribute in a time of crisis; that democracy is a mere veneer that can occasionally be scrubbed away, rather than the lifeblood of any society that truly wants to remain rational, free and good.
We need so many reckonings with the past year. The key reckoning must be with the foul idea that ordinary people have nothing of value to say or contribute in a time of crisis; that democracy is a mere veneer that can occasionally be scrubbed away, rather than the lifeblood of any society that truly wants to remain rational, free and good.

For a year we have been living through one of the most extraordinary events of modern times: the hibernation of democracy. The suspension of public life. The adjournment of politics itself. This has been the most dire consequence of lockdown. We have witnessed the outsourcing of decision-making to non-political actors, the withering away of political opposition and political debate, and the decommissioning of the public itself. Stay at home, watch the news for Covid updates, and don’t breathe on, far less talk to, another human soul. That has been the instruction to the demos for the past year. The impact of all of this on the spirit and practice of democracy is likely to be long-lasting.

Today is the first anniversary of the imposition of lockdown in the UK. It was a year ago today that Boris Johnson, having initially bristled at the idea of enforcing a China- or Italy-style shutdown of society, solemnly addressed the nation and said: ‘Stay at home.’ It would last three or four weeks, we were told. It was just about ‘flattening the curve’ and preventing the NHS from being overwhelmed. We’d be out of it soon and cracking on with life relatively normally. How naive we were to believe that. Today, on this unhappy birthday, we’re in lockdown again – our third – and public-health experts are telling us that some social restrictions could last for years. A three-week shutdown has become a neverending nightmare.

How did this happen? It is not, as some people insist, a conspiracy. Government officials did not plot this severe suspension of our freedoms. They aren’t rubbing their hands with glee at having finally made the masses docile and made themselves all-powerful (although it is certainly the case that bureaucratic opportunists have spied in this crisis a chance to push their pet nanny-state causes, whether it’s on obesity, the evils of boozing in pubs or the ‘annoyance’ of political protests). And nor is lockdown the handiwork of Big Pharma or dastardly corporations desperate to inject their drugs (and microchips?) into the lab rats of humanity. These attempts to uncover the plot behind our predicament can end up confusing the issue and in some cases can stir up conspiratorial thinking.

No, the far more unsettling truth behind the past year of suspended democracy and suspended liberty is that no one has really been in the driving seat. Rather, the Covid-19 crisis, the arrival of this new, threatening virus, merged with the pre-existing trends of fear, apocalypticism and doubt in the wisdom of ordinary people to create a reaction to the virus that was unhelpful in the extreme. Rather than coolly analyse Covid’s likely impact, the elites depicted it as a threat to everybody. Rather than galvanise the public in a mass national effort to keep the vulnerable safe and to keep the economy and society moving, the elites decommissioned the public, forced us into house arrest, and insisted our role was to be passive, atomised and compliant. Rather than ensuring that democratic debate could continue, and flourish, in this era when unprecedented political proposals were being made, the elites put politics into cryonic suspension. When we needed the political freedom of discussion and dissent more than we have at any time in living memory, it was taken from us.

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See Also:

(1) What’s Eating British Capitalism?

(2) Lung cancer referrals fell by a THIRD during the Covid pandemic

(3) Angela Merkel in staggering Covid admission: ‘It was a mistake, I am responsible for it’

(4) ‘Merkel holds the whip!’ Macron humiliated over ‘submissive’ defence alliance with Germany

(5) EU planning first blockade of Britain since U-boats patrolled North Atlantic

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