News from Nowhere: Liberty, Fraternity and Virulency

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On 21 October, a politician called Jacob Rees-Mogg – the Leader of the British parliament’s House of Commons, an anachronistic figure who most closely resembles an aristocratic Victorian stick-insect – declared that he and his fellow Conservative parliamentarians did not need to wear masks in the Commons chamber because (despite their own government’s guidance that faces should be covered when around ‘people you don’t usually meet’) the Tories’ 360 or so MPs all already knew each other so intimately that it was perfectly safe for them to mingle in accordance with the ‘convivial, fraternal spirit’ of their party.

Mr. Rees-Mogg has never made it his business to be particularly well-attuned to the mood music around him. On the same day, the UK’s Health Secretary Sajid Javid was reported as having urged his colleagues to set a good example by wearing face-coverings in crowded public spaces (such as the chamber of the House of Commons), following calls from senior doctors and chiefs of Britain’s National Health Service to restore some of the nation’s COVID-19 safety measures as England’s infection rates had started steeply to rise. Five days later, it was announced that everyone in the House of Commons would have to wear masks – apart from the Members of Parliament themselves, the very people whom Mr. Javid had called upon to act as role models in this respect for the Great British public.

During October, daily new COVID-19 infection rates in the UK exceeded 50,000 cases for the first time since the end of lockdown in July. At the end of last month, the government was obliged to pledge nearly £6 billion in additional funding to support the country’s National Health Service through this ongoing crisis. At the same time, however, Boris Johnson’s administration was continuing to resist the opposition Labour party’s demands that the nation returns to the compulsory wearing of face-coverings in indoor public spaces, advisory social distancing and the general recommendation that, wherever possible, people should work from home. 

This set of actions has been referred to as ‘Plan B’. The British government has meanwhile denied the existence of a ‘Plan C’ – the possibility that it might be forced to impose restrictions on social interactions during the Christmas period if the pressure on health services continues to increase. It was of course 2020’s yuletide festivities which provoked Britain’s last major coronavirus peak; and, despite every politician’s fear that the popular press might accuse them of planning to cancel Christmas, this weighty threat to families, communities and businesses must remain a very real possibility. Exactly two months before the festive date itself, the Health Secretary predicted that the UK would be able to enjoy ‘a normal Christmas’ this year – just as long as people ‘keep playing their part’ in maintaining the safety of the nation. On the same day, he conceded that wearing masks in parliament was a ‘personal decision’ for MPs. At the same time, a leading government scientist told the BBC that the country was in ‘quite a dangerous situation’ and that it was still ‘hard to be precise’ as to what COVID conditions might look like towards the end of the year. These things are virtually impossible to predict with any confidence of accuracy. Indeed, by the end of last month, England's COVID infection rate had started to fall again – though no one was quite sure why; and the Prime Minister’s office insisted at that point that it was too early to draw any conclusions from this data. 

A few months ago, of course, the United Kingdom was on top of the world, leading the way in its post-pandemic recovery. A swift and robust vaccination campaign had allowed the withdrawal of COVID safety restrictions; night clubs and mass sports and entertainment events had reopened, and infection rates had not climbed as many had expected. So, what has gone so horribly wrong that the media are starting to whisper once more about threats of lockdowns over the winter holidays?

The first problem was that, compared to its neighbouring nations, the UK came late to a policy of extending vaccinations to children as young as twelve years old. Although the take-up has been brisk, the majority in that age group were only given the opportunity for vaccination during the course of last month. By that point, the majority of French, Danish, Spanish, German, American and Canadian twelve-year-olds had been offered their jabs. Chinese children as young as three were being vaccinated at early as June. As a consequence, the reopening of schools as the autumn’s colder weather loomed created a perfect environment for viral incubation. By the end of October, 67% of the British population had been fully vaccinated – 7% less than China, and 20% less than Europe’s leading vaccine hub, the tourist-friendly nation of Portugal.

The second problem has been that thanks to the early roll-out of vaccinations in the UK, the efficacy of those vaccinations has diminished since the most vulnerable members of society received their first doses last winter. The current programme of third, booster jabs for those who received those first inoculations nearly a year ago, has proven much slower than the progress of the original campaign.

The third problem has been an extraordinarily extensive relaxation of the COVID-19 safety rules. This is particularly clear in England, which, unlike other regions of the United Kingdom, has removed the requirement for masks on public transport and which has permitted large-scale and close-contact events without the imposition of a COVID vaccine passport system seen in other parts of the country and the planet. The devolved government in Wales, which by the end of October was experiencing even higher infection rates than England, chose to extend its mandatory pandemic pass system to theatres and cinemas; but this was an initiative which the UK government continued to resist imposing upon its English heartlands.

That third problem is one underpinned and exacerbated by the fundamental libertarianism of an overwhelming proportion of Britain’s ruling Conservative Party. It was this same libertarianism which, despite all the economic and social arguments to the contrary, prompted so many Tory members so vocally to support the UK’s departure from the European Union. It was this same ethos of liberty which resulted in the British government’s hesitancy to impose border restrictions to delay the arrival of the delta variant earlier this year, and indeed their initial refusal to introduce a statutory lockdown in the early weeks of this crisis, even as Britain’s neighbours were falling like dominoes to the onslaught of the virus. 

Last month, the British parliament’s Health and Social Care Committee and Science and Technology Committee published a joint report on lessons learned so far from the coronavirus crisis. Their report concluded that the government had taken action too late and that this delay had cost thousands of lives: ‘suppressing the spread of the virus in the early period would have bought valuable time to consider what was the best way to manage the pandemic in the medium term’. They also observed that, by contrast, the government’s original expectation that the infection curve might be flattened through the general development of what was then being described as ‘herd immunity’ (an approach quickly abandoned) would have ‘entailed people contracting COVID in large numbers with hundreds of thousands of deaths likely to result’.

Yet, once more at this crossroads, Boris Johnson’s policies in this critical area seem to be inspired not by a spirit not of fraternity (as his friend Mr. Rees-Mogg supposed) but one of a dogmatic commitment to liberty at all costs – the freedom to infect others as well as to get sick oneself, those freedoms so famously promoted by the likes of Donald Trump and his lockdown-defying allies. These are freedoms whose points of short-term convenience might seem to many reasonable people to be heavily outweighed by the risks not only to the immediate health and lives of a nation’s most vulnerable citizens, but also by the massive economic, social, cultural and educational impacts of future lockdowns which might end up being imposed as a result of delays to the earlier introduction of significantly less stringent restrictions. 

But leadership of course requires the capacity to lead on difficult decisions in an appropriately timely and resolute fashion, to present a moral role model and to spearhead public opinion rather than to wait until one eventually has no choice. However, one must admit that, despite his perennially bullish demeanour, this is not necessarily an approach to which Mr. Johnson appears particularly well-suited.