Readers of the Daily Sceptic may be interested to listen to yesterday’s UnHerd roundtable discussion conducted with Lee Cain (former Director of Communications at 10 Downing Street and a leading member of Boris Johnson’s ‘brain trust’). It is, as academics say, a ‘rich text’, with an awful lot in it to digest. But what really fascinated me about it – and what has really fascinated me about all of the General Election coverage so far – is the shoe that simply hasn’t dropped: namely, the biggest public policy decision since the Second World War, which was the 2020 lockdown.
Cain provides a very interesting diagnosis of what has gone wrong for the Tories since 2019. But it is only two thirds of the way into the conversation that the subject of Covid comes up. And it is discussed almost in isolation as though it took place in a never-never land – as though, indeed, it doesn’t touch upon almost every single thorny issue in which the Government now finds itself entangled: inflation, public borrowing, a self-entitled and unproductive civil service, NHS waiting lists, declining public order and civility, a backlog of criminal cases, excess deaths, huge increases in school truancy and behavioural problems in schools, and so on and so on.
It is almost as though spunking up to £410 billion of public money, deliberately stoking irrational fears amongst the populace, closing schools and universities for almost a year off and on, and telling people not to go to hospital for months on end was a series of actions that were always going to be consequence-free – a no-brainer that was just going to provide a sugar-rush of good opinion polling followed by a happy period of ‘building back better’. And it is painfully evident, listening to the Cain interview, that he remains stuck in that mindset, insisting that failing to have a lockdown in March 2020 would have been “against all the scientific evidence” and even doubling down on the insanity by suggesting that the main problem of Covid policy was trying to open up too quickly in the summer of that year.
It is like a cold slap in the face to have to reconfront the basic problem which has preoccupied all of us ‘lockdown sceptics’ since the beginning: the monomaniacal focus of the Establishment on ‘stopping the spread’ and the consequent total failure to see the bigger picture. It was as though lockdown was simply an inevitable response to an act of God – a freak weather event, which would require us to hunker down in a storm shelter for a period of time before emerging to rebuild – rather than a political decision that was made, and which involved the making of many foreseeable trade-offs that would have serious, long-term repercussions.
In a hundred years’ time, historians will be describing a pre- and post-lockdown era in the same terms in which they currently speak of a pre- and post-war, or a pre- and post-Great Depression, but our media commentators and political class behave as though it is an issue that is basically of trivial interest in understanding the Government’s chances in the next General Election. I suppose this is no great surprise to students of human psychology, who will understand very well the powers of cognitive dissonance and denial. Facing up to lockdown’s legacy would involve, for Lee Cain, a very painful process of self-reflection that he is understandably unwilling to undertake. But despite not being surprising, it is profoundly shocking and suggests we haven’t done very much collectively in the way of learning lessons or restoring a basic idea of what good government entails.
Nevertheless, it remains an interesting question to ask: what would the Government’s chances of winning this election be if it had stuck to the original plan regarding Covid and our position was now like that of Sweden? Maybe, just maybe, you guys should have listened to those of us who were suggesting it might be a good idea to hold your horses on the ‘We’re all going to die!’ routine?
Dr. David McGrogan is an Associate Professor of Law at Northumbria Law School. You can subscribe to his Substack – News From Uncibal – here.
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