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2020-

2020-11-29 e
THE COVID-CON VI
"But the relentless suppression of individual freedom, and the inevitable determination to reassert ourselves over the agents of the state, means that the day will come when they will."

History suggests the roar of rebellion will follow Covid's suppression

The Government would do well to realise that excess authoritarianism can backfire badly

Many of you will know the immortal Ealing film The Blue Lamp. Shot in 1949, it is an ultra-idealistic story of the police and their fight against Britain’s post-war crime wave. It revolves around a loathsome thug, played by Dirk Bogarde, who shoots an avuncular policeman, played by Jack Warner.

The very idea that something so dreadful could happen shocked audiences when the film was released; they knew it was too close to the truth for comfort. The film’s opening sequence shows various newspaper headlines about gangsterism, thuggery, delinquency and a rise in crime compared with the orderly years before 1939. Everyone who read a newspaper knew these were not pure invention.

Mostly, when we think of the war’s end, we think little beyond the jubilation of VE and VJ Day. But the mood quickly turned restive: rather than a return to ‘normal’, the years immediately following were marked not just by a crime wave, but by cracks in society. Both were a reaction to the public’s loss of liberty during total war. The family unit especially suffered: births out of wedlock rose during and after the war; so did divorces, especially when men came home and found they were married to total strangers.

Many Britons had had enough of an authoritarian, repressive state that had, to secure national salvation, taken over their lives. For six years the state had directed people as part of a war machine. It had controlled where they could go, and when they could go there. It had censored their newspapers, rationed their food and fed them a diet of propaganda on their regular visits to the cinema. By the time the war ended they were ripe for rebellion. In many respects they – especially the younger ones, most of whom had been under military discipline – simply stopped obeying.

Today, we have endured state-imposed restrictions for less than nine months, and comparisons can sound excessive. But the society that confronted the Covid pandemic was far less used to authority, deference and conformity than its forebears who went to war in 1939. Nor, in that war, were people controlled to the extent where they could not visit their families and friends; could not go to the pub; could not run a basic business such as a café or a clothes shop; could not meet more than a limited number of people outside, or visit them indoors.

Nor was there any doubt about the strength of the enemy; blitzed towns and cities, and until El Alamein in the autumn of 1942 the strong possibility that a German invasion would be launched against the United Kingdom, were proof enough. Today, thanks to conflicting scientific evidence and a lack of transparency in decision-making, the enemy is more questionable. The level of authoritarianism in the Covid crisis is unprecedented in peacetime.

... The public are not stupid; they increasingly feel they are being governed not by politicians exercising the judgment they are elected to use, but by politicians doing as they are told by scientists. Unlike politicians, scientists have no direct responsibility for the economy, and their advice takes no account of it. The result of this abdication by politicians could well be turbulence in the future. History suggests that life after the pandemic will be more troubled. (read more)

2020-11-29 d
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