We’re publishing a new post by Dr. David McGrogan, an Associate Professor at Northumbria Law School, about how Britain has muddled through the past two years and come out the other side more or less unchanged. Which is more than can be said for China. Here are the opening three paragraphs:
Did you watch the Winter Olympics? If you did, you were probably struck, as I was, by its strange resemblance to the twilight zone of 2020: mostly empty stadia; deserted streets; everybody wearing masks; the theatre of Covid restrictions on vivid display. It was like being forced to look backwards on a past that one has long ago left behind. Apart from our December flirtation with madness, everyday life has been more or less normal apart from the odd mask here or there in the U.K. for well over six months. As of this week, we are, essentially, free – the real free, the old free. Beijing, by contrast, looked as though it was held in aspic.
Folk wisdom has it that China did ‘well’ in the pandemic, while Britain did ‘badly’. The narrative that set in, very quickly, in the first months of 2020 was that the Chinese had identified a dangerous virus and immediately locked down ‘hard and early’ to stop the spread. We, meanwhile, lacking either the will or competence to do likewise, had ‘dithered and delayed’, with the result being many thousands of avoidable deaths. However, even if one ever believed that narrative (the credulity with which Western journalists reported news from China about lockdowns in early 2020 is something I still find difficult to fathom), it is surely long overdue for revision. China in February 2022 appears to resemble a fully-fledged biosecurity state; it is hard to imagine it ever returning to the pre-2020 ‘normal’. We, on the other hand, in our characteristically bumbling sort of a way, have navigated the stormy seas of the past two years to something like calm waters. Lockdown sceptics will argue that a Rubicon was crossed in 2020 when the state criminalised conduct over which it had no rightful purview, and I would agree: the lockdown of March 2020 was probably the stupidest and most damaging thing a British government has ever done during peacetime. But one has to acknowledge that our social fabric has largely remained intact, in a way it has not elsewhere. We no longer wear masks and never required our pre-adolescent children to; we do not have vaccine passports or vaccine mandates despite brief dalliances with both; we need never take a godforsaken lateral flow test ever again. Life is not exactly as it was in 2019. But it almost is.
The asinine comparisons of the numbers of infections and deaths in different countries – all with different climates, cultures, population densities, age distributions, methods of gathering statistics, and so on – during the Covid era, as though we’re all in some Premier League of pandemic performance, has been one of the more idiotic characteristics of the period. But we can at least compare how well our political and social institutions have withstood the shock of the emergence of the virus and the panic that followed. And across that metric, it must be said that Britain has come out better than most of the rest of the developed world. In much of mainland Europe, one must now exhibit a vaccine passport of some kind to do the most basic things – to go shopping, eat at a restaurant, watch a film at the cinema. In the rest of the Anglosphere, the relationship of trust between governor and governed has almost totally broken down over the introduction of mandatory vaccinations. Blue state America is eating itself alive over the issue of relaxing compulsory mask-wearing for children. My Japanese relatives, like all of their compatriots, still wear a mask from the moment they leave the house to the moment they return home – even outside, even when alone. Compared with all of this madness, Britain can be said have arrived at a rather sensible position – and, indeed, to have been surprisingly wisely governed.
Worth reading in full.
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