Lionel Shriver’s column in the Spectator this week is a searing critique of the West’s pandemic response and the mockery it made of our supposedly ‘inalienable’ rights. Here’s an excerpt.
We are forever changed. The British people, along with the populations of many American states such as New York and California, have henceforth to live with the fact that civil liberties we Yanks call ‘inalienable’ can be cancelled at a moment’s notice for years on end. Our ‘rights’ are alienable as can be. We’re often warned that democracy is fragile. Lo, that turns out to be horribly true.
Which is why indulging our aversion to all things Covid with a wilful amnesia – blanking out two years of our lives as if redacting the calendar with black marker – is a mistake. The pols, media shills and limelight-basking scientists-for-hire complicit in grievously wounding our lives and countries have good reason to hope that we forget all about that little unpleasantness. But I need to remember, if only to understand myself – why post-pandemic I’m so much more cynical, misanthropic and pessimistic about the future.
Given the perfect absence of any correlation whatsoever between the severity of restrictions and Covid mortality rates, even when comparing like regions with like, it’s probable that this plethora of ‘interventions’ that made our lives hell while making a mockery of representative government – all those ludicrous ‘tiers’, the Harry Potter-ish ‘rule of six’ – made not the slightest difference to the death toll. Waves of variants came and went, oblivious of state diktats. Nature prevailed, as nature is wont to. We’d have been far better off if governments had done absolutely nothing.
This perspective has gained in currency. Some longstanding lockdown critics are resentful that many former establishment cheerleaders are now pretending they also opposed these failed and disastrous policies at the time. I’m not resentful. If you’re late to the party, welcome to the party. For the threat far greater than a handful of recent converts lying to themselves about their previous bovine compliance is the state’s self-interested company line surviving intact.
Most ordinary people still believe that lockdowns, and the accompanying bramble of insensible, ever-changing and medically illiterate Covid restrictions, saved hundreds of thousands of lives in the UK, millions in the US, and tens if not hundreds of millions worldwide. The ‘narrative’ may have bent ever so slightly, but it’s holding up. To my utter astonishment, when a new YouGov poll asked Britons how they assess their government’s handling of Covid-19 in hindsight, 34% said ‘About right’ and 37% said ‘Not strict enough’ (incredulous italics added). A mere 19% said ‘Too strict’. A full 54% of Labour voters still think the ‘measures’ (a word I’ve come to hate) should have been even more brutal.
This matters. True, last week, numerous journalists joined the chorus of ‘never again’. Yet meanwhile the WHO is contriving two agreements whereby countries will “undertake to follow” this unaccountable supranational organisation’s “recommendations”, including imposing lockdowns, vaccine mandates and passports, border closures, mask-wearing (never mind how ineffective) and whatever else these bureaucrats might dream up – all over the heads of nation states.
As currently conceived, these agreements would make WHO edicts not merely advisory but compulsory. Tucked in China’s pocket and dependent on Big Pharma, the organisation that during Covid promoted both a string of falsehoods and the ghastliest of policies would arrogate to itself a budget of up to 10 times its current one. It’s seeking the power to repeat its mistakes not only when confronting a verifiably lethal organism, but when confronting an organism that might prove deadly in future. Thus the WHO could soon be able to shut down the whole world over a pathogen that turns out to be as dangerous as cheese mould – just in case.
Worth reading in full.
The Telegraph wit Michael Deacon is most aghast at the poll’s findings about 18-24 year-olds, who he says by their extraordinary support for the lockdowns that ruined their young lives appear to be afflicted by some form of Stockholm syndrome.
Their education was disrupted. Their love lives were suspended. The best days of their lives were ruined. We already knew all that. It seems, however, that lockdown harmed the young in another way – one which I would never have foreseen.
It left them suffering from Stockholm syndrome.
In other words: they’ve actively grown to love captivity. That’s the only conclusion I can draw from a startling new YouGov poll – which reports that over half of those aged 18-24 think that the lockdown rules weren’t strict enough.
No other age group takes anywhere near such a hardline stance. Not even the elderly, who had the greatest reason to want transmission of the virus halted by whatever means necessary. Yet only a third of those aged 65+ agree that the rules weren’t strict enough. And almost a fifth of them think the rules were too strict.
The young, meanwhile, had the least to fear from Covid, and the most to lose from lockdowns. Yet they, according to this extraordinary poll, are the ones who supported lockdown the most fervently. Not only that, they wish it had been tougher. A mere 13% of them think the rules were too strict.
A charitable reading of the poll would be that the young people of today are just heroically self-sacrificing. I’d like to think so. But I’m afraid I’m not convinced. Self-sacrifice, by definition, was always in their own hands. These young people could have locked themselves in their bedrooms for the entire pandemic if they’d wished. They didn’t need the Government to make them do that. This poll, therefore, suggests that they simply have an alarming enthusiasm for draconian rules. An authoritarian impulse. A love of all-powerful government.
Is this yet another baleful consequence of their woke education, that accustoms them to love an all-powerful paternalistic authority that wraps them up in their ‘safe space’?
Deacon recalls an equally disturbing poll from around the time of ‘Freedom Day’ in July 2021, where over a third of respondents said that the Government should keep hotel quarantine “permanently, regardless of the risk of COVID-19”, over a quarter said that all nightclubs should be permanently forced to close, and almost a fifth said there should be a permanent curfew “against leaving home after 10pm without a good reason”.
At least they had the excuse then of still being in the middle of the pandemic (Delta had just arrived) and subject to Project Fear propaganda. What’s their excuse now?
Also worth reading in full.
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