To lockdown sceptics’ great chagrin, recent polls have found that the majority of Brits are still very much pro-lockdown. In a YouGov poll taken in early March, only 19% of respondents said the government’s handling of pandemic was “too strict”, and a remarkable 37% said it was “not strict enough”.
Likewise, when UnHerd asked Brits whether “in retrospect, lockdown was a mistake”, they found there wasn’t a single constituency in the country where a majority agreed. Overall agreement was 27% – which is barely more encouraging than YouGov’s finding.
Now, you can always quibble with polls – the figures might be off by five or ten percentage points. But this clearly isn’t enough to turn 27% into a majority. So what explains Brits’ continued support for a policy that imposed such huge costs while conferring such small benefits (if any)?
Are many of us suffering from Stockholm syndrome? (although it should really be called ‘Wuhan syndrome’). Here are the factors I think are involved.
First: as veteran-lockdown sceptic Lord Hannan has noted with regret, “many of my countrymen couldn’t give two hoots about liberty”. Like the citizens of most Western countries, Brits have long favoured higher taxes and nationalisation of industry. So their support for lockdown isn’t exactly a major anomaly that needs to be explained.
Second: as I noted in my reply to Lord Hannan, Brits massively overestimated the risks of Covid, particularly the risks to the young. This owes partly to general biases in the estimation of small quantities. But it also stems from the intentional use of fear tactics whose very aim was to increase compliance with lockdown.
Third: the theoretical case for ‘flattening the curve’ was strong. If infections rise too high, hospitals will become overwhelmed, leading to huge numbers of deaths; a temporary lockdown can prevent this from happening. The argument is flawed, of course – not least because it ignores the ‘costs’ side of the equation. But it seems quite compelling.
Fourth: case numbers did start falling around the time of each lockdown in 2020. Yet as the statistician Simon Wood has shown, infections were already in decline before the lockdown was called – in all three cases. This can be seen in the chart below, which shows the timing of lockdowns in relation to five reconstructions of infection numbers.
Fifth: while the supposed benefits of lockdown were obvious and immediate, the costs were largely delayed. As a result, members of the public are more likely to credit lockdown for its ‘successes’ than they are to blame lockdown for its failures – including debt, inflation and plunging test scores.
Sixth: for months, credentialed scientists appeared before the television cameras and informed the public that lockdown was the right choice – that the Government really was ‘following the science’. Meanwhile, dissenting scientists (like those who signed the Great Barrington Declaration) were consistently marginalised.
This last point is particularly important, as surveys show that scientists are among the most trusted professionals in the country. Through a combination of groupthink, deplatforming and biased media coverage, the public became convinced that there was such a thing as ‘the science’ and that it supported lockdown.
Three years later, they haven’t changed their minds.
To join in with the discussion please make a donation to The Daily Sceptic.
Profanity and abuse will be removed and may lead to a permanent ban.
What an absolute farce modernising the past is. Maybe just leave the past as we find it and accept the present as it is.
Tut, tut, dear sir. You’re entirely insufficiently post-modern. Everything is just what we make of it. Since the past is defenseless and harmless, revolutionizing it is always easily possible.
This should be artisans and not artists and my suggestion would be “Let them have it”. The descendents of the people who created these works can keep them should they value the work of their ancestors. Or melt them to turn them into ammunition. Or whatever they want to do with them.
That would serve no good purpose. Certain things, such as great art and antiquities, transcend conventional concepts of ownership and must be considered as belonging to all humanity. A person or organisation may pay millions for the privilege of having custody of these brilliant, irreplaceable objects, but where their loss would be a loss to all humanity, they cannot have the right to destroy.
We can all benefit so much from having these pieces on public display, and perhaps the ideal situation would be to have some in Europe, some in America, some in their native Africa, and so on. But if there is a real risk of them being lost forever in Africa, we in the west, as their supposedly enlightened guardians, have a duty to shield them.
If you want this seriously crude stuff, feel free to keep it on your lawn or in your attic or whatever other place suits you. If it was mine, I’d advertise it as free to collect. Curiosities from all over the empire are not part of my cultural heritage. Here, I sort-of agree with the wokesters: They want this because they believe it’s valuabe (in the sense of $$$). And my opinion on that is If they believe this is valuable, the problem of storing it should be theirs.