No One Wants to Talk About Lockdown

It’s the first General Election since Covid, yet lockdown and the rest of the catastrophic response just aren’t being discussed. Huge costs, vast harms, but no one wants to talk about it. Francis Hoar highlights the absence in the Telegraph.

For over two years, the country would be dominated by the consequences of its unprecedented and unadvised reaction to a respiratory pandemic that, while unforeseen, was highly foreseeable. One might think this issue should dominate the first General Election since. Not so.

The immediate effects of this legal, economic and social experiment were more all-embracing than anything we had experienced in modern times outside total war. Never in this era had the entire population been persuaded to leave its workplaces, stay at home and deny themselves the social comfort of their friends and family: and, while the ‘persuasion’ was supported by the force of law, the immediate and almost unconditional acquiescence of the public was all the more alarming. The decision to forbid a large proportion of economic activity was unprecedented in war as much as in peace and the consequences predictably severe. And the effect of the closure of schools, together with the cancellation of public examinations for two school years, will leave a long tail as its victims enter the workplace. That is to say nothing of the consequences of the mass cancellation of operations and the effective closure of much of the NHS, justified by misleading and downright false information about the anticipated effect of COVID-19 on the healthy population.

Those harms were as predictable as they were predicted – not merely by the tiny number of us arguing against lockdowns from the start but by the pandemic plans of most governments, including the U.K., and the WHO. …

While lockdown should have served as a warning of the harm that can be inflicted on a nation by an all-powerful state, it has only increased that power, size and reach – and the public’s reliance on it. We changed our behaviour on a sixpence listening to the modelling of a discredited epidemiologist, and we accepted lockdown on the asserted ground of safety. Our society showed how little it values its own independence and freedom when it is told to be afraid. …

The failure to talk about it is a failure of democratic accountability, says Francis:

Representative democracy only works if its representatives do their duty to scrutinise legislation and hold governments to account; and the ability to exercise democratic choice matters little if the public is unable to give its verdict on the sitting Government’s most far-reaching decision. We can only hope that time and experience will teach us the lessons that will not be learned in this election about this catastrophic error.

Peter Franklin in UnHerd makes a similar point, saying: “Covid is the forgotten issue of the U.K. election.”

Francis suggests the silence is either due to “embarrassment” or the misguided assumption that lockdown is something that ‘just happens’ in a pandemic.

Another possibility is that many people see Covid as a kind of freak event in the past that they don’t expect to recur for a very long time, so see no need to talk about it in an election focused on the next five years. If so, they may be underestimating the determination of some in the ‘health security’ industry to conjure up emergencies on very thin pretexts.