It is tremendous to see 2025 starting off with yet more questions in the Times about the devastating effect lockdowns had on children. James Kirkup writes brilliantly: “What sort of country launches a multi-year policy to inflict lifelong damage on children, then forgets all about it?” I want to issue James Kirkup a note of caution however: mea culpas will be a long time coming, not necessarily for reasons of official cover-up or collective amnesia but because the errors are simply too severe to reckon with yet. The faults surrounding the harmful activities of 2020-21 lie in the grave immoralities of ignorance, cowardice, an imprudent sense of the carnivalesque, petty tyranny, and neglect of our basic human duty to care, faults that are too difficult for most of us – both as a society and individuals – to admit to, let alone apologise for.
Ignorance
Let us start with the first of the grave sins (for want of a better word) of lockdown: ignorance. There was an illuminating comment beneath Kirkup’s piece from a gentleman who said he “ran a school” at the time. He explained he was told by the local authority the school hall might have to be used as a morgue and that a GP had told him as a 60 year-old man working with large numbers he was at a higher risk of dying. This explanation reminds me of a conversation I had at the time with a teacher friend who was very reluctant to return to school before the eventual third lockdown in January 2021. I asked about her concerns and she said very simply: “I might die. Hundreds and thousands of teachers might die.” We who are sceptical of lockdowns must always remember the genuine fear that gripped the hearts of the majority during this time. Whether confected or not, the fear that was felt was genuine. Where my tolerance for this position ends however is the inability of the two teachers, and thousands others like them, to then take the next required step: research to discover if their fears were well founded. I remember showing my teacher friend graphs from the Spectator data hub and that thing on the BBC where you could see how many cases per 100,000 were in your area, evidence about risk of death for all age groups – figures that demonstrated to me her fear was entirely misplaced. My teacher friend looked at these websites and said: “This is too complicated for me, I’m just going to do what I’m told.” Will the gentleman who “ran a school” ever admit that his inability to investigate things for himself, to question his GP and local authority advice, has harmed a generation of his schoolchildren in his supposed care?
Cowardice
James Kirkup admits his own cowardice, writing: “I’m sorry I didn’t go further but I was afraid that going full throttle against one element of lockdown would put me on the wrong side of what felt like the divide between scientific orthodoxy and oddball contrarianism.” I wonder how many others involved in the Government of the time, or think tanks, or writing for national newspapers, thought as James Kirkup did, but did not speak out? Until more admit to their own cowardice around this situation then nothing will significantly shift in this debate. But honestly, what grown adult will readily remember, let alone admit to being frightened of questioning the advice of Matt Hancock or Boris Johnson?
An imprudent sense of the carnivalesque
An underestimated element of grand historical events is the manner in which people get swept up in them thanks to the drama, the shaking up of otherwise dreary lives. Dominic Sandbrook described it brilliantly in a Rest is History episode about the fishwives march to Versailles in 1789 – many got involved for the sheer hell of it, a hankering for the carnivalesque. We all know people like this, who run along with things for the ‘drama’. I class Dominic Cummings entirely in this category – finally this was his moment, his destiny to achieve something, to save the country from flu. He ran around shouting PANIC, thrusting around his scribbled-on white board, flamboyantly wearing his surgeon’s mask. And there were thousands like him in positions of authority who got simply carried away with the carnivalesque elements of lockdown. My son’s local school bought everyone a school-branded face mask, local women volunteered to swab children in the hall, people made a big fuss about cancelling events because they’d been ‘pinged’. The whole paraphernalia of lockdown: the masks, the hand sanitiser, social distancing stickers, that app, self-isolating, Covid tests, scotch eggs, bubbles at school, the tier restrictions, queuing up in out-of-town carparks to visit the vaccine centre, and so on, provided elements of the extraordinary in ordinary lives. It is too embarrassing for grownups to remember they succumbed to such irrational carryings on.
Petty tyranny
I’m thinking here about our lovely cricket coach, a more decent man you couldn’t hope to meet, who taped up the local cricket nets so they couldn’t be used by children during lockdown. Or the gentlemen who videoed my sons playing in the local park and told them he would call the police if they didn’t go home – I still see him around today behaving like a normal person with his family. Or the otherwise blameless churchwarden who stuck green tape on the medieval tiles to enforce the two-metre rule. There will be millions of people who committed small acts of petty tyranny. Some did it with the intention of ‘helping’, others did it with relish, and this is a dark part of human nature into which I don’t think we are yet ready to venture. I’m thinking here of the tinpot dictator manager of the local garage who banned me from not following the one-way system in the empty shop. This is a benign example; what of the hundreds of thousands of medical staff who prevented loved ones from seeing dying relatives? Who really wants to admit that they committed petty acts of tyranny that led to the actual harm of people, children in particular, because they had succumbed to fear or were ‘just following orders’?
Basic neglect of our caring duties
Amidst all the clamour to ‘save lives’ (as well as protect the NHS), too many of us were complicit in harming the lives of those we should have cared for. And this is where James Kirkup’s plea to shake off our collective amnesia will stumble, for the memories of our own neglect of our loved ones are too distressing. How many people let their loved ones die alone in isolated hospital beds because of ‘rules’? How many mothers spoke to their babies through face masks because of ‘germs’? How many husbands let their wives give birth alone because of ‘regulations’? How many parents made their children wear face masks because of ‘school rules’? How many parents let their children remain in their bedroom on their phones for months on end because of ‘school closures? How many of us didn’t visit the lonely and elderly because of ‘restrictions?’ Shame on us all.
But James Kirkup is right, the sooner we all admit to our grave errors, the sooner we will begin to repair the damage done.
Joanna Gray is a writer and confidence mentor.
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