The road to hell? Really? Liberty is important, but surely so is protecting life and health Melanie Phillips
https://melaniephillips.substack.com/p/the-road-to-hell-really?token=eyJ1c2VyX2lkIj
The number of MPs who are in potential revolt over the government’s Covid restrictions is apparently rising.
They protest that they aren’t being consulted and parliament is being sidelined over measures which threaten people’s liberties.
The main focus of their ire is that these restrictions are being introduced through regulations made by ministers. This complaint is echoed by three briefings published by the Constitution Unit, the Bingham Centre and the Hansard Society.
Ministers are given powers under acts of parliament to make such regulations. They come into force immediately, with parliament able to approve them for up to 28 days.
Their instant application, which so concerns MPs, is precisely why ministers say they are needed: to combat the threat from the virus which develops and changes all the time and so needs the fastest possible interventions.
But the result has been a succession of stop/go/stop measures which are undoubtedly contradictory and confusing and have squandered public trust.
The MPs’ concern about their inability adequately to advise, warn or hold the government to account over mistakes it is making over the virus is understandable. Even Boris Johnson didn’t seem to know the answer, when he was asked today how his own rules on household mixing are supposed to apply in the north-east.
In the main, however, the fury is being fuelled by the fact that these protesting MPs don’t agree with the need for most of these restrictions. And although they may be reluctant to admit it, that’s mostly because they either don’t think the virus is as dangerous as the government believes; or because they think it’s possible to shield the most vulnerable while allowing everyone else to go back to something approaching normal (a false belief exploded here); or, as the Tory MP Sir Bernard Jenkin brutally observed here, they want to rely on “herd immunity” which would mean hundreds of thousands of further deaths, a fact they seek to deny.
The Tory MP Sir Desmond Swayne, who in July railed against “this monstrous imposition” of wearing face-masks, told the Commons yesterday that politicians should stop being “in thrall to science”. He even demanded that the government’s chief scientist and chief medical officer, Sir Patrick Vallance and Chris Whitty, should be sacked over their warnings of what might happen if no further restrictions were introduced. The Telegraph reported his “spluttering” onslaught:
“What was their purpose in presenting that graph [projecting 50,000 cases a day by mid October]?” he jeered. “It was the purpose of the fat boy in Pickwick Papers: ‘I wants to make yer flesh creep!’ It was Project Fear! It was an attempt to terrify the British people! As if they haven’t been terrified enough!”
Unlike Sir Desmond, who seems to deny the validity of scientific evidence if he doesn’t approve of the consequences, Steve Baker, a principal leader of the Tory MPs’ protests, accepts that Covid-19 still presents a very serious threat to public health. He has drawn attention to the analysis by Raghib Ali, a consultant in acute medicine and a fellow of Oxford university’s Department of Population Health, who has written here and here that although he opposes a second full lockdown,
the pandemic is far from over and a second wave has the potential to cause very significant direct and indirect health harm.
For Baker and his fellow MP rebels, however, the key concern is the erosion of liberty that’s taking place. And yes, these restrictions would be unthinkable in normal circumstances. Yes, they infringe upon people’s liberty to live and act as they wish. Yes, the masks are an infernal and dehumanising nuisance. Yes, it’s awful and appalling that even close family members can’t meet and socialise indoors, or hug their relatives.
But some of the rhetoric is ludicrously over the top. Boris Johnson, we are told, is now on the road to dictatorship. Steve Baker has been pictured sporting a tee-shirt bearing a legend comparing today with 1984. The Times reports that he told a virtual conference organised by The Spectator:
We know the road to hell is paved with good intention. And yet here we stand wandering down the road to hell.
“The road to hell”? 1984? Are we seriously supposed to believe that the current restrictions augur fascist dictatorship or communist tyranny?
Might not the more plausible “road to hell” be the possibility of so many more people either dying or becoming seriously ill from Covid that the health services finally become overwhelmed and the economy fractures along with the social fabric?
This is not to deny the immensely harmful and distressing economic and social downsides of these restrictions. And undoubtedly, the government should treat parliament much more as a partner in the fraught and necessarily imperfect management of this crisis. It’s wrong, for example, for the health secretary, Matt Hancock, to announce policy developments to the media rather than to parliament, which has rightly occasioned sharp rebukes from the Commons Speaker, Sir Lindsay Hoyle.
Nevertheless, the idea that every regulation that impinges on liberty should be debated and voted upon in parliament before it comes into effect is unrealistic and potentially paralysing.
And it’s alarming that some otherwise serious people have been suggesting that the restrictions are driven by Boris Johnson’s dictatorial impulse or his wish to destroy his country’s economy — and thus his career and reputation.
Some of these critics, who are so sure of their own cherry-picked analysis, are in fact remarkably uninformed. Take the great outpouring of scorn for the Vallance and Whitty claim that, if infection rates continued to double every seven days and nothing was done to stop this, there could be 50,000 cases per day. Their critics, who pooh-poohed the “doubling every seven days” point as not consistent with the published infection rates, don’t even seem to grasp the statistical basis for these scientists’ concern.
As The Times explained, Vallance and Whitty had realised that failings in national community testing meant that these figures were critically underestimating the spread of the virus.
The paper quoted Graham Medley from the London School of Hygiene and Tropical Medicine, who sits on the modelling committee for the government’s Scientific Advisory Group on Emergencies, Spi-M:
“The estimates from Spi-M are ten to 20 days’ doubling time, but these are largely based on data from two to three weeks ago,” he said. “The concern was that the more recent doubling time is shorter. There was also concern that the problems with testing meant that the data were not particularly reliable.”
A spokeswoman for Sir Patrick said that the seven-day estimate had instead been based heavily on the findings of the weekly survey of the Office for National Statistics, and a similar less-frequent survey called React-1, run by Imperial College London.
These studies both test a random sample of more than 100,000 people to track the progress of the virus. Because the virus is still at low levels, however, it involves making projections on the basis of small numbers of positive cases.
On the basis of the change in the proportion of positives over the period they were sampling, they estimated a seven-day doubling time.
There’s also a distinct flavour, in this MP’s revolt, of fighting the last war. In its briefing, the Constitution Unit complains:
Parliament’s sidelining over coronavirus has been striking, but is part of a longer-running trend. In his first six months as Prime Minister, Johnson cancelled or indefinitely postponed three Liaison Committee evidence sessions, unlawfully prorogued parliament, and introduced a Withdrawal Agreement Act which – unlike its predecessor – gave parliament no real oversight of this year’s Brexit negotiations. All this already suggested a reluctance to face parliamentary scrutiny.
There’s more than a whiff here of smouldering Remainers’ resentment over being unable to stop Brexit by their tactic of weaponising parliamentary procedure, facilitated by the courts.
Equally, there may well be a feeling in Boris Johnson’s immediate circle that, through those Remainer antics, MPs forfeited parliament’s right to be a dispassionate guardian of the public interest.
Both attitudes are very wrong-headed and dangerous to democracy. During the three-year war of attrition against Brexit by the Remainer parliament, some of us warned that the damage to democracy through the public losing trust in its elected representatives could be severe and long-lasting.
Unfortunately, by his handling of the pandemic Boris Johnson has squandered more of that public trust. He has made bad mistakes and given the impression of incompetence, dithering and chaos.
That’s probably because he’s been unable to form a coherent strategy and stick to it. Trapped between the Scylla of unconscionable rates of death and serious disease on one side and the Charybdis of even greater damage to the economy on the other, he’s been tacking simultaneously in two opposing directions.
That’s why there are patent absurdities such as pubs and bars being allowed to open but being forced to close at 10 pm – causing mass crowding on the pavements, the precise opposite of the distancing that’s intended.
And seeking to avert national lockdowns by local ones doesn’t work and just causes resentment, because the virus does not respect city or regional limits.
The strategy needs to be ruthlessly focused on preventing an unconscionable amount of death and disease being caused by this virus which, absent a safe and effective vaccine, can only be contained, not eradicated. That can only happen if people maintain social distance (as well as wear masks and wash their hands); and by developing a properly run testing and tracing infrastructure.
Lockdowns are a last resort which becomes unavoidable only when people fail to distance in sufficient number. To persuade them to do so, however, Boris Johnson has to take people with him.
That means talking to them, personally, candidly and regularly, on TV and social media; it means accepting and answering head-on the questions that people have about the science and the conflicting opinions of scientists; it means, while acknowledging the economic and social pain currently being experienced, spelling out the likelihood of greater economic and social pain from allowing the virus to accelerate; it means explaining why the view on masks changed and why it’s important to wear them; it means owning up to the mistakes that have been made and explaining why they were made; it means telling people precisely how the particular mistake over crucial but botched test and trace procedures is now going to be put right.
It means having the courage to allow people to see the thinking behind the strategy, and how it it may have changed. It means sharing the dilemma over priorities with the public. It means being honest and transparent. Oh, and above all, competent.
So no problem, then.
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