The “roadmap” out of lockdown announced by Boris Johnson has disappointed a vociferous section of his backbenches and an equally vociferous cohort of the press. Typical of the responses from these quarters was Steven Glover’s lament in the Mail that the “optimistic, freedom-loving Boris has disappeared.” But if this is indeed the case, it’s been a very drawn-out disappearing act.
Lives now depend on whether Johnson’s boosterism really has been consigned to the dustbin, so it is worth investigating the role played so far by “lockdown libertarianism” and asking: how deadly have been its consequences?
In his triumphant and swaggering Brexit speech at the Greenwich Royal Naval College on 3rd February 2020, we find one of Johnson’s earliest mentions of coronavirus. It is a warning, but not of imminent peril. Rather, it is a warning of the danger posed to the economy by what he regards as over-reaction to it. Thus:
We are starting to hear some bizarre autarkic rhetoric, when barriers are going up, and when there is a risk that new diseases such as coronavirus will trigger a panic and a desire for market segregation that go beyond what is medically rational, to the point of doing real and unnecessary economic damage.
Little did we realise what lay ahead of us then, still less that the situation would be made far worse by inaction and incompetence on the part of the government—much of it originating in exactly the kind of libertarian, “free-market” attitude expressed here. Johnson invoked Britain as a “country ready to take off its Clark Kent spectacles and leap into the phone booth and emerge with its cloak flowing as the supercharged champion of the right of the populations of the earth to buy and sell freely among each other.” Not in the least coincidentally, the swashbuckling speech was given beneath a mural by James Thornhill, “The Triumph of Liberty and Peace over Tyranny,” depicting William III and Mary II enthroned after the “Glorious Revolution.”
“A freedom-loving country”
However, months of mounting deaths did absolutely nothing to change Johnson’s libertarian stance. So here he is in the Commons on 22nd September, effortlessly insulting other countries around the world by claiming that there is something specifically British about valuing freedom:
There is an important difference between our country and many other countries around the world: our country is a freedom-loving country. If we look at the history of this country over the past 300 years, virtually every advance, from free speech to democracy, has come from this country.
It is important to understand that this view is shared by many Tory MPs and government-supporting papers in the shape of the Telegraph, Express, Sun and Mail. Significantly, these are largely the same forces that were such vociferous advocates for Brexit, and in both instances what has powered them is a particular conception of—and attitude to—freedom. Just as many Brexiteers shared the view of Jacob Rees-Mogg and Boris Johnson that the UK was a “vassal state” of the EU that needed to set itself free, so many of those who oppose lockdowns regard them as unacceptable abridgements of both individual freedom and economic activity that need to be curtailed as soon as possible.
The anti-EU, anti-lockdown linkage is clearly visible in the announcement on 11th November of the formation of the soi-disant Covid Recovery Group (CRG) by 50 Conservative MPs bitterly opposed to the government’s decision to introduce a second lockdown in England. This is chaired by the former Tory chief whip, Mark Harper, and its deputy chair is Steve Baker, formerly a minister in the Department for Exiting the European Union and chair of the European Research Group (ERG), which shares numerous members with the CRG. As inveterate culture warriors, both groups are equally contemptuous of established expert opinion which doesn’t suit their purposes, and their members habitually hold forth with an air of authority which is entirely belied by their actual knowledge of the fields of knowledge in question. They also enjoy an open door to the papers which share their views.
As far back as 3rd May, Baker had written an article in the Telegraph, the house journal of the Tory libertarians, headed “Boris Johnson must end the absurd, dystopian and tyrannical lockdown,” which he compared to “house arrest.” Entirely predictably, Harper was given space in the same paper on 11th November, plus a generous summary of his piece by chief political correspondent Christopher Hope, to publicise the group’s formation and demand that the government “undertake and publish a full cost-benefit analysis of restrictions on a regional basis” while ending “the monopoly on advice of government scientists.” It continued: “Prevailing expert scientific opinion must be challenged by competitive, multidisciplinary expert groups. Government should publish the models that inform policies so that they can be reviewed by the public.” Ministers must “ensure that all critical Covid-related policies are underpinned by at least three independent expert opinions, all to be published ahead of the next vote on restrictions in parliament.”
Impossible demands
This set the pattern for all the CRG’s subsequent interventions. And so on 22nd November the CRG, now numbering 70 MPs, wrote to Johnson protesting his proposed three-tier scheme to replace the national lockdown. The letter told Johnson that the MPs could not support his approach unless the government demonstrated that the proposed new restrictions would “save more lives than they cost.” To this end, they repeated their demand for a full cost-benefit analysis of the proposed restrictions on a regional basis, and added that “the burden is on the Government to demonstrate the necessity and proportionality of each restriction.”
Impact assessments might sound reasonable. But given the number of variables and imponderables involved in the pandemic, it is clearly impossible to forecast with any degree of exactitude the precise impact of a specific change to a specific restriction. However, this did not stop the letter being enthusiastically amplified by the CRG’s press allies. The Sunday Express published the letter in full and splashed the story on the front page, under the headline “Boris facing Tory REVOLT as MPs furiously reject looming Covid crackdown after December 2.” The same day’s Sun quoted at length from the letter in its article headed “PROVE IT'LL SAVE LIVES.” It was also the subject of an article in the Sunday Telegraph and another in the next day’s edition, with the latter carrying an 895-word article by one of the letter’s signatories, Nusrat Ghani, the Tory MP for Wealden, headed “I will not support renewed Covid restrictions if the cure is worse than the disease.” As the headline suggests, the article is largely a re-hash of the letter, although it adds its own libertarian flourish with the words:
We have already overstepped the mark and it is particularly intolerable to me that it is the Conservative Party that is legislating about how people live their lives in their private homes. In my experience, when men, institutions and governments get hold of that power, they give it up very reluctantly.
As the vote on the tier system neared, coverage favourable to the CRG continued apace. For example, Harper was allotted 674 words in the Sunday Telegraph, 29th November, to put forward once again the CRG’s impossibilist demands, while an editorial in the daily edition on 2nd December, following the government’s Commons victory, complained that “its strategy is less a proportionate response to the virus than a heavy-handed and illiberal regime, which undermines our fundamental freedoms at the risk of permanently damaging our prosperity.”
The next episode in this saga occurred on 11th February, when the CRG, taking advantage of the success of the government’s vaccination programme, wrote yet again to Johnson, this time demanding the permanent lifting of all Covid restrictions as soon as all those over 50 had been vaccinated.
In its article headlined “This must be final lockdown,” the Sunday Express, 14th February, referred to the CRG as “a powerful group of Tory MPs” and quoted from its letter to the effect that “the vaccine gives us immunity from Covid but it must also give us permanent immunity from Covid-related lockdowns and restrictions.” “Back in the pub garden by Easter!” ran a headline in the Mail, while in the Sun, CRG member and chair of the 1922 Committee Graham Brady illustrated particularly clearly the kind of Tory libertarian attitude to the lockdown which is the subject of this article, arguing that “in this country, the Government is there to serve the people, not to tell us what to do.”
A new note
These pressures notwithstanding, in the past couple of weeks, a new note of caution has crept into Johnson’s pronouncements on the future of the lockdown, presumably because even his instinctive boosterism has not prevented him from grasping that there is a limit to the number of times it is politically possible to make baseless promises that excite false hopes doomed to end in disappointment.
However, this has served only to increase the pressure on him from the let-it-rip brigade. Thus the CRG has clamoured for the lockdown to be lifted by the end of April, according to a timetable of dates as arbitrary and meaningless as one would expect from these self-proclaimed “experts.” Similarly, the front page of the Mail, 18th February, ran the headline “Infection and death rates plunging. Vaccines roaring ahead. Yet no normal life until JULY, despite the human cost. No wonder so many say… NOW TAKE THE BREAKS OFF, BORIS.” Inside was an editorial, headed “Your cavalry is here, Prime Minister… Now set Britain free.” This complained that Johnson is “in thrall to a clique of unelected scientists and vested interests” and has been “spooked by finger-in-the-wind academic modellers and grotesque tales of the NHS collapsing.”
Johnson’s newly cautious approach was in evidence in the “roadmap” unveiled on 22nd February, which set out a four-stage plan for bringing England out of lockdown. There is a five-week gap between each stage in which data about the impact of the prior step will be gathered and analysed. The introduction of each new stage is contingent on four tests being met, namely the effectiveness and rollout of the vaccines, the pressure on the NHS and the emergence of any new Covid variants of particular concern. Thus, although dates have been set for the introduction of each stage, these are by no means set in stone.
It should be pointed out, however, that not only does the number of new daily cases currently remain high compared to summer and early autumn, but, according to modelling carried out by Imperial College London, which assumes a similar relaxation of restrictions to that laid out in the roadmap, a further 150,000-280,000 people stand to be hospitalised and 32,200-54,800 people are liable to die between February and the end of June. On the other hand, a study carried out for the government at Warwick University suggested that if all restrictions were lifted by the end of April, as the CRG has urged, this would spark a huge fourth wave of infections and over 91,000 people could die by June.
These considerations, however, cut little ice with the anti-lockdown papers, which were distinctly unimpressed by Johnson’s new-found caution. The front page of the Mail, 22nd February, was headed “End in sight at last – but it’s going to take months. What are we waiting for?” Glover enquired: “Why has Boris been bounced from boosterism to gloomsterism?” The answer, apparently, is that “the doleful characters who have finished him off are the unaccountable scientists of Sage.” The headline of the front page of the Sunspeaks for itself: “The wait escape. Boris sets England on snail-paced return to freedom with restrictions not fully lifted until at least June 21,” as does that of the Telegraph editorial: “The vaccines are working incredibly well. So why is the roadmap out of the lockdown so inflexible?” All of these papers also quote Baker’s complaint that “Today's pace of change will be a hammer blow to aviation, pubs, restaurants, hotels, gyms and pools, the arts, and entertainment. It seems to be modelling, not data, driving decisions.”
“The loudest voices in the room”
Doubtless there will be much more of this kind of thing as the vaccine programme continues, but it is striking just how out of kilter with public opinion are the views of the anti-lockdown ultras. For example, in an Ipsos MORI survey conducted between 12th-13th January, almost half the respondents said that the current restrictions were not strict enough (48 per cent), up from 39 per cent at the start of November. Over a third (37 per cent) said that the current measures were about right, while only 9 per cent believed they were too strict. And in a YouGov poll conducted on 12th February, 45 per cent of those surveyed strongly supported social distancing measures staying in place until Autumn 2021, with 31 per cent somewhat supporting this idea.
However, it would be most unwise to ignore the fact that the kinds of ideas discussed in this article are capable of having very considerable impact on government policy. As Robert Shrimsley argued in the Financial Times on 6th January, because up until recently Johnson has been so deferential to his fellow libertarians in both parliament and the press, “the story of Britain’s crisis has been one of delaying the inevitable until it is unavoidable, a vicious cycle of slow response followed by sharp correction which lasts longer for starting later.” This has led him to over-promise and under-deliver, with desperately serious consequences for all of us. Thus it is profoundly to be hoped that in future he will be less in thrall to the let-it-rip faction, and that England’s roadmap will be driven, as Devi Sridhar puts it in the Guardian, “by data and science, and not by the loudest voices in the room.”
