Being bossed around has infantilised people

After nine months of slithering into submissiveness, Britons have lost the confidence to use common sense about COVID.

Britain's Prime Minister Boris Johnson gestures on his return to 10 Downing Street after taking the Prime Minister’s Questions at the House of Commons on Wednesday. Picture: Tolga Akmen/AFP

In letters inches high the word “coward” took up almost a quarter of the British Daily Mirror’s front page on Thursday. “He won’t change the law and wants YOU to take blame for killer 3rd wave. He’s such a COWARD.”

So much for Boris Johnson’s decision during the week to leave it up to families to decide what they should do over Christmas.

A hankering for control is never far from the left’s instincts but even from the right, The Spectator sounded less than confident.

The magazine pondered what it called “the gamble” that people “will suddenly start adhering to government guidance … even though the law does not force them to do so”. On Twitter the Mail on Sunday columnist Dan Hodges was at least witty: “The Prime Minister is telling the country not to do what he’s telling the country it can do.”

They’re all saying essentially the same thing and it fast became the smart thing to say after Mr Johnson confirmed that the Christmas truce in pandemic regulation would still go ahead but added that he hoped families would think about the risks and consider cancelling plans to gather. Cue outrage. “If it’s unwise, why aren’t you making it illegal?”

So this is what a free people have been reduced to. Whimpering for someone to boss us around. Yearning for a smack or to see others threatened with a smack. After nine months when the smallest twitch of an epidemiologist’s eyebrow seems to have been translated into statute, we’ve come to feel naked if there aren’t laws commanding everyone to be sensible rather than just advice recommending it.

Thus we British slide, order-in-council by order-in-council, back to childhood. We’ve been infantilised. Even if we trust our own common sense, we don’t trust others’.

“Stockholm syndrome,” say the dictionaries, “is a condition in which hostages develop a psychological alliance with their captors during captivity” and this begins to sound like the mentality now gripping us. So used have we become to being ordered about in what we know is a good cause that we prefer compulsion to reasoning things out for ourselves. “Please, miss,” runs the old joke about a girl in a progressive, free-thinking school, “must we do what we like today?”

What are we to make of this pandemic-driven slither into submissiveness? The easy response for someone like me is to meet certitude with certitude: to insist that grown-ups can always make up their own minds; and that all pandemic regulation should be scrapped and replaced by strong advice to use our common sense, plus advice about what the experts say common sense dictates. I could relish the simplicity of such assertions.

But the truth is not so simple. Nobody but an anarchist believes there should be no laws against misbehaviour. Nobody but a Maoist believes the law should reach into every corner of our private lives. All sensible people know a balance must be struck and differ only on the question of where.

I, for instance, would not advocate freedom for someone to charge into a nightclub fully aware that he had COVID-19 and would be infecting others. My Times colleague David Aaronovitch would not advocate criminalising COVID-risky kissing. And what David and I would both agree is that Johnson’s festive swerve towards individual responsibility sits awkwardly with the statutory approach his government took from the start. You can’t turn the public’s use of its own judgment on and off like a tap. If the PM trusts the public’s good sense now, why didn’t he in March?

Sometimes we would have been more careful, not less, if left to our own judgment. I was at the Meadowhall shopping village near Sheffield on Friday. What a scrum. I’ve never felt more coronavirus-vulnerable. Though it was all legal, I shall not go again. On the other hand, left to me, I’d stop for a quiet pint at the Flying Childers, whose landlord has gone to huge lengths to ensure proper distancing.

The “there ought to be a law against it” brigade tend to assume that wherever you set the statutory boundaries, people will push them to their limits: so they narrow the limits. But this becomes a self-justifying prophecy: the more minutely we’re regulated, the more we outsource our own judgment to the state. If everything you mustn’t do is listed, we naturally assume that whatever’s left off the list is fine. Our reliance on common sense atrophies.

Boris Johnson speaks inside 10 Downing Street on Wednesday. Picture: Pool/Getty Images

Sensible lawmakers know this. So in road traffic legislation we set broad parameters, for example 20mph (32km/h) or 30mph in residential areas, while expecting drivers to use their own judgment within those limits. Every driver knows that even 20mph will often be too fast, and safe and sensible road use depends entirely upon millions of daily exercises of people’s own discretion. And so, to some degree – and I stress “to some degree” – it could be with this pandemic.

So I hope, though without much confidence, this Christmas could be the start of our being treated as grown-ups. Each family’s situation is different and I do not like journalist Dame Esther Rantzen’s bossy boast that “the best gift we can offer our families this Christmas is to refuse to meet them. That’s what I’ve done”.

The redoubtable dame appears to be in good health, and God give her many more years of it, but there will be literally tens of thousands of grandmas and grandpas who cannot be confident they will still be here for Christmas 2021. They are not idiots. They’ll know there’s a risk in seeing children and grandchildren next week.

They’ll know this risk is posed by their younger relatives to them and not the other way round. If, knowing this, they would still rather take the risk who is Dame Esther to tell them they mustn’t? My late mother, if she had made it through to this Christmas, would have wanted all her children with her now – and she well knew the risk.

Couldn’t we be more honest? Couldn’t the health secretary just spit it out? “You should know you pose some risk to granny’s life. She should know too. And as long as you both know, your Christmas arrangements are up to you.”

I’ve no window into Boris Johnson’s soul but I don’t believe that by pausing lockdowns for Christmas the Prime Minister was being a coward. I half think he was reverting to his deeper instincts. I wish he had trusted them earlier and I wish he’d trust them again.

The Times