Coronavirus: Boris Johnson too disorganised to be a dictator
“Our country is a freedom-loving country,” says Boris Johnson, while at halls of residence in Manchester and Glasgow, security guards tell students that they’re not allowed to go out to buy eggs. Which is awkward. Although logically, you don’t need to have much of something in order to love it. Perhaps we are a freedom-loving country in the same way that Namibia, say, is a rainfall-loving country. Like France is with winning wars. Or the passengers on the Titanic, with rafts.
It is quite a thing, to be confined to a block of flats. Very Wuhan. What with us all being so freedom-loving, British people are generally expected not to stand for this sort of thing, but students are only small and easy to bully. In fact, students are merely being asked not to go out — what with there being no law to enforce it — but when you’re being asked this by a combination of the government, your landlord, your educator, the police, and a large man in a high-vis waistcoat literally standing in the doorway, I expect it’s hard to know the difference. No pubs, no parties, no nothing.
Scottish universities are reportedly working on a plan to incorporate “Covid discipline” into student discipline rules, to give themselves a bit more legal heft. As in, you do what you’re told or else you get kicked out. Perhaps in time for Christmas, if you’re lucky.
Universities are always the incubators of political fights which don’t have the oxygen to happen elsewhere, and in a sense that’s what’s happening here.
The Tory MP Steve Baker was on Sky News at the weekend, complaining about Britain’s slide into authoritarianism via laws, rushed through without debate, on to a population increasingly uncertain about what it’s allowed to do and what it isn’t. “How do people think that liberty dies?” he said, to Sophy Ridge. “It dies like this.”
Liberty’s not dead, unless you’re a student
Well, yeah, I thought, watching him, but actually no. Because it hasn’t. Or at least, not unless you’re one of those students, far from home, peering from a narrow window, wondering what the hell is going on.
I’m not a fan of the idea that Britain’s fight against coronavirus has led us into authoritarianism, and I don’t think this is because of my own petty irritation at the sort of people who think it has. “No more going to the shops for me,” tweeted the former Ukip MP Douglas Carswell after the rules requiring masks came in back in July, as if he were nine. My God, get a grip. And yet the more I listened to Baker arguing that any new coronavirus restrictions simply must go through the House of Commons, the more I began to think he had a point. Not because I think we have an authoritarian government but because we just don’t have a very good one.
The distinction is important. Think about where we are and then think about where we could have been. It is six months since the PM confidently told us that antibody tests via Boots and Amazon were about to be a “game-changer” and about the same since we started hearing about a privacy-busting contact tracing app.
Together, they seemed to point towards a looming techno-tyranny, in which masked workers had to shuffle through checkpoints, wielding apps connected to vast databases which showed whether or not you were allowed to be out.
Day-glo aside, dystopia hasn’t happened
Obviously, I don’t mean to downplay the trauma of day-glo stickers on supermarket floors and some people getting a bit pissy with you if they can see your nostrils, but I think even the greatest lockdown sceptic would have to accept that the predicted Children of Men-style dystopia hasn’t quite happened. There haven’t even been that many fines. Across England and Wales, police seem to have levied about 18,000, about half of which have been paid. This might sound like a lot but I feel we’ve all learnt a great deal about statistics recently and so we ought to recognise that it really isn’t. Almost all of them were before July. When it comes to fines for failing to observing quarantine on returning from abroad, as of the middle of this month, there had been a grand total of 34.
As in, it’s not exactly Colditz out there. One way or another, we are a long way from George Orwell’s vision of oppression as “a boot stamping on a human face — for ever.” Right now, this country is more like an odd pair of socks, slapping a little annoyingly at your upper arm.
It is too generous to suggest that Britain has failed to slide into tyranny because we’re “freedom-loving” but it’s also too harsh to suggest the opposite, which is that we’re just really bad at organising things. Rather, it’s probably because it was never the plan because this government isn’t wired that way. If it looks otherwise sometimes then that’s because of the Cummings-esque tendency to use rules to herd, rather than direct. Set a rule of six, and it suddenly becomes an almighty hassle for one family to have another round for lunch. Demand 14 days of self-isolation and you increase your chances, more often than not, of at least getting some.
Until you get to university halls, where it is all taken literally. The universities have no excuse not to enforce the rules, and the students have no excuse not to obey them. And suddenly, thanks to drift and panic and scattergun nudging, you really do have something that looks an awful lot like authoritarianism. With the lesson being that we should only try to pass laws that we actually mean, for fear of suddenly waking up to a shock. And us a freedom-loving country, too.
The Times
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