Coronavirus Freedom Day: Just what are the British expected to take responsibility for?

It’s all very well telling people to use their judgment after Freedom Day but we’ll soon come across others exercising theirs very differently.

Hooray for Freedom Day, which I read is to be celebrated with a “bonfire of Covid regulations”. Are we sure there are enough regulations for a whole bonfire, though? On the “what you can and cannot do” page of the government’s website, even the big print, easy-read version with pictures is only 60 pages. Even if you bung on printouts of all the actual legislation passed in parliament, you’re probably still only talking about the sort of very mini and bijou bonfire you could have with, say, Boris Johnson’s 410-page history of Winston Churchill.

Still, let’s indulge them and imagine there’s enough paper for a proper one. It’s Freedom Day! It’s a mix between the Fourth of July and Guy Fawkes Night and VE Day itself. Right? See us all, drunk and merry, dancing around the fire, like Dragnet without the Satanism. The one-metre rule is gone. We’re drinking, we’re hugging, we’re screaming in each other’s faces. “LOOK AT US!” we’re bellowing, so close that we can feel each other’s warm breath and spittle on our eyes. “FINALLY! WE’RE TAKING PERSONAL RESPONSIBILITY!”

For Robert Jenrick, the housing secretary, “personal responsibility” is to be the maxim of the next phase of the coronavirus pandemic. Boris Johnson says we must “exercise judgment”. How, though?

Passengers on the London Underground. Picture: AFP.

Take your guy on the London Underground with his mask on his chin, for example. You know the one. Might have a medical exemption but probably doesn’t, on account of the way he looks like a weightlifter. At present he is definitely doing the wrong thing. So speaketh the law. But come July 19, when he is to do this “exercise judgment” thing, what judgment is he actually supposed to be making? And based on what?

Is the government trusting him, say, to have pondered the latest study published in The Lancet on airborne transmission (Greenhalgh, Jimenez, Prather et al), while bearing in mind the inconclusive nature of the 2020 Danish DANMASK-19 study into the efficacy of masks at protecting the wearer, while also weighing up the latest, promising, if not yet peer-reviewed paper from Public Health England (PHE), “Effectiveness of COVID-19 vaccines against hospital admission with the Delta (B. 1.617.2) variant"? Is this what he should have done, before leaving the house and sitting on the Tube with his legs so very far apart, quite openly scratching his balls? Or what?

This is not a flippant question. It is in fact a deadly serious question, and if I sound like I’m being flippant then I’m afraid it is simply that I know no other way. Nor, by the way, is it an argument for continuing controls. Personally I have never minded masks, not least because they allow me to covertly mouth obscenities at people who annoy me, but the logic behind many Covid rules does indeed seem to be ebbing away as vaccines keep deaths low. Although the government isn’t quite saying that, either, is it? Rather, it is saying that it is all now up to us. Without quite saying what is.

The Royal Box at Wimbledon stands and applauds Sarah Gilbert (Bottom R), one of the people behind the AstraZeneca vaccine. Picture: AFP.

When we speak of personal responsibility in the age of Covid, we are actually talking about two very different things. The first is responsibility for ourselves, and the second is for everybody else. Remarkably, quite a lot of people seem yet to comprehend the distinction. Your hardcore mask refusers may choose to style themselves as akin to 1930s German Jews refusing to wear yellow stars, but for many of us they have actually more closely resembled those American libertarian gun nuts who make a point of wearing an assault rifle strapped across their chests at the Walmart cheese counter. As in, it is not, and has never been, only about you.

For me and I’m sure many others, the greatest anxieties of Covid have been all about being the link between whoever I’ve just seen and whoever I’m about to, whether it’s small children and elderly relatives, or crowded public transport and my office, or coughing colleagues and everybody else. If we are to be honest, though, then we should admit that this moralistic neuroticism about being a vector is a novelty.

Boris Johnson announces the lifting of restrictions. Picture: Getty Images.

What with lockdown being over, I’d imagine you aren’t nearly bored enough to spend your time on YouTube watching old adverts for cold and flu products, but they are instructive. Is this really how we used to behave? She’s on a bus, he’s in the office, she’s got a fever while working in first-class cabin crew for God’s sake, he’s coughing into the face of his parachute instructor. “A seggund glass return doo Dottingham,” snivels a man in a station, badly in need of some Tunes. Always, the theme is about powering on, attending that meeting, turning up anyway. Nobody ever says, “go home, Sharon, for God’s sake, or else you might start a chain of infection that ultimately kills my mum”.

Right before this pandemic started, the day after the 2019 election, I myself flew to Washington DC with a fever to be best man at a friend’s wedding. It was the olden days. It would have been horribly selfish not to. Is that what we’re eventually going back to? Even with Covid? It seems impossible to justify and half-mad that it was ever how we lived. But, perhaps, only to some of us.

“Masks work,” PHE’s Nikki Kanani told Times Radio yesterday, and both Johnson and Chris Whitty said people should still sometimes wear them even though they don’t have to. And yet we have numerous cabinet ministers proudly asserting that they aren’t going to bother, making it sound a lot like the government’s guidance about the government’s guidance is that you shouldn’t feel the need to be guided by it.

I’m glad restrictions are ending. I think we’ve all had quite enough. What, though, are we about to take personal responsibility for? Just ourselves, again? Or everybody else, too?

The Times