Mick Hartley

At UnHerd, Paul Embery, like many of us, wonders what's happened to parliament through all this.

Has there ever been a time when our Parliament was more supine, more compliant, more irrelevant? Has it, on any major issue, been less willing to question the wisdom of Government policy, than it has the decision to impose some of the most severe restrictions on our civil liberties ever experienced in peacetime?

When it implemented the coronavirus lockdown in March, the Government acknowledged that some of the measures were unprecedented and would require us to make huge personal sacrifices. But they were necessary, we were told, to help flatten the curve and prevent the NHS being overwhelmed. Then we could get back to something resembling normality. […]

For here we are, six months from the implementation of the first lockdown restrictions, with the curve duly flattened and number of daily deaths now mercifully low — notwithstanding a recent rise in the number of infections caused by a variety of factors. The NHS seems to be in no more danger of being overwhelmed than is usual for this time of year, the Nightingale hospitals remain empty, and there appears no serious prospect of the second wave matching the first. Yet still the nation remains bound up in the straitjacket of draconian laws, with a panicked Boris Johnson threatening every day to tighten the straps yet further. It seems the Government’s objective now is to keep us in some form of lockdown until the virus disappears from our shores completely – an absurdly quixotic ambition and a sign of the obvious mission creep that has occurred. […]

And for what? For a virus that, while undoubtedly unpleasant, represents a serious threat to a relatively tiny number of people, many of whom will have other underlying conditions. That doesn’t mean this small minority should be considered expendable: on the contrary, we should protect them aggressively, and far better than we have managed so far. But place the rest of the population under effective house arrest? Cripple our economy? Impose alien measures, such as compulsory mask-wearing, which fundamentally alter our relations with each other as human beings? Such a response has surely proven to be disproportionate in the extreme.

One might have a little more sympathy with the lockdown approach if it had demonstrably saved lots of lives. But there appears to be little evidence of any correlation between the severity of a nation’s restrictions and the impact on the number of excess fatalities. All too often, those who implore us to “follow the science” seem not to have studied the science themselves.

It didn’t have to be this way. A Government of a calmer disposition, and one courageous enough to take a long-term view rather than be in thrall to the 24-hour news cycle, would have seen that a policy which erected a shield around the elderly and infirm while defending the freedom of everyone else to go about their normal business, albeit with regard for sensible hygiene measures, was the wisest course. Even now, we might look to Sweden, which, in taking a more relaxed approach – no hard lockdown, no compulsory masks, no mass panic – seems not to have fared worse than many countries. Moreover, with current infection rates among the lowest in Europe, the country looks well-placed to come through the crisis swifter than most.

Instead, Britain is in the grip of a collective national hysteria, unleashed and prolonged by a Government that flails around dementedly, petrified of negative headlines, afflicted by short-termism, imposing extreme and counter-productive measures utterly out of proportion to the problem we face, trashing ancient liberties along the way, and all with disregard for the appalling economic consequences.

And parliament says nothing.