Why on earth did we give up our freedom without an argument?

We cannot afford to ignore the collective nervous breakdown which triggered the West's lurch into lockdown

By The Telegraph 

We need to go on talking about lockdown. You might think now that both candidates for Tory leader have begun what is likely to be a stampede of government ministers denying they ever supported it, that the story of this unprecedented historical event was finished.

So discredited will the policy and its sinister propaganda programme have become that sooner than you might have thought possible, records will be amended and memories erased in the great totalitarian tradition, to make it appear that this terrible thing was somehow inflicted on the nation without anybody’s official approval.

So why not let it go? It’s over, thank God. It will never happen again. Let’s just forget it and get on with life as we used to know it rather than wasting time on post hoc analysis.

But we cannot - must not - give in to this seemingly reasonable temptation. Because what happened over the past two years, in this country and most of the developed world was not just a mistake: not merely a failure of judgement, or a misreading of the facts (or, more specifically, a confusion about what constitutes fact).

It was something far bigger and more alarming: a surrender of the fundamental principles of liberty and individual responsibility which we had assumed were unassailable in the West and were envied (with much consternation) in the East.

It is absolutely imperative to remember that we believed, before this great lurch into authoritarianism, that we had cracked it: the western democracies had found the answer to the ancient question, “How should people live?”

Here was the unbeatable formula: freedom under the rule of law, the primacy of personal responsibility under elected government, the right to a private life over which the state could not intervene except in the most carefully litigated ways.

The despotic states which held out against this global democratic tide became more and more desperately defensive. The principal one - the Soviet Union - simply collapsed under the impossibility, and its upcoming rival - China - had to resort to bribing its younger generations with shameless wealth, creating a new bourgeoisie which would have appalled Marx.

So what really happened here? Not only was there the introduction by fiat of the most extraordinarily invasive legal prohibitions, exceeding anything that had been imposed in the modern era even during wartime (children were not banned from embracing their grandparents during the war, nor was it a crime to have a sexual relationhsip with someone outside your household) but any public criticism of these measures was effectively prohibited or stigmatised to an extent that was almost unendurable.

But let’s get past the outrage and condemnation and ask the real question: why? How did it come to this? The explanation has to go beyond politics - at least in the ordinary sense of the word. It has to be pathological. The world went crazy. There is no other way to account for what was an almost nihilistic dismantling not just of particular liberties and rights, but of the very idea of liberty.

Of course there was a strong element of traditional political activism in play. The argument was instantly framed by the inevitable Marxist hangers-on in terms that suited anti-capitalist dogma.

If you were opposed to lockdown on the grounds of the damage that it would do to the economy, you were cast as a ruthless defender of “profits over people??. In other words, you would prefer to sacrifice lives (notably of the elderly and vulnerable) for the sake of mere monetary gain. Thus did “protecting the economy” become synonymous with protecting the richest (and probably healthiest) sectors of the population.

Presumably even the most infantile left-winger can see now that the damage to the economy in this horrendous period is hitting the least well off hardest. “A thriving economy” is not a euphemism for profiteering: it is the condition that provides prosperity, well-being and opportunity for the maximum number of people.

And prosperity does not mean crass affluence - buying more and more unnecessary stuff. It offers the great mass of the population the chance of self-determination, the ability to make life choices and to fulfil their potential.

Making a conscious decision to embrace policies that damage the economy should be morally unacceptable except under the most horrific circumstances. Some people in power clearly thought the pandemic was such a circumstance. Other people simply used it as a pretext for shutting down an economic system that they had always disliked. If we had got the argument out in the open, that second group might have been exposed.

But there was a more insidious difference between the pro and anti-lockdown camps which is older than the divide between the supporters of free markets and the champions of command economies. Perhaps it is the most basic disagreement of all because it goes right to the heart of the human condition.

There is an eternal struggle in every organised society between the longing for freedom and the need for security. (Indeed, that struggle exists within every individual.) In political systems, those two polar impulses have taken the form of liberal democracies which prioritised freedom, and authoritarian governments which promised (often falsely) security.

During the second half of the last century there was a pretty clear sense of which countries - and which political systems - represented those two options. During the Cold War, we knew where we were: it was Communist dictatorship versus the Free World. You chose the side you supported - which was not always the one you were born into. Some people changed their minds and their loyalties over time.

Then, a generation ago, all that certainty - and the debate that went with it - came to an end. The failed Communist leviathan, it is now obvious, had a complete nervous breakdown. Maybe, not so obviously, we did too.