Janet Daley
It is difficult to recall now the shock of learning that it had become a crime for children to hug their grandparents. But we must hold on to the memory of that extraordinary moment when a liberal democratic society introduced prohibitions in personal and family life which went way beyond anything that the East German Stasi had devised. These rules were, in the technical sense of the word, inhuman and they should have been inconceivable.
What kind of bizarre pathological state of mind had enveloped the country – and, as we now know, much of the government – which made it acceptable to inflict such an edict? Even when the cruel consequences of its imposition had been widely publicised – the elderly parents being forced to die alone without a final embrace, the isolated and housebound being “protected” from the virus who fell into irreparable despair – still it went on relentlessly. And it was enforced even in the face of data that should have been taken into account. That a British prime minister expressed resistance to such measures should not be shocking or even surprising. His comments on the disproportionate death rates among elderly people may sound crass but they were factually sound and acknowledged even by the implacable lockdown champions. More important, the force of his argument should have been seen, in spite of its flippant delivery, as ultimately compassionate: he was protesting against draconian rules which, in the end, deprived the entire population – including the old and sick – of the comfort and solace of family intimacy.
The key observation he cited, that a large proportion of people dying of Covid were beyond the normal age of life expectancy, should have been of huge importance in this. What he was suggesting was that Covid had effectively become what pneumonia had been called in a more unsentimental age, the “old man’s friend”. That may or may not have been a simplistic view of what was a new and unknown virus. But the moral question at the heart of this remains the same. Should an entire population – including those who were, by virtue of their youth or state of robust health unlikely to be at risk – be locked into personal isolation from friends and family, stopped from engaging in the activities which constitute normal emotional development, and prevented from making an economic contribution to society, in order to protect people who might have been close to death under any circumstances?
Or, even more to the point, who could have chosen to isolate themselves? The idea of sheltering or advising confinement only for those in serious danger apparently appealed strongly to Boris Johnson but was firmly beaten back by the Cummings-Gove alliance who were adamant that the situation was so grave that personal choice and individual responsibility could not be permitted any space at all. Back in 2020, before there was even a vaccine programme in place, I wrote on these pages in what seemed like very stark terms at the time. As someone who counted, because of my age, as one of those being protected by everybody else’s sacrifices, I assumed the moral right to say: please don’t. Don’t give up the liberties and opportunities that properly belong to your stage of life for my sake and do not go meekly into that imprisonment to which the government has sentenced you.
It horrified me that my grandchildren might be disadvantaged into the indefinite future in order (possibly) to protect me from – what? Mortal illness, which must come eventually? The inevitability of death? I concluded that column with the favourite refrain of anti-war protesters: not in my name. As it happens, we know now, the then prime minister felt the same.
The Telegraph
