Liberal democracy will be the biggest casualty of this pandemic – Telegraph.co.uk

The biggest casualty of the lockdown will not be the closed pubs, restaurants and shops and the crippled airlines. It will not be our once-thriving musical, theatrical and sporting culture. It will not even be the wreckage of our economy. These are terrible things to behold. But the biggest casualty of all will be liberal democracy.

Liberal democracy is a remarkable but fragile achievement. It is an attempt to meet the challenge of making governments answerable to the people, while protecting personal freedom. This is hard to do. People crave security and look to the state to provide it. To do this, the state needs extensive powers over its citizens. This is why, in democracies across the world, the power of the state has continually increased. It is also why liberal democracy is the exception rather than the rule. Democracies are easily subverted and often fail.

What makes us a free society is that, although the state has vast powers, there are conventional limits on what it can do with them. The limits are conventional because they do not depend on our laws but on our attitudes. There are islands of human life which are our own, a personal space into which the state should not intrude without some altogether exceptional justification.

Liberal democracy breaks down when frightened majorities demand mass coercion of their fellow citizens, and call for our personal spaces to be invaded. These demands are invariably based on what people conceive to be the public good. They all assert that despotism is in the public interest.

The problem is perfectly encapsulated in a recent interview with Professor Neil Ferguson, whose projections were used to justify the first lockdown last March. Before that, as Prof Ferguson related in that interview, Sage had concluded that the Chinese lockdown had worked but was out of the question in Europe. Its a communist, one-party state, we said. We couldnt get away with it in Europe, we thought. And then Italy did it. And we realised we could If China had not done it, the year would have been very different.

China is not a liberal democracy. It is a totalitarian state. It treats human beings as so many tools of state policy. There is no personal space which the state cannot invade at will. Liberal democracies have good reasons of political morality for not wishing to be like China. Considering this issue only in terms of whether lockdowns are effective against pandemics, and whether governments can "get away with it", serves to reduce liberty from a major principle to a mere question of expediency.

We have to assume, since the Government took his advice, that ministers agreed with Prof Ferguson. Certainly that was the position of the senior minister who recently told me that liberal democracy was an unsuitable model for dealing with a pandemic. Something more Napoleonic was needed, said he.

Many people believe that it is OK to be like China for a time, because when the crisis ends we can go back to being like Britain again. These people are making a serious mistake. We cannot switch in and out of totalitarianism at will. Because a free society is a question of attitude, it is dead once the attitude changes.

A society in which oppressive control of every detail of our lives is unthinkable except when it is thought to be a good idea, is not free. It is not free while the controls are in place. And it is not free after they are lifted, because the new attitude will allow the same thing to happen again whenever there is enough public support.

Covid-19 is not unique. There will be other epidemics. Some will be worse. Other issues will pose similar dilemmas, from terrorism and climate change at one extreme to obesity and censorship of politically incorrect opinion at the other. A threshold has now been crossed. A big taboo has gone. Other governments will say that the only question that matters is whether it works and whether they can get away with it. In a world ruled by the empire of fear, the answer will usually be yes.

We already have a striking example. The vaccine, which was supposed to make the lockdown unnecessary, has become a reason for keeping it in force. Because there is now an exit route, we are told that it doesnt matter how far away it is.

Infections, hospitalisations and deaths are plunging, but millions who are at virtually no risk are being kept in house imprisonment. This is being done mainly because a selective regime of controls would be too difficult for the state to enforce. Coercion quickly becomes an object in itself.

Liberty is not an absolute value but it is a critically important one. Of all freedoms, the freedom to interact with other human beings is perhaps the most valuable. It is a basic human need, the essential condition of human happiness and creativity.

I do not doubt that there are extreme situations in which oppressive controls over our daily lives may be necessary and justified: an imminent threat of invasion, for example, or a violent general insurrection. Some health crises may qualify, such as a major epidemic of smallpox (case mortality about 30 per cent) or Ebola (about 50 per cent).

Covid-19 is serious, but it is not in that category or even close. It is well within the range of perils which we have always had to live with, and always will. According to government figures, more than 99 per cent of people who get Covid survive. The great majority will not even get seriously ill. The average age at which people die of Covid-19 is 82, which is close to the average age at which people die anyway.

The Prime Minister claims to believe in liberty and to find the current measures distasteful. Actions speak louder than words, and I am afraid that I do not believe him. He is too much of a populist to go against public sentiment. He lacks the moral and political stature to lead opinion rather than follow it.

I hope that I am wrong about this. But we shall soon know. In the next week Boris Johnson has an opportunity to show that he has some principles after all.

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Liberal democracy will be the biggest casualty of this pandemic - Telegraph.co.uk