Lockdowns and the decline of Western civilisation

If there was any doubt before, it’s very clear now that the 21st century will be China’s. Faced with an Eastern virus that our forebears would have shrugged off, the West has immiserated itself in such an extraordinary manner that Chinese officials must have fainted in delighted disbelief. It has presumably got to the stage where, although they were initially rather pleased to see their competitors on the world stage destroying their economies and societies, they now fear we have done so much financial damage to ourselves that we might not buy as many of their goods from now on. This could explain why the WHO has recently gone cooler on lockdowns, for the WHO is under the hoof of the Chinese.

The direction of travel has been obvious for the last three decades or so. China’s admission to the World Trade Organization in 2001 was seen at the time as a great moment for the world, and the hope was that as China became richer, capitalism would do what it always has done, ie foster a flowering of freedom and democracy. That, to put it mildly, has not happened (the same utopian thinking was common among those extolling the virtues of the nascent worldwide web). As China’s economy grew and grew, so did the West’s, but not at anything like the same speed. Cultural forces in the West were, arguably, more contributory to a growing malaise, as chronicled by Douglas Murray in his two mini-masterpieces The Strange Death Of Europe and The Madness Of Crowds. By the time we got to 2020, for reasons I also go into here, the time was ripe for the West to properly implode. And that it has done.

I’ll focus on Britain, my place of abode, the world’s fifth largest economy, and still one of the most influential countries. Our response to a virus that killed 0.2% of those who got it, 94% of whom were already very ill or very old, was to plunge the economy into the worst recession for 300 years, pursue the greatest curtailing of freedoms in our history, wreck children’s education and mental well-being, cause three million people to miss cancer screenings, in a single year borrow £394 billion (up from an expected £40 billion), and much more besides.

The ripping apart of the UK has been accompanied by sheer incompetence every step of the way. Didn’t we used to be known for basic competence, if nothing else? Testing, which creates vastly more problems than it solves, is a joke: even Public Health England has admitted nearly one in four individuals receive an inaccurate result. The tier system is beyond inane. Bristol, whose Covid rate was 292 per 100,000 pre-second lockdown, slightly nudged up to 309, but leapt from Tier 1 to Tier 3. The government repeatedly saying it is ‘following the science’ would be laughable were the consequences not so tragic. When you’re building an aeroplane you do indeed ‘follow the science’ by not making the wings too small or the body too big, so the thing actually flies - when you are being told you can go out before 10pm but not after, and you can have no visitors on December 22, but you can have six people round on December 23 (as long as one of them’s called Ian and walks with a limp, or something), then you are emphatically not following any kind of science. Many of the rules are like the ones the kid comes up with for his games in Peter Greenaway’s Drowning By Numbers. And how can even the most demented lockdown fanatic look at what is being done at the start of December - the placing the vast majority of the country in a straitjacket after one month’s lockdown - and claim with a straight face that lockdowns work? 

When the history of the West’s demise is written, many individuals will be named and shamed. But Boris Johnson’s name will be up there amongst the greatest villains. Once assumed to be a libertarian and a conservative, the serial liar, philanderer and “phoney” (as Christopher Hitchens once said to me of him), has demonstrated that he is very much on board with the century’s ‘feelings over facts’ narrative. He has turned a crisis into an existential catastrophe. Did this man really write a biography of Churchill? Perhaps it was ghost written? How utterly pathetic that this buffoon was last week hiding away in Downing Street, escaping from the world in an act that was so deeply symbolic it could not have been written better. It’s because of him that we now live in a sort of medieval police state. As he approaches the one-year anniversary of winning the 2019 General Election, I wonder which of his achievements he is most proud of: stopping elderly people seeing their family for most of the year? Ruining children by pointlessly making thousands of them 'self isolate'? Cratering the travel, hospitality, events and retail industries? Nearly doubling the suicide rate? Overseeing a 75% increase in deaths from dementia among women? Making people wear masks that do them more harm than good, and are a social catastrophe?

And can we stop calling him ‘Boris’? It makes him sound cuddly and that we like him. Yet this clueless cretin has destroyed the minds and jobs and businesses of millions of people up and down the land. He is a comedy dictator with an unruly blond mop. As I see it, there are six solid reasons why Johnson is not suitable to be prime minister:

1 He can't make decisions, and he can't make good decisions.

2 He is terrified of even short term unpopularity.

3 He can't do detail; he isn't intelligent enough to study complex problems. 

4 He has no overriding philosophy or principles.

5 He has shown cruelty and mendacity in his private life.

6 He has no understanding of fiscal discipline.

And there have been four huge lies from his government:

1 The virus is one of the most virulent humanity has ever faced.

2 The NHS is perpetually in danger of being overwhelmed.

3 Lockdowns, quarantines and masks do good.

4 That it would not have been possible to protect the vulnerable while letting the healthy get on with their lives.

In a way, everything else is small fry. All this current arguing about tiers is just arguing on Johnson's pitch. It's swapping deckchairs on the Titanic - after the Titanic has gone down. This week in town I saw a baby with his mother who had a mask on (a child needs to see his mother's face); I saw an old person in a wheelchair who could have done with nothing more than breathing fresh air into her lungs, with a mask on; I saw teenage girls at virtually no risk from this virus, with masks on; I saw people in their cars alone, with masks on. We’ve been led into this terrible social wilderness because of Boris Johnson, because of his terrible scaremongering, and his government's inability to put out accurate, sensible health information and instead go for a 'let's terrify everyone’ approach. Hysteria has been deliberately spread: we obsess over ‘cases’, which are not proper cases at all, and we fret about infections, but infections do not matter unless they lead to serious illness or death.

We are an emasculated country, pitiful and browbeaten, led by a government relishing the destruction that it is meting out. How I hope that Johnson, Hancock, Gove et al are barred from every single pub in the country, presuming we will have any left soon - and if there’s any of the airline industry left flying, even better if we could jet them off to a land far, far away from here. Despite the economy lying on the ground in a pool of vomit they still insist on kicking us in the guts a bit more. And the best judge of the future is the past: seeing what our lunatic rulers have been doing for the last nine months gives me zero hope that they will act sensibly and proportionally over this winter. The more they try to do, the more mistakes they make, and then to cover up those mistakes they make more mistakes. They built up the hysteria so much that the only way out was going to be a vaccine - lucky for them they’ve apparently got not just one, but three on the way. Expect an exact reverse of the Project Fear propaganda we’ve had all year when it comes to promoting them.

Crippling your own society and torpedoing the lives of millions of your own people was only ever an idea which could have taken countenance in a land ruled by a totalitarian regime like China. That it was then imitated by Western nations, unsuited to the ways of murderous authoritarian rule, indicates how credulous, foolish and devoid of confidence we now are. At the start of this year China handed us a dangerous weapon; we chose to put it to our head and blow our brains out. Talking of metaphors: the next time I stub my toe, perhaps I should cut my entire foot off. For that is what, in essence, the government has done in response to this virus.

They went from ‘flatten the curve’ to ‘suppress this virus by doing whatever we can no matter what the ruinous consequences of this are’ and it became all about PR, in keeping Covid numbers down so the press wouldn’t yell about them. It all speaks to a failure of government and media on a truly gargantuan scale, the greatest failure these institutions have ever been part of, and a clear indicator of the decline of the West. In the future the word 'lockdown' will come to be as associated with horror as the word 'thalidomide'. When you throw decades of textbooks on disease control out the window and embrace the methods of a Communist state, and you're egged on to do so by a febrile media, what you get is misery and destruction on a massive scale. Lockdowns are evil: they are broken glass and barbed wire stuffed inside a teddy bear.

Globally, millions of lives have been and will be wrecked in what was apparently an effort to give a tiny number of people a tiny bit more time on this planet. It's the most disastrous philosophical conclusion the civilised world has ever arrived at. Our ancestors would look on with horrified amazement at what we've done. But in the early part of the 21st century the conditions were exactly 'right' to ruin the world in the way we have done so. We needed a great historical figure to stop this from happening. We did not get one. We are ruled by pygmies. Their infantile pandemic response has infantilised us all, and the West is now closer to tyranny than it has been for a long time. If you ever wondered what being governed by a group of psychotic children would feel like, now you know.

Many things will come out of this long term, some huge, some smaller. But even what might appear to be small changes will add up to big changes. I would guess that more people will pretend they are unwell and not go into work more; more people will go to the GP for minor ailments. So at one end, lower productivity, at the other, more strain on the health service and the public purse. Both these things point to the continued, gradual decline of the West as an economic power. If you think you’ve assessed the collateral damage from this thing, I can assure you, you’re not even a fraction of the way there. All this wreckage… all for nothing… all to make politicians feel good about themselves while indulging in their favourite habit: lying. I don’t watch politicians any more for the same reason I don’t watch adverts - they insult my intelligence. Damn them all.

There are many other reasons why the West will continue to deteriorate - and most of these wounds are self-inflicted - but embracing lockdowns along with a number of other totalitarian ideas this year will be seen as one of the biggest signposts on its road to oblivion.