Mad World

One of the most common retorts lockdown sceptics hear is “How can lockdowns be wrong when the whole world is doing them?” And it appears to be one that carries some weight. We sceptics can point to the countries and US states that didn’t lockdown, or did so very lightly, and did no worse health-wise, and often better, than those that did (with none of the terrible collateral damage), but our point still doesn’t appear to land. It seems that by and large the public assess that the ‘experts’ all across the globe have decided lockdowns work, and so they must work. We might respond that if lockdowns worked why aren’t there a thousand medical text books on the veracity of them (as opposed to zero); but perhaps we need to change tack. What if we pointed out how the ‘experts’ of the past sometimes got it horribly, ridiculously, outrageously, dreadfully, appallingly wrong! So perhaps our current 'experts' are wrong too. You never know. So, join me on a journey into the fragility of hum...

Imagine what would have happened in the last year had Boris Johnson not been our prime minister. How different would it have been if David Cameron had still been in charge? Here I imagine such a scenario. I hold no special candle for Cameron although I realise the following will come across a paean to him, which it is not intended to be. It is just that I don’t think there is an alternate universe scenario, out of the trillions available, where Boris Johnson, a blundering, mendacious authoritarian, does a good job. Anyway, here we go on a road to the multiverse… January 2020 David Cameron, still prime minister of Great Britain after wisely choosing to remain neutral in the Brexit debate of 2016 and therefore not having to resign when the country voted to leave the EU, receives urgent briefings about a new virus that appears to have originated in China. Not distracted by dealing with the fall out of cheating on his wife for at least the fifth time, he gives great attention to the pro...

There are many reasons why the UK adopted disproportionate and catastrophic policies in response to Covid-19, and I have gone into them in detail, including  here , here and here . Deep beneath any government’s policies is a philosophy constructed by academics over many decades, and in this article I posit that postmodernism is to blame for our regressive response. Postmodernism evolved in the mid 20th century to counter modernism, to make the case that there was no such thing as objective truth, there were only subjective truths: each person could have their own ‘truths’. Nothing was out of bounds, even the claim that ‘the sun sets in the west’. What do you mean by ‘the west’, the postmodernists might say. What do you mean by ‘the sun’? A generous interpretation of the motives behind postmodernism would be along the lines of: everyone is different, everyone has different experiences and perspectives, it is right and respectful that we acknowledge this. A less generous interpreta...

One of the many disasters of 2020/21 has been the dismal inability of the Press to properly hold this government to account for its enthusiasm for dissolving previously taken-for-granted freedoms. Front-line journalists by and large seem unable to ask any questions along the lines of “what are the downsides of what you are doing?” or “where is the real-world evidence that your lockdowns are effective?”, instead going with a variation of “why did you not lock down harder/faster/forever?” Newspaper and online columnists have been, in part, a bit better. Hero of the era probably goes to the Mail on Sunday’s Peter Hitchens , who from the very start pointed out that what the government was doing was unprecedented, disproportionate and possibly illegal. The brickbats he faced without backing down speak of his bravery and commitment, and his willingness to debate with all and sundry on Twitter was to his credit. On the same paper, Dan Hodges was predictably disappointing, especially in the l...

Even people who have broadly supported the government’s lockdown policies - and, incredibly, there appear to be many, if opinion polls are to be believed - are surely not blind to the various kinks in those policies that have been at best misguided and at worst, truly scandalous. Here I list some of Boris Johnson’s most catastrophic missteps in a year full of them. Care homes In a perverse attempt to ‘protect the NHS’, thousands of Covid patients were shunted out of hospitals into care homes , without tests, where they infected others which led to a huge proportion of Covid deaths. (Interestingly, many countries and US states, including Sweden and New York, made the same mistake.) Nightingale hospitals ‘Fever hospitals’ would have been one of many infinitely preferable ideas to lockdowns, which bowdlerise the economy and atomise society  in dangerous ways, and the quick construction of discrete health centres gave rise to the hope that this would happen. But the eight of t...