Covid has killed off our civil liberties

It started with smoking. The 1960s and 1970s saw little popular objection to legislation restricting advertisements by private companies purveying a legal product. Little objection was raised thereafter when these same companies were banned from promoting their wares at all. Broadly shamed, even smokers have mutely accepted confiscatory taxes on cigarettes. As laws to protect the public from passive smoking have extended parts of the US to beaches, parks and even one’s own apartment balcony — locations where the danger to others is virtually nonexistent — few have cried overreach. It’s a truism: tobacco companies are evil (and so are smokers). The suppression of smoking is widely regarded as a public health triumph.

Thus few of us ever paused to examine the assumption behind anti-smoking laws: that the people are not to be trusted to make their own decisions regarding their health. The idiots have to be controlled.

For the curtailment of civil liberties, public health policy, graciously instituted for our own good, has been the thin end of the wedge for decades. Over time, that wedge has been getting fatter.

Why, speaking of fat: the latest matter that the state regards as its business is what we eat and how much. In the interests of curbing obesity, British soft drinks now incur a tax when exceeding a set level of sugar. Regulatory pressure to reduce fat, salt and sugar content is resulting in smaller serving sizes, so that shoppers pay the same price for less food. NHS GPs are encouraged to ‘prescribe’ bicycles. Teachers primly remove chocolate bars from children’s lunch boxes. Denmark’s groundbreaking 2011 ‘fat tax’ on products containing more than 2.3 per cent saturated fat (butter, meat, non-skimmed milk, cheese, pizza and much processed food) may have lasted less than a year, but could credibly be revived any time at a supermarket near you.