These are confusing times for all of us. But for small-government libertarian Tories, Covid-19 is all their worst nightmares compressed into nine months.
It is hard to think of any basic civil liberty that hasn’t been impinged in the cause of limiting the spread of coronavirus, except perhaps freedom of speech. As for Thatcherite constraints on the expansion of the state, we’ve not seen growth in public spending as fast or as large since 1945.
Nor have we witnessed such encroachment by government in markets and enterprises (from underwriting almost all employment, through to banning evictions and creating a whole new diagnostics and vaccinations infrastructure).
The vaccine, which has given most of the world such hope, is also something of a disaster for small-state libertarian ideologues. So much of the technology that underpins these vaccines stems from research paid for by governments and that could only have been funded by governments – because it is so inherently risky and therefore uncommercial.
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