Don’t let anyone tell you there’s a war on

‘Shut up — don’t you know there’s a war on?’ Strong hints of that attitude have emerged in recent weeks, and the hints are getting stronger. The attitude is mistaken.

The right answer to any enquiry about whether we know there’s a war on is that there isn’t a war on. Nobody with sensible questions to ask about the current strategy or its implementation should be abashed to ask them. Hitler’s spies are not listening, Lord Haw-Haw will not be broadcasting them, and a grown-up citizenry does not confuse intelligent questioning with unpatriotic breaking of the ranks. No doubt some questions will be misplaced, some will have easy answers and a few may hit home, so courtesy is needed and we must start from the assumption that everybody is doing their best. But critical scrutiny has seldom been more necessary.

Comparisons with the second world war are preposterous. We face no existential threat as a nation. No fascist dictator is trying to take over the planet. Nobody is trying to exterminate an entire race of people. It’s important to remind ourselves that (for instance) ventilators, about which everybody is now talking, are a relatively recent medical advance — and, more generally, that our era is keeping millions more old people alive but in very, very fragile health. With this, inevitably, comes heightened susceptibility.

Hear this article read out by Matthew Parris on the Spectator’s Audio Reads:

Every death is a personal tragedy, but figures do matter. It worries me that bald media reports of (say) ‘2,000 deaths so far’ tend to land on the public imagination as might reports of a terrible train crash: like some kind of horrific incident, rather than a shift in the cause of deaths that in many cases were already imminent.