Nanny Boris: the PM’s alarming flight from liberalism

‘Freedom day’ is coming, but how free will we actually be when it arrives? Boris Johnson is to abolish all coronavirus restrictions on 19 July. But in the small print, we find a strange caveat. The government will be ‘encouraging’ businesses to demand proof of vaccination from customers if there’s a ‘higher risk’ of the virus spreading on their premises. If they do not do so, then the government reserves the power to force them to. It’s a voluntary system — until it’s not.

In a rather Orwellian turn, ‘freedom day’ means freedom for some, but not others. The unvaccinated might find their freedoms curtailed in ways that would have seemed astonishing not so long ago. Meanwhile, the controversial ‘no jab, no job’ policy, through which the unvaccinated can be fired or not hired, has been formalised and expanded beyond those who work in healthcare.

Yet just two weeks ago, vaccine passports were dismissed in Whitehall as an idea whose time had already passed. Israel tried its ‘green passes’ and then abandoned them as unnecessary. In America, Joe Biden ruled out vaccine passports at a federal level, and Florida and Texas banned them.

But in Britain, with no open debate or even a vote in parliament, the Prime Minister is hoping to sneak through a fundamental change in the nature of the relationship between individual and the state. Freedom — to go to cinemas, watch football and so on — could soon not be guaranteed to all, but contingent on criteria decided by the government and enforced by private companies. Johnson looks set to bring in an ID card system that is even more intrusive than the Blairite scheme he once so fervently opposed. And this fits a trend. From gambling laws to the huge salt and sugar taxes now being proposed, the current government is doing a fairly good impression of creating the nanny state that Johnson once held up to ridicule.