Charles Moore Charles Moore

Perhaps we are all communists now

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‘I am a columnist for the Daily Telegraph,’ I began a text message to an NHS executive last week. Due to predictive text, the word ‘columnist’ was replaced by ‘communist’. Luckily, I spotted it just in time to delete. But perhaps the error was accurate. Some say we have all come to see the virtue of massive state control. Perhaps we are all communists now, even on the Daily Telegraph, accepting Jeremy Corbyn’s self-assessment that he has been proved right. For a heady moment, it might seem to be the case, but the more one ponders Mr Corbyn’s claim, the odder it sounds. He seems to think that the policies now introduced because of Covid-19 would have been the right ones even if there had been no emergency at all. If he had won office in December, he implies, he would have started to double the national debt, triple unemployment, force bankruptcies, put the population under house arrest, snoop and encourage others to sneak on citizens’ movements and forbidden freedom of worship and freedom of assembly, all without any ill wind from Wuhan. He does not seem to realise that an emergency is, by definition, a dire exception, not a normally desirable way of life. He is guilty of the phenomenon Orwell satirised in Nineteen Eighty-Four — wanting a state of permanent war (if not on people, then on viruses) to secure permanent state control. Those of us who are still not communists can be made to look heartless when we point out that the economy should not be destroyed in the process of defeating the disease. We appear to be putting money before life. No, we are suggesting that the two tend to go together. The word ‘economy’ sounds technical. In fact, in its Greek origin and its early usage in English, it meant ‘The management of a family; the government of a household’ (Johnson’s Dictionary).

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