The Covid trap: will society ever open up again?

The great pandemic of 2020 has led to an extraordinary expansion of government power. Countries rushed to close their borders and half of the world’s population were forced into some sort of curfew. Millions of companies, from micropubs to mega corporations, were prohibited from carrying on business. In supposedly free and liberal societies, peaceful strollers and joggers were tracked by drones and stopped by policemen asking for their papers. It’s all in the name of defeating coronavirus; all temporary, we’re told. But it’s time to ask, just how temporary? As Milton Friedman used to warn: ‘Nothing is so permanent as a temporary government programme.’

Measures that seemed unthinkable a few months ago have been implemented in haste and without debate. In the UK, as in many other countries, the rationale changed. First, lockdown was designed to ‘buy time’ so the health service could prepare. Next, it was needed to ‘flatten the curve’. But when the curve peaked a few weeks later, the restrictions didn’t merely stay in place, they were reinforced.

Is the science on face masks weak? No matter, let’s make them mandatory anyway. Is there any evidence that closing borders has any meaningful effect on slowing the spread of the virus? With parliamentary debate suspended, no one will really ask. It was always a certainty that Putin or Xi would use any kind of Reichstag fire to grab more power, but it is very worrying to see similar behaviour in liberal democracies.

Covid gave despots in China, Iran and Turkey the perfect excuse to monitor citizens’ movements through their mobile phones. But the British government’s test and trace programme also wanted to suck up private data and store it centrally. This was abandoned only when Apple refused to participate. Authoritarian leaders behind in the polls have postponed elections, but the trailing US President has also suggested that November’s election should be postponed, because otherwise ‘2020 will be the most INACCURATE & FRAUDULENT Election in history’.