Vaccine passports are a ticket to freedom

In principle I’m in favour of vaccination passports, and don’t understand how — again in principle — anyone could be against the theory. One can have severe doubts about whether our NHS, pubs, theatres, sports grounds and restaurants would actually be capable of operating such a scheme, yet at the same time think it would be an excellent thing if they were. To me it seems not just sensible and fair but obvious that access to jobs or spaces where there is an enhanced risk of viral transmission might be restricted to people who could demonstrate a high degree of immunity.

I’d add that in order for the idea to command widespread public acceptance, it might be best to wait until anybody who wants to be vaccinated has had free access to vaccination. At that point, good reasons in principle to resist the proposal elude me altogether.

That’s an opinion I’d be happy to defend. What I will not do is accept that those of us who take this view are the ‘big state’ and ‘pro-regulation’ nannies, the people eager to be ‘bossed around’, while the anti-passports brigade are the ‘libertarians’. There is absolutely nothing libertarian about delaying the lifting of lockdown for everybody, just because it wouldn’t be safe for somebody.

One of the ways you know there’s a serious category mistake in play here is when you read that prominent among the 70-plus ‘Tory libertarians’ resisting ‘creeping authoritarianism’ is Sir Iain Duncan Smith. Sir Iain holds his views in good conscience and many share them, but a parliamentarian who voted against civil partnerships in 2004, against reducing the age of homosexual consent from 18 to 16 in 2001, and against reducing the age of consent from 21 to 18 in 1994 (and wasn’t present in the 1967 parliament to vote against any decriminalisation at all) is not a card-carrying libertarian.