What will the lasting impact of the coronavirus be in the UK? It’s a question William Hague attempts to help answer on this week’s The Edition podcast from The Spectator. The former foreign secretary joins James Forsyth to discuss the politics column in this week’s magazine.
He says that any such forecast has to come with a very big caveat:
‘It’s very hard to predict the longer term effects of a big change in world affairs – if we think of the end of the Cold War and the universal assumption that liberal democracy was going to triumph everywhere for the long term – well it didn’t work out that way’.
However, Hague says one issue that will be up for debate in the short to medium term is individual freedoms:
‘A big battleground is going to be surveillance. This is going to be the very difficult bit that’s coming up because it looks likely that after this initial phase of the crisis, where we have a collective concentrated restraint on our freedom, we might have to move to individual constraints as developing in South Korea now – there is the app you have to have on your phone, you have to report to the government where you are or how you’re feeling every day and they have to be able to see who’ve you met every day.
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