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. That is going to be a very difficult ethical-philosophical battleground and if we have to do any of that we have to make sure we roll it back at the first opportunity.’
As for what it means for geopolitical relations, Hague says that the moment the story is hostility from the West to the East. It may not last but, he says, the general direction of travel ought to give those of a ‘conservative disposition’ cause for alarm:
‘That’s certainly the way at the moment – you only have to look at the way the Trump administration has categorised the virus and the way the Chinese have reacted by expelling US journalists. This is not good, this is a rise of nationalistic attitudes in the world. I would just add that caveat I made at the beginning that it’s hard to see months and years in advance because the public reaction globally could be that it demonstrates the need for international co-operation.
‘That actually we need some new, stronger structures in the United Nations to deal with this. That the first instinct of countries should be to work together on producing the medical equipment and the vaccine rather than compete with each other to control it at the expense of others. So it could be that a lot of public opinion swings round in that direction and political systems follow it. But at the moment, we are heading for increased nationalism and increased socialism in the world so this crisis is not good for those of us of a conservative disposition.’
The full podcast is available here.
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