Never forget, never forgive.
Five Years Ago Today
Boris Johnson orders UK lockdown to be enforced by police.
Boris Johnson will order police to enforce a strict coronavirus lockdown, with a ban on gatherings of more than two people and strict limits on exercise, as he told the British public: “You must stay at home.”
The prime minister ratcheted up Britain’s response with an address to the nation on Monday evening, warning that people would only be allowed outside to buy food or medication, exercise alone once a day, or to travel to work if absolutely necessary.
All non-essential shops will close with immediate effect, as will playgrounds and libraries, he said in the address from Downing Street.
After days of being accused of sending mixed messages about what the public should do, Johnson significantly escalated his language as he urged people to comply with the more stringent measures.
“You should not be meeting friends. If your friends ask you to meet, you should say no. You should not be meeting family members who do not live in your home. You should not be going shopping except for essentials like food and medicine – and you should do this as little as you can,” he said.
“If you don’t follow the rules, the police will have the powers to enforce them, including through fines and dispersing gatherings.”
The bulk of the article is devoted to the hypocrisy of Britain’s ruling class, the way they carried on partying while confining the peasants to their quarters, but I’m more focused on the shutdown itself and the devestation it caused. The author links to this article in The American Conservative that discusses Boris Johnson, but has lessons for Americans as well:
Boris Johnson Missed His Churchill Moment. The pandemic was Boris’s biggest test. He failed.
The entire world had surrendered to the People’s Republic of China, adopting its totalitarian disease-control strategy, and unlike France or Poland in World War II, we surrendered without a shot being fired. If any man in the world was well-positioned to stand against this, it was the garrulous British renegade, Boris Johnson. Instead, the United Kingdom became a police state.
Under Johnson, Britain had some of the harshest pandemic lockdowns in the developed world. The crazy thing, though, is that they almost didn’t.
In those fatal few weeks of March 2020, Johnson’s government was much slower to impose all-consuming measures than most other European countries. When Johnson finally announced the nationwide lockdown on March 23, a CNN analyst asked, “What took Boris Johnson so long?” The reason, the analyst concluded, was that Johnson is “not naturally comfortable with removing anyone's personal liberties.” Throughout his long political career, Johnson had shown a libertarian streak and a rare tendency towards common sense. Like Trump, his instincts were correct.
Johnson was ultimately inspired to change course by Britain’s Fauci, Dr. Neil Ferguson, an Imperial College London researcher who worked for the government until he was forced to resign for breaking lockdowns himself to sleep with his married mistress. Ferguson, in a hugely influential study published in March 2020, recommended “social distancing of the entire population” for 18 months or more until a vaccine was developed.
This was a solution pioneered by the People’s Republic of China, which at the time was unprecedented in Britain or any other Western nation. But Ferguson was itching to implement it, and he later marveled at how easy it had been to import Chinese policy: “[China is] a communist one party state, we said. We couldn’t get away with it in Europe, we thought… and then Italy did it. And we realised we could… If China had not done it, the year would have been very different.”
When Johnson’s idol, Winston Churchill, first came to power in 1940, France was in the process of falling to Nazi Germany. Most of the other great European powers had already fallen. For a time, Britain stood alone in the world, the sole defender of the West, with Churchill at its helm. Even when his own ministers urged him to accept Hitler’s peace offer, Churchill held firm to his convictions and chose to fight on.
This is the laudable mantle that Johnson has, all his life, aspired to shoulder. He faced just such a defining moment in March of 2020. The entire world had surrendered to the People’s Republic of China, adopting its totalitarian disease-control strategy, and unlike France or Poland in World War II, we surrendered without a shot being fired. If any man in the world was well-positioned to stand against this, it was the garrulous British renegade, Boris Johnson.
Instead, the United Kingdom became a police state.
…. As in the United States, lockdowns ruined a great many lives in Britain. The economic and social costs of this colossal mistake will take decades to fully untangle. Worse, Johnson helped legitimize the principle of public-health-over-freedom that will surely rear its ugly head again and again, haunting us for decades to come. The proper disease metaphor here, perhaps, is herpes.
….
One can imagine a world in which Boris Johnson had defiantly announced that he would not shut down the United Kingdom, and that people would be free to go about their business, taking whatever personal health precautions they saw fit. He might have even invoked that most British of slogans: “Keep calm and carry on.” Of course, he would have been very unpopular for a time. The media would have called him a lot of bad names. But it would have been the Churchillian act, to stand stolidly by the truth, to “never give in except to convictions of honour and good sense,” to “never yield to the apparently overwhelming might of the enemy.”
Well, not the entire world: How Sweden proved the world wrong about lockdowns: The evidence is clear: authoritarian restrictions did not save more lives.
