However obedient its citizens are, the government can’t help but revert to thuggish type | Opinion

The most shocking feature of the lockdown is not that it is fraying but that it has held at all. If you had listened to rightwing moralists, you would never have believed collective self-discipline was possible. For decades, they have lamented the decline in deference. In her first speech as leader of Conservative party, Margaret Thatcher saw liberal leftists as rats who “gnaw away at our national self-respect”. By debunking the glories of British history, and undermining religious and educational standards, they were turning the British into a rootless mob unable to act in its own or the national interest.

Leftwing moralists reached the same conclusion but took a different road to hell. Capitalism turned citizens into consumers, who thought only of themselves. “A market society automatically carries with it an undermining of solidarity,” declared Noam Chomsky. It generates selfish individualists, unable to stick together. In our day, liberals have explained away Brexit, Trump and populism by citing the willingness of tens of millions to listen to idiot demagogues rather than the educated.

And yet here we are, shorn of most traditional beliefs, the undoubted products of consumer capitalism, and still more or less sticking together and obeying the medical elite. I could go on in the style of George Orwell or JB Priestley at their sentimental worst and praise British decency. Although it exists in millions – whoever thought that it did not? – surely the reason why the British and so many other populations are obedient is that they are terrified. The only way the authorities can begin to clear up the mess they have made of this crisis is by understanding our fears and showing us how to improvise ways round them. Unfortunately, they show no sign of doing it.

I should emphasise that the fear is a fear of the virus, not of the government. At the start of the crisis, many warned of the creation of a police state. They had every reason to be alarmed. Ministers had ordered the population to stay at home, as if it were an invading army imposing a curfew. Their emergency regulations allowed the police and public health officials to detain, test and interrogate everyone they thought might be infectious, and force them into quarantine if required. We were, in the words of the former supreme court judge Lord Sumption, losing our freedom in a fit of “collective hysteria”.

As it has turned out, the hysteria has been on Sumption’s side of the argument. A police state requires police officers willing to enforce a dictatorship. The police aren’t prepared to do it. Nor has the Johnson government asked them to, for whatever faults the hopeless man has, he’s not a dictator in the making. Correct me if I have missed them, but I can find no reports of officers herding the sick into quarantine. The police in England and Wales have merely issued about 9,000 fines for breaking the lockdown – usually to young people out in public spaces without reasonable excuse. I don’t want to underestimate how the determination to protect the old by denying education and social life to the young will haunt this country for decades. But to put the punishments into perspective, the French police had issued 915,000 fines for breaking the lockdown as of 23 April – 100 times as many. You can either believe that the English and Welsh are 100 times more law-abiding than the French or that chief constables have, on the whole, trusted the public to behave sensibly if given a little leeway. If there had been a determined effort by even 10% of the population to break the lockdown, it would never had held. As it is, people have done what was asked of them, more or less.

Having denigrated their fellow citizens for decades, moralists have seized on the solidarity. Rather than realising that people were hiding from a terrifying plague, Tories decided the nation was rallying round the flag and seeing Johnson as a new Churchill. From the other side, I have heard leftists bend the Tory line for their own purposes and assure me we are witnessing the public sacrificing its freedom for the sake of the NHS. The peak of the self-congratulation came in early May when the BBC ran a propaganda series, Our Finest Hours. It would show “how the outbreak of Covid-19 has revived our nation’s wartime spirit and once again we can be proud to be British,” the tastelessly upbeat narrator told viewers. “Now, as we did in World War Two, we are uniting in a common endeavour.”

Sceptics could counter with the revelations of the unforgivable failure, not just of Johnson but also of the government’s scientific advisers, to lock down soon enough. They might point to NHS managers’ willingness to send infected patients into care homes and to threaten doctors who spoke out about the shortages of protective equipment. Not much common endeavour to be proud of there.

Realists would do better to return to what matters above all else: the fear. There may never be a vaccine. Even if there is and it is available to all – a big if – the virus may mutate. We will need new ways of living with the fear outside lockdown. Indeed, we need them now. Yet, instead of explaining to people how they can safely travel and work, the government is reverting to its thuggish type. It is picking fights with teachers’ unions asking reasonable questions about how schools can reopen. Instead of realising that the cooperation of the mayor of London is essential if the capital is to reopen, it goes for him because he’s Labour and a remainer and therefore an enemy.

It’s not just that the government is gnawing away at national self-respect, to use Thatcher’s words. If it can’t find the authority and patience to convince the public to overcome its fears, it will gnaw away at the nation’s security.

Nick Cohen is an Observer columnist

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