Sarah Ingham is the author of The Military Covenant: its impact on civil-military relations in Britain.
To borrow from Dr Samuel Johnson, the thought of who will be standing at the government despatch box taking Prime Minister’s Questions in less than three weeks concentrates the mind wonderfully.
Change? Labour won’t change. Unimpressive in Opposition, why would they shine in government? And, following the catastrophe of lockdown, surely no-one believes that more meddling and micromanagement by the state is the answer to the country’s ills.
Politicians’ silence around the impact of lockdown is so intense it is almost deafening. Eager to put us under house arrest back in 2020, today they appear just as keen to avoid reflecting on the consequences of their response to Covid-19.
Even those voters who wholeheartedly supported the management of the pandemic might be seeking some reassurance. As the House of Commons Library observed last September: “The Covid-19 pandemic resulted in very high levels of public spending. Current estimates of the total cost of government Covid-19 measures range from about £310 billion to £410 billion.” (A £100 billion discrepancy hardly suggests rigorous oversight of the national finances.)
Lockdown was the biggest experiment in socialism since the fall of the Soviet Union: like almost everything socialism has ever touched, it was an abject failure.
Those Conservative voters who considered lockdown an unwarranted assault on hard-won liberties are still unhappy that Boris Johnson’s government betrayed bedrock Tory principles of freedom and personal responsibility. Conversely, none of us is surprised that Labour cheered on every instance of state interference and uncontrolled spending, the shuttering of business, the increased deification of the National Health Service, and the flexing of union muscle, particularly over school closures.
Despite the December 2019 Conservative landslide, lockdown and the muddled policies associated with it were essentially Labour in action, unbothered by the ballot box. Seen in this context, it was inevitable that Keir Starmer and his colleagues caved into every make-it-up-as-they-went-along measure the Johnson government introduced by undemocratic secondary legislation.
The duty of Her Majesty’s Official Opposition was to oppose. But instead of undertaking the most cursory of cost-benefit analysis in connection with lockdown or querying the ethics of the government-approved “Don’t Kill Your Granny” propaganda being pumped out to cower an already frightened population, Labour backed every proposal.
In Wales, the Labour administration’s control-freakery over the contents of the Principality’s shopping baskets led to Gloucestershire police patrolling the border to prevent Welsh people buying “contraband items”. It is jaw-dropping that Starmer once claimed that Wales should be the blueprint for the Labour Party in national government.
In April 2021, a furious Bath publican confronted the Labour leader, stating “he has completely failed to ask the questions that needed asking”. Starmer was hustled away by aides, who afterwards accused Rod Humphris of “spreading dangerous misinformation.” Caught in the headlights, all the toolmaker’s son could do was utter platitudes about the NHS.
For anyone hoping to consign Covid-19 and its associated devastation to a box marked “the past”, the UK Biological Security Strategy is best avoided. Published in June 2023, it states: “There is a reasonable likelihood that another serious pandemic could occur soon, possibly within the next decade.”
While the Strategy indicates a laudable willingness to engage with bio-threats including Anti-Microbial Resistance, it raises a few questions. Not least, if another pandemic is on the way, why are the three main parties silent about exactly what our national response should be? Their manifestos say nothing.
We can assume we should be on standby for another lockdown, with Big State running amok and all the collateral social damage that it entails. Today, full-time attendance at school is an optional extra, and shirking from home is normalised: the Conservative manifesto concedes “We are now spending £69 billion a year on benefits for people of working age with a disability or health condition”, up two thirds since the pandemic.
It is intellectually dishonest of Labour solely to blame Liz Truss and the mini-budget for Britain’s current economic and social malaise, while excluding the impact of lockdown, a policy which they supported, quibbling about details rather than challenging the overarching principle. It is as incoherent as parroting “14 years of chaos”, without reflecting on why the Conservatives were elected in 2010, and then re-elected in 2015, 2017, and 2019.
On Tuesday, the former Justice Secretary called for an amnesty for the almost 30,000 people who received a criminal conviction for breaking Covid-related rules. Robert Buckland deserves our thanks for engagement with the issue rather than outsourcing his thinking to the Covid Inquiry.
The pandemic has caused a psychic national wound. In 2021, there were 67,350 recorded deaths from Covid in England and Wales: the Office for National Statistics states 2,807 of them were among those aged under 65 with no pre-existing health conditions, including obesity. Instead of worshipping the NHS, where is the focus on making Britain healthier?
As Election Maps observes, the last time the Conservatives led the polls was two days before the news of “Partygate” broke in December 2021. The Conservative Party could well be facing a final reckoning by voters for the do-as-I-say, not-as-I-do approach to the muddle of pandemic-related laws, rules, and guidance piled on them by the Johnson government.
Forcing us to stay home, lockdown neither saved lives nor protected the NHS. This dystopian experiment was supported by all the political parties. Will it be repeated?
The post Sarah Ingham: Lockdown showed the horrors of what a Labour government will be like in practice appeared first on Conservative Home.
Click this link for the original source of this article.
Author: Dr Sarah Ingham
This content is courtesy of, and owned and copyrighted by, http://www.conservativehome.com and its author. This content is made available by use of the public RSS feed offered by the host site and is used for educational purposes only. If you are the author or represent the host site and would like this content removed now and in the future, please contact USSANews.com using the email address in the Contact page found in the website menu.