COVID-19 Has Exposed the U.K. as a Failed State

By Cameron Hilditch

Friday, January 01, 2021

 

Judged according to any passable definition of a free society, the United Kingdom is no longer fit for purpose. To those with eyes to see and ears to hear, this has been clear for some time. The simultaneously heavy-handed and ineffective government response to coronavirus is only the most recent example.

 

Consider the case of Charlie Gard from 2017. He was born in August 2016 with mitochondrial DNA depletion syndrome, a rare genetic disorder that leads to brain damage and muscle failure. His parents wanted to try experimental treatments in the hope of saving their son’s life. They weren’t alone. In fact, Pope Francis offered to fly the Gards to Rome so that the child could receive the treatments in question at the Vatican hospital.

 

The government-employed doctors of Britain’s National Health Service disagreed. They thought it was in Charlie’s best interest to die. This dispute between the doctors and the parents made its way through the courts, which eventually sided with the doctors. Mr. and Mrs. Gard’s son, it turns out, was the property of the British state all along — a state that has the right to kill him (and presumably any other child in its jurisdiction) for its own reasons and on its own pretexts.

 

Cases such as this fade in and out of the national consciousness from time to time here, but they never trigger the sustained personal fear of the state that Americans would expect. Most people in the U.K. are content to live quiescent and biddable lives without venturing to the borderlands of their civil liberties, where alone they discover how free they really are.

 

Coronavirus has changed all that. The high-handed, bipartisan disregard for personal freedom that has long stalked the corridors of Whitehall and Westminster is now being impressed daily upon the life and livelihood of each and every British subject.

 

Each year, the British parliament is prorogued during the holidays. This means that the legislature is temporarily dissolved so that members of Parliament (MPs) can take a Christmas vacation along with the rest of us. During periods of prorogation, there is no legislative scrutiny or check on the power of the prime minister. Nor is there any consistent or reliable judicial restraint on the executive, since the prime minister is not bound by any supreme written law akin to the American Constitution.

 

The House of Lords used to serve as a counterweight to executive power in Great Britain, similar to how the Senate is supposed to in the U.S. But Prime Minister David Lloyd-George essentially castrated the House of Lords of all its power over 100 years ago. The United Kingdom is, for all intents and purposes, a parliamentary dictatorship. A prime minister who commands a majority in the House of Commons can do just about whatever pleases him or herself within the Machiavellian parameters of practical electoral calculation.

 

But during brief periods of prorogation, the United Kingdom ceases to be a parliamentary dictatorship and becomes a dictatorship outright. Up until this week’s recall of Parliament to vote on the new Brexit deal, Boris Johnson has been governing the country’s coronavirus response over the Christmas period by plenary fiat.

 

This is particularly sinister because, before Parliament was prorogued, the British people were promised a temporary restoration of their fundamental liberties over the Christmas period. Only after MPs had been relieved from their duties did the executive start to renege on these promises and to reinstitute restrictions in the most arbitrary and humiliating manner.

 

During the week leading up to Christmas, the government announced that London would be placed under its severest “Tier 4” category of restrictions in response to a new coronavirus surge. The government gave Londoners mere hours’ notice before putting restrictions into effect. Since Tier 4 rules prohibit nonessential domestic travel, hordes of Londoners immediately packed a bag and flocked to the capital’s major train stations in a panicked attempt at escaping to the Elysian fields of Tier 3 or Tier 2 territory for Christmas.

 

When a man’s ability to make plans for the next 24 hours of his life depends entirely upon his ability to successfully predict the whims of 20 or so technocrats strutting about the halls of power, it’s clear that he’s no longer living in a free society.

 

Many appeal to the exceptional circumstances of the pandemic to justify this debasement of the British people by their rulers. I don’t think this appeal works. But leaving the relative merits of lockdown hawkery aside for a moment, if a government decides to pursue policies this draconian when combating the spread of a deadly virus, it should at least do so efficiently and effectively.

 

But that’s not what the Johnson government has done. By springing the lockdown of London upon its residents with hardly any notice at all, it inadvertently orchestrated a super-spreader event at each of the city’s train stations. A significant portion of London’s population predictably congregated in close and cramped quarters with one another on platforms before boarding various and sundry trains and scattering to the four corners of the country, presumably taking the virus that had prompted the lockdown in the first place with them.

 

Similar stories can be told from across the U.K. The lockdown sword of Damocles hangs over the English, the Irish, the Scots, and the Welsh alike. We watch the news each night with bated breath to see whether or not it will fall upon our necks during the next few hours, knowing that we cannot even expect the swift and efficient stroke of a competent executioner.

 

The idea of the hapless tyrant can be a comforting one sometimes: It holds out the promise of a would-be despot who lacks the administrative skills needed to successfully carry out his ignominious schemes. But in Boris Johnson, the British people have a leader who manages remarkable success at curtailing their freedoms but who, at the same time, fails abjectly to achieve the ends for which his authoritarian measures are the supposed means. Even the usual silver linings of political incompetence are nowhere to be seen in the gloomy Johnson premiership. In fact, the British government’s characteristic abridgment of civil liberties brings no uniquely positive public-health benefit.

 

This is to be explained by Johnson’s life-long talent for surrounding himself with awful people. It’s why Michael Gove torpedoed Johnson’s initial leadership bid for the Conservative Party in 2016. The prime minister lacks the mature moral and political judgement required to pick the right people for the right job. His terrible personal judgement has, for obvious reasons, become a matter of national concern since his ascension to the highest office in the land. It’s been predictably borne out during the pandemic by his over-reliance on one epidemiologist: Professor Neil Ferguson (not to be confused with the brilliant Scottish historian). Ferguson was the man behind the government’s initial U-turn away from a libertarian approach to dealing with the virus, which was pretty clearly articulated by the prime minister when the crisis first broke in the spring. For this, the media christened Ferguson “Professor Lockdown,” a moniker he’s proven worthy of in thought and deed.

 

Ferguson resigned from the government’s Scientific Advisory Group for Emergencies (SAGE) earlier this year after violating his own lockdown rules to sleep with his married lover. However, he’s now back on the scene, having been slowly and quietly drafted back into service in a manner befitting a morally compromised Catholic priest. Here’s what he had to say in an interview with the Times only four days ago:

 

Sage . . . had watched as China enacted this innovative intervention in pandemic control that was also a medieval intervention. “They claimed to have flattened the curve. I was sceptical at first. I thought it was a massive cover-up by the Chinese. But as the data was accrued it became clear it was an effective policy.”

 

Then, as infections seeded across the world, springing up like angry boils on the map, sage debated whether, nevertheless, it would be effective here. “It’s 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.”

 

And they have.

 

From the way the British government has handled the pandemic, you’d think that Ferguson’s views represent the settled consensus among medical experts, but they really don’t. The Lancet medical journal recently published a study that examined the impact of lockdowns across the world. It concluded that restrictions bore no relation to measured infection rates. Dr. John Lee, a former professor of pathology and an NHS consultant pathologist, has also advanced a different view about the possible shortcomings of lockdown hawkery:

 

. . . lockdowns may be worse than just useless. There is some science to suggest — perhaps ironically — they actually drive the disease to spread more easily. This danger lies in the evolutionary nature of the coronavirus . . . restrictions may actually be fuelling the evolutionary imperative. If you change the environment, you change the beast. A successful virus is one that does not kill its host and which becomes more infectious over time — reproducing itself and infecting more and more individuals. Variants of the virus that survive longer in the air, for example, or achieve infection through lower doses of viral matter, will become commoner.

 

In other words, changing the environment in which the virus spreads creates a context for natural selection to do its work. The weaker variants of the virus are killed and stymied by the lockdowns to such an extent that only the most contagious variants survive.

 

Few of us have the requisite scientific expertise to judge between Professor Ferguson and Dr. Lee’s respective interpretations. But the latter view should have at least some weight for policy-makers. Right now, it has none.

 

More concerning than anything else, however, is the tone of admiration Professor Ferguson adopts when he speaks about the Chinese Communist Party. Different people will have different definitions of a failed state. Perhaps applying that term to the United Kingdom is a bit melodramatic. But the fact cannot be avoided that, as of this moment, the British people are utterly powerless to resist the extraordinary power that men such as Neil Ferguson wield over their lives, and that this does indeed constitute a dramatic failure of constitutional statecraft.

 

There are no vertical or horizontal checks on parliamentary power in the United Kingdom; no checks on executive power during prorogation. There is no supreme law to which citizens can hold their leaders in court. The population has been completely disarmed. Every British man, woman, and child works, eats, sleeps, and worships by the leave of apparatchiks and commissars such as Professor Ferguson. And the thing is, this isn’t new. The British people have been collared like dogs on the leash of their leaders for nearly 100 years. The only difference this year is that a critical mass of the public is feeling the tug of the leash for the first time. In years past, it was felt only by a brave and sorry few, such as the Gards.

 

If there’s a lesson to take from the British experience this year, it’s that tyranny in the 21st century is more like carbon monoxide than mustard gas. By the time the poison has revealed its deadly nature to a once-free nation, the polity has likely already succumbed.