November 1, 2024
A strategy of protecting the vulnerable could have saved lives without devastating the whole of society.
What is perhaps most tragic about lockdown is that it has demobilised society by shutting everyone indoors, when we should have mobilised the country to the task of protecting the vulnerable.
What is perhaps most tragic about lockdown is that it has demobilised society by shutting everyone indoors, when we should have mobilised the country to the task of protecting the vulnerable.

The most blindingly obvious observation anyone could make while living under Britain’s third lockdown, after nine months of restrictions, is that we have clearly failed to suppress the coronavirus. It seems that practically the whole world west of Asia and Australasia has fared pretty poorly in these efforts. The extraordinary sacrifices to health, wealth and education made in the name of fighting Covid have not paid off. Many of the countries which have endured the worst death tolls have also enacted some of the longest and most severe lockdowns.

The lockdown sceptics who have spent the past year warning of the dangers of this strategy have been maligned and smeared as ‘Covid deniers’ or are accused of wanting to ‘let the virus rip’. But we at spiked do not oppose action to mitigate the virus; we simply question the authoritarian form that action always seems to take.

In a more rational era, particularly in the supposedly liberal West, you might have expected our representatives to strain every sinew to avoid putting an entire population of healthy people under house arrest. But in a climate of hysteria, the wide-ranging discussion we needed never took place. The only permitted questions were whether we should have locked down earlier, harder and for longer. And the only alternatives to lockdown which caught the government’s attention were local lockdowns (remember Tier 4?) and the eye-wateringly expensive shambles that is Test and Trace.

So with that in mind, these are some things we could have tried – because there must always be an alternative to top-down coercion.

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