I like Tim Stanley. Years ago, when I was on the radio in Spain, Tim was based in Washington DC and would come on with me regularly. Tim is old school. He’ll debate anyone and is a zealous defender of free speech. My world-view is a million miles away from his, but who cares? It was great radio.
He’s written a sobering article in today’s Daily Telegraph. In it, he warns that there is no guarantee that Britain will ever fully return to normal and that in the future, the government will “be slow to lift anti-Covid measures because it senses that many of us rather like them.”
On the day that millions of schoolchildren return to classrooms Tim wrote;
Schools are back today but not back to normal, because Covid has turned them into field hospitals. Masks; distancing; three tests in school in the first two weeks then twice weekly testing at home. The PM calls this the “irreversible” end of lockdown, but it’s not. It’s lockdown transported from the home, where we were imprisoned for weeks, to the public sphere, and woven so tightly into the fabric of everyday life that we will eventually take it for granted.
As I’ve written elsewhere today, even I was startled and dismayed to see children self-administering covid tests in school gyms this morning. I don’t shock easily, but it was horrifying, the routineness of it all I mean.
Stanley goes on to say in his article;
If you’ve ever wondered how civilised societies succumb to fascism or communism, now you know. Emergency. Panic. Control. Some readers will find it distasteful to compare lockdown Britain to Lenin or Mussolini, but even if the justification for our pandemic response operated on a far higher moral plain, the result was still totalitarian in structure. Think about it. An entire population was banned from going out. The economy was controlled by the Government. Protesters were arrested.
He says that the government, through the imposition of lockdowns and the people, through their compliance, have “erected a new architecture of control.”
Again, it would be over in a day, if the UK’s marquee news presenters, did their jobs.
Read Tim Stanley’s article in full here: https://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/2021/03/08/era-covid-totalitarianism-far/
