On this day in 2020, the British Government made it illegal for people to leave their houses without excuse, shut schools, closed hospitals for regular operations and consultation, shut down small businesses, kept families from visiting their elderly relatives, and spent billions of future taxpayers' money on the failed Track-and-Trace project, sub-standard PPE, and furlough payments and business loans that were often fraudulent.
To enforce this it filled the media and news with fear-mongering propaganda, confused the public and the Police with ever-changing conflicting and vague instructions, and provided incomplete and misleading statistics based on implausible definitions. At one point, it reached the absurdity of outlawing sex between people who were not living together. Not one of its policies was based on facts. Even more absurd was that just under half the UK workforce was still leaving the house five days a week to go to work, even in the Spring 2020 lockdown.
And then in February 2022, it vanished into thin air.
Leaving behind troubled children, spoiled educations, ruined businesses, a backlog of medical treatment that will beggar the NHS for years, creaking public services, massive debts, and double-figure inflation.
The Daily Telegraph has been doing a good job of bringing all the issues to the front pages. The WhatsApp messages it obtained prove that the Government and civil servants were making up rules in an absence of facts, to promote a policy that was only made possible by improvements in the internet infrastructure since the mid-2010's. Working from home would have been impossible in 2010 at the FTSE 100 company I worked for.
I was not scared of the virus. Even by the end of March 2020 we knew that almost everyone who got it survived, and the few who died were very old, obese or had a number of other conditions. Some people would go on to have long-term effects. That happens with any viral infection.
I was scared of getting quarantined. I would have starved, for one thing. I don't have two week's supply of food in the house, and the supermarket delivery services weren't taking on new customers. So I took all the actions and inactions necessary to decrease those chances.
I was scared of a Government and State that had clearly lost its grip, if not its mind; of the powers devolved to unaccountable local councils and other bureaucrats, who could (and did) make up rules from thin air; and of the license it gave to every snitch, crazy person, control freak and busybody. It was a crisis that many, many people could and did exploit, from swindling the Government to re-igniting family feuds.
I did not want to find out that anyone I respected actually believed any of it, because they would be lost to me. Falling for the Lockdown propaganda was a litmus test: if you did... well, there's that.
My deepest fear was that I had fallen for the hype, and was just putting a defiant face on it. After all, look at how I behaved. Did I go along with the Lockdown? What choice did I have? There was nowhere to go, except for a thirty-minute walk round the local park. The job kept me indoors, or in the garden, since the weather was fine. Outwardly I was behaving like a True Believer. Inwardly, and after June 2021 outwardly, when I finally revolted (!) and declared myself mask-exempt, none of it ever made sense. As we get further from it, Lockdown will enter into history as another Extraordinary Popular Delusion and a Madness of the Crowd.
To this day, I'm not sure about why everyone rolled over for it at the start. At the time, I suggested that life in 2019 had become ridiculous for many people: too crowded, too expensive, too hectic. They saw the chance to take a break: after all, it was only three weeks to flatten the curve. What they did not know what that the Minister of Health and the Civil Service had other plans. Those three weeks turned out to be a bait-and-switch.
There are many people who assume that the 2020-22 Lockdown has proved itself so awful in its consequences that it will never happen again. On past form it will, and sooner than 2041. Every year potentially deadly viruses appear, mostly in animals, and every year there is a brief fluster about what might happen if this one crosses over to people. Any of these could be promoted to Lockdown status using the same techniques used in 2020. All that's missing is the money to pay for it, and the wrong people in the wrong jobs making the wrong decisions.
Not sure? 1914-18 was supposed to be the "War to end all Wars". Which is why they had another one twenty-one years later in 1939-45.
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