On lockdown and Brexit: a response to Oliver Kamm

In his recent article, Oliver Kamm made a link between supporters of Brexit and the increasing number of “lockdown sceptics”, who are cropping up in the comment pages and broadcast studios to attack the government’s infringements of their liberty. The “extraordinarily close” crossover between Brexiters and “opponents of public-health” shows up, Kamm says, in an inherent “suspicion of expertise”.

Many obvious figures fall into this category: Nigel Farage, Daniel Hannan and crackpot conspiracists such as Piers Corbyn and David Icke. The latter two are in this argument irrelevant; both base their esoteric ideas on the notion that the state created coronavirus. Farage and his coterie on the other hand, while prone to spouting conspiracies, see the lockdown as a chance to stoke the culture wars that have engulfed America and threaten to divide Britain.

The establishment, as they see it, is the voice of the government and its scientific advisors. Therefore the establishment must be challenged, and that means all lockdown measures are attacked. Their opinion is not derived from questions of liberty, or from a horror at the lives ruined by the economic consequences of lockdown. It is merely another way of extending the “anti-establishment” contest, which was set off in the Brexit debate.

Unfortunately, Kamm and those who find themselves backing the lockdown groupthink as well, form the flip side of this unhappy contest. The odious Faragists are so prevalent that all lockdown “sceptics” are smeared with the same invective. To oppose the lockdown is to express an “anti-public health sentiment”. To hold such a view it to ignore the experts and to leave the old to fend for themselves. But the idea that in opposing the Prime minister’s edicts I was hastening their end cannot be substantiated.

This idea, that the matter of opinion in this lockdown is merely one of lives versus the economy or vice versa is profoundly damaging, and derails any chance of serious debate. Consider the tens of thousands whose lives will be shortened by delayed cancer treatments, missed GPs appointments, and the families of those people who died, having been discouraged from attending A&E departments. Should we chastise those who oppose the measures which brought these tragedies about as being “ideologues who fail to recognise the truth”, and who are guilty of “intellectual obscurantism”? Fallaciously told that there was a binary choice between saving lives and keeping jobs, it is no surprise that the majority of the country have stuck firmly to the first offering.

As winter approaches and Hancock and Co. show little sign of letting up on their new programme of provincial immiseration by stages, the two sides of the culture war are reemerging in the form of this new division. Pitted on the one side are the “fanatics” who supported Brexit, and on the other are the “Remoaners”, who support the lockdown consensus of Johnson and No10. This factionalism can only damage the argument, and take it away from the real point which is that lives are at risk.

Mr Kamm will no doubt be aware of Christopher Hitchens’s saying that, “The essence of the independent mind lies not in what it thinks, but in how it thinks.” I may be unsettled to be holding the same opinion as Toby Young and Peter Hitchens on anything, but I would also hope that such a coincidence should never bar me from holding an opinion. Fervent Remainer I may be, but Brexit has little to do with our present woes. I do not have an innate “suspicion” of experts in any field, but I know that to tackle this virus and save lives it takes far more than the advice of epidemiologists alone. I happen to agree with Dr. Sunetra Gupta and thousands of others who have challenged the accepted narrative. I happen to think that continuing with much of the measures we are under will cut down many more years of life than coronavirus ever did, and that much of the damage is yet to be done.

To be such a lockdown “sceptic” does not require a hatred of expertise or a right-wing ideology, and or any particular identity at all. When arguments start to forget the real points and descend into the stock phrases to which we have become so accustomed — “herd immunity”, “exponential growth”, “let the virus rip” — then we know that new, more treacherous ground has been reached. This path leads down into the quagmire of identity, and of “culture war” where all those who disagree are thrown onto the same ignominious heap.