![A general view of empty streets in central Newport in April 2020](/https/www.telegraph.co.uk/content/dam/news/2024/06/28/TELEMMGLPICT000314736923_17195584127990_trans_NvBQzQNjv4BqA7N2CxnJWnYI3tCbVBgu9T0aesusvN1TE7a0ddd_esI.jpeg?imwidth=680)
![A general view of empty streets in central Newport in April 2020](/https/www.telegraph.co.uk/content/dam/news/2024/06/28/TELEMMGLPICT000314736923_17195584127990_trans_NvBQzQNjv4BqA7N2CxnJWnYI3tCbVBgu9T0aesusvN1TE7a0ddd_esI.jpeg?imwidth=680)
As Britain moved into 2020, it seemed likely that Brexit and its aftermath would continue to dominate British politics for years to come. Boris Johnson was fresh out of a general election with a mandate to “Get Brexit Done”, the Brexit “deal” had been all but agreed and “Brexit Day” was set for January 31.
And yet, for over two years, the country would be dominated by the consequences of its unprecedented and unadvised reaction to a respiratory pandemic that, while unforeseen, was highly foreseeable. One might think this issue should dominate the first general election since. Not so.
The immediate effects of this legal, economic and social experiment were more all-embracing than anything we had experienced in modern times outside total war. Never in this era had the entire population been persuaded to leave its workplaces, stay at home and deny themselves the social comfort of their friends and family: and, while the “persuasion” was supported by the force of law, the immediate and almost unconditional acquiescence of the public was all the more alarming. The decision to forbid a large proportion of economic activity was unprecedented in war as much as in peace and the consequences predictably severe. And the effect of the closure of schools, together with the cancellation of public examinations for two school years, will leave a long tail as its victims enter the workplace. That is to say nothing of the consequences of the mass cancellation of operations and the effective closure of much of the NHS, justified by misleading and downright false information about the anticipated effect of Covid-19 on the healthy population.
Those harms were as predictable as they were predicted – not merely by the tiny number of us arguing against lockdowns from the start but by the pandemic plans of most governments, including the UK, and the WHO.
School absences have climbed from around 4.5 before 2020 to around 7.5 per cent in 2022/23, perhaps hiding the scores of thousands of the most vulnerable children who, after being abandoned in 2020, were lost to education altogether. The effect on democracy was grave, with the questionable use of powers in the Public Health Act 1984 and the inability – or unwillingness – of Parliament to scrutinise it. Public health has suffered in wholly predicable ways, as a consequence of the monomaniac focus on one illness (unthreatening to the vast majority) and the state mandated closure of sports and encouragement of sloth.
Economically, lockdowns and other restrictions served to increase the high spending, highly taxed trend and to reverse the reductions in the deficit that had gradually diminished over the previous ten years to balloon to £240 billion in 2020/21, almost 12 per cent of GDP, the highest level since the War. Public spending increased from £992 billion 2019/20 to £1,172 billion in 2020/21. The tax burden rose from 36.9 per cent in 2019/20 to 40.3 per cent by 2023/24. Total debt has also risen.
While lockdown should has served as a warning of the harm that can be inflicted on a nation by an all-powerful state, it has only increased that power, size and reach – and the public’s reliance on it. We changed our behaviour on a sixpence listening to the modelling of a discredited epidemiologist, and we accepted lockdown on the asserted ground of safety. Our society showed how little it values its own independence and freedom when it is told to be afraid.
These depressing reflections perhaps explain not only why lockdowns have been ignored in this election but why they were accepted with such little debate in the first place. And it is for that reason – the collective responsibility of the entire political class – that they can only be treated either as an embarrassment or (in a thoroughly dishonest appraisal of historical precedent) something that “just happens” in a pandemic.
Representative democracy only works if its representatives do their duty to scrutinise legislation and hold governments to account; and the ability to exercise democratic choice matters little if the public is unable to give its verdict on the sitting government’s most far-reaching decision. We can only hope that time and experience will teach us the lessons that will not be learned in this election about this catastrophic error.
Francis Hoar is a public law barrister who acted for claimants in judicial reviews of the first and second lockdowns, travel restrictions and vaccine mandates
This is the real conspiracy of silence in the election
Lockdown was a catastrophic error. Our failure to confront it is a danger to democracy