Hugo Rifkind on the trade-off between health and liberty

Hugo Rifkind in the Times this week had a piece on the trade-off between liberty and saving people from Coronavirus, which began with today's "Quote of the day."

There are no easy answers on this. I don't agree with those who are attacking the UK government for the admittedly draconian measures they taken to save lives. But I do understand some of their concerns. And Hugo's article asks some disturbing questions about where we will end up when this is all over - will there be long-term effects on our liberties?

You don't have to disagree that the actions the government is taking to cut the spread of COVID-19 are the right actions for now to think that we need to consider now how to make sure these do not result in a loss of our freedoms in the longer term.

Here are some extracts from the Rifkind article, "We will soon tire of Big Brother’s embrace.



"In Derbyshire, there must be something in the water.

"In the case of the blue lagoon in Buxton, there definitely is, because the local police have filled it up with black dye to stop people going for a swim.

The same police force, a few days before, sent a drone over a few ramblers in the Peak District in a bid to shame us all out of unnecessary travel. 

A couple of months ago, in a different context and another age, my colleague David Aaronovitch referred on these pages to the 1940s American journalist Dorothy Thompson’s parlour game, Who Goes Nazi?, in which she’d look around a room, assess the characters, and ponder who would resist tyranny, who would cave and who would actively relish an excuse to pull on the jackboots. There is somebody high up in Derbyshire police, I suspect, who would go Nazi pretty damn fast.

"Or maybe that’s unfair. Maybe it’s decadent. Our parameters, after all, change pretty fast. Sadiq Khan, the London mayor who made his name as a human rights lawyer, declared last week that he was open to a situation in which “our liberties and human rights need to be changed, curtailed, infringed, use whatever word you want”.

"On Saturday night, a friend who has spent the past fortnight sealed in a small flat with her husband and kids texted us in horror to say that the twentysomethings upstairs seemed to be having — of all things — a party. What to do? Call the police? Would that be moral? Or, as a more nagging question, what if I were 23 rather than 43? How would I be acting right now? Better? The same? Or worse?

"This is our new dystopia. Just occasionally, it’s bleakly comic how much it resembles the old ones. Doing the YouTube Joe Wicks exercise class last week, it suddenly struck me that we were spending our early mornings much as Winston Smith spent his, doing physical jerks in front of the telescreen in Victory Mansions.

“ Our technology, at least, is not watching us back. Or at least, not yet.

“In parts of China, technological monitoring has been a huge part of the coronavirus fightback. In order to travel, citizens must have an app on their phones which shows a different colour code — red, yellow or green — depending on their medical history and where else they have been. Without the right code you cannot enter a variety of buildings, most importantly metro stations.

“Such a system sounds imponderable in a British context, although Jeez, these days, what doesn’t?

“Fast forward your mind by a few months, though, and consider a Britain in which many have had the lurgy and recovered, and are maybe now immune. There may even be an antibody test to prove it. Such people could be back at work, keeping the wheels turning, looking after everybody else.

“Only, who are they? How do they prove it? Do we just leave it to chance and personal responsibility? Or if not, then what?

“So much more is possible. In Israel, for example, phone data is being used to track individuals thought to have come into contact with somebody infected. On an extreme level, your phone could even be used to monitor how often you flout the two-metre rule with strangers while going for a walk. Although, for that to work of course, you’d need to be under an obligation to carry the thing. Last week, a journalist who was subject to mandatory tracking in Taiwan wrote for the BBC about having been visited by police within the hour after his phone battery died.

“As the legal commentator David Allen Green puts it, the coronavirus regulations last week summarily suspended freedom of movement, freedom of association and freedom of worship all at once, along with in many cases the freedom to conduct business. Less remarked upon, though, is a clear public appetite, at least presently, for all this and more. One poll last week put the percentage of Brits prepared to sacrifice civil liberties in this fight at 86 per cent. It’s less “Live Free Or Die”, as the American revolutionaries had it, and more “Live Free And Die, So For Preference, Neither”.

“This is the easy time. As this horror show drags into summer, I think we can expect divisions and flashpoints, not only from the impoverished and struggling but also from the young, the restless, and the deeply bored.

“Today, the government’s greatest challenge is protecting our health. Before long, it will be maintaining our consent to keep doing so. This will take unprecedented transparency and endless explanations as to what is being enforced, and why, and when it will end.

“We are not China, and I do not think we ever will be, and for that I am relieved. But it is hard to comprehend, right now, what we are to become instead.”