Leading article

‘The government would love to put issues such as these beyond the bounds of debate by creating an air of national emergency.’ So this magazine declared on 27 November 2004 in response to Tony Blair’s proposal for national identity cards, which had just been announced in the Queen’s speech. Our editor then, Boris Johnson, argued that their very existence would threaten the character and liberty of the country. If you buckle in an emergency, he argued, the principle will be lost for ever. He urged Tory MPs to rebel and crush identity cards which, he later said, he’d abolish if he ever ended up in government. History now repeats itself. Blair is back, advocating identity cards in the form of vaccine passports or ‘Covid status certificates’.

Almost 20 years ago, Michael Howard spoke about the ‘British dream’: that immigrant families like his could come to this country and find every door open for their children. The same was true for Priti Patel’s parents, both refugees from Idi Amin’s Uganda. Dominic Raab, the Foreign Secretary, has spoken movingly about his father, who was a refugee from the Nazis. Our islands are and have always been a beacon of light for those fleeing darkness, or simply seeking a better life for their families. Over the years, our country’s reputation has drawn millions of people who have settled here in search of the British dream. They have faced headwinds of racism and bigotry, as migrants and their families invariably do.

During the referendum campaign five years ago, the pro-Brexit side argued that by freeing ourselves from the EU’s native protectionism and over-application of the precautionary principle, Britain could revitalise its economy and democracy. The EU wanted to seize more power, they argued, by taking control of ever greater areas of public life. Remainers thought these fears were exaggerated. They saw in the Leave vote an eruption of nativism. The EU’s vaccine war, however, could not have better demonstrated the problem of Brussels overreach. While the vaccine programme rolls on in Britain, with more than half of all adults now inoculated, the EU is being drawn ever further down a blind alley of its own making.

The power wielded by Nicola Sturgeon and her Scottish government means it’s hard to hold her to account for basic policy failures — of which there are many. It’s even harder to investigate accusations that her aides conspired to frame and imprison someone who had become a political problem for her. The Alex Salmond affair has shown the many ways the public prosecutors in the Crown Office, led by a member of Sturgeon’s cabinet, have sought to censor and redact his allegations. The House of Commons is immune to the threats and menaces of government lawyers. The notion of parliamentary privilege, a corner-stone of British democracy, means that anything can be said within the walls of parliament without fear of prosecution.

The campaign for a Scottish parliament was rooted in the notion of a ‘democratic deficit’. Scotland kept voting Labour but the UK kept getting Conservative governments. Devolution, so the logic ran, would give Scotland a more responsive government. Two decades on, a new democratic deficit is emerging: the chasm between the minimum accountability demanded by the parliament and the maximum Nicola Sturgeon’s government is prepared to give. A new establishment has taken root in Edinburgh, more powerful and less accountable than the old one. The Alex Salmond inquiry, which began as a recondite tale about a failed attempt by Sturgeon’s government to probe sexual misconduct claims against the former Scottish National party leader, has narrowed to three stark questions.

When the Prime Minister sets out his ‘roadmap’ for easing Covid restrictions on Monday, it will be against a backdrop that is both better and worse than could have been imagined six months ago. Worse because we have gone on to suffer a second wave of the disease that has seen almost as much excess death as the first wave. But better in the sense that we have vaccines that are in use and more effective than many hoped, with first doses given to 15 million people — almost a third of the adult population. On several occasions last year, Boris Johnson referred to vaccines as the cavalry coming over the hill. The cavalry is here, and most of those at serious risk of dying from Covid are being inoculated.

Scottish politics tends to go through long bouts of single-party dominance. In the 19th century, the Liberals were in charge. After the war, Labour reigned unchallenged, which is why, in 1997, it drew up a devolution settlement on the assumption that Scotland would always be its fiefdom. But Scottish Labour then imploded. The Scottish National party is now the only game in town. Yet there are signs Nicola Sturgeon’s party is stumbling into the pitfalls that await all parties who spend too long in office. Incumbency eventually renders even the most alert and focused political practitioners complacent. Like Scottish Labour before it, the SNP has become arrogant, secretive and controlling. Parties are at their strongest when they can see the potential for their own defeat.

Who would have thought, this time last year, that the British government would be planning to detain British nationals at the airport and keep them under guard in a hotel room for a ten-day quarantine? It’s quite a departure for a country whose values have always been defined by the defence of liberty. But we’re living in exceptional times, with the Covid death count at more than 100,000 — a bigger hit, as a proportion of population, than almost anywhere else in the world. This requires deep reflection about the mistakes made and the changes needed. When the sick are still dying — at a rate of more than 1,000 a day — it’s hard to have a calm political discussion about what went wrong and how to get it right now.

When lockdown was first proposed in March, one of the many arguments against it was that people would tolerate being deprived of their liberty only for a few weeks. The idea of criminalising basic community behaviour — welcoming a guest into your home, educating children, going to church to pray — was viewed as an extreme measure with a short shelf-life. One of the big surprises of the pandemic is to see that lockdowns, in fact, are popular in large quarters. People have complied for far longer than was ever envisaged. But it’s a careful balance — and examples of overzealous policing risk upsetting that balance. It does not help that the rules change regularly, with even government ministers saying (in private) that they have given up trying to keep track of them.

Does it matter that Debenhams and the Arcadia group have gone under this week, taking 25,000 jobs with them and leaving large gaps in the high street? In normal times we would be minded to say no. The failure of businesses — large ones, included — is part of a healthy market economy. It is a routine aspect of the renewal process, whereby good upstart businesses drive out tired and stagnant retailers, to the benefit of consumers and employees alike. If unemployment were as low as it was at the beginning of this year, the redundant staff would not have had to wait long, or search far, for alternative employment.

Every country was blindsided by the pandemic; few governments responded to it by borrowing as much as Britain. The figures that Rishi Sunak laid out in his spending review this week boggle the mind. He has been Chancellor barely ten months, yet has already borrowed more than Gordon Brown did in ten years. The upshot of his Commons statement this week is that Sunak will carry on spending money as fast as the Bank of England can print it. But as he knows, debt bubbles have a habit of bursting. The response to this crisis may sow the seeds of the next one. It’s a point which Sunak has a hard time making in Downing Street, let alone with his party. The Prime Minister likes to use the language of low taxes, economic dynamism and fast recoveries.