Coronavirus

My, how we all laughed. Thirty years ago the physicist Alan Sokal hoaxed a social science journal into publishing a paper ‘liberally salted with nonsense’ (in his own words) that ‘flattered the editors’ ideological preconceptions’. Its title alone gave away the joke: ‘Transgressing the Boundaries: Towards a Transformative Hermeneutics of Quantum Gravity.’ Little did we in the truth-seeking enterprise which is real science realise that verbose and vapid social deconstruction was coming for us too. In a new book, The War on Science, edited by the astrophysicist Lawrence Krauss, 31 scientists and scholars lament the corruption of their field by left-wing ideological nonsense.

Last month, the government announced that 16-year-olds would be able to vote at the next general election. If these new voters had wanted to inform themselves about political issues over the weekend, they would have found it strangely difficult. Take, for example, a recent speech about the rape gangs made by the Tory MP Katie Lam in parliament. It was blocked on X, alongside transcripts of the trials of the perpetrators. X users also discovered that they were unable to watch videos of protests against illegal immigration, unless they could prove they were over 18. Even if 16-year-olds are now wise enough to vote, the government believes there is information that they are too childish to know.

It was at about this time, five years ago, that the workers at my (then) local farm shop began wearing plastic bags on their feet, over their trainers. This was because of a report somewhere that said the Covid virus hung about on the ground and then leapt, with great agility and cunning, on to people’s shoes, from whence it swiftly decamped to your bloodstream and killed you. We were still rubbing raw alcohol on to our hands wherever we went, if you recall, because whatever you touched harboured the virus. You couldn’t actually go in the farm shop but had to give your orders to the staff who manned a table out front, from which you were instructed to stand one metre back. People with short arms had difficulty reaching their groceries.

In an otherwise excellent article for the Sunday Telegraph last week about our government’s hopeless pandemic response, Dan Hannan made one comment I’d like to take issue with. He wrote: ‘For years to come, Britain will be poor, indebted and repressive because, in early March 2020, no one (with the exception of one brave Sunday Telegraph columnist, modesty forbids, etc) wanted to stand in the way of a stampede.’ In fact, he wasn’t the only one and, lacking Dan’s modesty, I’m happy to name myself as one of the first journalists to oppose the lockdown policy, along with Peter Hitchens, Allison Pearson, Ross Clark, Julia Hartley-Brewer and a handful of others. But Dan is right to emphasise how one-sided the debate was, with almost everyone falling in behind the government.