Lockdown

Family dinners, like almost every area of American life, have become a subject of fierce politicization recently. In the years following Trump’s election in 2016, readers of elite progressive outlets were treated to a long parade of thinkpieces urging Americans, in the words of a 2019 Atlantic essay from Ibram X. Kendi, “to liberate our relatives from their abusive relationship with Trump’s alternative reality.” “This Thanksgiving, It’s Time to Take on Your Conservative Relatives,” declared a headline in the Nation. Molly Jong-Fast called on readers to “Deprogram your relatives this Thanksgiving.” A 2017 GQ article was perhaps bluntest of all: “It’s Your Civic Duty to Ruin Thanksgiving by Bringing Up Trump.

Washington, DC Amid the recent orgy of violence across America, it was the carjackings that finally got me. Lost amid all the mass shootings and gang slayings of late has been another wave of crime: vehicle thefts. In Washington DC, carjackings in 2021 were up by a third over 2019, while in nearby Alexandria a motorist made national news after he shot two boys at a gas station who were trying to lift his car. In Chicago, 1,900 vehicles were jacked just last year, which is eye-wateringly high even by that city’s grim standards. There is an inhumanity at work in this country that’s as stark as anything I’ve seen in my lifetime These thefts are almost all committed by teens, often at gunpoint.

No one is getting canceled, we’re told. There’s no such thing as “cancel culture.” It’s just consequence culture. People say racist, sexist, mean things and so they deserve to be fired from their jobs, stripped of their standing in society, shunned by their friends. Should Hitler have been able to keep his job after publishing Mein Kampf, huh? If only life were that simple. But mob rule is, by definition, imprecise. The people who get canceled aren’t really Hitler, of course. And somehow, actual criminals find themselves forgiven far sooner than regular folk who say something out of step with the narrow set of guidelines proffered by the worst, wokest people in society. Still, there’s something different about the people canceled for their Covid views.

In many ways, it has been absurd to have police spend months (and £460,000) investigating birthday cakes, glasses of wine and garden parties. Lord Finkelstein, the Tory peer and commentator at the Times, has come out against it (‘Playing politics is no business of the police’) and the front page of yesterday’s Daily Mail lambasts the cost. I respectfully disagree. If partygate focuses political minds on the wisdom of lockdown rules, it’s well worth it. Keir Starmer and Danny Finkelstein both voted for Boris Johnson’s lockdown laws. If they now find the laws objectionable if used to investigate past offences by politicians: good.

Afew weeks ago it seemed that the issue of Downing Street parties over lockdown had been usurped by a more serious matter: what to do about the invasion by a nuclear power of a neighbouring European state. But now partygate is back, fuelled by the news that the Metropolitan Police has issued 20 fixed penalty notices and may announce another tranche of fines at a later date. Some of the heat has left the whole affair. Several of the letters written to Sir Graham Brady, chairman of the 1922 Committee, demanding a Conservative leadership election were withdrawn at the beginning of the war in Ukraine. The leader of the Scottish Conservatives has withdrawn his own call for the Prime Minister to resign. Nevertheless, partygate continues to present an acute difficulty for Boris Johnson.

For some time now, Covid has been rising in Scotland - there are now more Scots in hospital with Covid than at any time throughout the winter. A freak, or a sign of what’s to come nationally? The ONS survey answers that question today, confirming that Covid cases are rising nationally: some 4 per cent of England’s population, it says, would test positive. In Northern Ireland it’s closer to 8 per cent and in Scotland 5.7 per cent. Have waning vaccines created space for another wave - and do we need to worry? Just as Gauteng and South Africa then Lambeth and London were the early warning signs for Omicron’s rise and speedy peak, so seems to be Scotland now. The ONS survey have shown cases rising there for weeks and it’s been puzzling scientists.

On February 14, Prime Minister Justin Trudeau issued an edict granting himself emergency powers to rule Canada by martial law with the intent of making all those trucks back up. He wants to confiscate them along with freezing truckers’ bank accounts. His soldiery is not altogether with him. Ottawa’s chief of police, Peter Sloly, abruptly resigned. Things aren’t looking bright for North America’s newest autocracy. But, OK.  Let’s back up. On December 18, 2020 a French musician known as HK (Kaddour Hadadi) and his group the Saltimbanks released on video a song titled “Danser encore” (“Dancing Again”).

Is a modicum of sanity about to reassert itself regarding the Wuhan Flu? Are the people finally exhausted by their panic over the Fauci-altered coronavirus? Remember those little bulletins that Mike Pence carried around, enjoining us all to to take “fifteen days to stop the spread”? I think we’re at about day 750 now. New York restaurants and many cultural emporia demand that you produce your papiers (it sounds better in German) — identification plus an image attesting to your “vaccination status” — in order to enter. Some are even requiring proof that you’ve had a “booster” jab. Pfizer likes that.

Did lockdowns save lives? We will never have a definitive answer to this vital question because it was impossible to conduct controlled experiments — we don’t have two identical countries, one where lockdown was imposed and one where it wasn’t. Nor is it easy to compare similar countries, for the simple reason that every country in the world — bar Comoros in the Indian Ocean — reacted to Covid by introducing at least one non-pharmaceutical intervention (NPI) by the end of March 2020. There was no clear link between lockdown stringency and fewer deaths in the spring of 2020, A team from Johns Hopkins University has, however, assessed the many (albeit flawed) studies into whether lockdown works — a ‘meta-analysis’.