Kent Barker wonders whether Covid-19 has made it acceptable to get into bed with a Tory.
I once had a girlfriend who was adamant she could never sleep with a Tory. This was OK with me because, as a lefty, I was exempt from her boycott. Indeed, subsequently, I pretty much adopted her stance and have never, knowingly, had a relationship with anyone since who voted Conservative. But many of us on the left both in Hastings and the country at large, may currently be wondering about our philosophical – even if not physical – bedfellows.
The Libertarian right have always seemed something to be despised – their approach utterly selfish. ‘It’s alright for me to do anything I like and hang the consequences for everyone else’. Thus the ‘state’ has no right to interfere with their ‘liberty’ to behave as they wish; to make as much money as possible; to pay as few taxes as they can get away with; to pollute, hunt, shoot, fish and shag at will. Personal power without any responsibility to what they regard as that nebulous or non-existent concept of ‘Society’.
In theory at least, those on the left view all their own actions in the context of how they will affect others. You pay taxes to fund health and social care and education for those who otherwise couldn’t afford them. You boycott goods made in sweatshops to protect the workers and you take personal actions to mitigate climate change because of the effects it will have on those in the developing world and so on….
There is a third or middle group, the liberals, who believe in essence that you should be allowed to do pretty much as you like as long as it doesn’t adversely affect others or impinge on their liberties.
So we have a political spectrum from right, through the centre, to the left. And suddenly many in these three groups are united against a common enemy – state imposed restrictions to mitigate the effects of the Coronavirus.
The Left is, generally, in favour of the State, believing it is best placed to make social provision and run essential services and utilities. The Libertarian Right has a visceral hatred of collectivism, believing in individual charity rather than Welfareism and in ‘free’ market-driven enterprise to run all things. The liberal centre tolerates the state largely on the basis that is affords the underprivileged the ability to go about their business with the least hinderance possible.
But what all three groups would agree on is that the state should not be dictating how many people we may mingle with in the street or in our homes – or at any rate that such rules should not be imposed without full democratic scrutiny and should not be enforced in an arbitrary way.
The left argues this from a civil liberties perspective. It is unacceptable that the police (anyway the guardians of capitalism) should themselves interpret rules which were made by government rather than parliament. This, says former Supreme Court Judge Lord Jonathan Sumption, is the beginning of a police state. And along with the left, he decries the lack of Parliamentary scrutiny under which the rules were made.
With his 80 seat majority Boris Johnson pushed through The Coronavirus Act in just 4 days in March enabling the government to take the emergency powers to impose whatever restrictions on our movement and liberty it deems fit. No parliamentary scrutiny or oversight possible for two years. Concerned backbench MPs have been fighting to catch up ever since and now they have won the power to review the legislation every six months. But a lot can happen in six months.
The Libertarian Right is probably not much exercised by the legislative niceties. What they care about is their personal freedom and especially their ‘liberty’ to make money without the hinderance of lockdown restrictions. For them, the idea of Rishi Sunac doling out billions of pounds of their money in welfare payments is an absolute anathema. And with one eye to the value of their shares and another on the appalling prospect of tax rises to pay for the spiralling national debt, they are philosophically much more inclined to let the vulnerable take their chances with the grim reaper. And when Nigel Farage re-launches his Brexit party to ‘fight this cruel and unnecessary lockdown’, you know without a shadow of doubt where the far right have positioned themselves.
But…and it is a big but…it is not necessarily a position the Left disagrees with. Take the Great Barrington Declaration. Dozens of world-renowned scientists arguing that Lockdown is not only unnecessary but actually counterproductive. Any vaccine will be a long time in coming. Viruses can and do move through populations. Natural immunity is achieved by infection. Enough immune people will prevent the virus spreading…or at least restrict the ‘R’ number to well below one. In the meantime what you have to do is to protect your elderly and vulnerable. Oh yes, and be honest about the number of deaths in the group actually from the virus rather than from, say, pneumonia which is what kills a larger proportion of elderly people anyway.
Watching Farage adopting the Barrington Declaration almost as his own is uncomfortable for those on the left who also agree with it. But as I say, the response to Covid-19 has brought about strange bedfellows. I wonder if my former girlfriend now also finds herself in bed with not just one, but a whole swathe of unsavoury Tories.
Soaked 
Strange bedfellows indeed.
We have, as a society, accepted many restrictions on individual liberty to protect public life and health; seatbelts, drink drive laws, crash helmets, all vociferously opposed by the libertarians at the time. Of course there are many other examples – compulsory education of children, payment of taxes, etc.
Kent is quite right to highlight the danger of measures taken by government without proper parliamentary scrutiny. But, it is strange that he chooses to take aim at measures taken to protect public health rather than the billions of public money that have been handed out to private company cronies that further advance the privatisation the NHS.
Johnson’s totally inept government has been caught in a dilemma between it’s libertarian inclinations and the reality of a pandemic and, as a consequence, has acted too slowly and too incompetently to be effective. Something that will have devastating consequences for us all. That a ‘no action’ narrative should still be finding traction is, sadly, a sign of our troubled times.
And, then there’s the Great Barrington Declaration, an option piece (it has no scientific basis) published by a neoliberal organisation, the American Institute for Economic Research, a libertarian think tank that is part of a Koch-funded network of organisations associated with climate change denial and signed by well respected scientists like “Mr Banana Rama”, “Dr Johnny Fartpants”, “Dr Person Fakename”, “Harold Shipman”, “Professor Notaf Uckingclue”, and “Prof Cominic Dummings”.
Leading figures in the field of infectious diseases, epidemiology and virology have dismissed the declaration as “fucking stupid”, “a dangerous mix of pixie dust and pseudoscience.” a dangerous fallacy unsupported by the scientific evidence”. Link
Last week hospital admissions rose by nearly 2500 over the previous week – to dismiss these levels of acceleration is madness – where exactly do you want the bodies stacked? How do you imagine hospitals, doctors, nurses and support staff can cope with a herd immunity strategy that overwhelms them? The effectiveness, painful as it is, of lockdown is clear to see in Wuhan where the city has returned to normal life with no restrictions.
So, my friend, you really should think again about who you get into bed with – you never know what you might catch!
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Agree with most of your points Rohan, but not about the Great Barrington Declaration. Yes when it was opened up for PUBLIC signatures it got some daft contributions. But below are the original signatories. Respected scientists in their field and far from a bunch of conspiracy theorists. though as views are currently so polarised it’s hardly surprising that people venturing alternatives that went against the flow would be rubbished from the establishment….
Main signatories:
Dr. Martin Kulldorff, professor of medicine at Harvard University, a biostatistician, and epidemiologist with expertise in detecting and monitoring infectious disease outbreaks and vaccine safety evaluations.
Dr. Sunetra Gupta, professor at Oxford University, an epidemiologist with expertise in immunology, vaccine development, and mathematical modeling of infectious diseases.
Dr. Jay Bhattacharya, professor at Stanford University Medical School, a physician, epidemiologist, health economist, and public health policy expert focusing on infectious diseases and vulnerable populations.
Co-signers
Medical and Public Health Scientists and Medical Practitioners
Dr. Alexander Walker, principal at World Health Information Science Consultants, former Chair of Epidemiology, Harvard TH Chan School of Public Health, USA
Dr. Andrius Kavaliunas, epidemiologist and assistant professor at Karolinska Institute, Sweden
Dr. Angus Dalgleish, oncologist, infectious disease expert and professor, St. George’s Hospital Medical School, University of London, England
Dr. Anthony J Brookes, professor of genetics, University of Leicester, England
Dr. Annie Janvier, professor of pediatrics and clinical ethics, Université de Montréal and Sainte-Justine University Medical Centre, Canada
Dr. Ariel Munitz, professor of clinical microbiology and immunology, Tel Aviv University, Israel
Dr. Boris Kotchoubey, Institute for Medical Psychology, University of Tübingen, Germany
Dr. Cody Meissner, professor of pediatrics, expert on vaccine development, efficacy, and safety. Tufts University School of Medicine, USA
Dr. David Katz, physician and president, True Health Initiative, and founder of the Yale University Prevention Research Center, USA
Dr. David Livermore, microbiologist, infectious disease epidemiologist and professor, University of East Anglia, England
Dr. Eitan Friedman, professor of medicine, Tel-Aviv University, Israel
Dr. Ellen Townsend, professor of psychology, head of the Self-Harm Research Group, University of Nottingham, England
Dr. Eyal Shahar, physician, epidemiologist and professor (emeritus) of public health, University of Arizona, USA
Dr. Florian Limbourg, physician and hypertension researcher, professor at Hannover Medical School, Germany
Dr. Gabriela Gomes, mathematician studying infectious disease epidemiology, professor, University of Strathclyde, Scotland
Dr. Gerhard Krönke, physician and professor of translational immunology, University of Erlangen-Nuremberg, Germany
Dr. Gesine Weckmann, professor of health education and prevention, Europäische Fachhochschule, Rostock, Germany
Dr. Günter Kampf, associate professor, Institute for Hygiene and Environmental Medicine, Greifswald University, Germany
Dr. Helen Colhoun, professor of medical informatics and epidemiology, and public health physician, University of Edinburgh, Scotland
Dr. Jonas Ludvigsson, pediatrician, epidemiologist and professor at Karolinska Institute and senior physician at Örebro University Hospital, Sweden
Dr. Karol Sikora, physician, oncologist, and professor of medicine at the University of Buckingham, England
Dr. Laura Lazzeroni, professor of psychiatry and behavioral sciences and of biomedical data science, Stanford University Medical School, USA
Dr. Lisa White, professor of modelling and epidemiology, Oxford University, England
Dr. Mario Recker, malaria researcher and associate professor, University of Exeter, England
Dr. Matthew Ratcliffe, professor of philosophy, specializing in philosophy of mental health, University of York, England
Dr. Matthew Strauss, critical care physician and assistant professor of medicine, Queen’s University, Canada
Dr. Michael Jackson, research fellow, School of Biological Sciences, University of Canterbury, New Zealand
Dr. Michael Levitt, biophysicist and professor of structural biology, Stanford University, USA.
Recipient of the 2013 Nobel Prize in Chemistry.
Dr. Mike Hulme, professor of human geography, University of Cambridge, England
Dr. Motti Gerlic, professor of clinical microbiology and immunology, Tel Aviv University, Israel
Dr. Partha P. Majumder, professor and founder of the National Institute of Biomedical Genomics, Kalyani, India
Dr. Paul McKeigue, physician, disease modeler and professor of epidemiology and public health, University of Edinburgh, Scotland
Dr. Rajiv Bhatia, physician, epidemiologist and public policy expert at the Veterans Administration, USA
Dr. Rodney Sturdivant, infectious disease scientist and associate professor of biostatistics, Baylor University, USA
Dr. Salmaan Keshavjee, professor of Global Health and Social Medicine at Harvard Medical School, USA
Dr. Simon Thornley, epidemiologist and biostatistician, University of Auckland, New Zealand
Dr. Simon Wood, biostatistician and professor, University of Edinburgh, Scotland
Dr. Stephen Bremner,professor of medical statistics, University of Sussex, England
Dr. Sylvia Fogel, autism provider and psychiatrist at Massachusetts General Hospital and instructor at Harvard Medical School, USA
Dr. Udi Qimron, professor of clinical microbiology and immunology, Tel Aviv University, Israel
Dr. Ulrike Kämmerer, professor and expert in virology, immunology and cell biology, University of Würzburg, Germany
Dr. Uri Gavish, biomedical consultant, Israel
Dr. Yaz Gulnur Muradoglu, professor of finance, director of the Behavioural Finance Working Group, Queen Mary University of London, England
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