Neil O’Brien is over the top. We need nuance in the lockdown debate
“Powerful Covid-sceptics in the media have got it wrong at every stage. They fought to stop or delay every measure necessary to control the virus. They opposed masks, resisted travel restrictions, fought local lockdown tiers as well as national measures, often with conflicting arguments.” In Neil O’Brien’s recent op-ed for The Guardian, the Tory MP and head of Number 10’s policy board made some frank and in some cases, justified criticisms of “lockdown sceptics”. Their bombastic predictions of a swift conclusion to the crisis had been proven wrong, he argued, “politicians are used to accountability. The guilty people within the media are not.”
O’Brien has emerged as a prominent Twitter personality – as a trusted voice and crusader against the lies of lockdown sceptics. Along with the economist Sam Bowman he has founded a website chronicling mistakes made. And yet, is there not something unfair in the characterisation O’Brien makes of the debate as a fight between deniers and truth-seekers? If we are going to audit the comments of scientists over the whole course of the pandemic, the list of Covid “guilty men” might fruitfully be extended to Boris Johnson, Jenny Harries, Chris Whitty, Patrick Vallance, Rishi Sunak, and Michael Gove all of whom have “got it wrong” on key issues (masks and travel restrictions being the most prominent).
In his Guardian piece, O’Brien calls out “motivated reasoning”. He argues that lockdown sceptics were misplaced in praising Sweden’s light-touch Covid strategy in the summer: “Libertarian Sweden was all the rage. Never mind that its death rate was 10 times that of its neighbours.”
But Sweden is not that similar to its neighbours – there is a reason why the sole country in Scandinavia to have made a really significant contribution to European geopolitics is Sweden, partly because of its relative size and its interconnectedness with the continent. Sweden is far more comparable to a country like Scotland – a couple of pretty densely populated cities with deep inequalities within urban areas. Death rates in the two countries are pretty similar and have tracked each other closely throughout the pandemic.
And yet, Scotland and the UK have been under severe restrictions for much of 2020. Sweden’s most hardcore gesture throughout much of the pandemic has been to limit public gatherings to eight people. The UK government criminalises picnics. Claiming to furnish the debate with a factual basis is nothing more than a rhetorical ploy if nuance and context are left out of the picture.
Indeed, I can understand why it might be easier to dwell on comfortable bromides and blame “powerful Covid-sceptics” for the seemingly intractable nature of the crisis. Dunking on Toby Young is debating on easy mode – I would far rather our MPs engaged with the substantive issues at stake here. For how a society chooses to handle disease is a question that touches on deeply felt moral and political principles.
If we are to make accommodations to disease, and I am of the camp that says we should make accommodations, we must also instruct ourselves in the business of thinking very carefully about what accommodations are justified in light of the harms they cause. Is public health best served in the medium and long term by measures which appear to do little more than cultivate compliance by stoking fear?
O’Brien’s recent comments that “the countries that have done best during the crisis (Taiwan, Korea, Japan, Australia, New Zealand) have tough health controls at the border” are of a piece with a new orthodoxy on Covid – that disease is dealt with best by hard, fast and brutal interventions structured around national priorities. Some form of enforcement at the borders may play a role in managing the pandemics of the future – but again, context is all. Japan is experiencing severe pressures on its hospitals. Taiwan is a city-state with far fewer border points than our own and Korea’s success is rooted in its remarkable ability to contain new outbreaks, not stop them altogether.
Do we really wish to mimic “Fortress Australia”? Swift action to contain an outbreak in Melbourne, which involved the quarantining of people in municipal tower blocks without food or medicine was ruled to be a human rights violation by a state investigator.
Neil O’Brien claims that his interventions qualitatively elevate the debate – but the practice of calling out media shock jocks is hardly very edifying. He might be better served in making the argument for lockdowns with a measure of coherency.
He might tell us, for example, what principles he can draw on to justify the extraordinary and unprecedented measures this government has taken. Why is it right to do these things? Why is it right for schools to be shut for extended periods? Why is it right for changes in the law to be forced via government diktat? We know that lockdowns shield the affluent from the threat of disease while the working class have to take greater risks – why is that right?
These are real political conflicts. And the debate cannot be conducted usefully if it is had in this argot of disinformation, fake news and rival shock jockery.