‘You must stay at home.’ Five years ago today, on 23 March 2020, then prime minister Boris Johnson uttered those five words in a televised address to the nation, ushering in the first ever lockdown in the UK.
During the Covid-19 pandemic, lockdowns were presented as a sensible, necessary precaution to slow the spread of this deadly, novel virus by reducing human contact. Yet this explanation does not capture the apocalypticism that the elites in Britain and around the world were swept up in at the time. It was this hysteria, rather than a compassionate concern for public health or a dispassionate assessment of any costs and benefits, that ultimately drove those in power to abandon rationality and liberal-democratic norms, and to embrace a policy as authoritarian and destructive as lockdown.
Covid-19 was not the first or even the deadliest pandemic to strike in modern times, but it was the first time the authorities had ever thought to institute nationwide lockdowns, effectively placing entire populations under house arrest, quarantining even the healthy. In the words of one Court of Appeal judge, the first lockdown in England was ‘possibly the most restrictive regime on the public life of persons and businesses ever’. We were forbidden to leave the house, except in extremely narrow circumstances. Schools, universities and colleges were closed. A wide range of businesses were banned from operating. Access to healthcare was severely curtailed. All in-person socialising with people outside your household was banned. Any sense of perspective and proportion had been jettisoned by the time Johnson delivered that fateful instruction to stay at home.
The authoritarian impulses driving the Covid response were palpable in how the police enforced the new rules. Police forces in England routinely went above and beyond what the lockdown laws – the most restrictive laws in history, let’s not forget – actually demanded of them.
Within days of the lockdown’s announcement, Derbyshire Police deployed drones to scour the Peak District for people strolling, fearing they may have travelled further than strictly necessary for their daily exercise. One police force monitored supermarket aisles selling ‘non-essential’ items. A police chief threatened to start inspecting shopping trolleys for supposedly illicit purchases, such as Easter eggs. Of course, travelling for exercise or making non-essential purchases was never illegal, and nor could there ever be any rational public-health justification for criminalising them.
Even if you dutifully stayed at home, as Johnson’s televised address had instructed, the corona cops could still come knocking. In April 2020, a man filmed the police smashing his door down. He was at home alone watching television. Police had to apologise for telling another man he was forbidden from being in his own front garden. Apparently, being homeless was no excuse for not staying at home, either. In May 2020, a homeless man was taken to court for the crime of ‘leaving the place you were living’ – ‘namely, no fixed address’.
The overpolicing of the lockdown was not simply a matter of frontline officers being poorly trained, or struggling to get to grips with a complex, evolving crisis. It was a product of an authoritarian streak that had, by lockdown’s arrival, infected every level of the criminal-justice system – from top officers and prosecutors to the judges who are supposed to act as a check on state power. The Crown Prosecution Service (CPS), meanwhile, was initially determined to put homeless people on trial for breaching the stay-at-home order. When Lord Sumption, a former Supreme Court justice and leading lockdown critic, lambasted Derbyshire Police’s use of drones to intimidate law-abiding citizens, Derbyshire’s police and crime commissioner wrote him a letter to insist that ‘in a crisis such things are necessary’. The implication, Sumption argued, is that ‘in a crisis the police were entitled to do whatever they thought fit, without being unduly concerned about their legal powers’.
In April 2020, a woman was arrested, held in police custody for 48 hours and then convicted by a district judge for a crime that did not exist. When police came across Marie Dinou, they accused her of ‘loitering between platforms’ at a train station. She said her journey was ‘essential’, but refused to disclose further information and was promptly arrested. She was then convicted under a part of the Coronavirus Act that compels infectious people to self-isolate. But there was no reason to suspect she had the virus and nor was there any power under the law to demand she give up her address or identity. At every stage, including when her case reached a judge, the criminal-justice system simply made up the law as it went along. Her conviction was later overturned.
The first lockdown in the UK did not technically have legal force until three days after Johnson’s address. But that didn’t stop police going after people almost immediately. This may sound like a trivial oversight, but it does underscore the authoritarian nature of how lockdown rules were made and imposed. For a brief period at least, police were arresting people on the basis not of laws passed democratically in parliament, but on the mere words of the prime minister, merely because they had been uttered in a television broadcast. This really did bring Britain into ‘police state’ territory.
For much of the lockdown, government ministers effectively ruled by decree. Parliament declared itself ‘non-essential’ in March and shut down for almost a month. Yet even when it returned in socially distanced form, the overwhelming majority of Covid rules and regulations, including criminal sanctions, were passed with minimal or no parliamentary scrutiny. Powers were invoked under the Public Health Act, allowing the health secretary to make and unmake regulations at the stroke of his pen. Even when we weren’t in a national lockdown, Matt Hancock was issuing social-distancing diktats on everything from casual sex to singing to mingling. As Lord Sumption noted in October 2020, ‘The sheer scale on which the government has sought to govern by decree, creating new criminal offences, sometimes several times a week on the mere say-so of ministers, is in constitutional terms truly breathtaking’.
Hancock himself acknowledged his Covid rule-making was ‘Napoleonic’. ‘We’ve got to tell people that they can’t do anything unless it is explicitly allowed by law’, he reportedly told Johnson at one point. This was a reversal of the usual presumption of English liberty that people are free to do what they like unless the law explicitly prohibits it.
Liberal democracy had essentially been upended. But that didn’t seem to matter to the then Conservative government’s critics. Keir Starmer, then leader of the opposition, only ever called for earlier, longer and more stringent lockdowns. The Labourite and former human-rights barrister seemed totally unmoved by the theft of our civil liberties by a Conservative PM. Corbynista columnist Owen Jones expressed relief (only half in jest) to have been placed ‘under house arrest along with millions of people under a police state by a right-wing Tory government’. Just days before Johnson’s press conference, London mayor Sadiq Khan, another former human-rights lawyer and ex-chair of Liberty, demanded a lockdown of the capital: ‘Our liberties and human rights need to be changed, curtailed, infringed – use whatever word you want.’
Those who imposed or supported the lockdowns will no doubt insist that it was all for the greater good of saving lives. But the authorities’ actions in 2020 repeatedly gave the lie to this. Enforcing the rules became an end in itself, regardless of the actual risks of spreading or contracting Covid.
Particularly notable was the excessive amount of attention and energy devoted to preventing people spending time in parks and beaches – places where, even in early 2020, the virus was widely known to be less transmissible. By April 2021, John Edmunds, a prominent member of SAGE (the government’s Scientific Advisory Group for Emergencies), was able to state that: ‘There is really almost no instance that we know of, of transmission occurring outside.’ Nevertheless, just about every local council in the land saw fit to tape up park benches and cordon off access to outdoor gyms and playgrounds. Derbyshire Police, as well as dispatching drones to monitor joggers, poured black dye into the ‘blue lagoon’ of Buxton to deter groups from gathering there. In Spain, ahead of a partial easing of lockdown, one local council sprayed a two-kilometre stretch of beach with bleach disinfectant, killing local wildlife in the process. Even in Sweden, where social-distancing rules were far more liberal than the rest of Europe, a park was covered with chicken manure, with the express purpose of making the smell unbearable for visitors.
In contrast, some places where risks were the highest were treated as an afterthought at best, expendable at worst. Care homes housed the very group that was most obviously vulnerable to Covid-19 – namely, the elderly and infirm, who were tens of thousands of times more likely to die from the virus than the healthy and young. Yet in the early days of the lockdown, guidance from Public Health England instructed hospitals to discharge Covid patients into care homes, even if they had the virus. The aim was to clear hospital beds, for an enormous wave of inpatients that – thankfully – never materialised. Local authorities threatened homes with funding cuts if they refused. According to a Sky News survey, by April 2020, 38 per cent of care homes believed a Covid-positive patient discharged from hospital caused an outbreak in their home. Astonishingly, the deranged policy was repeated in Scotland, New York and Italy. No doubt this is one reason why, as SAGE member Mark Woolhouse has pointed out, ‘more people who died in the first wave [of the pandemic in England] got infected during lockdown than they did before or after it’.
HL Mencken’s description of puritanism, as ‘the haunting fear that someone, somewhere, may be happy’, could just as easily be applied to the Covid regime. People who were spotted gathering in small groups outdoors were branded ‘Covidiots’ in the press and subjected to a daily Two Minutes Hate, despite the low risk they posed to themselves and to others. Often these were young people looking to blow off steam after weeks or months of confinement.
An atmosphere of spite and recrimination reigned. Many members of the public discovered their inner Covid marshal, ratting out their neighbours for minor rule infractions, such as going for more than one jog per day. By the end of April 2020, over 194,000 calls had been made to 999 or 111 over lockdown-related breaches.
In a locked down society, there was no room for discretion or compassion for anyone deemed to be bending the Covid rules. Social-distancing diktats prevented people from visiting dying loved ones and from comforting each other at funerals. Everyday humanity had to be discarded for the enforcement of lockdown.
Fear was certainly a driver of this. A study carried out during the first lockdown found Britons were more afraid of Covid than other comparable countries. And no wonder. The UK government’s propaganda campaigns urged the public to ‘act like you’ve got the virus’ at all times. Scientists produced implausibly large predictions of overwhelmed hospitals and mass deaths, which bore little relation to reality on the ground. The mainstream media also kept up a steady drumbeat of apocalypse porn, broadcasting daily death and case figures, with no contextualisation of the actual risks faced by the average person.
But the fear that drove the Covid response was less a fear of the virus itself, than a fear of how the public would react. It was a fear of the masses, a misanthropic distrust of the other. It was imagined that without strict rules and harsh enforcement, the ‘Covidiot’ plebs would run amok. The public were treated not as rational adults, capable of making decisions for themselves, their families and communities, but as reckless super-spreaders of disease. The fact that compliance with the official health advice was extremely high, well before the first lockdown compelled people by law to remain indoors, did little to dent this elitist prejudice.
In reality, it was the elites who behaved recklessly. It was they who abandoned earlier, saner plans that sought to minimise disruption to everyday life in favour of a total shutdown of society. The lockdown policy was not merely an unprecedented response to a pandemic, but was also unthinkable until just weeks before it was implemented, at least in a Western liberal democracy. ‘We couldn’t get away with it in Europe, we thought’, said Covid modeller Neil Ferguson of the early lockdowns in China. ‘And [then], we realised we could.’
They really shouldn’t have ‘got away with it’. The effects of lockdowns and other pandemic restrictions have been catastrophic and long-lasting. In 2020, the UK was plunged into its worst recession since the Great Frost of 1709. The economy has been struggling with stagnant growth, high inflation and chronic indebtedness ever since. Education was devastated by school closures, with British children losing a combined billion days of school. The number not attending school at all has also swelled since the pandemic. Even the nation’s health was jeopardised by policies limiting access to GPs, as well as by the government’s doom-laden messaging, which discouraged the sick from bothering the NHS.
All of this collateral damage was blithely dismissed as a necessary sacrifice to save lives. But there is no evidence that countries that opted for stricter measures did a better job of protecting their populations. Sweden was vilified throughout the pandemic for refusing a full lockdown and yet, between 2020 and 2022, it endured some of the lowest levels of excess deaths in Europe. Needless to say, by not putting its citizens under house arrest, Sweden also fared far better in a range of other areas: emerging from the pandemic with a smaller hit to the economy and education, and with fewer suicides and incidents of domestic abuse. The safetyist, authoritarian mantra that ‘freedom kills’ was simply not born out by the experience of the pandemic.
All of the damage caused by lockdown was foreseeable, but in the fog of Covid hysteria, critical questions were marginalised and shouted down. Sceptics of the never-before-tested restrictions were accused of being anti-science or simply wanting to ‘let the virus rip’. A lockdown on dissent ensured that sweeping, authoritarian measures could continue for well after the pandemic ceased to be a major emergency.
Indeed, restrictions were extended in the summer of 2021 despite Britain’s successful rollout of the Covid vaccine. Many European countries imposed lockdowns in the winter of 2021-22 often despite their high vaccination rates, and despite the relative mildness of the variant that was spreading at the time. SAGE urged England to follow suit. There was a genuine prospect that lockdown could morph into a routine tool for managing the NHS’s annual winter crisis. The extreme, unprecedented emergency measure was starting to seem dangerously normal.
Perhaps the clearest indication that lockdown was a spasm of authoritarianism, rather than a considered attempt to mitigate a virus, can be seen in the post-pandemic debate about Covid-19’s origins. The lab-leak theory, which posits that Covid emerged accidentally from the Wuhan Institute of Virology, is now the settled view of MI6, the CIA, the FBI, German intelligence and many other state agencies around the world.
Yet the UK’s sprawling, staggeringly expensive Covid Inquiry has dismissed the entire topic as too ‘divisive’ to consider. The scientific and political establishments have gone to extraordinary lengths to knowingly create the false impression that a lab leak was implausible, even when leading scientists privately believed it was likely. Understanding how this pandemic started is, of course, crucial to preventing the next one. The lockdown lobby’s eagerness to suppress debate on this suggests that their talk of ‘saving lives’ was all so much cant – a mere fig leaf for their hysteria and authoritarianism.
Five years on from that first instruction to ‘stay at home’, we need to be able to recognise the lockdown for the authoritarian horror it really was. We must not forget the catastrophic effect it had on liberty, democracy, the economy, our lives and our collective sanity. We must not let the elites off the hook for the unhinged experiment they inflicted on us.
Fraser Myers is deputy editor at spiked and host of the spiked podcast. Follow him on X: @FraserMyers.
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