British politics this week faces an intellectual crisis. It is one of whom to believe. With yet another wave of Covid at full throttle, the cabinet is reportedly split on whether to rely on its one “winner” from the pandemic, vaccination, or whether to return to mass lockdown. There is no disputing that the Omicron variant is highly infectious. There is bitter argument about how to contain it.
On one side is a prime minister, Boris Johnson, and much of his party, pleading for no lockdown. Vaccination, they say, is the one sure defence against this disease. What matters is hospitalisations and, at about 1,000 a day, they are far behind the 4,200 of January this year. Deaths are still further behind. Lockdown would savage the economy, even if relieved by state subsidy. It would bring back social and psychological isolation and devastate not just elderly people but often young people, too. The costs would be enormous.
These, mostly Tory, politicians, believe the new outbreak should be dealt with via health policy. The NHS coped a year ago, but the service remains desperately inefficient. Only now is it apparently looking at how to expand care of elderly people to relieve hospital beds. Only now is it proposing to treat more patients at home, while making greater use of GPs, pharmacies and private testing clinics. The NHS is there to absorb pressure. That it may need more money cannot justify a return to lockdown. To these politicians, we should bank on vaccination and take a risk.
On the other side are the massed ranks of what is called “the science”. While frontline doctors and medical staff face a sudden rise in patient numbers, scientists on the Sage committees face a nightmare. It is that of a relentlessly mutating virus that nobody yet knows whether vaccination can contain, let alone a vaccination that is readily available to all. They are backed by a strident train of statisticians, modellers, researchers and drug corporations.
Each of these groups is a lobby with a vested interest in caution. Their motto is protect the NHS; or – by implication – the NHS will fail to protect you. Don’t take the risks, they cry. This year may not be as bad as last, but you don’t know. When you are racing the devil, you do not stop to ask if he is tiring. Lock down now.
Both sides in this argument are political because both are playing a political game. They are exploiting fear and toying with risk. The public’s only sensible reply is constantly to demand evidence for what is claimed.
Just now we are being told that the Omicron variant may be a weaker and possibly final form of the virus. Some scientists say it is, some say not. Professor of social psychology Stephen Reicher, who sits on a Sage subcommittee, says alarmingly that by 2022 it will be too late for an effective circuit-breaker lockdown, but how and why? What sort of lockdowns are most effective in reducing infection? Why might shops and schools be left open but indoors pubs and restaurants forced to close? Is that a cost-benefit equation? How many more lives are saved by 2-metre distancing compared to 1 metre? What is the real effect of a two-week “circuit breaker”, or is it just a macho gesture? These seem reasonable questions to which the coronavirus bureaucracy must have answers if it is so sure of the solutions.
The public should be now be deluged with evidence if it is to trust government with renewed infringements on its liberties. Yet all it gets are bland, unqualified statistics that have lost any shock value.
This is now a political battleground, one of lives lost, devastated and diminished, of costs collateral and unseen, and of ever-dwindling faith in authority. The British government is taking the power to apportion those costs across the nation. Its one duty in return is to present evidence. It must give reasons, reasons galore.
Simon Jenkins is a Guardian columnist
