‘Freedom Day’ is here at last — but at such a cost

I suspect that many of those who have supported the draconian measures of the last year-and-a-half will look at some of their opponents today with a brusque “Happy now?” In response, one can

only say that those of us on the other side have had it against us for quite a while, so it’s only fair to have the first sense of success. For every doom-laden press conference, desultory

chart, domineering outburst or despicable propaganda of the latest period of this country’s travails, there was the consensus that each step was the most necessary, obvious course ahead. To

resist, or simply perhaps to question the wisdom of these moves, was to deny the perceived urgency of the moment. Even, in the case of this virus, to deny the lives of those it so cruelly

affected. 

So I don’t, can’t, see “Freedom Day” as a particularly joyous occasion. Not because I am terrified at the prospect of dramatically rising cases among the young about to inevitably swarm our

hospitals, or because I think the unmasked minority are trying to ravage the cautious majority with their recklessness, or because I think the Government has wilfully signed a death warrant

for tens of thousands more of its more vulnerable citizens, or because I detest any idea of communal celebration and Bacchanalian liberty overcoming the streets. Merely that we should

perhaps take this moment when mandatory restrictions come to an end to look back honestly at the damage inflicted during this period in both personal and national life — a period where every

single citizen has been affected in some way, has some grievance to tell, or some list of curtailed opportunities to relate to. A period, too, which has perceptibly changed most people’s

ideas of how society, and they themselves, should act, and made many of them think, day after day, of death. A time of deaths rolled out in bulletins, on screens, on graphs, and in speeches.

Not even in wartime was mortality so close to our minds, so ever present in our actions, in the news, in the decisions of our politicians. 

Never before, or at least for seven decades, have political power and its shortcomings been so evident either. Even the most seismic political events, whether they be Brexit, the financial

crash, or a general election, were not so evident in all of our everyday actions. No one instantly stopped going to work because we left the EU, unless they were extremely upset. Churches

did not close when the Tories won in 2019, however much Archbishop Welby may have wanted them to. The decisions made by a small group of men (and it was, unfortunately, mostly men) have

determined the shape of most of our lives for months on end, have decided what we should wear in a shop or train, whether or not we would be able to meet that extra family in the park, or in

the restaurant, whether we could hug that grandparent. These are powers which I suspect much of the electorate would never have thought of giving to Boris Johnson, still less to Matt

Hancock, only two years ago. Now it is accepted as a necessary bargain of rights, an essential deal of liberties. It was, don’t forget, all for our own good. 

As well as looking back, glimpsing to the future offers some premonitions. In speaking out against each lockdown, I claimed that personal responsibility should be much higher up the

Government’s charge sheet for its people. Now, it may well have risen to the top. Yet Britain is a different nation to the one it was before whatever happened in Wuhan was brought to these

shores. Notions that “it can’t happen here” are hopelessly antiquated in a country that has undergone such a rapid and unassuming change in its life over this period. Whatever some of us may

hope or expect, mask-wearing, and its cultural baggage, will continue, whether or not government diktats or the real threat of disease remain. When we are commanded to be “cautious”,

“sensible”, or “responsible”, our leaders know that interpretations of this will differ wildly. Even in a country so multi-vaccinated as this, a divide between the “cautious” and the

“irresponsible” can only widen, and bring with it all the threats to ordinary social cohesion such a chasm entails. Our politicians’ risk-averse language could all too easily become moral

signposts for both the flouters and the zealots. 

Boris Johnson is keen on his Churchillian comparisons. It is even very conceivable that he saw the beginning of this pandemic as his greatest chance to steal the mantle of grandeur from his

hero, monumentalised on Parliament Square, although the amount of heroic rhetoric — bluster to some — has markedly fallen since his own humbling experience with the virus. Yet if we are to

continue the metaphor, then this day of previously suppressed liberty and now repressed national catharsis could be labelled his own D-Day. The perilous days of May 1940 are over, and the

“end of the beginning” of El Alamein has passed. Johnson will be desperately hoping for this to be one of his last dies to be cast, and that his own term in office can walk with more destiny

onwards. 

But unlike Churchill, Johnson is a supremely confident man. What Churchill had more of was resolution; Johnson’s hope must be in his resolutely sticking to the path of some kind of freedom

which he has warily started to tread. He would do well, however, to consider the other side of the war’s legacy. By the end, Britain was exhausted and wanted to rid themselves of the

government and the figureheads they could see only as war-leaders. Johnson will hope the same label of a mere crisis manager does not stick to him, however well (or not) he knows himself to

have steered the nation through such an ordeal. 

In the dismal days of January, when the third lockdown was announced, I wrote here that a “prevailing feeling” was one merely of “numbness”. The nation had taken what I thought and still

think was a disastrous step. Most of the country has long since disagreed, and so it will be with trepidation, not numbness or anarchy, that most of us step out into a long-promised freedom.

I fear the same follies of governmental haranguing and tedium will be repeated when the shadows lengthen and winter comes. Until then, delusional or not, we would do well to think on the

painful sceptre of lockdowns and the mental burden the coronavirus has made all of us endure. Only then might we begin to ponder any of those “broad, sunlit uplands” ahead. 

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