Why the push to silence lockdown sceptics?

Since I've been too busy to find something new for the blog today, here's a blast from the past; an article that I wrote in the fall of 2020, but mislaid, on the push to silence lockdown sceptics.

The New Statesman wants lockdown sceptics silenced

by George J. Dance

As the coronavirus continues to rage through Europe, lockdowns are failing to control it in one country after another, including the United Kingdom (UK). In the UK, lockdown lovers may be getting desperate, which explains the newest craze among the left, seeking to have "lockdown sceptics" (or as I would call them, "Covid libertarians") 'deplatformed' or silenced (or at least marginalized). To do that, they have to malign and misrepresent the movement. 

The New Statesman (NS) magazine, a flagship magazine for the British left (similar to the New Republic in the U.S.), has been doing its fair share of maligning and misrepresenting. Last week I dealt with one such NS article, by lockdown cheerleader and Conservative MP Neil O'Brien, but that was just the tip of the iceberg. 

Throughoug the pandemic, NS has been attacking Covid libertarians with the strawman of "Covid denial"; here is a representative sample from a June article: "Most governments now reject Covid-19 denialism. Nonetheless, it has inspired far-right groups, and sparked protests against lockdowns, from Michigan to Melbourne."  The magazine repeated that strawman as late as January 6, when a "writer, broadcaster and activist," Paul Mason, was still  equating "Covid ... denialism and lockdown scepticism". Mason appears to understand neither lockdown scepticism nor the reasoning behind it: 

Their arguments often rest on scientific arguments and viewpoints that have now been discredited, such as that of the physician Karol Sikora, who in June predicted there would be “no second wave”, and modelling published last March claiming that as much as 50 per cent of the UK population had already been infected. 

Well, no. Maybe someone's arguments rest on that, but not Dr. Sikora's: his argument has always been that (as he titled an October Spectator article), "Covid-19 kills – but so does lockdown"  (a non-"denialist" claim that Mason does not address, but merely dismisses as "adopting ignorance in defence of [one's] own material interest" - as lf Sikora's only concern about his cancer patients missing hospital treatment is his lack of fees from same). Nor do those claims have anything to do with my argument, which I may as well give here:  

1. Lockdowns violate human rights; it is a matter of fact that people have been deprived of liberty, property, and even life against their will as a result of them. 
2. Governments, like everyone else, must respect human rights wherever possible. 
3. Governments violated human rights through lockdowns by pleading an emergency: that if they did not violate those rights, "millions of people would die." 
4. Granted that saving the lives of "millions of people" would excuse violating some rights: no governments have ever proved that their lockdowns have saved the lives of millions of people (or, for that matter, of any people). 

I have seen only two arguments for the cheerleaders' claim that lockdowns saved lives. One, ironically, was "modelling published last March" that claimed the UK would suffer 220,000 deaths without a lockdown, but just 20,000 with one. (Three lockdowns later, the death toll for the UK is pushing 100,000.) The other is the fact that Covid cases and deaths declined in the spring, which may have been due to (a) the voluntary social distancing that began everywhere before lockdowns (two weeks before, in the UK's case); and (b) the hypothesis that the virus is seasonal (which implies both that it would decline in the spring anyway, and that there would be a "second wave" in the fall).

Three lockdowns later, the UK is left with 100,000 deaths and counting (higher than any non-lockdown nation in Europe); but Mason is sure those deaths were all the lockdown sceptics' fault. Thanks to them, the first lockdown in March worked "too slowly;" the second one, in November, was "far too late"; and the third, after Christmas, came only after "disastrous delay and dither". No wonder he wants to shut the skeptics up: if their opinions are what is causing all these lockdowns to fail, then they must be silenced before any UK lockdowns can actually start saving all those lives. 

Which leads into Mason's own evidence. According to him: "The statistics are clear: the first lockdown worked, despite its late imposition, because schools and colleges were closed" (and not because a seasonal virus like a flu or a coronavirus declines in the spring). "The second lockdown in November, during which schools and colleges remained open, managed only to stabilise the death rate" (and not because a seasonal virus like a flu or a coronavirus does not decline in November). While the "outcome of the third lockdown depends on compliance, which the lockdown sceptics are helping to undermine." See how that works? Shut up the skeptics, close the schools again, and the lockdown may work by next spring.  

Which brings us to the real objects of Mason's spleen: the "prominent lockdown sceptics such as Toby Young, Allison Pearson, Laurence Fox, Julia Hartley-Brewer and Peter Hitchens: celebrity right-wing opinion formers with no scientific credentials." (Mason's own scientific credentials are "New Statesman contributing writer, author and film-maker.") That Gang of Five are not only wrong, but de facto traitors; they are not merely "denying reality," but "are spreading the equivalent of enemy propaganda in wartime." This alleged treason happens because, like "millions of die-hard conservative-minded people," they "still believe they live in a world of individuals and that society has no right to mandate their behaviour in an extreme crisis."

That last conjunct makes little sense. It is not British "society" mandating its citizens' behavior, but the UK government. "Society" cannot mandate anything, because it is not a person or even a god. Society is the human-constructed part of the environment (of which the 'economy' or the 'market' is an iportant part). Environments do not mandate; organisms adapt to them or die, but that is not because they go around punishing mankind for its "noncompliance." 

To a socialist, though, government is "society" - or, at least the members of it who get to mandate how "society" functions. For the past century socialists have tried to 'plan' and 'manage' their national economies to eliminate poverty and scarcity, blaming every failure on 'traitors' of their own. And the result has been so great (it has never worked, but would have every time except for the 'traitors'), that they are now emboldened to try planning the rest of society: if they plan all the minutiae of everyone's lives, from seeing friends to simple outdoor exercise, they will be able to eliminate disease and death itself just as successfully. (One could call this "pathological socialism.")  

Mason candidly admits is that "we’ve been here before with climate change". Since the failure of communism, socialists have trying to build a new case for a new socialism around the climate change threat arguing, as Mason does, that "Mitigating climate change means ... the state taking control of the market." The lockdown debate, as he says, "is rooted in the same ideological soil. If Covid is real, free-market capitalism of the kind the elite sold to British people for 40 years cannot work." Denying those conclusions - that either climate change or the coronavirus prove the case for socialism - is what, for him, actually makes non-socialists and lockdown skeptics "deniers." Even questioning the ability of the state to perform such miracles (if only capitalism were destroyed and all its defenders silenced) is, for someone like him, equivalent to "denying reality." 

Look where pathological socialism has brought us already. As Mason tells it: "We are paying people not to work" thanks to the economic shutdowns that came with the lockdowns taking away their jobs. "We are lending money to bankrupt companies" thanks to those shutdowns driving companies into bankruptcy. "We are forbidding landlords to evict people" thanks to making it impossible for people and businesses to meet their rents. "We are scrapping the exams that divide children into winners and losers at an early age" by working to create a whole generation with no winners. "We are printing money so that the government can borrow it" because, having taken a chainsaw to so much of their societies, western governments have no other way to pay for all of this.  

To secure all these gains, the traitors must be silenced. "I was glad to see YouTube temporarily pull the plug on TalkRadio. I would be even gladder to see Ofcom review the station’s licence to broadcast and Twitter and Facebook label the claims of columnists as questionable or false where appropriate." 

"But above all," Mason concludes, "I want to see politicians and public figures proactively and strongly refute Covid denialism." Here may be another point of agreement. If by "refute" he means try to intellectually engage with (as opposed to misrepresenting, slandering, deplatforming, or outlawing), I would welcome that as well. Unfortunately, I am losing the hope of ever seeing it happen. Unfortunately, I am afraid that by "refute" he means "silence". He wants his opponents silenced.