Nigel Farage
Nigel Farage single-handedly changed the course of British politics. Without the pressure he piled on the Conservative party through his campaign for the UK to leave the EU, David Cameron would not have been sufficiently spooked to call the referendum on EU membership that he assumed he would comfortably win. The rest is (almost) history.
The Brexit vote in 2016 demonstrated that Farage possesses awesome political acumen. He exhibited this again when, once more single-handedly, he forced onto the agenda earlier this year the issue of illegal migrants crossing the Channel in ever-escalating numbers, over which he piled pressure on the government to stop this traffic (which it still hasn’t managed to do).
Now he has announced that he is rebranding his Brexit party in order to oppose the restrictions that have been imposed upon the population to combat Covid-19.
This is a mistake.
The reason why he changed the course of British politics is that he understood — intuitively, viscerally and correctly — the mood of the silent majority.
He understood that there was enormous unspoken public anger about Britain’s continued membership of the EU. He understood that a majority of people were deeply unhappy that they were being deprived of their basic right to be governed by laws passed by their own democratically elected and sovereign parliament which should be answerable to them and to no other power. And he also understood that those who felt like this had been abandoned by an entire governing class which was wholly detached from the public’s concerns and which, worse still, denounced and disdained those who expressed them.
But over Covid-19, Farage is not articulating unspoken anxieties. He is not championing those suffering these anxieties against those who disdain them. On this occasion, he’s actually going against the public mood, aligning himself instead with those who say the public are too stupid to understand the available evidence and that they have been terrified out of their wits into behaving like sheep being herded to the libertarian slaughter.
Polling suggests that more than 70 per cent of the public support the lockdown. That’s a reduction from the 93 per cent who supported the first one in March; but that drop is almost certainly due to the understandable loss of trust in the government for having so demonstrably messed up by constantly changing its mind, doing too little too late and then introducing belated initiatives in a muddled, chaotic and contradictory way.
If Farage had chosen as his platform criticism of the government for its failure to adopt clear, decisive and more effective measures as the only way to achieve the only honest and moral objective there can be at present — ie, to depress the incidence of infection and thus the levels of serious illness and death in order to protect life and buy time for health provision to cope until effective vaccines eventually come on stream — he would be speaking for the majority. Instead, he has chosen to dump on them by suggesting the restrictions they support are unjustifiable, and by making claims that are simply wrong.
In today’s Telegraph, he and his party chairman Richard Tice write:
Lockdowns don’t work: in fact, they cause more harm than good. But there is a credible alternative, recommended by some of the finest epidemiologists and medics in the world. It is the Great Barrington Declaration. It is effectively being practised to a large degree in Sweden, with considerable success. Focused protection is the key, targeting resources at those most at risk: the elderly, vulnerable or those with other medical conditions.
Certainly, lockdowns inflict appalling damage on the economy. But they are only made necessary if the population in general haven’t observed social distancing measures with sufficient self-discipline to keep the infection level down.
These social distancing measures themselves cause harm, requiring for example grandparents not to hug their grandchildren, keeping families away from lonely elderly relatives in care homes, increasing depression and anxiety through isolation, and so on.
Farage doesn’t want the general public to suffer any such restrictions. Instead, he wants to shield the vulnerable as proposed in the Great Barrington Declaration. This was a statement issued last month by a number of scientists which said:
The most compassionate approach, that balances the risks and benefits of reaching herd immunity, is to allow those who are at minimal risk of death to live their lives normally to build up immunity to the virus through natural infection, while better protecting those who are at highest risk. We call this Focused Protection.
But this has been rightly dismissed by other scientists as irresponsible and unworkable. As Simon Clarke, associate professor in cellular microbiology at Reading University wrote in The Spectator:
It’s a nice idea, but one lacking any realistic and practical way forward. As a former cancer patient who has undergone chemotherapy, I just don’t see how it could be possible. Those who are vulnerable, by definition, regularly require increased medical attention and outside support. How are they supposed to rely on the help of doctors, carers, support staff, friends and family without coming into contact with potential virus carriers? Would we have set shopping times for certain age groups? Or certain segments of society? And what about the increased risk to BAME communities? How on earth would it work pragmatically?
What’s more, we know that rising infection levels in the young has a knock-on impact in every other age group. Dr Duncan Robertson at Loughborough University has produced a number of interesting heat maps which neatly show how infection has bled into older age groups as numbers have increased. It’s not simply a case that we can lock-away huge chunks of the retirement age population.
As for the notion of herd immunity, Clarke observes that it is
a fanciful and dangerous notion… Those pushing herd immunity are trying to create the impression of a genuine and serious scientific debate where there is none. Quite apart from the fact that it would cost an extra few hundred thousand lives to achieve a sufficient level of post-infection immunity, there’s an increasing body of evidence that any such immunity wanes rapidly.
Even epidemiologist Anders Tegnell, architect of Sweden’s Covid-19 strategy which Farage thinks is the Great Barrington Declaration in action, says:
striving for herd immunity is neither ethical nor otherwise justifiable….there has been no infectious disease in history in which herd immunity has completely stopped the transmission without a vaccination beforehand. And that won't happen with COVID-19 either.
As has been pointed out countless times, Sweden is a quite different society from Britain. Its citizens are more docile and pliable, trusting their government to get things right, and so have been far more disciplined about observing social distancing rules.
Even so, Sweden is hardly the role model Farage thinks it is. Its death rate from Covid-19 is more than the total of all its Scandinavian neighbours combined. Moreover, it has now been forced to introduce “mini-lockdowns” to cope with rising infection rates, instructing citizens to avoid shopping centres, museums, libraries, swimming pools, gyms, sports training, sports matches and concerts, and with further restrictions possible on visiting the elderly and others in risk groups.
Farage also says this:
The average age of a Covid fatality is 82: older than average life expectancy. The truth is this horrible illness is only very dangerous for a tiny minority of people. The average person has more than a 99.5 per cent chance of surviving the disease if they catch it.
But the danger from Covid-19 doesn’t just lie in the mortality rate but in increased morbidity. Younger people, including those with relatively minor initial symptoms, have gone on to develop serious chronic illnesses. As Simon Clarke observes, the virus is simply too dangerous to be left unchecked:
At the heart of these arguments is the idea that the virus is not dangerous. But, make no mistake: it really is. It is common to hear the argument that ‘It’s just a bad cold’ and ‘it’s no more dangerous than flu’. Not since 1918 has a PM been brought so low by a case of flu and Spanish flu was hardly typical. During the first eight months of this year, flu and pneumonia were the underlying cause of 14,013 deaths in England and Wales (a mere 394 of those were confirmed as cases of flu and although a lot of the pneumonia deaths were actually caused by unverified flu infections, many will not have been), yet Covid-19 accounted for 46,168 fatalities, more than the ONS has ever recorded for flu and pneumonia in the first eight months of any year. For reference, that’s about 40 times the number of deaths on the roads over an averaged eight-month period.
So what constituency is Nigel Farage now representing? There seem to be three broad groups. There are the economy-firsters, for whom nothing is as important as economic considerations. There are the libertarians, people who make the mistake of assuming that liberty consists in an absence of rules; in fact, true freedom can only exist within certain rules, without which freedom is extinguished by the abuse of power. And there are the consequentialists, people who don’t judge a situation according to whether it is innately right or wrong but only by whether it is justified by the consequences — and in this case, who have decided that the consequences of Covid-19 restrictions are too bad to justify the saving of life.
These three groups are distinct but they overlap. Together, they amount to a significant and amoral faction on the right and within the Conservative party.
The 70 per cent-plus who support severe restrictions are people who need no lectures about the importance of personal freedom, nor about the potentially ruinous effect of lockdowns on the economy. But they also understand that Covid-19 poses a serious threat to the lives and health of many, which both government and society have a duty to try to minimise; and that if the virus is unchecked, it may destroy the lives and health of many more people and take down the economy as well. So their position is both moral and anchored in sober reality.
The mutation of the Brexit party into Covid-contrarianism is not the germ of a new popular movement reflecting overlooked but core values. It is merely the germ of a faction within the Conservative party. That is Nigel Farage’s mistake.
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