My direct paternal ancestor at the time of the American rebellion against Britain was a Virginia gentleman named George Veal. Unusually for his class, he was a loyalist. His neighbors seized his property, placed him under arrest and confined him to a jail, where he died. If he had foreseen the state of affairs recounted by Lionel Shriver in “The Most Frightened Nation”, he would, I am confident, have changed his mind about independence.
According to an Ipsos MORI poll conducted in July, an impressive 27 percent of Britons want to impose a government-mandated nationwide curfew of 10 PM – not then in force – “until the pandemic was under control worldwide,” which might be years from now. A not-inconsiderable 19 percent would impose such a curfew “permanently, regardless of the risk from Covid-19.” Presumably, these are people who don’t get out much. While 64 percent want Britain’s mask mandate in shops and on public transport to remain a legal requirement for the duration of the global pandemic, an astounding 51 percent want to be masked by law, forever.
There’s more: some 35 percent want to confine any Briton who returns from a foreign country, vaccinated or not, to a ten-day home quarantine – permanently, Covid or no Covid. A full 46 percent would require a vaccine passport in order to travel abroad – permanently, Covid or no Covid. So young people today would still be flashing that QR code on whatever passes for smartphones in 2095, though they might have trouble displaying the device to a flight attendant while bracing on their walkers. Likewise, the 36 percent who want to be required to check in at pubs and restaurants with a National Health Service contact-tracing app forever. A goodly 34 percent want social distancing in “theatres, pubs and sports grounds,” regardless of any risk of Covid, forever. A truly astonishing 26 percent of Britons would summarily close all casinos and nightclubs forever. Are these just a bunch of fogies who don’t go clubbing anyway? No. In the 16-to-24 age bracket, the proportion of Brits who want to convert Ronnie Scott’s jazz club in London’s Soho into a community lending library, even after Covid is a distant memory, soars to a staggering 40 percent.
Far from yearning for their historic liberties as “free-born Englishmen,” eight out of ten of the British, according to a Southbank/Kingston University survey, were “anxious” about lifting any of their benevolent government’s copious pandemic restrictions. I’m not sure that you can call it Stockholm syndrome when captives don’t fall in love with their captors but with the state of captivity itself.
Miss Shriver has much more. To be fair, restrictions in Australia are more authoritarian than in Britain, but a not insubstantial number of Aussies at least protest, even if they haven’t yet stormed Canberra with stakes and torches in hand.
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