Fraser Nelson
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This is the crucial democratic point. Politicians must – absolutely must – be made to feel the effect of their own laws. For the sake of a healthy democracy, the Metropolitan police absolutely had to investigate everyone in No. 10 who was accused of rule-breaking.
Next time lockdown is proposed in parliament, they may spend more time focusing on (or speaking up for) those wrongly criminalised by badly-drafted, unnecessary laws. If politicians worry about getting fined for rules they rush through at the time, it’s a healthy, vital democratic force. Keir Starmer, who sent his MPs to vote for Johnson’s lockdown laws, will now have plenty of time to reflect if he was right to vote to make it illegal for people to have a beer and a curry with each other after a hard day’s work.
We are only now beginning to discover the extent of the societal damage of these lockdown laws. And what did they achieve? Finkelstein summed up the argument for lockdown:-
The more we relax restrictions, the more people will mix. The more people mix, the more people will get it. And the more people get it, the more people will die.
This is lockdown theory: that lockdown was a too which allowed politicians to increase or decrease social mixing (and, ergo, Covid deaths). It is entirely plausible in theory, but appears not to have been the case in practise. People hunkered down on their own initiative: international data shows not much of a link between restrictions and mixing. As Matthew Parris powerfully argued in The Spectator, the data is now in – and it’s hard to find a link between lockdown policy and Covid death toll.
What interests me is the democratic deficit. Why was lockdown theory not properly explored and pulled apart by parliament when lockdown laws were debated? The flaw in lockdown logic could have been discovered and exposed earlier, had parliamentarians of either house carried their duty of through scrutiny. If the liberty of millions of people were at stake – not to mention the education of children and mental health of adults – then where was the debate? Where was the forensic examination of this draconian theory? Where were the voices of moderation, in either chamber? Our democratic process failed.
The question we should ask now is how to stop this failure of scrutiny ever happening again: ie, a mechanism to keep parliamentary scrutiny alive in times when Opposition supports the government. But instead the question being asked is wht police are investigating politicians rather than just moving on from the whole debacle.
Partygate (and beergate) have ended up packing a bigger political punch than anything else from the lockdown era. There are no columns asking that we find the thousands of children who vanished from school during lockdown, but no end of commentary about this stupid investigation. Politicians tend to focus on things that actually affect them personally: so the partygate investigation is perhaps the biggest single factor stopping MPs voting for lockdown again. I supported lockdown at first, thinking it was worth a shot – if it reduced deaths from 250,000 to 20,000 as Prof Neil Ferguson claimed – then it would have been worthwhile. This theory has since collapsed, and people like me must now re-examine our decision to back lockdown in the light of the evidence.
There will be another Covid variant – and a new pathogen. Another lockdown will likely be proposed. At that stage, those parliamentary power to scrutinise the government are not likely to question the validity of lockdown theory: everyone has moved on rather hurriedly from that awkward topic. But they will remember partygate and ask: if we pass more lockdown laws, might we end up falling foul of them? If fear of being caught in a Boris or Starmer-style investigation stops MPs from voting for another lockdown, then the £430,000 spent by the Met on partygate will be money very well spent.
Because you read about lockdown
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