Is Britain a nation in fear of safetyism?

It should come as no surprise that Britain’s city centres remain, in the words of CBI chief Carolyn Fairbairn, ‘ghost towns’, and nor is it a shock to hear a civil service union boss shoot down Boris Johnson’s plea for public sector workers to head back to the office. Safety first, said the union man, echoing the caution of his teaching counterparts.

As Trevor Kavanagh wrote in the Sun last week, Britain is ‘a scaredy-cat nation of masked hypochondriacs who won’t leave home for fear of dropping dead’. A poll last month bore this out, revealing that while two thirds of workers in France, Spain and Italy were back at their desks, in Britain barely a third of the workforce had plucked up the courage.

In a Spiked podcast last month, two Spectator regulars, Brendan O’Neill and Dr John Lee, blamed this fear on the insidious spread of ‘Safetyism’. In Lee’s opinion, ‘the Covid-19 crisis had been brewing for two or three decades.