The luxury of being pro-lockdown

I’ve just written an essay for the People’s Lockdown Inquiry, a new collaboration between Buckingham University, the Institute of Ideas and the Reclaim party. The question I’ve puzzled over in my contribution is why the global elite became such enthusiastic supporters of the heavy-handed, statist approach to managing the coronavirus crisis — stay-at home orders, business closures, face masks — and passionate opponents of less draconian alternatives, such as those set out by the signatories of the Great Barrington Declaration.

Choosing between these two positions is far from simple, with powerful moral arguments and compelling research evidence on both sides. Yet most members of the upper professional class across the western world treat the question as if it were a no–brainer. Supporting the interventionist approach is just something everybody does, darling, like turning left when you get on a plane and spending Christmas in the Caribbean.

For cynics like my friend James Delingpole, the answer’s obvious. It’s because these 21st-century robber barons are making money out of the pandemic. According to Robert Watts, who compiles the Sunday Times Rich List, more people have become billionaires in the past year than at any other time in Britain’s history. The combined fortune of these Masters of the Universe has grown by more than a fifth, and the rest of the 1 per cent haven’t done too badly either, thanks to massive government expenditure. Across the developed world, central banks have pumped money into the economy, boosting asset prices and further enriching the plutocratic elite. What’s not to like?

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Julie Burchill

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This is clearly a factor, but I think there’s something else at play, too, which is that supporting non-pharmaceutical interventions is a high-status indicator, a way of advertising that you’re in the same club as tech titans like Bill Gates and Jeff Bezos and eminent public health scientists like Anthony Fauci and Neil Ferguson.