Delaying decline: Evaluating Britain after coronavirus

This crisis will force us to look with clarity at who we are and what we value, and we must evaluate our own strengths accurately.

I fear, like so many already have, that I need to disagree with this lockdown. Many of the arguments have already been made against it; it is true that the evidence does not support its usefulness in combating the disease but the real issue here is not one of disease prevention but one of liberty.

Us Brits like to think of ourselves as proud and stalwart. I myself have a strongly ingrained notion that as a people there is more evidence that we are made of iron than flesh and blood. In this crisis, however, all of this has completely fallen apart; we now cower in our homes relentlessly jabbed at by an increasingly paramilitary-esque and overbearing police force, one that insults the memory of Robert Peel and all that he tried to establish.

This crisis will force us to look with clarity at who we are and what we value, and we must evaluate our own strengths accurately. And unfortunately, those strengths are incredibly few. As a nation we are rather useless, we will struggle to build 330 miles of high speed rail in around thirteen years while going massively over budget while China has built, in a similar time frame, over 6000 miles of high speed rail. Of course, while China benefits hugely from their projects, HS2 is something most people do not even want. They say a true patriot is his country’s worst critic, and as we head into an economic crisis worse than the Great Depression we will seriously have to consider whether in our current state we are capable of surviving in any meaningful capacity.

It is true that everything must end; but it is our duty to make sure that ending is as far away from now as possible. We have an obligation to endure, to survive, to protect what we already have and to safeguard the future of our nation. The task may be grim, but we must remember that men did not love Rome because she was great, she was great because men loved her.

There is hope, and the most disgraceful thing we could possibly do now is to succumb to fate without a struggle.