Liberty and cultural freedom are dying right in front of our eyes

She was not targeted for anything to do with COVID-19, or even the lockdown. She was singled out for her unwillingness to comply and go along with the crowd.

On Friday night a young woman appeared to be arrested in London’s Soho for chanting ‘we have the rights’ on the corner of Old Compton Street and Frith Street.

Wearing a long, brown winter coat and smiling with her friends after an evening of socialising, she shouted those words as mobs of masked police officers descended on the crowded streets to enforce London’s new Tier Two COVID-19 restrictions. The young lady’s voice was not disruptive. She was repeating her chant in a unobtrusive voice and in a tipsy ironic tone. 

Nevertheless, she was followed by police as she and what appeared to be her boyfriend walked down Frith Street to escape the crowds and avoid the intimidating presence of the police. Two officers followed her and after a few minutes pinned her to to the wall and surrounded her. She had done nothing wrong but give out a meek, harmless chant in a slightly mocking way.

On a typical Friday night, this young woman’s actions would have been laughably unremarkable. But this is the ‘new normal.’ In our current moment of hysteria, Covid-paranoia and sanitised tyranny, she was deemed to be a dangerous criminal. She was not putting anyone vulnerable at risk. She was not causing aggressive disruption to residents in the area. Her offence was simply to defy the arbitrary laws of our petty dictators and to show a defiant lack of fear or surrender to their gaslighting intimidation tactics. 

She was not targeted for anything to do with COVID-19, or even the lockdown. She was singled out for her unwillingness to comply and go along with the crowd. The police could have arrested anyone else present at this impromptu protest, but they focused on this woman because she symbolised to them a threat to their own self-importance, a thumbing of the nose at their conceited, petulant, immoral authority. 

There is another symbolism to be found in this depressing incident. Soho is traditionally London’s bohemian district, a centre of artistic vibrancy and individuality. Even today as it becomes increasingly overrun by yuppie sushi bars and overpriced coffee shops, you can still see the colourful old eccentric luvvies and boozy poets shuffling past Maison Bertaux in the late afternoon. 

As gay culture everywhere turns increasingly woke and is distorted by angry groupthink, the gay culture in Soho remains freedom-loving and mischievous, the last bastion of the Oscar Wilde tradition of elegant, intellectual rebellion that has been the refuge for artists and dissenters since the scandalous fin de siecle decadence of the late nineteenth century. 

Soho was the meeting point for artists such as Lucian Freud and Francis Bacon. Rimbaud, William Hazlitt, David Bowie and Dylan Thomas all have their names associated with the area’s heritage. It was the drinking hole for actors, critics and poets for much of the twentieth century. That sense of graceful but illicit bohemianism can still be found in some of the independent coffee shops or among the crowds who sun themselves on the street tables outside Cafe Boheme.

During the first lockdown these streets were chillingly quiet. The dependable, reassuringly consistent buzz of Soho had been silenced by a contagion of hysteria. As the lockdown eased over the summer some of that old vibrancy appeared to come back. 

After Friday night’s scene however, the last traces of that dissenting spirit have been crushed. The police, London mayor Sadiq Khan and the soulless Health Secretary Matt Hancock have sent a message in the form of an innocent young woman’s arbitrary arrest.

Pesky free thinkers, artists, bourgeois individualists and bohemian trouble-makers will not be tolerated. You can drink and have fun only on the government’s terms. You can socialise but you cannot huddle in spontaneous, diverse groups. 

Creativity, innovative culture and the free exchange of ideas between strangers are no longer permitted. By all means wait in a socially distanced queue in Pret a Manger, or have a drink in an atmosphere-sapped pub with a flatmate and be served by a de-personalised waitress in a mask whose job is on the line. But whatever you do, don’t mingle. Don’t loiter in suspicious crowds. And absolutely do not hang about after 10pm, your government-mandated bedtime. 

Many of those who support lockdown seem to answer any worries about loss of liberty with gaslighting denialism. ‘Come on,’ they say, ‘you are being dramatic. It’s not a police state, stop exaggerating.’

What they don’t understand however, is that liberty and cultural freedom die by a thousand cuts. The apparent arrest of a smiling, liberty-loving young woman for having the temerity to show ironic disdain for these new fatuous, ineffectual restrictions should give anyone who prizes civilisation and cherishes freedom of conscience sleepless nights.