Lockdowns are a repeat of the War on Terror

Now, the threat has changed from radicalised Islamists waging Jihad on the West, to an invisible foe that can penetrate our very anatomy

People from my generation will struggle to remember embarking on an aeroplane in the pre-9-11 world if they ever did so, and many of course were not yet born before that fateful day in New York City. The War on Terror began the minute the second tower collapsed into a heap of rubble; western governments hastily drafted legislation to grant the state a series of new, and questionable, powers to give security services the knife-edge over this apparently existential threat.  

The social contract between the state and the people changed overnight; the state was no longer a preserver of liberty, but immediately took it upon itself to forge a utilitarian objective. The concerns of the elected class now inhabited the realm of international security, to the detriment of individual liberty. The era of mass surveillance had begun.

In the United States, the Patriot Act was quickly typed out and placed on then President George W. Bush’s desk only a month after the Twin Towers came crashing down, gifting the security services the power to conduct searches on American citizens without a warrant, in violation of the Fourth Amendment under the Bill of Rights. 

In the United Kingdom, the Terrorism Act, possessing identical provisions to the Patriot Act, was passed in 2000, a year before 9-11, unveiling that the attack was the twenty-first century equivalent to the assassination of Archduke Franz Ferdinand in 1914 – many European powers desired war at the time, they only needed an excuse. 

The War on Terror continues to this day, where, at the time of writing, an Intelligence Bill is currently floating through the Houses of Parliament seeking to legalise the use of child spies in covert operations.

As usual, terrorism, as well as cross county drug gangs, are offered as justification for this Orwellian method. 

The political class remains in the same state of paralysis it was hypnotized into two decades ago, like a spell from a witch’s wand, when it became impossible to challenge the methods deployed to fight terrorism. After all, who would not want to stop terrorism?

The current opposition to the Intelligence Bill resides in a group of cross-party peers in the House of Lords, who are demanding that safeguards be put in place to protect the child spies if their work environment becomes too dangerous – there is no debate about whether there should be child spies at all. 

Whilst the security services must use all the powers available to them to combat terrorism, the powers they introduce and wield must be reasonable, proportionate, and not infringe upon liberty. Of course, these are also the same arguments summoned by lockdown sceptics. 

Now, the threat has changed from radicalised Islamists waging Jihad on the West, to an invisible foe that can penetrate our very anatomy; the threat level has also mutated, given that it is much more difficult – to the point of impossible - to prevent something as unalterable to human existence as disease. This has allowed the petty tyrants living amongst us to drum up the level of hysteria to boiling point, permitting them to sign an enabling act, confining our centuries old liberties to the dustbin of history. Even if, and when, we receive them back at the death knell of lockdown, the precedent has been set for them to be seized again in an instant, making them privileges, not rights. 

In 40 AD, the mad Roman Emperor Caligula declared war on the sea, assembling his finest warships, and propelling them head-first into the English Channel (so the historical myth describes). If this were a children’s fable, the message would be ‘waging a foolish war makes you do foolish things.’ Government leaders, both under the war on terror and COVID-19, have generated a war-like atmosphere. In war, when the nation and our very way of life is in mortal peril, or in danger of changing completely under a foreign regime, it maybe necessary to swap much of what we take for granted to, instead, help the war effort in any way we can. The rationing of goods is probably the best example of this. But we are not in war. 

Yes, terrorism is a threat; yes, the Coronavirus is a public health emergency, but the nation is not at threat from extinction. In 2019, 1,752 people were killed in road traffic accidents, and, according to cancer research, there are over 166,000 cancer deaths per year; if the Government and the media were to forge a war-like atmosphere from these figures, current times show this would be laughingly simple to accomplish. 

But the tarnishing of lockdown sceptics, from character destruction in the case of Lord Sumption, to outright censorship regarding TalkRadio, public hysteria has extended to controlling the flow of information and policing people’s opinions in an effort to keep people safe. Like clockwork, lockdown sceptics are accused of murdering their fellow man, from Government billboards to angry rants on that bird app. 

The war on COVID was the natural progression of the War on Terror, and the inevitable conclusion of protecting us from harm at any costs, has left us with nothing to protect, and has cost us all dearly.