Remember: life is finite and freedom is innate

Subdued in spirit in a godless age and having grown weak on the numbing nectar of endless government subvention, we have lost our thirst for liberty.

You couldn’t go to a shop without a mask, but you could a pub or cinema, but now you can’t. In a restaurant you can sit down, chat and laugh and imbibe sans mask, but you have to wear one to have a pee. Unless you’re exempt, natch.

There wasn’t a party held at No. 10, or perhaps there was. Or it was just some cheese and wine. The PM didn’t know about it, but it definitely didn’t happen. Probably. He apologises anyway.

Allegra Stratton didn’t organise the party at No. 10 though and might not have been there. But she’s been sacked, or resigned. The difference is academic. Anyway, we can all continue to have parties this Christmas though, but you shouldn’t go into work.

Restrictions may stay in place, but may not. We’ll have a review in a few weeks. Judgement will come around the five month anniversary of the humorously named ‘Freedom Day’.

Perhaps now people will see that when it is the government that is deigning to grant you ‘freedom’, you do not have it at all. They can just as quickly snatch it away again.

Vaccine passports have arrived, having once been the stuff of conspiracy theorist fantasy. Alarmingly, the Government clarified that we definitely won’t be having mandatory vaccinations, so expect them to be introduced within the fortnight.

The occasion for this clarification was the Prime Minister’s nudge (the promise of a ‘national conversation’) towards following the continent’s spiral into illiberalism and compulsory jabs.

For those of us who believe in a cyclical process of history, we are just about due a spasm of violent authoritarianism. Think 1789-1815, the subsequent lull of pax Britannica (conveniently ignoring the Crimea, the Boer War etc.), followed by 1914-1945. Standing now in 2021, we’ve reached seventy-six years without a catastrophic hiccough; history would suggest we’re soon to be overdue another.

But all the signs are that the British people will take it lying down. There has been scanty whiff of any fight in our collective belly. This will remain the case.

Subdued in spirit in a godless age and having grown weak on the numbing nectar of endless government subvention, we have lost our thirst for liberty.

Like well-kept pets, we thank our masters for the constant flow of food and entertainment. And when our master shouts, we scuttle away with our tail between our legs, cowering in some darkened corner, praying to avoid further punishment.

It is not clear what will make people realise what is happening. Our lives are finite, yet we are now measuring time sacrificed on the altar of public health in years, not days or weeks. We are dictated to by a hyper-privileged and cossetted elite that views its rules as designed only to affect the little people.

The little people who couldn’t see their dying loved ones, who spent their last Christmas alone, who saw their business, their life’s work, stamped out in front of their eyes.

Yet, in a democracy, it is these same little people who hold all the power. The British public could stop all of this today should they decide to do so, and every day more will recognise this. However a massive number will continue to comply. The slide into authoritarianism is far too comfy.

The longer it continues, the greater the odds are that it will only end in a spasm of violence whose trigger is yet unknown. What is clear, however, is that the trigger will not be the extinguishing of our much-lauded natural born freedom and liberty.

Modern man, having grown up free and amid plenty, took it all for granted. As such, it will be something far more mundane that will tip the balance.

Maybe a global crisis – China in Taiwan, Russia in Ukraine – could upend the precarious British economy. The debt-fuelled economic hedonism of the post-Bretton Woods era would come crashing down.

It would only be something of that magnitude that would shake us from our slumber.

It is a depressing indictment of the depths to which we, and the rest of the Western world, has fallen.