The new restrictions show what is truly driving the government’s response to coronavirus

‘Controlling information, spin doctoring scientific evidence and harnessing media to enforce ‘behavioural change,’ have become the ends not the means for our leadership class. These new unthinkable intrusions into public liberty are just the latest crazed diktats from an executive intoxicated by its own sense of imagined genius.’

Boris Johnson’s announcement that pubs in England are to be subject to a new 10pm curfew is yet more evidence that this government is concerned with ‘managing the narrative’ around coronavirus rather than ensuring the public good.

The new draconian intrusion on civil liberties follows professors Chris Whitty and Patrick Vallance’s warning that failure to enforce new curbs on public life and freedom could result in 50,000 new Covid cases a day by mid October and 200 deaths a day by mid November.

There are serious doubts about the figures upon which these warnings are based; Vallance himself emphasised that this scenario was not a prediction, which in itself raises questions as to why this was the only scenario presented.

Setting aside the question of how accurate these assertions are, the manner in which the government’s scientific advisors made these doom-mongering prophecies continues Boris Johnson’s obsession with avoiding public scrutiny or transparency. During an alleged ‘press conference’ no questions were taken by Whitty or Vallance and the government has been consistently issuing diktats and arbitrary decrees, apparently uninterested in justifying its growing powers to the press or the House of Commons.

On 30th September MPs will return to parliament to vote on whether or not to extend the Coronavirus Act, which was nudged through parliament amid panic and hysteria in March, and which expanded executive power beyond parliamentary accountability. During the Covid crisis the government has also rested (perhaps unjustifiably) on the Public Health Act (1984), which has been used as the basis of many of the more far-reaching statutory instruments that have resulted in major infringements of normal constitutional liberty.

The latest new powers accumulated by the state allow police to enforce the new restrictions on pubs and hospitality venues by issuing fines of up to £1000 to business owners, a sum that could rise to £4000 if fines have to be issued for a third time to the same venue.

Whether it is the ‘rule of six’, the £10,000 fines for organising protests or these new gestapo-like spot fines for business owners, the government appears to be drunk on its own power, and determined to maintain a ‘state of emergency’ so that it can cling to its instruments of tyranny for as long as possible.

The Dominic Cummings school of politics encourages a school-boy secrecy around policy-making and has fostered a cliquey, technocratic culture in the Cabinet, with many leading Tory MPs excluded from an in-group of leaders who appear to be drunk on their own maniacal self-image.

Back in May, Steve Baker MP warned of this cloak-and-dagger culture in Whitehall, which he said can be blamed on Dominic Cummings. Baker wrote in The Critic Magazine:

‘We must have no more “hollow men” leaning together with heads filled with straw, whispering together the same vapid tropes handed to them by a strongman to whom they have sworn fealty. Neither can we have in backroom power a dominant figure who regards accountability with contempt. One who venerates science beyond reason and whose response to every serious problem is, metaphorically, to drag someone into the public square and chop off their head.'

Now that the mainstream media seem to be waking up to the gross exaggerations, inflated numbers and doomsday tactics of scientific advisors, it would be naive to think that the government will try a new tack in order to keep public opinion on their side. What’s more likely in this culture of Tory in-groupism is that the executive and their ‘wartime consigliere’ Cummings will simply double down. The greater the dissent, the greater need, in their twisted minds, to increase the spin, media manipulation and scare tactics.

Chair of the Defence Select Committee Tobias Ellwood MP embodied this arrogance recently when he told the Prime Minister that he should consider to bringing the military to the forefront of the ‘enduring emergency’ and use the ‘command and control’ abilities of the forces to, among other things, ‘manage the narrative.’

The cult tactics of behavioural science, nudge-tactics and public relations skulduggery are driving the government’s coronavirus response, not a concern for public health. Controlling information, spin doctoring scientific evidence and harnessing media to enforce ‘behavioural change,’ have become the ends not the means for our leadership class. These new unthinkable intrusions into public liberty are just the latest crazed diktats from an executive intoxicated by its own sense of imagined genius.