The blogger Raedwald put up a piece recently that should make everyone think. At the moment most people are going along with the social restrictions that have been imposed ostensibly to deal with the problem of the Chinese Covid19 virus. However Raedwald has stated that the longer that these restrictions go on, the greater the chance of a backlash against centralised control. I do hope he’s correct in his prediction.
Raedwald said:
I have one prediction – that after an unprecedented intrusion into our freedoms and liberties, any hopes that the Central State has of permanently maintaining these controls will be dashed. On the contrary, the universal backlash against central State power will catalyse a hugely overdue Big Bang devolution of powers. We must just ensure that our most fundamental freedoms remain intact; universal suffrage, the secret ballot and the freedom to form and participate in political parties.
In addition to movement controls, we are likely to see food rationing, possibly even energy rationing and internet and phone restrictions, controls on internet shopping and deliveries, import controls, currency controls and unprecedented State use of mobile phone location and activity data to police and monitor public behaviour. These may all be used to ensure the greatest benefit for the greatest number whilst the crisis subsists. But paradoxically it will not be libertarians praying for the early development of a vaccine (which may also be compulsory – and sod the anti-vaxers. They will disappear along with the food faddists) but the central Statists; the longer and deeper the restrictions on our freedoms, the stronger and wider the public backlash, and the bigger the Big Bang demolition of the Central State to come.
Raedwald may well be correct in his prediction. Britain’s police forces for example, prior to the current health emergency, had a lot of unearned and often unjustified respect from the general public. There was a lot of mindless and unthinking support for the police and most people ignored cases where the police behaved badly or engaged in politicised and indeed political policing. The public ignored this because this sort of police misconduct and bullying did not affect them as individuals nor affect their families. Now things are different. Because of the overzealous attitude of police with regards to Covid19 and movement restrictions a whole lot of Britons who were previously what could be called ‘police neutral’ now are developing a profound dislike and disgust at both individual police officers and the way that we are being policed.
My own view is that the Government has at best four weeks left before people start to chafe at the restrictions and start to rebel against both the police and the filthy curtain-twitching grasses who are informing on their neighbours who take more than one walk per day. I don’t know what will spark the backlash but it could well be pictures or video of cops in body armour arresting a pensioner walking their dog. It could even be the arrest of some frustrated parent, in an area currently less affected by Covid19, taking a bolt cropper to a currently locked children’s playground in order to get their child some decent play.
If Raedwald is correct and this emergency and the way it is being handled and policed is creating both a disgust at the police and a growth in the ‘little platoons’ doing things for themselves by themselves for the benefit of their family and local community, then it may be less easy for the ‘woke’ and other authoritarians to turn the clock back to how we were on the 1st January 2020. Just as the aftermath of World War II changed the nation’s moral habits and the country became more liberal, so Covid19 may destroy the myth that a huge, oppressive and all ecompassing State is the only way to manage a nation such as the United Kingdom.
