I’VE never been a great one for conspiracy theories, but sometimes events seem to conspire to the degree that you think even Piers Corbyn and David Icke might accidentally have a point. Well, maybe not quite that, but you know the line about a stopped clock being right twice a day.

Part of acknowledging society at all is the acceptance that your own judgment might, in certain circumstances, be overruled. Most of us are capable of putting up with that, even when the full force of criminal law is threatened over an issue that you may think none of the state’s business – you can pick your own examples, but planning regulations and prohibitions on drug use would be areas where quite large chunks of the population might want a change in the law. Yet, even though they might, a lot of them will still abide by the rules, just because they are the rules, though they may think them idiotic, or even be actively campaigning to get them changed.

But what do you do when the rules appear to be being made by idiots, when they’re not clear, when they change every five minutes, and they make no sort of sense? This is the charge that is being made by a lot of lockdown sceptics, and the fact that so many of them are tin-foiled-hatted loonies doesn’t mean that they are necessarily wrong.

Take, for example, two stories that appeared yesterday, literally within minutes of one another, on the BBC’s website. The first was the warning from Aberdeen University to its students that they could be fined £250 or even expelled from the university, if they disobeyed the rules on coronavirus isolation. The second was the declaration by the education minister, Richard Lochhead, that students could go home if they had a “reasonable excuse”.

Now, these need not be contradictory. They may even be a declaration that people are entitled to use their own judgment. But you could be forgiven for not being entirely clear on whether that is the case, since not even the people issuing the edicts seem clear on the matter, either. A ruling that you may exercise your own judgment isn’t worth much if some authority can later decide you were at fault in doing so, and impose penalties.

In normal circumstances, the assumption ought to be that people should be free to determine for themselves what a “reasonable excuse” is, even though some of them will come up with what the rest of us think pretty flimsy ideas, such as checking your eyesight by going for a drive in County Durham. But, as we keep being told, these are not normal circumstances.

Hasty legislation is often terrible, even when it’s well-intentioned: think of the Dangerous Dogs Act or the terrorism legislation brought in after the Omagh bombings, both instances where the Government was keen to show it was doing something, without having thought through what it was doing. The pandemic has produced a truly extraordinary series of such measures, made all the worse by the fact that they keep changing every five minutes.

But no sooner is one inclined to blame the Government or its scientific advisers for the latest idiocy than the public provides some indication of an inability to exercise any common sense. The new rule that pubs and restaurants should close at 10pm has absolutely no logical or evidential basis; if anything, it is probably counterproductive. But when the reaction of large numbers of people to this restriction is to head for the off-licence and then continue to party in the centre of London or Manchester, you begin to wonder if threats of jail time and £10,000 fines might not be warranted.

Perhaps the natural conclusion is that most people are blithering idiots, and the Government are blithering idiots, and you and I are the only sane people left in the country. But, though I naturally find that an attractive notion, it’s not very practical as a basis for establishing the best course of action for minimising the spread of disease, while trying not to tank the economy or impose excessive limitations on civil liberties.

Though the general perception seems to be that the Scottish government has done quite well, and the UK government has bungled things, there has been no real difference in their policies; it’s a judgment based solely (if reasonably) on how well they’ve presented themselves. A similar sort of self-editing seems to be going on in people’s own behaviour; polls suggest that the majority are remarkably sanguine about penalties and restrictions, until they happen to apply to them. Back in March, an astonishing 93 per cent of the population approved of what are, after all, the biggest removal of basic human rights ever imposed in peacetime.

But, as with other legislation, the fact that people will put up with something doesn’t indicate they like it, or will thole it indefinitely. For most of us, it depends on the degree of inconvenience involved. For example, you may well think, as the World Health Organisation did until a few weeks ago, that there’s very little evidence that masks do any good. But you might at the same time think that you should comply with the requirement to wear one, on the basis that it can’t do any harm. Measures designed to “nudge”, however, with no other justification, are unsustainable.

Serious impositions rely on active consent; in the initial stages of the pandemic, that was more or less universal. It is not now, and it hardly matters whether that is to do with the public’s patience, or with its perception that the authorities have made mistakes. What counts is that a significant number of people will no longer simply take any restriction on trust; they expect parliamentary and public scrutiny of whether these measures are actually doing any good.

Given that many of them have seen their livelihoods wrecked, weddings and funerals cancelled, or been prevented from seeing loved ones, even as they were dying, that seems a reasonable request. If the Government doesn’t trust the people to exercise their own common sense in assessing risk, the least it can do is give some justification for why it knows better.

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