The Fake Liberty of Anti-Mask Whinging

I understand Peter Hitchens's beef with the Conservative Party. His argument, reminiscent of the doctrinal disputes of the long abandoned Trotskyism from whence he came, is the Tories are no longer Tory. They have abandoned the tenets of conservatism as divined by Edmund Burke and have instead embraced liberalism. This was more than confirmed with the coronation of Dave in 2005, and Theresa May and Boris Johnson since have not departed from this point of view in the years since. Front and centre is the sovereignty of the individual and everything else - tradition, the common good - are nothing next to the crudities of gratification and self-indulgence. And as social liberalism is the de facto dogma of the early 21st century, conservatives have plenty of reasons to be miserable.

Peter should have paid more attention to his 1970s International Socialist educationals. The abandonment of conservatism for liberalism (or, more properly, neoliberalism) was part of the Tories' ideologically tooling up to take on the labour movement in the following decade. Or to put it another way, the shift to free markets, individualism, and authoritarianism under Margaret Thatcher was because the Tories were the political vehicle for the forcible reassertion of capital over labour. They are a ruling class party. But ideas, even when they're grafted onto a bourgeois political project can take on lives of their own as they stuck to the consequences of the Tories' sweeping, purposeful enterprise of social devastation. Despite her affecting Victorian morals, the dog-eat-dog governance and great property scramble Thatcher kickstarted inaugurated a new hegemony of I'm alright Jack, and nowhere does in manifest in more pathological and mind-numbingly stupid ways than among those fancying themselves as conservatives today.

Take Andrew Lilico, for example. Writing for The Spectator, he argues Boris Johnson's announcement of new mask mandates in shops and on public transport is, an "imposition on the public" and equates to "simple tyranny." There was an emergency situation at the beginning of the pandemic, and therefore a case could be made for extraordinary measures then. Now? There is no case to answer - the pandemic is virtually over. He argues infections have been flat since the summer, a claim that is demonstrably not true. He says there isn't the remotest risk of the NHS getting swamped, while ICU is still mobbed by the Covid ill and nurses and doctors driven to exhaustion by the relentless pressure of cases (we're currently at rates comparable to last March). Interestingly, he forgets to mention numbers of deaths, which were 848 this last week, and 1,029 the week before. And now we have the new variant. I'm sure these facts slipped his mind as he barrelled toward his first knock out point:

If the government had suddenly declared, in mid-2018, that it was making masks mandatory in all shops for no better reason than this might cut down on respiratory illness a bit, would you have complied? Of course not!

A textbook example of a facile comparison. 160-odd thousand excess deaths and around a million dealing with long Covid were enough for anyone to take notice. Especially someone whose day job involves shuffling numbers around. What's his excuse?

Having done the heavy lifting, he settles into the "hey, I'm a mask wearer too, I just bridle at government tyranny" shtick. He says it's simply not legitimate for the government to expect people to comply with public health strategies because there's no emergency. There has to be imminent danger. An argument as foolish as saying we shouldn't bother with seat belts because the chance of crashing our car is slim. It's very simple. The right to life is the most fundamental of liberties, and because we're not living in compounds walled off from one another, maintaining life and ensuring collective health is a responsibility for society as a whole - its institutions and, where appropriate, as per an incredibly infectious disease, with its members. Because we live in a capitalist society criss crossed by class struggle, this abstract communitarian standpoint acquires the flesh and blood of materiality when it is our class who are at the forefront of exposure, while the likes of Lilico and other right wing contrarians can pick and choose their level of risk. When the Tories fail to protect public health, they deserve condemnation not because of "incompetence" or "being wrong", but because of the interests they champion. The health of the property portfolio and the wage relation comes before that of actual human beings, and this too has been demonstrated time and again.

But with the freedom bit between Lilico's teeth, we should stand up for our liberties and refuse to comply. He might want to reflect on words he wrote early in the autumn: "When you are engaged in an illegal act you should have no protection from other citizens intervening in a proportionate way to prevent you from that illegal act, unless the police themselves are in the process of preventing it." I look forward to a maskless Lilico whining about getting fined on the tube and kicked out of shops. Assuming he has the guts of his convictions to follow through his clickbait stance.

Lilico, like most right wing commentators, is not only a latter day enthusiast for the blasted Thatcher and broadly aligns with that section of capital that wants to be free of all social bonds and obligations, he has to play the right wing commentator game where he competes with others for paid hot takes, profile, and attention. He and others like him typify the conservatism which Hitchens despises: individual self-interest and advancement dressed up as defences of liberty. On this, we can agree with our very erstwhile comrade, especially as his nonsense are the sorts of arguments Covid-19 finds congenial.

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