" It was not about science, it was about politics. That was clear as soon as the government started talking about following The Science as if it were a fixed body of revealed truth. No one who knows anything about science can say such a thing unless they are engaged in a deliberately misleading campaign of public coercion.
The sheer absurdity and pointlessness of so many of the restrictions on normal life should have given the game away: this programme was designed to frighten, not inform, and to make doubt or scepticism seem morally irresponsible - which is exactly the opposite of what science does. But those of us who disapproved of all this at the time were not just protesting an intellectual betrayal - the dismantling of a tradition of open argumentation and rational debate that had created the modern world.
It was tinkering with the conditions that make life recognisably human: the intimacies and bonds that form the basis of personal relationships and emotional health. Much of this went far beyond what we usually think of as authoritarianism: even the East German Stasi did not forbid children to hug their grandparents or prohibit sexual relations between people living in different households.
The mass public acceptance of these extraordinary dictates was not initially surprising. At first, it was considered a temporary emergency. What are a few weeks (of what was exceptionally pleasant sunny weather) of a human life if it serves to protect yourself and others - and, of course, the National Health Service? But it went on and on - and the longer it went on, the more the population seemed to accept it as a new normal. Even when the damage - especially to the young, both educationally and psychologically - became clear, it continued. It is important to try to understand this.
The model for the monumental government programme in which sitting on a park bench or meeting with extended family became punishable was the nation at war. The cooperation and willing sacrifices of the population during the last world war (which was then often referred to as "the present emergency") clearly inspired the lockdown operation.
The publicity campaigns that normalised - and hailed as virtuous - the acceptance of atrocious levels of social isolation were deliberately designed to present the country as mobilised in a collective effort against an evil enemy. Every other consideration had to give way to a heroic national struggle against an invading army whose aim was to kill as many of us as possible. And this enemy was particularly insidious because it was invisible.
The threat now came from the presence of other people harbouring this evil aggressor. Since the Covid virus was a hostile foreign force, it had to be defeated using the same propaganda techniques as against a foreign state.
Of course, the analogy was false. This "enemy" was not a sentient being with an evil plan for conquest. He had no purpose other than that shared by every living organism - survival and multiplication. He was not engaged in a conscious struggle for domination that we should never shy away from.
The suppression of any doubt or contradictory argument is justified in wartime because it can, in the words of the US Constitution, "give aid and comfort to the enemy". In law and in reality, it is treason. But Covid would never allow itself to be encouraged by ill-considered talk at Westminster. To treat anyone - even Carl Heneghan, a professor of evidence-based medicine at Oxford - who questioned official policy as a potentially dangerous subversive was simply outrageous.
Most disturbing was the speed with which the news media fell into step - with boundless enthusiasm - when they were given a key role in the daily dissemination of government authority. As the medium through which official information was conveyed - with, as we now know, often misleading model projections and outdated mortality figures - they went from public news media to what the BBC in particular has always stressed it was not: state broadcasters. From disinterested journalism to Pravda in one fell swoop.
It was certainly the duty of news channels to present what government officials wanted to tell the country. But did they have to ban - and sometimes implicitly demonise - those who questioned those judgements? Did they have to participate in the metaphorical stoning of any dissident - even Lord Sumption, a former Supreme Court judge - who suggested that the suppression of fundamental freedoms was unacceptable?
If this crisis was as serious as we were told, was it not vital that every source of expertise be given a fair hearing? Or was the appearance of unity considered so important that it overrode everything - even sometimes the facts? Perhaps the worst effect of all this uncritical reporting was that ministers, having manipulated public opinion into an intoxication of fear and possible guilt, found themselves trapped in the national mood they had created.
How could we not see the consequences coming? How could anyone who has raised children not have foreseen the likely damage that would result when developing babies, growing toddlers and sensitive adolescents were deprived of all that vital contact with the unfamiliar world outside their own homes? Never mind the awful fate of those elderly patients who had to die alone and the endless grief of their loved ones who had to miss the final moments and were denied even the comfort of a full funeral.
What was everyone thinking?"
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