The Most Frightened Nation

Why the United Kingdom will never be the same

Lionel Shriver Autumn 2021

What was once the land of “keep calm and carry on” could now be the “most frightened nation in the world.” So says Laura Dodsworth, author of A State of Fear: How the UK Government Weaponised Fear During the Covid-19 Pandemic. Data seem to bear her impression out. According to an Ipsos MORI poll conducted in July, an impressive 27 percent of Britons want to impose a government-mandated nationwide curfew of 10 PM—not then in force—“until the pandemic was under control worldwide,” which might be years from now. A not-inconsiderable 19 percent would impose such a curfew “permanently, regardless of the risk from Covid-19.” Presumably, these are people who don’t get out much. While 64 percent want Britain’s mask mandate in shops and on public transport to remain a legal requirement for the duration of the global pandemic, an astounding 51 percent want to be masked by law, forever. 

 There’s more: some 35 percent want to confine any Briton who returns from a foreign country, vaccinated or not, to a ten-day home quarantine—permanently, Covid or no Covid. A full 46 percent would require a vaccine passport in order to travel abroad—permanently, Covid or no Covid. So young people today would still be flashing that QR code on whatever passes for smartphones in 2095, though they might have trouble displaying the device to a flight attendant while bracing on their walkers. Likewise, the 36 percent who want to be required to check in at pubs and restaurants with a National Health Service contact-tracing app forever. A goodly 34 percent want social distancing in “theatres, pubs and sports grounds,” regardless of any risk of Covid, forever. A truly astonishing 26 percent of Britons would summarily close all casinos and nightclubs forever. Are these just a bunch of fogies who don’t go clubbing anyway? No. In the 16-to-24 age bracket, the proportion of Brits who want to convert Ronnie Scott’s jazz club in London’s Soho into a community lending library, even after Covid is a distant memory, soars to a staggering 40 percent..............

 Mind, with no written constitution and no bill of rights, Britain has been drifting in an illiberal direction for years. Elaborate hate-speech statutes apply to “protected” groups, such as sexual and racial minorities, the list of which grows ever longer, in defiance of the democratic principle of equality under the law. A mere claim is sufficient to make something hate speech, so guilt depends only on some touchy member of the public pointing a finger. Even posting a droll limerick on Twitter to which trans activists take exception has qualified as a hate crime, as has bannering the dictionary definition of “woman.” Police also lodge the oxymoronic-sounding (or straight-up moronic-sounding) “non-crime hate incidents” in citizens’ criminal records. Now numbering 120,000 over the past five years, non-crime hate incidents have included whistling the theme tune of Bob the Builder at a neighbor and leaving a hamburger bun in a Portuguese national’s driveway “due to their ethnicity.” Britain has imported wholesale the poisonous critical race theory / cancel culture package from the U.S., and its universities are as corrupted with this stuff as America’s. “Health and safety gone mad” is a British tabloid cliché. Thus, the U.K. was already primed for social control when Covid hit..........To Read More....