The country that gave the world the Magna Carta has reacted to the pandemic by allowing centuries of hard-earned personal and financial freedoms to be stripped away in the name of safety.
Brits like to think of themselves as a freedom-loving people. Two world wars, a 50-year Cold War, and interventions in the Middle East against totalitarian regimes, were all conducted in the name of liberty.
The myriad of nations once in our empire are now some of the freest countries in the world. The USA, Canada, Australia, New Zealand, even the planet’s largest democracy, India, were all born out of what is often thought of as a distinctly British attitude to freedom.
However, the Corona-virus outbreak seems to have shown that the UK may well have exported its last drop of that sort of spirit.
After initially resisting the continental response of lock down to stop the spread of the virus, the British people have embraced their new restrictions in frighteningly supine and lamb-like fashion.
The eagerness of freeborn Brits to acquiesce to the greatest suspension of their liberties has been breathtakingly sad to witness.
It was once said that an Englishman’s home is his castle. Well, that may once have been true, but recent months have turned that Englishman into Edward V, and that castle into the Tower of London prison.
We have willingly and almost gleefully accepted our effective house arrest with barely a whimper of dissent. Daddy government told us to go to our room and we raced up the stairs as fast as our feet could carry us.
There has been no opposition from any political party, big or small, to the lockdown imposed on Britain. Police are now stopping people who dare to leave their homes, questioning them and handing out fines if they don’t have a good enough reason.
It is not an exaggeration to say that the NHS is the closest thing Britain has to a national religion. This was the case before the Covid-19 outbreak, but the pandemic has cemented the organization as almost the sole object of universal veneration in the country.
It is not just the notoriously freedom-loving Americans who have been stirred up into protests against lock downs.
Brazil, Russia, France and even Germany have seen unrest or demonstrations against the draconian social distancing measures brought in.
But our docile compliance has even surprised the government’s own scientists who have said that they had “seen even larger reductions in normal behavior” than they “could have hoped for.”
RT. com / ABC Flash Point News 2020.
Liberty has never existed.
Only in the minds of the enslaved people?