But from the images of the violence that were soon shared across the world, there didn’t seem to be much of that famed Dutch moderation, openness and reasonableness on show. While the rioters left destruction in their wake, it later emerged that the police had directed live rounds of fire at rioters, leaving four people with gunshot wounds. As Dutch virologist Marion Koopmans — who initially likened the protests against the Netherlands’ latest coronavirus restrictions to a World War Two bombardment (before retracting the war analogy after facing a barrage of criticism) — said, there was a “bitter irony” to the location of such wanton violence.

Dutch leaders were quick to paint the riots as acts of hooliganism rather than protest, with commentators citing the existence of group chats where people reportedly said things such as: “Where’s the protest? I want to riot.” Rotterdam mayor Ahmed Aboutaleb called it “an orgy of violence” that drew “a number of people who had no intention of acting peacefully, but who were there to riot, to confront the police, and to destroy public property”. Dutch caretaker justice minister Ferd Grapperhaus echoed his comments, saying that a protest against a controversial (and as yet unimplemented) idea to restrict access to certain areas for unvaccinated people was hijacked by football hooligans and criminal low-life.

But just 10 months after a the country was gripped by nationwide riots in protest at an earlier coronavirus curfew, such an explanation seems overly simplistic. I can’t be the only person here in the Netherlands left wondering why some of the country’s 17.6 million citizens are so visibly out of control and alienated from the majority. This isn’t some new phenomenon: the Dutch police have been highlighting the increasing violence of protesters for several years.

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According to the latest reports, it seems that rioters in Rotterdam were made of a number of disparate groups, motivated for a range of reasons. Football hooligans, young men with nothing to do, harbour workers with low wages and job security, and those suffering from the national shortage of decent housing were all ripe for civil disobedience. As MP Attje Kuiken says: “It’s a poisonous cocktail.”

But behind their resentment — which includes recent anger at a nationwide ban on fireworks this New Year — there are clearly bigger social problems. A widespread disaffection with government is evident in the peaceful protests in major cities practically every weekend (sometimes for things as trivial as wearing face masks).

As in many other Western countries, there is a deep polarisation in Dutch society, and increasing distrust in politicians. This was exacerbated when the Government fell in January over a scandal in which tens of thousands of parents — most of dual nationality — were wrongly accused of childcare benefit fraud and forced to pay back every cent they had ever received, with devastating consequences for their financial, personal and children’s wellbeing. Last week, the Dutch highest court officially apologised for upholding unlawful tax office rulings. But while 15,000 people have received €30,000 in compensation so far, the apparent racism engrained in government institutions has not yet been fully investigated.

After elections in March, resulting in a hugely splintered outcome, Dutch political parties are still unable to form a government — a telling picture about the difficulty in finding common ground. Those who voted for change are no doubt disappointed by the continued presence of the same establishment faces around the table, led again by liberal Mark Rutte. Meanwhile, newish far-Right parties such the Forum for Democracy have delighted in exploiting the pandemic to undermine “the political elite”. As Amsterdam University cultural anthropologist Dr Danny de Vries tells me: “Just a few days ago one of them publicly threatened another politician in the chamber, saying his time would come when tribunals are held to hold him accountable for ‘corona crimes’” Only last week, the leader of FVD, Thierry Baudet, compared corona measures to Nazi Germany.

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Yet the country’s political leaders have hardly earned a glowing report. For all their confidence in their liberal, efficient and wealthy society, they have been behind at every step in the pandemic. The Government was one of the slowest in Europe to start vaccinations, and now that it has one of Europe’s highest infection rates, it has just started offering boosters. Moreover, despite being perfectly well aware that there have been at least 31,000 corona deaths (as recorded on death certificates), the Government continues to put a much lower figure of “officially-tested positive deaths” front and centre on its dashboards. Conveniently, this number (18,966) is less than neighbouring countries like Belgium, which have always recorded suspect deaths too.

And so while there is broad support for vaccination and the Dutch have fully vaccinated 84.7% of adults, trust in government policy and leadership has plummeted recently. There have been U-turns on policy, with nightclubs open one minute, and then closed the next, and an imprudent loosening of most restrictions at the end of September. With coronavirus infections at record highs in the past week, and hospitals saying they will soon have to make decisions about who gets the IC beds, virologists are talking once more about the need for a full lockdown — and it’s not only the coronavirus sceptics or protesters who are looking at December with sinking hearts.

When he appeared on a morning chat show yesterday, Nijmegen mayor and chairman of the National Security Council Hubert Bruls was keen to emphasise that most people are not out on the streets rioting. That’s true, and it’s difficult to say whether the Dutch have more coronavirus sceptics — or, indeed, hooligans — than anyone else (although the head of Viruswaarheid corona protest group Willem Engel, adds a certain flair to events with his experience as a former dance teacher).

But anyone who has ever tried to stand in a queue in the Netherlands will realise that there’s a widespread sense of assertive individualism here, which is not often restrained by social norms such as politeness or the-other-person-was-actually-first. Basic rights like freedom of speech, movement and protest, are also grounded in the constitution, which has meant that it is very difficult for a government to restrain them. This has led to a surprising number of civilian court cases about coronavirus policy (eventually overturned by the courts).

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As a Brit living in the Netherlands, I’ve been surprised how much opposition there has been to following relatively minor rules such as wearing a face mask in certain places; the mere prospect of showing a coronavirus pass for entry is enough to cause a spiky hour of debate in most social groups, where it’s likely that at least a few people will disagree with their existence as a matter of principle.

Another element that might sit behind recent discontent is something that the Netherlands is often praised for: a light-touch legal system and emphasis on alternatives to prison and processes like mediation. Although Grapperhaus has pledged to fast-track stiff justice for rioters, and police are busy scanning camera images to round up the Rotterdam culprits, the Netherlands has recently been seen by organised crime as a “low-threshold” entry point to Europe.

The current struggle with organised crime has laid bare gaps in policing capacity, and a sense that a liberal but illogical weed policy is not helping (because smoking weed is tolerated, but growing it commercially is a punishable crime). Young men are apparently attracted to act as “collectors” of drug shipments in containers at Rotterdam harbour or criminal errand boys, and there’s a desperate need to offer other opportunities to certain groups of young people — something that has been recognised by the new mayor of Utrecht, Sharon Dijksma.

The recent violence in Rotterdam cannot, therefore, be dismissed as mere hooliganism. As the authorities launch an official investigation into the gunshot wounds sustained on Friday night, and police forces are deployed across cities to stop-and-search as bars close at 8pm, this isn’t a time to sit back and dismiss the rioting as an “orgy” of criminal activity. It’s time to sift through the ashes.

Before Covid, few believed that the British people would accept population-wide restrictions for over a year. Yet official concerns over whether we would obey the rules swiftly dissipated as it became clear that a national lockdown was not only the most effective way forward, but also the most popular one.

You don’t have to buy into fusty caricatures of the plucky, liberty-loving Brit to find something rather troubling in this. It is one thing for people to run for cover when confronted with a terrifying new disease. It is completely another to become so cautious of each other that we look to the Government to tell us when we can hug our Grandma or let our children play freely.

It is not that we have suddenly become a nation of introverts; nor, given all the low-level rule-flouting that has been going on, does it appear that we have actually stopped seeing our nearest and dearest. Instead, we seem to have tacitly embraced loneliness as a way of life.

In 1950, when the project of sociology was more about developing big ideas than deconstructing them, David Riesman published his bestselling book The Lonely Crowd. Riesman’s central thesis was that the typical American had transformed from being “inner-directed”, with norms and values passed down through the generations and internalised at an early age, to “other-directed”: trained to be continually responsive to present-day influences — and, therefore, better suited to a bureaucratic era dominated by advertising, television and HR departments.

It spoke to an unease about the tension between the individual and “mass society”. But while Riesman’s insights fell on fertile ground, particularly in Richard Yates’s bleak 1961 novel Revolutionary Road, his diagnosis of conformity has continued to be misunderstood. Indeed, his depiction of an atomised society attuned to the “radar” of other-direction, as opposed to the “gyroscope” of inner-direction, continues to chime with prejudices about mass society; the cover of the book’s 2001 edition predictably features a flock of sheep.

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Riesman, however, insisted that he was not pointing to an increase in conformity, but rather a change in how people came to conform. “Other-directed” people were not behaving as an undifferentiated mass, but as individuated souls searching for cues about how to act from those around them. Critics who interpreted Riesman’s insights as a problem of the conformist “crowd” missed the bigger point about loneliness.

This is where his discussion has most relevance today. In a similar manner, some lockdown critics choose to deride the public as misguided “sheeple”, mindlessly conforming to Government diktat; at the other extreme, some lockdown proponents assume that people are incapable of making sensible decisions and need to be banned from thinking for themselves. By constructing their claims around caricatures of “the individual”, they fail to engage with the kind of people we have become.

A quarter of a century after Riesman theorised about the changing American character, Christopher Lasch’s The Culture of Narcissism diagnosed post-war American society as suffering from a pathological insecurity, brought about by the long corrosion of family and community bonds in the face of increasingly intrusive cultural forces.

But it is Lasch’s far less well-known book The Minimal Self, published in 1984, that contains the most prescient warning for today. In it, he describes how the belief that political action can create a better world has given way to an inward-looking focus on personal survival, with the primary ambition being “to hold one’s own life together in the face of mounting pressures.” Crucially, he says, the result is a self that is “beleaguered”. And like today, one consequence of this beleaguered selfhood was “a kind of emotional retreat from the long-term commitments that presuppose a stable, secure, and orderly world”.

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Fast forward to the 1990s, and the kind of personality that was valued by Western societies was already shaping up to be both “other-directed” (as Reisman warned) and “beleaguered” (per Lasch). As the end of the Cold War finally brought about the collapse of political institutions and grand ideologies, this minimal self stood exposed and increasingly alone: as if to vindicate Thatcher’s famous claim that “there is no such thing as society”. There was, in essence, no such thing resembling a crowd.

Of course, both Lasch and Riesman have their critics, who correctly point to the differences between constructed “ideal types” and people in real life, who, as the past twelve months have shown, get on with living, loving, and taking responsibility for their families and communities. But our response to lockdown indicates that their theories are not as abstract as they might appear. Indeed, the past year seems to reveal a character type that is not merely other-directed or beleaguered, but what we might call other-deflected: yearning for contact and intimacy with others, while attuned to pulling back at the whiff of potential danger.

Other-deflection has been around for some time. We see it in the hesitant character of public speech, shot through with fear of causing offence; in the ambiguous value attached to sexual relationships, where people are continually encouraged to approach commitment with caution. And we have seen it, writ large, with the pandemic. For frightening and deadly though Covid has been as a disease, the enforced cessation of all spontaneous human contact has been as much about our quest to balance our desire for social contact with fear of its consequences.

When public health officials claim that we have got used to certain social distancing practices so they might as well persist, or psychologists advise people that they should “just say no” to family and friends who break lockdown rules, they are tapping into this sensibility. And even though people in real life may be bending The Rules, the absence of a public validation for physical interaction has given social life a nervy, provisional quality. For example, hugging Grandma in secret becomes a risky act that we choose to do even though it’s wrong, rather than something that is taken for granted that we ought to do because it’s right.

And so as we slowly emerge from lockdown, with our radars constantly scanning for dangers that we might pose to others and that others might pose to us, a grim truth is slowly coming into focus: that, in this age of the “New Normal”, we are loneliest when we are together.

Over the past year, his unabashed criticism of lockdown policies has turned him into something of a renegade. It is a development that mystifies him; as he sees it, his views have always been mainstream liberal, and it is the world around that has changed.

In the course of our conversation, the retired judge doesn’t hold back. He asserts that it is becoming morally acceptable to ignore Covid regulations, and even warns that a campaign of “civil disobedience” has already begun.

You can read what he really thinks below. And watch our interaction on Lockdown TV — it was a fascinating conversation.

Podcast version:

On civil disobedience:

“Sometimes the most public spirited thing that you can do with despotic laws like these is to ignore them. I think that if the government persists long enough with locking people down, depending on the severity of the lockdown, civil disobedience is likely to be the result. It will be discrete civil disobedience in the classic English way — I don’t think that we are likely to go onto the streets waving banners. I think we will just calmly decide that we are not going to pay any attention to this. There are some things you have to pay attention to: you can’t go to a shop if it’s closed. On the other hand, you can invite friends round for a drink, whatever Mr Hancock says. People are doing that to some extent already.

“Everyone will have their own different threshold. But I think that in the eyes of many people who disapprove of the lockdown, and some people who approve of it, we’ve reached that point quite a long time ago.”

On the ethics of law-breaking:

“I feel sad that we have the kind of laws which public-spirited people may need to break. I have always taken a line on this, which is probably different from that of most of my former colleagues. I do not believe that there is a moral obligation to obey the law… You have to have a high degree of respect, both for the object that the law is trying to achieve, and for the way that it’s been achieved. Some laws invite breach. I think this is one of them.”

On sacrificing civil liberties:

“[Thomas] Hobbes believed in the absolute state — it didn’t have to be a monarchy, but it had to be absolute. He said that there was nothing short of the state actually killing people that the state should not be entitled to do. He was not, let us say, a believer in liberty. This is because of his experience of the anarchy which flowed from the civil war in England. Hobbes believed that we resign our freedoms unconditionally and permanently into the hands of the state, in return for security. Now, this is a model which ever since the rise of a recognisable form of modern Liberalism in the middle of the 19th century, has been almost universally rejected. But we have tended to revert to it during the current crisis. And I think that that is a very striking and very sinister development.

On the dangers of public fear:

“John Stuart Mill regarded public sentiment and public fear as the principal threat to a liberal democracy. The tendency would be for it to influence policies in a way that whittles away the island within which we are entitled to control our lives to next to nothing. That’s what he regarded as the big danger. It didn’t happen in his own lifetime; it has happened in many countries in the 20th century, and it’s happening in Britain now.”

On the fragility of democracy:

“Democracy is inherently fragile. We have an idea that it’s a very robust system. But democracies have existed for about 150 years. In this country, I think you could say that they existed from the second half of the of the 19th century — they are not the norm. Democracies were regarded in ancient times as inherently self-destructive ways of government. Because, said Aristotle, democracies naturally turn themselves into tyranny. Because the populace will always be a sucker for a demagogue who will turn himself into an absolute ruler…

“Now, it is quite remarkable that Aristotle’s gloomy predictions about the fate of democracies have been falsified by the experience of the West ever since the beginning of democracy. And I think one needs to ask why that is. In my view, the reason is this: Aristotle was basically right about the tendencies, but we have managed to avoid it by a shared political culture of restraint. And this culture of restraint, which because it depends on the collective mentality of our societies, is extremely fragile, quite easy to destroy and extremely difficult to recreate.”

On being a liberal:

“I regard myself as a liberal with a small L. Until the Covid outbreak, that was a very middle of the road position to be in. Since the outbreak, it’s become controversial, even in some people’s minds extreme. This is, I think, some indication of how far our national conversation has moved.”

On what the Government should learn:

“My first proposal is that governments should not treat information as a tool for manipulating public behaviour. They should be calmer than the majority of their citizens; they should be completely objective. My second lesson would be that governments dealing with scientific issues should not allow themselves to be influenced by a single caucus of scientists. They should always test what they are being told in a way that, for instance, judges test expert opinion by producing a counter expert, and working out which set of views stacks up best.”

On his critics:

“I would very much have preferred the kind of points that I have been consistently making for the last year to have been made by just about anybody else. Those colleagues or former colleagues who disapprove of what I’ve been doing have got a perfectly good point. But there are some issues which are so central to the dilemmas of our time, which are so important, where I think that you have to be prepared to stand up and be counted.

I caught myself having similar flashes of gratitude as the Prime Minister set out his roadmap this week, towards liberating schools, restoring outdoor socialising and eventually — gasp — allowing people to see their loved ones when and where they like.

Our expectations have become so diminished that his granting of permission “to have coffee on a park bench” is taken not as an insult but a gift; and the restoration of permission to “hold hands on care visits” is accepted with joy, the cruelty of his withdrawing it in the first place long-forgotten. For parents across the country, the relief that schools will soon be opened will no doubt temper the anger at the damage it has wrought on the people they love the most. All the horror of livelihoods destroyed, funerals with no mourners, older people aged beyond recognition by a year of isolation — the instinct will be to forgive it all in exchange for getting our lives back.

This, for me, is the most frightening thing about the past year. More than the virus itself, more than the political divisions that have opened up — it’s that extraordinary ability of humankind to adapt their horizon of expectations. Twelve months ago it would have been unthinkable that we would so readily accept, apparently with an overwhelming majority, another four months of such drastically reduced existence.

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How did we come to be here? The political argument against lockdowns was lost, comprehensively and globally. The awkward-squad journalists who styled themselves as “lockdown sceptics” were systematically pilloried; the scientists who thought there were better ways were shut down. The campaign was effective and only made easier by the careless statements of the “sceptics” themselves.

No one now wants to hear arguments about Sweden, which — still now — poses an awkward counter-factual to lockdown, with its strikingly similar (although less bad) epidemic trajectory to the UK, or India with its partial herd immunity and mysteriously small death rate in comparison to ours; no one wants to admit the stubborn absence of any clear dataset showing that countries with more stringent restrictions performed better than those that avoided them.

As long as we can agree that “there was no alternative”, then nothing has been wasted, nothing needlessly destroyed. This means that as we emerge, blinking, into the sunshine, we can once again make common cause with friends who felt differently, and put past disagreements down to the strangeness of a lost year.

I’ll go along with it. I don’t want to be fighting about lockdowns for a day longer. I’ll take my vaccine and sign my papers. I look at that 21 June date with as much exhilaration and trepidation as anyone.

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But the suspicion will never leave me that a more elegant policy response could have been devised — something less cavalier about the precious achievement of our liberal way of life and less insistent on the fallacy that an entire population would behave identically (they never did, not even at the height of the lockdowns). That niggling thought that perhaps there was always a better, safer option than on-off national mandatory confinement.

What about that voluntary “traffic lane” system I suggested, which seemed a more positive metaphor for a functioning society than the “traffic lights” we endured, with their attendant frustration and crudeness? Or greenbandredband, a proposal that never got much attention, but which might, with more work, have been developed into something good. We’ll never know because no government tried them. Creative ideas were suppressed rather than developed. They were dismissed for being “too complicated” —which is rich when you consider the byzantine tiers, rules and regulations we’ve all had to navigate over the past 12 months.

With the UK timeline now set, I imagine most self-styled “sceptics” will pack up their placards, wind down their WhatsApp groups and start to look forward to Spring. But the Prime Minister should realise that if that timetable were to slip — if, for example, an increase in cases that is not pressurising the hospital system were to lead to a new campaign to delay; or if a domestic vaccination passport were to threaten to fundamentally alter the relationship of every citizen with the state; or if the close-the-borders activists were to try to use this crisis to drastically restrict international travel long-term; or if a new variant or virus identified in some faraway land threatens to start the whole process again — they would be reactivated fast. So far, public opinion has surprised everyone by being so much in favour of restrictions; next time it may surprise again, but in a different way.

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Obviously, I hope we continue smoothly on the roadmap out of here, and that the summer and following winter opens up and plays out just as the Prime Minister has detailed.

But even if we do manage to return to the “old normal”, it will now have a different aspect. The past year has changed the way I see the world. Having grown up in the 1990s, at university in the 2000s, I’m a product of the “End of History” generation that never got awarded an initial. Too old for the full force of the new technology, too young to remember the Cold War, if anything my generation’s complaint was that the world was too safe, too mercenary, too boring.

Well, the past year has shown how precarious that settlement always was. After this taste of what it is like to have freedom withdrawn, I appreciate it fully for the first time. I have also seen up close how intellectual fashions can sweep through the governing class just as excitedly as they can among those disparaged as “populist voters”. I have seen those elites throw out many principles that they previously held dear in response to a new threat, and invoke the new religion of science and “data” to cast dissenters as heretics. I’ve seen this power wielded by my own friends, my own class — and how sinister it has the potential to be.

So, yes, let’s look forward to spring and promised liberation. Please, let’s move the conversation on. But as we move towards the exit of our long confinement, I don’t think it will feel the same as before. The structures and freedoms that once felt so unassailable have been exposed as fragile and contingent, their defenders weak; and the question of whether there was a better way lingers, taboo and unanswered.

“ZeroCovid” is, after all, a term that elicits confusion and, sometimes, outright hostility. Perhaps that’s why, when leading members of the global ZeroCovid movement met for a three-day international conference last Wednesday, it had a far more innocuous title: the “Covid Community Action Summit”.

But even though this increasingly popular school of thought — which holds that we must not return to normal until the virus is completely eliminated within a country — wasn’t explicitly on the billing, its presence was made clear from the outset. In her introductory remarks, the moderator confirmed to the more than 600 registrants and speakers from across the world that “we are here to end Covid through ZeroCovid and CovidZero policies”. More often at the event, held over Zoom and organised by American scientist Yaneer Bar-Yam, speakers preferred to refer to ZeroCovid as an “elimination strategy”.

Yet the purpose of the event was clear: to share evidence and political advice to help campaigners lobby Western governments to abandon any notion of living alongside the virus, and instead to follow the lead of Asia-Pacific nations in aiming to eliminate the disease entirely within their borders. This group is crucially distinct from people who support ongoing lockdown measures to suppress the virus to a level where it is safe to reopen — for ZeroCovid believers, we cannot rest until that level is zero.

On paper, this approach may sound rather sensible. After all, surely we’d all rather live in a world without Covid? Yet having attended last week’s conference, I keep returning to a question that didn’t seem to particularly trouble the speakers: at what cost?

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In the coming weeks, I suspect this is a question we will all be forced to answer. For make no mistake: this is no fringe movement. Their advocates are among the most regular faces in broadcast media; Professor Devi Sridhar, one of its most outspoken advocates, has appeared on Channel 4 News 21 times during the pandemic — more than any other expert.

There’s a UK ZeroCovid chapter, which last month hosted its own well-attended online conference; the Scottish government is committed to their campaign, alongside Independent SAGE, British trade unions and Labour MPs such as Jeremy Corbyn and Diane Abbott. Meanwhile, influential Tory MPs like Jeremy Hunt advocate a strategy of “zero infections and elimination of the disease” and routinely refer to the Asian model. Google search results in the UK and US for “ZeroCovid” are at an all-time high. The campaign has momentum.

Judging by last week’s conference, it is easy to see why. The campaigners are, for the most part, an impressive, sincere and eloquent group. Many of them are young, telegenic and skilled communicators. But there was a mood — a unanimity of world view — that was unsettling; a fusion of overt progressive-Left politics with an ironclad certainty about their interpretation of the science. They referred to people who disagreed with them as needing to be “educated”: “deniers”, “right-wingers”, “conspiracy theorists”, or, perhaps lowest of all, “herd immunity apologists”.

More striking, however, was the time given over to messaging, organising and communications. Alongside talks on subjects ranging from how to reduce transmission in universities to which technologies could purify the air in gyms, some sessions felt more like the War Room of a political campaign.

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“You have to be playing with the theory of mind of your audience,” said Tomás Ryan, a neuroscientist at Trinity College Dublin and co-founder of Ireland’s “ISAG” group that hopes to persuade the Irish government to adopt a ZeroCovid policy, in a session on strategy. “We’ve made a lot of tactical errors. We didn’t give enough time to selling the reward, which is so we can be like New Zealand.” His ISAG colleague Aoife McLysaght, a professor in molecular evolution, agreed: “We were the merchants of doom for a while… we’ve had to change our messaging. So we are now saying: you can have hugs again. You can go to music festivals. That kind of thing.”

The speakers all agreed on one central tactic: to be successful, ZeroCoviders must present themselves, counter-intuitively, as being anti-lockdown; it is only in order to quit today’s cycle of restrictions, they say, that we need to eliminate the virus completely.

But how to convince Western governments? One place to start could be two articles written by Tomas Pueyo, a tech and marketing executive who explained during a session on  “Communications Strategy & Policy” that his blogposts had garnered over 60 million views. They had even, he claimed, contributed to a global policy change on Covid. For him, it didn’t matter that he wasn’t an epidemiologist. His skill was in a different kind of viral transmission: online content. “I have experience in virals, in communication, in products that people like and share,” he said. “So I designed them for that purpose. I put a narrative structure, and some tips to make them spread virally, and it succeeded.”  The outcome of the pandemic, he explained, hinges on winning the comms game: “The epidemics of the 21st century are going to be fought more in communication than they are in the lab.”

Such a pithy remark is, of course, typical of communications professionals. But why are they now such a central part of the ZeroCovid campaign? Part of the reason might be the sustained vilification aimed at their opposing fringe group — the so-called “Covid deniers”. The ZeroCoviders are determined to avoid the same fate. As Tomás Ryan says: “unfortunately we have been presented as the extreme end of the Overton window — the other end being herd immunity and denialist people.”

More importantly, I suspect it also stems from the realisation that the implications of a country committing to ZeroCovid are highly political. At the moment, the fundamental offer in Western democracies is: accept these awful restrictions now, and the vaccines will soon offer a way out. This means that once deaths and the pressure on the health service are reduced to acceptable levels, people will expect to be able to resume their previous way of life.

But for the ZeroCovider, at that point we would need to do the opposite of relax. Instead, we would need to use ongoing “interventions” and test and trace protocols to drive virus levels even lower — even at a time when there is hardly any Covid about. It would need very talented comms professionals to successfully sell this to the British public.

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At that point, even if — and that’s a very big if — Britain was able to reach ZeroCovid within our borders, what then? Most people accept the need for sensible border controls to defend against new variants while the vaccine is still being rolled out. But if our goal is an entirely Covid-free land, why would we ever relax border restrictions? You’d have to wait until the disease were eradicated on a global scale, which even the most committed activists don’t think is possible for years. As Irish minister and former Taoiseach Leo Varadkar said last week, ZeroCovid is “a promise you could never fulfil”; if you cut off the country, “when do you ever unseal, because then inevitably, you let the virus back in again”?

Still, perhaps the thorniest question is what life would be like inside our theoretical ZeroCovid fortress. At last week’s conference, speakers explained that they prefer to use Australia and New Zealand as good examples because they garner a more positive response than when they mention Asian countries.

But the country that invented the approach, one which may be a better guide of a large nation pursing the strategy after a severe outbreak, is China. Despite the footage of people celebrating in Wuhan on New Year’s Eve  — provided by the CCP and obediently carried on global networks such as CBS and the BBC — the reality of life in ZeroCovid China is anything but normal. Constantly fearful at the prospect of another outbreak, the country’s already expansive surveillance state has ramped up a gear, ready to withdraw liberty at the slightest sign of Covid. Last month, all 11 million inhabitants of Shijiazhuang were thrown into lockdown after a local outbreak; one week later, a further 5 million people outside Beijing were put into lockdown on the basis of a single case. Only this week, Hong Kong launched a policy of “ambush lockdowns” where residential blocks are sealed off at a moment’s notice.

David Rennie, Beijing bureau chief of The Economist, recently gave an astonishingly candid account of current ZeroCovid life in the Chinese capital:

“China’s strategy, from the start, was to have no infections at all… Still in Beijing, where we have hardly any cases, every time you step outside your door you have to use a smartphone to scan a QR code — every shop, every taxi, every bus, every metro station. You have no privacy at all — it’s all built around this electronic system of contact tracing. To leave Beijing you have to have a Covid test, to come back in you have to have a Covid test…. We basically don’t have the virus here, but the flip side is that they are keeping this place locked down as tight as a drum… It’s very hard to know where Covid containment starts and a Communist police state with an obsession with control kicks in.”

Surely that is the most powerful objection to the approach: that in reality it would require a long-term illiberal regime to achieve and maintain it. ZeroCovid is a totalitarian aim, best delivered by a totalitarian state. Even in Australia, last weekend there was panic buying in Perth as the city re-entered lockdown in response to a single positive test result. So far at least, British voters have not chosen to reject liberal democracy, no matter what the epidemiological allure of a ZeroCovid regime.

For now, the British Government has resisted the campaign’s logic, and the Prime Minister continues to make encouraging signals about easing restrictions and even summer holidays. But as the impact of the vaccine is felt and the number of cases continues to fall, the politically difficult question of what constitutes an acceptable level of infection will have to be addressed.

Whatever that level is, expect well-spoken ZeroCovid campaigners to say it is too high. At each hesitant step towards opening up society, expect it to be called irresponsible and short-termist. No doubt ZeroCoviders sincerely believe their campaign for a Covid-free world is a noble one. But how successful they are at influencing policy will affect the shape of our society for years to come.

The dream tended to be structured around me trying to catch them out. I would stand at the corner of a building and very quickly stick my head around the corner – quickly enough, I hoped, to find them still motionless, surprised by my stealth. But they were always too quick for me, always one step ahead. I could never expose this plot. But nor could I discount the possibility that it was nonetheless true.

This strange dream was, I suspect, partly inspired by a woman I met in Hinchingbrooke Hospital, where I helped out on the psycho-geriatric ward during my university holidays. The woman in question believed that her body was hollow and completely filled with urine. She would only sleep upright, for fear that she would drown. When encouraged to lie prone she would begin to panic, coughing and spluttering, with genuine fear in her eyes.

It wasn’t that she was stupid; in fact, far from it. She was still able to complete The Times’ crossword, for instance. But however much I tried to reason her out of her belief – genuinely held, I was convinced of that – she had a considered response. It drove me to distraction that I wasn’t able to find a way through her inter-locking explanations. Surely reason could expose such an obviously mistaken view of the world? But as hard as I tried, I was never able to puncture it. At turns angry and frustrated, I eventually gave up and spent my days holding her hand and talking with her about her grandchildren.

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We need Scepticism more than ever

By Freddie Sayers

Both of these memories returned to me after reading Freddie Sayers’ recent piece on the importance of scepticism. He was, of course, completely correct that to uphold a critical approach that requires us not to accept arguments on face value. But what happens when scepticism starts to challenge the very fabric of our lives, when it becomes so all-consuming that even the generally agreed mechanisms of explanation are themselves called into question?

The careful, methodical, empirical steps of the scientific method were unconvincing to the woman who believed she was filled with urine. She was surrounded by scientific equipment and various monitors. But all of these were a deception, she believed. In colloquial terms, we generally describe those who are distanced from rational explanation as “mad”. But to reach for this word hardly solves the matter.

Yes, many brilliant people are called mad when they first question received authority. But it is also the sort of thing said by conspiracy theorists the world over. From people who think lizards control the world to those who believe the Covid vaccine is a way to implant microchips, the language of scepticism is often employed to justify their doubt that things are really as presented. “You don’t question things enough,” they say. “You are too credulous.” This is both the language of genuine intellectual inquiry, and yet also that of the mad and the bad.

Scepticism turns out to be a remarkably tricky business. Generally speaking, we imagine some boundary beyond which scepticism should not pass, or some format that limits the sceptic’s operation. For Freddie, that format is the scientific method. But there have been many who would even apply scepticism to that methodology. And indeed, if we challenge the scientific method to justify itself, we might reasonably ask that it does not do so in its own terms: the scientific method cannot supply its own justification without circularity.

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Something other than itself is required as a means of justification. And this introduces the idea that, with radical scepticism, the questions never end. As Wittgenstein famously asked, at what point is the spade turned, and solid ground is revealed? At what point do the questions run out? Steady on, we say. There must be a point at which the questions end. But isn’t this precisely the kind of limit about which the sceptic complains?

You may think that these questions are a bit odd. Indeed, they are. And I will return to that. But it is worth noting that modern philosophy begins at precisely this point. Most university philosophy courses begin with Descartes and his methodology of radical doubt. Doubt anything that can be doubted, he argues, and see what survives. His famous answer to this was that the only thing you have left is the “I” – even when you doubt something, there has to be something doing the doubting. Doubt requires a doubter. Cogito, ergo sum. This is one of the most influential sentences of modern thought. And it is because modern philosophy begins at this point that the “oddness” of radical scepticism begins.

Because, whether or not you agree with Descartes, the Cogito method still leaves a lot more to establish, not least the existence of other people beyond myself. I may know I exist. But do I know that you do? Descartes used God to fill that gap. He believed that God, whose existence could be rationally demonstrated, would not deceive us, therefore guaranteeing a kind of bridge from my existence to that of others. But, in time, the God answer proved to be unconvincing. I suspect this was what was behind my dream. I had been reading too much Descartes and swallowed his methodology of radical doubt. Through the lens of his universal scepticism, the world seemed like a very odd place indeed.

To complicate matters, there are occasions where we can’t really know another person’s thoughts and feelings. I currently have a headache. But others may suspect I am claiming to have a headache to get out of the washing up – and they have no way to check if I am telling the truth. My pain is not accessible to others in ways that make Descartes’ challenge about the existence of other minds seem credible. At the very least, it feels like the basis on which radical doubt may have some purchase. This is why thinkers like Wittgenstein talk a great deal about pain.

Can radical scepticism be refuted? The person who, to my mind, has done most to examine this question is the American philosopher Stanley Cavell, who passed away a few years ago. Cavell thought the sting of scepticism can be removed, but not using Descartes’ framework. He argued that Descartes began in the wrong place and so set off on an impossible quest. For Cavell, the constant “how do you know?” of the radical sceptic is a question that is in search of the wrong sort of answer. This is because human beings do not begin as individual units, ontologically distanced from each other. Our individuality is a derivative concept, one that takes shape over time.

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Instead, the original basis for human life is community; or, at least, a sense of togetherness. The mother breastfeeding her child is in no doubt that her baby exists, and nor does it make any sense for the child to doubt the existence of the mother. Doubt, if it enters the picture, comes much later. What comes first is not a kind of intellectual certainty about others, but an implicit acknowledgement upon which everything else is based. This is crucial. Doubt and scepticism only make sense if there is an already basic understanding of human identification. We begin with the acknowledgment of others – and only after that do we begin to ask whether, for instance, a person is telling us the truth about their inner life.

In other words, the problem with my dream was that it converted something that is constitutive of the human condition, our living alongside others, into a hurdle that needs to be overcome intellectually. To put it simply: in real life, trust necessarily precedes doubt. Not a credulous trust in arguments that demonstrate the other’s existence, but a recognition that something other than intellectual arguments is the basis of human solidarity.

All of this may seem unnecessarily abstract. But, in fact, it can be remarkably straightforward. As Freddie rightly points out, David Hume acknowledged that “amidst all of your philosophy, be still a man”. In other words, scepticism is a human activity and one that must operate on the basis that common humanity provides. Too many thinkers, and philosophers especially, have not appreciated the wisdom here, and have tried to construct all knowledge on the basis of reason alone.

For all its apparent attractiveness, this way madness lies. For without this basic acknowledgement of shared humanity, nothing can ever be known with certainty. And this opens up a gap between the day-to-day operation of human life — chatting in the street, going about our shopping, even making love — and the increasingly bizarre questions that philosophers ask each other. To quote Hume at length:

“Where am I, or what? From what causes do I derive my existence, and to what condition shall I return? … Since Reason is incapable of dispelling these clouds, Nature herself suffices to that purpose, and cures me of this philosophical melancholy and delirium, either by relaxing this bent of mind, or by some avocation, and lively impression of my senses, which obliterate all these chimeras.

“I dine, I play a game of backgammon, I converse, and am merry with my friends. And when, after three or four hours’ amusement, I would return to these speculations, they appear so cold, and strained, and ridiculous, that I cannot find in my heart to enter into them any farther.”

But this sense of an ending doesn’t seem to have done much to shore up discipline. If anything, it seems to be going the other way: anti-lockdown protests this weekend led to over 150 arrests, people are moving around much more in lockdown 2 than lockdown 1, and the political rebellion among Conservative MPs has gathered, rather than lost, momentum since the vaccine news. It looks like keeping up restrictions is going to become more difficult, not easier, as the end comes into view.

You can see why Tory MPs are worried. The map of areas still stuck in ‘tier 3’ lockdown restrictions, with pubs and restaurants shut, has echoes of the most Brexit-voting parts of the country: a new ‘red wall’ stretching from Lancashire in the North West across to Lincolnshire and the Wash, with a separate pocket of red in the Thames estuary and Kent. These are the voters most precious to the Government — fear of getting on the wrong side of them runs deep.

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The Covid tiers can't go soon enough

By Sir Graham Brady

What’s more, the latest polls are not offering much reassurance. We’ve become used to surveys showing overwhelming support for more restrictions, leading to the general assumption that ‘lockdown sceptics’ are little more than a small but vocal group on social media; Nigel Farage’s attempt to launch a new political party on the back of that passion has so far fallen flat.

But on the post-lockdown tier system, opinion is more divided — of four options offered by YouGov, the most popular at 33% is the view that too many areas are now being held in top tiers. More disconcertingly for the Tories, the dissenting group rises to 37% of Brexit voters (compared to 28% of Remainers) and 44% of voters in the all-important Midlands (compared to just 21% of Londoners). The voters who propelled them into office are the least happy.

What Tory MPs know (and not only the 70-odd rebels lined up by Steven Baker and Sir Graham Brady) is that there’s something about this whole approach that goes directly against what they were elected to do. As Editor of the Sheffield Star, Nancy Fielder, told Andrew Marr on Sunday, Tory MPs in the North “were elected around Brexit, which was all about freedom — we want to be able to do what we want to do ourselves without being dictated to — and look where we are now.” Brexit was a rebellion against control from the centre, against remote regulations set by faraway people in Whitehall or Brussels who aren’t interested in the details of your area — the Covid tiers have an unhappy whiff of the same hauteur.

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The aggravation doesn’t stem from people being selfish or from behavioural fatigue so much as from the bluntness of the regulation. Even among those who are concerned about the virus and keen to be responsible, rules that are arbitrary and insensitive to local conditions quickly start feeling pointless and sinister; from there it is a short step to them feeling tyrannical.

Notes of absurdity are even more potent at destroying support. Think of how much energy the Brexit movement got from reports of EU regulations on “bendy bananas” — today’s elaborate one-way systems around half-empty garden centres and tiny designer Perspex vizers covering only the chins of waiters in restaurants are surely the new equivalents. You can imagine the mixture of hilarity and fury in the Kent village that has been divided down the middle between two tiers, so one of its pubs has to close but the other can remain open.

At heart, the flaw in the system is the continued adherence to a one-size-fits-all approach. A “traffic light” system of regional tiers may sound targeted and human at a No 10 press conference, but it doesn’t feel that way to the millions of people lumped together in Manchester or Kent, or to the 99% of the population still forbidden from seeing anybody inside during an English winter. As each MP knows, within each constituency, let alone county, there is a variety of urban and rural areas, and a range of different demographics — it’s a whole world, not a dot on a map. This is the central shortcoming of the lockdown movement — that you can force everyone in a hugely varied society to behave in the same way, by diktat.

This was never true, and particularly not for a threat like Covid that is so unusually targeted at a certain subset of the population: we all know people who are more- or less- cautious about Covid and have been all along for perfectly good reasons. Wise regulation would acknowledge this reality, and provide principles that people can apply to their unique circumstances. The Government will win their vote in parliament, but the anger will start to subside only when we move beyond universal life-rules controlled by the centre. The principle of different advice for different groups is already established: the proposal to ‘protect the vulnerable’ in the Great Barrington Declaration may have been rejected on the grounds of practical difficulty, but different ‘shielding’ advice was given early on to the particularly vulnerable and ministers insist that as soon as the most vulnerable are vaccinated, restrictions can begin to ease.

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The Covid tiers can't go soon enough

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So as we move through this difficult winter, with the new promise of a sunset clause on the Tiers system, perhaps the Government needs to switch up its metaphors: instead of traffic lights, which are notoriously frustrating and treat everyone the same, it might be better to start thinking about traffic lanes, which when functioning well on a motorway are a remarkably effective way for society to move safely along together.

A nationwide traffic lane system would allow people to choose at an individual or household level how to live: amber means you carry on as now, respecting regulations to a normal degree, red means you are additionally cautious because either you or your regular contacts are highly vulnerable, and green means either you have decided that the risk of contracting Covid is acceptable to you and you are personally not worried, or that you are now immune via prior infection or vaccination. Information about local virus levels and your own risk profile can help you choose your lane, and you can quarantine between lanes (which is already what the Government recommends to students coming home for Christmas). As long as you aren’t a threat to others, everyone can decide for themselves.

Rather than attempting to micro-manage the entire public square as a single space, which is the source of so much unhappiness, individual venues and events could be allowed to cater to different risk levels. Care homes and hospitals will obviously continue to operate on ‘red lane’ principles with the highest care, but supermarkets and shops could return to the excellent system where the first hour of the day is reserved for ‘red lane’ customers. Which system would you prefer, as a vulnerable elderly person — to be forced in, as now, among the noisy young people being cavalier about masks and bumping into you, or to be able to know that the newly-cleaned shop was open at limited capacity only to people taking proper care?

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Pubs and restaurants could start to operate similarly — red lane on one day, amber for most of the week and green on Fridays and Saturdays when young people and the increasing number of immune and vaccinated can do as they please without being accused of being selfish. Transport could work on similar rush-hour principles, and even schools would be safer than they are now with a class or stream reserved for students who had genuinely vulnerable people at home, rather than pretending all schoolchildren obey distancing guidelines when quite obviously they don’t. If a venue or service cannot be modified safely in this way, it can remain in the amber lane — no change.

A post-lockdown regime along these lines could provide a route for the whole UK to offer better protection to the vulnerable as discipline starts to collapse, while providing safe outlets for the people who will break the rules anyway to live their lives without censure. Most of all it would reacquaint people with the ability to make decisions for themselves, and move beyond the local colouring-in exercise that is causing so much political tension.

Thinking along these lines will become only more important as vaccines start to be administered: if people are frustrated now, imagine how they will feel if they or their loved ones have had the vaccine and are still being asked to lead a half-life of distancing and not seeing anyone for months afterwards. There must eventually be a mechanism to release the vaccinated and the less vulnerable, while providing proper support for people who need to continue avoiding exposure. The sooner it gets moving, the better.

I was surprised by it, not because I believed the numbers, but because I was surprised that anyone believed the numbers. A moment’s thought — simply dividing the second number by the first number, something you can do in your browser search bar in under five seconds — would have told you that this implied the UK TTI system cost 15,000 times what the Irish one cost. Surely, put like that, it is unbelievable. But two thousand people retweeted it, and six thousand pressed “like”, so presumably most of them did not check.

In case you’re wondering, the problem was that the tweet compared the cost of the Irish TTI app with the money the British Government had put aside for the entire costs of TTI, including, for instance, the wages of the contact tracers; a fairer comparison would be with the £640 million or so that the Irish government will spend in total. It’s pretty obvious that the UK TTI system has been an expensive failure, but this comparison is specious.

You see these things all the time — claims about the world which a moment’s checking would reveal not to be true, and yet which people do not bother to check. It reminded me of something I read in Tim Harford’s recent book, How to Make the World Add Up. (Which is, it pains me to say since it’s on a related topic to my own upcoming book, excellent and interesting. Do me a favour: if you buy it on the back of my recommendation, at least buy mine as well.)

Harford points out that quite often, we aren’t all that interested in being right — or, rather, in having true beliefs. “Maybe this sounds absurd,” he says. “Don’t we all want to figure out the truth?” But often, believing things that are true is of much less importance than believing things which are socially acceptable. He gives the example of climate change, and farmers in Montana. Montana is a conservative, Republican-voting state; climate change is a politically charged term. 

Montanan farmers see the impacts of climate change all the time, in failed crops and bad harvests. But expressing a belief in climate change comes at a social cost — a Republican farmer could easily be ostracised by her friends if she does it. There is essentially zero cost to saying the opposite, though, because — even if climate change is real — what can you, as one of nearly eight billion contributors to it, actually do? 

The negative consequences of socially unacceptable beliefs are large, immediate and close; the negative consequences of objectively false beliefs are often negligible. “With a handful of exceptions — say, if you’re the president of China,” says Harford, “climate change is going to take its course regardless of what you say or do. From a self-centred point of view, the practical cost of being wrong is close to zero.”

If you are — as I am — a firm believer that climate change is a real and pressing concern, then it might be easy to dismiss this as simply “the climate deniers are at it again”. But we all do it. For a significant percentage of the things we believe, we care less about whether they are true than about whether they are socially acceptable.

Kevin Simler, co-author with Robin Hanson of The Elephant in the Brain, wrote a wonderful blog post about this a few years ago, looking at what he called “crony beliefs”. 

Our brains, he says, work to establish true beliefs about the world. If there is a tiger in the bush, it is important to establish a belief that there is a tiger in the bush, in order not to get eaten by the tiger. Less dramatically, if planting crops in March gives the best harvest, then it is important to establish a belief that planting crops in March gives the best harvest. True beliefs help us to stay alive, feed ourselves, that sort of thing.

But that’s not all they do. Simler draws a comparison with employees at a company in a town called Nepotsville, where, in order to do business, everyone knows that you have to hire people who are well-connected to the city council. 

“In this environment,” says Simler, “Acme faces two kinds of incentives, one pragmatic and one political.” Pragmatically, you need to do good work and finish it on time so that people hire you to do more. So you need to hire qualified workers and fire the ones who are underperforming. You need to act as a meritocracy.

But politically, you need to keep the council sweet, so you need to engage in what Simler calls “cronyism”. You need to hire, say, the Mayor’s nephew, even though you know him to be a useless layabout, because if you don’t, the council will make life difficult for you.

Someone looking around the office, not knowing how things work, might be surprised to find — scattered among the competent, hard-working employees — several nose-picking simpletons who, for some reason, have never been fired. They are surprised because they wrongly assume that those people are there to do work, rather than to provide political cover.

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“I contend,” says Simler, “that the best way to understand all the crazy beliefs out there — aliens, conspiracies, and all the rest — is to analyse them as crony beliefs. Beliefs that have been ‘hired’ not for the legitimate purpose of accurately modeling the world, but rather for social and political kickbacks.”

So as well as meritocratic beliefs, which are about establishing true facts about the world — the best time to plant seeds, the presence or otherwise of a tiger — you have crony beliefs, which are intended to win you political or social credit. Simler quotes Steven Pinker: “People are embraced or condemned according to their beliefs, so one function of the mind may be to hold beliefs that bring the belief-holder the greatest number of allies, protectors, or disciples, rather than beliefs that are most likely to be true.”

Obviously this isn’t a hard and fast distinction: it’s not that all crony beliefs are false. For instance, as Harford says, while the Montanan farmers might be ostracised for professing a belief in climate change, someone in Portland, Oregon — or north London — might be ostracised for saying it’s a Chinese hoax. As it happens the north Londoner’s belief might be objectively true, but it would still be socially unacceptable not to believe it. By analogy, you might hire the Mayor’s nephew, and then it might turn out that he’s really good at his job. But he still provides you with political cover. 

Everyone has crony beliefs, on left and right; we all believe things, or at the very least profess them, because it is socially advantageous to do so. A left-wing equivalent of the climate change belief might be the claim that IQ is pseudoscience, for instance. 

That said, I suspect that people differ in the extent to which they are comfortable with them — as John Nerst points out here, the social category “nerds” is defined, partly, by “a concern for correctness over social harmony”, with a tendency to blurt out socially uncomfortable facts at inappropriate moments. By implication, then, most non-nerds are concerned with social harmony over correctness, and so will be more likely to believe things that are objectively false but which make living in society easier. (This makes sense to me. One of my own very proudest moments as a nerd was when the quantum computer scientist Scott Aaronson reviewed my first book and said that it had the rare quality of trying to assess ideas on “a scale from true to false, rather than from quirky to offensive”.) Still, we all have them. 

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Spotting them is hard, and Simler makes a few suggestions: if you get angry when someone tries to correct your belief, that’s a sign that it may be a crony one. You wouldn’t get angry if you said “The Liverpool game kicks off at 7:45pm” and someone said “actually no it’s 8pm” — you actually need that information to make plans. But if you said “the 2019-2020 Liverpool team is the greatest club side in history” and someone replied “actually no it’s the Ipswich Town 2000-2001 team,” you might angrily defend Liverpool’s claim, if in fact you were using that belief to profess membership of a group — if it was acting as a crony. Similarly, if they’re vague and abstract, with few real-world consequences, that’s another warning sign.

A need to constantly proclaim your belief might be another point. You don’t need to go around telling people that you believe that your car needs petrol to move; that belief is boringly pragmatic, designed solely to help you get from A to B. But you might go around loudly comparing mask-wearers to Nazi collaborators, if the point of that belief was to demonstrate that you are a member of the Lockdown Sceptics tribe. (The reverse is also true. I might make loud public noises about masks being good, because the tribe of which I am a member is pro-mask. It feels like I genuinely believe that masks are good, and I think the evidence is very much on my side — but I imagine that’s how it feels to the Nazi-comparing chap I just mentioned. Crony beliefs can still be true, remember.)

The obvious question is what my crony beliefs are. But our brains have a whole array of tricks to keep us from noticing our own false beliefs; I don’t suppose I am going to be very good at spotting my own. My greatest concern is over things I’ve previously confidently proclaimed – for instance, that social media probably isn’t causing a wave of teen suicides and that there probably isn’t an epidemic of loneliness. If either of those turn out to be false, I’ll look silly, so it’s socially important for me that I continue to believe them. My repeated claims that the world is getting better and that we are generally becoming less bigoted as time goes on are the sort of things that could be cronyish, although – obviously – I do actually think that all of these things are true.

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To return to the Irish TTI tweet, it seems pretty obvious, to me, what was going on. The tweet wasn’t true, but it signalled something that people wanted to express — that the Conservative government is incompetent and corrupt, funnelling money to its friends rather than trying to save lives. The belief, like Montanan farmers’ professed belief that climate change isn’t real, costs nothing or next to nothing in real terms — if you are wrong about the cost of TTI, it will make no difference to any decision you have to make. But if you hang around in left-liberal social circles, then signalling that you think the Tories are bad is socially advantageous, and saying “hang on a minute, actually” will only lose you friends. (Believe me, I know.) 

Assuming you do want to believe things that are true, Harford has recommendations: one key one is observing your own feelings about some claim, and seeing whether it makes you feel angry, or happy, or vindicated, and if it does, to wonder whether you believe it because you think it’s true, or you believe it because it’s socially advantageous. Simler, meanwhile, suggests that since crony beliefs are driven by social incentives, the trick is to create social incentives for believing true things. He points to the rationalists, a group of online nerds, as one group who are obsessed with being “less wrong”, and who have created a community where you are rewarded for obeying norms of truth-seeking and debate, rather than for believing specific things.

I hope these tricks work. In a world where thousands of people can believe that the UK TTI system is 15,000 times the price of the Irish one, we need all the help we can get.