Lockdown was meant to be a great cultural moment, and — with furlough to smooth everything over — an economic non-event. It was the reverse. March 2020 to February 2022 saw no period of quiet reflection or creative flourishing. Half a decade out there has been no definitive lockdown novel, or film, or stage play.

Economically, it was a silent revolution. Lockdown effected the greatest upward transfer of wealth in human history, the end of the era of low interest rates, unheard of levels of state borrowing. It is almost entirely responsible for the current rash of inflation in Britain, which had already reached 5.1% months before Russia’s invasion of Ukraine. Rising gilt yields; the deficit; the cost of living; the increase in PIP claims; mass economic inactivity; the “decline of the high street” — these are impossible to explain without recalling that the British state borrowed £400 billion to lock the population indoors for two years. The Britain of 2025 has a very different political economy to the Britain of 2019; yet the only thing that really distinguishes one from the other is this singular disruption.

A frenzy of borrowing lockdown made “austerity” seem like a bad joke. Yet it has made any alternative to austerity impossible. There was a time when Britain could have attempted a drive for growth through state-led investment, and it was in the decade before 2020, when gilt yields were at a historic low. When Rachel Reeves now borrows large sums to invest in infrastructure, she is betting the farm on a model for growth that disappeared five years ago. With a much higher cost of borrowing, the only route to growth lies through supply-side reforms and cuts to public expenditure — which is what the Government is now increasingly defaulting to. Labour’s dreams of “securonomics” have only been lockdown’s latest victim.

But of course the Government is out of ideas. Lockdown discredited liberal ideas; the failure of lockdown discredited statist ones. All ideologies came out of it shabby and condemned. It showed that the British center-right did not care about fiscal prudence, personal liberty, or small business. It showed that “neoliberals” did not care about globalization or transnational supply chains. Witnessing the virtual end of work, communists did not bestir themselves to agitate for the end of wage-labor. In pleading the cause of the furloughed stakeholder over the minimum-wage employees that delivered things to them, the British center-left revealed itself to be little more than the lobbying arm for the public sector. Lockdown showed that all these factions, when they were really up against it, only cared about two things: human rights maximalism, and money for the old. (The winter fuel allowance is a fiscal trifle compared with the triple-lock, which all parties have pledged to defend.) Not since July 1914 has so much been decided with so little debate.

The bad parts were bad and the good parts were worse. Insofar as there was a great social coming-together during lockdown its main effect has been a decline in responsibility and standards. British institutions — everything from the railways to local government — used the initial outpouring of goodwill towards key workers as a general license to give up: as late as December 2022 public services were still fobbing people off with “Covid disruption”. To this we can also add the rulers’ new creepy overfamiliarity towards the ruled, manifest in garish PR stunts like “Can you look them in the eyes?”, or, latterly, “maaate”. This is not how adults ought to address one another.

It was a last hurrah for every outmoded social force. Unreformed Whitehall, the courts, the monarchy and the BBC — all were given an artificial lease of life. Lockdown briefly revived the prestige of Britain’s broadcast media, which was achieved in part by a simultaneous crackdown on online “misinformation”, including the now-vindicated lab leak theory. Plans for a reform to Whitehall had been well in train, even during lockdown itself. But in this atmosphere of cheap moralism and recrimination, there was a general rallying to established institutions, and the plans did not survive Cummings’ fall. Lockdown sparked the counterrevolution in British institutions that had its climax with the brief regency of Sue Gray — who hoped to put these institutions, at last, beyond effective democratic control. This is something that’s only now being rowed back on — at least rhetorically.

If we don’t acknowledge lockdown and its effects, then the problems of mid-Twenties Britain will continue to confound us. The refusal to recognize the stakes involved, to have some honest accounting of which groups were being asked to sacrifice something for the benefit of others, has led us to this state of general amnesia and low-level resentment. It’s still taken as strange, in a country where the right to leave your house was suspended for two years, that the public might now be deaf to “liberal norms” and that the young are flirting with dictatorship. Why are so many avoiding work and claiming to be disabled, or phoning it in at “lazy girl jobs“? Because they were shown exactly how far hard work and gumption would carry them: to be a tax farm for pensioners and illegal migrants. Why did so many get rich off dodgy contracts? Because the economy was brought to a halt except for a list of key suppliers. Such conditions were almost guaranteed to produce a class of well-connected Covid spivs — of whom Matt Hancock is the spiritual chief.

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But there was only one true avatar of lockdown Britain, and it arrived in the person of Keir Starmer. The man and his credo, Starmerism, were both made by lockdown and were the fullest expression of its spirit. Like Starmerism, lockdown sidestepped all social and economic questions in favor of a vague sense of decency. Like Starmerism, lockdown sought to subsume all politics into the jargon of rights. Like Starmerism, lockdown meant a trembling reverence for clapped-out institutions. Partygate was when Keir Starmer was truly in his element, and it remains his beau idéal of politics: no “Condition of England” questions, just personal corruption and the law. Insofar as he’s now been forced to depart from this mode, then it’s only because of the insoluble material problems that lockdown created.

Lockdown was the great sinkhole: of time, memory, money. It is the true “Black Hole” of our age. It will live in history as a lurid and bizarre dreamworld, much better off forgotten. There was no resolution. There was no catharsis. Nothing was learnt, except this: that appeals to Humanity and Human Decency should always be treated with great suspicion, and that “social trust” is something that should be undermined.

In those moments, your mother not only knows best, but becomes a sort of goddess. Against the fevers, blocked noses and nettle-stung shins of childhood, she wields a mystical healing power — the ability to kiss it better, to ordain that you’ll be “right as rain” in the morning (and you always are). This relationship rests on a limitless bank of trust, the ultimate vulnerability and the ultimate faith.

But what if your mother is not worthy of it? What if, having recently emerged from a global pandemic, she is now at odds with your family doctor, and mistrusts the mysterious adults who administer jabs at hospitals? What if she now represents a gatekeeper to things that might help, or even save you, from syrupy sweet Calpol to a vaccine preventing a bout of measles that might kill you?

This is life for the children of “crunchy mums”, so called because of the hippy, molar-cracking-granola world they emerged from. They congregate on anonymous forums, on Facebook, Reddit and Mumsnet, swapping advice on raising a child under the radar of mainstream medicine. One mother asks for tips on how to lie to doctors about her children not having had their vaccines. Another’s 17-year-old daughter begs her for the Covid jab; she is told to coax her out of her mainstream-media brainwashing and push “homeopathic prophylaxis” instead. “All the protection, none of the risk,” the comment says. Another woman asks how to treat her four-year-old with meningitis, whom she refuses to take to hospital. “Is this necessary?” she says of heading straight to A&E. “I am over Covid politics.”

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On a different forum, a mother worries about the prevalence of measles in her son’s school; he is not vaccinated. “Stay confident in your decisions. Don’t let fear manipulate you,” comes the soothing reply. In one nannying forum, a woman tells of a mum who refuses to let her daughter carry an Epipen despite being fatally allergic to bananas. Instead, a “homeopathic salt” is kept in the house for emergencies. Another posts a picture of her three-year-old’s teeth — or what remains of them; they are all but completely decayed thanks to the misguidance of a “holistic dentist”. The mother now wants to do “what’s best” for her toddler, to relieve her pain, but it seems a little too late.

The Crunchy Mum phenomenon might appear, to most observers, as utter selfishness masquerading as care. This is certainly how I see one such “TikTok influencer” whose sister-in-law writes a warning post on Reddit exposing her for making videos about her “amazing and perfect” home births, assisted by an Amish midwife with “no official medical training”. Her fifth child, we are told, was delivered in a traumatic episode involving life-threatening pre-eclampsia and an admission to hospital — but the influencer “absolutely will not disclose” these facts to her followers, denying having had life-saving mainstream medical treatment to continue pushing her all-natural brand.

Spending a little time on these message boards, one gets the impression that these women — and it is almost exclusively women — are motivated not by selfishness, but by a surfeit of paranoid love. A couple of seams run through the discourse. The first is a hangover from woo-woo communal and natural-living circles of the Sixties and Seventies; it is all about lentils, flax seeds and coconut oil. This is where a lot of Crunchy Mums seem to start; after all, what can be so wrong with raising your child in the bosom of Mother Nature? There is an organic feminist flavour to it all, slightly witchy, vaguely empowering and ultimately quite harmless.

But the second seam is where the problems begin. It seems unlikely that the alt-Right homesteader mentality can coexist so comfortably with the dippy softness of the sandal-wearing Mother Earth sisterhood, but that confluence, the coaxing from concerned mother to anti-Big State freedom fighter, is at the heart of Crunchy Mum ideology. A few weeks or months among aluminium-deodorant-dodging acolytes online sends you hurtling down a pipeline of classic tropes — a distrust of Big Pharma, an aversion to vaccines, a suspicion of mainstream education.

There is a distinct hierarchy to these forums, where even quotidian questions are met with a barrage of replies which jostle to be the most extreme, the most radically sage. Mothers out-do each other with “well actually” correctives informing forum-lurkers that, in fact, you might be killing your child with radioactivity from baby monitors, seed oils or whatever else. Women bond over how they are shunned by other mothers at the school gates; they delight in the digital garrison they have formed, the spite of it all. If children see their mothers as a sort of magician, a healing goddess, then the cultists see themselves as the chosen ones.

This anxious-but-smug fatalism is nowhere clearer than in the big-ticket forums of Crunchy Mum culture: the autism boards. Here, mothers advise one another on “detoxing” their children through natural methods, which promise to see “autism characteristics improving or going away completely”. This process involves overhauling the diet, introducing supplements, and for some reason getting chiropractors involved. You must junk pesticides, preservatives and artificial colours. And give your child Epsom salt baths. One mother reassures another that her five-year-old has “lost” his autism diagnosis by cutting out “gluten and casein”. When the original poster expresses concern that this strict diet would remove some of the greatest pleasures from her little boy’s life, she is scolded: “The changes you make now can impact the rest of his life.”

The link between “alternative medicine” and obsessions with autism is not new. In 1998, Andrew Wakefield, a former physician, published a study in respected medical journal The Lancet linking the MMR jab to autism. Though the research was based on a study of only 12 children, it quickly became accepted that gastrointestinal inflammation from the vaccine caused developmental disorders. It sparked the first major wave of what would become a global and recurring anti-vax movement. The paper was ultimately discredited — The Lancet retracted it in 2010 — and Wakefield was disgraced. The fable is by now so familiar, but nonetheless many parents are still determined to believe it.

Why? The appeal of this theory is that it gives parents a sense of control, which saves them from the bleak uncertainty of genetic fate while conferring blame on those who didn’t try “hard enough”. There is great comfort in the belief that the destiny of the person you love most in the world is not random, but in fact entirely dependent on the sacrifices you are willing to make for them. You are determined to face censure from your community, to smilingly nurse them through bouts of mumps and rubella, to become the heroine of your own family story, to save them. If anything, the controversy of your beliefs only burnishes your heroism.

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There are significant spiritual overtones to this martyred maternity. Crunchy Mums represent a slippage between real and mystical lives; they are the modern continuation of a medieval thought system which held that left-handed children represented something sinistra, devilish, and that harsh correctives could drive the dark out. In one forum, this connection is taken to an extreme in the context of — what else? — the Covid vaccine: “Don’t take it under any circumstances,” a mother says. “The mark of the beast is an unforgivable sin and you will get grievous sores all over your body… Plus the shot changes your DNA — writing lucifer (shot contains luciferace) [sic] all over it. Hell is not worth it. Plus the definition of pharmacia is spells, witchcraft, potions. [The] Bible WARNS against witchcraft and seeking such things.” This is worth unpacking. Luciferase is a family of proteins that, from the Latin, bear light (produce photons) — so are used as bioluminescent markers. These harmless, useful proteins are used in a variety of common medical applications, but not the Covid vaccine. That this woman has combined fundamental medical misunderstanding with earnest spiritual sentiment crowns her Crunchy Mum to end all Crunchy Mums.

Groomed by others to leap from well-meaning woo-woo to paranoid extremism, Crunchy Mums are a growing army. But it is one thing asking how to make soap out of your own breast milk, and quite another to give your baby botulism. These children are living the same embattled lives as those who, centuries earlier, would have grimaced through back-room exorcisms, huffing the acrid smell of burning sage from the local warty witch, getting leg cramp from sitting in a salt circle until your deformity is cured. And for the mothers, the same ancient affliction: guilt, overwhelming love — you will and must do anything to save your child. But what if rather than saving them, you’re condemning them?

Nigerians have responded with a wave of “hardship protests”. Since February, demonstrations have rocked many large cities including Lagos, Ibadan and Kano. In Lagos, police responded with sympathy, handing out biscuits and water to the protesters to prevent them fainting from hunger. After ration sizes in Nigerian prisons were cut, protests broke out in the prison of the central city of Jos at the end of February.

Many have blamed the crisis on President Bola Ahmed Tinubu, who was elected in controversial circumstances last year. The powerful emir of Kano, Aminu Ado Bayero, said in February that Nigerians faced “economic hardships, hunger and starvation” and called on President Tinubu to take action. Later that month, Tinubu agreed to release 102,000 tonnes of a strategic grain reserve at subsidised prices, but such is the hardship faced by most Nigerians that when this happened there was a stampede at the depot.

On the face of it, President Tinubu’s economic policies are to blame. In May 2023, he removed fuel subsidies, which the World Bank estimated could save the Nigerian government $5 billion a year. It was part of a wider strategy to increase foreign investment. Yet, in spite of the pain this catastrophic strategy has already caused, global investors warned last week that the Central Bank had to “tighten” monetary policy further to attract investment — even after a 4% increase in Nigeria’s interest rate, to 22.75%.

This tightening of the screws will only worsen the crisis. The call from investors runs counter to what financial leaders said last year: that scrapping fuel subsidies was already giving markets “everything they hoped for”. Even the Financial Times reported last week that, in retrospect, “many are questioning the wisdom of abruptly removing the subsidies without a shock-absorbing plan”.

But Tinubu can’t be blamed for everything. When he was elected, Nigeria was already facing an economic crisis. By late 2021, analysts were pointing to a looming debt crisis, with public debt having soared under the previous president Muhammadu Buhari. This followed a decade during which, as Bloomberg reported, long-term loans had more than doubled. In 2022, the last year of Buhari’s government, annual debt repayments stood at $7.5 billion, which exceeded the government’s total revenue by almost $1 billion.

However, it’s worth noting that in 2019, the picture was the reverse. That year, the African Development Bank issued its annual report, which said that “the state of the continent is good. Africa’s general economic performance continues to improve”. This followed a decade of sustained economic growth across Africa, with some claiming at the time that the eradication of poverty by 2030 was possible. As two Dutch economists concluded in 2018, there were “broadened opportunities for sustained economic growth in the longer term”.

What changed between 2019 and 2022? The obvious answer is the Covid pandemic response, which not only interrupted economic growth across Africa, but in the Nigerian case, saw a collapse in the oil price that resulted in a sharp drop in revenues. It also saw a huge increase in the debt burden. In April 2020, the IMF approved a $3.4 billion loan to Nigeria to fund its Covid response — almost half of the government’s annual revenues. The Central Bank of Nigeria drew on this to offer credit facilities to businesses in distress. Now, however, those loans are being called in, and some accuse the government of “conning” Nigerians.

Worse still, at the end of February, the Nigerian Socio-Economic Rights and Accountability network filed a lawsuit against President Tinubu for the government’s failure to account for the disbursements from this huge loan. In a tale that will be grimly familiar to readers in the UK and the US, the effective printing of money that accompanied the Covid response is alleged to have led to diversion or theft of the funds that have never been accounted for.

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This suggests that the real cause of Nigeria’s crisis is what scholars Ruben Andersson and David Keen aptly label “wreckonomics” in their provocative new book of the same name: a label that describes how the setting of a war economic model is used for profiteering by existing institutional interests. For these interest groups, the purpose of the war is not necessarily in winning it, but in extracting profit from the crisis situation — often by extending it for as long as possible.

Such analysis offers a different twist to the concept of the neoliberal “permacrisis”. While these rolling crises are usually spoken of in political terms, wreckonomics shows that it is part of an economic framework. In each crisis framed as a war — whether real wars such as in Ukraine, or the “war on Covid” — existing economic interests have the institutional frameworks to leap in and profit from them. This corporate money printing comes at the cost of state budgets, leading to future indebtedness, which is paid for by those who had no hand in the profits — and who must put up with crumbling state services.

The Nigerian crisis perfectly fits the wreckonomics mode. A “war on Covid” was declared worldwide. This created a massive external shock and led to the printing of money financed with credit from the IMF. Existing interests took advantage of this to profiteer from the debt in Nigeria, as also happened in Senegal, the UK and the US. And none of this had anything to do with the threat posed to the Nigerian population by Covid itself, since, with a median age below 20, this was always low risk compared to a disease like malaria that kills 600,000 people annually across Africa. Indeed, at present, the registered Covid deaths in Nigeria total 3,155.

The consequence was a vast increase in Nigerian government debt which, twinned with collapsing revenues in 2020-1 because of the oil price, reversed the rosy picture described by macroeconomists in 2019. Not only has all this led to the new era of austerity, but it was predicted right from the start by groups such as Oxfam. The charity reported in 2021 that, as of 15 March that year, 85% of IMF Covid loans were tied to future austerity in the countries concerned. These “externalised losses” have now been realised, by people in Nigeria — and indeed across Africa.

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As the devastation wrought by these policies becomes clear, Africa has started fighting back. Last week, a coalition of senior African academics accused the WHO of being “colonialist” in its plans for a new pandemic treaty that could allow it to plunge Africa back into lockdown. “This is a perpetuation of classical Western imperialism coming through the backdoor,” said one academic. The coalition is seeking to challenge whether African governments should automatically accept the new pandemic treaty, as well as IHR regulation changes being promoted for discussion and voting at the World Health Assembly in May.

The group’s health advisory director, Wellington Oyibo from the University of Lagos, challenged the grounds for the new treaty. “Lockdowns affected Africans badly because these are people who earn their living from subsistent income, and yet you lock them in for several months?” he was quoted as saying. “The people are still not over the socio-economic and educational consequences of lockdowns.”

Yet with the crisis growing, the official policy menu for Nigeria’s government is very restricted. President Tinubu is negotiating further World Bank budget support of up to $1.5 billion — but this will just further the wreckonomics model that has proved itself so useless over the past five years. Meanwhile, with the postponement of elections in Senegal, and the imprisonment there of the leading opposition candidate Ousmane Sonko, political crises are growing across the continent. In such cases, governments usually look for someone to blame. The WHO might be a good start.

Emma Hester, another mother of a school-refuser, believes that the school advice she followed traumatised her six-year-old daughter, Grace, who has ADHD and autism. When Grace was in Year One, she wouldn’t get dressed. But Emma was told to bring her into school in her pyjamas and they would do the rest. “To my shame, I did just that,” she says. “I dragged her into the head’s office in her pyjamas where I was told ‘well done’ for getting her in. Basically, that’s what matters for the school: its attendance record. But there was my child, a gibbering wreck, and now I’m horrified at what we inflicted on her.”

These two children are not alone. One in five pupils is currently persistently absent from school — a number that has doubled since the pandemic — and the education system is panicking. While parents report distress, anxiety and stress, the Department for Education launched what has been described as an insensitive and patronising exercise in “parent shaming”, in an attempt to get these “ghost children” back in the classrooms. The “Moments matter, attendance counts” campaign features smiling children at school with strap-lines such as “This morning he had a runny nose…but look at him now!” and “This morning she was worried about school…but look at her now!”

“They are pitting parents against their children and against teachers,” says Niamh. “When you’re struggling with children who are unable to go to school for a variety of serious reasons, and then you see a poster telling you to get your kid into school and everything will be alright, it suggests it’s your fault.”

A huge number of parents are feeling similarly frustrated at the lack of support for their children, and the insensitivity of the DfE. The Facebook group “Not Fine in School”, set up to support parents of school refusers, now has 33,000 despairing members. One, Claire Gill, wrote: “My son has severe anxiety. We had a well-being person talk to him weekly, which helped him cope, and he looked forward to speaking to them as it was a release. Now, school has stopped the wellbeing person, saying what he has learnt is on his iPad and he can look at that if he gets anxious, [and that] talking is only a temporary fix and he needs to basically learn to manage it himself. He is 10.”

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Part of the problem, according to many members of this group, and a majority of the parents I spoke to, is that neither the Government nor the schools are properly addressing the youth mental health crisis. The official numbers are shocking — and that’s only the cases we know about. In the past five years, the number of children claiming disability allowance for anxiety has risen by 70%. And according to a recent survey by the mental health charity stem4, an alarming 28% of secondary school pupils have missed school because of anxiety in the past year. Those suffering the most tend to be children with neurodevelopmental conditions such as ADHD or autism.

Obviously, the pandemic must bear some of the blame. The clinical psychologist Dr Naomi Fisher puts it bluntly: “Their playgrounds were locked. Their opportunities to play were taken away. Normal life stopped. It was particularly earth-shattering for children, because they found it hard to hang on to what life had been like before.” When these kids went back to school, they were under pressure to catch up educationally, rather than focus on their psychological well-being. The news was full of horror stories about falling grades, not worsening mental health. But it didn’t take long for that damage to show itself.

The result is a system that can no longer cope with the numbers of children presenting with mental health complications. While it was hard enough for children with special educational needs and disabilities (SEND) to get help before the pandemic, things are now far worse. More parents than ever are applying for assessment and treatment in the hope of accessing an education, health and care plan (EHCP). But according to the DfE, only 49.2% of applications are established within the requisite 20 weeks, down from 59.9% in 2021. Hundreds of children are waiting more than two years to be issued with the plan that details the support they need.

While requests for EHCPs have surged, funding for them has not. And this growing burden is crippling local authorities. According to the County Council’s Network, which represents 20 county councils and 17 unitary councils, they are not receiving enough financial support from central government. This year, councils’ budget deficits accrued on Send spending are expected to rise from £2.4 billion to £3.6 billion.

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It all points to a system in crisis. Emma tells me it took eight years for her daughter, Grace, now 11, to be diagnosed with autism. She still isn’t receiving the help she needs and hasn’t been in school since last October. Emma has taken matters into her own hands and is taking an MA in occupational therapy in order to provide support for Grace herself.

“It’s a two-year course, but that’s still faster than waiting for Grace to get help on the NHS,” she says. “The system is broken. We’ve got a cohort of neurotypical children who can just about manage in a school system. Then you’ve got a big cohort of autistic people with learning difficulties, and they naturally fit into specialist schools.” But, she tells me, it’s the in-betweeners — the cohort of autistic youngsters who don’t have learning difficulties, but really struggle in a large, noisy, overwhelming environment — who are being failed. These children are afraid of school, hate the scratchy uniforms — many children with autism have hypersensitive skin — and can’t cope with the chaos of the playground or dinner hall. “They simply can’t manage,” says Emma. “And the school is doing nothing to reduce the things that they don’t have to stress about.”

Emma is not alone in feeling that her child’s difficulties aren’t being taken seriously. Last year, in a paper entitled “School distress and the school attendance crisis: A story dominated by neurodivergence and unmet need”, psychology researchers at Newcastle University interviewed 947 parents of children who struggled to attend school because of what they termed “school distress”. The researchers found that 92% of these children were described as “neurodivergent” as opposed to “neurotypical”, with 83.4% being autistic — hardly the picture being painted by the DfE’s “it’s just a sniffle” campaign.

No wonder parents are desperate. “They feel their employers, their friends, social services, the local authority and their child’s teachers don’t believe them, aren’t listening and don’t want to hear,” says Dr Sinéad Mullally, one of the authors of the Newcastle paper. “The DfE campaign just feeds into that lack of societal understanding of the problem. Simply getting your child into school won’t solve the problem if the school is the problem.”

This disdain is borne out by what happened to nine-year-old Ellie Green. She has ADHD and autism, and though she loves school, she can suffer from debilitating bouts of anxiety and hypersensitivity. The experience of her mother, Nancy, is typical of so many parents I spoke to.

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“Ellie is academically very capable and has always been articulate, so at school they tend not to see how much she struggles in other areas,” Nancy tells me. Ellie often attends school wearing her PE kit, because it is more comfortable than the uniform. But this makes her feel different. “The need to obey the rules and be different at the same time can make her extremely anxious,” she says. “And when she struggles, as is often the case with autistic children, she may growl or make animal noises and the way a teacher responds to this could either calm the situation or send Ellie into a meltdown… A simple understanding of this would go a long way, but sometimes it can result in a teacher punishing or belittling a child.”

All too often, teachers are at a loss as to what to do. They simply aren’t equipped with the strategies to help. According to the 2023 annual education report from the National Autistic Society (NAS), only 14% of secondary school teachers had had more than half a day of autism training. Among primary teachers the figure was 39%. More money being spent on special needs provision probably wouldn’t make a significant difference to Ellie, but a change in the way children like her are treated would. As Tim Nicholls, at the National Autistic Society, told me: “School shouldn’t be a tick-box exercise in attendance. It should be about ensuring all children get the support they need to be able to thrive from well-trained staff who understand their needs. Instead of shaming parents and children for low attendance at school, the government should prioritise urgent reform of the education system.” And while it’s a little more complicated than blowing a runny nose, it wouldn’t actually cost that much.

The Government’s response to this growing catastrophe is to identify problems earlier, and to spend an extra £440 million in 2024-25. This will take spending on SEND to £10.5 billion — an increase of 60% in five years. The Labour Party hasn’t added much, which, as it prepares for government, doesn’t provide anxious parents with much solace. But as Catriona More from the Independent Provider of Education Advice says, just throwing money at the problem isn’t going to make much difference. Local authorities aren’t motivated to ensure that children are given the help to which they’re already entitled. “Following the law seems to be widely regarded as an optional activity, with very little requirement on local authorities to be accountable for this,” she says. “The existing SEND system doesn’t need fundamental reform: it needs to be made to work as it should.”

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Not everyone is so positive about the existing system. Others believe wholesale change is required, at least to find a way to understand why so many children need help. Dr Fisher believes that this means facing up to the effects and aftermath of the pandemic. “What is missing in government thinking is accepting that this generation has gone through a massive event in their lives, which undermined the sense of safety that many of them had in the world,” she says.

And right now, the Government doesn’t seem to grasp the extent of the problem. DfE sources insist that the attendance campaign was intended only to discourage absenteeism where children had coughs or mild anxiety rather than serious SEND issues  — though they didn’t define “mild” anxiety. But such is the rigidity of our education system, there seems to be little or no attempt to interrogate the reason for these high levels of absenteeism.

Such a careless attitude towards vulnerable children shames the system and consigns that cohort to a bleak future. A child’s needs must come first — not a school’s targets. And if a student is reluctant to go to school, it’s a sign of a greater problem. Perhaps we need to rethink the role of schools: increasingly, they are becoming more rigid in focus — more vocational and less creative. Throwing cash unthinkingly at this is neither going to help the anxious children nor regain the confidence of parents.

“The problem is that they aren’t listening to us, and don’t seem able to learn anything from what we’re trying to tell them,” says Ellie’s mother, Nancy. “Education should be the key to unlocking the world and a passport to freedom. By that measure, more and more of our children are becoming prisoners.”

*Some names and locations have been omitted or changed in order to protect the identities of children.

For Edinburgh University officials are stifling my efforts to help find the truth about the origins of Covid-19 in order to protect one of their top academics, who finds himself a central figure in a furore of worldwide significance. It might seem a long way from Wuhan, where the pandemic erupted at some point in 2019, to Scotland’s genteel capital. But at the core of debate over the birth of a strange coronavirus stands an evolutionary biologist called Andrew Rambaut. This influential professor, among the world’s most cited scientists, is accused of playing a key role in efforts by a cabal of prominent experts to suppress the idea Covid might be linked to risky research carried out inside a Chinese laboratory.

Science, of course, depends on data, evidence and unfettered debate. And tracking down Covid’s origins could help protect the planet from future pandemics; it might even have implications for the global tussle between autocracy and democracy. But it seems clear now there was an alarming cover-up led by the heads of major American and British research funding bodies — and the emails exchanged between Rambaut and other leading players might shed light on what else went on behind the scenes.

Edinburgh University boasts a “culture of openness” on its website. But it rejected my requests under the Freedom of Information Act to access these emails on the basis that such a move might affect their professor’s health and safety. After 27 months — and following my appeal to Scotland’s Information Commissioner — the university admitted finally it held the information that I sought. However, it declined still to release it into the public domain, and rebuffed similar requests on the same grounds from US Right to Know, a public health campaign group that has winkled out significant information on these issues using similar tactics.

So in the absence of their evidence, let us examine some of the existing data. After all, as Conan Doyle once wrote to explain how dodgy theories can get bolstered to mask the truth, “there is nothing more deceptive than an obvious fact”. There are at least 10,000 cities on our planet. And yet, Covid emerged in the Chinese metropolis of Wuhan. This sprawling city is hundreds of miles from the nearest colonies of wild bats with similar coronaviruses, found in the tropical caves of southern China, so the location surprised even Shi “Bat Woman” Zhengli, their leading expert on such diseases. She is based at Wuhan Institute of Virology, China’s most important bio-security laboratory and the biggest repository of bat coronaviruses in Asia. It had known safety concerns. And it was conducting risky research to boost the infectivity of mutant bat viruses in humanised mice in low-level biosafety conditions.

Other labs in the city were also carrying out cutting-edge scientific work. So it did not take the forensic genius of a great detective to suspect the emergence of Sars-CoV-2 — the strain of virus that causes Covid-19 — could possibly be tied to research in the city. Especially when this new disease had a feature not seen on more than 200 similar types of coronavirus called a furin cleavage site, which allows its spike protein to bind effectively to cells in many human tissues.

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Maintaining on an open mind regarding all possible scenarios the available data might indicate should not have been controversial. This is, after all, the basis of science. Yet from start of the pandemic, a few prominent scientists, led by the bossses of the most important research funding bodies in Britain and the US, publicly dismissed fears Covid might be linked to a Wuhan lab. This led the suggestion to be scorned as “conspiracy theory”, condemned by patsy journalists, and even dismissed by some people as racist.

Among these experts was Rambaut, who ran the online site that first published the Sars-CoV-2 genome after it was leaked by a brave Chinese scientist in early 2020 in tandem with their mutual friend Eddie Holmes, a Sydney-based British virologist. Before the pandemic, both men were critics of the sort of “misguided” virus-hunting carried out by Wuhan scientists such as Shi in those bat caves of southern China. Some of this work was carried out with Western partners, especially the controversial British scientist Peter Daszak and his EcoHealth Alliance group that was backed by US taxpayers.

Yet in mid-March 2020 — just 11 weeks after Taiwan tipped off the World Health Organisation about a weird new disease in Wuhan, and six weeks after the body had declared Covid to be an international emergency — Rambaut and Holmes were among five authors of a commentary in Nature Medicine hastily stating that they “do not believe that any type of laboratory-based scenario is plausible”. This unequivocal statement — entitled “The proximal origin of SARS-CoV-2” — was arguably the most influential scientific document published in the pandemic. It was even cited in the White House by Anthony Fauci. And it was singled out to me for its significance by Sir Jeremy Farrar, the former head of the Wellcome Trust who was appointed as the WHO’s Chief Scientist last year.

It has since been revealed through leaks, investigations, books and a barrage of freedom of information requests that these two scientific leaders, along with the head of the biggest US science funding body, were involved in covertly drafting this statement (although strangely not credited). And it emerged that some of these scientists privately feared the possibility of a laboratory link even as they drafted the paper condemning such ideas. Farrar himself had complained to Francis Collins, then the head of the US National Institutes of Health, which helped fund some research in Wuhan, about the “Wild West” biosecurity at labs in the central Chinese city. Private messages released though a Congressional inquiry — detailing “super secret” discussions between Rambaut and three fellow authors of the “proximal origins” statement — further exposed concerns that Covid might be tied to scientific research, along with concerning signs of pressure from “higher ups” to squash such a stance.

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One admitted the lab escape theory was “so friggin’ likely” based on work carried out in Wuhan and molecular data — leading Rambaut to say that their discussion of the idea “shows how plausible it is”. In February 2020 he wrote: “I personally think we should get away from all the strange coincidence stuff… I agree it smells really fishy but without a smoking gun it will not do us any good. The truth is never going to come out (if escape is the truth).”

Rambaut also said that “once you lose the market as the origin, all bets are off” — a reference to the theory that the virus originated with an infected animal in a food market, ruled out three months later by the Chinese authorities. The Edinburgh academic also wrote about “the shit show” if “anyone serious accused the Chinese of even accidental release”, arguing they should say “given there is no evidence of a specifically engineered virus, we cannot possibly distinguish between natural evolution and escape so we are content with ascribing it to natural process”.

Such discrepancies between the private views of prominent experts and their public positions, published in prestigious journals with commercial ties to China, fuel fears that powerful scientists — whether trying to appease China or mask Western funding ties to risky research — duped the world by trying to stifle debate. Needless to say, this has been firmly denied by those involved. Rambaut, however, also used social media to debunk the “Mojiang miners theory”. This suggests Sars-Cov-2 might be tied to three miners who died from a respiratory disease, similar to Covid 19, that they caught while clearing bat droppings in a cave network in south China. The trio were infected in an abandoned copper mine where scientists from Wuhan sampled RaTG13, the closest known relative of Sars-Cov-2.

Having been looking into these issues since early 2020, I requested Rambaut’s email discussions with Farrar, Fauci, Holmes and Danish evolutionary biologist Kristian Andersen in relation to that controversial Nature Medicine document. I had made an earlier effort to obtain emails between these experts through Whitehall and Sir Patrick Vallance, then the government’s chief scientific adviser, but this resulted in release of a batch of documents so heavily redacted that they were almost worthless. So I sought Rambaut’s emails with Vallance, too, on this issue.

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This was far from a journalistic fishing exercise — as proven by evidence that has emerged elsewhere from other FOI requests. These include US Right to Know’s exposure of how Daszak had secretly organised another notorious statement published in The Lancet early in the pandemic that condemned “conspiracy theories suggesting that Covid-19 does not have a natural origin” and ridiculously praised Beijing for “rapid, open and transparent” sharing of data. It was signed by 27 experts, including Farrar and two Wellcome Trust colleagues.

Daszak also authored a $14.2 million funding request to the Pentagon’s research arm for a study supposedly “defusing the threat of bat-borne coronaviruses” that suggested the insertion of “human-specific cleavage sites”. US Right to Know found last month that he envisaged much of this controversial gain-of-function work being carried out in Wuhan — although Ralph Baric, his partner on this project, admitted they might grow viruses in such low-level biosecurity that US researchers “will likely freak out”. The initial 2018 proposal was rejected since it could “put local communities at risk” — but clearly there were plans afoot for precisely the sort of high-risk work in Wuhan that could have led to the pandemic.

We still do not know the definitive answer to the riddle of Covid’s origins. But we do know China’s Communist dictatorship covered up the emergence of a deadly new virus with disastrous consequences, silencing medical whistleblowers and burying crucial data that could have saved lives. We know that two major US intelligence agencies feared the virus leaked from a lab. We heard housing minister Michael Gove tell the Covid inquiry “there is a significant body of judgement” that believes coronavirus “was man-made”. Meanwhile no sustainable evidence has emerged to prove the claims of zoonotic transmission, despite desperate efforts to link animals such as pangolins and raccoon dogs to the spread of a bat disease into humans.

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Curiously, Edinburgh University admitted last year to being over-reliant on Chinese funding with more than 7,500 students coming from Asian superpower, compared with 11,000 from England. Two months ago, Civitas think tank accused it of taking £12 million in five years from bodies with ties to China’s military — revealed through freedom of interest requests. Such sources of finance are not unusual at our universities, sadly, but it would be disturbing if such links were the real reason why this prestigious institution does not want to release important documents that might embarrass Beijing.

It rebuffed my request in an eight-page letter from its legal chief that even had the gall to argue that Rambaut had already published his views on Covid origins in that contentious Nature Medicine article “accessed over five and half million times”. The letter — ironically delayed for months by Covid’s impact on working practices — ruled that disclosure of their professor’s emails might “endanger the physical or mental health or safety of an individual” following “threatening behaviour against several academics in this narrow field”. Like many journalists, I am aware of the unsettling nature of abuse and threats. Such treatment is unacceptable for any scientist, however famous or controversial. But it should be pointed out that it is the shameful behaviour of some of science’s leading lights that turned this into such a toxic debate, which became all the more poisonous after becoming entangled in tribal politics amid disingenuous talk of conspiracy theories.

Science, like academia and journalism, should not be undermined by hiding of key information. Data, facts and evidence should be shared, not shackled or suppressed in a democracy — especially if they might cast light on the worst public health disaster for a century.

Tegnell, both revered and reviled as the architect of Sweden’s more laissez-faire Covid response, begins by restating the fundamentals in answer to a series of written questions. What was Sweden’s approach to lockdowns? “No formal lockdown used.” What about so-called “circuit-breaker” mini lockdowns? “None used.” And what was the overall result in terms of excess deaths, or the number of people who died as a result of the Covid period? “Excess mortality differs slightly depending on the method but Sweden is at the same level as the Nordic countries and sometimes lower. The UK has a considerably higher excess mortality.” Ouch.

Frankly, Dr Tegnell needn’t have said anything else. The combination of these two datapoints alone — that the only country in Europe to avoid lockdowns entirely emerged with the lowest excess death count of the whole continent — should be enough for any fair-minded evaluation of the evidence to conclude that lockdowns were a mistake. The minimum evidential threshold for a policy experiment so radical and so destructive to society must surely be that it definitely saved lives; this threshold was not met, and in fact the Swedish example suggests that the policy may well have cost lives in the longer term.

The reason the inquiry invited Dr Tegnell to answer questions was to convict Boris Johnson of recklessness in not imposing a second lockdown sooner in September 2020. Tegnell attended a now-famous Zoom meeting with Johnson and Sunak alongside Professors Sunetra Gupta, Carl Heneghan and John Edmunds in that month, to hear from alternative voices. The theory is that they delayed the autumn lockdown in part as a result of this meeting.

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In his evidence to the inquiry, Tegnell meticulously avoids the traps being set for him, insisting that on the Zoom call he shared information about the Swedish experience but avoided giving specific advice about whether the UK should lock down or not. Indeed, in a memo written to the UK government at the time and shared with the inquiry this week, he concludes that the UK should take action of some kind, but in doing so should be guided by evidence.

“The short answer to the question [of whether the UK government should intervene] is in my opinion yes,” he wrote in September 2020. “The myth that Sweden did nothing during the pandemic is false. We have initiated a wide range of activities not least in the area of communication.” There was advice to work from home where possible, for example, and to self-isolate while you are symptomatic.

But throughout, Tegnell relentlessly places emphasis on the need for evidence: if he was not convinced that a particular measure provably worked (for example mandating face masks) he refused to introduce it. As a result, except a few notices on trains for some months in 2021, Sweden avoided face-masks entirely.

Perhaps the most interesting section of Dr Tegnell’s evidence is his analysis of the impact of the Swedish constitution. Unlike in most parliamentary democracies including the UK, Swedish politicians are forbidden from interfering in the work of the government agencies, including the health agency:

“The Government sets out the objectives of the agencies’ activities and how much money they have available to them… but it has no powers to interfere with how an agency applies the law or decides in a specific case… In many other countries, a minister has the power to intervene directly in an agency’s day-to-day operations. This possibility does not exist in Sweden, as ‘ministerial rule’ is prohibited.”

In other words, the real reason Sweden resisted the global rush to lockdowns in 2020 was that its technocrats (such as Tegnell) were all-powerful. Where politicians are instantly vulnerable to media narratives, public opinion and political pressure, the Swedish agencies were constitutionally protected from these influences. They had a plan, and they stuck to it. In other contexts, I can attest, the Swedish insistence on sticking to the rules can be quite maddening; but in 2020 it saved the day. It’s a paradox that will not sit well with many anti-lockdown campaigners who see the evil technocracy as the problem, and want to sweep away the “blob”.

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Further, Sweden’s constitution has a specific approach to crisis management, designed precisely to avoid power-grabs by governments during a crisis. It enshrines three principles: responsibility (in which the normal regional authorities retain their jurisdiction during a crisis), similarity (business-as-usual as an explicit virtue and goal, so that policies during a crisis should be as similar to normal as possible), and proximity (meaning that the lowest devolved authority should retain responsibility unless that is absolutely impossible, to avoid central government taking over.) It is a rubric specifically designed to avoid power-grabs by the centre during so-called emergencies. Tegnell continues:

“Sweden’s constitutional order does not allow for the declaration of a state of emergency. Fundamental civil rights and freedoms can only be suspended in the case of war. Public health emergencies are therefore regulated by ordinary law… It is legally impossible to enforce a general quarantine or “lockdown” measures.”

So, even if the Swedish politicians had buckled to international pressure and called for lockdowns, they would have been constitutionally unable to impose them.

If the Covid Inquiry were actually interested in preparing for future crises, this lesson from Anders Tegnell is a profound one. It points in the opposite direction to the “muscular” Asian-style central government so revered by Dominic Cummings and Michael Gove. It suggests that if you want to protect people during a so-called crisis, keep the politicians out of it, slow the spread of panic and enshrine in law the virtue of “keep calm and carry on”. It used to be considered a British virtue; a Covid inquiry that was more connected to reality might have rediscovered it.

The first Wetherspoon I went into was The Cherry Tree in Huddersfield, to hide from a morning rain shower. Even at 10.30am, it was buzzing. At first glance, it appeared to be filled with more outwardly broken people per square foot than almost anywhere I’ve been in the world: alcoholics (functioning and not), people with disabilities (mental or physical), and the very poor. If I were that way inclined, I could easily paint it as a scene to be gawked at, mocked, pitied, or all three. I could make a clown of the perfectly and precisely dressed bald gentleman who sat four tables down from me, alone, staring straight ahead, sipping his pints and periodically lifting up his tie to lick off the drops that fell on it. Yet as I sheltered in The Cherry Tree, what I saw in him, and beyond him, were hundreds of warm, human and moving scenes of otherwise lonely people not being alone.

The table directly next to mine catered to an evolving mix of mostly elderly people who seemed to all know each other. They would come, hug, sit, sip, gossip, get up, hug again, then move on. It ebbed and flowed like that through lunchtime, until by 2.00pm the table sat only a single couple, across from each other. They eventually invited me to join them. When they introduced themselves, they explained they were not a couple. Not like that, you see. Just friends, drawn a little closer now, because each had recently lost their spouse, and they were more alone than they’d ever been.

She had lost her Oliver eight months before, after 53 years of marriage. He was everything to her, and her to him. Oliver had been a builder, she had been a dinner lady, and after they raised a family, they retired to live their dream of travelling the world. Nashville, Italy, Spain, Vegas. Then he passed away. She tried to tell me more, but kept teetering on the edge of tears.

Her tablemate, a retired military man, had a similar story, although instead of tears there was a measured stoicism. A lost spouse of 22 years, and now confusion. Life wasn’t supposed to be lived without her.

So, they both came to The Cherry Tree daily, to forget and connect. We talked for two beers, and they tried, with all they had left, to keep the conversation positive — even though Huddersfield isn’t what it used to be, the world’s become crueller, and everything is going down the gutter. You have to make the best of the ups, and weather the downs, and focus on the grandkids.

It was an eerily similar conversation to one I’d once had with two widowers in McDonald’s outside of Houston, Texas: a conversation that had helped me to see the fast-food chain not as the soulless corporation to look down on, but as an essential part of local communities, especially “downscale ones”. A welcoming space in a world that’s becoming ever colder and more mechanical. Society needs these inexpensive, judgement-free zones, for people who are used to being judged; places where those of any race, class or age can get together simply to be together; where someone can escape loneliness and the elements, and sit all day in a quiet corner, reading the paper.

After The Cherry Tree, I would go into a Wetherspoon whenever I was near one, and I came to respect them even more than I respect McDonald’s. Partly because they are so pleasant: there is no blasting music or blinding lights. They have comfortable chairs with actual fabric. They are thoughtful, too, with separate spaces for every type of customer, from large families with rambunctious toddlers to sullen singles wanting to bond only with their pint. The employees are polite, which puts the customers on their best behaviour, even those who’ve been drinking for hours straight. I’ve now been to over 40 Wetherspoons, in all parts of the UK, and there are no clunkers.

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It is easy to take those things for granted, if you are well-off. But Wetherspoons are also beautiful. Other large chains aim to be dull in their consistency, but every Wetherspoon is unique. With rare exceptions — The Cherry Tree being one of them — each one is in a refurbished historical space, done up in neither a gaudy nor a sterile fashion, honouring the past while keeping it alive in the present. The preservation spirit alone ought to make cultured people gush about Wetherspoons, but, as I quickly learned, when I did gush about them, few gushed back. In fact, they tended to be downright scornful. I learned that I wasn’t supposed to love Wetherspoon, except perhaps ironically, because the chain is “problematic” with an owner “who’s a closed-minded arse”, who supported Brexit and “was wrong about Covid”.

The founder and owner of Wetherspoon, Tim Martin, is not loved by journalists, or others in the credentialed class. When I first picked up the chain’s in-house magazine, I found that the feeling was mutual. The issue in question had a blood red cover blaring, “Does Truth Matter?” with the subheading: “Many untrue statements were made about Wetherspoon during the pandemic. Wetherspoon News sets the record straight.”

The case he makes — about a snobby media class twisting his words to make him sound like an Evil Boss — might have merit, but it really doesn’t matter. The snobs can adjudicate over the finer details of the morality of going to a ’Spoons for breakfast when they’re hungover; meanwhile, the regulars’ loyalty has never wavered.

I find it particularly odd that people object to Wetherspoon because the owner supported Brexit. Because the other reason the chain gets judged is because it’s killing off smaller, family-owned pubs: undercutting them in price, due to its size and scale. I won’t deny that, after a week of going to such pubs, I was shocked at their prices. Was I really getting my favourite locally-made cask ale — the work of a craftsman, from an American perspective — for around £2? The same one for which I’d paid over double a few nights before? In short, Wetherspoon is doing exactly what the EU was doing.

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One of the main reasons for voting against Brexit was for more open markets: for the cross-border, neoliberal agenda that encourages global uniformity, and consequently larger corporations offering lower prices — like Wetherspoon. Those well-travelled, well-educated Londoners, with careers in big global corporations and enough money to pay the £7 for a pint in their uptight South Kensington local, sneer at the poor for drinking in a big corporate chain run by a bad man. But if they were consistent, they’d cheer it on, as one of the more pleasant and socially useful manifestations of corporatisation.

Because ultimately, what matters is this: that Wetherspoon is good for people. Politics has absolutely no bearing on whether that couple will keep meeting to share their sorrow over a drink, or whether that solitary man with the 1,000-yard stare will find shelter in a well-upholstered corner. It does not explain why I will continue to tour the Wetherspoons of England. All of us will keep going simply because we take ’Spoons at face value, and like them without irony. They are simply great establishments to have a pint in — which is how a pub is generally judged.

I now tune out when people start telling me the political reasons they don’t like a Wetherspoon. But I also skip over the editorial at the front of Wetherspoon News, before I read the rest of the magazine, which tells the stories of regular customers and long-time employees, such as shift leader Carol, who skipped 100 times a day for a month to raise money for cancer research, in honour of her late grandmother. 

Not surprisingly, my favourite profile to date is of a former medic, Steve Jones, who’s halfway to his retirement goal of visiting every Wetherspoon in the UK — using only trains and his feet. Wetherspoon is not its owner’s politics or even its owner. It is this: human stories, told simply.

The preferred idiom was very sweary. According to Cummings’s communications from 2020, government ministers and civil servants dealing with the Covid crisis were “useless fuckpigs”, “morons”, and “cunts”. Everyone mentioned seemed to have a nickname, as if planning a heist: “Sonic” the Hedgehog Special Advisor; “Frosty” the Snowman Minister of State at the Cabinet Office; “Trolley” the Problem Prime Minister, and so on.

Sexist bravado also apparently abounded, with Cummings threatening, in one exchange with Trolley and Director of Communications Lee Cain, to “personally handcuff” Deputy Cabinet Secretary Helen MacNamara and “escort her from the building”. In cadences reminiscent of a made man arranging concrete shoes for a troublesome foot soldier, Cummings continued: “We gotta get Helen out of [the Cabinet Office] She’s fucking up Frosty. She’s fucking up me and Case. She’s trying to get spads fired and cause trouble on multiple fronts. Can we get her in Monday for chat re her moving to [the Ministry of Housing, Communities, and Local Government] … we need her out ASAP. Building millions of lovely houses.”

Yet in the flesh at the Inquiry, Cummings was more penitent schoolboy than would-be gangster, apologising repeatedly for his previous “terrible” and “appalling” language. And the contrast was also stark with his written submission, in which, as others have also noted, he came across more like Adrian Mole than Harvey Keitel. (A characteristically mournful extract: “Although I was/am often described as ‘all powerful’ in No 10 in 2020 this is false and very misleading regarding Covid… For example, in January 2020 I could not even stop Chris Grayling being appointed by the PM to chair the Commons intelligence committee”.)

Equally, when the next day MacNamara herself appeared at the Inquiry, giving us first sight of Cummings’s much-maligned female nemesis, the deep histrionics running through his communications about her became even more discernible. For if his own fictional lodestar seems to be Nineties Tarantino films, MacNamara’s seems to be Bridget Jones Diary — even down to the fact of having once brought a karaoke machine to a lockdown party at Downing Street.

Though appearing calm and self-assured on the stand, MacNamara’s reported messages to fellow officials seemed almost parodically self-deprecating and tentative — perhaps partly due to the calibre of the individuals she was dealing with at the time. One email to the Cabinet Secretary from 2020 about the inadequate fit of most PPE with female bodies started with the words “Just when you thought you were out of the woods on annoying emails from me” and closed with “I didn’t know who to annoy with this so chose you”.  She signed off with a fist emoji but immediately felt the need to explain, quasi-humorously: “that’s a fist bump not a punch”.

And as the mostly male officials around her focused their attention on managing manly pursuits like “football, hunting, shooting and fishing” — ignoring trifling issues like women being locked down with no escape from violent partners, or having to give birth alone — with touching optimism MacNamara bought “multiple copies” of a book about male bias in policy for her colleagues to read. Indeed, it seems increasingly likely that, when Cummings furiously said of MacNamara, “we cannot keep dealing with this horrific meltdown of the British state while dodging stilettos from that cunt”, he was really trying to get out of reading Invisible Women by Caroline Criado-Perez.

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Some dissatisfaction has been expressed among the commentariat about the extent to which the Inquiry’s KCs — often sounding like gently disappointed headmasters — have focused on the bad language of dramatis personae like Cummings. Writing in The Spectator, witness Professor Carl Heneghan complained of the Inquiry that he “had submitted a 74-page statement on what I thought it should discuss. Instead the main topic was rude words in old WhatsApp messages.” For many, understandably tired of endless trivial complaints about hurt feelings stemming from inappropriate word choices, it perhaps feels like a capitulation to focus less on what a person said or did and more upon how, exactly, he said it.

Still, I don’t think that focusing on the way Cummings and others expressed themselves at work is wholly tangential to the main business of the Inquiry. For a person’s words are one of the main sources of evidence we have in judging their character, understood as a relatively fine-grained collection of personality traits. And there is a definite public interest in knowing which characters, precisely, are supposed to be running the country.

It is why a public inquiry’s unusual access to an individual’s emails and private messages is often so potent — for we get to find out, relatively directly, what sort of people are behind the public actions that affected so many lives. When combined with witness statements, cross-examination transcripts and other material, onlookers can get genuine insight, not just into what a person said or did, but also into who they are: their intellectual obsessions, quirks, and blind spots; their talents and inadequacies; their vices and virtues; whether they are funny or charming, or pompous or boring, or patronising or evasive, or whatever. No wonder other public figures apparently get so worried about WhatsApp disclosure.

In Cummings’s case, there are also hundreds of blog posts over the years to add to the overall picture. To read one of them is to travel on a syntactically unexpected, invective-laced and often hysterical emotional journey — full of quotes from famous men, head-spinning new ideas (“It would be great if Oxford created alternatives to PPE such as Ancient and Modern History, Maths for Presidents, and Coding”); undecipherable technical jargon; and deep gloom about the future, assuming the world continues not to listen to him (“such is life in a country that increasingly resembles the trajectory of the Austro-Hungarian Empire”).

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Cummings’s musings existed in the public domain well before any of his high-profile public appointments. It still astonishes me that anyone reading them could excitedly call off the search for their next political adviser. It’s hard not to wonder whether his appeal was so great for his employers because, though they personally couldn’t understand what he was on about, they were still impressed by the superficial signs of cleverness and staggering self-belief and desperately hoped it all made sense to someone else.

We are, after all, in a strange place these days, in which we pretend we can understand everything relevant about another person’s motives and meaning from just a small, context-free snippet of their discourse. And yet we tend to pay little attention to the obvious warning signs embedded in much larger chunks of publicly available information (such as, for instance, the fact that Cummings reportedly used to sign himself into No. 10 as “Osama Bin Laden”). Perhaps it is partly just a matter of not having enough time or a long enough attention-span to do the reading. But perhaps another reason for myopia in higher Tory echelons about Cummings’s evident weak points was that they felt his swearing, scowling presence there was a comforting counter to a general atmosphere of stifling political correctness and conformity.

If so, I understand this impulse. The more that mindless progressive types try to micromanage language and instil irrational guilt in their traditional po-faced manner, the more tempting it is to stick two fingers up at the lot of them and to start striking deliberately offensive poses just for the hell of it. And if you can’t do that, perhaps the next best thing is to hire someone who will do it for you; someone whose socially transgressive interventions will act as satisfyingly irritating provocations to any mealy-mouthed, rule-quoting pencil-pushers in the vicinity.

In a microcosm, this is the dynamic that appears to be inhabiting large parts of the Right-leaning political spectrum at the moment. The unstated ethos seems to be that if my attitude-policing, finger-wagging political enemy is against something — in this case, using outrageously rude and bullying language at work — then I must be for it; and vice versa. And of course it doesn’t hurt that large swathes of the electorate are similarly fed up with being told off by self-righteous missionary-types.

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But to base your current political sensibilities on what your opponents hate is to court destruction, whether on the Right or the Left. It gives the enemy effective control of the political agenda and can end with some deeply counterproductive, incoherent decision-making. Just as no Home Secretary supposedly interested in free expression should be talking about banning Palestinian flags just because some deeply revolting people currently want to wave them, no government minister should ever employ a loose cannon with an apparent case of oppositional defiance disorder, just because it tends to set the teeth of members of the Blob on edge. As the Trolley knows all too well by now, such initially tempting ideas tend to come back to haunt you.

We have yet to understand the full cost to Britain of having had such an anarchic crew at the heart of government during one of its worst crises in recent history; nor of the way that degraded norms in workplace communication enabled other forms of dysfunction to proliferate there. At the very least, it is already suggested from MacNamara’s testimony that the atmosphere resulted in some chaotic and damaging choices. As she said at the time, in an email to superiors about the lack of options for victims of domestic violence during the first lockdown: “It is very difficult to draw any conclusion other than women have died as a result of this.”

Perhaps the Inquiry will eventually shed some light on this. But either way, Cummings doesn’t seem to have learnt much from the experience. The day after his Inquiry appearance, he was back on social media in his more familiar Lord of Misrule guise, responding to criticism by asking: “so is the problem a/ me calling Hancock ‘a lying cunt killing people’ or b/ Hancock actually being a lying cunt killing people?!” And it doesn’t seem to occur to him that the answer might be “both”.

This week, he joined me at the UnHerd Club to discuss everything from our evolving attitudes to war and Joan of Arc, to Covid, the ECHR and Roe v. Wade. Below is an edited transcript.

Freddie Sayers: Lord Sumption, you’ve kindly agreed that we are on “ask me anything” rules. Our ambition is to move between your recently completed history of the Hundred Years War and contemporary controversies that a historical perspective might shed light on. Let’s see how that goes! 

To begin with, it’s remarkable how much the historical period you’ve devoted 43 years of your life to is defined by war.

JS: War is crucial. Until the beginning of the 20th century, the two principal collective activities of mankind were religion and war. The purpose of the state was to serve the second of those things, but usually the first as well. War is at the heart of the experience of societies. It is what created the state, in that war made it necessary for the state to find a way of organising the resources of a country. It’s something that, during the Hundred Years War, the English government initially did very much better than the French, which is why, although they were a smaller, less populated, less rich country, they won their battles initially. The tables were reversed later. But war is absolutely critical to an understanding of the creation of the state and of human societies. That doesn’t just apply to this country. It applies to pretty well every country.

Medieval societies had a completely different attitude towards conflict. We regard war today as an unwanted catastrophe that periodically breaks in on us against our wishes. They regarded war as the norm, the normal way of settling international disputes, and quite a few internal disputes. And so, people didn’t say: “This is terribly wasteful, we could be spending the money on new universities or the National Health Service.” It was not felt that the duty of the state extended to relieving poverty or to promoting human happiness. Therefore, there was nothing wrong with war, it was a perfectly reasonable thing to spend what money you had on. It’s an attitude that, today, it’s quite hard to work your way into.

FS: Although given the news of the past fortnight, it is clear that primal war over territory, between peoples that don’t have any hope of seeing eye to eye, is still a feature of today.

JS: It is as old as the hills. In the 14th century, the English adopted what I can only describe as terrorist tactics to try and batter the French government into submitting to their demands. They conducted huge raids in which they indiscriminately killed large numbers of people and burned whole villages. This is what we would call terrorism. It really wasn’t until the 18th century that war became a battle between organised armed forces. We’re now reverting to an earlier pattern in which at least one side in any war is a disorganised group of people. Hamas is a good example. They’re semi-organised, and their object is indiscriminate violence because they do not have the resources to confront whoever their enemy is with the same sort of weapons. If you are a semi-state, and the underdog, this is how you wage war. England was 100% of a state in the 14th century, and they still waged war that way.

FS: So you think what we saw on 7 October in Israel — the killing of infants, the kidnapping of elderly people: there would be no qualms about that in the 1400s?

JS: None at all. There were theoretical qualms about killing priests and pilgrims. But that was it. Everyone else was fair game. We have an image of the late Middle Ages as an age of chivalry. Actually, chivalry was a purely decorative concept, a form of aristocratic showing off. It had almost no implications for the conduct of war, except that it governed the rules about taking prisoners and ransoming them — taking prisoners was very profitable because you could sell them. So apart from that, chivalry was a decorative illusion. It was actually a very grubby and violent period. On the whole, I don’t believe that humanity changes very much. The technological possibilities which enabled them to achieve their objectives have changed quite radically, obviously. But their ambitions and moral sensibilities have not changed at all and we can see that all around us.

FS: Do you think we are regressing back to a more medieval mode of warfare?

JS: Organised wars, conflicts between disciplined armies — I’m certainly not suggesting we won’t see more of those. That would be tempting fate. But all the wars since the Second World War — possibly the Korean War is an exception — have involved loose associations of guerrillas and terrorists either facing other similar groups or facing organised armies like the Western armies in Iraq and Afghanistan.

FS: Much of your history is concerned with the formation of England and France as nations. Do you think that nations are receding from the prominence they have historically enjoyed?

JS: On the contrary, I think nations, after a period in which they were thought to be rather old hat, are coming back. I think that national self-interest is reasserting itself in quite a big way.

FS: Since we touched on the current conflict, it would be remiss not to ask what you think the legal situation should be here in the UK regarding Israel-Palestine protests. There has been a lot of discussion of whether slogans like “Palestine shall be free, from the river to the sea” should be deemed illegal as they are supporting a terrorist organisation or advocating the destruction of Israel. Where do you think the line should be?

JS: There’s been an awful lot of nonsense talked about this, some of it coming from surprising authorities like the Home Secretary. Hamas is a proscribed organisation. It’s illegal to support them. I don’t think that it’s illegal to support — lawfully, without violence — the cause which they support violently. I do not think it’s illegal to say that Palestine should be a distinct state. I don’t think it’s illegal to say that Palestinians have a legitimate grievance. (These are not necessarily my views, but they are views, which it’s perfectly legal to express.) The mere fact that most Palestinians live in an area, Gaza, which is controlled by Hamas, does not mean to say that everything that you say in favour of the Palestinians is necessarily to be treated as equivalent to supporting Hamas. So a great many of the slogans, the demonstrations, and the flags that we’ve seen in the streets are not illegal at all, at least not on that ground.

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FS: Are you worried that normal freedom of expression is being imperilled?

JS: I don’t think so far it’s been imperilled. I think what we’ve seen so far is some rather silly and ill-considered statements from people who should know better. We’ve got to see how the situation develops. My impression, for what it’s worth, is that we are tending slightly to recede from the initial feeling that all good men and true must necessarily support Israel. I think that a realisation of the humanitarian consequences of the Israeli invasion of Gaza has caused quite a lot of people — not everybody, but a lot of people — to pause. And on the face of it, it looks as if an invasion of Gaza would have some of the indiscriminate qualities that people quite rightly objected to when practised by Hamas.

FS: I’m going to take us back to the late Middle Ages now. Joan of Arc is perhaps the standout character of your last volume. And it’s just the most extraordinary story and oddly quite a contemporary one.

JS: She is the most interesting phenomenon, I agree. The Middle Ages basically believed that women were unfit for any responsible job other than heads of state. You could be a queen, but you couldn’t be anything else. Joan of Arc clearly and spectacularly broke that convention. She was a 17-year-old peasant who reversed the course of the war in the space of a year. That was a very remarkable thing. She challenges objective history. No serious historian can really believe in miracles, however religious he may be (and I don’t). On the other hand, some of the things that she did are difficult to explain short of divine intervention.

So what is one to do if the probability points to something that you can’t possibly believe in? I think the answer is that, in war, there are risks and there is bluff. And people who take risks, and try bluffing, often get somewhere. It’s usually luck. It’s not an act that can be sustained for that long, but it wasn’t sustained for very long. Joan of Arc’s military career lasted less than a year. Napoleon said that, in war, three quarters of it is morale, and the rest of it is manpower and all the rest. And I think a lot of experienced soldiers, certainly a lot of historians, would agree with that.

FS: So a 17-year-old girl — you describe her as anorexic in your book, illiterate, who dresses in men’s clothes, somehow manages to get herself to the court of the Dauphin and become the mascot of the French within months. So, she was a sort of influencer?

JS: Yes. She transformed the morale of the French, and completely destroyed that of the English. And that was something that not only the French thought, but the English agreed with. The Duke of Bedford, who ruled the English occupied parts of France, in his post mortem on what had happened, said: this woman was a miracle worker. He didn’t think that she was inspired by God — the miracles were the work of the Devil — but that she had supernatural powers, and that they destroyed the English morale was something that he regarded as self-evident. The records that we have of the interrogation of English prisoners of war taken by the French around that time bear out exactly the same story.

FS: Is it ridiculous to make the comparison to someone like Greta Thunberg?

JS: Well, Greta Thunberg has this much in common with Joan of Arc: Joan of Arc was widely regarded by the professional soldiers as a damn nuisance. They kept their councils of war in the middle of the night when she was in bed, or when she was somewhere else. And I think there’s a lot of feelings of the same sort, among people who are actually serious climate change authorities, about Greta Thunberg. But Greta Thunberg was a demonstrator; Joan of Arc was a fairly active doer.

FS: Although she didn’t actually fight. 

JS: No, she didn’t actually fight. She was in the middle of the melée, and she had a sword and axes and things, but she never killed anybody. She told her judges that, and all the evidence bears it out. She was there essentially as a morale booster.

On the coronation march to Reims to crown Charles VII, all the towns opened their gates because she simply appeared in front of them and said: “Open your gates, in the name of God.” They had heard slightly exaggerated stories of her miracle-working in the Loire Valley and they were terrified. And that worked a dream until she came to the walls of Paris. They didn’t open the gates. Paris was the great capital of the English and the Dukes of Burgundy, and the population was onside and they fought back. She announced her mission, demanded that they open the gates, and said they would be sent to Hell by the God of justice if they didn’t. And the response from a quite lowly crossbowmen was, “Shall we now, you brassy trollop,” whereupon he loosed his crossbow and caused her quite serious injuries, which prevented her from taking any further part.

FS: The beginning of the end for Joan of Arc.

JS: It rather damaged her credibility!

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FS: One other event that took place in this huge period between the 1300s and the mid-1400s was, of course, the Black Death, the huge plague that ravaged both England and France. Do you think this history and your sense of proportion were part of your background thinking when our own pandemic took place in 2020? 

JS: My sense of history told me that there had been an awful lot of epidemics, which were at least as serious, usually more serious than Covid. And it seemed to me, therefore, that to overreact, to treat this as an occasion for closing down all social life, was, frankly, absurd. It was a serious enough illness. But it was not unprecedented. And humanity has survived without inflicting these appalling tortures on itself perfectly satisfactorily through much worse epidemics. The Black Death was one example. But there are very many others.

There is one similarity, which is worth noting. In the Black Death and during other epidemics of bubonic plague in the Late Middle Ages, people used to believe that they had suffered a terrible infliction sent to them by God. It was due to their sinfulness. So they organised processions around the walls of the towns in which they lived in which they flagellated themselves. And during the Covid inquiry, we flagellated ourselves quite unnecessarily.

In my view, they were more sensible approaches than lockdowns. But what the two incidents had in common was a feeling that if you didn’t modify the flesh, if you didn’t inflict some misfortune on yourselves, you were going to be a sucker for this disease. People did it without any kind of religious motivation. So that’s an important difference. But the desire to inflict damage on yourself in order to ward off what you believe to be an impending catastrophe is a fundamental feature of human psychology at most historical times.

FS: If we look at other dissenting figures of authority, I think you could almost observe a trend, that people who had a broader learning, a broader interest than purely one particular branch of one particular science, tended to take a view more similar to yours. Sunetra Gupta for example, the scientist from Oxford, is also a novelist. Do you think there’s something in that?

JS: I think the more experience that you have of life — and history is essentially a source of vicarious experience — the more sceptical you are likely to be about any magic bullet solution. What was remarkable about Covid was that in deciding upon lockdowns the Government didn’t even look at perfectly modern examples of reasons why you shouldn’t do this. It is absolutely clear that they never considered, and discouraged other people from considering, the downsides — economic, financial, educational, social, mental health issues. This was a classic example of an extreme magic bullet mentality: “We are going to lock people down, we do not care what the collateral consequences might be, because we’re only interested in one thing, which is reducing deaths from Covid. We don’t mind if deaths from dementia go up, if deaths from untreated or undiagnosed cancer go up.” It is the most narrow minded conceivable approach to any major policy issue. You don’t need to go back to the 14th century in order to see why.

FS: When you look back at the Covid period, now three years on, do you think you can now say with confidence that you were right and that lockdowns were a mistake?

JS: I felt I could say that with confidence at the time actually! I think that the proportion of people who think lockdowns were a good idea has diminished, but a majority still think that. I also think that I converted very few people. What I did do I suspect was cheer up a lot of people who already agreed with me.

Now, lots of people come up to me and say: “Thank you for what you said, during the lockdown.” And I got a huge postbag of 200 letters a week and I would think 90% of them were supportive. I’m not suggesting for a moment that this is a statistically representative sample of the British population. But the sorts of people who take the trouble to write your letter are people who want to say: more power to your elbow. And that’s obviously cheering — you feel you’re doing something useful, even if it’s not persuading people on the other side of the argument.

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FS: Do you look at society differently — with greater trepidation — or feel like the institutions of our liberal society are more fragile than you had thought they were? Has it changed your world view?

JS: Yes. I was surprised by the readiness of people to submit to this. I have always been fascinated and appalled in roughly equal measure by the political writings of Thomas Hobbes. Ever since I was a teenager, when I first read Leviathan. Everybody should read Hobbes, because he is the most persuasive master of the English language and of advocacy that I know. If you follow his syllogisms, one after the other you agree with them all, and you suddenly end up in a place you didn’t want to be. And you say, “Blimey, how did I get here?”

But the serious point about Hobbes is that he believed life was horrible, and that fear of its horrible qualities was what made people accept despotism. Hobbes believed in absolute government and he quite correctly noted that fear was what drove people to support absolute governments. Now, we have actually managed, since Hobbes was writing in the middle of the 17th century, to live our public lives on quite different principles. We’ve managed, without fear and without the systematic application of coercion, to achieve a moderately civilised system of political discourse and decision making. And that’s very remarkable. But what struck me about the Covid epidemic, was that quite suddenly, you found yourself reverting to a pattern which I thought we had abandoned for nearly 300 years. That was a dismaying experience.

And it was one reason why I took a reasonably public and prominent role in criticising it. And I actually believe in the principle that former judges should, on the whole, not engage in politically controversial things unless they have a strictly constitutional or legal nature. But it seems to me that everybody has a threshold beyond which the issue is so serious that you have to stand up and be counted. And I felt that this was a change in the collective mentality of not just this nation, but European nations and North American nations generally, which had really sinister implications for the future of liberal methods of government. And it seemed to me this was far more important than any conventional limitations on what former judges ought to say.

FS: Do you think we’re going to get it back, that liberal mood, or do you think it is broken? 

JS: I’m both an optimist and a pessimist on this. It depends on what your timeframe is.

FS: How about the next 50 years?

JS: At the moment, we are in a mood which progressively jettisons basic liberal positions, like the observance of Rules of Procedure for government, which are more important than the outcome of any particular issue. And you’ve got to have a devotion to the rules, which transcends your attachments to particular issues, so that you do not regard it as an outrage when you lose on some, as you inevitably will. I also think that the classic liberal position on free speech is seriously undermined. I would expect these trends to continue for a while, certainly beyond my lifetime, and possibly beyond yours, I don’t know.

What will happen is that the current trend which is common to both Left and Right, to favour more authoritarian ways of doing things, to favour the idea that society should only have one view on something, and it is a political responsibility to determine what that view is going to be — all that is going to get worse. And I think that the ultimate result will be an authoritarian style of government across Europe and North America. North America may well be the first place that one sees it in its ultimate culmination. I think that at that point, people will say: “We don’t like this very much.” And at that stage, you will see a reversion to a more considerate model of social existence. I can’t say how long that’s going to take, but it might be decades.

FS: One example that you’ve been in the news talking about recently — which might seem to go against what you’re saying, in that it’s about leaving behind a set of rules — is the European Court of Human Rights. To some people, that court would be a nice example of a liberal institution respecting rules beyond individual tribes and nations. And yet, you want the UK to leave it?

JS: Yes. I don’t think this is likely to happen, but it would be a good thing if it did. I am not against a rule-based system and I am not against human rights. I simply think that we need to decide what human rights we want and to what degree we want them. At the moment, the problem is not the Convention itself, which is a collection of principles, not a single one of which I would question in any way. What I oppose is the legislative process by which the Strasbourg court, the European Court of Human Rights, has emancipated itself from the only thing that the states party to the Convention ever agreed, which was the text of the Convention. I do not think that it is the function of judges to revise the laws to bring them up to date — that is a function of representative institutions, certainly in a democracy.

So I would favour withdrawing from the European Convention and substituting it for an identical text, but simply interpreting it responsibly in accordance with what it’s intended to mean, and not in accordance with a wider political agenda — which I’m afraid is the animating spirit currently of the Strasbourg Court. I had hoped before that the Strasbourg Court would learn from the occasions when, particularly in this country, we have jibed at what they’ve done. I had hoped that things would improve as a result of the Brighton declaration, and its statement in favour of what was called, rather pompously, “subsidiarity”. I no longer believe that the Strasbourg Court is capable of independent reform.

FS: So you don’t mind the rules, but you think they’ve been politicised or they’re being incorrectly applied?

JS: I think the point about rules is that they’re designed to bring some kind of order to human affairs. If you have a rule which depends on whatever a legislator in Strasbourg thinks it ought to be, the essential predictability which rules are designed to achieve is gone. I have no problem about the notion of a foreign tribunal deciding whether our observance of human rights is adequate provided that the tribunal in question follows the rules. What I object to is a situation in which they require everyone else to follow rules of their own devising, but recognise no rules governing their own decisions.

FS: Do you think we should be renegotiating or reconsidering the Geneva Convention on refugees as well?

JS: I don’t know. I certainly think that the Geneva Convention was made for a different world: a world in which travel across national borders was a lot more difficult, and a lot more expensive. Originally, asylum rules were designed for very prominent national leaders of rebellious movements such as Lajos Kossuth, the great Hungarian nationalist of the 19th century. Then, in the wake of the catastrophe involving millions of displaced persons at the end of the Second World War, there was a strictly temporary Refugee Convention designed to enable these people to be resettled. In 1951, that was changed so that it became a permanent institution, and not limited to the persons displaced by the Second World War.

I think the people who agreed to that at the time did not appreciate that, with the disappearance of the European colonial empires, a lot of the world would come into chaos; that people suffering persecution would become very numerous — millions and millions in many countries of the world; and that, simultaneously, the improvements and the easing of the actual logistical difficulties of travel over long distances would enable lots of them to make their way towards the remaining ordered parts of the world.

FS: It sounds like you think the Geneva Convention is no longer fit for purpose?

JS: It isn’t fit for purpose, but whether one should depart from it is a different question. I confess that I’ve not studied this as carefully as I have studied the problems associated with the European Convention on Human Rights. I think it’s obvious that the Refugee Convention was made for a world that no longer exists. I am much less certain about what we should do about that.

FS: We’re going to go back to the late Middle Ages one last time. The whole series of volumes is about Britain (or England) and France — and whether they were to become one country or not. There was a moment when it looked like the Lancaster kings would manage to unify the kingdoms. That obviously didn’t happen. We retreated and the Channel became our border. 

You have a house in France. You spend a lot of time there. You were against Brexit, even though you’re now in favour of leaving the Strasbourg Court. Do you feel like we are more separate from Europe than at any time since the Hundred Years’ War?

JS: Well, before the Hundred Years’ War, England was a European polity because it ruled a significant chunk of western France. It was never an island politically until the Hundred Years’ War: it became one as a result of the war. But Britain has always engaged with the Continent. William Pitt the Younger was one of a number of people who remarked that the frontier of England is actually on the Rhine. He wasn’t asserting a right to rule everything on the western side of the Rhine. He was saying: that is the boundary on which our security depends. It’s not the Channel. So there’s a mixture of insularity and pre-European integration with Europe. It’s part of the dualism around British foreign policy that has always existed.

One of the reasons why I think that Brexit was a mistake was that it is a repudiation of five centuries of intelligently conceived foreign policy in Britain. The main policy of successive governments in Britain, since the 16th century, has been to avoid a situation in which a single power dominated the whole of continental Europe. That is why we went to war with Louis XIV at the start of the 18th century, with Napoleon at the beginning of the 19th century, and with Germany twice in the course of the 20th century.

What we have done by withdrawing is, first of all, to remove from the European system the principal opponents of the federalisation of Europe. We were undoubtedly the leading objectors to this, and we had actually successfully resisted it for many years. In this way, we have contributed to what will over the next few years become the greater unification of Europe. And at the same time, we have abandoned any possible claim to influence what it does. So we have done something that, it seems to me, has negated decades, centuries of serious thoughts about the strategic position of the United Kingdom in Europe.

FS: Would you vote to rejoin?

The problem about rejoining is that we wouldn’t get the golden terms that were there when we left — and that is a really serious problem. What I think will probably happen is that we will, over the next generation or two, conclude a succession of agreements with the European Union that will bring us closer to it without actually being members. And I would applaud that personally. Eventually, we may well decide that we might as well join and recover our influence.

FS: This is the perfect time to take some questions

Question One: In your Reith lectures, you talk about how the judiciary has usurped the legislature throughout many Western countries — and you give the particular example of the United States, and the controversial Roe v. Wade Supreme Court ruling. If you could advise the six conservative Supreme Court justices, what would you advise them moving forward?

JS: I can’t imagine a situation in which I would end up advising them — or a situation in which they would pay attention to me if I did. But it would be quite difficult.

The rationale of Dobbs v. Jackson Women’s Health Organization — the case which overruled Roe v. Wade — was that there was no constitutional right to abortion, from which it necessarily follows that the right to legislate on this subject reverted to the individual states. That view has been in keeping with the conservative view on the Supreme Court for a long time — although it was until recently a minority view: that the federal government, and the federal legislature, have intruded too far on the autonomy of the states.

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FS: Do you think it’s a good thing that it’s gone back to the states?

JS: Yes, I do. I thought that Roe v. Wade was a bad decision because it took an intense moral issue on which a very large proportion of ordinary Americans had strong views of their own, and decided it in a way that marginalised and rendered irrelevant the views of the public. I think that was the main reason why in Europe, where regulated rights of abortion were introduced by legislation, the issue is pretty uncontroversial now. In every case, it was done by statutes. (The only country which doesn’t have a right of abortion tool now is Malta.) The result was that people, whatever their initial views, accepted it; they don’t in the United States because they were never consulted.

Although I think that Roe v. Wade was a very bad decision, I think that Dobbs was in a way an even worse one, because I actually believe that there ought to be a regulated right of abortion. But I do not believe that it is a fundamental right. I don’t believe that it is part of the United States Constitution or any other constitution that I know of. I think it’s a matter for legislative choice. And I think the sensible legislators will do what most European legislators have done.

I think the problem about Dobbs was that Roe v. Wade had survived for 50 years, and there was no respectable reason for departing from a judgement that had become part of the basic legal structure of life in the United States. The reasons given by the Dobbs court for overruling Roe v. Wade in spite of the precedence were to my mind wholly unconvincing. I do not agree with Justice Breyer’s justification of Roe v. Wade in principle, but I wholeheartedly agree with his view that — having decided Roe v. Wade the way that they did, and having in successive decisions of the Supreme Court reaffirmed it — they should not have disabled it.

Question Two: You said that the nation-state was coming back, and I wonder what your comment would be about the level of migration which we see in this country. The figure of net migration last year of about 600,000 was widely reported — do you think that will alter the legitimacy of the nation state?

JS: I don’t believe that the nation-state is inconsistent with very high levels of migration. I think there are other objections to very high levels of migration, but not that one. The classic example of the nation state in the modern world is the United States of America, which is entirely made up of ethnic and cultural minorities coming from elsewhere. It’s the great migration state.

An awful lot depends on the culture within the state, the ability of a society to absorb migrants, and to encourage them to adopt collective attitudes which are the same as those of the rest of the original population. I actually think that this country has been quite good at that — better, for example, than France, to name one obvious country, which has also suffered even higher levels of migration.

As to what can be done about it — the argument against high levels of migration is that it promotes insecurity, it strains resources, although migrants also create wealth as well as consuming it. But these are different arguments to the ones about the existence of the nation. What can one do about it, if one takes the view that migration is excessive? The answer is it’s a mixture of national and international measures. We have the misfortune to be an island. And it’s easier to get into an island than it is to a country with land borders. This sounds ironic, but the fact is, if you’ve got a land border, you can erect a physical barrier and keep people out who do not satisfy whichever test you choose to impose on new arrivals. If you are an island, you can’t erect a barrier in the middle of the sea. But actually, our own migration figures are not as large as those of Italy, France, Greece, Germany, or Sweden. So we are not we’re not in a unique position here.

FS: It’s notable also that the French are not being especially helpful in solving the boats situation in the Channel.

JS: One can understand that — they have a bigger migration problem than we do. And they are, no doubt, happy to see some of their migrants disappearing across the Channel.

Question Three: In the last 10 days or so we’ve heard a great deal about the law of armed conflict, and international humanitarian law, which seems to be a way of possibly stilling Israel’s hand. Both concepts grew out of the just war tradition, and I’m wondering, how recognised was that in the Hundred Years’ War and did it make any difference? And will international humanitarian law make any difference or is it really about the battle of the narrative?

JS: The notion of just war is a form of natural law. And it was much favoured by theologians and civil lawyers, the successors of the Roman law tradition. In the Middle Ages, it had virtually no practical impact on the way that wars were conducted. Current just war theories are very different because they’re essentially based on treaties, in particular the various Hague and Geneva Conventions, which control the way that we use force.

One of the rules, which has been in existence at least since 1908, is that you may not target civilians, and you may not conduct operations in a way that will inevitably produce casualties among civilians disproportionate to those among actual fighters. Now, these are quite difficult concepts to apply to a fighting force, which is not a disciplined army — of the sort that people had in mind in 1908 — but is a semi-organised group of, for want of a better word, thugs, like Hamas.

FS: Should we try, though?

JS: We should try. The difference is that more is expected of organised states like Israel, with disciplined armed forces recognising an orthodox hierarchy of command. So it seems to me to be perfectly clear that for the Israelis, to conduct the war on a basis that indiscriminately targets civilians is contrary to international law, and has been for quite a number of years. It’s also contrary to international law to forcibly displace people from their homes, to blockade them in the way that Israel has been doing certainly since 2007.

FS: So you believe Israel is breaking international law?

JS: I certainly believe that it has done and that what it threatens to do now would do.

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Question Four: You mentioned the destruction of civil liberties that took place during the pandemic and what struck me especially was the abolition of negative liberty, and in particular, bodily sovereignty. Given the Hobbesian view that the security of the people is the supreme law, and given that power-hungry despots must certainly share that outlook or be aware of that, what’s to stop supranational opportunists, who may want a Leviathan, from seeking or even creating continuous insecurity and crises in order to impose their supreme law? Will we have solutions in search of problems?

JS: Well, the notion that Salus Populi Suprema Lex is actually due to Cicero and it is, to my mind, complete rubbish. The authorship of Cicero lends to it spurious respectability. But it’s actually a recipe for tyranny at a time of crisis. So I’ve never been impressed by that as a maxim of government. As to whether foreign powers or supranational authorities might promote disorder for the purpose of taking advantage, I don’t know any example where that is actually happening.

FS: I suppose maybe she was thinking about the World Health Organization, organisations like that, which might try to get the right to dictate pandemic policy in the future.

JS: That’s not creating disorder. The problem about that kind of thing is that it assumes that one size fits all. It seems to me that a completely uniform, internationally-regimented approach to dealing with, for example, a pandemic, would deprive us of the possibility of experimenting with a different approach. I think that one of the principal lessons of the pandemic was the success of Sweden in achieving a lower death toll than this country and a death toll broadly in line with the European average, without a lockdown. And it seems to me, therefore, that had we been deprived of that possibility by some kind of international arrangements, we would be much poorer. I’m in favour of a situation in which different pressures, different political situations, different constitutional positions, can produce a variety of solutions, because they are much more likely to ensure that one of them is right.

Question Five: You said previously that you think that in the near-future we probably will see a major shift towards authoritarianism across the West, and that the US might well be the first country to exhibit it. What concrete aspects, practically speaking, might take America, both politically and judicially, in that direction?

JS: I wasn’t necessarily thinking of judicial interventions. The United States has a very rigid Constitution. It has a fair-weather constitution. And the United States has had remarkably and unusually fair weather throughout its history. There have basically been only two periods of American history in which there have been serious economic difficulties. One was in the immediate aftermath of the Civil War, and the other was in the Thirties. So, America has experienced an upward trajectory, both in absolute terms, and relative to the rest of the world, for the greater part of its history.

The Great Destroyer of civil society is the disappointment of entrenched expectations. That was why most of Europe turned totalitarian between the wars. The Depression of the Thirties disappointed expectations of continuous upward movement which had become entrenched for a long time and had only briefly been interrupted by the First World War. I think that the problem that the United States has is that its rigid constitution, and in particular its legislative immobility is very ill-adapted to deal with a situation of long-term decline. I don’t think that the United States will decline in absolute terms. But I think it’s pretty clear that it will decline in its relative position in the world.

And I think that the implications of that for jobs that aren’t at the cutting-edge of technology are really very serious. And I don’t think that the Americans are likely to be very good at managing it. A much more flexible political constitution such as ours has managed to accommodate a significant relative decline since the Second World War rather successfully. And I am concerned that Trump and Trump’s doings and followers are not simply an incident related to this particularly extraordinary individual, but a symptom of a much broader malaise in the United States associated with capricious patterns of inequality, with the decline of traditional skills, and with the exportation of jobs, which is the inevitable result of the decline of traditional skills.

I am not optimistic about the future of the United States because I think that its current political travails are essentially part of a pattern that is dictated by the general situation of the country and its history, and not an unfortunate accident of the arrival of this particularly monstrous individual.

FS: Does that mean that you’re more optimistic about the prospects of the UK? Will our flexible constitution mean that we weather future declines better? 

JS: Yes, I think it will. But that doesn’t mean to say that we will avoid future decline. I think that the political consequences of decline will be much more serious in the United States than they are here. But decline is an uncomfortable experience, whether you accommodate it politically or not.

Triumph and Illusion, Volume V of Jonathan Sumption’s history of the 100 Years War, is out now.

While two centuries would be a solemn milestone for any publication, for The Lancet it’s much more than that. After the turbulence of the Covid pandemic, the journal is not only more celebrated than ever but also more embattled. It faces the fallout of a major Covid retraction and accusations of malfeasance by prominent figures.

Here, however, The Lancet is in its element. The journal’s long-reigning editor-in-chief, Richard Horton, a kind of Anna Wintour figure of science publishing, seems more sanguine than ever as he advances political and even ideological positions in the name of science with his characteristic media savvy and a constant refusal to tone it down — no matter how unruly it gets. While some may claim that this is a departure from the journal’s staid, grey roots, they’d be wrong. For The Lancet was forged by controversy.

Conceived by a fiery Victorian physician and rights campaigner named Thomas Wakley, The Lancet came into the world in a fit of protest. Born in 1795 in Devonshire to a family of yeoman farmers with 11 children, Wakley had in his early twenties married the daughter of a wealthy businessman and hospital governor who set him up with a London medical practice. Ensconced in a 15-room house at 5 Argyll Street, Wakley had every reason to believe his success imminent until one evening in 1820 when an unexpected knock on his door was followed by a brutal assault. The assailants believed (probably baselessly) that Wakley had played a role in the execution of members of the Cato Street Conspiracy, a radical plot to murder the entire cabinet and the prime minister. Wakley survived, but his house and practice were burned to the ground.

Part of the founding myth of The Lancet was that it was born from Wakley’s outrage and desperation. His insurance company refused to cover damages from the fire, leading to Wakley’s first confrontation with institutional injustice. He sued — and won. His practice had been ruined but a new career as a journalist rose from its ashes. The episode thrust Wakley’s name into the limelight and, according to a review of his 500-page 1897 biography, earned him “a reputation as a man who would fight strenuously against an injustice”.

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With The Lancet, Wakley set out to do something different. While the existing journals were the elite products of an elitist medical system, The Lancet was “founded by a marginal medical man with no reputation and a left-of-centre agenda [within] a conservative profession”, according to a 1998 history published in (none other than) The Lancet. But The Lancet was far more than an ideological and class reaction to medical orthodoxy. It was a stylistic mould-breaking experiment driven by a commitment to “entertain, instruct, and reform”. Its early editions featured chess problems, theatre reviews, and even gossip. “Our Columns will not be restricted to Medical Intelligence, but on the contrary, we shall be indefatigable in our exertions to render ‘THE LANCET’ a complete Chronicle of current Literature,” Wakley wrote in the preface to the journal’s inaugural issue.

The literary elements were quickly dropped but a more potent approach was taken up, one that construed medicine itself as an inherently — and even primarily — political endeavour. “It is widely recognised that, from its foundation in 1823, The Lancet functioned as the principal mouthpiece for the disadvantaged medical classes,” historian of medicine Michael Brown wrote in a 2014 academic article. “It is likewise recognised that, as its editor, Thomas Wakley occupied a uniquely powerful position from which to shape the radical medical political agenda.”

For Wakley, medicine was the arena of a Manichean struggle between good and evil. This played out in the pages of The Lancet as a grand melodrama, with Wakley’s pen supplying a slashing lexicon entirely out of character for a journal at that time. It was a rhetoric of “monsters, spies, and villains, of fetid dungeons and the chains of bondage”, the forces of darkness and evil embodied by the British medical establishment — in particular, surgery — that preyed on the snowy innocence of its eternal victims, the poor and disadvantaged.

In an 1828 editorial, Wakley raged with characteristic hyperbole that: “The Hydra of medical corruption is at its last gasp, and one well-directed blow may rid us of a monster, whose noxious influence has retarded the progress of science, disgraced the character of British surgery, and rendered the profession an object of public scorn.” He was talking about the Royal College of Surgeons. Wakley wrote in the same editorial that while the “tyranny” of the medical establishment was strong “we have possession of the field, and THE LANCET IS UNBROKEN”. In this sense, the publication’s name referred not only to an instrument that could pierce infected skin, but also to the pointed spear used by medieval cavalry. Wakley was the self-styled white knight of public health. The Lancet was his weapon.

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Though it was draped in the language of melodrama, Wakley had in hand a remarkably effective formula for success. His target was a corrupt system, but abstractions rarely make for good targets. Wakley, ever the effective polemicist, understood this. He directed his most ferocious attacks on individuals. In the most notorious case, The Lancet covered a lithotomy (the removal of a kidney stone) from a patient by a surgeon who was the untalented nephew of a luminary figure in British medicine. The surgery was a debacle. The procedure (inserting forceps into the male patient’s urethra to remove the stone — with no anaesthesia) should have taken 10 minutes. It took an hour. The patient, who begged the surgeon to stop, died shortly after.

It wasn’t the facts that got the journal into trouble, but the florid, withering tone it employed. Casting the procedure as a literal tragedy, the article theatrically divided the events into “Act I” and “Act II”. Bransby Cooper, the surgeon who performed the botched lithotomy, sued Wakley for libel and won (though the damages granted by the court were considerably less than what he’d claimed). While The Lancet’s coverage of Cooper’s surgery was deemed libellous, the journal had found a template for how to not simply address medical incompetence and corruption, but to catapult itself to further fame as a crusader for justice. As Brown put it: “By deliberately publishing libellous material and thus positively soliciting prosecutions, Wakley was able to locate his specifically medical campaign within the established traditions of democratic political reform.”

One of the many remarkable things about The Lancet is that it has managed to poignantly maintain its character for two centuries. In the past three years, the journal has again and again found itself at the centre of the most heated Covid controversies and scandals. The most prominent began in the first week of June 2020, less than three months after the WHO declared a pandemic, when the journal was forced to retract a paper on hydroxychloroquine — the anti-malarial drug promoted by Trump as a Covid cure — because it was based on fabricated data.

On its own, a retraction by a journal as prestigious as The Lancet would be noteworthy. But this wasn’t just any paper. For the preceding two months, the media had leaned on The Lancet’s paper, authored by a Harvard Medical School cardiologist, to claim that the Trump-touted drug was not just ineffective in treating Covid, but also dangerous. It became a weapon to attack the President, furthering the notion widespread in the media that no matter what Trump said, the opposite was likely true.

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Nevertheless, it was in the context of not just The Lancet’s hydroxychloroquine retraction but no fewer than seven other Covid-related retractions that the journal clinched the top impact factor — science publishing’s measure of influence — in its category last year, doubling its 2021 score. “I think what you saw with The Lancet is they were clearly chasing big splashy papers that would get a lot of attention,” said Ivan Oransky, the co-founder of Retraction Watch and editor of the journal Spectrum. In this, he says, the journal is no outlier. “The Lancet is like a more public version of what happens at every journal. Everybody’s chasing impact factor, everybody’s chasing particular papers.”

In the wake of the retraction, The Lancet’s editor Richard Horton mounted a very different defence. After acknowledging the paper to be a “monumental fraud”, he averred that the peer-review system that forms the backbone of science publishing isn’t equipped to detect this kind of fraud at all. “If you have an author who deliberately tries to mislead, it’s surprisingly easy for them to do so,” he told The New York Times.

This, however, raises the question of what the science journal is there to do. For Horton, the answer isn’t merely to ensure the integrity of scientific papers. Rather, it’s an explicitly political mission that can be traced directly back to his predecessor, Thomas Wakley: using science to accomplish the objectives of radical politics.

Like Wakley, Horton has created a field-defying public profile by standing on a mountain of accumulated controversy. This includes his scathing open letter to Gaza on Israel’s treatment of Palestinians, which brought accusations of antisemitism (followed by an apology); The Lancet labelling women as “bodies with vaginas” (followed by an apology); and Horton channelling the ghost of Wakley by attacking the Royal Society as a “shrill and superficial cheerleader” (followed by a semi-apology). There were also accusations that the journal vastly overestimated the number of deaths caused by the war in Iraq, drawing the ire of Christopher Hitchens, who called the study in question “moral idiocy“. And, more recently, Horton has supported Extinction Rebellion, chiding Britain’s scientific community for doing too little for “the struggle for climate justice”.

Far from being a black mark against the publication, each new episode presents Horton with an opportunity to drive home the institutional ethos that has defined the journal for two centuries — namely, that science is, and ought to be, a vanguard for politics. “Some of the great advances, like the 19th-century sanitary movement and the birth of the NHS, were not technical accomplishments but political struggles,” Horton told the Financial Times. “The idea you can strip out politics from medicine or health is historically ignorant. The medical establishment should be much more politicised, not less, in attacking issues like health inequalities and poor access to care.”

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So successful has this strategy been that it was effective in navigating Horton through the mother of all science publishing scandals — the fraudulent paper published by Andrew Wakefield in The Lancet claiming a link between the MMR vaccine and autism. It took The Lancet an astonishing 12 years to fully retract it. By that point, the damage had been done, and vaccine-related conspiracy theories had taken root.

Horton’s response to the scandal was to publish a “5,000-word avalanche of denials”, according to Brian Deer, the Sunday Times journalist who broke the story. Even more disturbingly, Horton looked to Wakefield and a number of co-authors of the MMR paper to lead the initial investigation into the fraud. “In short,” Deer wrote in the BMJ, “the accused were investigating themselves — an investigation that Horton would say ‘cleared Wakefield’.”

And in the most quintessentially Lancet fashion, the scandal did nothing to damage Horton. Far from it. In the midst of the scandal, he was awarded the Deans Medal by Johns Hopkins University in 2009. A decade later, he received the Roux Prize. Between those two honours, he received another: in 2015, he was the recipient of the “Chinese Government Friendship” award granted by the CCP. To mark the occasion, Horton offered Lancet readers soaring rhetoric on how China’s “emphasis on friendship, and the free flow of critical ideas that such friendship encourages, might offer lessons to other nations about how scientific co-operation can accelerate social and political change”.

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In the years that followed, Horton would be vocal in his defence of China. In 2016, he attended a symposium organised by the Chinese government body that ran the country’s “Thousand Talents” programme, which, according to The New York Times, “lured” Western scientists into collaboration with China using “lavish funds” that sometimes amounted to quadruple a scientist’s official salary.

There is no evidence to suggest that Horton personally took any money from China. Nevertheless, he became one of the most high-profile voices to praise China for its handling of the pandemic — not only in the Western media but in China too. In a May 2020 interview with China Central Television, he said: “I think we have a great deal to thank China for how it has handled the outbreak in Wuhan.”

Horton also claimed during the interview that questions about whether the virus might have originated from a lab in Wuhan amounted to “disinformation” based on “conspiracy theories”. This narrative would go on to form the basis of the first major publication on the question of Covid’s origin. Published in mid-February 2020, “The Lancet Letter” — as it came to be known — made baseless claims that the lab-leak hypothesis was a racially motivated conspiracy theory. It was later revealed that the man who organised the letter, Peter Daszak, funded the lab in Wuhan in question — and that four of the scientists who signed the letter were affiliated with Daszak’s NGO. More astonishingly, according to The Daily Mail, Horton admitted to being aware of the conflict of interest. Nevertheless, The Lancet waited almost a year and a half to formally disclose the conflicts.

None of this would stop, or even put a dent in, The Lancet’s ceaseless march to prestige and power. This likely has to do with the fact that the journal has built its reputation on a foundation of public scandal and melodrama. It was founded not on the principle of scientific rigour — but as a basis for radical political activism. And it remains an activist publication to this day. If he were alive now, Thomas Wakley would likely be proud of Horton, his intellectual heir, who has remained strikingly true to the founder’s vision. While the formula has brought acclaim for Horton and for the journal, the question for the rest of us is this: who really pays the price for The Lancet’s success?

For this reason — and also because my own books feature murder, mayhem, and severed body parts in kitchen sinks — I make it a rule never to assume that the views expressed by a fictional character also belong to that character’s creator. But I have made an exception for Stephen King’s latest novel, Holly, because it includes a note from King himself, at the end of the book, stating that the novel’s politics are also his own.

The novel is set in 2021, in the thick of the Covid pandemic and addresses the country’s pandemic policies directly. King writes: “A considerable portion of the American population — not a majority, I’m relieved to say — are anti-vaccination” — but those people, he says, will probably find his heroine’s Covid takes “preachy”. After her own unvaccinated, Trump-supporting mother dies of the virus, the eponymous protagonist, Holly Gibney, spends a good portion of 450 pages obsessively masking, inquiring after other people’s vaccination status, and bemoaning the selfishness of the unwashed, unvaxxed Right-wingers without whom the virus would surely have been tamed by now.

King admits: “It’s true that my opinions match hers on the subject.”

Other critics have lamented King’s lack of subtlety, but to me, what’s more striking is the lack of craft. I’ve read — and in many cases, re-read — virtually everything the man has ever written; this is the first book of his I’ve ever struggled to finish. A hallmark of King’s oeuvre is how human the horror is, how rooted in a world that is familiar and recognisable. Holly, on the other hand, feels like it was written by someone who’d been locked down for so long that he no longer remembers the basic rhythms of normal in-person conversation. Insofar as the world it depicts is recognisable, it’s only because it’s the world as it appeared online during the pandemic, filtered through the lenses of social media and cable news. Holly is nominally a detective novel, but the mystery is like a whisper-thin web that strings together one trendy Covid narrative after another, the kind of stories that went viral on Twitter because they confirmed the biases of its highly educated, politically progressive user base.

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The irony is that a number of these viral narratives were themselves fiction, fed to us by a media that had gone all in on the pandemic as a politicised spectator sport and didn’t particularly care if the stories they aired were true. It’s a bit grotesque, to see how fake news becomes repurposed, and legitimised, in fiction: when Holly’s mother catches Covid at an anti-mask rally and dies gasping to her last that the virus is a hoax, one assumes that King must have caught the relevant segment on CNN — but not the later reporting that revealed it to be a fabrication.

And while Stephen King has never shied away from addressing political topics in his work, the pro-lockdown, pro-mask, pro-vax messaging of Holly is different — not in degree, but in kind. If there’s such a thing as a unifying political principle in King’s books, it’s anti-authoritarianism. Look at who his heroes are: bullied teens, rogue gunslingers, plucky outsiders who follow their principles instead of just doing what they’re told. And his villains? They’re the corrupt bureaucrats, the officious rule followers, the control freaks-in-chief who must insist you take your medicine — for your own good, and for the greater good.

Consider The Institute, his 2019 novel in which children with supernatural abilities are kidnapped, tortured, and weaponised by a shadowy government organisation that believes itself to be the keeper of a precarious world peace. Consider Firestarter, featuring a young family on the run from the state agents who want to imprison and experiment on them. Consider Carrie, whose protagonist is failed by every authority figure in her life until the story ends in a literal bloodbath — or The Running Man and The Long Walk, both set in dystopian futures where human suffering doubles as state-sponsored entertainment. Even Annie Wilkes, the iconic villain of Misery, is terrifying not because she’s an agent of chaos but because she’s a stickler for the rules, and as such, capable of perpetuating astonishing cruelty under the guise of giving care. If Wilkes had been around during Covid, she would have loved kicking people out of their dying loved one’s hospital room in the name of social distancing protocols.

The critical consensus in certain corners is that this is the result of King having gone woke — perhaps in an attempt to stave off cancellation for work that hasn’t aged well. There may be something to this — King’s pre-Y2K oeuvre makes heavy use of the Magical Negro trope, not to mention the n-word, which white authors are no longer allowed to put in the mouths of their characters. And some of his more recent books do carry a whiff of attempted atonement for past political incorrectness. Sleeping Beauties, co-written with son Owen, is an enjoyable thriller that nevertheless also reads like a 700-page plea for membership in the Good Male Feminist club (as do many of King’s tweets). Billy Summers, published in 2021, features a protagonist whose inner monologue is deeply disdainful of Donald Trump, and King himself has said that The Institute is intended as an allegory for the Trump administration’s border policies.

Pandemic aside, Holly definitely has the fingerprints of 2020 political Twitter all over it. The book’s female villain, one half of a pair of cannibal murderers who think they’ve found the proverbial fountain of youth in the form of human brain parfaits, is basically Karen incarnate, written to embody the stereotype of the older white woman who became a national object of fear and loathing during the pandemic. She’s not only anti-vax and anti-mask, but also anti-black and anti-gay. In one particularly on-the-nose scene from the book’s denouement, the female villain’s diaries are discovered: they contain a detailed record of her crimes interspersed with page upon page of all-caps racial slurs, in keeping with the contemporary belief that people do not contain multitudes, that any person who is one kind of bad thing must be every kind of bad thing.

But there’s something different, and tragic, about how this plays out for Holly — not the book, but the character. Holly Gibney had all the makings of a classic Stephen King heroine, an eccentric and iconoclastic outsider who has become an increasingly complex and confident character over the course of several books. Yet here, in this novel with her name on it, she’s practically unrecognisable: a model of pandemic paranoia, the personification of dull and dutiful compliance. King’s author’s note suggests that Holly just happens to share his views on the topic of Covid, but reading the book, she seems more like a mouthpiece for them, a character being used by her creator to send a message rather than tell a story. If you had any fondness for Holly Gibney, this hollowed-out version of her is dismaying to see.

Still more dismaying is to see an author who has written so poignantly about the triumph of the human spirit, of heroic free will, tweeting his earnest belief that unvaccinated people should be fired from their jobs and unpersoned by their government: “We are in a war here. Thousands of Americans die each week.” This sudden enthusiasm for empowering the state to strong-arm people into compliance is quite a change, coming from a guy who used to have nothing but contempt for such meddlesome overreach into ordinary people’s lives. As the narrator of Firestarter observes, “No one likes to see a government folder with his name on it.”

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There’s something decidedly Boomer about King’s political and creative evolution. His was a generation that fancied themselves revolutionaries, that fetishised youthful irreverence and made “Never trust anyone over 30” into a catechism; imagine their horror at waking up one day to discover that they had become the ones with all the wealth, all the power, all the butts in all the seats of our nation’s elected offices. For some, this identity crisis expresses itself in the form of frantic current thing-ism, as aging members of the protest generation glom onto LGBT pride, or the war in Ukraine, or anti-racist book clubs, all for the sake of aligning themselves with whatever passes for a movement these days; for others, it’s all about white-knuckling those last few years pre-retirement, praying to make it through without being cancelled by their 23-year-old assistants.

But if the boomers were set off balance by culture’s great awokening, the pandemic awakened something else: the terrifying and unavoidable awareness of their own mortality. The virus, as it turns out, does not care how young you feel.

Which brings us back to Holly, and more particularly to its villains. This couple, these cannibals, are terrified of aging, deteriorating, dying; consuming the flesh of younger, fitter people is how they buy themselves more time. It’s a perverse inversion, to sacrifice those at the beginning of their lives for the sake of those who’ve already lived full ones. But it’s one that we might recognise: what did so many of our pandemic policies accomplish, if not to prioritise the safety of vulnerable octogenarians over the health and happiness of kids?

There was a time, not long ago, when Stephen King might have objected. “Sane people don’t sacrifice children on the altar of probability. That’s not science, it’s superstition,” he wrote in The Institute. But of course, that was before the Science, and its self-appointed interpreters, decided that children were nasty little vectors for disease, and that maybe a little sacrifice on the altar of probability — just the education of an entire generation or so — was in order.

When you’re old, and scared, and vulnerable, maybe a government folder with your name on it suddenly doesn’t seem so bad. Someone has to protect you, after all, from all those irresponsible youths who don’t understand that it’s more important to be safe than free.

Gun violence is booming in the US. In the past three days alone, there have been reports that residents of Washington DC are afraid to walk five blocks, because “I don’t want to get randomly shot”; that a New Mexico governor has issued an emergency ban on bearing arms in response to gun violence; and that 60 congressional Democrats have signed an open letter to President Biden demanding that he use “every tool at his disposal” to combat the wave of gun-related deaths.

Within this culture of fear, guns are rapidly ceasing to be the preserve of white men. Since 2020, according to the National Shooting Sports Foundation (NSSF), there has been a 43% increase in Asian-American gun ownership, a 49% rise by Latinos, and a 58% increase among black people. And the diversification of gun ownership is intersectional: during the pandemic, Geneva Solomon, co-owner of Redstone Firearms in the Hollywood district of Los Angeles, said that she began noticing “an increasing number of black women, including single mothers and those living alone” coming to her shop to buy guns. “The desire to feel secure and empowered sparked a significant surge in interest,” she told me. Even before Covid, change was afoot, with the National African American Gun Association reporting that, since 2015, half of its new members are women.

Gun ownership increases when people feel threatened; it is well-documented that gun sales spike after mass shootings. Likewise, the increase in violence against people from non-white backgrounds during the pandemic has helped spark a national arms race. Attacks on people of Asian backgrounds in particular exploded, as political leaders began calling Covid the “kung-flu” and blaming China for unleashing it on the world. In liberal states such as California and New York, where large numbers of people from Chinese, Japanese and Korean origin have lived for generations, businesses came under attack and people were subjected to random assaults on the street.

The Latino population, who account for one fifth of new American gun owners, have some more complex, nebulous motivations for arming themselves. American Latinos, particularly those who speak Spanish at home, have traditionally been in favour of gun control. But that support has dropped precipitously. The desire to assimilate to their new lives as Americans has been cited as one factor, as has fear of hate crime. In Texas, where Latinos now outnumber white people, they are increasingly being targeted by white supremacist propaganda and are moving further to the Right — particularly along the Mexico border. There are signs that the same trend is taking place in New Mexico, where there are calls to impeach the Democrat governor trying to ban guns.

For African Americans, the question of gun ownership — something denied to them for long periods of American history — is thornier still. Black people remain the most targeted demographic for hate crimes in the country, while the number of black people killed by police has also increased in recent years. Civilian gun violence also takes a hugely disproportionate toll on black communities, particularly in disadvantaged areas. Between 2016 and 2020, more than 10 out of 100,000 black teens were murdered with guns; the equivalent figure for their white peers was 0.8, and for Latinos 1.9.

But if black people are arming themselves out of fear of violence, the inevitable result has been more violence. Josh Sugarmann, an anti-gun activist and founder of the Violence Policy Center, says that the real effects of a broadening gun ownership base is already having catastrophic consequences within the black community. “We’re starting to see the impact of putting more guns in homes,” he says, “especially as measured by suicide among black kids.” Last year, the gun suicide rate among black teens surpassed the rate of white teens for the first time on record. The most likely result of being armed, Sugarmann says, is that they will use their guns “against themselves, their friends or their family — and never to kill a criminal or stop a crime”.

While discrimination and violence are undoubtedly central to the changing demographics of American gun ownership, there is another factor at play. For the gun industry, expanding its ownership base has been an active project, and an existential one — bred of cold-blooded capitalism as much as radical ideology. Since the Nineties, the gun lobby has conducted an all-out assault to expand its market share, weaponising fear as part of a diversity push to expand its customer base.

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Watching the extinguishing of the tobacco industry, the powerful gun lobby realised that failure to move with the times would see guns, like cigarettes, becoming a fringe vice that was looked down on by the general public. To survive, the industry would have to persuade citizens that its product is a mainstream commodity. Limiting itself to only the “pale, male, and stale” demographic was not only bad for its image — it was bad for business.

Naturally, it turned to advertising. White men would no longer be the focus. Women, people of colour, and the gay and lesbian communities were targeted with slogans such as “Equality? Brought to you by Sam Colt”, “Gun control once kept freedmen defenseless against KKK”, and, “99.8% of rapists polled prefer you unarmed”.

The industry hit their target. One recent study found that videos geared towards protecting women were viewed two-and-a-half times more often than videos that only featured men. Whether these were directly appealing to women, or to men keen on protecting women, isn’t clear. But these ads were onto something. Women’s gun ownership has almost doubled since 2007, from 13% of the population, to 22% today.

In 2015, the NSSF, which has overtaken the NRA as the key industry voice, held a summit. The theme was: Diversity. Its marketing chief Chris Dolnack said that the industry was focused on making changes “to embrace a new consumer audience”.

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This increase wasn’t entirely down to the gun industry’s activities. Tragedies such as the Columbine High School massacre and 9/11 saw Americans of all stripes feel the need to be armed for self-protection. A woman firing off rounds in a bikini might look cute, but it’s fear and loathing that really sells — and wins votes. “Stand your ground” laws, where individuals have the right to use deadly force if necessary to protect against an intruder, have now been enacted in 38 states. People listened. Whereas in 2000, the majority of gun owners cited hunting as their primary reason for possessing a firearm, six years later, two-thirds said it was self-defence. By 2021, the proportion of people who said they purchased a gun for self-defence had risen to 88%.

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By John Masko

What effect this shift in gun-owning demographics will have at the polls next year remains to be seen. It won’t necessarily benefit the Democrats. Gun owners, a historically Republican base, can still be in favour of harsher weapons restrictions and background checks, the traditional domain of Democrats: rights for me and not for thee has never been an unpopular position. And attempts to take on the well-funded and highly aggressive gun lobby have fallen short time and time again.

Addressing the broader social issues that have led many to gun ownership could, in theory, persuade some new gun owners to put down their weapons. But, if the past decades are a guide, there’s only so much politics can achieve here. There’s no getting round the second amendment: it’s baked into American history.

At its most extreme, this focus descends into a postmodern oblivion: a world where everything is narrative and there is no difference between Newton’s Principia Mathematica and Carroll’s Alice in Wonderland. Yet this does not mean that narrative analysis is useless. Quite the opposite, in fact.

For more than a decade, our ability to form a coherent narrative about ourselves has been degrading. By “our”, I mean the West, which emerged in its current form in 1945 after three decades of war, desolation, and economic upheaval. The narrative that it told itself was crystalised during the Cold War: that the West would stand for liberty and freedom against the very live totalitarianism of the Soviet Union.

But this framework crumbled together with the Berlin Wall and the fall of communism. Overnight, a new narrative was needed, and it didn’t take long for one to emerge. The post-Cold War narrative formed in response to the Gulf War in 1990, when Saddam Hussein’s Iraq aggressively attacked Kuwait, principally with an eye to seizing its oil reserves. The United States and a 42-country coalition intervened, the Iraqis were soon pushed back, and Kuwait was allowed to govern itself. Here was the seed of the new narrative: the West, having won the Cold War, would keep the peace in the new status quo.

This updated founding myth required a domestic component — something tangible at home — and it found it in the ideology of the New Economy, which emphasised the transition of Western developed nations from highly industrialised economies to more technologically driven ones. This idea grew organically with the computer revolution, a loosening of financial and trade regulations, and the feelgood vibes of the Nineties’ economic boom. This was a world where Bill Clinton played the saxophone as the stock market rocketed.

By the early 2000s, however, this post-Cold War narrative started to fracture. The first blow was the collapse of the New Economy ideology as a massive bubble in the stock market unwound at the turn of the millennium. And then, three years later, came the invasion of Iraq. This intervention was very unlike the first Gulf War in which Hussein had clearly acted as the aggressor. This time, the conflict was instigated by Britain and the United States, opposed by many European countries, and was justified based on false, made-to-order intelligence — the now infamous “dodgy dossier”.

Still, even with these tremors, our narrative broadly held together: economic growth continued apace, and the war gave rise to an anti-war movement that would eventually produce future President Barack Obama. But then came the next hit — a real hammer blow. In 2008, as housing markets collapsed across the world, much of the growth of the 2000s turned out to be fake, fuelled as it was by housing debt. More debilitatingly, the impressive financial architecture that had sprung up as the sector was liberalised turned out to be rotten.

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But all was not yet lost, as two movements emerged out of the ashes of the 2008 collapse: the Right-wing populist movement and the Left-wing populist movement. The former, associated mostly with the Tea Party movement in the United States, saw the government and corporations as corrupt interlopers. Its Left-wing cousin, associated with the rise of Bernie Sanders and Jeremy Corbyn, saw things the same way. The two movements only differed on preferred solutions, with the Left wanting a more interventionist approach and the Right wanting to cut down on the state and promote market competition.

In the subsequent years, its Left-wing incarnation has mostly disappeared. In the US, it was absorbed back into the mainstream of the Democratic Party, won over with promises of radical social and cultural agendas that did not interfere with the economic bottom line. In the UK, the Corbyn movement collapsed in a wave of scandal, and a slightly confused group of Blairites seized the reins.

Meanwhile, the Right-populist movement mutated. Driven largely by the Brexit movement and the rise of Donald Trump, it dropped many of its more libertarian-leaning firebrands and became more pragmatic. It no longer wanted, say, tax cuts for the sake of tax cuts. Rather, it wanted cultural and economic rejuvenation. Taking place against a backdrop of severe and ever-increasing social and economic problems, this evolution was far from a surprise.

Today, however, there is reason to believe that the Right-populist movement has also failed. Donald Trump won the presidency, but he did not produce much in the way of constructive change. What happened instead is that the American political system became highly unstable, and many of the previously existing norms that held it together started to dissolve. This reached its crescendo in recent weeks with the arrest and indictment of Trump, an anarchic blip from which the country is unlikely to ever recover.

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In Britain, the Brexit movement got its way and, after years of bickering, the Conservative Party eventually managed to pull the country out of the European Union. Once again, though, nothing changed. The economy did not take off like a rocket. Mass immigration increased rather than decreased. Right-populist cultural and institutional concerns remain as they had before Brexit. At the same time, nothing catastrophic happened either. The Remainers who promised economic collapse and a sharp fall in trade with Europe were wrong. None of this happened. Indeed, nothing happened.

In both the UK and US, then, there is reason to think that we have no real coherent narrative. No one is sure where to go next or what to believe. And as three recent events have demonstrated, this noxious position is already causing serious dysfunction in our political culture.

The first was the Covid-19 outbreak and the responses in the form of the lockdowns and the vaccines. Compare this traumatic incident with, say, the Iraq War. Today, most people in the West agree that the Iraq War was a mistake; it was tragic and produced a terrible aftermath, and we have managed to come to terms with it. If you were to sit down at a dinner table full of strangers, you would all broadly know what the narrative is on the Iraq War — and so you can discuss it. Yet this is not the case with Covid-19 and the government’s response to it. There is no accepted narrative. Did we beat the virus with our prudent and rational response? Or did we overreact and create havoc? There is no settled answer, so it festers.

The second of these events was the destruction of the Nord Stream pipeline last year. Once again, we have no official or widely accepted narrative of what happened. Most people appreciate that it was an enormous development that will have tremendous economic and geopolitical ramifications in the coming years. Yet we do not have a coherent narrative of why the pipeline was destroyed, who destroyed it, and what this means. Instead, conspiratorial thinking permeates and, as with Covid-19, it festers.

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Then, at the start of summer, there was the march of Yevgeny Prigozhin, the head of Russia’s Wagner private military company, on Moscow. As it happened, the media went into overdrive. We were told that a world-changing coup was unfolding; a major historic event, possibly of the magnitude of the collapse of the Soviet Union, was taking place before our eyes. But then, once again, nothing happened. Prigozhin stopped, apologised, and went to Belarus with some of his troops. The conclusion was inconclusive; there is no coherent narrative about what happened. We cannot digest it, and so it festers.

In turn, each of these world-changing moments confirmed that narrative breaks are becoming more frequent as time marches forward. The recent coup in Niger demonstrates this once again, exposing uncomfortable truths about French-African relations that we would prefer to ignore. And yet, as we try to ignore it, our global influence ebbs. Increasingly, major events — or pseudo-events — are taking place in the world and provoking impassioned reactions, but then seem to lead into a ditch of unmeaning.

And then what happens? After the initial passion or even hysteria, people are forced to move on without processing what has just happened. In other words, we, as a society, advance without forming a coherent, broadly accepted narrative. We drift on, allowing doubt to fester, paralysed by a sneaking suspicion that the West is losing the plot.

The plasticity imperative was aimed at everyone, but some were quicker to adapt than others. Women, we were reminded, had been multitasking for years — and suddenly this made us marvellous. “Plastic Woman” was the protagonist of Hanna Rosin’s 2012 book, The End of Men: and the Rise of Women: during the past century, Rosin wrote, Plastic Woman has “performed superhuman feats of flexibility”, going from “barely working at all to working while married and then working with children, even babies”. She has embraced her liberation from “ladylike standards” to engage in everything from sexual adventurousness to demanding better salaries. Trailing far behind her was “Cardboard Man”, who “hardly changes at all”. Men have “lost the old architecture of manliness”, argued Rosin, without replacing it with anything more solid than “’mancessories’ — jeans and pickup trucks and designer switchblades, superheroes and thugs who rant and rave on TV”. Welcome to Kendom.

Rosin’s book expressed the insights of academic “crisis of masculinity” literature, and for all its oversimplifications, it had a point. Deindustrialisation had not only made the skills demanded by traditionally “male” jobs redundant by the late 20th century, but it had set the scene for a new kind of worker role that women seemed to glide into. This had less to do with a specific type of work, and more to do with a type of worker prized by the new deindustrialised economy. People have often assumed that women are better suited to service-sector jobs and care work than they are to the factory floor, but this doesn’t stack up; women for centuries have engaged in back-breaking physical labour in the fields, the home, and indeed in factories. Instead, in all sorts of workplaces, women fulfilled the criteria of the new model employee: one with a host of generic skills, whose expectations of continuity and stability were less firmly rooted than for the “job for lifers” of old, and whose workplace demands were tempered by gratitude that we were encouraged to be there at all.

For women in the Nineties and 2000s, working was seen as a privilege that our mothers had fought so hard to win. If work didn’t allow us to self-actualise to the degree Betty Friedan had promised, it was still better to be out in the world than suffocating in the “comfortable concentration camp” of the home. Or was it?

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We are no longer so sure. Now perimenopausal and dreaming of retirement, the archetypal Nineties Plastic Woman finds herself “just so tired” by the demands of everything, everywhere, all at once that she has begun to wonder if it was all a bit of a con. Meanwhile, younger women are opting out of various aspects of the game, boasting of “lazy girl jobs” or deciding to remain childless. A new breed of “conservative feminist” argues that (other) women should re-focus their attention and affection back on the family and the home, reclaiming the fulfilment of motherhood from the bad press given to it by the Women’s Liberation Movement.

But amid this furious backlash against Girlboss feminism, the deeper problem with the cult of plasticity is obscured. It’s not about all the things we have to do, but about who we think we are. The promotion of Plastic Woman did not come at the expense of men — who, as many pointed out when Rosin’s book was published, were already well on their way to being plasticised. It came at the expense of the ideal of self-determination, which lay at the core of both the labour movement and the campaign for women’s liberation. What drove both movements, albeit often in different directions, was the desire for more control over one’s life: you might have to do a lot of hard and boring stuff, at work or at home, but that did not define who you were.

In paid work, the authority of the boss stopped at the end of the working day, and your personal “well-being” was your own bloody business. For stay-at-home mothers, it was more complicated: the boundaries between the work of childcare and the role of motherhood had been mashed together, such that women often struggled to work out where the role ended and “I” began. That’s why feminists demanded social childcare: not because they thought all mothers should get a paid job, but because it placed a conceptual boundary between the understanding of oneself as a woman and mother, and the tasks involved in caring for children.

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The cult of plasticity turns this boundary-setting on its head. Constantly “juggling” a range of tasks and commitments is prized, because it keeps people on their toes and weakens the stubborn pride that comes with doing one thing properly. People who are confident about what they are doing — whether that is raising children, or being skilled in a particular kind of work — are less amenable to being pushed around than those who find themselves constantly unsettled by demands to do things in a new way. So, on one level at least, the promotion of plasticity allows Human Resources departments and parenting “experts” alike to manufacture a culture of compliance.

In this vein, diminishing the boundaries between home and work — a trend shamelessly accelerated during the pandemic, via the embrace of “hybrid working” — may not be doing great things for productivity, but it sends an effective signal that even when we are not at work, the company is still with us. Yet the hybrid working fiasco points to a contradiction: it seems pretty obvious that surveillance and micro-management do not encourage people to work more efficiently or effectively. When ticking boxes and jumping through hoops become the job description, employees end up bewildered, defensive, and distracted from the task at hand.

The sensible course of action would be to back off. Instead, HR departments seem to be doubling down in their quest to create the new model employee, by further breaching the boundary between work and our internal lives. The latest incursion on self-determination is the growing demand to declare our pronouns. The symbolic replacement of “I am” with “refer to me as” represents far more than a clarification of office etiquette. Gender-critical feminists have rightly pointed to the obliteration of “woman” or “man” as meaningful categories, once anyone can claim to be either (or neither, or both). Once these categories become free-floating flourishes in an email signature, the pretence that “we” are the ones choosing them will be short-lived. In practice, this is already being revealed — the use of gender-neutral language to avoid misgendering means that we are all rapidly becoming “they”: non-binary, non-specific, generic, plastic.

At least to this, fantastically, Plastic Woman seems to be kicking back. In the untidy coalition of Terfs, Hags, conservative feminists, and colleagues muttering quietly in corners, we see the holding of one important line: the desire to determine oneself, rather than submit to being endlessly moulded. It’s a reminder that people will bend only so far; as Weird Barbie shows us, we can be played with “too hard”.

His date (Sandra Bullock) recoils: “Ew! Disgusting! You mean…” — she can barely say it without gagging — “…fluid transfer?!”

This scene isn’t exactly pivotal to the movie, but with time it’s come to seem significant. “Rampant exchange of bodily fluids was one of the major reasons for the downfall of society,” Sandra Bullock says, explaining that the practice — which includes not only sex but kissing — has been outlawed in the name of safety. In our future, human touch has been deemed a luxury no enlightened society can afford.

Obviously, our own attempts at social engineering haven’t reached the point of outlawing physical contact, although the height of the Covid pandemic brought us remarkably and sometimes hilariously close. Remember when a Canadian Center for Disease Control recommended that couples have sex through glory holes to avoid breathing on each other? And yet, that instinct towards safetyism is one to which human beings have always been susceptible — and one that’s visible today in our ongoing attempts to streamline, organise, automate and make frictionless all the parts of life that used to be messy.

The vacuum left by the decline of old-fashioned dating and relationshipping, the kind that involved meeting someone in person and experiencing the exciting chemical process known as “hitting it off”, has been filled by a fair amount of explicitly anti-social behaviour as people eschew, or even fear, the possibility of making a connection without the intermediary of a screen. Meanwhile, the lure of the online world and its peculiar system of rewards has upended the etiquette surrounding romantic entanglements, particularly when it comes to being gracious with and about rejection. It is not frowned upon, for instance, to publicly share and mock the awkward messages men send to hopeful matches on dating apps.

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The more we delegate to the apps and the algorithms, the more we swipe and tap our screens, the less we ever actually touch anything else, including each other. In lieu of connection, what we increasingly have are services, which offer a safe, controlled facsimile of the real thing. A lot of these are also online: there are the camgirls who perform for a faceless crowd of observers, all competing for their attention through donations. There are the OnlyFans performers who offer the illusion of an intimate online connection in exchange for cash. There are virtual chatbots who will role-play as your girlfriend and talk to you for hours; some of them are even AI clones of real people.

But most interesting, and most controversial, are the services that simulate intimacy face-to-face and skin-to-skin. In the past, a person aching to be touched by another human being would make do with massage or having a stranger shampoo her hair; now, there’s a booming cottage industry of professional cuddlers who will hold you (or just hold your hand) for about $100 per hour. One, recently profiled in the New Yorker, has a menu of 80 different positions to choose from and says that the country is suffering from an epidemic of “skin hunger” in the wake of the pandemic — though he skirts the question of whether said hunger can truly be satisfied by this sort of transactional intimacy. All he knows is, his clients keep coming back.

A professional cuddle is safe and certified, but also explicitly non-sexual. For those who want more, who desire the intimacy but not the risks or vulnerability or self-doubt of a sexual relationship, there’s a whole new category of sex therapist, one who will not only discuss the physical act of love, but actually do it with you — at least sometimes, at least for a while. Their patients are people who struggle with physical intimacy, perhaps due to disability, military injury or gender transition. They call themselves “surrogate partners”.

A New York Times article about the practice is at pains to explain that they are not prostitutes, but nor are they just therapists. What they offer is something like psychology with a dash of sex work, with elements of self-improvement and skill-building. To me, they seem like a sort of sexual sensei, the equivalent of a fencing coach who has to spar with his client to help them improve their game. But also the word, surrogate, means substitute or replacement, and a central tenet of these relationships is that they’ll eventually end — that the surrogate partner will be replaced by a real one.

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Here, there seems to be something of a catch-22: how well do the teachings of a paid sexual sensei translate in real-world relationships? By the time you’ve hired one of these therapists to teach you how to have a normal sex life, don’t you sort of definitionally not have one? When you find a real partner, do you tell them about the sex therapy you’ve had, as you might discuss your sexual history — or keep it to yourself, as you might the intricacies of your medical one?

But the question of whether surrogate partners are effective is less interesting than the question of how they came to exist, what societal void they’re filling. Obviously, there’s always been a market for people who are willing to trade sex for money — but again, these are not prostitutes. (As one of the profiled therapists notes, sex workers do not generally require you to attend months of therapy before sleeping with you.) Their appeal, their purpose, must be something else. Maybe it’s this: they make formal and transactional what is, by nature, unpredictable and messy.

A surrogate partner will never ghost you, never blindside you with an “it’s not you it’s me” breakup; “sessions,” the New York Times notes, “are typically held weekly, in one to two-hour meetings until all three” — that is, the client, referring therapist, and surrogate —”agree that the therapy is complete.”

In this way, surrogate partners seem to be a product of a broad cultural desire to organise every emotionally risky endeavour into a rules-based framework that makes it safe — from refereeing the conflicts of children during their parent-organised playdates to making spontaneous flirtation taboo (“I didn’t consent to being asked out!”). We’re not quite at the point of finding the unbridled human experience revolting, or trying to make it illegal, but there does seem to be an emerging consensus that fumbling around in the sexual realm, be it literally or figuratively, is dangerous.

The controlled, controllable, bought-and-paid-for version of intimacy offered by professional cuddlers and surrogate partners is arguably one example of mitigating that danger. Another, perhaps, is the incursion into ordinary relationships of therapy-speak, which simultaneously obscures and exacerbates whatever actual conflicts a couple might have. A scroll through TikTok or Instagram reveals that normal dating and relationships have been all but pathologised, the conversation surrounding them rife with “red flags” and “triggers” and “boundaries” — the latter often used to describe things that might have once been called “preferences”.

In one recent and remarkable example, the actor Jonah Hill was accused of “coercive control” (note: still more therapy-speak) after his ex leaked a years-old text message in which he described his desire for her not to post bikini pictures on Instagram as one of his “boundaries”. On the one hand, the whole incident was just a piece of not-particularly-salacious celebrity gossip; on the other, it does reveal the mechanisms by which we try to protect ourselves from our own human messiness. To speak of boundaries in this context implies a sort of moral righteousness — the kind associated with the phrase “doing the work” — even as you seek to exert undue control over another person’s choices. It also implies that this is a high-stakes conflict in which the very integrity of one’s person is at risk. Yet scratch the surface of Hill’s so-called boundaries, and what do you find? Jealousy, plain and simple.

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Of course, it’s not hard to figure out why someone would prefer to frame this as a conversation about boundaries instead of one about jealousy. Boundaries are enlightened, elevated, therapeutic. Jealousy is ugly, and unpleasant, and ordinary.

And so is loneliness.

Here is where, I think, the worlds of therapy-speak and surrogate partners and professional cuddlers collide: people don’t want to feel bad. They especially don’t want to feel bad about themselves. And channeling our feelings of humiliation or loneliness or jealousy through a different framework, be it therapeutic or transactional, allows us to pretend that they’re something other than what they really are. To hold them at a clinical distance. To experience them as an inoffensive copy of a copy of a copy of the real thing.

It’s an understandable impulse, not to want to wade around in the mess. And maybe for some people, the ones who might never otherwise experience intimacy at all, the ones who fear losing control too much to ever allow themselves to be vulnerable, these risk-free relationships — or the illusion thereof — are as good as it gets. But it’s hard not to notice that, like the VR sex helmets in Demolition Man, the safe and transactional version of intimacy has a way of making everything a little bit less human — including ourselves.

Bird is right about the need for faith in scientists as we hurtle into a technological revolution based on artificial intelligence — and indeed, to point out how their efforts depend on rigorous testing of theories with facts. Unfortunately, the behaviour of a few key scientific figures in the pandemic, seemingly desperate to appease China and protect their ties to high-risk research, has done the precise opposite.

This is, one prominent US biologist told me, “the biggest scientific scandal of our lifetime”, involving a deliberate attempt to suppress debate on a health catastrophe that killed almost 15 million people in two years. It revolves around a landmark commentary in Nature Medicine stating firmly that the five authors “do not believe that any type of laboratory-based scenario is plausible”. This was published in March 2020 — barely six weeks after the stumbling World Health Organization had declared an international emergency.

Now, hundreds of private messages between four of these five scientists, exchanged as they wrote and published this article, have emerged — and they are astonishing. The “super secret” discussions show this arrogant quartet boasting about success, misleading the media, sneering at journalists and making fun of other experts, even a world-renowned epidemiologist co-opted as the fifth author. They condemn China “for trying to rewrite what happened” and disclose Beijing sequenced the genome for SARS-CoV-2 — the virus that causes Covid — just before the rest of the world discovered from a Taiwanese tip-off that the disease had erupted in Wuhan.

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Most significantly, these discussions on Slack expose the quartet’s deep fears that Sars-CoV-2 could have been tied to laboratory research — along with overt signs of pressure from “higher ups” to squash such suggestions. Clearly these scientists were concerned the disease was engineered. They dismiss the well-worn theory about the virus arising in a Wuhan animal market on several occasions, one calling it a “red herring”. Yet they abruptly switched direction in public despite the lack of discernible new evidence. They carried on debating their suspicions in private after the article’s publication — even as they attacked claims about a possible lab leak in public and their statement was used to condemn such “conspiracy theories”.

“Let’s face it, unless there is a whistleblower from the WIV [Wuhan Institute of Virology] who is going to defect and live in the West under a new identity we are NEVER going to know what happened in the lab,” wrote Eddie Holmes, a British virologist based in Australia with strong contacts in China, at one point a month after publication. “That’s my thinking too,” responded lead author Kristian Andersen, a Danish evolutionary biologist — although he admitted that he was “worried” US diplomatic cables showing concerns over biosecurity in Wuhan, which had been disclosed by The Washington Post, “might have something”.

It is hard to overstate the influence of this single article, accessed almost six million times and cited by 5,942 other specialist papers. The journal’s editor João Monteiro tweeted out a link saying: “Let’s put conspiracy theories about the origin of #SARSCoV2 to rest and help to stop spread of misinformation.” China’s ministry of foreign affairs welcomed its “evidence” — as did the Communist Party chief at WIV. It was highlighted in the White House by Anthony Fauci, the US infectious diseases expert and adviser to several presidents. Sir Jeremy Farrar, now the World Health Organization’s chief scientist, told me it was “the most important research on the genomic epidemiology of the origins of this virus” more than one year later as he insisted “no scientific evidence I have seen to date points to outbreak linked to a laboratory”.

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It subsequently emerged through leaks and freedom of information requests that this pair, along with Francis Collins, head of the biggest US science funding body, were involved behind the scenes in the article. Farrar, then director of the Wellcome Trust, was tasked with hosting a teleconference on February 1 involving the five authors and six other experts including Sir Patrick Vallance, the UK government’s chief scientific adviser until three months ago. After the call, Farrar confessed he was “50:50” on whether Covid came from a lab — and later was found to have told Collins that Wuhan engaged in “Wild West” research practices. His office admitted to me eventually, after a barrage of emails, that he helped “convene” the Nature Medicine authors.

As Vallance once wrote in another science journal, “inferences should be drawn from attempts to hide interactions”. Unfortunately, the lab leak theory was snarled in tribal politics after it was flagged by Donald Trump, creating a toxic climate for those of us probing the origins in the pandemic’s early days. Now, this article is at the centre of a House subcommittee investigation after Republicans summoned the two US-based authors — Andersen and Bob Garry, a microbiologist in New Orleans — to answer questions earlier this month on their deliberations. Afterwards, the cache of documents and messages were detected in the committee papers and on its website by members of Drastic, a group of independent researchers that has uncovered many key nuggets in this quest for the truth about a deadly disease.

Andersen set up what he called the “super secret” Slack group under the intriguing original name of “project-wuhan-engineering” with Holmes and Andrew Rambaut, an evolutionary biologist at Edinburgh University, on the day of the teleconference. Farrar, portrayed as a driving force behind the paper, urged everyone to keep their deliberations confidential in that first discussion. A few days later, he signed a letter with two Wellcome Trust colleagues in The Lancet journal hitting out at “conspiracy theories suggesting that Covid-19 does not have a natural origin”. It was later found to have been covertly organised by British scientist Peter Daszak, who runs a body that funnelled substantial US funding for research into bat coronaviruses to WIV.

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The Dane declared to his colleagues that the question they needed to answer was whether Covid emerged due to “evolution or engineering” since both were “really rather plausible” — as remains the case today. Andersen added that Garry would not want the virus to have arisen from “GOF escape” — a reference to controversial Gain of Function research, which boosts the infectivity of viruses and was banned for four years in the US. “The main thing still in my mind is that the lab escape version of this is so friggin’ likely to have happened because they were already doing this type of work and the molecular data is fully consistent with that scenario,” he said.

The fact they were discussing the concept of a lab leak “shows how plausible it is”, added Rambaut the next day. But the Scottish-based expert urged them to change tack. “I personally think we should get away from all the strange coincidence stuff. I agree it smells really fishy but without a smoking gun it will not do us any good,” he wrote. “The truth is never going to come out (if [lab] escape is the truth). Would need to be irrefutable evidence. My position is that natural evolution is entirely plausible and we will have to leave it at that. Lab passaging might also generate this mutation but we have no evidence that that happened.”

Rambaut said revealingly that due to “the shit show that would happen if anyone serious accused the Chinese of even accidental release, my feeling is we should say given there is no evidence of a specifically engineered virus, we cannot possibly distinguish between natural evolution and escape so we are content with ascribing it to natural processes”. Andersen responded that he agreed this was “a very reasonable conclusion” despite hating “when politics is injected into science”. And this seemed to become their eventual template.

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Much of their subsequent discussion, interspersed with banter, is technical. They discuss RaTG13, the closest known relative to Sars-Cov-2 that was collected by scientists at WIV from a mine hundreds of miles from Wuhan and is linked to the deaths from a mysterious Covid-like respiratory virus of three miners clearing bat guano from a cave. They puzzle over the infamous furin cleavage site, which allows more efficient entry into human cells and is not found on similar types of coronaviruses. “Bob [Garry] said the insertion was the 1st thing he would add,” wrote Holmes. “Yeah,” responded Andersen. “The furin site would be the first thing to add for sure.”

Garry even explains at one point how easy it would be — even for a graduate student — to make such a virus by inserting a furin cleavage site into a bat virus such as RaTG13 in cell culture. “It’s not crackpot to suggest this could have happened given the GoF research we know is happening,” he adds.

Justin Kinney, a quantitative biologist at Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory in New York and co-founder of the advocacy group Biosafety Now, said he was struck by how strongly the Slack messages made the case for a laboratory origin for Covid. He pointed to a decade-old paper shared among the quartet detailing experiments on bovine coronaviruses, which found that when inserted in different human cells they developed a strikingly similar furin cleavage site. Kinney claims knowledge of this paper flew in the face of their claim in Nature Medicine that such cleavage sites had only been observed after prolonged experiments on avian flu. “Bovine coronavirus is much more closely related and this took place after minimal passage in cell culture,” he said.

The discussions show how Farrar strengthened one key phrase — and that the force of their entire argument was beefed up after an initial draft was rejected by Nature, a more prestigious journal. Last month, Garry admitted to a BBC podcast “maybe we went a little too far” by taking such a strident position. Kinney, who wants the paper to be retracted, believes they succumbed to the intensity of pressure from a variety of directions, including from funders with the cash and power to determine the future of their careers — and that this cover-up could have disastrous consequences for their profession. “Science must be honest,” he said. “The logic in the paper is so weak, the conflicts of interest are not revealed and it now seems clear that the authors did not fully believe their own claims.”

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By N.S. Lyons

Emails show the team consulted with Ron Fouchier, a Dutch scientist who pushed the boundaries of Gain of Function work with experiments on avian flu. “Molecular biologists like myself can generate perfect copies of viruses without leaving a trace,” he told them baldly. There is also mention of “intel” in the background — and at one point, members of the quartet accuse “Ron” of leaking details of their activities to a journalist.

Perhaps the most damning aspect of these revelations is how their private debate over the origins carried on after publication of their seismic statement. The March article stated that their “analyses clearly show that SARS-CoV-2 is not a laboratory construct or a purposefully manipulated virus”. Yet Andersen wrote on 16 April that he was “still not fully convinced that no culture was involved”. When Holmes pushed back, warning such fears could lead to an end of Gain of Function research, the Danish biologist replied that the top bat researcher at WIV was carrying out “a lot of work that involved isolating and culturing SARS-like viruses in BSL 2” — a reference to the sort of low-level biosecurity comparable to that found in a dental surgery. He linked to four papers on this “concerning work”. And he said again the next day that “we can’t fully disprove [cell] culture… we also can’t fully rule out engineering”.

Later that month, this same scientist told a journalist that the odds of Covid’s accidental release in Wuhan were “a million to one”. And he told those politicians that after considering all the evidence, their group concluded that “culturing” — which can make a virus more infectious and better-adapted for human transmission — had not occurred since the virus most likely spilled over naturally from wildlife. “By the time we published our final version of Proximal Origin I no longer believed that a culturing scenario was plausible,” he stated in written evidence. The evidence now seems to challenge this pivotal claim to Congress.

Andersen claimed they reached this conclusion through scientific inquiry rather than under pressure from Fauci or other funders. Yet he told the others at the outset “it’s well above my pay grade to call the shots on a final conclusion”. The messages show that just before the paper was submitted for publication it was shared with Farrar and Collins, at the time heads of the two most significant funding bodies in Western science. They were “very happy”, reported back Holmes. Coincidentally, Andersen works at Scripps Research in California, a non-profit lab given $8.9 million for work on infectious disease outbreaks from the grant body headed by Collins five months after the statement’s publication — although he insisted to the Congressional subcommittee that this funding decision was agreed before the pandemic.

We still do not know for sure the origins of that destructive pandemic. But we do know it was an extraordinary coincidence that Covid emerged in the Chinese city containing the biggest repository of bat coronaviruses in Asia, a place with known safety concerns conducting high-risk research to boost the infectivity of mutant bat viruses in humanised mice. We know China covered up the outbreak, hid key data, lied to other countries and refused to allow proper investigation. And we know that accidents and human error can occur during research. So as Andersen said to his pals, the possibility of some kind of lab incident was “friggin’ likely”.

It looks beyond doubt that Beijing’s cover-up was aided by an outrageous attempt to suppress global debate, led by the Western scientists we should have been able to trust to search for the truth and guide an unshackled debate based on hard facts. They were assisted by patsy politicians, supine journalists and complicit scientific publications. This murky affair appears to be the most terrible betrayal of science — and indeed of democracy — that was far darker and more disturbing than those sinister events that felled Oppenheimer seven decades ago.

The 21st century narrative couldn’t be more different. To mark the National Health Service’s 70th birthday, in 2018, Nicklaus Thomas-Symonds wrote a new preface to his biography of its architect, the Labour MP Aneurin Bevan. Like most contemporary paeans to the NHS, Thomas-Symonds’ lavishes praise on its staff, both past and present. “Those who work in our National Health Service have made it what it is today,” he wrote, “and we should always thank them for their remarkable commitment to public service, often carried out in the most difficult of circumstances.”

This view of the NHS, which turns 75 this week, is even more pervasive now than it was then. During the pandemic, politicians, journalists, and patients commended the devotion of doctors with such regularity that it became cliché. Most discussions of healthcare in the UK present NHS workers as heroes, or at the very least unusually committed to their jobs. The recent news that doctors will be taking industrial action this month has been framed by the sympathetic press as a difficult decision made in the interest of patients’ safety. Supporters on social media argue that the medical profession is driven not by personal greed, but by its unwavering commitment to the British public. In February, Jeremy Corbyn repeated a familiar claim: “Doctors devote their lives to the needs of others.” Medicine is not like other professions, the story goes; working for the NHS is different from any other job. Unlike the rest of us, they don’t do it for the money, they do it because they care.

All this seems complimentary. The people praising NHS doctors are sincere, often expressing gratitude for care they’ve personally received. But the insistence that doctors are saints actually does a lot of damage. Not only does it harm medics themselves, it also does a disservice to patients.

The origin of the myth lies in the 19th century, when doctors launched something of a PR campaign to give their image a dramatic makeover. They marketed themselves as different from the quacks with whom they were competing for patients in a busy medical marketplace. Trainee physicians were reminded perpetually that the medical “calling” was very different from that of other professions. In 1890, Governor J. Proctor Knott issued the doctoral address to the graduating class at the Kentucky School of Medicine: “No other calling,” he said, “demands a more absolute self-negation than the one you have chosen. No other vocation — not even the sacred ministration of religion itself — requires a more constant exercise of the higher faculties of the human mind, or a more earnest devotion of the purer and nobler attributes of the human soul.”

By the end of the century, medical organisations had begun to describe their work using the romantic language of heroism. In 1900, surgeon Frederick Treves spoke at the annual meeting of the BMA, using military rhetoric to describe his profession: “So as one great surgeon after another drops out of the ranks his place is rapidly and imperceptibly filled, and the advancing line goes on with the still same solid and unbroken front.”

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Despite these efforts, the poor reputation of doctors survived into the 20th century. In 1937, A. J. Cronin published his novel The Citadel — an attack on self-serving healthcare professions. He particularly targeted those at the top of the medical hierarchy, the “grandees” whose driving concern was money, and who encouraged illnesses in their “wealthy, idle, hypochondriac, and mostly female patients”. The Citadel was an extraordinary success, selling over 150,000 copies in its first few months. Clearly, it struck a chord with the British public.

Just over a decade later, on 5 July 1948, the NHS was founded. It did a huge amount for the medical profession’s reputation, though not initially. The BMA was one of the most vociferous opponents of the proposed NHS, not wanting medics to be relegated to the status of “salaried” workers. “The medical profession is,” declared the BMA, “opposed to any form of service which leads directly or indirectly to the profession as a whole becoming full-time salaried servants of the State.” Nye Bevan had to “stuff their mouths with gold” to get them on board: he allowed consultants to continue taking on private patients as well as NHS ones.

The mythical status of the NHS we recognise today didn’t emerge until later, in the early Seventies — in part due to the decade’s economic and political pressures, which prompted people to campaign in defence of the welfare state in ways they hadn’t felt they needed to before. The myth was also a product of subtle but deliberate NHS propaganda, in the form of TV hospital dramas, nurse recruitment films, and medical romance fiction.

As the health service grew in popularity, the public image of medics also slowly improved. But in 1978, their freshly-minted reputation was put to the test, when NHS doctors first went on strike over pay and working conditions. Indeed, some doctors were opposed to their colleagues taking industrial action, because they thought it compromised their high-minded principles. A consultant surgeon wrote in 1976: “Doctors have to decide whether medicine is to remain a profession with ethics or to become an industry with strictly regulated hours of work.” He criticised the strikes by arguing that the withdrawal of services would “make nonsense eventually of any idea of vocation”, which was “over and above job satisfaction”. That same year, another consultant wrote to the government to argue against industrial action, which had “immediately put the doctors on a par with the trade unions and other workers”. These ideas are still around. In 2016, the Telegraph argued against industrial action by junior doctors because their “vocation in life” is “to care”. Imagine saying the same thing of the striking civil servants.

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Then again, it does make sense for healthcare professionals to think of themselves in these terms. Many medics really do feel a sense of devotion to their profession and to their patients. They do often take an oath. And if doctors couldn’t cling onto the idea of exceptionalism, would any of them stay in the job? During the height of the pandemic, doctors and nurses were working impossible hours, under extreme pressures, and the very real risk of serious illness or death loomed over them. One in ten health workers in England during the pandemic had suicidal thoughts. There is still a palpable crisis of wellbeing among NHS staff, pay has stagnated, and the number of doctors fleeing the UK in search of better jobs elsewhere has sky-rocketed. And Rishi Sunak’s plan to boost the workforce, announced on Friday, seems squeamish of acknowledging the true challenges to retention. Is it any wonder that doctors try to find meaning in a romantic ideal of their work, rather than just focusing on the day-to-day drudgery and dehumanisation that so often characterises employment in the NHS?

But politicians who characterise doctors as saints often do so to deny their right to industrial action. They don’t need better pay or working conditions, or so the argument goes, because their jobs are so meaningful. Members of the public who buy into the myth, even if they are well-meaning, obscure the bleak state of the NHS. During the pandemic, we clapped for health workers because there was little else we could offer them. You could text CLAP to 70507 to donate £5 to NHS charities, knowing that the service itself was inadequately funded. The public was unable to provide the NHS staff with the protective equipment they so desperately needed — but it could tell them they were heroes.

Doctors cannot live on saintliness alone. Poor pay and conditions means it is often hard for medics to stay professional — let alone heroic. How can you devote yourself to patients, or even show them compassion, when you can only speak to them for seven minutes at a time? In 2022, 51 million GP appointments lasted less than five minutes. 94% of NHS doctors surveyed said short appointment times put patients at risk and one in three GPs admitted they have failed to properly diagnose patients due to time constraints.

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We also need to recognise that some doctors are bad at their jobs, no matter how much time and money they’re given — just as some teachers and civil servants are also no good. But the medical profession’s glowing reputation makes it hard to confront this fact. While doctors are frequently targets of abuse, sometimes they treat their patients poorly. Not all doctors are competent, and their vaunted position in today’s society can make it a lot harder for patients to have their complaints heard, for abuses to be taken seriously, and lasting improvements to be made. In 2013, the NHS Ombudsman found that patients were often “too frightened to complain” about problems with their care.

Doctors are just people. If we just thought of them not as heroes but simply as skilled professionals doing their jobs — sometimes well, sometimes not so well, sometimes in impossible circumstances — we could level out the power dynamic between them and patients, making it easier for the latter to get their voices heard. Doctors, too, would be better equipped to advocate for themselves. And the NHS as a whole might be forced to stop falling back on the myths of medicine’s heroism, stop relying on its workforce’s goodwill, and reckon with the radical reforms needed to make the service fit for purpose in its 75th year. Some doctors might be reluctant to let go of their romantic ideals. But surely a slight drop in social status is a price worth paying for a comfortable working life?

Shasta County has always attracted American outliers, a laboratory for both success and failure. These are the valleys and mountains where John Steinbeck sent his characters in Of Mice and Men and The Grapes of Wrath, escaping from the restrictive cities and scarce land of the Midwest. In the Seventies, hippies fled the fading counterculture of the Bay to live communally here. Today’s exiles take the form of a conservative militia.

When the Covid pandemic hit in March 2020, California’s Democratic governor Gavin Newsom enacted America’s first state-wide stay-at-home order, before introducing some of the country’s strictest measures, closing schools and mandating the wearing of masks in public buildings. The health officials in Shasta, aware of local sentiment, attempted to limit the extent of these policies and consequently implemented some of the most lenient lockdowns in the state. However, if the fiercely independent residents of Shasta bit their tongues and did as they were told, it was grudgingly, and only up to a point. According to many libertarians in Shasta, lockdown measures threatened their livelihoods, while vaccine mandates were viewed as a further infringement on their personal liberties. So, when Shasta County’s elected Republican Board of Supervisors suggested residents take up their grievances with state legislators, enraged residents took matters into their own hands.

Over the past three years, the established local political elite — a wealthy class of Reagan Republicans that has traditionally run the county from its ranches and legal offices — has slowly found itself recalled and replaced with libertarian newcomers. Post-Covid, only Mary Rickert, a local cattle rancher who describes herself as an “incredibly conservative Catholic” (though others in the town label her a “rhino” — Republican in name only), remains in office.

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Patrick Jones, whose family owns a local gun store, helped to overturn the once mighty Republican majority by convening a new movement made up of libertarians, evangelical conservatives, the local Cottonwood militia, the Shasta-based Liberty Committee, and anti-California secessionists. Jones and his three other newly elected insurgent supervisors — Kevin Crye, Chris Kelstrom and Tim Garman — are backed by Right-wing millionaire Reverge Anselmo and Mike Lindell, a leading Trump associate. And now that lockdown is over, this militant faction has even bigger targets: their goal is to return Shasta to traditional ballot-box voting, to abolish what some consider to be California’s unconstitutional gun laws, and to secede from Sacramento and become part of a new breakaway State of Jefferson.

High on mutinous ambition, residents of Shasta County (population: 182,139) find themselves at the confluence of several distinct American forces, each with its unique worldview and a disregard for ideological enemies. There is little consensus to be found beyond a shared sense of American crisis. There is also fierce resistance from Rickert and her equally odd coalition of progressives, liberals, moderates, conservatives, public worker unions and local media outlets; the rare Democrats and liberals who reside this far outside the Bay Area have to work closely with Republicans.

Yet no matter what side of the conflict they occupy, the people here are keen to describe how the state of California has abandoned its rural peripheries, exporting state-wide problems around drug abuse, homelessness, farming, land use, water access, forest fires and property prices.

Another element to consider, whose presence is felt everywhere in Redding, is the powerful Bethel Church, led by pastor Bill Johnson; it espouses an overtly political theology and counts many local politicians among its flock. Almost everyone I stayed with was a member of this megachurch, which espouses an extreme form of Pentecostalism. One host, with a beard of biblical proportions, prayed over me in tongues while a taxi driver offered to cast out my demons. Yet when I asked about the church, people often went silent, perhaps fearful of the last time they were dragged into the media. In 2019, members of the church — which practises grave-soaking, whereby the energy of deceased Christian leaders is “sucked” from tombs — attempted to resurrect a dead toddler. Since then, however, Bethel’s influence has continued to grow: its music division still racks up millions of views on YouTube. And yet, Bethel was the only organisation in Shasta to decline my request for an interview.

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I arrive in Redding by train after dark and look for somewhere to see out the night, but the station’s main building is locked up and surrounded by a large spiked fence. A torch flicks on, and a security guard asks where I’m heading and where I’m from. He tells me the station was closed because of homelessness: “They shit everywhere and ruin the place. They’re coming up from San Francisco and LA, or they’re being sent… Who knows?” Instead, I find a bench beneath a poster warning against fentanyl use.

The next day, I walk to my hotel across town and amble past a roadside rally of MAGA flags, libertarian regalia, and what look like old Tea Party signs from the 2010s. A huge truck blasts its horn in support as it speeds down the freeway. An old man standing behind a stall filled with Trump leaflets gives me a nod as families and individuals stop to talk.

Later, I join the open session of the local Board of Supervisors, which, in 2020, was the focus of tense protests and debate over lockdowns. The hall slowly fills up; the majority are retired hippies or conservative ranchers from out of town. What starts as a regular local government meeting dealing with the prosaic business of water reservoirs and local art foundations quickly escalates into a debate about Trump, Covid and voting fraud.

Speakers from the floor discuss the pros and cons of Dominion voting machines, whose manufacturer was recently paid $787.5 million by Fox Corp to settle a defamation case involving cable news pundits and conspiracy theories. The conversation soon spirals out into stolen elections, national corruption, drug addiction and the “lies” of the media class. One local stands up and claims she had seen buses run by the San Francisco government dropping scores of homeless people in Redding at night. Another man in a trucker hat points to the serried ranks of local journalists and shouts: “I’m watching you. You don’t intimidate us anymore.” Yet the tenor of today’s political debate is comparatively anodyne; three years ago, amid lockdown controversy, one constituent told the board that “you have made bullets expensive ­— but, luckily for you, ropes are reusable”.

Although the recall efforts have a large civic element, they have also been bolstered by the Cottonwood Militia, one of several active groups across California. It was started by local barber Woody Clendenen in his barn back in 2008 and counts around 1,000 local business owners and ranchers among its ranks. Indeed, Cottonwood Militia members often intersect with other organisations such as “the Jefferson Movement”, “Red, White and Blueprint” and local evangelical churches.

“They’re different legs of the same spider,” Carlos Zapata, a Cottonwood militia member and restaurant owner tells me over a drink in the local saloon of the nearby town of Palo Cedro. For Carlos Zapata, the militia “is here with a message that we’re not going anywhere…we’re here to fight [government overreach]. We want to take this project into rural America and the nation in general.” Zapata, like many others in Shasta, was drawn to the militia during the pandemic. He tells me: “Covid was like this Great Awakening. People started showing up to protest in droves — they wanted to join something because they thought we were going to civil war against the opposition. Do we need a civil war? I’d hate to think we’d need a civil war, but how do we get past this?”

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“I had heard about a militia my whole adult life in Shasta,” says Doni Chamberlain, a local reporter. “And I kind of thought: ‘It’s just a bunch of guys out in the woods with paintball guns.’ I had no idea until George Floyd’s death. During the 2020 riots in Portland, there were all these crazy stories about Antifa coming down with truckloads of bricks. We had a protest here in Shasta. That was the militia’s coming-out party in Redding. There were more militia members than there were protesters. There was a mix of open and closed carry guns.”

“They’re faux-cowboys,” she says. “Most of them, I would say, are from average California towns. I think they’ve just embraced the whole gun culture because they believe that a civil war is coming — us against them.” She later describes how one resident told her that she “should be publicly executed… that the only way people like me learn is to be dragged behind a car”. And yet, she argues that many people in the county are acting in good faith, even if they are fundamentally misguided: “I understand there are some people who joined the militia for what they thought were good, valid reasons. What’s more American — or manly — than protecting your city from riots?”

A few days later, I meet Patrick Jones at the family shop, Jones’s Fort. (“Come to my gun store,” he says, “you’re English — you probably don’t get to see many.”) The shop is a large building on the edge of town where the heads of elk and bison hang beside the racks of rifles and shotguns. In a back room adorned with two massive buffalo heads, he leans up against a chair in a pair of old cowboy boots.

“I’ve been in local politics a while,” he tells me, “but when I won my [Board of Supervisors] primary in 2020, that’s when a lot of the excitement started. I’m a traditional, small-state conservative”, emphasising that his political vision is regional rather than federal. Indeed, much of what he and others argue is in step not with contemporary protectionist Trumpism, but with the earlier Tea Party movement. During the 2010s, the Tea Party was concerned with fiscal conservatism, national debt reduction, lower taxes and a small state. “This area is conservative, and it should have a government that reflects that,” Jones continues. “We rose up and did something about it. It’s our job to push back.”

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Indeed, Jones has long been associated with the State of Jefferson (SoJ), a movement that opposes the cultural and political dominance of Sacramento, Los Angeles and San Francisco. The SoJ is a group with roots in the 19th century when the remote north became a natural resources hub for the cities. By 1941, SoJ activists had set up armed roadblocks around Northern California and Southern Oregon, unilaterally declaring succession before the Second World War interrupted.

Jones maintains that a break from California and the creation of the SoJ — from the northernmost counties of California and parts of neighbouring Oregon — will take an uprising. “There have been hundreds of attempts to split the state. But there’s no way, legally, for us to break away,” he says. “The only real way, if it’s ever going to happen, is for the people here to rise up and make it happen. Rural parts of California have no representation today. So splitting the state would allow us to form a more conservative government where you are paying less tax and are more free. We’re setting a trend. We have five counties in California watching what we’re doing here right now.”

Leaving Jones, I head to the Shasta County office to talk to Supervisor Mary Rickert. I’m joined by her husband Jim. Both are long-time cattle ranchers whose families have farmed in Shasta County for five generations. Neither believes that a libertarian SoJ would solve any of Shasta’s problems. “Some 85% of our funding comes from state and federal dollars,” Rickert says. “We’re a taker, not a giver. We couldn’t survive.”

However, she shares Jones’s distrust of Sacramento’s ability to effectively govern Northern California. “Gavin Newsom is not agriculture-friendly,” she says, giving a stark example. Under Californian law, she can’t shoot the wolves that threaten her cattle. “But why is a wolf’s life more valuable than a cow’s?” She maintains this isn’t really a priority for the militia. “I’ll be very clear, I believe they’re using Shasta County to elevate themselves. To his followers, Jones talks about not working with the government,” Rickert argues. “But behind the scenes, he’s for his personal gain through government grants to promote a new gun range.”

Before I leave Redding, I call Mark Baird, the leader of the SoJ movement. When he picks up the phone, the line is hazy; he’s under the wing of a small aeroplane in remote Siskiyou County, where he works as an aerial firefighter.

Baird identifies two flashpoints in Northern California history. The first is the 19th-century discovery of gold, which transformed the region into a resource hub with less settled urban populations than the powerful South. For Baird, second in importance are the constitutional reforms of liberal Republican governor Earl Warren during the Fifties that reduced rural representation at the state level. “We have a model in California, where the northern third of California has six state-level representatives and the other two-thirds has 114,” Baird tells me. “As you can see, the natural resource counties, and the rural counties, never win. We never get anything we want [and then] all of this lunatic bullshit comes up from Sacramento. The State of Jefferson is really about ‘Rule of Law and Liberty.’ As Thomas Paine said in his funny little pamphlet, oddly enough called Common Sense, all parts of the colony need to remain representative.”

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For Baird, state and national politics, across all parties, have fundamentally betrayed these principles and grown distant from their voters. “It’s time for the people to take back the government that they formed to represent them,” he tells me. “They’re not doing anything for anybody — except lining someone’s pocket and I guarantee you that someone lives in Sacramento.”

In some sense, America has always looked back to its early leaders for political prototypes. At the national level, the current arena seems to be dominated by a contest between Biden’s technocratic and institutionally focused Hamiltonianism and the plutocratic Jacksonian populism of Trump. On the open frontier, however, far from centralised power, a third model appears to be re-emerging: that of Jeffersonian yeoman democracy. Whether this very American brand of folk libertarianism will survive a 2024 national election year remains to be seen — especially if the race becomes defined, as seems likely, by the need for an economically interventionist policy in the face of mounting competition with China.

Despite all this, many in Shasta County seem determined to mount political resistance against a changing world. Much like the cowboys of old, they’ve barricaded the saloon, and they’re waiting, guns drawn, for a showdown at dawn. From this distance, however, it’s hard to tell whether the pistols and hats are even real.

And so the biological-industry complex was also born, swept into being as the US started to reckon with the inevitability of biological warfare and bioterrorism — an inevitability that arrived just one week after 9/11, when envelopes of inhalation anthrax were mailed around the country. But, as with the military-industrial complex, the emergence of America’s biodefense infrastructure was about much more than defending against potential threats. It was about anticipating them, understanding them, spying on them, and creating them. In many ways, the sense of urgency echoed the Manhattan Project, which showed just how quickly a “scientific-technological elite” could coalesce around a military project of strategic value. Consequently, American biodefence today spans the Departments of Defense, Homeland Security, Agriculture, the FBI, the State Department, and the Intelligence Community (not to mention state-level agencies).

Curiously, however, it also appears to have spread into American foreign aid. In April, Samantha Power, the former human rights activist and Obama hand now serving as administrator of United States Agency for International Development (USAID), testified before the Senate Foreign Relations Committee. Senator Rand Paul asked: “Did USAID fund coronavirus research in Wuhan?” In response, Power was evasive, referring repeatedly to USAID funding of the Wuhan lab having taken place “before my time”. But Power’s testimony raises a much bigger question: Why was USAID funding risky research in a Chinese lab that the US Department of Energy and the FBI now assess to be the source of Covid at all?

Since the heady days of the pandemic, when top scientists resorted to burner phones and clandestine meetings, journalists have uncovered thousands of pages of redacted emails, deleted virus sequences, and concealed events related to the outbreak of Covid. Among the key revelations of this years-long investigation was the enormous sums of US government funding spent on risky virus research around the world, but with a particular emphasis on China. The vast majority of this money was funnelled through a New York-based NGO called EcoHealth Alliance, led by  British zoologist Peter Daszak. And by far the largest portion of US money channelled through EcoHealth — no less than $65 million — came from USAID. Not even the pandemic could put a stop to investment. As recently as late 2021, well after EcoHealth Alliance had been rebuked by the National Institutes of Health (NIH) for improper practices regarding its funding of the Wuhan lab, USAID gave EcoHealth Alliance a further $4.67 million.

This was merely the latest in a long series of funding rounds. EcoHealth received its first installment from USAID in 2009. The money would come from a then-novel USAID programme called Predict, whose mission was to hunt out viruses that jump from animals to humans and could potentially cause a pandemic. Predict was the brainchild of Dennis Carroll, an infectious diseases expert who had run USAID’s Pandemic Influenza and Other Emerging Threats (PIOET) Unit.

Carroll had permanently joined USAID in 2005 — a critical year for the agency, but also for the country. Two years prior, an outbreak of avian flu, or H5N1, had decimated poultry stocks and infected around 1,000 people around the world. The outbreak heightened a sense of terror of biological agents that had gripped the Bush Administration since the anthrax attack. In response, the Bush administration increased non-military biodefence funding from a paltry $60 million 2001 to a staggering $2 billion in 2003 — in addition to $6 billion dedicated solely to the development and stockpiling of vaccines. Just as importantly, with the 2004 presidential directive called Biodefense for the 21st Century, based on the assumption that “a bioweapons attack could devastate America”, Bush would lay the foundations for America’s first biodefence infrastructure.

At USAID, a similarly seismic change was underway. Under the leadership of Andrew Natsios, a longtime Republican political operative who started his career in politics running the 1990 primary campaign of George H.W. Bush, USAID would take a dramatic shift towards America’s defence establishment, becoming “a quasi-security agency”, as British professor of conflict studies Alice Hills wrote in a 2006 paper. This began in 2005 when USAID created its Office of Military Affairs (now the Office of Civilian Military Cooperation). “Uniforms [of US military personnel] in the corridors of the Ronald Reagan Building that houses USAID are now so commonplace they are not even noticed,” Henrietta Fore, the USAID administrator from 2007 to 2009, wrote in Parameters journal in 2008. “This is not the way things used to be.”

In 2009, USAID was forced to ramp up its efforts when another seismic event in the world of biological-threat preparedness took place: a novel influenza virus called H1N1, swine flu, which infected around one billion people and killed tens of thousands. In May 2009, Carroll testified before Congress that USAID had announced the launch of a new Emerging Pandemic Threats (EPT) Program, which would create “a global early warning system for the threat posed by diseases of animal origin that infect humans”. The programme, which in various forms ran until 2019 was slated to consist of four projects: Predict, Respond, Identify and Prevent — with the first, Predict, granted around $200 million in funding over two five-year funding cycles. (A follow-up USAID virus program called STOP Spillover was announced in May 2020 with a $100 million budget before getting quietly shelved.)

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With Predict, USAID sought to “identify the emergence of new infectious diseases in high-risk wildlife, such as bats, rodents, and non-human primates, that could pose a major threat to human health”. Under Carroll’s leadership, however, Predict went much further than identifying the “emergence” of dangerous new viruses. Instead, it started actively hunting them out. It sampled more than 164,000 animals and people and sourced more than 1,100 unique viruses, including strains of Ebola, Marburg, MERS- and SARS-like coronaviruses, 949 of which were not previously known. In doing so, Predict introduced a completely new kind of pandemic risk: giving these deadly, unknown viruses a direct pathway to become introduced to large human populations living nearby.

Given the risk, the benefits would presumably need to be at least as great. But a highly influential 2017 paper by Emma L. Geoghegan and Edward Holmes demonstrated that the predictive value of the programme wasn’t merely of dubious value but of no value at all. “[E]fforts to predict disease emergence commonly conflate fundamentally different evolutionary and epidemiological time scales, and are likely to fail because of the enormous number of unsampled viruses that could conceivably emerge in humans,” the paper stated.

Nevertheless, the programme’s leaders were certain that Predict worked. A 2012 article published by the journal PLOS concluded that, as a result of Predict and EPT: “China has made a series of changes to public health policy and infrastructure specifically targeting SARS-like illnesses… It is likely that any future spillover from SARS… would be less likely to result in international spread.” One of the main authors of the paper was Dennis Carroll. Another was Peter Daszak.

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It would be less than seven years from the publication of that paper before a pandemic would be caused precisely by a SARS-like pathogen originating in China. This raises the very serious question of how the world’s leading experts on pandemics, who commanded nine-figure budgets to monitor populations for exactly this kind of emerging virus, failed to even detect its emergence.

The reality is that Predict was doing more than detecting dangerous pathogens: it was helping labs make them. In May 2021, the office of US House Representative Guy Reschenthaler released a report showing that USAID had funnelled $1.1 million to the Wuhan Institute of Virology (WIV) through the EcoHealth Alliance. Among the work funded by USAID was a 2015 study jointly conducted by Shi Zhengli, the infamous “bat lady” of the Wuhan Institute of Virology, and the University of North Carolina researcher Ralph Baric, which used reverse genetics to insert a spike protein from a wild coronavirus capable of binding to a human receptor into the SARS-1 virus. The new lab-made virus was shown to bind to the human receptors and replicate “efficiently”, according to a House Foreign Affairs committee report.

The 2015 study — which the Bulletin of Atomic Scientists characterised as a “prototype” for making SARS-CoV-2 in a lab — was considered so dangerous that its authors did not upload the resulting sequence to GenBank, the NIH’s genetic research repository, for fear it might “fall into the wrong hands”, as Baric, its lead author, would later attest. But the study also omitted one other critical piece of information: USAID had provided funding for the study. Nature Medicine, the journal that published the paper, was forced to add a “Corrigendum” clarifying that the aid agency had in fact funded it.

Funding this kind of research in China added a whole other dimension of risk. According to the State Department, the Wuhan Institute began collaborating with the People’s Liberation Army no later than 2017. NBC News reported that in spring 2018, the Wuhan Institute’s Shi collaborated with military scientists specifically on coronavirus research. And in April 2020, it was revealed that the Wuhan Institute worked with Chinese military researchers to conduct research on Covid in humanised mice cells for the purposes of investigating the new disease. (US government investigators later found that the mice cells used specifically for Covid testing would have been created in the summer of 2019 — months before the pandemic began.)

There is little doubt that the US had, and still has, a global premium on the equipment, expertise, and ambition to do this type of research. So why would the NIH, let alone the USAID, fund such research in, of all places, a lab in China?

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Among the four pillars of “Biodefense in the 21st Century”, Bush’s strategy that gave rise to programmes like Predict, was one called “Threat Awareness”. It indicated that the US was “improving the Intelligence Community’s ability to collect, analyze, and disseminate intelligence [on bioweapons]”. Of all places, China would almost certainly be at the top of any list of bioweapons intelligence targets. Though the nation is a signatory to the Biological Weapons Convention (BWC), the State Department found in 1993 that its bioweapons activities continued long after its accession in 1984. A 2002 report by The Nonproliferation Review found that one of a number of PRC-connected factories producing bioweapons was located in Wuhan. It was there that Shi Zhengli was conducting her own cutting-edge virus research, though under the banner of scientific research.

While failing to anticipate, or even identify, the Covid pandemic, Predict could have given American intelligence access to the findings of virus researchers such as Shi Zhengli, not just in China but around the world. In which case, given the sums associated with America’s defence and intelligence budgets, the project’s hefty $200 million lifetime budget would have paid for itself.

It wouldn’t have been the first time that international aid programmes have been used to gather intelligence. In 2014, it was reported that USAID had been caught trying to create a version of Twitter in Cuba that would help the CIA influence the political situation, with an eye to overthrowing the government. “USAID, perhaps, is the new CIA here,” Peter Kornbluh of the National Security Archive’s Cuba said at the time. The programme backfired, eventually allowing the Castro government to spy on the 40,000 Cubans who signed up.

Have USAID’s intelligence efforts failed again? In September 2019, the Wuhan Institute, with no explanation, took its database of viruses offline — a database populated by efforts funded, in part, by Predict. It was only months later, in March 2020, that Predict was brought to a close. But far from being the end of the programme, Predict’s demise was only the beginning of a much bigger and bolder incarnation of it.

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The Global Virome Project (GVP), a $3-billion private venture to “identify and characterize, within a decade, 99% of all zoonotic viruses with epidemic/pandemic potential”, was envisioned as Predict on steroids. Not coincidentally, it was created and led by the same people at the centre of Predict, including Dennis Carroll, Peter Daszak and Predict’s principal investigator Jonna Mazet. Like Predict, the GVP would be rooted in tight cooperation not just with the Chinese government (one of the co-authors of the Science paper announcing its launch was George Gao, then head of the Chinese CDC), but specifically the lab in Wuhan. “The Wuhan Institute of Virology… is the forerunner to the Global Virome Project,” a 2018 State Department cable from the US consulate in Wuhan reported. “China has expressed interest in building the GVP database… Other countries…are skeptical on whether China could remain transparent as a ‘gatekeeper’ for this information.”

In addition to the Chinese government, a core partner in the GVP was health-tech company Metabiota. Led by a PR-savvy “virus hunter” named Nathan Wolfe, Metabiota played a key role in USAID’s Predict, despite having been accused of running a “bungled” response to the Ebola outbreak in 2014. The company received around $24 million in funding from the Department of Defense, funding that is alleged to have been facilitated by Hunter Biden, whose investment firm, Rosemont Seneca, led a $25 million investment round in Metabiota, investing $10 million for a 13% stake in the company. Emails revealed by US Right to Know show that, while building the GVP, Carroll (using his USAID email address) earmarked hundreds of thousands of dollars in USAID funding to Metabiota, possibly in violation of federal law.

Since then, even in the wake of a pandemic that it might have caused, the power of the biological-industrial complex has continued to grow. Funding to EcoHealth Alliance has been fully restored. Everyone from Anthony Fauci to Samantha Power to Anthony Blinken is able to calmly sit in front of a powerful senator and explain that documents regarding the research done at Wuhan, subsidised by USAID, NIH and the State Department, will not, after all, be forthcoming. When I asked USAID about Predict, a spokesperson said: it “focused on understanding viral risk” and lowered “the pandemic risk in several ways”. They also stated: “USAID has never funded gain of function or dual use research of concern activities.” But it still remains unclear what exactly it did fund. With 20 million people dead and the world no closer to answers regarding what actually caused the pandemic — not the scientific method, but the policies, people, and institutional corruption — we can only continue to pose questions that have, for three years, gone glaringly unasked.

For starters, we are still a minority. Over the past year, official reports have confirmed many of our claims that were initially dismissed as disinformation — on the likely artificial origin of SARS-CoV-2, on the futility of universal masking (especially in children), on school closures, on the negative impact of lockdowns, on the possible side effects of the mRNA vaccines, and much more. But most people are not aware of these developments. Instead, they still largely subscribe to the Covid consensus: that the pandemic measures were a necessary, albeit painful, response to a novel virus which we knew very little about. As a recent UnHerd Britain poll revealed, most Britons are still convinced that lockdowns were the right choice.

Will this shift? It seems unlikely, given the vast resources that will likely be poured into consolidating the “accepted story” of the past three years — what we might call the post-Covid consensus. This can already be seen in the media’s hagiographic reports about two of the chief architects of America’s pandemic response, Anthony Fauci and former CDC director Rochelle Walensky, following their recent departures from government. Meanwhile, the World Health Organization and national governments are pushing to increase the power of centralised public health authorities during health emergencies, through the revision of the WHO’s International Health Regulations and a new pandemic treaty. Elsewhere, despite the launching of official Covid inquiries in several countries, including the UK, it seems doubtful that they will lead to anything more than a merry-go-round of buck-passing. The failures committed at the highest level during the “war on Covid” are simply too big to expect states to put themselves on trial.

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By Thomas Fazi

Indeed, if the past three years have taught us anything, it is that most of the constitutional safeguards, legal formalities and “checks and balances” that we took for granted can easily be swept aside in the name of “emergency”. That most of the Covid measures are now being curtailed doesn’t change the fact that the potential for a return to boundless executive power is always there. Indeed, perhaps this is the most pernicious legacy of the pandemic: that most people appear to have accepted the fact that democratic norms and practices may be suspended in the name of “public threats”. In other words, the politics of emergency have been normalised.

While the Covid pandemic may be over, then, the Covid paradigm remains very much alive. In fact, we are already witnessing its deployment in the context of new crises, most recently in the emergence of a totalising narrative surrounding the Ukraine war. This points to another uncomfortable truth: that the underlying conditions that made the Covid response possible have not gone away. If anything, they have been exacerbated since the virus struck: the capture of state institutions by corporate interests, the hyper-concentrated nature of our mainstream media, the power of Big Tech and its symbiotic relationship with the repressive apparatuses of the state, and the transfer of power from the national level, where citizens are able to exercise some degree of influence over policy, to an unaccountable supranational level.

In this context, it is worrying to see many of those in the so-called lockdown-sceptic camp drawing misplaced conclusions from the events of the past three years. It has become almost an article of faith among lockdown sceptics to place the blame for the pandemic response on excessive state power — and to conclude that the solution to all our problems is to dramatically curtail the role of the state.

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The fall of America's benevolent empire

By Thomas Fazi

We profoundly disagree with this conclusion. Of course, Western state institutions have failed in the Covid era — proving to be inefficient, terribly oppressive or both. Yet it seems pretty clear that they failed not because they are state institutions per se, but rather because they have been captured by private corporations and their interests. If the main lesson drawn from the pandemic is that there should be further erosion of the productive and organisational capacities of the state, disaster will surely follow. The worst possible outcome would be the further privatisation of public services, allowing private interests to further distort public institutions through “revolving door” policies and close government ties to biotech companies. Such an approach ignores the fact that private corporate power can be just as tyrannical as state power. In fact, many of our problems can be traced back precisely to the deregulation of big business of the past decades, which has led private corporations to exercise significant control over our lives.

To see how this corrupts the public sphere, consider the rise in conspiracy theories around the mRNA vaccines. Many of these, suffice it to say, are deeply disturbing. However, as we observed in The Covid Consensus, a main driver of these conspiracies has been the enormous secrecy with which Western governments have shrouded the entire Covid vaccine process — ranging from the original trial records to the contracts signed with vaccine manufacturers to the question of vaccine injuries. Secrecy is by definition an element of conspiracy, and with governments refusing voluntarily to divulge any of this information except when legally challenged, it’s clear that this has influenced the rise of the conspiracies, and general distrust in public health.

What’s particularly disturbing is the reason generally cited by Western governments to support this secrecy: corporate confidentiality. When Vikki Spit — whose partner had been recognised by UK agencies as having died of a blood clot to the brain after taking the AstraZeneca vaccine — requested information about why the company had requested indemnity from litigation, the UK government responded: “The requested information contains commercially sensitive information with regards to the contracts… [disclosure] would prejudice the commercial interests of the companies involved.” This suggests that the main problem is the way the role of the state has changed in recent decades, becoming little more than an enforcer of corporate priorities.

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Another important example of this process is the marketisation of healthcare. In the years before the pandemic, bed occupancy rates in health systems rose across Europe, as the number of hospital beds were slashed in the name of austerity and “efficiency”. The pandemic has exposed the short-sightedness of such a policy: in order to have enough capacity to continue the treatment of routine conditions during a health emergency, health systems require built-in “inefficiencies” of empty beds, probably of around 20%. The problem is that, in the UK in particular, the healthcare system is failing on this front. Compared to France (5.73 per 1,000 population) and Germany (7.82), the UK has a shocking low number of hospital beds (2.43). Of the top 10 countries for hospital beds per capita, only two (Germany and Austria) are not in Asia or Eastern Europe.

This might just be one measurement, but it strongly indicates that Western market dogmas around efficiency shouldn’t be taken at face value. Rather than doing away with the state, the past three years have shown that we actually need more of it. But we also need to increase democratic control and oversight over its institutions, while at the same time placing clear limits to what can be done in the name of public health. This is the only way to restore the public faith’s in public health — and, hopefully, avoid a repeat of the Covid disaster if and when the next pandemic strikes.

One of the UK’s poultry producers’ associations reported last autumn that between bird flu and persistently low margins, up to a third of its members either reduced production or closed down altogether. One former egg farm near me now rents storage units; another has been on the market for months, unable to find a buyer. As a result, there aren’t enough eggs to stock the shelves — and supermarkets are importing them from Italy. “So what?” you might ask. This is the market at work. But around this time three years ago, egg politics looked for a moment as though they might be on a different course.

Covid lockdowns scrambled many of the food supply chains we’d grown accustomed to — and as the country reeled, it seemed briefly as though more local networks might begin to re-emerge. (This was the point we first got our birds, albeit less with profit in mind than our own kitchen.) On my street, neighbours with back-garden poultry did a roaring trade.

Early 2020 brought a wider sense, too, that Covid might signal the end for free-trade absolutism more generally, and prompt a return to more bounded and local networks. But three years on, although my street still has several poultry-keepers, most have reverted to buying eggs from the shops. The turn away from free trade, if the Italian egg suppliers are anything to go by, has yet to occur.

Why, then, do we seem unable to imagine any other way of doing things? This seemingly inexorable drift back to the impersonal market epitomises Britain’s approach to food. This system, which we embraced in earnest nearly two centuries ago, maps a belief in the impersonal logic of “the market” onto a terrain whose most important attributes are simply not visible to market logic. And egg politics shows, in microcosm, just how poorly this ideology meshes with food production — to the extent that it now threatens our capacity to produce food at all.

Our trajectory toward the current situation was set out by Karl Polanyi, in the influential 1944 book, The Great Transformation. Humans, Polanyi argues, have always bought, sold, and exchanged things. But for the most part, across time and cultures, the market has been ordered to the needs of social institutions, and regulated accordingly. What’s unique about the modern world, he suggests, is that it works the other way round: our social institutions are ordered to the market.

For Polanyi, it was the enclosure of the commons that set England on this trajectory, by displacing England’s subsistence peasants, and creating the industrial proletariat, who were obliged to work for a wage. Perhaps the last nail in the coffin for that older, landowning order was the 1846 repeal of the Corn Laws: tariffs that aimed to protect domestic grain prices from the influence of cheaper foreign imports, and were vigorously opposed by the mercantile class and industrial proletariat.

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It was, in effect, a contest between Britain’s food producers and an emerging population of food consumers. And in 1846, the food producers lost their protection from competition. The change accelerated Britain’s shift from a farming-first to an industrial economy, and set agriculture — once the largest employer in England — on the trajectory it’s followed ever since: dwindling opportunities for youth, relentless demands for efficiency, and with these a bitter tension between land stewardship, and market-driven pressure to lower standards. The historian Robert Ensor writes that after repeal, “the only chance for any young or enterprising person on the countryside was to get out of it”. Many smaller farmers gave up, and emigrated to America.

As populations urbanised, this also pushed Britons to abandon domestic poultry-keeping — or rather, to centralise it. Today, most egg farming (where it survives at all) is highly industrialised, with 48% of British birds in battery cages. Despite more recent regulations banning the cruellest intensive farming practices, bird welfare often suffers. And their waste, though an excellent nutrient for our domestic veg beds, is a major source of river pollution at scale.

Perhaps the gains in efficiency warrant the loss of chicken-keeping culture. But chicken centralisation also illustrates how, when market pressures collide with food production, it’s not so much that costs are driven down. Rather, they’re externalised into areas that don’t appear on the balance sheet, such as animal cruelty, river pollution, distressed producers — or, more subtly, disappearing cultures.

We’re middle-class chicken hobbyists, not farmers, but even amateur poultry-keeping has left me wondering what else is lost in cultural terms when chickens are centralised, from realism about animal behaviour, to poultry-based metaphors — or seasonal rituals. Absent modern, artificial housing conditions, many hens stop laying over the winter. If your birds are free-range, when they start again in the spring, you have to figure out where they’re hiding their eggs. When I learned this, it left me wondering whether this insight survives for most modern families only in the other egg glut we’re eating our way through: the chocolate one. Modern chocolate was, after all, invented the year after the Corn Laws were repealed. So Britain’s urbanisation began in earnest just as chocolate became a mass-market treat. Did a trace of the older form of “spring egg hunt” —  for real eggs — urbanise, too, in chocolate form, among now-henless households?

The nineteenth-century Tories were ambivalent about such losses: the Corn Law debate split the Tory Party down the middle, and eventually forced Robert Peel’s resignation as Prime Minister. But despite their residual association in the public mind with the interests of landowners, today’s Tory Party seems closer in spirit to the old Whigs: mercantilist to the core, and deeply reluctant to look too closely at how well “markets” manage the complex mesh of social, environmental and economic issues bound up in domestic food production.

When, for example, Johnson struck a “free trade deal” with Australia around two years ago, it was hailed as a benefit of Brexit. At the time, the National Farmers’ Union warned that the proposed deal would be disastrous for British farmers; Johnson shrugged it off with a merrily Whiggish nod to market ideology, declaring: “This is a country that grew successful and prosperous on free trade, on exporting around the world.”

Last year, British farmers warned again that, applied to farming, these free-market policies are “sleepwalking” Britain into a food crisis. In January, shop shelves across the country stood empty. The government shrugged, this time blaming supermarkets for “market failure”. More recently, food tsar Henry Dimbleby quit his post, condemning ministers’s “ultra-free-market ideology” as a threat to Britain’s food security.

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But the ideology seems as tenacious as ever, and our leaders as convinced at ever that where the dictates of the market require that something be dissolved — even if that turns out to be Britain’s capacity to produce eggs at all — then it will be dissolved. We don’t need poultry producers in Britain. The market will provide: we’ll just import eggs.

But this is premised on a belief that nothing can stand in the way of international trade, now or in the future. And even leaving aside energy prices, just based on news headlines over the last 20 years, this strikes me as — to put it mildly — a risky bet. What if we grind domestic food security to nothing in the name of the “free market”, only for the wheels to come off global trade again?

And yet nor am I sure that this is just a matter of ideology-blinded mercantilist leaders. For all proposed solutions to food security — whether free-market ones from the Right, or regulatory or veganism-based ones from the Left — share the same implicit certainty that whatever the solution is, it will still involve centralisation. And yet we could surely make a dent in the nested (sorry) poultry problems of food security, pricing, pollution, welfare, and carbon-intensive supply chains — not to mention improve domestic food waste management — by going the opposite way, toward chicken decentralisation.

Yes, some people live in apartments. But 87% of British homes have a back garden. And regulations on intensive poultry farming permit an insane density of birds — 17 hens per square metre — meaning even a tiny back garden could easily keep a few hens in many times this space, while enabling the recycling of kitchen scraps and supplying the garden with high-quality fertiliser.

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So why aren’t we doing this? I don’t think it’s just that Tories are wicked mercantilists, or that the farmers are almost gone already. The only explanation I can see is simple, and dispiriting: that however excited some got in 2020 about re-localising and de-marketising food production, the vast majority of people just don’t want to.

The fault, in truth, lies with all of us: for market “efficiency” and “convenience” isn’t just about price and choice. It’s also about lack of obligation. As I’ve learned when buying (and, occasionally, selling) eggs among neighbours, the moment you make trade more local — which is to say, more personal — you swiftly become caught in additional layers of obligation, whether to the birds that depend on you for food and safety, or to the neighbours whose subsistence is now (in however tiny a way) more bound up in yours.

And while communitarians often idealise such networks, we’ve grown accustomed to being able to buy eggs without this layer of complexity. No one who views taking the neighbour’s bin round as a huge favour will be keen on re-creating this complexity unless they absolutely have to. Most are still more than happy to look away from the uncounted welfare, ecological and food-security costs of this freedom from obligation. And I suspect it’s this, more than anything, that explains our Titanic-like drift toward the iceberg of food supply disaster.

Changing course would not just mean kicking out the Tories, or fiddling with regulations, embracing synthetic foods, or even re-building forgotten practices in domestic food production. It would mean re-evaluating every basic assumption about how we relate to one another, and why. The food crisis will have to get a great deal more severe — and fresh eggs a great deal more expensive than mass-produced chocolate ones — before many are willing to do that.

This is a mistake. Demography may be destiny, but it is geography that determines its political shape. The greatest division today is to do with place: in particular, three basic terroirs — urban, suburban and rural — which reflect a divergence in economic interest, family structure and basic values, particularly between big city economies and those on the periphery.

This fracture is widening at a time when the demographic balance between these regions is shifting. For much of the past two centuries, the overwhelming inclination was towards urbanisation, with dense cores serving as the prime engines of economic, cultural and social change. Today, however, that pattern is shifting, particularly since the pandemic, which saw two million citizens move out of big US cities. Even in urban-oriented Europe, 63% of cities experienced a population decline during the pandemic.

Does this mean “the era of urban supremacy is over”, as the New York Times put it? Quite possibly. But don’t expect the urban leadership to acknowledge it. Even as they desperately attempt (and largely fail) to lure workers back downtown, urban political interests continue to dominate the national conversation — even amid high levels of crime, street-level disorder and the resulting shuttering of businesses.

Largely ignored by the city-dominated media, the world’s urban core has been losing this battle for generations. This is not only evident in the United States, but also across Europe and Australia. According to the Australian Bureau of Statistics, little more than 5% of growth from 1966 to 2021 was in the core cities. In Europe, barely 37% of people live in cities, with the rest in fast-growing suburbs, small towns and rural areas.

Of course, many cities have experienced some revival over the past decade, but that “boom” has largely benefited educated newcomers and their wealthy employers. Urban regions became both richer and poorer; according to Pew research, the greatest inequality in America now exists in “superstar cities”, such as San Francisco, New York, Los Angeles and San Jose.

These shifts have, unsurprisingly, shaped urban politics. As middle-class families have left, the urban terroir has been gutted of the old urban bulwark of solid middle and working-class families; as Fred Siegel has observed, it is dominated by an “upstairs/downstairs” coalition of the affluent and dependent.

This demographic reality has driven a shift towards a more progressive politics. In 1984, for example, Ronald Reagan won 31% of the vote in San Francisco and 27.4% in Manhattan. In 2016, Donald Trump won only 10% of the vote in each. Between 1998 and 2018, urban counties — which sometimes includes suburbs — went from 55% to 62% Democratic. Today, there is not a single Republican Mayor of a city of more than one million people. Recent victories of progressives in Los Angeles, Oakland, Chicago, New York and Minneapolis, despite widespread social disorder and economic decline, suggest this pattern may well be inexorable.

The antipode to the urban terroir lies in the countryside and rural hinterlands, which are experiencing a modest revival across the Western world. Yet even as they begin to regain appeal, rural areas are struggling against the dominant urban drive to “net zero”, which threatens economies based on local fossil fuel development, farming and manufacturing. For instance, it was high energy prices brought on by climate policies that sparked the Gilets Jaunes movement in France’s small towns, villages and exurban communities. To meet climate demands and limit their use of chemical fertilisers, Dutch farmers, among the world’s most efficient and ecology minded, have similarly risen up and joined their Spanish, Polish and Italian counterparts.

Even worse, the urban elites propose reaching their net zero fantasies by physically disfiguring rural communities. This offensive is being pushed by oligarchs such as J.P. Morgan’s Jamie Dimon, who resents peasants blocking land acquisition for subsidy-driven “green” investments and seeks federal help to secure these lands. But he is just one man of a wider movement, in which rural areas, home to the vast majority of proposed new solar and wind projects, are now asked to fulfil the green dreams of Manhattan, San Francisco and west Los Angeles. In California, the Nature Conservancy estimates that fulfilling the state’s net zero targets would require up to one-tenth of the farming acreage in the coming decades.

People living in the areas have responded as one might expect: between 2015 and 2022, community rejections of such projects in the US grew from 50 to over 500. A similar narrative is playing out throughout the EU and among farmers Australia, who fear transmission lines and windmills will not only make their farms less productive, but destroy the surrounding landscape.

For now, the political revival in small towns and rural areas represents an enormous boost to the Right. The once-strong progressive populism of rural communities has evaporated as more residents now feel more threatened by urban interests than corporate power. As a 2020 study from the Bennett Institute at the University of Cambridge found, there is a “deepening geographical fracture” in European societies reminiscent of “the stark urban-rural political divides of the early 20th century”.

This can be seen most clearly in the United States. In 2008, Barack Obama won nearly one quarter of the country’s non-metro counties. Eight years later, Hillary Clinton won barely 10%. In the past, notes Ernie Goss, professor of economics at Creighton University, the rural states regularly elected Democrats. How will Biden fare? “He couldn’t get a cup of coffee in this part of the country,” he told me. “To say he’s unpopular is an understatement.”

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Caught between these two increasingly extreme polities lies the third terroir, “the middle landscape” of suburban and exurban areas. Although these areas constitute an absolute majority of Americans and two-thirds of Europe’s 99 largest metros, they have little political power. This largely reflects the fact that suburbs tend to be populated by middle and working-class households, often too preoccupied with making a living and raising a family to indulge in political theatre. In other words, the middle landscape has the numbers, but has not found its voice.

Yet ultimately, it is the suburbs that will determine America’s future. They remain, unlike the other terroirs, contestable, home to at least 40% of all US House seats. For almost 20 years, the Republican-leaning suburban voters held steady at around 47%, with Democratic leaders at 45%. In 2016, the suburbs voted 50 to 45 for Trump, but two years later the suburban electorate tilted blue, effectively handing the House back to the Democrats. Then, in 2022, the predicted GOP landslide never developed, in large part because suburbanites split their ballots.

Whether this will be repeated remains unclear. On the one hand, Biden’s embrace of policies that seek to force communities to densify and take in low-income residents are not likely to be widely popular among suburbanites, who, after all, moved there to escape the city. On the other, the suburb’s changing demography could work to the favour of Democrats, as culturally liberal millennials and ethnic minorities join the city exodus.

But none of this represents the politics of choice — a programme suited to the needs and aspirations of this middle terroir. Right now, politics is inflicted on these communities rather than being shaped around them. Until they gain a voice, the West’s geographical cleavage will continue to widen, producing endless conflicts that fail the majority caught in between.

I was once one of those people. I’m a lower-middle class, suburban British bloke from Generation X, who was brought up to believe that the system broadly worked and was mostly fair, at least for people like me. The government did its best, though sometimes the wrong people got in; the police were here to help; there were career ladders and housing ladders, and if you worked hard and behaved responsibly and paid your taxes, then society would reward you for it.

Of course, this was a partial story, as all stories are. Plenty of people would have cackled cynically at it from the start, while others, including me, disabused themselves of it by degrees. I spent 30 years writing about the degradation of nature and culture by the state-capitalist technocracy that governs us, so I imagined I was a hard-bitten realist. But the last few years taught me that I was still too naive about the mythic “social contract” with the state that I apparently entered into at birth, despite having never signed a thing.

As I say, it’s not just me. The loss of faith across the West in our institutions, leaders and representatives in recent years has been radical. When, I wonder, did that contract expire? Maybe in 2003, when the lies with which the Iraq war was launched were so blatant that even those telling them seemed unconvinced. Or maybe later, in 2016, when Brexit happened and Donald Trump happened and European “populism” happened, and suddenly any opposition to liberal globalism became fascism or bigotry or the work of Russian bots.

But it was the pandemic — or rather, the response to it — that changed everything for me. I hadn’t been prepared see, in my allegedly free and democratic country, a merger of corporate power, state power and media power in the service of constructing a favoured narrative, of the kind which had previously only characterised totalitarian regimes. What the Covid regime brought home to me was that I had not, despite what I believed, really understood the real nature of power until I saw it exercised in its raw form over my life. Specifically, I had not understood the power of the state.

Nothing has the power or reach of a modern state. Its sheer scale and strength gives it the ability to corral, organise, define, measure and control its population in a manner that is unmatched in human history, and that power only grows and deepens. The momentum of a state is always towards the centre, always towards the agglomeration of more power. A state is like a black hole: at a certain point, it begins to suck in everything around it. As it grows, it will tell stories that justify its existence. Democracy, liberty and progress are some of the more recent banners beneath which state power has gathered, but there have been others: racial or ethnic homogeneity, human equality, religious purity. All of these stories have the potential to unite a people around a state core.

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What happens, then, when large and powerful states, along with the transnational institutions and corporations they promote and protect, are all driving towards the same goal: the universalisation of an American-style “global economy” and its associated culture? This has been the story of the world since 1945, and the result is the world’s first truly global system. The expansion of this system has created problems — ecological degradation, social unrest, cultural fragmentation, economic interdependence, systemic fragility, institutional breakdown. The system has responded with more expansion and more control, growing bigger, more complex and more controlling.

Modernity can best be seen as a system of enclosure, fuelled by the destruction of self-sufficient lifeways, and their replacement with a system of economic exploitation, guided by states and exercised by corporations. The disempowering of people everywhere, and the deepening of technological control, is the inevitable result, and the pandemic overreach will not be the last example. So what is the correct response to the problem of power, and the reach of the state? Avoid it? Hide from it? Confront it? Ignore it? All of these? Or something else? Can we escape the state and live differently? If so, how?

Jacques Ellul, the great theorist of technocracy, had his own answer to these questions: “The only successful way to attack these features of modern civilisation is to give them the slip, to learn how to live on the edge of this totalitarian society.” Ellul, I think, was right. The state is the chief enemy of human freedom. It cannot be conquered or replaced. But sometimes, under the right circumstances, it can be evaded.

In his 2009 book The Art of Not Being Governed — subtitled, “an anarchist history of upland Southeast Asia” — the historian James C. Scott offers up some historical examples. Scott’s aim is twofold: firstly, to lay out the history of a vast upland region he calls “Zomia”, straddling territories from India to Malaysia, which has managed over centuries to avoid assimilation by encroaching states. And secondly, to rewrite the standard story of historical progress as it applies to the region. The “hill tribes” and “barbarians” living outside civilisation’s walls, he says, are neither “left behind” by “progress”, nor the “remnants” of earlier “backwards” cultures; they are in fact escapees. “Hill peoples are best understood as runaway, fugitive, maroon communities who have, over the course of two millennia, been fleeing the oppression of state-making projects in the valleys — slavery, conscription, taxes, corvée labour, epidemics and warfare.”

Scott’s thesis is that throughout history, escaping from the reach of oppressive states has been a popular aim, and that in response, some cultures have developed sophisticated ways of living in hard-to-govern “shatter zones”, which allow them to avoid being assimilated. Standard-issue historical accounts of “development”, he says, are really the history of state-making, written from the state’s point of view: they pay no attention to “the history of deliberate and reactive statelessness”. Yet that history — whether of hill tribes, runaway slaves, gypsies, maroons, sea peoples or Marsh Arabs — is global and ongoing. Taking it into account, says Scott, would “reverse much received wisdom about ‘primitivism’”. Instead, we would read a history of “self-barbarisation”: a process of reactive resistance, of becoming awkward, of making a community into a shape that it is hard for the state to absorb, or even to quite comprehend.

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The state, says Scott, is fundamentally a colonial entity. In its youthful vigour, it will institute a process of “internal colonisation”, creating a homogenised “national identity” from the various cultures it governs, flattening language and dialect and telling a story in which loyalty to community or place becomes indistinguishable from loyalty to the state. Later that colonisation process may move beyond its borders, as the state projects its power onto more distant peoples, assimilating them too. This is enclosure at work, and it is never voluntary. Like laissez-faire capitalism, or aristocracy, the state — which has only existed for the last 1% of human history — did not simply “evolve” as some logical phase of human “development”. It was created, by the use of raw power, through land seizures, slavery, enforced labour and taxation.

For this reason, escaping from state power and creating different ways of living in the “shatter zones” was an attractive option. Those zones were usually to be found in hard-to-reach places; in Southeast Asia, this meant the hills and mountains. Their peoples — the “tribals” or “Adivasi” or “savages” — would not, in most cases, be entirely cut off from lowland life; they would often trade with urban centres, for example, and some would raid them, too, if they got the chance. But they would keep their distance, wary of being corralled by the state machinery.

The Asian states, as they expanded, sought to impose the religious, cultural and economic practices of the dominant ethnic group — be it Thai, Burman, Han or Kinh — onto disparate peoples. When European colonists arrived in Asia, they simply continued the process, with a new cultural flavour. The official religion now might be Christianity rather than Buddhism, and “civilisation” might mean British rather than Han manners, but to the peripheral peoples the result was little different. British imperialist Sir Stamford Raffles spoke not only for his Empress, but for the mind of the colonial state across history, when he wrote of Sumatra:

“Here I am the advocate of despotism … Sumatra is, in great measure, peopled by innumerable petty tribes, subject to no general government … At present people are wandering in their habits as the birds of the air, and until they are congregated and organised under something like authority, nothing can be done with them.”

But such localised, potentially dispersed cultures can be tough to conquer. In the 1890s, the British found the conquest of the Kachin and Palaung hill peoples in Zomia almost impossible. Because they had “never submitted to any central control”, complained the chief commissioner responsible for the process, they had to be attacked “hill by hill” to ensure their submission. The historian Malcom Yapp invented a wonderful term for this kind of dispersed culture of refusal: jellyfish tribes. In Scott’s words, jellyfish tribalism is “a process of defending cultural and economic autonomy by scattering” to “make the group invisible or unattractive as object of appropriation”. The Berbers of North Africa, faced with colonisation by the Arabs, had their own way of putting this: divide that ye be not ruled. Lois Beck, who studied tribal culture in Iran, pointed to the same tactic in use there: “Large tribal groups divided into smaller groups to be less visible to the state and escaped its reach.”

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All of this points to some potential ways forward for those who fear the continued expansion of the increasingly globalised, technocratic state today. The challenge, it seems to me, is to move beyond pat political formulations of “resistance”, and begin to think instead like the hill tribes of Zomia. To think about becoming barbarians by choice. To begin to build parallel systems — economies and cultures — which are hard to assimilate, and have a robustness to them which can last. To construct “cultures of refusal”.

But how could this actually be done? The modern West is not like Zomia — indeed, as Scott himself points out, modern Zomia is not like Zomia used to be either, with many of its stateless people now being rapidly absorbed into state systems, which new technologies have made more powerful and far-reaching than ever. What hope of any kind of alternative life in a hyper-connected, monitored, digital age? Even if we wanted to retreat to the margins to build our own community, how many of us could do it? And what would make that community more robust than the last counter-cultural wave of “intentional communities”, which sprang up after the Sixties, and failed to create utopia?

This is why I find the notion of the jellyfish tribe so intriguing. Any attempt at building utopia will fail — but utopia should never be a goal. Some form of free survival is the goal; survival in order to uphold the values of a true human life. There is no easy or standardised way to emulate what Scott calls the “state-repelling characteristics” of the Zomians, but there is one question it might be useful for anyone who seeks to evade Leviathan to ask themselves: what kind of barbarian do I want to be?

In ancient China, the state distinguished between two different kinds of barbarian outsider: the raw (sheng) and the cooked (shu). A 12th-century document detailing the relationship of the Li people with the Chinese state speaks of the “cooked Li” as those who have submitted to state authority and the “raw Li” as those who “live in the mountain caves and are not punished by us or do not supply labour”. But while the raw Li were clearly enemies of the state, the cooked Li were not exactly friends either. State officials “suspected them of outward conformity while slyly co-operating with the raw Li”. The raw barbarians lived outside the walls and the cooked lived within, but neither were really to be trusted.

What we see here, then, is two potential escape routes: one outside, one inside. Shatter zones do not have to literally be in the hills: they can be within our homes and even within our hearts. My heart soars whenever I hear of some remote monastery or surviving rooted community with no online access or even electricity, whose people know exactly where they stand: outside the state, the better to see God and experience creation. Such places are the work of the raw barbarians, and we need more of them.

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But most people are cooked barbarians. We are, to different degrees, in the state but not of it. Perhaps we look like good citizens on the outside. But if we coalesce as a jellyfish tribe, we can begin to dissociate ourselves from the state, while creating alternatives to it. Plenty of people are already doing this. They create cultures-within-cultures, parallel economies and ways of living. Like small furry mammals running unnoticed beneath the feet of the tyrannosaurs, we can thus build our own little worlds on the margins and wait for the coming of the meteor, which we can already see coming in the very un-sustainability of technological modernity. The mice don’t attack the dinosaurs, and neither do they wait for them to die out: they just avoid them as best they can, and get on with their work.

What Scott’s book shows me above all is that the tension between expanding power centres and free peoples is eternal and never-ending. Throughout history there has been an ongoing flow of assimilation and breakout, consolidation and collapse. There has never been any system as large, as overwhelming, as inhuman, as all-seeing, as technological modernity, and yet Rome and Babylon and Han China operated on the same principles. The shatter zones that rise in response are sometimes geographical, sometimes psychological and spiritual, and often all of these at once. Today, some of those shatter zones are at least partly online; and despite my own instinctive Luddism, I have to accept that such spaces are meeting points for state-repelling people who might never meet in real life. I have to accept, too, that using technology to resist technocracy can be of benefit, even though it can also be a trap.

In the age of Starlink, eyeball scans, AI bots and digital passports, it is getting harder and harder to find anywhere to hide. But humans are creative. There are countless practical ways in which cultural refusal can manifest in our everyday lives. I am a writer, for instance, who is currently watching the publishing industry being taken over by political puritans who are purging incorrect thoughts from the shelves, while rooting around in the past for baddies to cancel. I can whine about this, or I can support or start new publishers on the margins who do things differently. The same might be true for music, art, academia, food-growing. Everything is compromised; nothing is easy. But building anew, retreating to create, being awkward and hard to grasp, finding your allies and establishing your zone of cultural refusal, whether in a mountain community or in your urban home: what else is there?

Whatever culture you come from, it will offer up at least one folk hero who earned his or her status through state-repelling behaviour. In England, we have hundreds of pirates, highwaymen, outlaws and rebels to choose from. You all know the name of the most famous: England’s shadow self, Robyn Hode, who flits through his shatter zone, the English greenwood, with his merry band of refuseniks in tow. We could do worse than to find our own greenwood and take our stand there, beneath the shelter of its great, ancient oaks.

*

A longer version of this essay was first published at the Abbey of Misrule.

If vicars are often an object of projection, so much more the Archbishop. Any assessment of Justin Welby’s 10 years of office, therefore, will say more about me than him. The Archbishop is a living, breathing Rorschach test. Still: here goes.

Welby is hard to read because he is seemingly open and yet emotionally closed at the same time. Even before he landed the top job in the worldwide Anglican Communion, he was adept at not granting access to his inner world. The social polish you learn at Eton, with its arsenal of confident self-deprecation, is precisely the sort of self-protecting buffer zone that you need to survive being the nation’s punch bag.

There has been great pain in his life: dysfunctional alcoholic parents, the loss of a seven-month-year-old baby daughter in a car accident. Understandably, he has suffered periods of crippling darkness and has admitted to taking anti-depressants. He is brave in talking about his bruises, and yet also strangely hidden, both open and emotionally distant. And since he is not a natural people person, his openness can come across as scripted.

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Welby smiles to reassure, but in repose his face crackles with all the scary intensity of an officer on the Death Star; yes, a bit like a born-again Director Krennic. People say he has a thunderous temper when things don’t go his own way, which I can quite believe. Sometimes you can’t keep it all bottled up. I like Welby, but I am frightened of him.

Back in 2012, I interviewed him for The Guardian when he was still Bishop of Durham. Paddy Power had him at 6/1 to be the next vicar to the nation. We discussed woman bishops, still seen as a long way off. How would he reconcile the competing demands of those who see it as a theological necessity and those who deem it a theological impossibility? How would he square the circle, I asked? “Well, you just look at the circle and say it’s a circle with sharp bits on it,” he laughed. Anglicanism has always involved a certain amount of shape-shifting from its leadership. The phrase “all things to all men” is from the Bible, after all. But that doesn’t mean it’s necessarily a good thing. Ideologically, Welby can be what you want him to be.

Here’s an example. A few days after that Guardian interview, the Rev Rod Thomas — an evangelical conservative — and I discussed who should get the top job on Channel 4 news. Thomas was against women bishops and believes homosexuality is a sin. I thought the opposite. Yet we both agreed that Welby was the right man for the job. That’s the power of a circle with pointy bits. Some see a circle, others see a square.

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Women bishops were approved within a few years, and the Church has now agreed on prayers for blessing same-sex marriages. Rod Thomas was made a bishop in 2015 and kept on board. But he is far from happy. “We should not mislead people into believing that we can ask God to bless those things that He has revealed are contrary to His will,” said Bishop Rod recently. I think he may have been more deceived than I about that circle.

Welby’s church, his circle with pointy bits, turned out to be this: a collection of morally-progressive, liturgically-charismatic evangelicals with a hint of woke. Damaged public schoolboys who find it hard to express their feelings in everyday life are often attracted to forms of worship that let it all hang out. Welby talks in tongues. The whole thing is so achingly sincere. This is surely what Prince Harry would be like if he got God. It’s the sort of religion that some of us watch through our fingers with embarrassment — like dad dancing.

With Welby, open evangelicalism has become the new centre of gravity in the Church of England. More Radio 2 than Radio 4, undemanding and depressingly easy listening. “Let’s be clear, I’m one of the thicker bishops in the Church of England”, he told me back in 2012. There remains stiff competition for this title, I can tell you. And Welby is not even close. He has a keen and lively intelligence and a steely will. But Welby’s Church of England, it might be said, no longer feels the need for academic-minded bishops. Better some B-school MBA or a Certificate in Church Planting than a proper PhD in Patristics for the modern cleric on the make.

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And here is my real beef with Welby’s Church: managerialism. The backdrop to Welby’s appointment was the banking crisis and the subsequent Occupy camp at St Paul’s Cathedral. The Church needed to get a bit more this worldly, many thought. It needed to understand finance and business. When it came to capitalism, Welby was a grown-up, having worked for Elf Aquitaine in a previous life. And 11 years in the oil industry clearly shaped his thinking about organisational structures. The old, slightly bumbling high-table, soft-power understanding of Lambeth Palace was not for him. Welby wanted to change things and have access to levers of real executive power.

But the Church of England is not set up like this. It never has been. The parish system is the very model of subsidiarity. If anything, the Church is a bottom-up institution rather than top-down. You bow to your bishop, but you don’t necessarily do everything he asks. Under Welby, however, the centre has grown ever stronger, the parishes increasingly weaker. Max Weber famously divided power into the charismatic, the traditional and the legal/rational. Welby is the first archbishop who has tried to govern through the latter.

The “Save the Parish” movement was established as a fightback. Too many bishops became middle managers, hidden behind their laptops. Directives and new initiatives came down from head office, which many of the clergy, myself included, received with an inner groan. In the face of declining attendance, we all had to learn that evangelical up-speak, and get on with the paperwork. Morale has plummeted.

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The Church’s reaction to Covid was the depressing conclusion of Welby’s legal/rational approach to power. Buffeted by abuse scandals — including that of a previous friend and mentor, John Smyth, who beat and sexually harassed young boys on Christian summer camps — Welby read the Covid situation in the light of his safeguarding nightmares. Safeguarding was the one area where rules could be imposed on the clergy. Churches were to be closed to protect the faithful from infection. Clergy were allowed into their churches to check them over for insurance purposes, but not to celebrate the holy mysteries, even on their own. The shepherds abandoned their sheep.

It was a terrible directive and a lot of us — myself included — ignored it and were put on the Lambeth Palace naughty list. The gap grew wider between the clergy and the powers that be. “If I had my time again, I would be more cautious about closing the churches,” Welby later admitted. But the damage was done. For many people, a pattern of churchgoing had been broken never to be taken up again. Sunday schools were abandoned, the vulnerable left to fend for themselves. Parish treasurers pulled their hair out as finances went into a death spiral. Zoom was never a realistic alternative for a religion that is inherently physical, all about the body and the blood.

In a couple of months, Welby will preside over the coronation of King Charles III, and the Church of England has never felt weaker. It’s not his fault. Secularisation is a feature of the Western world, not of any specifically failed leadership. But nonetheless, Welby has failed to speak the right words for our time.

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In a moment of crisis, Welby’s answer seems to be organisational restructuring — redirecting more and more resources into big, successful, glitzy, mostly-evangelical churches, while letting smaller ones wither on the vine, run by the unpaid or the retired, all exhausted. This feels like what a CEO archbishop would do. Not a pastor or an evangelist. And, most depressing of all, the whole thing seems to be an exercise in bureaucratic navel-gazing.

Welby is a well-intentioned man, but he is unable to read the room — or, rather the nation. When in 2020, he abandoned his fine 13th-century chapel to take the Easter service online from his kitchen, I imagine he thought he was expressing solidarity with those who were stuck at home. But most people didn’t see it like that. It felt like a silly gesture, a gimmick. And a kick in the teeth to those of us struggling to keep the Church show on the road.

Some say Welby will go after the coronation. I don’t know about that. But what I would want from the new man or woman is someone who could help revive the morale of the clergy. “It’s just not so much fun anymore,” said one senior cleric to me recently. On the front line, in the parishes, it feels like the Archbishop doesn’t much care about us. Or if he does, he has been refusing to show it.

Here was a prominent figure dedicated to the role of science in solving global problems — even if he did display flashes of the egotism that led him to serve on the Sage advisory body during the pandemic and then quit to rush out a book lamenting other people’s failures.

“If we do revert to a lack of evidence, a lack of information — if we’re going back to the era where we’re just making policies up with no evidence behind them, the world is in a worse place. And we’re moving away from an era of sort of 20th, 21st-first century enlightenment to something darker,’ he concluded with a flourish. ‘We can’t let that happen.”

Who could argue with the need for evidence-based science and the unfettered flow of information to help make the world a better place? It was no surprise, however, Farrar chose The Guardian for his valedictory interview as he heads to Geneva for a new post as chief scientist of the World Health Organization. For this ensured there would be no challenging questions over his central — and profoundly anti-science — role in stifling debate on the pandemic origins and effectively pushing his own conspiracy, cooked up with a handful of influential colleagues, including Anthony Fauci in the US, which suggested any idea that Covid might have emerged from some kind of laboratory incident in Wuhan was crackers.

Never mind all the evidence that has emerged showing how members of a group of experts that Farrar marshalled to squash the lab-leak hypothesis harboured their own doubts over the disease emerging naturally, based on its location and unusual properties. Let alone his own initial fears on this vexatious issue — or indeed, his recently-revealed verdict on high-risk experiments on coronaviruses being carried out in low bio-security laboratories in Wuhan as “Wild West” research. Instead, his interviewer, a long-serving health reporter, dutifully told her readers that “Farrar’s position is that while it is likely to have come from animals, it is important to stay open-minded and gather evidence. Above all, we need transparency, he says.”

This is, sadly, typical of the pitiful reporting seen on this particular issue from The Guardian. Presumably this continuing failure is a legacy of the media group’s reaction to Donald Trump’s promotion of the possibility of a lab leak, a response shared with The New York Times. The Guardian, however, even allowed British scientist Peter Daszak to publish an article headlined “Ignore the conspiracy theories: scientists know Covid-19 wasn’t created in a lab” without disclosing his organisation’s financial and research links to Wuhan Institute of Virology (WIV) until forced into hasty clarification. Farrar, incidentally, promoted this risible piece on Twitter: “As always worth reading @PeterDaszak”.

Yet The Guardian was far from alone; almost all Western media failed in their duty to challenge powerful players and vested interests on the crucial issue of the pandemic origins. Patsy journalists churned out reports fed to them by prominent scientists that dismissed “conspiracy theories” about a possible lab leak, placing more faith in a brutally-repressive Chinese dictatorship than an elected US government. They kept pointing to an animal market in Wuhan as the most likely source of SARS-CoV-2, a theory dismissed even by the Chinese authorities and despite obvious flaws in this argument given earliest cases. Ultimately, much of the media ended up presenting a collective idea that there was settled consensus, sweeping aside the voices of bravely-dissenting scientists.

Farrar was at the centre of this deceptive web, spinning lines to impede unfettered debate on the origins of the biggest public health crisis for a century. Along with two of his Wellcome Trust colleagues, he joined 24 other scientists to sign a key letter in The Lancet journal sycophantically praising Chinese experts for their “rapid, open, and transparent sharing of data” and hitting out at “conspiracy theories suggesting that Covid-19 does not have a natural origin”. It was later discovered to have been covertly organised by Daszak, who had spent years working with his friend Shi Zhengli, the celebrated lead researcher into bat coronaviruses at WIV.

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Farrar also hosted a conference call on the first day of February 2020 at the behest of former presidential adviser Fauci. They were joined by Francis Collins, then head of the biggest US science funding body, and Sir Patrick Vallance, the British government’s chief scientific adviser, and at least 10 other experts. We know now that several taking part held concerns over the virus being engineered. Even after the call, Farrar admitted he was “50:50” on whether it came from a lab. Yet he oversaw the near-instant drafting by four participants and one other author of “The proximal origin of SARS-CoV-2”, another hugely-influential article published by Nature Medicine stating firmly that they “do not believe that any type of laboratory-based scenario is plausible”.

Dr Robert Redfield, an eminent virologist who led the US Centers for Disease Control and Prevention when the outbreak began in 2020, has long feared Covid resulted from a lab leak. Now his suspicions are backed by two US intelligence agencies. FBI chief Christopher Wray admitted last week they have “for quite some time now assessed that the origins of the pandemic are most likely a potential lab incident”. Yet Redfield told a congressional committee hearing into the virus’s origins this week that he was deliberately “sidelined” by the likes of Fauci and Farrar: “It was told to me that they wanted a single narrative, and that I obviously had a different point of view. Science has debate and they squashed any debate.”

Redfield’s written submission to the committee rightly argued that both theories on the origins “needed to be aggressively and thoroughly examined” — although his own view “indicates Covid-19 infections more likely were the result of an accidental lab leak than the result of a natural spillover event”. This conclusion, he explained, was “ based primarily on the biology of the virus itself, including its rapid high infectivity for human to human transmission… as well as a number of other important factors to include the unusual actions in and around Wuhan in the fall of 2019”.

Many other experts disagree. This is how science works: through the clash of ideas and rooting out of evidence to test theories. Yet Redfield told investigative journalist Paul Thacker last year that he believed Fauci and Collins used their political power in the scientific community to set the narrative and exclude dissident voices such as his own, using Farrar as “the front person”. He claimed The Lancet statement, as well as the Nature Medicine missive, “was orchestrated by Jeremy Farrar — I think under direction of Fauci and Collins, trying to nip any attempt to have an honest investigation of the pandemic’s origin”.

This is incredibly damning: these two documents were the most influential papers on the pandemic’s origins — accessed by millions, widely shared, heavily quoted and even used by social media to suppress publication of “conspiracies”. Meanwhile, Farrar pointed to the Nature Medicine statement when questioned on his belief that natural transmission was the most likely cause of the pandemic. “Jeremy’s belief is that the Nature Medicine research paper remains the most important research on the genomic epidemiology of the origins of this virus to date,’ his spokeswoman told me in June 2021.

Prior to this week’s hearing, Republicans on the committee issued a sharp memo asking why Farrar’s work on the Nature Medicine paper — which his spokeswoman confessed to me he had helped to “convene” although it now emerges he made at least one edit to toughen its tone — was uncredited by the journal. A fair question. They also quoted an email from lead author Kristian Andersen dated February 8 — eight days after that secretive conference call — to German participant Christian Drosten, which admitted “our main work over the last couple of weeks has been focused on trying to disprove any type of lab theory”.

Yet before the conference call, Anderson was “60-70%” convinced the virus came from a lab, according to Farrar’s book, alarmed by properties such as its receptor binding domain which “looked.. like a perfect key for entering human cells”, and the infamous furin cleavage site, which allows more efficient entry into human cells and is not found on similar types of coronaviruses.

Concerns have grown after it was discovered EcoHealth Alliance, the group run by Daszak that funnelled US funding to support research at WIV, sought a grant in 2018 from the US Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency proposing to insert a furin cleavage site into SARS-like bat coronaviruses to assess their ability to infect cells. The bid was declined, due to the risks. Daszak insists the collaborators have not pursued the research to his knowledge. But who knows exactly what really went on in those Wuhan labs given the stonewalling of outside inquiries? They could have continued the work with other funds for all we know.

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Let me state again with absolute clarity: we do not know the pandemic’s cause. It might have been through natural transmission. Or it might be the legacy of some kind of unfortunate laboratory incident. There is no hard proof for either theory, despite intense efforts to find an intermediate species of animal that might have “amplified” a bat virus to spill over into humans. Yet it was foolish to ignore that SARS-CoV-2 erupted 1,000 kilometres from the closest colonies of wild bats with similar coronaviruses. And in a city that was home to China’s only maximum bio-security laboratory — especially when WIV held the biggest repository of bat viruses in Asia, had known safety concerns, suddenly took its virus databases offline weeks before the pandemic emerged, and was carrying out risky gain-of-function research to boost infectivity of mutant bat viruses in humanised mice.

Whatever the origins, it seems alarmingly clear that a group of influential scientists, empowered by holding the purse strings for research, set out to deliberately stifle debate over the birth of a pandemic that has caused such devastation — often while saying that we must “follow the science” and despite their own early concerns over risky research in Wuhan and the virus’s strange properties. They pushed the toxic notion that anyone asking valid questions was inflaming conspiracy theorists and backing “implausible” ideas — and were aided by weak politicians, supine journalists and complicit science journals. Such was the influence of these funding behemoths, they set the tone across Europe. This was the real Covid conspiracy.

We can only guess why they adopted such a stance, although I suspect it was through misguided desire to protect both science and some of their own reputations having backed gain-of-function research. Regardless, their stupidity risks harming their profession through sinister efforts to crush free debate, a doctrine that lies at the root of scientific advancement. Sadly, all those journalists who failed to do their job of challenging powerful players and vested interests have also undermined my own profession again. This should provoke soul-searching, especially on the Left, over allowing partisanship to override fearless interrogation of important issues.

We can, however, now see the reason for the shameful silence in Westminster and Whitehall following the furore over former health secretary Matt Hancock’s leaked WhatsApp messages. These reveal how the Government argued behind the scenes that the outbreak’s location was “entirely coincidental” and that any discussion of a possible lab leak risked “damaging national security”. So our bureaucrats, politicians and spooks put their desire to appease a Communist dictatorship in China above the global quest to discover the truth about the pandemic origins, which might help us to prevent subsequent health disasters. No wonder my Freedom of Information requests on this issue have been stymied in both London and Edinburgh.

These inquiries still have some distance to travel, although slowly but surely the truth is emerging. “Recently released unredacted email messages make it clear that in early 2020 science funding heads Fauci, Collins and Farrar were informed by Anderson and three others that the genome sequence of Sars-Cov-2 raised the possibility that it was a laboratory product. The funding agency heads told them this threatened “great potential harm to science and international harmony”. The four scientists, following their paymasters’ lead, published a commentary in a journal falsely affirming that science ruled out the possibility of laboratory origins. “This false narrative still colours discussion, having dominated the debate for a year,” said the biosafety expert Richard Ebright, professor of chemical biology at Rutgers University.

But this begs a question: how can Farrar, having corroded the brand of one of our nation’s finest institutions and played such a role in promoting this narrative, now be handed the influential role of chief scientist at the WHO? “In this context, the appointment is a major error,” says Ebright rightly. This is another disastrous own goal by a UN body that has performed so badly in the pandemic from the earliest days. This post, arguably the most influential scientific role in the world, has been given to a figure who was at the epicentre of spinning a web of deception that stifled scientific probing of the first global pandemic for a century. It suggests that we are sliding from an era of enlightenment to something darker — and as Farrar says, we can’t let this happen.

The body tasked with the protection of public health, however, is undaunted by the criticism. We now learn it is engaged in a silent coup that, if successful, would grant it even more sweeping powers of intervention in the affairs of nation-states.

When it was created, after World War II, as an agency of the United Nations, it had the aim of promoting “the enjoyment of the highest attainable standard of health” across the globe — whereby health was understood, crucially, as “a state of complete physical, mental and social well-being and not merely the absence of disease or infirmity”. It was, in other words, predicated on an understanding of the fact that economic and social development are fundamental determinants of health —  a concept that would be reaffirmed in the Declaration of Alma-Ata of 1978.

As a reaction to the brutality of 20th-century totalitarian and colonial regimes — both of which had involved horrendous cases of medical abuse — the WHO also emphasised the importance of democratising medicine by putting communities and individuals in charge of their health through the promotion of proximity and primary healthcare. Under this democratic and rights-based framework, the WHO achieved several notable achievements, most notably the eradication of smallpox.

However, from the Eighties onwards, things started to change. Until then, the organisation had relied on the contributions of its member states for its regular budget. In 1982, however, the World Health Assembly, the WHO’s decision-making body, voted to freeze its budget — under pressure from the Reagan administration, which saw the WHO as a socialist-leaning, unaccountable organisation working against American interests. This was followed by the 1985 decision by the United States to withhold its contribution, in part as a protest against its “Essential Drug Program”, which encouraged developing countries to develop their own capacities to produce essential medicines, rather than rely on Western drug companies — small wonder leading US-based pharmaceutical companies were averse.

As a result, the organisation was forced to rely increasingly on extrabudgetary funds provided by “stakeholders”: not only governments and bilateral and multilateral agencies (such as the World Bank), but private and corporate donors as well, including pharmaceutical giants such as GlaxoSmithKline and Novartis. Over the years, among the private extrabudgetary donors, the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation rose above the rest: by the 2010s, it had become the WHO’s second-largest donor, accounting for around 10% of all funds.

Since voluntary contributions are earmarked, the donors largely get to call the shots on the use of the funds they contribute, as Margaret Chan, the WHO’s former Director-General, complained a few years back. This has led to the proliferation of public-private programmes more or less independent of the rest of the WHO’s programmes and decision-making structure, such as the Children’s Vaccine Initiative.

“The priorities of WHO have evolved accordingly, moving away from community-centred care to a more vertical, commodity-based approach”, writes David Bell, a public health physician and former WHO staffer specialising in epidemic policy. “This inevitably follows the interests and self-interests of these funders.” In place of the preventative and “holistic” approach to health initially championed by the WHO, which viewed health as the outcome of a wide range of economic, social and political factors, a new paradigm has slowly emerged: a commercialised approach to health, single-mindedly focused on high-tech, largely vaccine-based solutions, with a particular interest for genetically engineered biotechnologies — an emerging industry potentially worth  billions of dollars.

A crucial role in this shift was played by Bill Gates. As the WHO’s second-largest funder, Gates exercises a massive influence over the organisation, as even admirers of the foundation admit. And he has used that influence to promote vaccine-driven responses to matters of global health — through the WHO as well as through related public-private partnerships such as GAVI (Vaccine Alliance) and CEPI, also funded by Gates. In 2011, Gates spoke at the WHO, and declared: “All 193 member states [must] make vaccines a central focus of their health systems”. The following year, the World Health Assembly adopted a “Global Vaccine Plan” that the Gates Foundation co-authored, and over half of the WHO’s total budget now goes to vaccines.

His obsession with vaccines really shouldn’t come as a surprise. The Gates Foundation is strongly connected to the pharmaceutical industry, and ever since its creation, it has owned stakes in several drug companies. The foundation’s website even candidly declares a mission to pursue “mutually beneficial opportunities” with vaccine manufacturers. This is the essence of what has been called philanthrocapitalism — “a capitalist, market-based, for-profit approach to solving the world’s biggest and most pressing issues”. This kind of corporate-driven approach exemplifies the conflicts of interest inherent in the WHO’s dependence on unaccountable private donors such as the Gates Foundation.

Some activists in the Global South have especially negative views of the consequences for public health. A leading human rights activist in India, Vandana Shiva, said: “Gates has hijacked the WHO and transformed it into an instrument of personal power that he wields for the cynical purpose of increasing pharmaceutical profits. He has single-handedly destroyed the infrastructure of public health globally.”

Meanwhile, Linsey McGoey, a professor of sociology at the University of Essex, explains in her book No Such Thing as a Free Gift: The Gates Foundation and the Price of Philanthropy how Gates has used his influence over the WHO to defend the intellectual property rights of drugs manufacturers.

Crucially, just as the WHO was falling increasingly under the dominion of private capital (and Gates in particular) the organisation also started expanding its power. A key step was the third revision of its International Health Regulations (IHR) in 2005, on the heels of the 2002-2004 SARS outbreak, which for the first time made the agreements, encompassing a wide range of rules for the management of epidemics and pandemics, binding for all member states (even though the latter remained formally in charge of health policies).

This coincided with a wider push towards the supranationalisation of health policies, with the transition from “international” to “global” public health. While the two terms may appear synonymous, they in fact indicate two very different systems: while the former is grounded in nation-states as the ultimate repositories of authority, the latter implies that governments are just one (and not even the most crucial) component of a global health system involving a wide range of “stakeholders” — for example the media, private institutions and multinational corporations — with the WHO at its core as the ultimate voice of authority. This gradually inverted the relationship between the WHO and member states: as the latter’s influence over the organisation was increasingly eclipsed by private interests, the WHO’s influence over member states was growing.

This has led, over the past two decades, to the burgeoning of a massive global health industry encompassing the world’s largest pharma and biotech companies, global and national public health organisations (first and foremost the WHO itself), private philanthropies such as the Gates Foundation, vaccine-focused public-private partnerships such as GAVI and CEPI, and trans-Atlantic planning groups-cum-think tanks such as the World Economic Forum as important intermediaries between the various actors. These actors clearly have interests independent of each other, but over the years such interests have come to coalesce over the need to prepare for, and the profit opportunities offered by, future pandemics — deemed to be all but inevitable.

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Indeed, the pandemic shone a light on the power accrued by the global health industry in the years leading up to 2020 — and its influence over the WHO. As Covid took hold, the organisation jettisoned its years-long established position on pandemic management, along with any form of evidence-based science, in favour of a completely novel pro-lockdown and vaccine-centric narrative — the same approach championed, among others, by its main private donor, Bill Gates, who, Politico suggested, used his clout to “control the global Covid response”. As one civil society group stated, the WHO effectively “outsourced” the management of the global Covid vaccine rollout to Gates.

The WHO, for example, played a crucial role in the cover-up of the lab leak hypothesis. It also jettisoned its 2019 pandemic plan (which didn’t mention “lockdown” once) to embrace and promote Chinese-style lockdowns. Such was its praise and defence of China, it was criticised for appeasement. It stoked panic by claiming Covid was much deadlier than it was already known to be. It ignored known age-stratified risk. It promoted test-and-tracing, even though it had previously claimed that “under no circumstances”, however severe the outbreak, should contact tracing be adopted, due to its limited effectiveness, but also due to “ethical concerns”.

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It promoted universal masking, even though it had acknowledged early on that there was no evidence of its benefits. It negated the benefits of natural immunity in order to promote the claim that herd immunity could only be achieved through vaccination. It refused to acknowledge (until April 2021) that SARS‑CoV‑2 is airborne, despite ample evidence of the contrary. And it promoted the censorship of factually true claims relating to all of the above under the guise of fighting disinformation — and actually promoted misinformation and disinformation itself.

All this points to a colossal failing on the WHO’s behalf. On the one hand, it highlights the risks inherent in a top-down, highly centralised and bureaucratised approach to public health — the opposite of the democratic, community-based, bottom-up approach initially championed by the WHO. On the other, however, it is also a stark reminder of what happens when an institution becomes captured by private interests. So why are plans underway to hand the WHO even more power?

This is the aim of two agreements currently under discussion. The first consists of a set of amendments to the existing International Health Regulations, an instrument with force under international law. The second is a new “pandemic treaty” that goes in the same direction as the IHR amendments.

The IHR amendments are at a much more advanced stage, and have a much greater chance of being approved — the modifications will effectively carry the same weight as a new treaty, but are much less contentious than the proposed “treaty” and only require the approval of 50% of countries to come into force. The consequences would be far-reaching. These amendments, as Bell writes, “are intended to fundamentally change the relationship between individuals, their countries’ governments, and WHO”.

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In terms of individual rights, the WHO propose to abandon, even formally, the WHO’s anchoring to the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, by suggesting that the phrase stating that the regulations will be implemented “with full respect for the dignity, human rights and fundamental freedoms of persons” be deleted from the text and replaced with the vague terms “equity, coherence, inclusivity”. In terms of the relationship between member states and the WHO, the amendments aim to give the WHO authority over states, by proposing to change the definition of “recommendations” from “non-binding” to (by deletion) “binding”, and specifying that states will undertake to “follow” (rather than “consider”) the recommendations of WHO. The latter may include: vaccine mandates, measures requiring proof of vaccination (vaccine passports), quarantining of individuals (lockdown), travel restrictions and all manner of health interventions.

Moreover, an entire new article is proposed where states “recognize WHO as the guidance and coordinating authority of international public health response during public health Emergency of International Concern”. This is of particular concern if considered in tandem with another amendment which widens the definition of what constitutes a public health emergency to include “all risks with a potential to impact public health”, and assigns to the Director-General — today, Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus — the sole authority to declare an emergency. It’s hard to see how anyone could consider putting so much power into the hands of a single person a good idea, especially in view of Ghebreyesus’s flawed response to the pandemic.

We should be very concerned about the power grab being attempted by the WHO — especially since it’s happening without any public debate whatsoever. It would be concerning even if the organisation had maintained its original funding model, institutional structure and underlying philosophy. But it’s particularly concerning if we consider that the WHO has fallen largely under the control of private capital and other vested interests. It would mark the definitive transformation of global health into an authoritarian, corporate-driven, techno-centric affair — and risk making the Covid response a blueprint for the future rather than a disaster which should never be repeated.

It is a useful phrase to measure core beliefs because it takes us beyond the idea of conspiracy theories, with all their distracting details and absurdity, to the underlying intuition that fuels them. In this world view, the “elites” are faraway and malevolent, exercising control in self-serving ways; meanwhile, democratic politics and the mainstream media are regarded as little more than distractions, likely in the service of powerful secret masters.

Whatever people believe about specific conspiracies — and this week offered no shortage of them, from UFOs over North America to hushed-up explosions in Ohio — our findings reveal how widespread the underlying mindset is that propels them. Thanks to our partner Focaldata and a statistical process called MRP, we can now see which constituencies are the most and least conspiratorial in the country. The results shed new light on how these voters should be viewed by the main political parties.

First, it is clear that conspiratorial thinking is not a “Right-wing” phenomenon. Voters who believe in a controlling secretive elite are much more likely to vote Labour than Conservative, and much more likely to live in a safe Labour constituency. By this measure, the 10 most conspiratorial constituencies in the country are all safe Labour seats, whereas the 10 least conspiratorial constituencies are all Tory (except Chesham and Amersham, which switched to Lib Dem in the 2021 by-election).

As the above table shows, the “most conspiratorial” list is made up of poor and highly diverse inner-city constituencies, which may explain why people come to feel so alienated and suspicious. In these places, a conspiratorial world view is the norm — in Birmingham Ladywood, for example, only 14% of people disagree with the statement. Meanwhile, in the rolling Chiltern hills of Chesham and Amersham and the affluent enclaves of Henley and Mole Valley, where the elites likely seem less distant and more on your side, few are concerned. It is a useful reminder to politicians of all parties that, while they may find conspiratorial voters troublesome, many come from the most disadvantaged communities.

Second, the results should encourage new anti-establishment parties on both the Left and Right. Thanks to our unusually large sample size of more than 10,000 respondents, we were able to measure the attitudes of voters who chose even the smallest parties in 2019 with a high degree of confidence. More than any of the mainstream parties, including Labour, the voters most prone to a conspiratorial outlook come from the anti-establishment parties: 54% of Brexit Party voters agree with the statement, alongside 45% of Plaid Cymru voters and 43% of SNP voters. So, while the Brexit binary pushed a larger proportion of voters towards the two main parties in 2019, it seems there are millions of voters who remain potentially open to new populist appeals.

There is a specific lesson here for the Labour Party. When I first tested this phrase at YouGov during the Labour leadership election of 2015, the belief that “the world is controlled by a secretive elite” was revealed to be a defining characteristic of supporters of Jeremy Corbyn: 28% of Corbyn’s backers strongly agreed with it, compared to 16% of Yvette Cooper’s and just 7% of Liz Kendall’s. Today, 42% of Labour voters agree with it, of whom 18% strongly agree. Antisemitism may have finally been dealt with in the Labour Party, but the mindset that drove it has not disappeared.

This suggests that, rather than Brexit or the election of Trump, the shock outcome of the 2015 Labour leadership election was the first real marker of the new era of low-trust and high-volatility politics; and the best way to understand it is by looking at the general election that took place immediately before. Today, it seems almost comic to recall, in the context of the eye-watering sums borrowed by successive Conservative governments, that the 2015 election was dominated by technical discussions of exactly what percentage point of austerity was appropriate to cut the deficit. Tory strategist Lynton Crosby calculated — correctly, as it turned out — that if nothing more interesting were discussed, the Tories would win by default. It was a cynical way to treat an electorate, for which he was rewarded with a knighthood. Shadow Chancellor Ed Balls, meanwhile, frightened of seeming weak on economics, committed a Labour government to “austerity-lite”.

Come the election, the differences between the main parties were marginal; voters sensed a stitch-up in which the Tories and Labour had colluded to starve them of a more meaningful choice. It is hard to say they were wrong: 2015 saw the UK’s highest ever immigration numbers, for example, but this topic was hardly mentioned in the campaign. A rejection of this non-choice sowed the seeds not only for Corbyn’s election but for the Brexit result the following year.

The story of what happened in the years since 2016 is well-known. First came the attempts to frustrate the Brexit vote, which confirmed voters’ worst suspicions about cross-party collusion and elite disregard for the democratic process. And then came the rolling Covid lockdowns, which in turn radicalised a whole new constituency. There has perhaps never been a policy so life-altering and so little-debated, with a cross-party consensus parroted throughout much of the media. In those dystopian months and years, millions of people lost trust in authorities and turned to alternative explanations. These were not Right-wing activists or spotty teenagers in basements: they were mothers, grandparents and people who had never before been political. It’s hardly surprising that Google recorded the all-time high of searches for “conspiracy theory” in March 2020.

The pattern, from the 2015 election through to the pandemic, is that whenever views are suppressed, distrust and alienation follow. It is when the “Overton Window” is too narrow, not too wide, that politics feels fake and conspiracies abound. The distrust that now cuts across society is not the fault of a few small-time cranks and bad-faith opportunists — it is overwhelmingly the creation of elites who consistently tried to deny the electorate real choices.

Fast forward to the past few months, with the ejection of Liz Truss as prime minister and the rehabilitation of pre-2015 figures such as Jeremy Hunt, and many will be hoping that the era of political turbulence is finally coming to an end. It certainly feels it; for the first time since 2015, there are two technocrats at the helm of Britain’s major political parties. Centrists in both parties are hoping that as Corbynism and Brexit recede into history, the “grown-ups” will be back in charge.

But today’s UnHerd Britain data suggests that, beneath the surface, voter distrust and suspicion are more present than ever; and that the currents that propelled both Jeremy Corbyn and Brexit still run right through Labour’s heartlands. If the 2024 election is anything like 2015 — with the mainstream parties becoming harder and harder to tell apart — it could be the beginning of a whole new wave of democratic revolts.

But, as Big Brother Watch revealed on Sunday, the activities of these units went far beyond refuting claims such as “gargling warm water cures Covid”. The Counter Disinformation Unit, first used in 2019 to monitor potential interference in elections, was intended to combat deliberately misleading online content. In March 2020, however, its scope was extended to include misinformation and to work even more closely with social media platforms. This may not be an official censorship regime — departments have a hotline to these platforms to ask that material is removed — but it is a very easy way for the Government to reduce the spread of posts it disapproves of.

Based in the Department for Digital, Culture, Media and Sport, the CDU has also been active in relation to COP26 and Russia’s invasion of Ukraine. Freedom of Information requests and questions from MPs have failed to discover its budget or how many people it employs. The Big Brother Watch report has, however, identified a number of contracts with firms which specialise in using AI and automated systems to detect “harmful and illegal content” online.

During the first months of the pandemic, both medical theories and government policies were highly contested. Epidemiologist Professor Mark Woolhouse, a member of Sage, criticised lockdowns as a policy response to Covid as early as August 2020, while a number of experts openly disagreed over the assumptions underlying the computer models used to make policy decisions, including the Imperial College model used to justify the first national lockdown in March 2020. Nevertheless, public questioning of Covid policies, or close examination of the scientific evidence, was enough to earn an appearance on the weekly CDU report. Conservative MP David Davis was among those cited as “critical of the Government” after he questioned, on Twitter and in the Daily Telegraph, the mathematical reasoning of the Imperial model.

Similarly, when vaccines against Covid were created, the CDU worked to counter a number of falsehoods, including the conspiracy that they make people (especially those from ethnic minorities) infertile, or the fanciful idea that they would turn people into monkeys. But the CDU didn’t stop there. Included in its file on “vaccine sceptics”, for instance, were many who objected not to vaccines, but to policy measures such as vaccine passports or mandated vaccination for care workers. Here, a matter of public debate was deemed beyond discussion — and turned into a target of countermeasures by a state unit that is not even subject to scrutiny by Parliament’s Intelligence and Security Committee.

Nor is the CDU the only unit engaged in this kind of narrative-management. The Cabinet Office has its own Rapid Response Unit (RRU), set up in 2018 and focused since 2020 on rebutting or removing (via social media platforms) “false and misleading narratives” about coronavirus. It monitors both social and traditional media, reporting on engagement with narratives and countering (or suppressing) those it deems harmful.

The RRU also uses media monitoring services which can report on audience demographics as well as content and sentiment analysis. Even sharing news articles critical of government Covid policies was enough to get an RRU flag. The Mayor of Greater Manchester, Andy Burnham, for example, appeared in RRU analysis, after voicing concerns about the effectiveness of localised restrictions. Expert criticism of data used in public briefings, personal testimonies of the impact of anti-Covid restrictions, and even jokes about the complexity of travel rules, were all included on RRU lists. Here, the scope of RRU activities goes far beyond false information to include opinions that question or contradict government policies. Again, it’s hard to see this as misinformation, let alone disinformation.

Yet for the Government, this was war. According to a whistleblower from the 77th Brigade, normally the British Army’s cyber-warfare unit, extra personnel were recruited to monitor social media for keywords — ostensibly looking for accounts that might be foreign agents spreading disinformation, but with no measures in place to ensure they were “not being directed at the UK population”.

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The whistleblower claims that screenshots of social media posts were collected and sent to the Cabinet Office. “We learned… that the Government were very keen on hearing what the public thought about their Covid-19 response and how scared people were,” said “AB”. “However, these posts did not contain information that was untrue or co-ordinated — it was simply fear and domestic dissent.”

The UK is not the only country to invoke the spectre of disinformation to seek to control public conversations. Greece passed a law against spreading false information in 2021, with a penalty of five years in prison, while Malaysia used emergency powers to pass a “fake news” law imposing jail terms for anyone spreading “wholly or partly false” information about either the pandemic or the state of emergency itself. Elsewhere, Turkey passed a law in October last year which threatens those who spread misleading news with prison, and social media platforms with fines for failure to remove content or disclose a user’s identity. Arrests have already been made.

But, as the wide-ranging activities of the UK’s CDU, the RRU and even the 77th Brigade reveal, allowing governments to define what counts as disinformation and misinformation is a slippery slope. As they extend their powers beyond falsifiable facts to policy debates, and even narratives, there is no limit to who can find themselves under scrutiny.

Throughout the pandemic the Government displayed a woeful lack of trust in the population to make sensible decisions, to act in a public-spirited manner, and to understand complex and changing information about a novel disease. Suppression of dissent and discussion is a symptom of that low opinion of the public. It’s the same paternalism that suffuses the Online Safety Bill: the politicians offering to keep us safe online by requiring technology companies to exercise a poorly defined “duty of care” are the same politicians working with those same companies to remove critics of its policies from the public square.

Government departments cracking down on false coronavirus information to protect us from dangerous falsehoods and malicious conspiracy theories? Don’t take their word for it. It’s Fake News.

As time wore on, and first my mother passed my grandmother in age, then I did, my mother told the birth story less and the death story more. As they entered their eighties, both with chronic illnesses, she and my father spoke often of the easy morphine shot and the effortless, paternalistic, shouldering of responsibility of the doctor who administered it. It seemed more outlandish and yet more enviable with each year. “That Dr Shipman,” my father would say, sighing gustily. “Caused all sorts of problems.”

“Dr Shipman did murder rather a lot of his patients,” I’d remind my dad. And it wasn’t just the subsequent regulation of doctors and their bags which discouraged people from dying at home. Preferring hospital as a place of death has been a trend for more than century: my grandmother, in 1967, was already a bit of an outlier. Hospital seemed — was — safer, cleaner, the right place to be. Until, that is, the pandemic. Deaths at home in the UK spiked immediately in lockdown, as you might expect. And they haven’t fallen since. Almost 90 more people than usual died at home every day last year, a fifth higher than in a typical year. That constitutes, as Cambridge statistics professor Sir David Spiegelhalter put it, “a major change” in national habit.

But, Spiegelhalter went on, we don’t know why this change is happening as it “hasn’t been studied sufficiently”. We keep no records of why someone died at home. It might be by choice — most people will, like my parents, state a preference for dying at home when asked — but relatively few individuals set out their wishes in a formal Advanced Decision.  Even when they do — my parents had three each, including one in a pot in the fridge — there is no national protocol for dealing with them.

Looking at causes of death does not help much, either. Most people take Covid to hospital. A little of the increase, we are beginning to learn, comes from the ambulance not arriving on time, but not much. The great majority of deaths at home derive from the same sort of slow, chronic conditions that end most lives in hospitals: heart disease, cancer, old age. The leading causes are dementia and Alzheimer’s disease, with diabetes being the most common contributing factor. There is no special reason, there, for a sudden and lasting change in behaviour.

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Perhaps we should be looking elsewhere, not with the patient but with the carer. Anyone dying of dementia at home needs an especially dedicated one. And diabetes — imagine, as my mother would have said, the washing. (Domestic work was always on my mother’s agenda. I never did it to her satisfaction.) Think, my mother would say, and my mother always had a point, of the sheets. Think of the woman washing the sheets.

The sheets matter because it may well be the carer rather than the patient who decides the place of death. They are the ones who call the final ambulance, whatever their loved one or their Advanced Decision may say. They may do it because they hope to give their loved one more time, or a pain-free death, but they may also do it to relieve the unspeakable strain on themselves, and to love, not just care, for someone in their last days. It’s not just the sheets. Modern, post-Shipman, deaths are more prolonged than my grandmother’s. Without that morphine shot, longer and more demanding nursing might have been required.

If a carer can’t cope with that though, there is now often little alternative to hospital. “It’s always been the National Hospital Service, really,” my mother would say, meaning that emergency and high-tech medicine had always taken precedence over social care from the inception of the NHS. Almost in step with her aging, she had seen first the doctor with the black bag disappear, then the remnants of the cottage hospitals and district nursing system. In her ever more frequent stays in hospital, she had seen the bed-blocking results; she had been, to her rage and sorrow, a bed-blocker herself. Here life was saved in hospital by high-tech medicine, but she also experienced loneliness and loss of agency which made her never want to go back. That was what the Advanced Decisions chilling in the fridge in 2020 said: no resuscitation, no interventions, and above all, please, no hospital.

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But how were we to achieve this? More particularly, how was I, isolated with my parents by lockdown, to achieve it? In 2020 there seemed to be nothing at all between an isolated, high-tech death surrounded by people in space suits, and one at home with — what? Only horrified, squeamish, cack-handed me? Surely not. I tried not to think about it, but my parents did, most days. I promised, often, to try my best.

But when my mother’s health went into crisis in January, at the very height of the 2021 Covid spike, the GP called an ambulance and I put her in it. My mother consented on the grounds she was only going to have her heart checked in the day ward. I consented because I was too scared not to. It wasn’t just that I was far out of my depth with the nursing — and the sheets. I wanted a hospital not for her but for me: a place where the responsibility, moral and practical, would be taken from me, where people more expert than I would know the right thing to do.

My mother never came home. Separated from us, her documents, and her own mind as she floated off in an infection, she was subjected to everything she had stipulated against — operation, ventilation, feeding tubes — before contracting Covid and dying alone. We saw her once more, on a visit during which my father also contracted Covid. It was the very opposite of what she had wanted: a death in your own bed with your daughter downstairs talking to the doctor, your daughter making the tea, your daughter managing, for once, the sheets.

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Hundreds of thousands of people died in similar fashion that year: in hospital, alone, relatives at best on an i-pad; an unknown, gloved hand to hold. Their families suffered, according to a thoughtful study by the Marie Curie Trust in 2021, “complicated grief”: trauma, degradation, loss of agency and connection, guilt. Complicated grief is a good phrase. I don’t have one of my own. At the time, I experienced extreme helplessness, while my father talked of my mother’s departure as the “kidnapping”.

But perhaps complicated grief could also be called iron in the soul: when my father, a few days after my mother’s death, collapsed with what I now know was myocarditis, I was able to refuse hospital care. I had his exquisitely clear Advanced Decision in my hand; I’d talked it through with him many times, but it may have been my mother’s experience which actually stopped me. I still wanted to call the merciful hospital, but my complicated grief told me it no longer existed. My complicated grief steeled me instead to do the work, practical and emotional, of letting someone die at home.

There must be hundreds of thousands of us in the UK with complicated grief, an epidemic of it. I wonder, even, if there are enough of us to be causing the change of national habit that Sir David Spiegelhalter spoke about; if experience of post-lockdown hospital is making 90 extra people a day unable to surrender their relatives to the hospital. I think it’s possible. I’d join the Marie Curie Trust though, in thinking we should examine the increase in deaths at home rather than hospital. It’s a choice we all come to, and we shouldn’t be making it in despair.

As the past year came to an end, the same stubborn arguments which have been spinning around the world’s hamster wheel for the last three years were aired again — this time about China’s decision to abandon Zero Covid, and what this might mean for the rest of the world in terms of variants, Covid spread and the health of the general population. We don’t want to rehearse these arguments again, but they are vital: they cut to the heart of what lessons global societies will take from the Covid-19 pandemic and associated policy response, and how institutions will balance health and disease in the future. It’s too easy to say that we should just move on, because the future health of human societies depends on what decisions now are taken.

It’s pretty clear that China abandoned Zero Covid because it didn’t work, was causing huge socioeconomic and psychological harm, and threatened to undermine the political control of Xi Jinping. The writing was on the wall when footage emerged in August of shoppers in a Shanghai Ikea stampeding for the exit after authorities sought to seal off the store and send everyone in it to quarantine following the discovery of one shopper who had been exposed to an asymptomatic six-year-old child. Once mass protests began to spread in November, the decision was taken to move on before they became a threat to the regime.

To us, a number of conclusions can be drawn, which we discuss in The Covid Consensus. Clearly, lockdowns could only work in a very limited way, to reduce spread for a short period of time; they were therefore impractical for any length of time without causing enormous harm, which is why Zero Covid was impossible. Moreover, in spite of China’s severe attempts to prevent travel, the spread of a highly infectious respiratory virus cannot be shut down completely in the era of global supply chains, even with hermetically sealed borders, as proved to be the case in Australia and New Zealand.

Nevertheless, many seem to be trying to draw different and nonsensical lessons, showing that nothing has been learned from the past three years. Once again, the Western media is stoking unnecessary fears with panic-stricken reports of “China’s new Covid nightmare”. The rapid infection of potentially more than a billion Chinese people, we are told, is likely to result in countless deaths among the population, and spark the emergence of dangerous new variants that could lead to “a global catastrophe”, as millions of potentially disease-carrying citizens prepare to celebrate the reopening of the country’s borders by travelling to all corners of the world.

So, instead of celebrating the end of the Zero Covid prison in which so many Chinese have been incarcerated, during the past week, several countries — including the US, Japan, Italy, Spain, France and, most recently, the UK — have reacted by reintroducing restrictions for passengers from China, requiring them to show a negative PCR or antigen test before boarding.

But are such fears justified? First, let us explore whether China is really heading for a public health disaster of apocalyptic proportions, as the news would have us believe. According to the Chinese government, the country is registering around 5,000 new cases, and only a handful of Covid deaths, per day. Official deaths since the start of the pandemic are just over 5,000. These numbers are universally considered to be hogwash; China has routinely been accused of downplaying infections and deaths for political reasons. The World Health Organization, for example, reports around 150,000 new cases, and 400 deaths, per week, and a total of just over 30,000 deaths.

As far as the latest wave is concerned, there is at least an official explanation for the discrepancy: China recently announced that it will include only deaths from pneumonia or respiratory failure in its official Covid-19 death toll; deaths that occur in patients with pre-existing illnesses, on the other hand, will not be counted as Covid-19 deaths. If true, this contrasts starkly with the very “liberal” approach to Covid-19 deaths (and hospitalisations) adopted by most Western countries throughout the pandemic, and still widely used, whereby any deceased person who has recently (or even not so recently) tested for Covid is classified as a “Covid death”, even if the death was manifestly unrelated to Covid. Figures related to new cases are even more unreliable, since they obviously depend on the number (and method) of tests that are carried out.

One thing, however, is certain: in the coming weeks and months, a huge portion of the Chinese population is going to catch the virus. The Institute for Health Metrics and Evaluation (IHME), for example, estimates that around 1 million Chinese people are already getting infected every day. Some reports claim that 250 million people across the country have been infected just in December. How many deaths this leads to depends on a number of factors, including the ability of the Chinese authorities to put measures in place to protect those who are actually at risk of developing a serious illness from Covid-19, namely the elderly and those with serious medical conditions. The IHME expects close to 300,000 Covid deaths by April 2023 — roughly 100,000 deaths per month (3,000 per day).

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These numbers may seem shocking, but they need to be contextualised. Assuming that a large percentage of the 1.4 billion-strong Chinese population eventually catches Covid, as seems likely, this would amount to a minuscule infection fatality rate (IFR) — less than 0.001%. Most of the deceased are also likely to be very elderly people who would have died within a short time — as was the case for the overwhelming majority of Covid-related deaths in Western countries. In fact, since more than 10 million people died in China in 2021 (the most recent year for which there are statistics), this figure — even if it continued at that rate throughout the year — would lead to around a 12% mortality increase, broadly in line with global averages elsewhere in 2020.

We also need to keep in mind that the dominant strain in China at the moment appears to be a subvariant of the Omicron variant BA.5 (BA.5.2.1.7), also called BF.7, which we know to be more transmissible but much less lethal than previous variants — exactly the kind of evolution you would expect to see in a virus like SARS-CoV-2. Indeed, Chinese authorities have confirmed that the virus causes relatively mild symptoms in the vast majority of those infected. There’s little reason to doubt this, as much as one may be sceptical of the information coming out of China.

And yet, Western politicians are now telling us that the reason we need new restrictions is that, as the Chair of the Defence Select Committee Tobias Ellwood said, “we simply cannot trust Chinese data”. Such claims would hold more water if that same Western establishment hadn’t spent the best part of the past three years taking the Chinese Covid-19 statistics at face value, and using them as evidence for the effectiveness of lockdowns. Up to March 2020, 39 of 42 reproduction number estimates were based on Chinese data, as was the Imperial College report that predicted 510,000 deaths in the UK, which would fall to somewhere between 5,700 and 39,000 with Chinese-style “suppression” measures. Needless to say, those predictions turned out to be wildly inaccurate.

In other words, the Chinese data was deemed perfectly reliable insofar as it was useful to justify restrictions in the West. Today, on the other hand, it is accused of being unreliable… in order to justify restrictions in the West. The doublethink is jarring — and the results are likely to be similarly flawed. Just as lockdowns failed to contain the spread of the virus within countries, previous attempts to prevent Delta and Omicron variants from spreading beyond India and southern Africa, respectively, also failed miserably. Even the WHO considers travel bans to be “usually not effective”, while Andrew Pollard, chairman of the UK Joint Committee on Vaccination and Immunisation, also admitted that “trying to ban a virus by adjusting what we do with travel has already been shown not to work very well”. Neither is there any evidence that pre-departure testing will “help slow the spread” of the virus, as claimed by the CDC’s director Rochelle Walensky. In July, for example, French researchers found the Omicron variant in wastewater from two commercial airplanes that flew from Ethiopia to France in December 2021 even though passengers had been required to take Covid tests before boarding, concluding that mandatory testing before boarding “did not prevent massive importation of Omicron variant into Europe”.

More importantly, why would we want to do that? Data from last month suggests a majority of people in Western countries have had coronavirus infections, and that prior infection, even in the unvaccinated, offers strong protection against BA.5 Omicron hospitalisation. Moreover, the Omicron subvariant that has been spreading in China has been detected in the US, Europe and rest of the world for many months, which means we also have good levels of natural immunity to that subvariant (as well as high vaccination rates, which were told were the golden bullet to end the pandemic). So, there’s no reason to fear coming into contact with a Chinese tourist any more than there is to come into contact with any other human being.

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Furthermore, not only is there “currently no evidence” to suggest that a new and dangerous strain of the virus has emerged in the Chinese population, but there’s no reason to believe this is likely to happen either — or at least it’s not more likely to happen in China than anywhere else. “The likelihood of variants emerging [in China] is the same as it is in other places where there are Covid waves,” said Pollard. Besides, as noted already, even if it were to emerge, it would spread across the world regardless of the measures put in place, just like all previous variants.

Why, then, are policymakers once again going down this route? Part of the explanation is that politicians, by peddling a pro-lockdown narrative for the past three years, have now created an artificial demand for restrictive measures among their fear-stricken constituents, some of whom are now even making the case for wearing masks forever or for the permanent institutionalisation of what Giorgio Agamben might call “bare life”. Even more worryingly, it appears to indicate that Western governments have little intention of giving up the powers they’ve claimed under the guise of “fighting the virus”. While these current travel restrictions won’t affect the daily lives of Western citizens, they nonetheless show how easily “lockdown laws”, many of which remain in place in the UK and other countries, can be reinstated. If restrictions can be arbitrarily brought back at any moment in the name of public health, what’s to stop governments from abusing these powers once again in the future? For instance, the British government’s “Living with Covid-19” guidance, published in February 2022, states that it “will retain contingency capabilities and will respond as necessary to further resurgences or worse variants of the virus”.

The threat of such “capabilities” relates to a more fundamental issue, which is how human societies relate to illness and disease. The pandemic threw this into the foreground, and offered two contrasting approaches. The first is the biomedical approach, which has been championed by Bill Gates in his book on the pandemic and subsequently by Joe Biden in his new pandemic policy, which relies on the rapid production of vaccines, while citizens will need to wait in lockdown until these new products are available.

The alternative requires us to move beyond the guidance — or tyranny, depending on your point of view — of “the science”, and to recognise the role that philosophy and humanistic knowledge has in human life. Whether or not humans choose to embrace this way of living is ultimately a question of values. We can either confront the truth that death is — and always will be — a fundamental part of life, embrace the case for living well and healthily while we are alive, and recognise the place that human contact, exchange, and the sharing of bodily and social space has in well-being and therefore in health. Or, we can assign more value to the technical shield which we have been constructing around ourselves for the past decades. Looking at what’s now playing out in China, we know which we prefer.