Disaster

'Thick fog in Channel: Continent Cut Off' was something regularly announced on the BBC before the 1939-45 war. I'm sorry to hear a moment ago Sky News announce "Britain is cut off from Europe" and "marooned from much of the world".

France, Belgium, the Netherlands, Germany, Southern Ireland and six other European countries last night closed their borders to flights and most lorries, trains and boats from the UK. The ban could be extended to the entire European Union.

I don't think the UK will leave the EU without a trade deal but if we do we'll hardly notice. Sweet are the uses of adversity.

When I told my friend George Alberts that we had no reason to suppose a vaccine for Covid-19 would ever be found he said wisely that so many highly intelligent men and women were working to find one that one would certainly be found. He was right, though he died from Covid, alas, before the vaccine was created.

Now as was inevitable a new variant of the virus has appeared, possibly more virulent and possibly less lethal. This changes things.

It might be a good thing which will prevent deaths and it might if not for human intervention allow us to reach herd immunity without need for vaccines.

Instead it will be used to restrain the population. William Hague, a very clever man, who is wrong about almost everything, insists that it means lockdowns or something like them for months to come.

It now seems inevitable that we shall continue tight restrictions until people are vaccinated. This will cause huge problems for the world economy and for the poor.

Worst of all, lockdowns will be repeated in the future when the next viruses appear.

We live in a age without belief in God where human intelligence is expected to prevent changes in climate, enable people to change their sex and to prevent death.

We are moving from a world that was free, meaning capitalist, to one run by experts concerned above all to prolong life, except when they decide on euthenasia, to prevent inequality (something all conservatives should favour) and to stop global warming.

Janet Daley in the most recent issue of the Sunday Telegraph:

The decline of religious belief which suggested that death gave significance to life seems to have combined with a sense that governments should be directly responsible for the permanent welfare of everyone, to produce a perfect climate for this super-response to a spreading disease. State health systems, and public reliance on them, has created a new moral order in which the success of medicine gives it a civil dominion which cannot be questioned: hence, the insensitivity and authoritarianism of medical and scientific experts who pay lip service to the idea that only elected political leaders can decide policy but clearly feel that they should be in charge even of moral priorities.