Boris Has Shown True Leadership by Refusing to Impose More Restrictions

I’ve written a comment piece for Mail+, praising the Prime Minister for refusing to give in to the gloomsters and doomsters. Here is an extract:

I think he’s been muddling through as best he can, driven by a combination of Machiavellian calculation and a sense of what’s in the public interest, like most national leaders.

At the beginning of the pandemic, that meant school closures, shuttered businesses and stay-at-home orders. But 21 months later, in the midst of a fifth wave, the political and economic calculus has changed.

To begin with, we now have a keener sense of the cost of lockdowns. I’m not just talking about the economic toll – £400 billion and climbing, as well as the collapse of thousands of shops, pubs and restaurants – but the social impact, particularly on the most vulnerable. Tens of thousands of cancer patients may die unnecessarily as a result of delayed treatment, the country is facing an unprecedented mental health crisis and education experts tell us it will take two years for children to catch up on the schooling they’ve missed.

Just as importantly, it has become clear that the non-pharmaceutical interventions favoured by governments around the world only have a modest effect on the life cycle of each viral outbreak, if any. The various waves triggered by new variants seem to rise and fall according to the same pattern, regardless of the severity of the restrictions imposed. They are self-limiting and eventually burn out of their own accord.

The starkest illustration of this fact is Sweden, which didn’t impose any lockdowns in 2020 and experienced an excess death rate below the European average. But it’s also true of US states such as Florida and Texas, where Republican governors resisted calls to follow the lead of Democratic governors in states such as California and New York, with their draconian shutdowns.

If you throw in the mass vaccination programmes, as well as the fact that Omicron appears to be milder than previous variants, the cost-benefit analysis has fundamentally changed.

Needless to say, most political leaders have doggedly stuck to the original playbook, responding to this wave as they have to every other, including Nicola Sturgeon in Scotland, Mark Drakeford in Wales and Paul Givan in Northern Ireland.

That has made it particularly difficult for Boris to resist the huge pressure he’s been under from his scientific advisers and their outriders in the media to impose another raft of restrictions.

But resist he has.

Worth reading in full.

Stop Press: Patrick O’Brien in the Spectator thinks Boris’s decision not to impose any more restrictions could be the start of a comeback in the polls in 2022.