{UAH} Why are the British so much more afraid?

Why are the British so much more afraid?

Dan Hannan

Mon, June 28, 2021, 7:00 AM

The United Kingdom has become an Anglosphere outlier in its attachment to coronavirus restrictions. In other English-speaking democracies, something close to normal life has resumed. But Brits are not allowed to gather indoors in groups of more than six. Masks, one-way systems, and all the paraphernalia of lockdowns remain in place. People are still being urged to work from home, with the result that some state employees have essentially had a paid vacation for 15 months.

Why? Wasn't Britain supposed to be ahead of the game on vaccines? And wasn't that meant to mean an earlier unlocking? The country was due to scrap its remaining restrictions on June 21, but having seized powers on a supposedly emergency basis, the state seems determined to keep finding new reasons to cling on to them.

The stated reason for the latest delay was the spread of the more infectious Indian variant (or the "delta variant," as we are now supposed to call it). But Britain's vaccines work against every known strain of the disease, including this one, at least in the sense of preventing serious illness. Being outside the European Union allowed the U.K. to avoid Europe's vaccine procurement disaster. Half of all adults have now had both doses, and three-quarters have had at least one shot.

No, the real problem is not inoculation, but public opinion. Despite the extraordinary success of the vaccine rollout, 71% of people back further delay. I wish I could tell you that that opinion poll was an outlier, but the truth is that every loosening of restrictions has been carried out in the teeth of public resistance. Ninety-three percent of British voters backed the first lockdown in March of last year. Eighty-five percent backed the second six months later.

Around a year ago, I was watching a news item with my friend, the former Conservative MP Douglas Carswell. There was footage of American anti-lockdown campaigners, several of them wearing "Make America Great Again" caps and some waving placards proclaiming lurid conspiracy theories — just the kind of American news story the BBC loves.

"You know what?" Douglas said. "I'd rather live in a country where people fight to hang on to their freedoms, even these weirdos and anti-vaxxers, than a country where everyone is happy to let the state take charge." He was as good as his word. Shortly afterward, he emigrated and now runs the Mississippi Center for Public Policy.

How are we to explain the divergence? Why are people free to congregate, mingle, and enjoy their property in Australia, New Zealand, most of the United States, and most Canadian provinces while the British still hope to "earn" their rights back, similar to prisoners seeking early parole through good behavior?

Was it that the U.K. was hit worse at the start? Did Prime Minister Boris Johnson's brush with death spook a lot of people? Is it simply the greater generosity of our furlough payments? Or is there something deeper?

It won't do to cite "cultural differences." Culture is not some disembodied entity that hangs numinously alongside a nation's institutions. It is a product of those institutions. When people say "culture," they are usually not looking closely enough at the structural incentives. And in any case, the Anglosphere democracies form a cultural continuum. They are supposed to be the countries that place the highest value on private property, free contract, and personal autonomy.

So what turned Britain into an exception? The short answer is that we have been an exception since around 1940 — the last time a large-scale common threat led to a surge in authoritarianism. Until that moment, the English-speaking democracies had had broadly comparable political and economic cultures. But the longer and more intense mobilization in the U.K. changed the psychology of its people. After 1945, there was a greater demand for state intervention in Britain than in its daughter nations, a demand that found expression in the state education and healthcare systems, the mass nationalizations, and the persistence, for years, of rationing, ID cards, and other restrictions.

A political culture often has its origins in remote inflection points. Many historians, for example, trace the rise of Western liberties to the Black Death — or, rather, to the way in which the subsequent labor shortages allowed peasants in Western Europe to improve their legal status. The internet is full of wonderful maps showing that, say, party support in Poland correlates almost exactly to whether the bit of the country used to be Russian or German and that the two sides in the Spanish Civil War were defined by rainfall and consequent farm size.

Prolonged total war moved the dial in Britain permanently away from freedom. I only hope that the pandemic does not have the same effect in the rest of the Anglosphere.

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