Out of the Crooked Timber of British media, no straight thing was ever made.

This week we have learned that Britons will accept extraordinary – indeed unprecedented – state control over their private and working lives if they can be made to feel their security is under threat. They will tolerate absurdity and blatant unfairness. Beaches may be opened to the crowds, but mountains must be closed off. Off-licences may open but churches must shut. Fines have been levied disproportionately to some groups over others. Garden centres were lethal but supermarkets not. In all honesty, these were the killjoy reflexes of bureaucrats on a control binge.

That trust is delicate. Insult it and consent collapses. In the Cummings affair, he may seem hard done by. Anyone could sympathise with his and his wife’s predicament. But he called the policy’s bluff. He too found the rules imposed by his own regime to be authoritarian and intolerable. When blanket rules came face to face with Kant’s crooked timber of humanity＊, as they did in a wood near Barnard Castle, trust and consent both disintegrated. Cummings was that crooked timber, and the public howled its rage.



Johnson and Hancock remain in denial over the apparent reasons for this, that thousands of Britons appear to have died after being ejected or turned away from NHS hospitals, either dumped into care homes or having vital operations postponed. Thousands more may have died at home, through being terrified by Johnson into not seeking hospital care at all.

This saga is approaching its end and there must be a reckoning. Perhaps some lives have been saved by lockdown. If so, it is strange that countries that rejected it, from Sweden to Taiwan, have seen a lower death rate than Britain. Meanwhile the longer lockdown lasts, the faster its cost rises towards the staggering total of £200bn. How many lives might that have saved?

With budget deficit now predicted to reach 17% of GDP, Britain now faces a double humiliation: the world’s highest coronavirus death rate and the worst resulting economic collapse. Johnson likes blood-curdling “worst-case scenarios”. Mine is that this will prove to be Britain’s most catastrophic and costly policy failure in modern times.

自由や民主主義のお手本みたいに見られていたイギリスでも、ちょこっと感染が拡大すると、ビビって、自由を安易に放棄して、おとなしく外出自粛、官僚がええかげんな自粛強制しておいて、その結果は？といえば、ゆるいお願いしていたスエーデンよかコロナ犠牲者の点で、結果が悪い。なんでそんなに結果が悪いのか、といえば、病院から追い出されれるとか、手術を延期されたとか、病院行くなとかおどかされて、数千の犠牲者がでた、と。要するに、自由も民主主義も福祉もだめ。コロナ犠牲者率で最悪の結果を出し、なおかつ、経済的にも崩壊・・・二重の屈辱を受けておる、と。


途中で、カントの言葉を引用している、

＊

Out of the crooked timber of humanity, no straight thing was ever made

I've always assumed this quote from Immanuel Kant means what it says—humans are inherently flawed, and any human arrangement is bound to carry those flaws.

なるほどねええ。