What we should be seeing in this pandemic is that freedom from constraint is empty if it leaves us unable to live safely. No truly liberty-loving nation would need persuading that the freedom to stay well and to earn a living requires both government action and the willingness of the population to follow the rules for the collective good.
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For decades after its construction in the 1960s, the only controversy about the naming of the University of Edinburgh’s David Hume Tower was whether Britain’s finest philosopher, if not the world’s, deserved a better memorial than this modernist monstrosity. Yet this week, owing to far more serious controversy, the building was renamed 40 George Square, a response to the dishonour of his deplorable views on race.
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It seems fitting that a government lacking in substance is now urging the nation to lose some of its own. But its strategy for weight loss it has a basic and fatal flaw: it doesn’t work.
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Asking where this is all going to end is a very effective means of whipping up panic. But slippery slope arguments are themselves slippery and need to be treated with caution. They force us to take one of two extreme, polarized positions and do not allow anything more nuanced.
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The Covid-19 crisis suggests that the Big Society has legs after all. If it failed the first time, it was not because of any inherent flaw, but the disingenuousness of those who championed it. Officially an attempt to redraw the social contract between state and society by empowering and enabling individuals, families and communities to take control of their lives, for many Conservatives it was primarily just a more palatable way to sell the shrinking of the state than a Thatcherite rolling back of its frontiers. Shorn of this not so hidden agenda, the Big Society has life in it yet.
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