“The state ceremonials of classical Bali,” wrote anthropologist Clifford Geertz, “were metaphysical theatre: theatre designed to express a view of the ultimate nature of reality and, at the same time, to shape the existing conditions of life to be consonant with that reality; that is, theatre to present an ontology and, by presenting it, to make it happen – make it actual.” Through its processions, royal cremations, and ritual extravaganzas, the 19th Century Balinese court both built and mirrored and a shared understanding of the cosmos and the Balinese people’s various roles within it. 

“lockdown […] should be a measure of last resort” 

Modern Western state rituals, like public inquiries, such as the UK’s COVID-19 Inquiry, often function in an analogous way. Alongside their stated purpose of working out what happened, what went wrong, and how to avoid it next time (the COVID-19 Inquiry aims to “examine the COVID-19 response and the impact of the pandemic in England, Wales, Scotland and Northern Ireland, and produce a factual narrative account” and to “identify the lessons to be learned from the above”), public inquiries bound the debate over contentious policy issues for the public as much as for policy-makers, and ultimately foster a shared understanding of what ‘common sense’ or ‘appropriate’ policy looks like. Whether their specific recommendations are implemented or not, inquiry reports cast a shadow within which subsequent policy is made and colour what citizens eventually come to expect of the state. In light of this, let’s turn to the UK COVID-19 inquiry’s recently released first report and ask, “what sort of shared, ‘common-sense’ understanding of lockdown and mandates does the first report portend?”

The answer is, to my mind at least, worryingly ambiguous. The report is a summary of the first module of the inquiry’s (quite damning!) findings on the state of the UK’s main pandemic preparedness procedures and structures. As such, while it is not an analysis or evaluation of the Boris Johnson premiership’s grievous lockdown-till-vaccine folly of 2020 and 2021 (the module two report will deal with these), it does briefly engage with the problem of lockdown’s im/permissibility during its discussion in chapters 4 and 5 of the UK’s past and future pandemic emergency planning. 

There, it acknowledges two things – first, that lockdown was unprecedented and second, that it was ill-thought-out. Lockdown, the report notes, does not appear in the UK’s only pre-2020 pandemic plan, the 2011 Influenza Pandemic Preparedness Strategy; rather the UK government once favoured voluntary measures such as “providing advice to citizens and trusting them to assess the risk and take such precautionary measures as they deemed fit.” It then quotes Professor Mark Woolhouse, an epidemiologist, government adviser, and lockdown-advocate–turned-sceptic, as saying,

“Lockdown was an ad hoc public health intervention contrived in real time in the face of a fast-moving public health emergency. We had not planned to introduce lockdown … there were no guidelines for when a lockdown should be implemented and no clear expectations as to what it would achieve.”

While much remains to be said about these points (and hopefully will be said in the Module 2 report), this acknowledgement will nonetheless make for pleasant reading to lockdown-sceptics who have long defended the propositions articulated by Woolhouse, often in the face of snarling opprobrium. Equally pleasant are the hat-tips given to lockdown’s gravity and to the argument that such sweeping, liberticidal policies are never permissible – 

“The Inquiry accepts that the imposition of a lockdown […] should be a measure of last resort. Indeed, there are those who would argue that a lockdown should never be imposed…” 

In some ways then, the first report contains more nuance than we had any right to expect, and ostensibly signals a shift in how lockdowns are being thought about. After three-and-a-half years, their lack of precedent, sloppiness, and brutality are receiving the recognition that they deserve and the ‘never lockdown’ position has gone from being a nasty, granny-killing absurdity to a legitimate perspective, worthy of respectful mention in an official document. This has even led some eminent sceptics like Toby Green to optimistically suggest that the report disguises a criticism of the decision to lockdown – and so, on Clifford Geertz’s terms, may be a sign of anti-lockdown or lockdown-hesitant socio-political norms to come. 

Technocracy tends to be ratchet-like and technocratic failure tends to prompt calls for better, brighter technocracy next time

However, without downplaying how welcome and surprising these nuances are, I believe such celebrations are premature. For one thing, as stated above, the inquiry has yet to actually deal with the Johnson premiership’s policies in any detail. For another, the first report is not uniformly sceptical of lockdown or lockdown-style polices – it notes, for example, that “there may be lessons to be learned from the experiences of South Korea and Taiwan and that, by a combination of early border restrictions, localised lockdowns, strict testing, contact tracing and quarantining, the spread of a coronavirus such as Covid-19 could be contained before a vaccine was found.”

Indeed, based on this report, it seems to me that when the inquiry inevitably criticises the Johnson lockdown, it will not do so less on the basis that lockdowns are wrong per se, than on the basis that he and his ministers implemented them poorly. The difference between these two approaches is crucial: while the former could help in ruling out lockdown as a legitimate exercise of political power, the latter allows citizens to reasonably expect protracted house-arrest during future emergencies, provided that certain conditions are met. 

The block quote begun above continues, 

“…however, for as long as they remain a possibility, lockdowns should be considered properly in advance of a novel infectious disease outbreak. There should be consideration of the interventions that can and should be deployed to prevent a lockdown but also of the circumstances in which a lockdown may become necessary.” (Emphasis mine)

The report even gives us an idea of what these circumstances might be. The UK’s future civil emergencies strategy must, it says, include “include an assessment in the short, medium, and long term, based on published modelling, of the potential health, social and economic impacts of the emergency and of potential responses to the emergency [including a lockdown] on the population and, in particular, on vulnerable people…” This, it continues, should allow future governments to assess a lockdown’s putative ‘necessity’ – i.e., if the projected net benefits (however these are construed and counted) of locking down exceed the projected net benefits of not doing so, then lockdown is ‘necessary’. Of course, this amounts to saying (and therefore fostering a shared understanding) that lockdown is a legitimate and permissible exercise of power, as long as the government’s models spit out the right numbers. It, in effect, proposes to affirm ‘Follow The Science’ as the leitmotif of British emergency politics.

Maybe some lockdown sceptics are happy to accept these terms, agreeing that Johnson failed locking us down for the wrong emergency or confident that the projected net benefits of locking down will never exceed the projected net benefits of not doing so. For my part, however, I can’t help but feel that this represents too heavy a concession. Firstly, it requires placing one’s faith in models made specious by their efforts to predict the futures of notoriously complex social systems and to generalise about what is fundamentally particular. After all, ‘benefit’ does not have the same meaning to all people and it is not clear that any model or cost-benefit analysis could ever do justice to the tangle of desires and needs making up our social fabric. Who exactly will set the models’ parameters and how? Secondly, these terms leave under-examined the deeper, ethical problems of government’s claim to rightfully suspend our civil liberties ‘because science says so’. Must we really now accept ‘science’, including the expert modelling of costs and benefits, as the true source of political and moral authority? 

Now, perhaps the second report will tackle these questions and open a public conversation about the proper role of models, science, and experts in our politics and our lives. And perhaps, after the first report’s surprising nuance, it is incumbent upon me to remain hopeful. But, dear reader, I am not. Technocracy tends to be ratchet-like and technocratic failure tends to prompt calls for better, brighter technocracy next time. 2020 thrust lockdown into the realm of the possible and, absent a wave of popular scepticism, there is no going back. And, based on this first report, it seems like all we can look forwards to is a future in which better, properly scientific lockdown is our common-sense policy-expectation.