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The shameful absence of lockdown scrutiny

When Boris Johnson addressed the nation on March 23 2020, instructing us all that Covid “is the biggest threat this country has faced for decades” and that “you must stay at home”, few doubted that it was a momentous political decision. Lockdown was a withdrawal of liberties for which these Isles have struggled over hundreds of years.

But because of that, it was at least natural to assume that those who confined us would seek to restore our freedom as soon as humanly possible. Unforgivably, the more we learn about decisions made at the time, the less that seems to be the case. Worse, the parliamentary scrutiny that could have corrected overreach was scandalously absent.

As we report today, rather than focusing entirely on seeking out every possible expert opinion, the government seemed eager to curtail debate around controversial lockdown policies. Far from welcoming the spectrum of views which is the hallmark of democracy, it succumbed to the temptation to deploy technological tools to limit scepticism. Social media companies, so frequently lambasted in the past for creating a communications “freefor-all” which might undermine democratic processes, in fact operated closely with government departments, offering them special “trusted flagger” status so that Whitehall requests for content to be removed were fast-tracked.

That shadowy campaign to shape the flow of information could possibly have been bolstered by the deployment of artificial intelligence tools capable of monitoring online posts, then highlighting those the government may have deemed to be “disinformation”. An AI company named Logically, which has received contracts worth more than £1.2million, produced regular reports on Covid for the Counter-Disinformation Unit – a secretive group within the Department for Culture, Media and Sport.

The cost of such monomania will only become fully apparent in the years to come. But it is already clear that young people endured school closures which wrecked their education and will continue to wreck their prospects, while some may have died from diseases which could have been treated had they been picked up earlier.

They, like so many on NHS waiting lists, are the victims of hospital treatments cancelled en masse. The whole population, meanwhile, continues to suffer from the vast and lasting damage inflicted by lockdowns upon our national finances.

Covid-era decisions – affecting the health, wealth and education of so many millions – could hardly have been more monumental. Yet it appears that during the pandemic those decisions were made by a few senior ministers and civil servants who were both relying on and perpetuating a flow of information that confirmed rather than challenged their thinking.

In our democracy it is the primary duty of Parliament to scrutinise the decisions of the executive. Perhaps MPs’ most important task is to weigh, debate and challenge the edicts of government. Nevertheless, when those edicts were harsher than in living memory, such scrutiny was needed as never before. Yet it was largely absent. There were few parliamentary votes in the crucial weeks when the nation’s fate was decided, and even after normal voting resumed, there was all too often a dismal consensus between parties to resume or prolong restrictions.

The consequences for many could hardly have been more devastating. That is why it is so important that we have full transparency today. If we are not to be doomed to repeat our mistakes, those pandemic-era decisions and the processes which led to them which were not fully evaluated at the time must be properly examined now.

Baroness Hallett, who is leading the Covid inquiry, has requested access to ministerial phone messages. Of course, there are concerns about privacy, but these are trumped by the importance of ensuring the inquiry builds a true picture of what happened three years ago.

It is concerning that the Government feels the need to launch legal action to prevent Lady Hallett receiving information she has asked for. But as we learn today, it has become a tendency of ministers to avoid scrutiny. One lesson that need not wait for the inquiry, then, is that Parliament must remember its duty and never again be so supine.

More keys, less security

Front door locks operated by fingerprints are growing more popular. But they fail to get to grips with a big problem in life now: the multiplicity of keys. Most of these keys are virtual, yet that makes them more troublesome. These virtual keys are often in the form of forgettable passwords. We need them every time we use a credit card, which seems to be every day. We need them to get on to a computer or get into an office. But the more keys we have, the less secure everything becomes. Fraud has never been higher. The golden age must have been between the wars, when houses were often built with front doors surrounded by easily broken glass. In some places no one locked the door. Burglary, though, does not depend only on the difficulty of breaking in. We now have more locks than doors, yet we fear thieves at every turn.

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2023-06-03T07:00:00.0000000Z

2023-06-03T07:00:00.0000000Z

https://dailytelegraph.pressreader.com/article/282016151714471

Daily Telegraph