LONDON — Britain, bruised and wary after months of lockdown, is reopening.
On Tuesday, Prime Minister Boris Johnson triumphantly announced a major loosening of restrictions. Much of the country’s cultural and recreational life — pubs, cafes, museums, galleries, cinemas, hotels — will return on July 4, while the distance people are required to keep from one another will be reduced from two meters to one, or about three feet.
“Our long national hibernation,” Mr. Johnson proclaimed, four years to the day since the Brexit referendum he did so much to sway, “is beginning to come to an end.”
The move is not in itself foolish. Other countries across Europe have done similarly, in some cases many weeks ago. But it comes after months of mismanagement marked by reversals, climb-downs and outright failures. Trust in the government has fallen precipitously, and Mr. Johnson’s approval ratings have plummeted.
Mr. Johnson was supposed to be the leader to “liberate” Britain, not to lock it down. When he was elected in December, his mandate was simple: “Get Brexit done.” But on Jan. 31, as Britain formally left the European Union, it quietly recorded its first two cases of Covid-19. The coronavirus, not Brexit, would define Mr. Johnson’s government.
The results speak for themselves. The virus has officially claimed nearly 43,000 lives in Britain — more than anywhere else in Europe — with the true number expected to be even higher. The country has one of the highest death tolls per capita from the coronavirus in the world.
Mr. Johnson and his cabinet have mishandled the pandemic, with devastating consequences. But as the death toll mounts, the dream of Brexit and its toxic legacy live on. The fantasies behind Brexit — of national captivity and liberation, confinement and freedom — have propelled Britain toward its current calamity.
In the fever dreams of many British Conservatives, the country has been in lockdown for decades. Long before the coronavirus forced everyone to shelter in place, they believed the entire country was a captive of the European Union, which wielded a power both arbitrary and pervasive over a once great sovereign state.
Escaping captivity was a central theme of the 2016 Brexit campaign — “we are fighting for freedom,” Mr. Johnson declared — and of negotiations with the bloc: In March 2019, Mr. Johnson called on Prime Minister Theresa May to summon “the spirit of Moses” to escape a stalemate in Brexit negotiations. “Say to Pharaoh in Brussels — let my people go,” he wrote in The Daily Telegraph.
Alas, Mrs. May failed to free our people. But Mr. Johnson, her successor, promised to deliver our long-awaited liberation, “do or die.” He campaigned for the December general election on a promise to “unleash” Britain — the word was used 17 times in the Conservative Party’s manifesto — and, in one stunt, drove a “Get Brexit Done” bulldozer through a polystyrene wall. The message was clear: Under a Conservative government led by Mr. Johnson, Britain was breaking free.
The Conservative Party romped home. With a towering new majority, Mr. Johnson fast-tracked Britain’s departure from the European Union, put in place a one-year transition period and reportedly told ministers to stop using the word “Brexit.” Britain would be free even of the word itself. Mr. Johnson — who referred to his party as “the people’s government” — appeared to be unassailable.
Then came the pandemic. Unable to shake off his trademark combination of bluff and bravado, Mr. Johnson struggled to match the seriousness of the situation. Boasting of shaking hands with Covid-19 patients, he demurred from imposing a nationwide lockdown, even as cases began to stack up. “The freeborn people of the United Kingdom,” he maintained, would not tolerate it.
“We live in a land of liberty,” Mr. Johnson said on March 18, as countries across Europe followed Italy into lockdown. Two days later, as he announced the closure of pubs, bars and restaurants, he noted ruefully “how it seems to go against the freedom-loving instincts of the British people.”
The people disagreed. When a nationwide lockdown was finally declared on March 23, public support for the policy was at 93 percent. It remained high for the next two months, even as much of the press focused on easing restrictions. Britons, it turned out, did not value their liberty above their lives. But Mr. Johnson did, to lethal effect. Twenty thousand people, according to one estimate, would still be alive if the prime minister had imposed lockdown sooner.
It was a calamitous misjudgment, but not necessarily a surprising one. Mr. Johnson’s reticence toward lockdown and his unbridled enthusiasm for Brexit are of a piece. Brexit is born of a mind-set that, at root, doesn’t like being told what to do: It imagines a dream state where neither the island nation nor its citizens are responsible to anyone except themselves, a libertarian nationalism where all state (and supra-state) regulations are given short shrift.
This freewheeling style of politics comes naturally to Mr. Johnson, and it greased his path to power. But it is ill suited to addressing a pandemic. One of the infamous claims of the Brexit campaign was that “the people in this country have had enough of experts”; the attack singled out “organizations with acronyms.” Now Mr. Johnson and his band of true believers deliver news conferences flanked by scientists from SAGE: the Scientific Advisory Group for Emergencies.
The dissonance, jarring to observe, has produced an incoherent response. Claiming at all times to be “led by the science,” the government has frequently changed its position and then denied doing so, offering the public confusing, ambiguous and sometimes impenetrable guidance.
Testing was the order of the day, and then it wasn’t (and then was again). Masks were not to be worn, until they were (and then only sometimes). People were told not to go to work, unless they could. Schools could safely return, and then they couldn’t. Britain would have a “world-beating” tracing system, except it wouldn’t. And so on, for everything from quarantining new arrivals to pursuing a policy of “herd immunity.”
Even now, with so many dead and around 1,000 new cases of the coronavirus each day, it’s Britain’s lockdown that animates Brexiteers more than anything else. No surprise there: They have been locked up for decades, trapped in the prison of their own anxieties, and still hanker to be set free.
The irony is that, according to modeling, Britain’s lockdown would have been briefer if it had been imposed earlier. Liberty and lives were lost because of Mr. Johnson’s avowed love of liberty.
It’s a grim irony, and it exposes an unhappy truth. The biggest threat to Britain’s freedom is Britain itself.
Samuel Earle (@swajcmanearle) is a journalist whose writing has appeared in many publications, including The Guardian, The Atlantic and The New Republic.
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