And of course the headlines:
The 'lockdown sceptics' want a culture war, with experts as the enemy
The dismissal of coronavirus expertise, the pitting of ‘elites’ against ‘the people’ – it’s Brexit all over again for the high-profile contrarians
Perhaps the sub put in the bit about culture wars to give this piece legs? If so, the actual result might be a yawn of recognition.
As usual, journo dogs bark loudest at neighbouring dogs:
Toby Young – self-appointed general secretary of the Free Speech Union – had his own take on the government’s tripartite slogan. “Stay sceptical. End the lockdown. Save lives.”
Then a lovely bit of self-aggrandizement:
Scepticism has a long and venerable history...Journalists are inheritors of this fine intellectual tradition. It’s our job to call out the self-serving spin of the powerful; to hold them to account.
Above all though, their day jobs involve keeping up their end with social distancing and virtue signalling:
a new, virulent strain of Covid-19 scepticism has emerged that is the precise opposite of journalism [a binary opposite by any chance?] Rather than holding power to account, it distorts and bends reality to serve elite interests – and to warp public debate.
There is the inevitable link appealing to the old constituencies:
Polls suggest that lockdown scepticism is very much a minority sport, but recent British history shows how quickly fringe views can become mainstream. When the former MEP and prominent Telegraph columnist [talk him up first] Daniel Hannan first got on board with Euroscepticism, it was a fringe concern...The echoes of Brexit in all this aren’t hard to spot. The disavowal of expertise. The pitting of “the elite” against “the people”. It is striking that while by no means all Brexiters are lockdown sceptics, almost all lockdown sceptics are Brexiters [based on?] .
And alibis are already on hand, just as with Brexit, if there is no disaster after all:
the “lockdown sceptics” are hoping to win a narrative battle, to shape what comes next. Britain’s success – such as it is – in curtailing deaths will be adduced as proof that the lockdown restrictions were unnecessary. The experts cannot be trusted. The cure was worse than the disease.
The writers are leading lights in investigative journalism outfit openDemocracy, which has done some great work. Their site says :
Each week we send an email reporting on how governments are suspending civil rights, ramping up surveillance and rolling back hard-won freedoms. We need to make sure that these measures are temporary and proportionate. And that starts with knowing what they are.
A commitment to 'calling out' their opponents seems to have exposed a bit of an ideological blockage here, as is so evident with Brexit.There is little analysis of Government policy, not even a tiny suspicion about UK suspension of civil rights. What happened to the venerable intellectual tradition of scepticism in this case? What happened to expertise for that matter? Toby Young is against so they must be for, whatever it is.
They might even read other bits of the Graun for some doubts:
They might even read other bits of the Graun for some doubts:
Young workers most likely to have lost jobs during Covid-19 crisis
Covid-19 strategy too nationally driven, warn UK's regional mayors
Disabled people in UK threatened with sack unless they go back to work
UK vacancies halve and pay falls as Covid-19 lockdown hits economy - business live
As was very noticeable with Brexit, journos develop such hissy fits when they are contradicted over matter like what counts as the national interest, or what the moral tone of politics should be that they display to all readers that they have simply lost their objectivity. So their past judgements must now come under question as well, and the useful condemnations of civil rights abuses elsewhere now could look only like pretty self-interested petty bourgeois moral campaigns after all, struggles over mere 'narrative battles'.
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