This week, Imperial College London released a paper confirming the central assumption behind the government’s coronavirus strategy was void. It will not be possible to reduce the peak of the epidemic to anything like a manageable level: the only option is to try and suppress it completely. Scientists from the editor of The Lancet to a former director of the World Health Organisation have been saying this for days, as it became increasingly obvious the UK was an international outlier.
Late last week, two hostile camps emerged on social media. On one side, the government’s supporters aggressively insisted that people should shut up and trust the experts. On the other, its critics began to peddle conspiracy theories about eugenics, suggesting the government was happy to cull economic ‘dependents’. To have a responsible public debate on the crisis – one that gets us through this horrifying period with the best possible chance of good decisions being made in the public interest – we urgently need to move beyond such immature positions. We need to learn how to combine expertise with democracy.
Commentators have been quick to pronounce the death of anti-expert populism: “people have actually not had enough of experts”. But it’s not this simple. In fact, this can be seen as a continuation of the politics of the past few years – highly polarised and characterised by widespread mistrust of authority – but with the roles reversed. Twitter trolls with Brexit Party avatars have told me to stop questioning things I don’t understand. Polls showed that older people and Leave voters were far more likely to think the government was handling the crisis well. Meanwhile, the left is suspicious both of those in power and their claims about the evidence.
