Yesterday, Jacob Rees-Mogg, in seeking to
defend the actions of Boris Johnson and his government, came close to saying that what
happened may have been against the rules, but the problem was that the rules
were not proportionate to the situation. At least, that is how some seem to
have interpreted his comments. It’s not out of character; this is, after all,
the man who claimed
that the reason so many died in Grenfell Tower is that they were too stupid to
ignore the advice of the fire brigade. In his world, ‘sensible’ people like him
and his boss should take take a view on which rules to obey and which to
ignore, and should be allowed to do so with impunity.
It’s a pity that his innate sense of
superiority and apparent attempt to justify rule-breaking retrospectively blur
the fact that he may actually have a point. Not one which can be used to in any
way excuse the past, but one which might be a lesson to learn for the
future. Were the rules really proportionate or sufficiently targeted to the
problem in hand? To take the specific example of the innumerable parties at
Downing Street, it is surely legitimate, in terms of infection control, to ask
just how much extra risk is created if people who are working closely together
all day long indoors in poorly ventilated buildings then go out into the garden
at the end of the day and enjoy a few drinks together in the sunshine. That
added risk must be very small indeed, and I can well understand how it might
have seemed that way to those involved. It doesn’t alter the fact that rules
were broken, though, and that those rules gave them no right to make their own
assessment of the risk of breaking them.
If that’s the point which Jake was
attempting to make, then it’s a reasonable one, even if he failed to make it in
quite such terms. If they’d wanted to, the government could have made all
manner of exceptions to the rules which would have covered that sort of
situation, but they chose not to for, I suspect, two very simple reasons.
Firstly, at the time they were making the rules, they had already dithered for
too long and were trying to claw back some of the time that they’d wasted – stopping
to work out the fine print would have compounded the disaster they were overseeing.
And secondly, keeping the rules as clear, and as black and white, as possible
was by far the best way of ensuring widespread adherence. The objective was to
stop people mixing beyond what was strictly necessary, and allowing people to
use their judgement to decide how much extra risk was involved in activity A or
activity B would have led overall to much wider mixing and faster spread – and
also have made the job of enforcement many times more difficult.
It’s easy to look back and say that such-and-such
an activity caused no problems, and should therefore be ignored, the argument
which Rees-Mogg comes close to making. It’s like arguing that driving above the
speed limit or crashing a red light on a particular occasion caused no
accidents and can therefore be ignored. In this case, the simple fact is that
the government made the rules and then ignored them, despite encouraging the
police to enforce them for other people. No amount of retrospective analysis of
the harm done (or not done) can change the fact that other people were prosecuted
and fined for lesser breaches of the rules.
The point which Jake makes about how
strict the rules should be is one which governments may well wish to consider
carefully in responding to future circumstances, although they will always
still be faced with the argument about ‘keeping it simple’ which many might
think trumps any attempt at finessing the rules. But trying to use that point
to justify, in any way, what has already been done is foolish to say the least.
It looks like what it is – just another attempt to justify following a
different set of rules.
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