On Freedom Day, Britain will be fighting the virus on the beaches, and in cafes, pubs — and party rooms

Freedom is coming! For the UK anyway. But how long will it stick around for? For good, according to British Prime Minister Boris Johnson, who has announced that on July 19 Britons will be able to throw away their masks, come out of their dim terraces and foetid turf-covered dwellings and dance in the streets.

With more than 45 million people having received one vaccination, and more than 34 million of those doubly vaccinated, Johnson is confident Britain can take it. (One never knows what to call the man — Boris is too folksy for the right-wing bruiser; but Johnson simply characterises him as a big dick, which burnishes his pants man reputation. BoJo is just disgusting. It’s a dilemma.) 

He is riding high after the country achieved its favourite sort of sporting triumph: losing the European football championship on a penalty, offering the chance for remorseful reflection without the burden of actual success. For weeks he’s been bigging up “Freedom Day”, part of an effort to join the development and purchase of the vaccines to an expression of British know-how, and the animal spirits of capitalism — “greed” drove the developers of the vaccine, he said. Forget the naysayers and the nanny-staters, i.e. the Labour Party — after an exceptional period, the British public would regain their birthright of liberty.

Except, er, now, not so much. Freedom Day is still going ahead, but Johnson’s tone is a little more circumspect owing to a rising chorus of experts who say the shift is too soon, too fast and too comprehensive.

All shops will reopen, mandatory masking abolished, the working-from-home directive torn up, social distancing discontinued. Or they were to be. A mask mandate has already reappeared for London public transport, and Johnson sounded like he’d had some particularly bad news just before his last announcement noting that (with the inevitable go at a Churchillian echo): “It is ver-” (sorry, I’ll do the voice): “It is … varry faar … frommm the und … of deeeling with this viris.” He appears to have little choice but to Winston it out, being now too committed to the event to backtrack.

The NHS deserves most of the credit, but won’t be getting much of a look-in in the celebration of Freedom Day — though it will have to pick up the pieces should it fail. Johnson is using the event to continue his relentless political war, in the name of a perfervid mix of 19th century Manchester liberalism and contemporary techno-optimism. It’s a war as much against whole sections of the Tory party as it is against Labour. It’s a weird mix, as I’ve noted before — the old notion of capitalism red in tooth and claw, but subordinated to the idea that a huge techno-development push, using either private or public money, would raise society to the next level. 

As also noted before, the particular formulation comes out of the Prometheanism of the UK once-far-left grouping, Spiked/the Revolutionary Communist Party. It’s quite different to the “let ’em starve” austerity of classical liberals who believe that a handy recession will cause the economy to bounce back ever more vigorously. The “Promethean” view is that that route leads to permanent stagnation. Big bold moves are needed, and Spiked has been running on a strong anti-lockdown, wonders-of-science vibe, and Johnson has channelled that once more. 

But has Johnson got a little tipsy on the corner shop £2 Bulgarian special? (Ah, England … will I ever get to drink really terrible red wine bought from a milk bar again?) Much of his energy appears to come from this Promethean ideal of forging ahead in freedom, but it relies on an argument that a certain excess of deaths must be tolerated to achieve that. Disgruntled insiders have already leaked that Johnson had said he was willing to let “the bodies pile up” to avoid a Melbourne-style lockdown.

This is out of step with the UK public’s mood, and it represents a fantasy projection on to them. By Johnson’s account, the British are all a mix of Isambard Kingdom Brunel and Johnny Rotten, distinguished from jabbering Continentals by their willingness to get on and do the job. Really, the British are a more settled people than most; the effect of the industrial revolution was to create an enduring culture of close neighbourhoods and towns, and modest individual expectations. The British took to lockdown readily, and without any sort of mass disobedience, its rules and privations reminding them of the Blitz, their other shared passion. 

But that is not to say they would welcome another one (lockdown; how they’d love another Blitz!) — especially one whose impact might be intensified by an over-exuberant application of Freedom Day. Johnson’s Freedom Day palaver was presented as ostensibly strategic, but is so high-risk that it seems to have more to do with his need to fire himself up with the mythologies he has acquired along the way. 

This utterly improbable man has floated from one disaster to the next on a gift for the gab and a supreme self-confidence projected through it, that people around him believe he must be the, er, coming thing. He got the Manchester liberalism at Eton and Oxford. His booster shot the improbable contact with the techno-Leninism of the Revolutionary Communist Party?

I suspect it came during his stint in Brussels as an EU flack, when he was at a low ebb and the doyen of Europe correspondents was Times man and former RCPer Bruno Waterfield, by a stupid Belgian kilometre the best writer to read on the EU. RCPers began to fill the pages of The Spectator during Stuart Reid’s editorsh- sorry, during Johnson’s editorship of the magazine. When he became mayor of London, he took as personal adviser Munira Mirza, former research assistant of RCP founder and theorist Frank Furedi. She has been with him since, now as policy director. His reliance on her work can be judged from the fact that, so far, he has not impregnated her. 

But his relentless return to this sort of politics is another example of the mainstream right’s dilemma. There is nothing remaining in its politics, no great vision, so it must be imported from without. Johnson does through a mix of bunting-hung nostalgia combined with repurposed leftish techno-futurism, and a dash of will-to-power. But even that comes apart in his hands, in anyone’s hands. Having attached himself to Englishness, as the English team rose through the Euro tournament — standing, looking upwards, thumbs up, on a vast St George-flag field of cloth covering all of Downing Street — he now has had to deal with an outbreak of racism in which the team’s loss has been blamed on the three non-white players in the squad. Posters featuring them were defaced — then refaced with positive messages and vigils held. 

The Tory party then became embroiled in a taking-the-knee controversy — tricky since it is doing well in recruiting young middle-class British Asians frustrated by the residual racism of, well, everywhere in the UK.

What happens next? If the virus roars back with new variants, and higher rates of serious illness among the under-70s, will Johnson be in the same sort of trouble as Morrison is in the vaccine debacle? Possibly, but he will also have the same advantage — a Labo(u)r Party incapable of prosecuting the case because its right faction is more focused on winning back full party control and is willing to lose an election to ensure it gets it.

With their commitment to both big spending and cost-cutting, Anglo-ethno-nationalism and multicultural outreach, right-wing parties have an open goal mouth. Nevertheless, on both these fields of the cloth of gold come Freedom Day. I fear our side will get all the way and lose on the penalty.