Tom Harwood, tweeting in response to a Guido tweet reporting that Starmer will support all government Covid restrictions:
On the areas it might be useful to have an opposition, we have no opposition.
I agree.
Where are the voices asking at what point do lockdown measures cost more than Covid?
No, that’s rather wrong. Lockdown is not only harming everything else; it is also doing no good on the Covid front at all. The only good thing you can say about these measures is that they are failing to accomplish their purpose. They are not stopping the spread of Covid, which is good, because the sooner Covid has done its spreading, the sooner this nonsense will be over with.
The cost of Covid itself will be what it will be. Whether the frenetic failure to control Covid will cost more than Covid itself is a way to dramatise the costs of this failure, so good in that way, but not the basic point. Which is that these restrictions are doing no good whatsoever, and costing us all a fortune, and should accordingly end. Whether Covid is nasty (I think it is quite nasty and very nasty indeed for those clobbered by it), or in particular is nasty compared to the cost of the restrictions, is only being vehemently argued about by people who don’t understand the essence of this argument.
But the essence of Harwood’s argument is that there ought to be some political opposition happening, and that’s right.
Harwood’s tweet then adds, and ends with, another potent party political point:
You’d think if there ever were a niche for the Lib Dems this would be it but they dropped liberalism long ago.
Just what I had not been thinking. When did I stop despising the LibDems and start ignoring them?
I think I just fisked a tweet.