The evidence on masks is very mixed. The current R0 value is low and falling. The mortality rate of Covid also appears to be falling. Yet the government (not just ours, this is increasingly a global phenomenon) is imposing a blanket policy, backed by civil and potentially criminal sanction, without any meaningful democratic oversight and with no defined mechanism for repeal. Again.
The precedent this sets is that on the basis of any supposed threat to anyone's health any freedom may be restricted or abrogated entirely at short notice and without, for example, a vote in parliament or any requirement for objective justification.
These restrictions are always dressed up in language that makes you the villain if you oppose them - it's for the sake of others, we're saving lives, we're all in this together. This has a chilling effect on discussion not just of the value of any particular restriction, but of the principle of restricting freedoms in the first place.
Remember, when you say "it's just a mask", that this government still thinks it can tell you how many friends you may see and whether you are allowed to have an overnight guest. Quite recently we submitted, apparently willingly, to something not unlike house arrest (or exactly like house arrest for many of our European neighbours).
Interestingly the Greens in Germany are pushing hard for Autobahn speed limits. This is a measure that has always been roundly defeated in the past. Yet now the line is "How ridiculous to complain about such a small restriction for safety, when recently we accepted closing schools and churches".
Any arrogation of authority can be ostensibly justified by safety, especially if you interpret safety broadly and the target group narrowly. You'll recall that not long ago the UK government debated banning people from covering their faces in the name of safety. In the UK, religious freedom won the day; in France, it didn't. Ah the irony that Macron has now decreed that masks must be worn in public, even on beaches where, under another law, masks are banned...
Some time ago, another continental government went a bit further in the whole "safety" thing. The secret police force that kept half of Germany under continuous surveillance and subject to rules about where and when they might go out, and with whom they might associate, was called the "State Safety Service". (As indeed was its brown-shirted predecessor)
This isn't hysteria. If I'm asked to wear a mask and given some reasonably compelling evidence that it actually achieves something, and there is a credible risk to others, then of course I'll wear a mask. But if you tell me I have to, despite there quite evidently not being agreement even within Cabinet about the value of the measure, and you threaten me with Police enforcement, then I become uneasy.
It's not helped by absurd hyperbole from the likes of the Royal Society, whose (chemist) president suggested that not wearing a mask should be compared to drink driving or not wearing a seatbelt - as though this were now a permanent response to a permanent threat rather than a temporary measure during a passing crisis.
The London case count, for instance, has been basically stable for six weeks at about 50-ish cases per day. No change from relaxation of lockdown. No change from BLM marches. This compares to 1,000 a day at the peak of the epidemic. So it seems an odd moment to introduce a significant new restriction on personal freedom, especially since no other freedoms are being restored in exchange.
If the idea is that masks, essentially as a placebo (which is the WHO line), will give the population confidence to go out and shop then why make them mandatory on penalty of a £100 fine? Why is it, as it was during lockdown, always the stick and never the carrot? What does this tell us about how the government sees the people? That's why mask laws are disturbing, not because of the masks themselves.