We have now been living with restrictions to our civil liberties for 6 months. The state now has the power to force us to dress in a certain way (face coverings), to restrict our right to family life (no more than 6 in social gatherings), to give up our personal details to retail establishments (contact details to restaurants/pubs), to give up our children’s right to a fair education (continued closures of schools following coronavirus cases), in some cases to give up our right to run a business or work (for example those businesses that can’t run properly due to social distancing etc), and now we have more police powers for enforcement of these rules and apparently “Covid Marshalls” to spy on people and control their behaviour. And there is no definite end point to any of this. None at all. There are vague “hopes” that the state will “try” to return to some kind of normal by a Christmas, but now that’s apparently dependent on regular mass testing - which in itself is a restriction on liberty. My worry is this: now that the state has realised it can control people in this way, will it give up those powers at all? Even if we get a vaccine, will the state actually give us back our freedom like it was before? And what if we never get a vaccine? People may say that all of this is justified by a virus (though a virus that has overall an extremely low fatality rate) but many governments throughout history have taken their citizens’ rights away permanently. How do we know our government won’t do the same?