Sorry - this is a bit long, and it's taken from an article by Allister Heath. But he's right:
Please, please, Prime Minister, do not lock us down again. Do not listen to the unidimensional, anti-economic, risk-averse groupthink from Sage. Ignore Sir Keir Starmer and Sadiq Khan’s shameless politicking.
A “circuit-breaker” is doublespeak for another lockdown, and cannot be a sustainable answer: the virus would only be temporarily suppressed, with transmission bouncing back as soon as the restrictions were lifted again. If the NHS cannot cope now, it never will.
Once one accepts the logic of shutting down society each time Covid reaches a certain prevalence, a third and perhaps even fourth lockdown become inevitable before the winter is up. It would lead to the most expensive game of whack-a-mole ever played.
A vicious circle of stop-go lockdowns would be a catastrophic indictment of Government policy, an admission of total defeat, a victory of fear and emotion over reason, an appalling signal that Britain has now become so culturally dysfunctional, so decadent as to be utterly incapable of any rational cost-benefit analysis.
We would no longer be a free society tolerating an exceptional, temporary shutdown to allow our scandalously unprepared establishment to learn to manage a terrible situation. Instead, we would have transitioned to a world of permanent emergency, a wartime society whereby individual rights and lives were permanently suppressed for an ill-defined, ever-shifting “national interest”.
A new principle would have become established: that the Government has the right and even the obligation to lock us down at the first sign of any new epidemic, even one that doesn’t truly threaten the survival of our society. Johnson must resist going down that route with every fibre of his being.
This is not to say that there wouldn’t be some gains from locking down again. Sharply reducing social contacts would slow the spread of the virus. But these benefits would be limited, uncertain and temporary, and some of them could be achieved in a less costly fashion. Any upside would need to be set against gigantic, guaranteed economic, social, personal and metaphysical costs.
The main rationale for a “circuit-breaker” – that it would buy yet more time for “one last push” on testing, the app, tracing and a vaccine – is tragically delusional. Even the French and Germans have failed to introduce effective testing and tracing, suggesting that the endeavour may be an elusive El Dorado, at least for now.
Our own system has improved beyond recognition, but lack of compliance and its own inherent limitations mean that it will almost certainly not be able to keep the reproductive rate below 1. Just as depressingly, there is unlikely to be a usable mass vaccine this year.
Yes, a few deaths might be avoided by spreading out ICU admissions to our hopelessly ineffectual NHS. Yes, a few others – maybe even up to 20,000 in a best-case scenario – might be saved as a result of multiple lockdowns if an effective vaccine suddenly, miraculously materialises by April.
But, in reality, most deaths would not be avoided, merely delayed, and there will be plenty of additional fatalities caused by the lockdown itself – including out of despair – to set against that. Unemployment would have surged, tens of thousands more businesses ruined, family and community life laid to waste, and immense misery created. What kind of society is ready to destroy so much to save so little?