Hi, I've been lurking for a while! Sorry for the long and rather ranty first post but I just wanted to raise some awareness of this and get it off my chest, because I'm feeling increasingly agitated about it and feel that there is very little awareness at the moment.
Obviously all mixing in our own homes is banned, indeed criminalised, as it was between March and July last year and now again in almost all of the country since November and apparently until at least May. Of course in many areas it also remained banned for some or all of the time in between - Leicester is going to reach at least 14 consecutive months under this law!
It is presented by our government and scientists as being totally inevitable that household mixing must be banned in a pandemic, and that anyone who disagrees isn't being realistic. Yet the reality is that almost no other European country has banned it. Here's the latest I can find on restrictions in comparable European countries:
France - no limits on being in other people's homes, as long as you don't come or go during the curfew hours.
Italy - Maximum of two adult guests per household at any time, plus any children
Belgium - a type of bubble system for non-household indoor contacts (called "cuddle contacts"!). But massively different to our bubbles, as every individual is allowed their own cuddle contact not just one per household. People living alone are allowed two cuddle contacts.
Netherlands - Each household may receive one adult visitor per day, children not counted (the adult number has only recently and temporarily been reduced to one, normally it has been two or three)
Germany - Any indoor gathering consisting of one household plus one person from another household is allowed. This was a temporary tightening introduced in January, and is being relaxed again from next Monday to be five adults from two households (plus any children).
Switzerland - rule of 5
Austria - General ban, but with exemptions for "closest relatives" and non-cohabiting couples.
Denmark - rule of 5
Sweden - advice to limit contact to a close circle
It's worth stressing that in many of these countries the rules have never been stricter than shown above at any point at all during the pandemic (and were of course much less strict during the summer), and furthermore the relaxation of household restrictions has generally been one of the highest priorities in each lockdown easing - see Germany above for example, easing this first in its unlocking. The sort of situation that we had in some parts of England last summer, where pubs and bars were open until the small hours of the morning but any mixing in your own home or even your own garden was completely illegal, is just absolutely off-the-scale compared anything that has been done anywhere else in the world as far as I'm aware.
Our government (and also Ireland) appear to be literally the only ones who have legislated to restrict family life to anything like this extent and duration. Nowhere else has attempted to confine people by law to a completely closed and rigid household/bubble system. In almost all other countries, this kind of government micromanagement of every private interaction just hasn't been on the agenda at all, as far as I can tell.
I've been astonished and actually quite frightened that this has happened here, and even more astonished at how little pushback there's been and how quickly it has come to be accepted as normal. In fact, despite already having these extra-draconian measures, it has often felt like most dissenting voices in this country have still been those calling for "even more, even harder, even stricter, even longer".
I think in part it's being driven by a widespread public misconception here that other countries are all doing "proper lockdowns" and therefore must be under similar or even stricter household rules than us, so I just wanted to post this to highlight that that really isn't the case at all and that our government has gone drastically further than others on this matter.
I really think that even the smallest of allowances, such as allowing one visitor at a time, makes such a huge difference to people. It means that, for example, a parent can legally visit a child or vice versa, or that a couple can legally see each other even if they don't meet the qualifying criteria for a support bubble, or that a lonely person who sadly doesn't have any close friends or relatives to bubble with can still have an acquaintance in for a cup of tea. I really do think that the countries such as Germany and the Netherlands, who have stopped at that level of restriction, have got it right - that that is as far as the government can reasonably go and that criminalising all mixing for months or even years just isn't an appropriate policy option in a free and civilised country - and that our government has got it very badly and uniquely wrong.
I think particularly of people who live in households which aren't their appropriate social group, for example one adult child living with one parent - they have been legally denied all indoor contact with anyone except each other, with anyone their own age, even with their own partners. Or people living in houseshares or as lodgers, whose "household" is just random people who they live with for purely financial reasons - they aren't deemed eligible for a support bubble as they don't live alone, and therefore all indoor contact with anyone who they actually care about has been outlawed indefinitely. If they've been completely following the government "rules" then they shouldn't even have hugged anyone since last March (if the people who they live with aren't people they would hug). Really, I think that's just appalling. I know people in this position.
A year ago this would all have seemed utterly unthinkable. Anyone suggesting that this degree of government control over our personal interactions could happen in this country and could be sustained for so long, even in a pandemic of this nature, would have been laughed out of the room. People in the other countries above would no doubt also have believed it would be unthinkable in their countries - and it turns out that they would have been correct about that. So how in this country have we ended up here? How have we gone off at such an extreme tangent compared to all the others?
The right to family and private life is one of the most fundamental rights of all, and while of course there can be emergencies which require those rights to be curtailed by the government I would have always just assumed that the level of government respect for these rights in this country, and the extent to which they would deem it appropriate to to curtail them in any particular crisis, would be broadly the same as in those other countries which we consider to be our peers as western democracies. It has shocked me quite profoundly and, I think, permanently, to discover during the last year that that clearly isn't the case and that we have diverged so far from the rest of the free world on this. I literally would never have suspected that about this country, and to be honest I'm really struggling to make sense of it. Family matters more than anything, even if you don't live in the same household as them. The sanctity of the family home matters enormously - how dare the government criminalise my young adult children if they enter. Intimate relationships also matter enormously, whether or not the partners live together, and banning them for most of a year is just not within the government's reasonable remit. The rest of Europe clearly gets all this. I used to be under the illusion that we did too.
And I fear that we have now uniquely set a horrendous precedent that it's fine for the government to intrude into our homes and completely switch 'household mixing' off whenever it likes, and for however long it likes, as a mainstream tool of public health policy. And I find that prospect totally unacceptable and terrifying. Am I wrong?
(I should also just add a little caveat about the Kent variant, as I know it will be brought up. Clearly that is something which came along and whacked us very unexpectedly and I would be far more understanding of the government if our unusually intrusive restrictions had only come about as a temporary response to that moment of acute crisis. But, what disturbs me is that they had actually already been in place for many months by then, throughout a time when we were facing exactly the same virus situation as the rest of the world.)