Freedom or Risk – Choose One

It is interesting to note that over recent days, certain elements of mainstream news media, having fuelled the Covid-19 situation with sensationalist nonsense and confused the differences between ‘The Coronavirus’ and Covid-19 well beyond the point of being reasonable, are now changing their tune - at least a little.

Coverage up to (and still including) now has focused entirely on the closing down of everyday life and the ‘huge numbers’ of people dying right, left and centre from ‘The Coronavirus’. As our contributors have pointed out, people are not dying from ‘The Coronavirus’. Those tragically passing away have done so from other conditions that Covid-19 has opened the doors to.

More pertinently, there is a growing awareness of two things; the first is the incalculable damage being done to the economy of the current lockdown but the second is possibly even more important.

To do anything requires the freedom to do it – and it is freedom itself that is most under threat. As Kevan James points out both on KJM Today and in his book, Comments of a Common Man, there is a risk to simply being alive. His book, carrying this sentiment, was first published three years ago. But that vital point remains in the third edition; to eliminate risk means the elimination of freedom. And it is this that governments around the world are trying to do – eliminate risk.

You cannot have it both ways. Either you take the risks of life, or you remove freedom in its entirety. The lockdown must, in its present form, go. There is no difference (again as is pointed out elsewhere on KJM Today) between standing two metres away from other customers in a shoe shop and doing the same in a food store or for that matter, anywhere else.

Give freedom back to the United Kingdom, Prime Minister.