What comes after Covid lockdown? Fines for smoking and being fat? – John McLellan

Could smokers be targetted by new laws designed to make us live healthier lifestyles, wonders John McLellan

As the Covid-19 coronavirus lockdown continues, John McLellan fears politicians may get carried away with their new-found power to tell us all when to go out and how to behave

For a world in lockdown where families in the same household communicate electronically – and not just those in self-isolation – the amount of publicly-funded bumf coming through the letterbox is quite remarkable.

That we are seeing our leaders on television, hearing them on the radio, reading about them in the newspapers, getting what purports to be their innermost thoughts on social media, the value of hard copy letters through the post is unclear. Letters from Boris, letters from Nicola, and this week even the chief executive of Edinburgh Council got in on the act with a herogram to staff and councillors to accompany a wage slip which is normally only available on the intranet system. At a time when a £50m funding gap has opened up in the local coffers? Still, the thought was there.

Some of them do come with information about self-isolation and that kind of thing which people without internet access might find useful, and one I did read a bit closer than most was a 16-pager from the Scottish Government on April 17 telling me I was more at risk than others and I should avoid all face-to-face contact with anyone for 12 weeks. The day before it arrived, the First Minister told the Scottish Parliament that everyone who needed to self-isolate had been contacted, so like everyone else who hadn’t heard anything I thought I was in the clear. What she should have said was that those people had been written to, not contacted, because the letter had taken three days to arrive.

By April 17, the number of confirmed Covid-19 cases had risen to 7,409 and deaths to 837, so it was getting a bit late to be telling those at the highest risk to shut themselves away and to be fed only by thin-crust pizzas shoved under the bedroom door. And as readers of this column might recall, far from self-isolating, I had been in and out of the Queen Elizabeth Hospital to see my dad in one of the wards dealing with the virus which had killed him four days earlier.

I understand the argument about putting strain on the health service if you fall seriously ill, and I also saw the warning to elected representatives to set an example to the public, but as my mum was self-isolating I decided there was a difference between attending a parent’s funeral and sloping off to one’s East Neuk bolt-hole. Apart from anything else, I’d been in a hospital ward full of people dying from the disease so a funeral wasn’t going to make much difference. And I was not just due to attend the service but conduct it.

Then a strange thing happened. The GP surgery rang to tell me that the letter wasn’t a mistake, but not to worry too much about it. I wasn’t on the list because of the open-heart surgery five years ago, but a thing called sarcoidosis which was never confirmed and the only symptom was a very red eye. 22 years ago.

But I’m still on the list and people in their 50s have a three per cent chance of dying from the disease and a higher likelihood of becoming seriously ill, so even with the GP’s blessing I was technically flouting the rules.

One problem of the imposition of lockdown law is it is normalising the criminalisation of previously innocent behaviour, where people get used to the idea of the police handing out fines for doing nothing more dangerous than meeting pals for a drink. It has led to over 200,000 complaints to police in England and Wales from members of the public concerned about others’ behaviour and Scottish police are dealing with the same as we are turned into a nation of snitches under the cover of protecting public health. People are rehearsing their excuses before venturing out, as I did when I went to collect my dad’s belongings from the hospital and care home, and the longer this goes on the more unhealthy and dangerous it becomes. As Justice Secretary Humza Yousaf demonstrated last week with his promise to make misogyny and sexism a hate crime, there is nothing politicians like more than passing more laws.

Now a group of Warwick University academics has suggested that the over-50s should be subjected to lockdown longer than everyone else, and fined if they breach the rules. Oh really? By extension, the principle of fining people for going out, even if they are socially-distancing, because they are potentially doing themselves harm leads to fines for smoking and drinking more than 14 units of alcohol a week, or being fat, because of the possible cost to the NHS. It might help the Scottish Government’s finances, but it would be an affront to personal liberty.

But academics can be a very focused lot and wider implications are not necessarily their concern, and balancing their views with public impact is where politics starts and science and academia end. For example, Edinburgh University’s Prof Devi Sridhar is a spectacularly well-qualified expert in global public health and this week she suggested that mass gatherings – presumably including funerals and weddings – should be prohibited for a year-and-a-half while more is learnt about the disease. While her recommendations about the future of lockdown cannot be dismissed, it doesn’t make them any less dispiriting when people are beginning to wonder how long it might be before some semblance of normality returns. Even if economic restrictions are eased, it threatens to condemn us to 18 months of joyless tedium with little to break up the cycle of home-shopping-work except an hour in the park.

If there is one good to come out of all this, it is the appreciation of those things which are often dismissed as trivial, pointless or expensive elitism, but which lift the soul and give a shape and cadence to our lives. But the return of sports and arts is one thing, the effect on schools and education in general of a continued ban on assembly could have far-reaching consequences. The long-term impact of limiting physical activity to the drudge of lone exercise on a nation with one of the poorest health records in Europe is something which should also concern public health specialists.

But more laws and restrictions? It’s enough to make you turn to drink.

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