Look behind the ‘lockdown’ cliches and you’ll see what really scares Boris Johnson about coronavirus

An infantilised society will not be able to imagine a new future, nor answer the demands of future generations of society of every origin which – far from being ‘distanced’ – must be socially united, writes Robert Fisk

Demonstrators take part in a Black Lives Matter protest in Leeds in the wake of the killing of George Floyd by US police (PA)

Please God, let us be free of the cliches as well as the virus. I might believe in the “second wave” – now a cliche in itself – but a second wave of cliches will surely diminish our language, our semantics, our very means of communication.

I’m not just talking about “absolutely”, “totally” and “completely” – always followed by the word “clear” – but the very use of that most abhorrent and repulsive of words which has since been adopted in the most slovenly of ways by every government spokesman, scientist, doctor and, of course, journalist: lockdown.

We are now so used to this word in the Covid-19 context that it has become a punctuation mark. Sure, we know that its origin was American: to describe the locking of prisoners into their cells after a jail riot. The first journalistic use of “lockdown” (to describe the prolonged incarceration of convicted inmates) came in a Los Angeles newspaper in 1973, although my own 1989 US Webster’s Ninth New Collegiate Dictionary makes no mention of it.

I first remember hearing the word as a journalist in the new millennium, when American cities were placed on “lockdown” after bombs had exploded in the street, or cops were searching for dangerous “terrorists” (another cliche which we can re-explore at another time).

Then, perhaps a decade or so ago, I received a phone call in Lebanon from a US radio station after a car bomb had exploded in Beirut, killing a local politician. “Is Beirut under lockdown?” I was asked. I doubted, I replied then, that the people of the city knew what a lockdown was – and would most certainly flood into the streets to discover what this creature looked like had they been informed it was on the loose.

Humour aside, my remark had a point. The very word “lockdown” is redolent of fear, restriction, prohibition and punishment. If we didn’t know what it meant, we clearly understood that it must involve a key. The real question, I suspect, is: who holds the key?

After this – and I’m now back in our age of coronavirus – the word began to agglutinate. It acquired a cluster – yes another cliche, but perhaps in more correct usage – of other words and phrases. We were asked to “abide” by the lockdown and then– as the fatalities rose and the media floated on the story – to “obey” the lockdown. Whether this could be enforced by law and order was at first unclear. Dominic Cummings’s adventures certainly did not clarify this. But we began to hear of the “very small minority” who were not “abiding” or “obeying” what were briefly called the “rules”.

“Regulations”, for some reason, rarely popped up. But the very great majority were certainly urged to snitch, jailbird-style, to the cops. The UK police, mercifully never transmogrified into the “frontline heroes” of the NHS, had become wardens; not of traffic, mark you, but of the cosy little homes and balconies and gardens (those who were so lucky) wherein the people should reside, stay and remain locked until such time as the prime minister allowed them to venture to the door and look at all the other inmates.

The intervention of Northamptonshire’s most preposterous policeman – he who was going to check the shopping bags of harmless customers in the supermarket – was highly instructive. For despite hurried government announcements disowning his suggestion, the aforesaid police officer got it right: his constabulary had to enforce the rules to ensure that everyone “obeyed” them. No Easter eggs for sale, they learned. Then the drones started swooping down on old ladies walking their doggies on hillsides.

Yes, in some ways this nonsense was all quite jolly. Where would he be without Inspector Plod? But then a new word started to filter out of Downing Street’s faithful media retainers.

The government was worried there might be “disorder” on the streets – by only a very small minority, you understand. But “disorder” is not the exact opposite of “order”. Order implies law; disorder implies anarchy – which is the enemy of government, as well as law.

The fears of Messers Johnson and his clique, with their futile and dishonest statistics, were not that the people of Britain – or at least England – might fail to realise the dangers of Covid-19. They were afraid that the vast majority (the law abiders) might suddenly take it into their heads that Downing Street and its doctors and its still resident Svengali were crackers, that their “lockdown” was a massive and ill-conceived project to which they had every right to object. In the streets, if necessary.

In retrospect, this – rather than merely “saving the economy” – may be why Downing Street was so keen to fast-forward the days when the “easing” of lockdown took effect. The danger of “civil unrest” might turn out to be rather more frightening than that nasty round thing under the microscope with the crown-like red prongs sticking out of it.

Was this, I wonder, why the Met originally deployed mounted riot police against a few thousand demonstrators of Black Lives Matter in the streets of London? Was this part of the original fall-back plan – now put to other use, of course – for the widespread “disorder” of which Downing Street was so frightened?

No wonder the British government wished to silence anyone who now doubted its behaviour, the honourable men and women of “the science” who suddenly reaffirmed that the rules applied “to all” as well as the hoi polloi. Little surprise then that the Johnson conglomerate condemned the “selfish” sunbathers and woodland partygoers – lethal though the latter has proved to be – with such vehemence. What if this got out of hand?

Any sane person would agree with the restrictions – which is why they were so easy to impose. Once they were broken with impunity, however, the real danger started.

How do you put down “disorder” by all those English men and women you have been urging on to even greater sacrifice, even those who were not Brexiteers? What no one could have predicted, however, was the murder of George Floyd or the rapid growth of the Black Lives Matter movement. More to the point, no one imagined that the latter would voyage so quickly across the Atlantic and threaten not just the “lockdown” but Britain’s imperial history as well.

The initial remarks about the selfishness of protestors who did not demonstrate “social distancing” – another cliche which must be destroyed – moved effortlessly into official fury at those who had toppled or defaced statues to Britain’s dodgy past. But when Churchill was supposedly a target of the monument-bashers, along with good old Baden Powell, it was henceforth a natural progression: prison for statue-breakers.

From a distance, it all looks quite farcical. A nation which cannot protect its elderly – which leaves them in their tens of thousands to die in their nursing homes – is now demanding protection for its dead. Not all the NHS frontline heroes, not those who administer the “world beating” medical care of which Boris Johnson boasts, can save the slave-owners and colonial conquerors whose deeds doomed the innocent lives of more than those who will ever die of Covid-19 in Britain. The English company of which Edward Colston was a member cost the lives of 19,000 slaves – just under half the official figure of the UK’s entire virus fatalities.

A new perspective was suddenly thrown across the shadow of infection: equality, human rights for all, justice, a demand that national – nay, international – history should be filled out.

It was the infamous “R” figure in reverse. History, the “H” figure, should be 100 per cent. We have been told by reporters for weeks – to the point of insanity – that the streets of British cities were “eerily silent”. But it was the hundreds of years in which the history of those who lived in these streets, and of the tens of thousands of African-Americans who rarely saw them, which were eerily silent.

Johnson spoke endlessly of the “roadmap” of “reopening” Britain, but a historical GPS might provide a better idea of how Britain’s people might come together. The problem with the second worst cliche of Covid-19 – “social distancing”– is that it subliminally argues for the division of society rather than its protection.

For suddenly these pitiful cliches have taken on a different meaning. The “new normal” has nothing to do with the new shopping experience with which British people have been traduced. The “new normal” is probably going to involve a long debate about Britain’s historical responsibilities rather than its historic victories over Napoleon or Hitler or (perhaps less satisfactory in the present circumstances) Covid-19. Note I use the word debate – not the infantile “new narratives” or “national conversations” with which we are being bombarded, all of them cliches for TV chat-show arguments and more internet hatred. Debates involve parliament, government policy, editorials, lectures, books, movies – the production of new movies, not the destruction of old ones – and school and university teaching and research.

It will have to include a new respect for words and phrases and the end of tired, meaningless expressions which insult a people faced with a pandemic.

Are most folk not mature enough to understand just plain “distancing” or even “health distancing” which is, after all, the point? Must the elderly be ridiculed by being told they must “cocoon”, as if they are each to be turned into a chrysalis which may – or may not – awaken? Must we have “bubbles” for families and “pods” for children? However low the estimation of their people may be by members of the British cabinet, they do not have to treat their citizens as babies.

An infantilised society will not be able to imagine a new future; nor answer the demands of future generations of society of every origin which – far from being “distanced” – must be socially united.

If the coronavirus, even in some devious and obscene way, helps to bring this about, then something will have been gained for the lives lost and the futures squandered. Maybe it’s the virus that holds the key to open the prison door.