Coronavirus emergency laws will be here long after Covid-19 – and in the hands of the our least trustworthy government ever

The hope for Covid-19 is that it will eventually reduce in potency to little more than a common cold, but you’ll still be liable to be arrested if you happen to catch it

History is not altogether clear to what Harold Wilson was specifically referring to when he may or may not have even said that “a week is a long time in politics”.

So it is up to us to dare to assume that this, the much-referred to long week in British politics, may at the time have felt even shorter than the one that’s not yet over, right here in early 2020.

It is scarcely even a full week since the national conversation principally concerned whether Rishi Sunak’s Budget did or didn’t break the fiscal rules as set in the Conservative Party manifesto, and here we are, rushing through emergency legislation to allow the government to arrest old age pensioners for the crime of going to the shops.

These emergency powers, as outlined in the coronavirus bill, are like nothing that’s ever been seen before, certainly not in a hundred years or more. But then, neither is the coronavirus.

Naturally, these new powers contain within them the power for the government to grant itself more powers, like a sort of megalomaniac version of using one of your three wishes to wish for infinite wishes.

But no one need worry, because they’re only meant to last two years, and this sort of thing never, ever goes wrong. Whoever could have foreseen, for example, when those planes hit those buildings on that awful sunny September morning, that seven years later, most of the Icelandic population would be posting pictures of themselves on Facebook holding up signs saying “I am not a terrorist”. Why? Well, the anti-terror powers the Labour government saw fit to grant itself, in response to the threat of Al Qaeda in 2001, would be deployed by Gordon Brown in 2008, as a means to rescue British savers’ money from collapsing Icelandic banks.

Who can blame him, in a way? They were desperate times. Desperate measures were required. But it is scant exaggeration to say that every time a government gives itself rights it would not be permitted under normal circumstances, it never quite gives them up again.

At Boris Johnson’s most recent press conference, he spoke of the medium- to long-term prognosis of the nation in dealing with this outbreak. In 12 weeks, he said, some semblance of normality will have returned. People who have had the coronavirus, and so built up some kind of resistance to it, will be able to return to work. There will be hundreds of thousands of such people, millions. And yet these people will step out again, into a world in which the government will be able to detain anyone suspected of having Covid-19, fine them for refusing to be tested for it, and to force potentially infected people to isolate, to stop them from travelling and seeing other people.

Such rights and powers make sense now while the supermarkets are empty and a country, indeed a world, braces for impact from a force it doesn’t understand and is too frightened even to fully consider.

But there are no sensible voices who don’t think Covid-19 will be with us for anything less than a year, and more likely longer than that. In some senses, it will be with us for good, even though its potency will have diminished, perhaps to little more than a common cold.

The Labour Party has requested for the powers to require parliamentary reapproval every six months. But that request is not expected to be passed. It will merely require the government to unilaterally reapprove it every two.

It will, in other words, not be all that long before you can be detained for catching a cold. At that point, the best you can hope for is that you trust your government to act responsibly. That it wouldn’t, say, play fast and loose with the law for its own ends. It wouldn’t, for example, seek to shut down parliament to force through a no-deal Brexit. It wouldn’t restrict access to briefings to a select pool of approved journalists. It wouldn’t be trying to shut down the BBC, and take a flamethrower to the independence of the judiciary.

No British government, certainly not in recent times, has been so brazen in using whatever power it can get hold of to do as it pleases. We will have to hope that government – our government – uses these new, and terrifying powers, judiciously. Hope, frankly, is not enough.