We are a nation used to our freedoms – but now we have no choice but to follow the rules

Editorial: Many will not like the idea of the police or officials having to enforce restrictive measures, but that is what will happen if coronavirus advice is ignored

The government is seeking to protect UK citizens from the most serious threat to public health for a century (Reuters)

Britons don’t like being told what to do, especially by governments. It is a long tradition to push back, sometimes violently, against authority.

From Magna Carta, the riots of the London mob in the Middle Ages, the Reformation, the English Civil War, the rise of organised labour in Victorian times, through to the various clashes during the 20th century, the power of authority has been curbed by the power of the people. It is a healthy and vital response, a cussedness that has served us well. We do not obey orders.

But there are times when we have to do what the government of the day tells us to do. Now is one of those times.

The government is seeking to protect UK citizens from the most serious threat to public health for a century, indeed since the so-called Spanish flu pandemic, which ravaged the world from the beginning of 1918 to the end of 1920. At the moment the only practical way of reducing the spread of the coronavirus is for people to make every effort not to pass it on to each other.

The UK has, by the standards of many other countries, sought to minimise the disruption to our daily lives. It is part of the very essence of being human that we should continue to meet, to argue, to share meals with each other – and occasionally misbehave. Gradually we have accepted progressively greater restrictions on our movements as the evidence mounts that the only way to check the spread is to abide by that clumsy expression “social distancing”.

Those restrictions should arguably have been tightened earlier. It may be awkward for the government to have to frame its response under the full high-beam headlights of a vigorous democracy. It would certainly have been easier to bring in draconian measures limiting public movement in an autocratic regime such as the one that makes the rules in mainland China. But that makes it all the more important that we should heed the government’s advice, without it having to enforce that advice by fining us for disregarding it, or by putting troops on the streets.

As the government ramps up its controls, our cherished civil liberties are increasingly compromised. That is both inevitable and necessary. The greater good of the whole requires individuals to have their personal rights curbed. The more we choose to follow the guidelines for our behaviour voluntarily, the less the level of coercion placed upon us.

If the government has been slow to clamp down, we as citizens have been slow to change our behaviour. We need more self-discipline, more decency, more order. Stripping the shelves in the supermarkets suggests that some of us are running a bit light on all three of those qualities.

However, one of the fascinating social observations of recent days has been the way in which many people are extending small courtesies to each other: keeping a distance when passing in the street, smiling, exchanging the odd wry joke. That is happening alongside the more explicit ways in which neighbours are helping neighbours, people are calling friends who live alone and dropping off food for those who are self-isolating, and so on.

As the government increases restrictions, it is all the more important not only that we stick by those instructions, but we also ramp up our own private courtesies. These are not good times and they will get worse. But we can make them better than they otherwise would be.