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LONDON — These days Britain never misses an opportunity for a new culture war.
The announcement Tuesday that masks will be compulsory in shops in England from later this month to help stem the spread of the coronavirus — with threats of £100 fines for rule-breakers — has prompted an eruption of angry social media exchanges and disagreements among conservatives.
Some believe forcing people to wear face coverings by law is an overreach of state power and people should be free to make their own choices. Others argue the need to protect people is the more pertinent libertarian view.
“You can present this in terms of an ideological tension within conservatism, and that definitely exists,” said Jeremy Black, emeritus professor of history and an expert on conservatism. But, he said, there was also a “sheer bloody-mindedness” at being told what to do.
Masks appear to have sparked more outrage in Britain and the U.S. than around continental Europe, where nations told to wear them have quietly gotten on with it or quietly ignored the rules, without such ferocious debate. Black put that down to “a different tradition of political action and independence” in those countries. “In Britain, the adversarial notion of politics is one that may well make the British ungovernable,” he said. “It reflects a different form of political culture.”
The one thing most Brits agree on is that the decision to make face masks mandatory in shops came late in the course of the pandemic. The U.K. government had been insisting for months that there is little evidence the mass-wearing of masks slows the spread of the virus, only to change its mind.
“There is no evidence that general wearing of the face masks by the public who are well affects the spread of the disease,” Deputy Chief Medical Officer Jonathan Van Tam said at the start of April. But slowly things began to change. A month later, the government said face masks would be compulsory on public transport.
As Scotland and nations around the world piled pressure on Westminster by mandating the use of masks in shops, the British Cabinet was clearly wrestling with itself.
Just two days before Downing Street announced the change in approach, Cabinet Office Minister Michael Gove was peddling a different line. He told the BBC's Andrew Marr he did not think masks should be mandatory, adding, “It's always best to trust people's common sense.”
Ministerial dithering over the issue no doubt speaks to Prime Minister Boris Johnson’s caution when it comes to treading on civil liberties.
As Britain edged into lockdown earlier in the pandemic, he was almost apologetic about the curbs on freedom. One of his old quotes, about the shark movie "Jaws," appeared to fit well with his sentiment. “The real hero of 'Jaws' is the mayor,” he said in 2006. “A gigantic fish is eating all your constituents and he decides to keep the beaches open.”
As he made the decision on masks, Johnson will have had an eye on his more libertarian MPs on the Conservative benches. And with good reason.
Conservative MP Desmond Swayne branded the move a “monstrous imposition” in the House of Commons. “Nothing would make me less likely to go shopping than the thought of having to mask up,” he told Health Secretary Matt Hancock.
Photos began to emerge online of Conservative members cutting up their membership cards. “This is not only the most incompetent government of my lifetime, it is the most authoritarian. It is not remotely conservative,” said Conservative-supporting barrister Francis Hoar on Twitter.
Brexit Party leader Nigel Farage, seen by many as an outlier for conservative thinking on the libertarian wing of the movement, was equally outraged.
The Brexit Party leader backed encouraging mask use to build confidence among the public after lockdown, but said being ordered to wear them by “prefect Hancock” and threatened with a £100 fine made him want to “stick two fingers up and shout abusive language at the television.”
“The way they have done it is more likely to put people’s backs up and cause mass disobedience,” he told POLITICO. “I don’t think we have a Conservative Party. We have a government which wants to threaten us and which has increased the power of the state in the most astonishing way during this crisis.”
He added that the Conservative base in rural England was “looking at much of this and shaking their heads.”
But Conservative officials insisted there had been no mass outpouring of anger from the party faithful. “I wouldn’t say it’s exercised the party very much at this point,” one said.
Other conservatives took a different view on the issue.
Former minister Steve Baker, a guiding light in the libertarian wing of the party and a leading Brexiteer, said the outraged arguments around the masks debate were “not worthy of being labeled libertarian.”
He explained it was “not legitimate to argue that you can’t be forced to wear a mask when the mask is for the protection of other people, not yourself.”
“One of the fundamental principles of liberty is the harm principle,” Baker said. “You are free to swing your fists around up to the point that you hit somebody else.” He added, “If the mask was for the protection of the individual wearing it then it would be wrong to force them to be worn.”
Robert Colvile, boss of the conservative-leaning Centre for Policy Studies think tank, agreed. “[I] Find it hard to buy the personal liberty argument [about] refusing to wear a face mask given that the liberty being infringed is your liberty to infect other people with a potentially fatal disease, which surely has an impact on their own liberty, and indeed mortality,” he tweeted.
The increasing reach of the state as the pandemic has unfolded has been difficult for some Conservative members, with masks being the latest concern.
But Black, the emeritus professor of history, said it was a minor issue compared to longer-term concerns of how to pay for the coronavirus crisis and how to deal with China. “I wouldn't see it as a cause of a permanent breakdown in the Conservative Party, which has much bigger tensions to cope with,” he said.
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