The Day the Police State Came

They Have Made Us All Prisoners

The new authoritarian State’s dream has come true thanks to the repulsive word 'lockdown'

Peter Hitchens
Mail on Sunday

We will never get out of this now. It will go on for ever. We will not be free people again.   Even when we seem to be free we will be like prisoners on parole, who can be snatched back to their cells at a moment’s notice.

I think I now understand why this period has come to be known by the repulsive word ‘lockdown’, an American term which describes the punishment of rioting convicts in a penitentiary, by confining them in their cells for long periods.   I hate this word, because it does not seem to me to be fitting to describe free people in a free country.

But we are no longer such people, or such a country. We have become muzzled, mouthless, voiceless, humiliated, regimented prisoners, shuffling about at the command of others, stopping when told to stop, moving when told to move, shouted at by jacks-in-office against whom we have no appeal.  We are learning, during this induction period, to do what we are told and to become obedient, servile citizens of a new authoritarian State. We are unlearning the old rules of freedom.


All the things we used to take for granted now belong to the State, which can hand them back to us if we are good, and yank them away from us again if we are bad, or if it can think of an excuse.

And there will always be an excuse, a rise in the fictional ‘R’ rate, an ‘emergency’ that can be exaggerated into fear, whether it be a virus, a terror threat or even the new Middle Eastern war that I have long feared is coming.

But who would have thought it would be Covid-19, of all things, that would be the pretext for the snuffing out of centuries of liberty?  I have long sensed a desire in our new elite to be more powerful. It goes with their belief that they are so wonderful that nobody ought to disagree with them.

You could tell that they longed for curfews, to go on the TV with grim faces and tell us all to go quietly to our homes, to ban gatherings of more than three people, for our own good. But it never quite worked.

People actually laughed in 2003 when Anthony Blair madly sent tanks to Heathrow Airport to deal with an alleged terror threat, which never materialised.  Al Qaeda was a good bogeyman for a bit, but all the stuffing came out of it, especially when we ended up supporting it in Syria. Islamic State had the same basic problem.

Its supposed supporters here almost invariably turned out (like Al Qaeda’s before them) to be fantasists or drugged-up maniacs with no coherent aim or plan. There was never an excuse to fire up the shiny new Civil Contingencies Act, with its enormous dictatorial powers. 

But now the new Strong State, growing in our midst for decades, has finally become powerful enough to emerge in all its naked nastiness. Or rather, all the proper institutions of a civil society have grown so weak that the Strong State can now get its way.

The married family, the independent middle-class, able to make a decent living on the basis of hard-won qualifications, the political parties, Parliament itself, the Opposition, the Monarchy, the Armed Forces, the Church (pathetically anxious to close itself), the Civil Service, most of the media, the BBC, are just husks of what they were 50 years ago.

In many cases, bodies supposed to stand up for us now lecture and browbeat us on behalf of the Government. But I think the worst thing of all has been the naked transformation of the police into a politicised state militia. I have had plenty of criticisms of the police before now, and take none of them back.

But their performance in this crisis has been deeply shocking and sad. They have acted as the agents of Ministers, openly taking one side in a political controversy, shouting angrily and menacingly at innocent citizens that they must go home and that, if they do not, they are ‘killing people’.

Lord Sumption, the former Supreme Court judge, distinguished historian and Reith Lecturer who has spoken repeatedly for Britain in these dark times, said it very clearly many weeks ago: ‘This is what a police state is like. It’s a state in which the government can issue orders or express preferences with no legal authority and the police will enforce Ministers’ wishes.’

These are not the words of some troublesome scribbler, like me, but those of an enormously distinguished intellect who is nobody’s fool, never uses a word he has not considered, and knows his way very well round the past and the present.

And so it has been. Lulled by the lotus-eating weeks of furlough payments and mortgage holidays, and by the almost unceasing spring sunshine, we have lolled about for the past two months vaguely wondering what that faint unpleasant sound in the distance might be.

Well, I will tell you what it is. It is the forging of the fetters we shall be wearing in the times to come, because, for the most part, we didn’t care about our liberty, and so no longer deserve to have it.