A Real Social Experiment

Forget Face Masks and Fear

Let's Relax and Accept the Risk


Peter Hitchens
Mail on Sunday


Every day I still see unhappy, frightened people cringing from human contact. They have been terrified almost out of their minds by foolish government propaganda, and the most basic trust, the very heart of civilisation, has been destroyed.

This is another side of savage, unforgivably cruel rules which have prevented grandparents from touching their grandchildren, or forbidden people to visit close relatives, even spouses, in their dying weeks.

Millions of us know this is all the most appalling rubbish, based on wild, wrong guesses and twisted figures, and one day soon I hope an icy public inquiry will condemn those responsible for the grave, incompetents they are.




Prime Minister Boris Johnson is pictured above wearing a face mask in a shop in Uxbridge. Since the only other way for this madness to end is for Mr Johnson to admit he made a terrible mistake, which is hardly likely, I offer this as a serious, if slow, route out of our dangerous and damaging national madness

But in the meantime what are those of us who have not been cowed into submission to do?


I suggest that we are allowed to register as ‘relaxed’. We will sign declarations that we will not sue anyone or claim on anyone’s insurance if we catch Covid-19. We regard it as a minor risk of life, to be coped with.  In return, employers, shops, pubs, restaurants, churches, swimming pools and transport operators should (if they wish) ask staff if they too are prepared to declare themselves ‘relaxed’. Or they could recruit new staff who are.

Where this happens, all the footling palaver of visors, muzzles, plastic screens, incessant obsessive use of hand-sanitiser and ‘social distancing’ will be abandoned.

Trains can have special ‘relaxed’ carriages where refreshments are served and baleful, doom-laden announcements are turned off. The upper decks of buses will be ‘relaxed’, or perhaps one entire bus in three (till we see what the take-up is). Airlines can offer entire ‘relaxed’ flights.

Everyone else can carry on, shrouded in gowns like the staff of a mortuary, muzzled in face-nappies, hiding from each other on footpaths and in doorways.

If this appeals to you as a way of life, if you think it is a proportionate reaction to the Covid-19 virus, please carry on behaving in this fashion. I have no desire to stop you or interfere with your strange habits.  And then we will see what happens. My guess is that the people who register as relaxed will be healthier, as well as far happier, than those who don’t.

Since the only other way for this madness to end is for Mr Johnson to admit he made a terrible mistake, which is hardly likely, I offer this as a serious, if slow, route out of our dangerous and damaging national madness.

In return for it, even I am prepared to submit to tracking and tracing while the experiment lasts.