WELCOME TO THE AGE OF FEAR.

Jonathan Cook discovers why "it's for your own good" is scary.

Once fear takes hold, populations risk agreeing to hand back rights, won over decades or centuries, that were the sole, meagre limit on the power of elites to ransack the common wealth. In calculations based on fear, freedoms must make way for other priorities: being responsible, keeping safe, averting danger.

Worse, rights are surrendered with our consent because we are persuaded that the rights themselves are a threat to social solidarity, to security, to our health.

He's a Briton, with a different notion of enumerated, limited, and separated government powers, and yet he gets that surrendering liberty for security ultimately yields neither.

The UK bill is far from unusual. Similar legislation—against noisy, inconvenient and disruptive protest—is being passed in states across the United States. Just as free speech is being shut down on the grounds that we must not offend, so protest is being shut down on the grounds that we must not disturb.

That might be a warning shot toward advocates of progressive intolerance.

Large sections of the population are happy to see speech rights stripped from those they don't like or fear. They are equally fine, it seems, with locking up people who cause a "nuisance" or are "too noisy" in advancing a cause with which they have no sympathy—especially so long as fear of the pandemic takes precedence.

For that matter, shaming people daring to have fun outside because they're not wearing their Fauci filters has become a thing, particularly if the fun doesn't go along with Approved Opinion.  I wonder if Mr Cook remembers the Brezhnev era of politicized schizophrenia.

Politicians have much to gain from basking in the reflected authority of science. And when politics and science are merged, as is happening now, dissent can be easily reformulated as either derangement or criminal intent. On this view, to be against lockdown or to be opposed to taking a vaccine is not just wrong but as insane as denying the laws of gravity. It is proof of one's irrationality, of the menace one poses to the collective.

He doesn't ever write "corona tyranny,' and yet, that's what it is.

Politicians and the police must not be the ones to define what protests are justified, what protests are safe, what protests are responsible.

Because otherwise, those in power who took advantage of the pandemic to raid the public coffers and waste billions of pounds on schemes whose main purpose was to enrich their friends have every reason to dismiss anyone who protests against their cupidity and incompetence as endangering public health.

Because otherwise, leaders who want to crush protests against their their current, and future, criminal negligence with extraordinary new police powers have every incentive to characterise their critics as anti-lockdown, or anti-vaccine, or anti-public order, or anti-science—or whatever other pretext they think will play best with the "responsible" public as they seek to cling to power.

And because otherwise, the government may decide it is in its interests to stretch out the pandemic—and the emergency regulations supposedly needed to deal with it—for as long as possible.

Better late than never to recognize that dictatorial officials have been stretching out the regulations for at least a year now.