The Christmas row highlights a key problem that we have never really discussed: what should be firm guidance and what should be law.
The government relaxed the rules around Christmas because it knew people would break them and it didn’t want to criminalise vast swathes of the population - partly because (you presume) it would embolden people to break more rules, more often, afterwards.
But this is exactly what it’s been doing since the start of the pandemic: criminalising people for gathering in gardens, criminalising them for having sex, criminalising them for chatting to another group in a park.
Has the gov commissioned any studies into human behaviour which fed into these policies? Are people more likely to follow rules if they are accompanied by legal action? How does it square with the messaging around ‘personal responsibility’ and common sense? It’s all a mess.
Anecdotal evidence suggests that people are aware of the risks and have set their own parameters from the start. Many have covertly broken rules to see people, albeit much less than before. Many others have lived by much tighter rules than the government has ever set.
Of course restrictions are necessary and the government had to use legal powers to shut down indoor venues, enforce mask use etc. But we have never had, and need to have, a national discussion about the much more intimate rules which have transformed our daily interactions.
Bottom line: if ministers are so concerned about criminalising millions of people now, maybe they should have thought about it before.
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