Boris Johnson’s mixed messages mar ‘independence day’

You might be tempted to think that Boris Johnson has a cunning plan. That the government is deliberately trying to confuse people as it eases the lockdown, so that most people will decide that it is not worth the trouble of exercising their restored freedoms because they cannot be sure what the rules are.

That way, Mr Johnson ensures the most gradual shift to more and more economic activity while claiming that the government has done its bit to save jobs and livelihoods. At his news conference yesterday, the prime minister seemed to be running scared of his decision to allow the reopening of pubs and restaurants, and warned people not to overdo it.

Welcome to 4 July, Independence Day in the United States, a country that stands as a warning to the world. If we think Mr Johnson is confused, we should be grateful that he is not as similar to Donald Trump as is sometimes claimed. At least our prime minister seems to take the coronavirus seriously – and indeed he has some personal experience of how serious it can be – whereas President Trump, with his anti-science, free-association monologues, does not seem to have a beginner’s grasp of the situation. The US is a huge country, and the states have considerable autonomy on matters of public health, but even so the quality of leadership from the White House has been lamentable.

Thus large parts of the US seem to be facing a second wave of infections after trying to open up their locked-down economies too soon. However, the picture is confused by the patchy increase in testing – one thing Mr Trump did understand was that if you did more tests, the number of reported cases would go up: he managed to draw the perverse conclusion that you should therefore carry out fewer tests. And so far, there has been no second wave of deaths in the US.

These are reasons for being cautiously hopeful that our government – a government for the whole of the UK that sets the rules only for England in our weirdly unbalanced non-federal structure – has the balance about right in opening up the economy. The Independent has argued that, while the number of deaths in the UK is no higher than usual for this time of year, the virus can be considered under control, and that the priority should shift to restoring children’s education and saving jobs.

That means, in our view, that as many children as possible – especially in vulnerable groups – should be back at school now and over the summer, and that all children ought to be in school in September, unless their parents want to teach them at home or are afraid to send them to school.

And that people should resume their social lives and the economic activity that goes with it as much as possible under the new distancing rules: one metre (two where possible), and masks in enclosed places involving sustained proximity. It is unfortunate that the guidance from ministers has been confusing, which has not been helped by the prime minister appearing to endorse the bending of the rules by his chief adviser and his father, who is at his holiday home in Greece, having got around the travel restrictions.

Nor has it helped that the regulations – the actual law governing the new dispensation – were published late yesterday. This means that, despite the prime minister announcing 11 days ago that the rules would change today, businesses are opening today having had only a few hours to read the law, and parliament has had, of course, no chance to scrutinise the legislation until after it comes into effect.

By accident rather than design, Mr Johnson has ensured that most people will probably wait to see before committing themselves to a careful, socially distanced night out. And when they do go out, most of them will heed the advice of Professor Jonathan Van-Tam, the deputy chief medical officer, at the end of May: “Don’t tear the pants out of it and don’t go further than what the guidance actually says.”