As we live through seemingly endless Covid-19 restrictions, the hubris of the British government in the Spring of 2020 looks increasingly bizarre. Prime Minister Johnson claimed that the British were exceptionally able in the face of adversity. But this was simply a case of hypocrisy argue Lisa Bortolotti and Kathleen Murphy-Hollies.
In February 2020, Prime Minister Boris Johnson argued that some governments in the world had to stand by freedom of exchange, contrasting the ‘irrational’ panic caused by Coronavirus. In his speech, he compared the UK to Superman: “humanity needs some government somewhere that is willing at least to make the case powerfully for freedom of exchange, some country ready to take off its Clark Kent spectacles and leap into the phone booth and emerge with its cloak flowing as the supercharged champion, of the right of the populations of the earth to buy and sell freely among each other”(1).[1] Prior to the announcement of a lockdown in March 2020, Johnson had also suggested that British people loved freedom too much to tolerate restrictions to their movement and so the lockdown measures adopted by other countries to contain Coronavirus could not be implemented (2).
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