Government Wires Still Crossed Over Mask Use- For Now Anyway.

To wear or not to wear, now that is the question, well it is when it comes to face coverings anyway. To date the government’s attempts to answer it have made Hamlet look like a model of decisiveness. 

 On Friday prime minister Boris Johnson dropped a pretty heavy hint that wearing a mask or face covering was soon to be compulsory in shops in England. Then on Sunday morning cabinet secretary Michael Gove said on the BBC’s Andrew Marr Show that wearing one was ‘basic good manners’, but that people shouldn’t be made to do so by law.

 Confused? To adapt the tag line from seventies American sit-com Soap, you will be listening to this lot.

 If you’re feeling generous it is possible to see how the government has got into such a mess over this issue. 

 The advice from experts hasn’t always been clear, at the start of the pandemic mask wearing was discouraged because it was feared doing so would give people a false sense of security. Over time though the consensus has moved to a position where masks are seen as a useful way of controlling the spread of the virus. 

 Then there is the near limitless capacity for the wing of the Tory core vote once described by David Cameron as the ‘turnip Taliban’ to misconstrue pretty much anything as an assault on their civil liberties. Somewhere in the vaults of the Daily Mail and its sister in woe the Daily Express there will be a stack of editorials blaming the edict to wear a mask on either Europe or the permissive society or the 1960’s; or both.

 In the wider and saner world mask wearing may be less of a problem than the government has keyed itself up into thinking. Face coverings have been required on public transport for six weeks, if there were protests in the streets as a result, I failed to notice them. 

 Today Boris Johnson dropped another and heavier hint today that the issue was going to be discussed again with an announcement later in the week. For which it is best to read that masks will be mandatory in shops in the near future.

 To this he added the hope that the ‘instruments of enforcement’ wouldn’t have to be used to get us to do so. For once I am in agreement with the uncombed one, I hope they won’t either, partly because they sound like something the Spanish Inquisition might have used, but mostly because if wearing a mask lets a little more normality return to our lives; then it’s a compromise worth making.