Tory Anti-Mask Libertarianism
Covid certification and mandatory vaccinations, most people can understand opposition to these measures even if they support them themselves. Channelling our old friend John Stuart Mill, there's always a balance to be struck between liberty and security. But these are in a different league to face masks, which saw 38 Tories oppose this inexpensive, low effort, and relatively effective means of mitigating Covid infections. Explaining their opposition, Graham Brady, Mr 1922 himself, described it as "mission creep. Because PPE is next to gulags in the chain of repression. The dependably stupid Steve Baker, the former (self-identifying) hard man of Brexit, said the Prime Minister need to have a grip on his party and "start driving it in the direction of freedom and personal responsibility." Personal responsibility is a funny way to describe one's indifference to exposing others to the risk of infection. And ramping up the rhetoric, Marcus "Clown" Fysh was angling for attention when he carped on about anti-Covid measures not being out of plaice in Nazi Germany. What can you say, anyfin goes on the backbenches these days.
Large numbers of people have pointed to an apparent contradictions in their arguments. You can have the parliamentary wing of Right Said Fred wibbling about freedom, and how putting on masks violates fundamental liberties and the sovereignty of the individual. Fair enough. Libertarianism is a pretty daft belief - the social is the condition of the individual, after all - but it is a coherent system of philosophy and could be interpreted as a wrong but a principled stance. But hold on a moment, what do we have here? Trawling his voting record, we discover Marcus Fysh has cast votes for mass surveillance of private communications, abstained on same-sex marriage, and supported Priti Patel's disgusting Nationality and Borders Bill. Steve Baker's record is little different, including supporting significant restrictions on the right to protest. It doesn't take a genius to work out there's a tension here, and one we find repeated across virtually all the anti-mask Tory MPs. Righteous champions of liberty when it comes to wearing a piece of cloth across one's face, and grubby authoritarians happily empowering state coercion and literal infringements of individual privacy. How to explain away this obvious hypocrisy in their own terms?
Easy. Libertarianism is probably the most infantile of bourgeois ideologies. It expresses capital's desire to be free of any social responsibility. Its nature, its impulse is the monomania of accumulation. Woe betide anything interfering with that (workers' rights, health and safety regulations) or "unjustly" takes a cut out of their cashflow. I.e. The state and its battery of taxes. Consumed by an overweening self-obsession, it purposely, symptomatically forgets that the piling up of cash, that capital itself, is a social relationship and can only be accumulated by a cooperative effort. This is much easier to ignore when the process of accumulation for a significant section of the bourgeoisie immediately appears to be the pay off from wise investments in stocks, hedge funds, and money markets. It's not an accident that libertarian capitalists drawn from manufacturing backgrounds are thin on the ground.
Sublimated into the limited imaginations of Tory MPs, this common sense of a class fraction becomes the common sense of a political faction. Anti-mask whinging is their dressing up opposition to a simple public health measure as high principle because it mildly inconveniences them. The same applies to repressive legislation. They have no problem empowering the police and spooks, and putting meatier sentences on the statue books because these instruments defend their freedom. Banging up Extinction Rebellion protesters is justified because road blockages disrupt the freedom of our high-minded defenders of liberty to go about their business. The hypocrisy is there and baked in because the subject of libertarian discourse is entirely bourgeois, and its identification of the individual and individual interests are one and the same as capital's interests. It is a naked demonstration, in all its duplicity, of class rule in theory.
It's pretty obvious anti-mask Tory MPs aren't acting in the interests of capital or, for that matter, the collective class interest their party serves. But the logic of their position is entirely within this terrain, and are therefore prepared to see potentially millions suffer and thousands die to defend the political relevance of their class habitus.
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