With infections rising, , the Tories are running a deadly experiment

A pandemic is a political event. It exposes who is vulnerable and who can afford to escape, who is prioritised for treatment and who is neglected. The politics of a pandemic are both large-scale and intensely personal. How we behave towards each other, what balance is struck between safety and freedom, how blame is distributed, what a country considers an acceptable level of illness and death: questions that may once have been philosophical have become frighteningly real.

- Andy Beckett

In Britain, the politics of Covid have been thought about and discussed almost entirely in party terms: the relative caution and competence of the SNP government in Scotland and its Labour counterpart in Wales; the recklessness and lethal mistakes of the Conservatives in England, and whether Labour can make the Tories pay for them. The pandemic has been seen as a potential turning point for all the main parties.

That it has not worked out like that - so far - has been a huge disappointment for the Conservatives' enemies. But this focus on the parties has also been convenient for voters. Uncomfortable questions about whether our individual behaviour during the pandemic has matched our political values have not been asked.

These questions matter now. Since Boris Johnson declared “freedom day” on 19 July, almost all the previous restrictions on everyday life in England under Covid have been removed. “Personal responsibility”, as Johnson and his ministers put it with a libertarian relish, has replaced emergency legislation as one of the main weapons against the virus. In effect, a giant experiment in individual ethics has been under way.