We’re not quite sure whether to applaud here - Owen Jones has noted reality - or hiss given how long it’s taken him.

Public support for lockdown measures is disintegrating - a new approach is needed

Owen Jones

Well, yes. This is, of course, the basis of the Swedish approach. Us folks out here will only put up with restrictions on how we wish to live our lives for so long. So, limit such restrictions to when they are absolutely and wholly necessary. For use of them on the precautionary principle, just in case, will exhaust that willingness and we might in fact really, really, need it at some point.

This must be why so few examinations of how Sweden has done through all of this are performed.

But the point is rather larger and we do wonder whether Jones will be able to recognise the logical connection. It is possible to get the Stakhanovites to storm the workfront - when there is a real emergency. What doesn’t work is that constant exhortation for the greater good at personal cost over time. Effort slacks off. That’s just the way humans work.

Therefore economic systems, entire societies, have to be based for the long term on personal incentives, not that more ephemeral gain to the general good. Again, this is just how humans work, we’ll all put our backs into it for no personal gain when we can see and feel the emergency. In more normal times we’ll all worry more about our own thumbs than the lives of a million Chinese - as the man, approximately, said.

Days, weeks, of constant effort to shore up the dyke, rescue the children from the earthquake rubble? Sure - a decades long struggle to build socialism? Doesn’t work.

Because we’re optimists we’ll hope that Owen Jones is able to make the connection - but it does require that significant optimism.