Is Johnson stuck in lockdown mode?

Rival soccer teams in Germany’s Bundesliga clash in an empty stadium, Italians meet for socially distant restaurant dining and tourists are visiting the Acropolis again. Things are reopening in Europe.
Not so much in Britain. Here, the lifting of restrictions has been a source of bitter controversy, confusion and nervousness. Britons may be pouring into parks and hitting the roads again, but 46% say the recent limited changes to lockdown rules go too far. Just one in 10 says the lifting of restrictions doesn’t go far enough. Scotland, Wales and Northern Ireland have refused to follow England’s reopening plans.
For some Conservatives, the public hesitation is out of all proportion to the risk. “Why, when other European countries are firing up their economies, do we remain the most timorous of all
the electorates polled?” lamented the writer and former Tory politician Daniel Hannan. Whether or not he’s sympathetic to that viewpoint, Prime Minister Boris Johnson is more inclined to listen to the public.
It wasn’t obvious that Britain should become one of the most pro-lockdown nations. Like the US, it was late to see the coronavirus threat as a national emergency, a major reason why the virus spread so fast and at such great human cost. Government advisers initially fretted that citizens wouldn’t accept restrictions and so they looked to avoid a lockdown. Now they worry that they can’t get Britain out of it.
One explanation is fear. So far, more people in the UK have died of Covid-19 than in any other country except the US. The death toll is read out during daily press conferences; newspapers and media websites publish running tallies.
Television has been an amplifier too. The stories of grieving family members are part of the evening and late-night news watched by millions each day.
And yet, that doesn’t quite explain it. Britain isn’t the only country that has suffered gravely or whose media reports every detail.
Some members of Johnson’s ruling Conservative Party have argued that
the reluctance to leave
lockdown owes much to
the government’s “whatever
it takes” rescue package, which includes paying people most of their wages for staying home. The funds are generous, but they aren’t extravagant and they won’t last forever. Other countries emerging from lockdown have ample social safety nets too, or they’re putting new measures in place. Spain is even launching a monthly basic income scheme for the neediest.
Johnson’s own serious illness was certainly a watershed in the public’s embrace of lockdown measures, as James Johnson, a political adviser and pollster says. “When your leader falls, that does much more to the national psyche than anything else,” he told me.

—Bloomberg