THE 1987 Don’t Die of Ignorance campaign about AIDS was arguably the biggest health panic of a generation. Despite the scientific knowledge at the time suggesting that transmission of the disease was very unlikely amongst heterosexuals, the Conservative government of the day started a campaign that spread fear across society.

This was the start of the modern-day obsession with health and safety, a new form of conservatism that replaced the traditional moralising of behaviour and replaced it with safetyism.

Safetyism, or the moral elevation of safety, led to the dog-collar sermons of moral behaviour being replaced by a more radical form of behaviour management, promoted by activists and health experts.

Now, sex, for example, was not to be restrained by condemnations from the pulpit and right-wing moral entrepreneurs like Mary Whitehouse but by the seemingly morally neutral message of “safe sex”.

Demonstrating the new 'liberal' turn towards safety moralising, journalist and broadcaster Mark Lawson, in a 1996 article entitled Icebergs and Rocks of the 'Good Lie', claimed that the government had lied with their safe sex campaign and he was glad they had.

Lies meant nothing to this 'progressive' commentator, so long as the correct message about sex was fed to the masses.

The message of safety spread like a disease across society, helped not only by a transformation of the de-moralised right but also of the left who had abandoned their utopian dreams of social transformation and turned instead to a caring crusade to keep everybody safe.

Safetyism continues to infect public and political life and is one of the keys to understanding the unbalanced and asocial efforts to deal with Covid-19. Caught within the narrow parameters of safetyism our governments appear unable to rationally engage with not only the disease but the devastating consequences that their measures are having on the economy, other areas of health provision and to the life and liberties of the population as a whole.

Rumours of police chiefs being consulted about measures needed to maintain some kind of lockdown for two more years come at the same time as evidence shows that even those in intensive care have an 80 percent chance of recovery due to new treatments.

Infected by safetyism, our health and safety obsessed elites lack the political and moral depth, or courage, to get us out of the devastating spiral that is destroying far more lives than Covid-19 ever could.

Our columns are a platform for writers to express their opinions. They do not necessarily represent the views of The Herald.