This is Peter Hitchens's Mail on Sunday column.

The sound of silence now spreads across the country as the economy dies. As I walk through my home town, I see even the few brave small shops closing earlier and earlier as the customers vanish.

I ask them how business is – carefully keeping the prescribed distance – and they give me strained smiles as they confess that it has all but disappeared. I genuinely do not know how much longer they will bother. And once those familiar doors close, will they ever open again?

People are so used to a world in which the lifeblood of commerce flows smoothly and reliably, that they seem unable to grasp what happens when it just stops. In the late 1970s and early 1980s I was an industrial reporter.

I spent my life writing about the strikes which then convulsed many of our major industries. I had some sympathy with the strikers, who were, after all, only trying to protect their pay and conditions against inflation and attempts to wring more work out of them for the same pay.

But they were badly and often quite stupidly led. In the end they killed their own jobs.

Ultimately, it was obvious that their actions were self-destructive. Newspapers and Government Ministers used to warn dramatically about the millions of irreplaceable working days lost through strikes.

They said that our economy would be crippled, and that foreign competition would sweep in and take their place. And they were right. When did you last see a British car?

The April wind now blows over the graveyards of dozens of great industries whose workers ignored this warning. Not much more than a mile from where I am writing this, you may see the place where the huge Morris Motors car factories and the Pressed Steel plant that fed them used to stand, enormous, busy and seemingly indestructible, with dozens of smaller businesses clustered round. Now they have quite vanished, as if they had never been.

But the damage done by those strikes is a pinprick compared to the damage now being done by our own Government.

Much of this lost industrial work was replaced by the busy service industries. But now they are being strangled by a Great Lockout, whose end we cannot foretell, but which destroys a job every few seconds, and a long-nurtured business every few minutes. On this occasion, it is the Government which has caused millions and millions of working days to be lost.

In this disastrous standstill, in defiance of humanity’s innate desire to work, produce and trade, and provide for children and the old, we must stand and stare, apparently powerless.

To me, the oddest sight is when huge buses trundle by, every few minutes, often wholly empty but sometimes conveying two or three passengers in unaccustomed state along the deserted roads. It would be cheaper if the Government provided the passengers with personal chauffeur-driven cars. How long can this go on? How is it to be paid for?

Oh, everyone says, the Government will pay. But when will it sink in that when we say ‘the Government’ we mean us? We will pay in heavier taxes, higher prices, lower wages, longer hours, ravaged savings, shrivelled pensions, less freedom of all kinds – for if you think our former liberty will ever fully return, you are mistaken. We will become a lot more like China, once this is finished. Because we have to. In my many visits to that thrilling, terrifying country, I used to fear this as a distant prospect. Now I see it as a more immediate one.

Oh yes, there are some small compensating pleasures in this. But they are sad ones. There is the glorious clean air in the heartbreaking spring sunlight of this lovely, magic season. But it ought to be a time of hope and rebirth. Instead it is a time of foreboding.

The deep velvet quiet at the dead of night takes me back to my childhood in the soft, safe Devon countryside. But I am not there. I am in a busy city. And so the silence is as alarming to me as a fire bell in the night. It is the wrong kind of peace.

How can the world we have known up till now survive if this goes on much longer?

I have explained here before why I believe the shutdown of Britain is a pointless folly.

I am not as alone in this as I used to be. Several other voices, including the conservative novelist Frederick Forsyth and the liberal former editor of The Times, Simon Jenkins, have this week joined in the expression of doubt. But perhaps the greatest break in the national groupthink was an interview given to Radio 4’s excellent World At One programme by Lord Sumption, the former Supreme Court judge and Reith lecturer.Until I mentioned his opposition to the shutdown here last week, the Establishment had buried or ignored his dissent, much as the USSR might have done.

But his radio interview, in which he rightly attacked police officiousness, became a sensation, and in my view caused the police to behave much better. Sadly the rest of his message was lost (it can be read on my blog).

The core of what this very considerable heavyweight said was much what I have been saying. ‘Is this serious enough to warrant putting most of our population into house imprisonment, wrecking our economy for an indefinite period, destroying businesses that honest and hard-working people have taken years to build up, saddling future generations with debt, depression, stress, heart attacks, suicides and unbelievable distress inflicted on millions of people who are not especially vulnerable and will suffer only mild symptoms or none at all, like the Health Secretary and the Prime Minister?’

The eminent German professor of microbiological medicine, Dr Sucharit Bhakdi, has also followed up his severe criticisms of the shutdown by writing to Chancellor Angela Merkel, saying: ‘It is expressly not my intention to play down the dangers of the virus or to spread a political message.

‘However, I feel it is my duty to make a scientific contribution to putting the current data and facts into perspective… The reason for my concern lies above all in the truly unforeseeable socio-economic consequences of the drastic containment measures which are currently being applied in large parts of Europe and which are also already being practised on a large scale in Germany.’

With minds of this candlepower criticising the policy, can it continue undiscussed, as it was when it was first implemented? I am honestly not sure that this shutdown and mass house arrest can be made to hold, as the warmer weather comes and as more and more people lose jobs and livelihoods.

Do any Ministers have a clue as to what it is like raising a young family in a small house in such circumstances? I think the terrible possibility of social unrest cannot be dismissed.

For that reason I think that all responsible people in our society should now be asking for an urgent recall of Parliament, so that Ministers can be questioned properly, for the first time, about the wisdom of their policy. Experts can be reinterrogated. Other experts, previously ignored, can be allowed to speak. Lord Sumption should be heard.

Grave damage has already been done. But maybe we can save something. I pray that it is so.

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