Are we losing the moral high ground on Covid?

Not only must we never see more than five other people at the same time, we must report those who do to the police, says Merryn Somerset Webb.

People in Wuhan, China © Shutterstock
China’s lockdown: it’s getting harder for us to criticise
(Image credit: © Shutterstock)

At the very start of the pandemic, on a plane from somewhere to somewhere, I pulled a furious article out of the China Daily. The author was maddened by criticism of Chinese handling of Covid. The New York Times had accused it of “Mao Style Socialist Control”; Foreign Policy had gone for plain old “Incompetent”; and China Uncensored for “Authoritarian Crackdown”. But as far as the paper was concerned, the criticism was all about the West running a xenophobic anti-China campaign “because they really want you to hate.”

I kept it, then, as a reminder of just how Chinese and US relations were breaking down. But now it is also a trying reminder of how much less of the moral high ground the West is hanging on to than it was even in March. We aren’t exactly welding people into apartment buildings here. But there’s a nasty precedent in being told that not only must we never see more than five other people at the same time, we must report those who do to the police. So are we doing things the right way?

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Merryn Somerset Webb

Merryn Somerset Webb started her career in Tokyo at public broadcaster NHK before becoming a Japanese equity broker at what was then Warburgs. She went on to work at SBC and UBS without moving from her desk in Kamiyacho (it was the age of mergers).

After five years in Japan she returned to work in the UK at Paribas. This soon became BNP Paribas. Again, no desk move was required. On leaving the City, Merryn helped The Week magazine with its City pages before becoming the launch editor of MoneyWeek in 2000 and taking on columns first in the Sunday Times and then in 2009 in the Financial Times

Twenty years on, MoneyWeek is the best-selling financial magazine in the UK. Merryn was its Editor in Chief until 2022. She is now a senior columnist at Bloomberg and host of the Merryn Talks Money podcast -  but still writes for Moneyweek monthly. 

Merryn is also is a non executive director of two investment trusts – BlackRock Throgmorton, and the Murray Income Investment Trust.