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It's not stamping on your rights to bring in a vaccine passport – it's trying to save them

We accept metal detectors at airports and speed limits on the road so why are people dismayed over Dominic Raab's comments?

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It was the following sentence, rattled off so casually by LBC presenter Maajid Nawaz on his weekend afternoon show, that left me standing slack-jawed by the kettle, long after it had boiled. According to the former activist turned radio host, the national debate about vaccine passports could be boiled down to a pithy one-liner: it’s about “not stamping on individual rights in the name of group rights”. Effectively forcing us to get the vaccine “doesn’t sit right with me”, he said.

But there’s a word for that overarching social sacrifice, isn’t there? More than one, in fact: selflessness, altruism, humanitarianism, social conscience, public spirit… take your pick. So Nawaz’s sentence could baldly be rephrased: “We shouldn’t be stopped from privileging ourselves over others.”

I’m glad my nine-year-old wasn’t there to hear it. From the moment a child is born, parents do everything they can to quash that instinctive but noxious instinct all the way through into adulthood. And we don’t just do it for society, urging kids at every turn to hold the door open for others, help others and think of others, but because only when armed with courtesy, grace, empathy and civility can they hope to enjoy life in the democracy they were lucky enough to be born into.

Nawaz is right about one thing, though: it’s important to boil arguments down. Because as helpful as it has been to have a term to hide self-centeredness behind since the pandemic hit – and to use and abuse the excuse-all “personal rights” in order to avoid wearing masks, socially distancing or, indeed, adhering to any of the scientific guidelines drawn up to save lives – we cannot hope to emerge from the waking nightmare in which we’re all trapped together if we persist in concealing our true motivations behind lofty ideologies.

The springboard for Nawaz’s discussion was the suggestion made by Dominic Raab on Sunday that, under plans currently being considered by the government, shops, restaurants and pubs could require customers to show vaccine passports.

Although the Foreign Secretary’s comments appear to put him at odds with No 10, which has repeatedly ruled out using them within the UK, Raab insisted that the prospect of Brits being given a document to prove they have been immunised against Covid has not been ruled out, either at a “domestic or local level”.

Cue the onslaught of LBC callers accusing the Government of “medical tyranny”. “Might as well be living in communist China,” raged one. “Civil liberties have gone out the window,” spluttered another. The very notion of making a small sacrifice to safeguard others was branded “discriminatory”.

Not one of those callers saw fit to list the tyrannical, discriminatory and alarmingly altruistic rules and practices we all live by in our day-to-day lives. By and large, we all stop at red lights and adhere to speed limits despite the fact that it slows us down. Most of us don’t drink and drive, cognisant even without the chilling statistics that have been drilled into us that hundreds of people are killed by drunk drivers each year with thousands more seriously injured. Similarly aware of the ongoing knife crime epidemic, most of us don’t carry knives, nor guns – although if you buy into American gun-nut thinking, this would arguably make us feel safer.

We no longer smoke in offices, pubs, planes and public places – so there’s another “human right” withdrawn. Because although we’re still free to kill ourselves, the lawmakers governing our civilised society have decided they would rather you didn’t exterminate innocent bystanders as you suck on that right. Despite the fact that it infringes our “civil liberties”, we don’t stash bags of nuts in our kids’ schoolbags. We are limited to buying two packs of paracetamol in Sainsbury’s and accept that even laxatives are now restricted by many chemists – again, not just for our own safety, but the safety of others.

We are made to walk through metal detectors at airports and have our luggage scanned for explosives. We accept that the meat or dairy products we might bafflingly have decided to take with us on foreign trips will be confiscated by customs and we sign away our rights, one boring, humiliating form at a time, at every stage of international travel.

But, interestingly, vaccine passport dissenters are far less sceptical about all this – particularly when it concerns arrivals into the UK. Indeed, the only anger incurred by the Government’s belated testing and quarantine regulations seems to have been about “why it took them so long to clamp down”.

The “individual” Nawaz defended on his show is livid at the idea of being endangered by others, you understand, but it is his or her right to be selfish, reckless and dangerous; to privilege their identity to the detriment of the rights and freedoms of others.

How vaccine passports would work – or, indeed, whether they would work – is another discussion. But it is truly depressing that, in the  desperate circumstances we find ourselves in, one LBC caller could demand to know “why should it be mandatory to have something that you don’t want?”

Had my nine-year-old been the one to ask that question, it would have plunged me into the depths of despair.

You can read Celia Walden’s column every Monday at telegraph.co.uk. Click here to read last week's column

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