IN HIS statement to the nation on the coronavirus crisis, Boris Johnson said: “We must act like any wartime government and do whatever it takes to support our economy.”

But what kind of war does Johnson want to fight?

One way of working out his battle plan is comparing his proposed coronavirus Emergency Bill with the Emergency Bills the government used to seize powers during World War II.

Johnson’s Bill has lots of emergency powers for which there are good arguments, like provisions for emergency registration of health staff, including nurses and doctors drawn from retirement or brought in from medical schools.

It also contains some very severe powers, like the right for “the police and immigration officers to detain a person, for a limited period, who is, or may be, infectious and to take them to a suitable place to enable screening and assessment.”

Arresting the possibly infectious might be necessary. Relaxing all kinds of standards in healthcare and education might be a good idea. But they could also go very wrong.

Early reports say the legislation “will be time-limited for two years.”

Compare this with the actual emergency legislation of World War II: under conditions of total war, the government got Parliament to authorise extraordinary powers. 

The Emergency Powers Defence Acts of 1939 and 1940 gave the government the right to detain without trial, along with many other potentially authoritarian powers.

But there was one big difference — the wartime legislation, fearsome as it was, had to be annually renewed by Parliament. 

Even in wartime, MPs had to be asked to renew the law every year. But Johnson is floating a two-year “sunset clause.” 

The Conservatives want to seize powers and evade scrutiny for longer than an actual wartime government.  

Rightly, Labour is demanding the law has to be renewed every six months. Some, like Chris Bryant, go further and want the law subject to 30 or 60-day renewal. 

The second difference is that the wartime Emergency Powers Defence Act allowed for “the taking of possession or control, on behalf of His Majesty, of any property or undertaking.”

Under the wartime act, the government could requisition buildings, machinery and anything else needed for the war effort or the home front.

But no such powers appear in Johnson’s coronavirus Bill. He wants to regulate people, but not property. 

He is seeking the right to arrest humans, but wants to leave assets to run free: by contrast, the Spanish government took the wise step of nationalising private hospitals to help with the emergency. It’s a wartime-style measure for the war against infection.

But in Britain the government is buying private beds off the for-profit healthcare system. 

The government is quick to evoke “wartime” in trying to grab emergency powers over people, or the power to change public-sector regulation. 

But for private property it is much more cautious. It wants to regulate labour more than capital.