Today Britain’s MPs failed the most important test of their political careers.

They voted – by 516 to 38 – to turn the United Kingdom into a totalitarian police state.

From midnight Wednesday, the British population will be forced to spend a month (at least) under restrictions so severe that they make life behind the Iron Curtain in Soviet Bloc Soviet Eastern Europe look almost carefree by comparison.

Nobody will be allowed to travel abroad (except on approved business). Nobody will be able to go to pubs or restaurants or gyms or swimming pools (all closed, by order of the government). Nobody will be allowed to practise any form of sport — not golf, not tennis, not riding, not shooting, and definitely not any team games. Everybody will be kept under house arrest, other than for certain state-mandated exemptions such as being a designated ‘key worker’ or shopping for supplies (but only those designated ‘essential’).

You might have thought that the biggest theft of civil liberties in British history would get some pushback from MPs, Conservative ones especially.

After all, lockdowns like this are not only enormously damaging to the economy — at a cost of at least £2 billion per day — as well as to the nation’s mental and physical health. Also, as senior lawyer Lord Sumption warned, it ‘marks a move to a more authoritarian model of politics’ which will transform ‘the relationship between the state and the citizen’ and lead to ‘distrust, resentment and mutual hostility.’

Anyone who doubts the corrosive effects this ‘authoritarian model’ is having on the British way of life should have a look at this video.

It purportedly shows a daughter — a qualified nurse — trying to take her 97-year old mother home from her care home only to be prevented from doing so by the police. It is claimed the mother is now back in the care home.

Here is another disturbing image, allegedly showing a five-year-old being refused entry to school because his parent is not wearing a face mask.

How can this possibly be a police matter? Surely, with Britain at a heightened state of terrorist alert, the forces of law and order ought to have better things to do than go round bothering people who are not wearing masks?

And surely when a once proudly-free country slides so rapidly towards tyranny, the first line of defence ought to be independent-minded MPs saying: “Enough is enough!”

But no. Only 38 MPs voted against this outrageous and dubious imposition.

It is as if Britain has been hijacked by a cabal of accidental fascists. No doubt the small group currently dictating Britain’s coronavirus policy — Prime Minister Boris Johnson, Health Secretary Matt Hancock, Chancellor of the Duchy of Lancaster Michael Gove, and Chancellor of the Exchequer, Rishi Sunak — entered Conservative politics for the noblest of reasons. But their policies are the purest totalitarian evil. Absolute power has gone to their heads.

This open letter to Michael Gove, written by his friend, Conservative Woman co-editor Kathy Gyngell, captures well the horror and disbelief so many natural conservatives are currently feeling as they look at government policy and ask ‘Why are they doing this?’

How can you continue to treat every British citizen as though they face a very high risk of being hospitalised or even dying as a result of exposure to Covid, when this patently is not true? And why pretend the NHS is overwhelmed when the Nightingale hospitals lie empty? And how, this weekend, could you have bought into and sold the public such a dodgy Covid deaths dossier, your so-called ‘realistic worst case’ scenarios that lack any credibility an excuse for lockdown?

How can you justify failing to subject lockdown to a detailed cost benefits exercise? And yet you are going down the same un-costed route again.

How can you justify outsourcing the entire educational, economic, mental and social wellbeing of the nation to ever more secretive and unaccountable NHS quangos with their own political and vested interests all supposedly under the control of Matt Hancock at the Department of Health?

Lastly, how can you, an economic liberal, be part of a government which has needlessly wrecked Britain’s economy? You and colleagues may be shielded from the onslaught that the nation is about to experience thanks to your publicly-funded salary and pension, but most others – particularly the self-employed, the sole traders and those who run small businesses – face a very different future, one that is genuinely frightening. Irresponsible doesn’t begin to describe the national economic and political catastrophe your latest lockdown decision is leading us to.

So many and varied and compelling are the arguments against a second lockdown that even the MSM — till recently the government’s bought-and-paid-for cheerleaders — is waking up to the scale of the impending disaster.

We know — because they’ve admitted it — that the computer-modelled projections by Chief Scientific Adviser Sir Patrick Vallance and Chief Medical Officer Chris Whitty (aka ‘Unbalanced and Witless’) of 4,000 Coronavirus deaths a day were an implausible exaggeration.

We know that Boris Johnson’s eyewateringly expensive ‘moonshot’ track and trace mass testing system — the end goal of the lockdown — is risibly unfit for purpose.

It is truly extraordinary that on the basis of no cost-benefit analysis, no serious consideration of the scientific counter-arguments, Britain’s MPs voted almost unanimously for a lockdown which will damage their constituents’ freedoms, livelihoods and health while offering no obvious compensatory benefit.

Not one of the MPs who so blithely voted for this monstrous imposition deserves your vote ever again.

Here is the small, honourable list of those MPs who did the right thing. Among Conservatives, they include Steve Baker, Ian Duncan Smith, Philip Hollobone, and Chris Green. The Democratic Unionists were also solid; as was Independent Dr Julian Lewis.

The rest should live eternally in infamy.