It’s the perfect storm: a steep rise in flu cases, a freezing arctic snap and a Labour government. And where does this all lead us? That’s right, we all remember those absurd days, not so long ago, when millions of people put on a face mask every time they got out of bed. Some wore them in bed too. Talk about a passion killer.

And now the madness is back. Yes, hospitals around the country are introducing Covid-style restrictions, including a requirement for visitors, however healthy, to wear masks. And with winter flu cases still to reach their peak, we can expect much more of this.

In the midst of lockdown mania a few years ago, some of us pointed out that if you supported non-pharmaceutical interventions for Covid (masks and social distancing etc), logically you’d have to support those same measures for flu, every winter. After all, flu has always caused thousands of deaths, sometimes as many as 20,000 a year. Surely, if you lock down for one life-threatening virus, you must be prepared to lock down for another.

We meant, of course, to show the mad overkill of the measures. But, incredibly, some immensely gullible people took it the other way. That’s a good point, they said. We really should lock down every year for flu. And with big-state Labour in charge, and flu cases rising, they are actually starting to get their way. Masks today, the rule of six and mandatory vaccines tomorrow. You heard it here first.

Never mind that masks make little, if any, difference to the spread of viruses. Never mind that on the many occasions we had winter flu crises before 2020 we never dreamed of requiring healthy visitors to hospitals to wear pathetic little masks over their faces. Never mind that non-pharmaceutical interventions were the stuff of science-fiction novels. We’re back at “something must be done!” screeching.

Only this time, the guy in charge isn’t Boris Johnson, who, as is clear from his recently published autobiography, felt pushed into all this stuff against his natural instincts. No, it’s Keir Starmer, who at every stage of Covid argued for longer, harder restrictions, and repeatedly and wrongly, argued that any relaxation was “reckless”.

Of course, the powers that be know that face masks, whether inside hospitals or out, make little difference. But they are trying to cover up (no pun intended) the real reason we keep on having winter flu crises. It really is quite simple. Since the year 2000, our population has grown by about ten million people. Yet the number of hospital beds has halved.

That’s it. That’s all you need to know: mass immigration without corresponding growth of our public services. If we had the same number of hospital beds per thousand people as, say, Germany (nearly eight beds for them, just over two for us) there would never be a winter flu crisis.

The magnificent doctors and nurses in our hospitals will no doubt get through this flu season as they always do, under enormous pressure with absolutely no help from our wretched politicians. Good on them.

Meanwhile, stand by for even louder, ever-more alarmist calls for us to wear masks as soon as we get to within 20 yards of another human being. As we discovered a few years ago, once you introduce freedom-destroying measures once, it’s so much easier to do it again and again. And so much easier than controlling immigration or building enough hospitals to cope with millions more people.