Lockdown redux

When Boris Johnson declared the first lockdown on 23rd March 2020, the United Kingdom was still marching in step, with the peoples of all four constituent nations subject to the same restrictions aimed at preventing the spread of covid-19. On 5th November 2020, when the Conservative government declared a second lockdown, Johnson’s remit applied only to England, with the Scottish, Welsh and Northern Irish governments pursuing independent and differing strategies. Wales, where a two week, ‘circuit-breaker’, lockdown had begun on 23rd October, was now completely out of synch, reducing restrictions at almost the same time as England entered its second incarceration. Welsh First Minister, Mark Drakeford, declared that the Welsh-English border, previously an invisible line on the map, would be the ‘hardest for several centuries‘. This time the schools were to remain open, but golf and tennis were banned. In the first lockdown, compliance was largely observed, would it be the same the second time around? The government was certainly less sure, with the home secretary advising the police to ‘strengthen enforcement’ measures. Had the spirit of ‘we’re all in it together’ endured? Would we be clapping the NHS and other key workers this time around? Would the impromptu networks of local and community support for the vulnerable and isolated that had sprung up in March be revived? In the first lockdown, people took up baking, exercising at home with Joe Wicks, and families took long walks and bicycle journeys together. Would they do so again? Zoom had been a moderately successful business conferencing app in March, now it was a verb. How would our newly developed online networks function this time? It certainly wasn’t going to be sunny – how would our mental health cope with dark nights and lousy weather? Would we prove resilient or succumb to despair? If the answers to the above questions were negative, why had so much changed in such a short space of time?

On 5th November 2020, the Pandemic Perspectives group debated these questions, guided by their own experiences and expectations and by a scattering of articles from the first and second lockdown periods. The BBC’s April video of the novelty of clapping the NHS was re-visited; Boris Johnson’s May declaration of a ‘world-beating’ track and test programme was reviewed; the perspective of covid’s impact on the economy after the first lockdown; it’s impact on Women; testimonies of lockdown’s impact on mental health; on the Global South; the timing of the second lockdown on mortality rates and Charlie Cooper’s Politico article on the likely impact of a second lockdown.

David Christie began by recalling his optimism at the start of the first lockdown, ruefully remembering how the weekly clapping for the NHS and other key workers had led him to believe the crisis had brought a mass understanding of who the truly important people were in society, and would presage a re-humanising of society, one re-grounded in family and local communities. He acknowledged that the rest of the group had warned him that it would be a temporary phenomenon and conceded that they were almost certainly right. He asked why this was so. The general consensus was that the changed mood of the nation was directly attributable to the multiple failures of the government to get to grips with the pandemic. Richard Kendall argued that, under the initial unexpected onslaught of the virus, the public had responded with a strong sense of solidarity and confidence in the British state, drawing on national myths/narratives of wartime resilience and conceptions of the ‘blitz spirit’, which had imbued the language used by the government at that time. He argued that this sense of national solidarity had been fatally undermined by the actions of Dominic Cummings, and cited an article from the Lancet that showed a measurable decline in compliance following Cummings’ peregrinations. Alastair Gardener concurred, arguing that the government had squandered the social compact of trust, partly through the special advisor’s actions and also by the mismatch between the government’s pronouncement and reality. The realisation that it would not, after all, be ‘all over by Christmas’ had lead to a widespread sense of disillusionment. David noted that government was a different entity to civil society, and that as the same workers were still performing the same vital functions, loss of faith in the government was insufficient as an explanation. Richard suggested that, as the majority of the public (excepting those who caught the disease or had relatives who suffered) were merely sequestered at home, the hard work and danger endured by health workers had seemed more apparent. He suggested that with the increasing economic consequences of the pandemic, suffering was now more widespread, and perhaps everyone, and therefore no one, deserved clapping. Hanan Fara agreed, saying that threats to people’s livelihoods had caused a widespread sense of anxiety to colour the public mood, individual fears making them more likely to behave unpredictably or aggressively and less concerned with the welfare of others. Liam Knight characterised Britain’s state of mind as being that of pupils at an unreformed public school, where the headmaster’s threat of the cane for miscreant behaviour was tolerated when it was felt to be consistently applied, but deeply resented when favoured groups were exempted from punishment. Alastair noted one of David Graeber’s arguments in his book ‘Bullshit Jobs’- that people who’s jobs were of value to society were considered by those in valueless employment to gain sufficient reward from the usefulness of the work itself, justifying their poor pay and working conditions, hence a limited scope for public sympathy. The international contingent at Pandemic Perspectives had a rosier view from across the pond. New member Caroline Lion, speaking from Oregon, considered the British ‘the most resilient people in the world’, and noted with admiration both the existence of a health service free at the point of delivery and the deeply held affection for the NHS that the British people held. This difference of perspective was echoed by our New York based member, Carmen Jones, who when asked what national myths the American people fell back on in times of crisis, argued that Americans were a fundamentally arrogant people, whose assumption of greatness made them assume ‘we’ve got this’, even when faced with a positive test rate of 100,000 per day. She noted, that whilst the British may be despondent, in New York, the pandemic had lead to a 200% increase in gun crime, increased home invasions, and a population arming itself with weapons. Noting that this debate was taking place at the same time as the US elections, other destabilising factors were clearly in play, the group was reminded of the diversity of the American experience by Caroline who commented that in Oregon the schools remained closed, mask wearing was near universally adopted, and al-fresco dining had become more common. Violence in Oregon, she argued, had come about at the instigation of the Trump administration, not from the people themselves.

Carmen also highlighted an increasing xenophobia in the US, noting rising hostility to Chinese-Americans and a troubling stand off in New York between the authorities and the orthodox Jewish community. David recalled another intemperate outburst of early optimism in that instead of the anti-semitism elicited by bubonic plague, people had marched against racism during this pandemic. He was reminded that ‘dog-whistle’ islamophobia had shown its head in the UK during the crisis with suggestions that Muslim communities in Rochdale and Leicester were agents of contagion. Hanan suggested that this was possibly a temporary phenomena, as the first lockdown had coincided with both Ramadan and Eid, and whilst the government’s determination to save the nominally Christian festival of Christmas was apparent in contrast, no explicitly Muslim celebrations were imminent, reducing the risk of further blame being afforded to British Muslims. An optimistic note was struck for the temperament of the British people, with the public’s enthusiastic response to Marcus Rashford’s plea to ensure that poorer children were adequately fed. The continuing role of faith groups in the provision of food and support during the crisis was also noted.

Having recovered its confidence somewhat, the group had a dispiriting reminder of the presence of baleful forces accelerated by the pandemic in the form of the rise of QAnon, although it was conceded that this was far more prevalent in the US, where its links to white supremacy were explicit. It was also noted that the numbers of those who denied the very existence of covid-19 seemed to be rising, and that Nigel Farage’s new anti-lockdown Reform party was perhaps indicative of darker times to come.

Liam elected to put the group out of its misery by asking to what degree the members of the group viewed the future in pessimistic or optimistic terms. The majority were somewhere in between, resigned to government ineptitude and the maintenance of an inegalitarian status quo, but reasonably confident that the NHS would cope and basic necessities would not be threatened. The likelihood of Trump’s imminent defeat was partly ascribed to covid, although Caroline noted that without the pandemic, Bernie Sanders, in her view the far better candidate, might have secured the Democratic nomination. Only David remained Churchillian, arguing that although it would get worse before it got better; postulating that terrible times lay ahead for the Global South, for the poor and marginalised in all states and a disproportionate effect on women’s livelihoods as the economic consequences hit home, the long-term consequences of the pandemic was that it had led to the death-knell of neo-liberalism, a renewed role for the distributive state, the political impossibility of a return to austerity and a likely state strategy of investment in a green economy that might just avert the looming climate catastrophe. No one else agreed.

There was much more, though not all of it coherent – to have your say join pandemic perspectives or set up your own group….