Naff; garish; tedious; mandatory; much hyped at the time; discrediting to many; ending with a large damages bill and a collective pact of forgetting — lockdown was an office Christmas party on a national scale. Five years on, almost nothing about mid-Twenties Britain — least of all our Prime Minister — can be explained without acknowledging its seminal role.
Lockdown was meant to be a great cultural moment, and — with furlough to smooth everything over — an economic non-event. It was the reverse. March 2020 to February 2022 saw no period of quiet reflection or creative flourishing. Half a decade out there has been no definitive lockdown novel, or film, or stage play.
Economically, it was a silent revolution. Lockdown effected the greatest upward transfer of wealth in human history, the end of the era of low interest rates, unheard of levels of state borrowing. It is almost entirely responsible for the current rash of inflation in Britain, which had already reached 5.1% months before Russia’s invasion of Ukraine. Rising gilt yields; the deficit,;the cost of living; the increase in PIP claims; mass economic inactivity; the “decline of the high street” — these are impossible to explain without recalling that the British state borrowed £400 billion to lock the population indoors for two years. The Britain of 2025 has a very different political economy to the Britain of 2019; yet the only thing that really distinguishes one from the other is this singular disruption.
A frenzy of borrowing lockdown made “austerity” seem like a bad joke. Yet it has made any alternative to austerity impossible. There was a time when Britain could have attempted a drive for growth through state-led investment, and it was in the decade before 2020, when gilt yields were at a historic low. When Rachel Reeves now borrows large sums to invest in infrastructure, she is betting the farm on a model for growth that disappeared five years ago. With a much higher cost of borrowing, the only route to growth lies through supply-side reforms and cuts to public expenditure — which is what the Government is now increasingly defaulting to. Labour’s dreams of “securonomics” have only been lockdown’s latest victim.
But of course the Government is out of ideas. Lockdown discredited liberal ideas; the failure of lockdown discredited statist ones. All ideologies came out of it shabby and condemned. It showed that the British centre-right did not care about fiscal prudence, personal liberty, or small business. It showed that “neoliberals” did not care about globalisation or transnational supply chains. Witnessing the virtual end of work, communists did not bestir themselves to agitate for the end of wage-labour. In pleading the cause of the furloughed stakeholder over the minimum-wage employees that delivered things to them, the British centre-left revealed itself to be little more than the lobbying arm for the public sector. Lockdown showed that all these factions, when they were really up against it, only cared about two things: human rights maximalism, and money for the old. (The winter fuel allowance is a fiscal trifle compared with the triple-lock, which all parties have pledged to defend.) Not since July 1914 has so much been decided with so little debate.
The bad parts were bad and the good parts were worse. Insofar as there was a great social coming-together during lockdown its main effect has been a decline in responsibility and standards. British institutions — everything from the railways to local government — used the initial outpouring of goodwill towards key workers as a general license to give up: as late as December 2022 public services were still fobbing people off with “Covid disruption”. To this we can also add the rulers’ new creepy overfamiliarity towards the ruled, manifest in garish PR stunts like “Can you look them in the eyes?”, or, latterly, “maaate”. This is not how adults ought to address one another.
It was a last hurrah for every outmoded social force. Unreformed Whitehall, the courts, the monarchy and the BBC — all were given an artificial lease of life. Lockdown briefly revived the prestige of Britain’s broadcast media, which was achieved in part by a simultaneous crackdown on online “misinformation”, including the now-vindicated lab leak theory. Plans for a reform to Whitehall had been well in train, even during lockdown itself. But in this atmosphere of cheap moralism and recrimination, there was a general rallying to established institutions, and the plans did not survive Cummings’ fall. Lockdown sparked the counterrevolution in British institutions that had its climax with the brief regency of Sue Gray — who hoped to put these institutions, at last, beyond effective democratic control. This is something that’s only now being rowed back on — at least rhetorically.
If we don’t acknowledge lockdown and its effects, then the problems of mid-Twenties Britain will continue to confound us. The refusal to recognise the stakes involved, to have some honest accounting of which groups were being asked to sacrifice something for the benefit of others, has led us to this state of general amnesia and low-level resentment. It’s still taken as strange, in a country where the right to leave your house was suspended for two years, that the public might now be deaf to “liberal norms” and that the young are flirting with dictatorship. Why are so many avoiding work and claiming to be disabled, or phoning it in at “lazy girl jobs”? Because they were shown exactly how far hard work and gumption would carry them: to be a tax farm for pensioners and illegal migrants. Why did so many get rich off dodgy contracts? Because the economy was brought to a halt except for a list of key suppliers. Such conditions were almost guaranteed to produce a class of well-connected Covid spivs — of whom Matt Hancock is the spiritual chief.
But there was only one true avatar of lockdown Britain, and it arrived in the person of Keir Starmer. The man and his credo, Starmerism, were both made by lockdown and were the fullest expression of its spirit. Like Starmerism, lockdown sidestepped all social and economic questions in favour of a vague sense of decency. Like Starmerism, lockdown sought to subsume all politics into the jargon of rights. Like Starmerism, lockdown meant a trembling reverence for clapped-out institutions. Partygate was when Keir Starmer was truly in his element, and it remains his beau idéal of politics: no “Condition of England” questions, just personal corruption and the law. Insofar as he’s now been forced to depart from this mode, then it’s only because of the insoluble material problems that lockdown created.
Lockdown was the great sinkhole: of time, memory, money. It is the true “Black Hole” of our age. It will live in history as a lurid and bizarre dreamworld, much better off forgotten. There was no resolution. There was no catharsis. Nothing was learnt, except this: that appeals to Humanity and Human Decency should always be treated with great suspicion, and that “social trust” is something that should be undermined.
Disclaimer
Some of the posts we share are controversial and we do not necessarily agree with them in the whole extend. Sometimes we agree with the content or part of it but we do not agree with the narration or language. Nevertheless we find them somehow interesting, valuable and/or informative or we share them, because we strongly believe in freedom of speech, free press and journalism. We strongly encourage you to have a critical approach to all the content, do your own research and analysis to build your own opinion.
We would be glad to have your feedback.
Source: UnHerd Read the original article here: https://unherd.com/
