'It will live in history as a lurid and bizarre dreamworld.' Christopher Furlong / Getty Images
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.
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SubscribeThe biggest irony of lockdown was that the net effect of being forcibly shut off from the rest of society has been to make me feel much more lonely, long-term. 3 years after the lockdowns stopped, it’s not any better. In fact, this feeling of apart-ness is getting progressively worse.
The lockdowns themselves weren’t really a lonely time for me: I had my most splendid Other Half to spend them with and didn’t mind the reduced social contact all that much (I’m a committed introvert, we tend to avoid it anyway).
The really crushing loneliness has come from the complete loss of trust in democratic institutions, politicians (to the extent I trusted them anyway, which tbh wasn’t a great deal), the media – and many of my friends and acquaintances who got completely carried away by lockdown-mania and reacted very aggressively to any kind of questioning of that prevailing wisdom of the time.
This loss of trust isn’t solely to do with the lockdowns (Brexit, events relating to the migration crisis, and Biden’s presidency have also been relevant) but it has been a big factor. And there is no un-seeing or un-experiencing all of this, my world view has been changed forever by it and I do not yet feel able to forgive or forget.
So whereas before I was socially quite withdrawn but moved around in a society I basically thought I could trust, participate in and seek out contact to the desired extent, now I just feel like I am bouncing around like a single molecule in an environment that could quickly become hostile, unpredictable, hysterical and authoritarian.
Now, I’ve stopped reading a lot of the classic media, I vote solely so that I have the right to complain about whatever happens afterwards not because I believe it has any effect or meaning, I’ve dropped contact to a lot of the worst lockdown-mania offenders and can’t look at the others in the same way since.
It’s all very, very jarring.
That is a sadly accurate summation.
Thanks – I rather wish your reaction had been “Whoah Katharine, you total weirdo go get a therapist because everyone else is doing just fiiiiiine” but I fear that I am one of a large number of people feeling like this.
A very well reasoned summary of what many feel
How very well put if I may say so, and you are certainly not alone in loosing your faith in all our once revered democratic institutions.
Irritatingly there doesn’t seem to be much else on offer, although I am encouraged by what I hear from America.
Fortunately after walking for four to five miles every day with my dogs, I’m too exhausted to feel despondent.
Walking and being with animals are chicken soup for the soul.
I could have written the same, word for word, save not quite so eloquently. Lockdown even affected how I regarded family members. I was the sole ‘ non- vaxer’ and the questioning one
The lockdown revealed the character of many, mostly in unflattering ways. I’ve thought that the lockdown was like a watered-down murder mystery movie where people become increasingly fearful of those “normal” people around them, as more and more people die. Eventually, no one trusts anyone and “society” disappears.
The most basic conclusion, in retrospect, is that the scientists making societal decisions and the politicians who made their recommendations law, were both incompetent.
I clicked “like” because I agreed with it, not because I liked it.
Many people that I had considered friends, for decades in some cases, became completely hostile when I suggested that lockdown was not right. I don’t have any sense any longer that I belong in society any more.
Anyone questioning covid orthodoxy can gain no meaningful place in mainstream media so people with fairly ordinary views like myself become further isolated as their own opinions are not easily expressed in public.
Well said. Lockdown was an awful time. I thought at the time we would have to pay, and so it has turned out.
You also gave voice to something that was bothering me but I couldn’t find the right words: “the rulers’ new creepy overfamiliarity towards the ruled”
Excellent article and spot on. I see it as collective insanity. Where was the cost benefit analysis when the average age of the victim was 82 and the cost of each life ‘saved’ (death deferred by a few months) was in the many millions before ignoring the social costs. And the absolutely killer fact which those on the left are wholly blind to, is that the rich got richer and the working poor got poorer.
For a six figure investment a seven figure return was fairly common, such was the state of abject bureaucratic panic on display by both HMG and the NHS.
You nailed it. But what explains the collective memory’s black hole? Why no art addressing lockdown? Shame is the answer. We are all to some extent or another ashamed of our own servile and compliant submission.
I agree, and its why there will never be an accounting for Covid, because as well as the rulers being culpable, so were the ruled, with honourable exceptions of course. The reason the lockdowns could be imposed was that the masses were demanding them, vocally. If the masses had just said ‘Nah, not doing it’, there was little the authorities could have done about it. But they got away with it because people wanted to be locked down. Heck, when Boris ended lockdowns the polls showed a significant proportion of the population wanted them to continue. And far too many loved every minute of it. The prodnoses, the curtain twitchers, the ‘you can’t do that!’ types high on their own self righteousness. None of them either want to be reminded of their role in it all (if they’ve had the self awareness to realise what they did) or to accept they did anything wrong anyway. So there will never be any public demand for an accounting, it will be permanently memory holed, even when those responsible for making the decisions are long out of power.
I took every opportunity to break the lockdown rules. Never wore a mask (except when flying), went to work everyday, made a point of going to big Tesco 5 or 6 days a week, refused the vaccination point blank, harangued lockdown fans every chance I got, abused those who clapped for the NHS and went out to deliberately catch the virus.
Just so. It is on a par with all the people complaining about the retreat from Christianity and British culture in the face of ‘foreigners’ coming in, when they themselves do not give a practical fig about either, just streaming Netflix and necking Aperol Spritz.
Speak for yourself.
Some of us, sustained by the oxygen of fellow-travellers on Unherd, did all we could to challenge and subvert the absurd lockdown narrative. But we were (and still are) in such a tiny minority that there was zero hope of turning the tide. The mass of mostly well-educated, vocal and self-righteous lockdown fanatics will never admit they were wrong because to do so would reveal their utter servility and compliant submission (to quote your words). My own conscience is clear.
No matter what you think of Starmerism, it was better than Corbynism would have been.
And yet May was so useless Corbyn nearly won. The reason was that he agreed to respect the result of the Brexit Referendum.
It is unsurprising that he did that. He was, at heart, a Brexiter.
It depends on who led it. While Corbyn was a terrible campaigner, some of his economic policies were quite popular. His undoing (apart from his tendency to appease terrorist groups) was Momentum latching themselves onto his campaign
His ‘alleged’, and to lapse into the vernacular, ‘bonking’ of Diane Abbott didn’t help.
Corbyn was a socialist. No good ever comes from socialism.
But NOT as bad as Mayism as we are now finding out.
May was a centrist. Corbyn was a socialist. There is no comparison in my book.
Bit of a silly huff and puff piece that for the Unherd base. Let’s try and link Lockdown and Starmer as that’s the sort of juxtaposition of hate figures that encourages the subscription. Author might as well of chucked Blair and the Guardian in there too.
Now there was for a moment a glimmer of an appreciation of how the Pandemic, and especially furlough, accelerated a massive asset wealth transfer in the UK. But Author backed off drilling into this further because you then have to confront how you set about reversing what happened. That requires taxation of assets esp the v rich who gained the most. That of course wouldn’t play so well to the subscription base, so Author veered away from that territory and stuck to rage amplification puff stuff.
I agree the Starmer/lockdown connection is tenuous but that transfer of wealth began long before lockdown, it started under Blair.
It started before Blair. It’s being going on all my adult life.
Clement Attlee onwards!
Although might blame Sir Robert Peel for introducing income tax in 1842.
Income Tax was introduced as a temporary measure to fund the Napoleonic wars, far earlier than 1842.
Exactly, but Peel made it permanent and in peacetime too!
Let’s say it turbocharge under Blair, running parallel with the 2nd wave of post war globalisation.
Yes. it’s another poor/misleading UnHerd headline undermining an article that’s better and more interesting than the title suggests. He’s right that we’ve learnt nothing from lockdown. And largely ignored and forgotten the costs.
Lockdowns had almost universal support amongst government and the media. And were administered by the Conservatives.
Is there really such a thing as “Starmerism” ? Anything this purports to include was there well before Starmer became PM. The suggestion that Starmer has exercised some actual leadership and developed his own policies doesn’t seem true to me. He’s the man temporarily bearing the torch.
I’m not sure there is really an “UnHerd base” as you imagine it. Nor that people are pandered to. There are plenty of articles I disagree with along with many I like.
And I don’t see Starmer rushing to implement the asset taxation (wealth tax) policies you seem to be calling for. I agree with your identification of a problem here – but not sure those are an actual solution.
Fair enough but the transfer of wealth and feathering the nests of our bureaucratic class was turbocharged by lockdown. I recall reading a piece based on an analysis of bank deposits in the US during lockdown. The figures were clear and shocking. The rich got a lot richer and the poor a lot poorer. And this was all egged on by Starmer who could not get enough of it.
Enjoyed prose style. two points of disagreement:
1. The most unconsidered national decision before Covid was not July 1914, but Net Zero 2017
2. Lockdown compounded our problems, but didn’t start them. Our maux go all the way back to the GFC and 12 years of QE inequality and declining real terms GDP per capita.
Otherwise we are in a febrile state with social contracts torn apart in so many directions that only a war-scale event with the requirement to unite or die could probably put them back together. Indeed, Starmer’s oxymoronic peace-keeping war mongering has exposed just how far the fabric is rent.
Excellent postscript to an excellent article!
I agree with most of this, however I think that any honest discussion about covid and the lockdown has to include consideration of the context: many (most?) people were very frightened. Of course the sacred ‘science’ exacerbated that fear, but the prospect of millions dying seemed quite realistic.
And I think we also need to acknowledge that what had happened in the previous decade (the ‘financial crisis’) has been as important, certainly from a purely economic point of view.
People were “very frightened” because it was in govt’s (and pharma’s, though I repeat myself) interest to make them that way. Plenty of people predicted a mortality rate that was very close to accurate and every one was silenced, ostracized, called a granny killer among the nicer names, and otherwise treated as a heretic. And many of those folks were MDs or others with knowledge of virology.
Yes, this. I recall that even in the very earliest days when the (low) numbers of deaths were being read out on the BBC they were all qualified by the age of the victims and the phrase ‘underlying health issues’. In my role at a local church I was on a rota with several others to take funerals at the local crematorium. Not needed. It was very clear from very early (certainly by mid April 2020) that this was not the Black Death. But still we loved lockdown.
My recollection is that for the first few weeks the government message was that we should be cautious but not unduly alarmed.
It was a combination of what happened in Italy, the rapid increase in the number of cases here and the scientists’ warnings that shifted the media coverage and forced the government’s hand.
A lot of people seem to have forgotten a lot about the real situation especially in the run-up to lockdown.
It was primarily the wildly inaccurate predictions of Dr Doom, the thoroughly discredited Prof. Neil Ferguson and his faulty modelling, that forced the government’s hand, despite his long track record of failure which was conveniently ignored..
As with all the other failures, grifters and government mediocrities (yes Hancock, I’m looking at you) who made our lives a misery for two years and destroyed our health, our economy and our self-respect, he will never be held accountable.
IMO “lockdown” was the head on the boil which goes back to the infantilism of UK adults by their leftwing owners – started def in the 1960s poss a decade earlier. I know well an area of the UK – majority Moslem, where lockdown was greated with the same hoots of derision that met SARS-CoV 2 ( cfr 0.05%). Many of our locals are clinical, medical or life science grads who understood the stats were fake. Others were just sufficiently numerate to see this – a problem as UK makes 5000 aerospace grads for <500 jobs – what else are they going to think about whilst cashing up after serving fried chicken and kebabs for 10 hrs? The covid lies are all things to all men – to Moslems – proof of the infidel’s perfidity and contempt for reason, for leftists proof of a Jewish conspiracy and for right wingers proof of a leftist one. Fact is all bad actors will take advantage of a c**k up – and that is the extent of their conspiracy – mere opportunist grifters. On the brightside, dinner parties had a massive re-surgence with the added thrill of sticking it to the “man” – though that is no description of bj boris, falter quitty and rear-valence – drug prices went down due to hiked demand and the many people fellating their govts’ dingus realised they were not going to get paid as per their prior agreement.
While I found the article mildly interesting, yet another attack on the elderly was annoying. Does anyone really believe lockdown was to protect the elderly (especially considering how many were left to die alone and without care)? I’ve always suspected it was because the government knew from Day 1 that this virus was the product of gain of function research and were utterly terrified of the implications of that. Luckily, it wasn’t as deadly as feared, but they didn’t know that at the start.
They knew. The one thing that was made clear when the first US cases occurred at a nursing home in Washington state was that those most affected would be: older people in general, older people in poor health more specifically, and people of any age with compromised immune systems. They covered up the lab leak and gain of function by generating mindless hysteria.
The Diamond Princess data told them all they needed to know about the effects of the virus, but they chose to ignore it.
I didn’t buy any of it. As soon as I saw those fake bodies from China’s media. I logged into .govuk and looked up Covid. HM Gov stated that Covid19 had been declassified as a High Consequence Infectious Disease. That with Witty’s Gresham College Lecture stating that most people will have it and not show any symptoms.
I must admit I was pretty terrified at the start, partly because I believed too much of what I saw online, but also because, in the early days before gain of function talk was shut down, I was fearful because I understood from what I was reading that engineered viruses like Covid could evolve incredibly rapidly to be much more lethal than the average virus – so I was expecting it to change for the worse at any time.
The author overlooks the fact that the economic effects of the lockdown are actually completely different from what economists predicted. It seems to have shown that a lot of the economic activity can be cut as long as a computer at the central bank pretends that money is flowing. It showed that David Graeber’s BS job hypothesis might actually be correct.
The big problem is that all that money creation ended up, again, with the rent seeking class who are now squeezing the middle class more than they already were. Not just due to inflation but especially due to QE, because it produced asset inflation, which is much, much higher. This is an important reason for the housing crisis. Nevertheless, this problem was already clear after the 2008 GFC. So in the end I think the lockdowns did produce problems but, economically, it just amplified and accelerated the problems that were already there while exposing that a lot of economic dogmas are wrong.
Lockdown was meant to be a great cultural moment, and — with furlough to smooth everything over — an economic non-event.
I’m not sure who sold it on either of those points but a child could have seen that the forced shutdown of thousands and thousands of businesses was idiotic. The only lessons were that 1) any politician given the chance at more power will take it and 2) far too many people are mindless sheep who want to be told what to do.
I agree with the sentiments of this piece and would have been even more fervent if still a teenager. Am guessing travis between 18-21? if not he’s done something to his brain that means he will always be <18? Covid was a failed assault like the charge of the light brigade, op Barbarossa or Bay of Pigs.The same ppl will try again unless messrs Trump and Musk can either ship them to gitmo, El Salvador or otherwise neutralise them with necessary force.
So he paints covid as a kind of Shoa? that is to some degree correct but a zero version – Shoa-light if you will?
All true, but doesn’t fully address the point that Covid gave our rulers cover to do all the things they had always wanted to do but thought that, in a society with even a vestige of democracy, they would never get away with.
2 worst aspects.
Both lockdowns lasted much longer than they ought to. 1st one we should have been fully opened up for end of spring/summer 2020 and 2nd lockdown should literally have been Jan 2021 and no more whilst vaccine roll out was accelerated and no way should the schools have been closed then.
Average age = 82. Death deferred by a few months. Madness
It’s easy to criticise what was done, because, well, it was done, and the results are there to see, and interpret as you wish. Not so easy to criticise what might have been done, other possible courses of action. So columns like this suggest that, but for lockdown, all would have been well. It wouldn’t, far from it. All the alternatives had potentially debilitating effects and outcomes. There were no right answers then. There are none now. Instead of all this heat we need more light on what we can best do to prepare for the next, inevitable, pandemic.
Nonsense. Everything that was done flew in the face of established protocols for dealing with a viral pandemic and exercises that had been carried out just the previous year.
Brilliant article …..
One point struck me…..a strange contradiction in Dominic Cummings…. Who absolutely knew what needed to be done to reform all the “mechanisms” of Government by taking a chainsaw to it and its collectivist thinking, but was the most extreme advocate for lockdown. I cannot get my head around it.
Superb essay.
Sloths for slogans.