April 23, 2020 - 11:25am
Whatever his rhetoric during the leadership campaign, Keir Starmer — North London liberal, member of Corbyn’s top team, Remainer and technocrat — has seemed perfectly poised to continue the Labour Party’s shift from a party of the regional working class to a party for graduates and the metropolitan young.
By putting Lisa Nandy — the most ‘Leave-friendly’ of the leadership candidates — in the shadow Foreign Secretary job he has kept her away from her main agenda of towns and left-behind places. Sure enough her first move in post was to wade in on Israeli settlements in the West Bank (hardly the number one priority for the old ‘red wall’ seats Labour so desperately needs to get back).
But one appointment in Sir Keir’s new team made us sit up and take notice: Claire Ainsley, formerly of the Rowntree Foundation, is to be his head of policy.
Anyone who has heard Claire talk while at Rowntree will know how much she saw it as an ‘somewhere’ rather than an ‘anywhere’ organisation — deeply rooted in the area around York where its founder came from.
She is pretty clear-eyed about the political shift away from economic and social liberalism, and the new centrality of social, culture and identity issues in British politics. She openly talks about how people don’t always act in economically self-interested ways, and that nation and faith matter. That’s already quite a big deal in Labour circles.
Check out this research she did about local people feeling ‘let down, ignored and patronised’ over Brexit, and this piece in the Times in which she even uses the F-word (family, that is) as one of the cornerstone values of working class voters. She’s hardly an ultra traditionalist on these issues — ‘more EP Thompson than R H Tawney’ as one friend put it — but even using the word ‘family’ is not something that Labour has been comfortable doing for decades.
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SubscribeIt is a misconception to believe that opposing the lockdown equates to the love of liberty. I self-isolated in early February, long before anyone suggested I needed to. Most people I know who understand the nature and the severity of this disease did the same, though not all of them at the same time. And most people now in lockdown would remain in lockdown even if they were no longer required to do so. Once schools reopen, it will be revealing to see how many people return their children to school, and how many voluntarily choose to continue to keep them at home – even if ordered otherwise. I predict most of them.
If you understand the concept of liberty properly, you will know that it means the fundamental right to be free from having your life, limb, freedom and property violated by others, provided you have not violated someone else’s life, limb, freedom or property.
Where is there any liberty for me, or indeed for anyone at risk from this disease (which is a lot more people than you might think, and a lot more people than think they are) when I am surrounded everywhere, on all sides, by people spreading a deadly virus, free to violate my life and limb (health) without fear of any consequences, and without any right to defend myself – as I would be, in a free society, if they threatened my life and limb in other ways?
If a country attacks another country with guns, it is considered a bad act but not beyond the pale. If a country attacks another country with biological weapons, it is considered a crime against humanity. But if a person attacks another with a gun, that’s considered a serious crime, whereas if they attack them with a deadly virus, they face no consequences. Why this double standard? How many people who shoot guns get prosecuted vs. how many people who deliberately spread the coronavirus by spitting or deliberately coughing into the faces of nurses or emergency workers, or licking handrails on the tube get prosecuted?
The reality is that neither a locked down Britain, nor a Britain released from the lockdown, is a free society. The former for reasons which are obvious. The latter, for reasons I just explained.
But of the two scenarios, the one that more closely approximates a truly free society is actually a Britain which is locked down. Why? Because there is no greater violation of your liberty than dying – particularly being made to die by another. Or not being able to go anywhere because leaving your house amounts to a risk of death so great you’re better off not leaving it – potentially in perpetuity. Letting a bunch of irresponsible people roam the streets free and spreading the virus without any fear of consequences would turn Britain into a place about as safe to live in as a war zone.
Most people realize that over the long term, liberty (and their own survival and the survival of those they hold dear, including their elderly relatives) will be better served by us defeating and eradicating this virus, than by ending the lockdown too early. This is why a freedom loving people would, and does, go along with the – unquestionably truly draconian – lockdown.
Of course, all of this could, and would, have been avoided had the government acted at the right time and closed the borders at the end of January, when it became obvious what a menace this virus was and Britain was still free of the infection. Then there would have been no lockdown, no sick people, no deaths and no economic damage. We, apparently, understand the concept of quarantine when it comes to dogs and rabies, but not when it comes to pathogens which threaten humans. But that’s another story.
This virus is a version of the flu. It is not the black death. But you, in your shrinking, shivering panic are the personification of the decadence and decay of our country. You are death, not life; and whether or not you actually breathe is irrelevant.
Excellent post, couldn’t agree more.
Hmm, where to start? You have a valid point, albeit one that could have been made in two or three sentences just as effectively.
As for sending children back to school, I predict you are dead wrong about that and I strongly suspect you have no young children of your own.
Let us see what happens .. if I am right and you are wrong, perhaps you will accept that most of the rest of what you said is wrong too 😉
“I soon discovered that even radically egalitarian households rapidly form pecking orders that ” in more everyday settings ” would definitely be described as ‘hierarchies'”
I think it is very difficult to escape hierarchy because it is inculcated into the way that we “necessarily” structure our relations to world (and vice versa). Nonetheless, obtaining egalitarianism and the establishment of a flat hierarchy are slightly different projects, and I wouldn’t want to conflate one with the other. 🦞 ðŸ“
What a silly article. Most people thought the govt should have taken action much sooner, and many people started to take their own measures before being told to. It has nothing to do with conspiracy theories, most people are not stupid and gullible, though journalists seem to persist in believing we are, we just do not want to become very iIl or die, or cause anyone else to, from an invisible threat about which ‘experts’ seem to understand so little.
Here in the West Country, where cases are relatively low, people are finding ways to go about the things they need to do, at least around here. Nobody has forced me to give up any liberty, everything I have done has been my own decision based on what I could find out is happening around the world. I have not turned on the BBC for some time – too much doom & gloom & pointless waffle.
Why has my innocuous comment, posted half an hour ago, not appeared?
What is the point of commenting ?
Unherd just follows the herd, comments aren’t displayed
We shall go on to the end, we shall cower in France, we shall quake on the seas and oceans, we shall self-isolate with growing hysteria and growing panic in the air, we shall defend our NHS, whatever the cost may be, we shall close the beaches, we shall lockdown the economy, we shall police the fields and the streets, we shall drone in the hills; we shall never surrender!
Few people would agree with a call for the abolition of the monarchy, because it would seem to be an attack on a family who have a purely symbolic role and who are not involved in the nation’s political life.
However there is a case to be made for stripping the monarchy of its very real political powers, and altering its relationship to the state.
During the recent prorogation of Parliament, there was much manufactured outrage at the prorogation itself – something that Prime Ministers have done before, usually for procedural reasons – but little attention directed towards the constitutional aspect, which was much more worrying – the fact that an unelected figure had the authority to empower a politician to enact something that he would not have been able to get through the House of Commons.
Few British people are aware that the monarch has this power.
We shall go on to the end, we shall cower in France, we shall quake on the seas and oceans, we shall self-isolate with growing hysteria and growing panic in the air, we shall defend our NHS, whatever the cost may be, we shall close the beaches, we shall lockdown the economy, we shall police the fields and the streets, we shall drone in the hills; we shall never surrender!
The nation has proved easier to frighten than a field mouse. Hardly anyone seems capable of any sense of proportion: the mention of daily deaths has them almost wetting themselves. It seems the country is full of people who think the usual number of deaths per day is zero.
No epidemiologist, you …
all the commentators I read – and OK, I don’t see all of them – have missed a trick on recent events in the Labour Party.
Yes, we have been told that Corbyn is a bad lot, racist, sexist, anti-Semitic, badly dressed, a closet Brexiteer, a Russian spy, a closet Remainer a Sinn Fein sympathiser, a Marxist and lots of other naughty things.
But, the interesting historical point is, has there ever in British history been another leader of a major political party who has been done to political death, not in a sudden, unexpected and swift Cabinet coup, but in an unrelenting 4 year campaign, which began the moment the party members elected him and was carried on by the great majority of his own parliamentary party?
Maybe the historians will pick up what the politicos wish to avert their eyes from.
Or maybe it’s simply that Starmer is going to be the same as Sadiq Khan: keep appointing white women with degrees and call it ‘diversity’.