September 15, 2020 - 3:00pm
Is the economy more important than a child’s birthday party? From one perspective, the answer is of course ‘yes’. But the value judgement implicit in imposing severe restrictions on privately organised gatherings, while leaving schools, businesses and now even grouse shooting unaffected, is going to rebound badly on Boris Johnson’s Conservatives.
I admit to a personal beef here: I just had to cancel my daughter’s fourth birthday party because of the ‘rule of six’. But what’s making people angry is not a sense of arbitrariness but of a government that can’t see the value of anything that doesn’t contribute to the exchequer.
The only consistent theme I can detect in which activities are included or excluded from the Rule of Six is whether or not you can make money out of it. There’s no other way to explain why organised sports are fine, but a kickabout in the park is banned.
Last weekend my daughter’s friend turned four and held a birthday party the day before the Rule of Six came into effect. I did a quick straw poll among the other parents there, on perceptions of the new rule. The result suggested that even in true-blue Conservative Bedfordshire, public consent is wafer-thin. When one of the most law-abiding and cautious mums I know sends me this meme, it’s clear to me that the public really isn’t on Johnson’s side now:
The meme catches a widespread and resentful perception in this part of the world. The view is that Johnson has decided to control the virus by reducing human interaction somewhere, and concluded that the most expendable interactions are those that don’t involve commercial exchange. That is, the place to clamp down is on friends, family, children, informal gatherings — those connections, in other words, that make ordinary life rich and full of meaning.
Charitably, Johnson seems to be trying to square the circle of Thatcherite economic liberalism and today’s calls for greater social solidarity. He’s doing so by telling us we have a communitarian obligation to curb our private social activities, so we don’t have to curb our economic ones. Because it seems only economic activity is understood as contributing to the common good. It’s our communitarian duty to Spend for Britain.
But of course this is a circle that can’t be squared. Because the economic liberalism that still runs strongly in Tory veins relies precisely on the dissolution of social bonds, via the ‘creative destruction’ of the market. Communitarian economic liberalism is an absurdity. No wonder even Bedfordshire’s tribal Tory voters are baffled and outraged.
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SubscribeIf it was just contributing to the economy Johnson would surely have opened the economy properly (and should have done). It is surely the maintainance of collective psychosis which is driving the policy. We all have to beg to be vaccinated to be released. Fauci was just saying that we can open the theatres when we have had the vaccines for a year. Well, they can all go to hell.
Hear! Hear!
Maybe a more imaginative way to look at this is would be that Aged Care remain in Lockdown, the elderly shield and the government offer assistance for free distance communication with their family and the rest of us go back to work. Multi generational households have now had six months to figure out how to protect their elderly living in the same property. Those with physical co morbidities work from home or offered financial support surely those two pieces of input would be less expensive than what we are doing and would do wonders for mental health and rebuild social cohesion and provide emotional nourishment. We seem to be confused by the fact that this thing is very efficient at transmission but leaves half unaffected and is fatal only to the frail and unwell.
I could not agree more. At the moment we are destroying the futures of the young for the benefit of the old. We wasted the summer months when the kids and younger working force should have been out and about catching and spreading it amongst themselves so when the schools restarted there was a decent level of herd immunity in that age group.
There is a very clear seasonal effect to this pandemic – look at what happened in South America during its winter. If you ignore countries with tiny populations, Peru has the highest deaths per capita in the world now with Bolivia, Chile, Brazil and Ecuador in the top 10 ahead of USA and UK.
As the seasons turn silly rules are not going to help us, isolating the most vulnerable from the rest of society and letting that rest of society get on with it is the only sensible answer. We cannot afford to cripple our slowly recovering economy again as that will destroy the future for young and old alike. I do feel for retired people who can’t now enjoy the fruits of their former labours or company with their grand children but that is the price they must be prepared to pay for their grand children to have a future to look forward to at all.
This fresh round of measures may have been poorly planned, implemented and publicised, but I struggle to see it as proof that the government ‘can’t see the value of anything that doesn’t contribute to the exchequer’. Economic subsistence and medical survival are certainly not sufficient to ‘make ordinary life rich and full of meaning’, but surely most of us would agree that they’re important prerequisites for human flourishing. And, in the long-term, Covid poses a far greater threat to our health and economic subsistence than to our social lives, which would recover from another tight lockdown in a way that our jobs and bank balances realistically might not. Yes, we’re all making sacrifices right now, but to protect our hopes of sustained, future happiness, is it really too much to ask that we keep the colour turned down on our lives for a little longer? Concern for the economy need not always imply a stunted view of human nature.