Chernovid and Cobyl

We have entered the black hole. Falling further into time – good old linear, everyday, diurnal and atomic time whilst simultaneously putting the species-engine into reverse. We stare out of the rear window, our head turned rigidly from the future, staring at the dusty, dirty places we have been. In an ironic turn of events, this has not reversed the ageing process, rather it has taken us closer to Death than we have ever known in our inoculated bubbles of elitedom.

Across the world the spectre of Covid-19 has caused different reactions in different people. A virus lottery that seems to do different things to different people, it has affected governments in much the same random way. Those countries with right-wing, populist/racist demagogue leaders like the UK and USA have suffered death-tolls thought to be impossible in technocratic countries. Sweden, until recently the poster boy for sensible politics, opted for a herd immunity policy and it too has paid the price with thousands of deaths.

Daily statements from the Government are now so filled with lies and misleading statistics that comparisons have been drawn to the Soviet Union’s disastrous handling of the Chernobyl nuclear plant disaster. Caught on the back foot, the Soviet effort to underplay the extent of the crisis had as much effort thrown at it as the efforts to contain the fire and radiation. In the astonishing television dramatization last year, the scientist Valery Legasov asks the viewer “What is the cost of lies?”, adding “The real danger is that if we hear enough lies, then we no longer recognise the truth at all.”

The comparisons are pertinent. Central to the success of identitarian politics in Britain the last few years has been this idea that we are special, that we alone kept the spectre of Nazism from conquering the world in the 1940s. This myth of a national exceptionalism is present in much of our culture and the way History is taught at school. Similarly, the Soviet Union, a Communist superpower gained much of its strength from the idea that her people too were forged from some greater stuff than those people from elsewhere. Chernobyl could not be seen to be a symbol of Soviet weakness and vulnerability. Once the truth emerged, the facts of everyday life could be challenged, and established notions of power with it.

Johnson knows this. Unlike Chernobyl, a genuine accident, Covid-19 came with an advance warning. China, South Korea and Japan reported cases long before the first wave hit the UK. Accordingly, COBRA meetings were called. The Prime Minister, a man obsessed with the vision of him becoming leader but not so much doing the actual work involved, declined to attend any of them.

The death toll that ensued should be a scandal worthy of toppling governments. Over 50,000 people have died. Seeking to protect the economy at all costs, Johnson did the one thing leaders shouldn’t do in a crisis, he prevaricated. Having been part of a government that underfunded the NHS deliberately, he left the country ill-prepared for a pandemic. An exercise in our country’s capacity to withstand such a disaster had been held in 2016 – the results of which were so dreadful, its findings were barely reported till now. Thousands of nurses, doctors and other frontline medical staff were infected for want of basic equipment and many hundreds of those are dead.

In the panic of the first deaths, the government then did what it should have done in the first place, attempted a lockdown. But it was a half-arsed lockdown, with such deliberately vague instructions, that many felt it didn’t apply to them. The idea of national exceptionalism in the UK, fostered by forty years of fuck-you governments, has led to a personal exceptionalism. People felt that the rules didn’t apply to them.

The shutting down of all non-essential businesses saw a long overdue refining of the idea of key worker. Supermarket staff, delivery drivers, food producers and fruit and vegetable pickers – traditionally amongst the worst paid people in Britain – were suddenly the heroic wall between the public and food shortages. The Chancellor launched a national furlough scheme which guaranteed 80% of wages for the majority of people forced to stay at home.

Such a scheme would of course be massively expensive. But there was a recent precedent as to how to pay for this. The banking crash of 2008 saw morally bankrupt lenders rescued by the government printing enormous amounts of money to bail them out. This money was to be paid for by the austerity measures of the Cameron government. The poor, the sick and the vulnerable had had too easy a time of it. They would foot the bill for the largesse of a banking sector driven by nothing more than greed. A United Nations report into the devastation this caused the most vulnerable people in the UK estimated that these measures had contributed directly to the deaths of over 120,000 people. It was the first UN report ever rejected by a British Government.

As the cost of the furloughing (a scheme designed to stop people from starving to death, remember) spiralled into the hundreds of billions, the narrative of lazy and workshy Britons began to pepper the pages of our right-wing papers. Since Norman Tebbit’s infamous “get on yer bike” speech 40 years ago, this idea that the British working-class are lazy, pampered bastards has captured the imagination of our least imaginative columnists. Despite the fact that the majority of us enjoy some of the highest working hours, the least public holidays and lowest pay in the developed world, this narrative continues to hold firm.

And so the “lockdown” has begun to be eased, people forced to return to work in the middle of a highly contagious pandemic. People who can barely afford to house themselves are castigated for not being able to afford either a car or a house close to their place of work. Images of packed tube trains are tutted at by the very people who sent them off to die as cattle.

There is a British laziness and it has been deliberately encouraged by successive governments in my lifetime. It is an intellectual laziness, introduced in our schools by a selective-memory take on historical events, a curiosity for facts over context. Culturally, our seemingly endless fascination with World War 2, a global conflagration in which our opposition to Hitler stemmed from our own desire to exploit the world’s poor rather than a fear of right-wing populism, and one in which we were not the sole saviours of the day but rather a team player in a game the aftermath of which saw us able to rightly view the horrors of Auschwitz as proof of our moral victory but more hesitant to look at our part in the Bengal famine which helped fuel the British war effort.

What will be the truth of Covid-19? What will be taught in our schools in the years to come? Will there be a day of reckoning for Johnson and his incompetent gang of spivs, crooks and cronies? It is hard to imagine. Truth can be unpalatable. In this country we prefer the comforting brew of lies we sip each day. The recent 75^th anniversary of VE Day saw a speech which championed those ideals of truth, honesty and self-reflection necessary for a country to move on in the face of tragedy. It was made by the German president. It was a call to be ever vigilant to the dangers of extremism, of exceptionalism and of evil. I’ll end on his words.

“Wherever your roots may lie, take a moment to revisit your memories, your family’s memories, the history of the country in which we all live. Think what the liberation and what 8 May means for your life and your actions.”

Here we beat on, boats against the current, borne back ceaselessly into the past. Our self-deluding eyes stuck to the places we have already been to, ignorant of the present, fearful of the future.

Stay alert, muthafuckas.