brixtonsubversity

Erika wrote to me this morning from Germany, from where she recorded one of the first Lockdown Diaries when we started the series last month. The shops are re-opening, small meetings of family and friends are now permitted, and from this weekend, they will be able to assemble once more in beer gardens. As the terrible strains of the country’s lockdown ease, she says some 81% of the population approve of the government’s handling of the crisis.

The death toll yesterday in Germany yesterday stood at 147, and has been on a downward trend for the past few weeks. In Britain, yesterday’s toll was some four times that. Sadly, no clear downtrend has yet emerged here. There’s little question that Britain is in no position to re-open as Germany is doing. But as Arabella Yandle writes from her small West Country town, you’d be hard-pressed to know it from the way people are behaving, as more and more of them appear to be lifting the lockdown themselves. The same is true here in London, where the streets and sidewalks are busy once more. With the tabloids having taken matters into their own hands, and calling next Monday ‘Happy Monday’ or ‘Liberation Day,’ the government is now engaged in a desperate fight to tamp down expectations that Boris Johnson’s speech to the nation on Sunday night will announce an end to the lockdown.

Johnson’s problem is that unlike Germany’s government, Britain’s is rapidly losing the public’s confidence. Recent polls show that barely half the public now approve of the government’s performance and unlike the death toll, the trend in approval is clearly downwards. As I wrote recently, Covid-19 is proving to be a harsh, swift judge of governments. Those who perform will live to fight another day, those that fail will weaken quickly. Boris Johnson’s Tory government now appears to be firmly on that downward slope.

 

‘Coming out the other side?’ by Arabella Yandle

When people were allowed to smoke in restaurants and pubs, not being a smoker presented a whole range of social challenges.  Every invitation to a social function would be accompanied with the need to decide if you would be happy to put up with the smoking.  You were a killjoy if you expressed a dislike of or criticism of it – you would get the look, a mixture of superior amusement and irritation.  You would have to weigh up sitting alone in a pub (and ending up smelling of fags anyway) against sitting with the smokers where the chat was.  Any natural responses to having smoke blown into your face, like coughing or waving your hand, would ramp up the look, adding in a level of judgement.  If it was their car you definitely had no opinion, no matter if you were asthmatic, had COPD or Cystic Fibrosis.  A token ‘I hope you don’t mind’ was accompanied by the fag coming out and being lit – it was a rhetorical question.  Socially speaking you were supposed to sit there, say nothing, express no opinion, school your face into a neutral expression and quietly go home afterwards and wash all your clothes.

Ilminster, if not the whole of Somerset, appears to have decided to come out of lock down unilaterally and Covid-19 seems to have become, overnight, the new no-smoking thing.   We have had no clear, unequivocal instructions from the government, no April Thesis Brexit style single statement, the stark black and white messages like those from Angela Merkel and Jessica Ardern, just lots of bombastic waffle and surmise and ‘we are sure you’ll do the right thing’ type talk.  Somerset (to date) is lucky to have had one of the lowest rates of infection and that might be part of the problem.  It is like the virus is something that is happening a long way away.  Traffic is building up, the farmers market has reopened.  Takeaways are opening in time for the May bank holiday next weekend and people are hanging out.  But the problem is that it isn’t everyone and there is no way to tell who is and who isn’t following social distancing.

But here’s the thing – you can’t tell who has good reason to be cautious just by looking at them.  If you don’t know the full details of what’s going on locally you won’t make the right choice and that’s not fair on those of us who are still trying to maintain some distance.  I know that there have been numerous deaths in the local care homes.  I know people who have had the virus and I know of people who have died of it.  I have MS and my best friend, who also lives in the town, has diabetes.  Whilst neither of us is more susceptible to the virus than other people, the impact of catching it could have life changing implications on either of us on top of all the complications of the virus itself and neither of us have been picked up in any of the precautionary groups being helped or now being offered testing.  We’re not frontline workers.  We’re not old enough or tory members or in the ‘Extremely Vulnerable’ group.  You can’t tell it by looking at us so we are having to depend on the responsible behaviour of those around us.

So, to the lady who I had to tell twice to back off because she was standing right behind me, and to the man who was standing in the doorway of our bakers who I had to ask to move so I could enter, don’t do the smokers’ face.  Don’t do the amusement, irritation and judgement.  We aren’t being killjoys, we are just taking care of ourselves and the others around us.

 

 

Yesterday, British Prime Minister Boris Johnson returned to the dispatch box in Westminster to take his first Prime Minister’s Questions since leaving the hospital. It quickly became clear that Covid-19 didn’t just threaten his life. It makes his political future look suddenly dicey.

Before the lockdown, Johnson reveled at PMQs, whipping the Conservative backbenches into roars of cheers and gales of laughter. That storm of noise would distract everyone from the fact Johnson largely avoided the questions the then-opposition leader tried lobbing at him. But now, with the chamber all but empty and most questions coming in over Zoom, Johnson faced the new Labour leader Keir Starmer all but alone, his voice bouncing off the ancient walls of the House of Commons. He floundered at times, was subdued and conciliatory, and had no choice but to answer Starmer’s probing, difficult questions. With no wall of noise to back him up, he seemed like a scrawny schoolyard bully, suddenly abandoned by his gang after picking one too many fights.

Populists are nothing without a crowd. Their authority takes root in the belief that a noble and virtuous populace are being abused by a corrupt elite, and that only an inspired individual can save them – Donald Trump declaring when nominated by the Republican Party that ‘I alone can fix it.’ That bond between governor and governed thrives on direct personal contact. Populists don’t communicate through press releases and television appearances. They go straight to the people, over the heads of a supposedly dishonest media and elitist ‘experts,’ reaching out to them with rallies, Facebook posts, tweets and staged events before supportive audiences.

So the lockdown is a sucker-punch that leaves them winded. It’s no wonder Donald Trump wants to re-open America and Brazil’s Jair Bolsonaro is still trying to rally his supporters in the streets. A populist without a crowd is like a movie without a soundtrack or an Instagram model without makeup or an exotic backdrop. When the music and the adornments that sustain the artifice and cue your emotional responses are stripped away, the actor stands alone on the stage. A gifted performer can still pull off a compelling performance. Someone whose style is their only substance, however, looks suddenly vulnerable, even pathetic. It’s a look that seldom wears well on them.

To governments around the world, Covid-19 towers like a blind judge, and its justice is swift. The law is simple: run your country well, and you will emerge with a few scrapes and some lessons you won’t forget, but you will otherwise be left to resume your way. Run your country badly, and you will be cut down mercilessly.

Politicians accustomed to blustering their way out of problems by whipping up their supporters are finding, to their dismay, that no amount of soaring rhetoric, clever scapegoating or conspiracy-talk has any bearing on a deaf opponent that is unmoved by humans emotion. It’s almost medieval, a trial by ordeal which, as did the plagues of our ancestors, resists human attempts to control. Just as medieval plagues were blamed on convenient scapegoats like Jews, today’s are attributed variously to the Chinese, CIA labs or tech companies. Still the virus keeps coming, ravaging the mobs that join the pogroms or demonstrations. Viruses love a crowd, after all, and a baying mob opens its jaws wide to receive the invader.

Nor does this pandemic, or any pandemic, hold brief for any faith or dogma. It does not favour democracies or autocracies. As I’ve noticed in listening to the Lockdown Diaries, there is no clear advantage of one political regime-type over others when it comes to responding to his threat. Some autocracies have responded swiftly and effectively, others have mismanaged it woefully. Some democracies have done splendidly, others have blown it.

But the one thing the virus does seem to respect, from what I can tell, is humility. The governments which have done most badly are those which arrogantly dismissed the threat. Western governments, almost without exception, thought themselves too rich, too technologically advanced to need to fear nature’s wrath. That was for backwards peoples to do. Some governments still talk that way, telling their citizens their economies will bounce back like never before, that in the meantime they’ve done everything right and needn’t change course. Watch their fate over the coming months. The microbe mocks them as they speak, the death toll mounting while desperate leaders thump their podiums ever more loudly and tell their critics to stop the negativity.

But those countries which stood in trembling awe as the virus approached, realising they could muster no weapon against the unleashed fury of nature – typically, because they’d been here before, wrestling with famine, plague and pestilence – and would do best just to find shelter while they worked out a plan, will not escape Covid-19 altogether. But relative to the complacent Goliaths now falling around them, the virus will reward them. When a semblance of ordinary life begins to resume, it will be those countries which resume their ascent the quickest.

As I argue this weekend in Canada’s Globe and Mail, this will upend the world. Covid-19 will accelerate the rise of much of the developing world, while Western countries will struggle to get back on their feet. And here’s a tip you probably never expected: Africa, the continent that still evokes images in Western minds of desperate starving fly-ridden children awaiting Bono’s rescue, is about to have its moment. In a generation, many countries there will be the new lands of opportunity.

More on that anon!

 

 

I lived much of my life in Jamaica, from where today’s Lockdown Diary comes.My daughter was born there, and when she entered the world she saw the light of day in a rustic, clean and basic hospital. Her godmother was a doctor and showed up at the birth but left everything to the midwives, since Jamaica’s approach to childbirth remains charmingly old-world. Given the limited resources, I would not have wanted to encounter any severe complications.

Recently, someone close to me lost a god-niece who did suffer such complications. When she showed up at hospital in labour, she was initially denied admission because she showed symptoms of Covid-19. After a frantic evening of running from hospital to hospital, she finally delivered a healthy baby, but died in the process. I’m told they found she never had Covid-19.

Within a couple of days of my daughter’s arrival at home with her mother, there was a knock at the gate and two nurses strolled into the yard. Unannounced and unbidden, they had – as is the usual practice in Jamaica – been notified of the birth and were no coming to weigh the child and check on her progress. As a student of development, Jamaica had always been something of an enigma to me: a poor country with indicators on life-expectancy and health one normally associates with advanced economies. During that morning visit, it finally hit me: Jamaica may be a Third-World country, with Third-World medical facilities, but its primary health-care puts that of many richer countries to shame.

Most of the reporting on Covid-19 in developing countries has focused on their resource-strapped hospital systems. Western journalists are predicting a bloodbath when the pandemic reaches the developing world with full force.  And as the tragic loss of my friend’s niece reveals, the country is ill-equipped to deal with a major outbreak of disease. If a wave of patients start spilling into the wards of the Third World, yes, catastrophe may follow.

But as the visit of the nurses after my daughter’s birth revealed, public-health systems in developing countries, like that in Jamaica, are often set up to prevent just that eventuality. Some countries have got behind the Covid-19 curve, but a great many have been aggressive in nipping the problem in the bud. It’s early days yet, but I’m willing to take a punt on the possibility that many developing countries will avoid the sort of horror-stories currently unfolding in some Western ones. Their horror-stories will remain like that of Jodiann Fearon, a beautiful young woman whose life was cut short by the vicissitudes of life in a poor country.

The European Union is a  cumbersome, hidebound, bureaucratic, ossified, barely functional machine, held together by jerry-rigged repairs to increasingly serious problems. It’s not that surprising that so many Britons voted four years ago to leave it, and it’s hard to tell if the Union learned anything as a result.

And yet, as Claudia records in her diary-entry from Italy, hundreds of millions of people – and not just in Europe – are desperately hoping it survives. In a world of resurgent nativism, anti-foreign sentiment and chest-thumping politicians out to humiliate their foes, the EU stands as a testament to the dream that peace and cooperation offers a better world than tribal warfare.

Nobody should really know this better than Europe, the continent which has long excelled at tribal warfare. People sometimes think of the Union as a free-trade agreement that grew too big for its britches, but the fundamental driver of European integration was never economic. Fundamentally, it was a means to bring peace to a continent ravaged by war, by getting countries to move away from conflict towards cooperation. Nothing speaks more loudly of its success than 75 years of peace.

Now, the coronavirus pandemic confronts the Union with a life-or-death choice: does each country pull up its drawbridges and try to protect its own, or do they together look out for the common good that binds them together? The early stages of the coronavirus pandemic offered worrying omens, like countries closing borders against one another or banning exports of medical goods to their neighbours. They since tried to clean up their act, but now the continent faces a choice: will they band together with a rescue package for the most vulnerable countries in their midst, or does each government restrict itself to looking after its own citizens?

That would be like London refusing to assist Leeds, or New York refusing to support workers in Arizona. In that case, Europe may revert to a collection of separate countries, each looking after its own.

But we’ve been there before. Is that really the past to which nostalgic Europeans want to return?

 

I once enjoyed the privilege of spending a year in Germany as a visiting professor, lecturing on my then-new book, Twilight of the Money Gods (and by the way, when it comes to cliches of the beer-and-sausage life of German intellectuals, don’t knock it, there’s something to be said for evenings spent in stone-walled beer cellars talking about philosophy!). In my lecture-series, as in my book, I presented the history of economics not as the science it wants to imagine itself being, but as what essentially became the official religion of the modern state.

My lectures took place on Friday mornings, and afterwards we’d all head to the university dining-hall for lunch where we’d continue the conversation – which later spilled into the evening over beer and schnapps. Among my students were some very bright, idealistic young economists, who initially felt a bit conflicted about my lectures. The content conformed to their worldviews, but they began to wonder if they had chosen the right discipline in which to conduct their studies – if perhaps they should have done one of the more ‘humanistic’ disciplines.

I told them no, they’d done something I consider noble. The truth is, the methods and techniques of economics can offer tremendous utility when it comes to tackling the world’s problems. The challenge for them, however, was to use the tools they had, but employing them with humility, understanding that they were not actually the scientists they’d been told to believe they were, but moral guides with a very important role to play.

When I taught the PhD methods module in Cambridge’s Centre of Development Studies, I gave the students a simple lithmus-test for their theses: if their argument couldn’t be expressed in a way that any literate, curious person would understand, it wasn’t yet ready for presentation. My reasoning was simple. Unlike, say, theoretical physicists, who are apprehending realms that are beyond the grasp of simple observation, and for which data can sometimes only be inferred, all the data and behaviour described by economists are things that play out in our daily lives. Anyone observing human behaviour, and reflecting on it, is capable of crafting a narrative that makes sense of it. Economists with a good solid grounding in their discipline’s methods, like my German students, could then test those narratives rigorously to find out if they can help us to understand reality.

The problem is that economists are not currently trained to operate that way. At one time, they were, but the fetishisation of ‘economic science’ in recent decades has persuaded economics students to ignore all narratives that originate outside their walls, on the grounds they’re not scientific. Sadly, that means the narratives of economics are usually drawn from crude prejudices and dogmatic claims, which have then been put beyond critique on the grounds they are scientific. Students in economics spend years mastering the methodological and mathematical techniques that enable them to construct models. What they currently spend almost zero time doing is pondering the narratives which shape those models – and fundamentally, economics is a moral tale.

Thus, I’ve long believed that poets, novelists, artists and film-makers need to join the conversation on economics – not as substitute experts in economic methods, but as experts in the craft at which economists seldom excel: producing compelling narratives. A good novelist, for instance, will spend an inordinate amount observing people to capture the nuances and intricacies in the way they behave, right down to the way they speak. I’m not going to ask them to build an economic model for me, and economists are entitled to regard with suspicion those intellectuals with no grounding in economics who present what they call complete economic theories. But by the same token, no economist can do this if she isn’t turning to the people who’ll come up with a story that more closely approximates reality than the ideal, sometimes even bizarre worlds dreamed up in university seminar rooms.

And so, I had one of those an a-ha moments while reading Andreea Petre-Goncalves’ critique of economism  – one of those occasions when you experience the alternately exhilarating and dispiriting realisation that something you’ve spent the last few years trying to pin down has been captured by someone else in the matter of a few words! What struck me most about her argument is the very perceptive observation that embedded in economics discourse has been the idea of stupidity – the notion that economics is a science, that only people trained in it can understand it, and that failure to do so renders them stupid, requiring that they be excluded from a conversation that will nonetheless have a profound impact on their lives.

If one good thing has happened in recent years in the economics discipline, it is that some of its doyens are calling for students to once again study a wider curriculum, one that includes history, the arts and literature. Of late, economics has been a big part of the problem. But done properly, done with that sort of humility, economics can be a big part of the solution.

 

Follow the Lockdown Diaries on Youtube and all other podcast platforms.

I was delighted I could persuade Andreea Petre-Goncalves to write this piece, which offers a penetrating and compelling critique of the doctrine of ‘economism.’ ‘Scientism’ is the cloaking of an ideological position in the garb of scientific language, giving it an aura of sanctity that places it beyond the reach of ordinary folk. Economism is the application of this method to all matters economic – as Andreea puts it so beautifully, an ‘invisibility cloak’ which presents economics ‘as a reassuring scientific base for progress.’ What Andreea offers instead is a contemporary version of an ancient injunction – that economics should serve humans and not other way around. But she says it more eloquently than I could ever hope to!

 

Every dogma has its day  – and its thought police

Contributed by Andreea Petre-Goncalves

 

It’s the economy, stupid. There’s no magic money tree [stupid]. The age of irresponsibility is giving way to the age of austerity [stupid]. Disagree with this if you dare [but clearly you must be stupid]. Let me explain what is possible [stupid].

 “I think people in this country have had enough of experts, from organisations with acronyms […]” Michael Gove, June 2016

 We are in the dying days of neoliberal capitalism. Its rulebook lies abandoned, its promises ridiculous, the science behind the doctrine evidently inexact. COVID-19 has hit us hard, when our defences were low. A decade of austerity had depleted our healthcare systems and weakened our social safety nets. The multilateral architecture had been enfeebled by much macho posturing. The free markets were no match for a pesky little virus, global supply chains faltering instantly, and all emergency actions undertaken by the public, not the private sector. When the chips were down, our lives took precedence over our economies, solidarity over profit. When we re-emerge, we will be poorer, more vulnerable and less willing to believe that the invisible hand can glue the pieces of our broken world back together. We won’t be told there’s no alternative. Our re-construction will be deliberate, collective, and have people and planet at the heart.

No one doubts the role that the discipline of neoliberal economics has played in ordering our societies. What we often misunderstand is how it has done that. We assume it was by way of offering a scientific pathway for prosperity and development. Yet benefits we may have derived from its learnings come second to its most powerful contribution – that of sustaining and policing the enforcement of a very particular moral system of assumptions, values and restrictions on behaviour. Economics, like religion once upon a time, has long delineated what we are permitted to think. John Rapley describes this eloquently here.

Tony Judt portrayed the way these limits operate on our imagination in his moving and incisive testament ‘Ill Fares the Land’:

‘Today, we are encouraged to believe in the idea that politics reflects our opinions and helps us shape a shared public space. Politicians talk and we respond – with our votes. But the truth is quite other. Most people don’t feel as though they are part of any conversation of significance. They are told what to think and how to think it. They are made to feel inadequate as soon as issues of detail are engaged; and as for general objectives, they are encouraged to believe that these have long since been determined.’

The scientific aura of economics has helped cement a highly ideological way of ordering society around the key idea that an individualist meritocracy is an evidence-based way of delivering social justice, of making sure there is fairness and balance in the world. This evidence base was always thin at best and not unequivocal. Economics has helped enforce an individualist, competitive worldview by meting out disdain and derision on any alternatives, deemed unscientific, backward and ideological. And frankly, stupid.

 

Stupidity became the new sinfulness

Stupidity, in the context of a moral order built on striving for progress, is a breach, a contravention, something to be controlled through thought policing and ridicule. In older moral orders, sinfulness would have played the role that stupidity or backwardness play in pre-COVID 19 neoliberal economism.

So successful was this narrative strategy in disciplining ideas that old left-right political divisions became irrelevant in the 1990s (in the era of Clinton, Blair, Schroder and others) as all of politics re-aligned itself with the assumptions of the neoliberal market-first, business-first, justice-through-individual-merit consensus. Anything else began to feel stupid, and risible. Progress was going to be attained through scientific method, not old-fashioned ideology, via purely rational, technocratic processes.

The political contest itself became a managerial competition, a patronising politics of progressive knowledge over backwards ideological conviction, of educating the stupid and looking down on the uncouth. The content of politics was no longer something to be debated, only the competence, the actors and the methods. Embarrassed by the ideological backwardness and stupidity of talking about structural economic injustice, the left dedicated its energy instead to identity politics and individual liberties, unwittingly reinforcing neoliberalism’s individualist filter with entirely noble aims. It simply stopped telling its own moral story, limiting itself to a slightly softer version of the core neoliberal narrative, with the free, worthy individual at the heart. No wonder its constituency grew ever smaller, as ordinary folk chose the main brand over the bleeding-heart imitation.

The success of neoliberal ideology was measured by how ubiquitous it had become, protected by the invisibility cloak of economics as a reassuring scientific base for progress.

 

Sic transit

In neoliberal societies, the moral order sits on a justice story which, put simply, says ‘the worthy individual does well’. If you are worthy (through effort, genius, brilliance), you will be successful. If you are not, you will not enjoy rewards. Conversely if you are successful, you must surely have deserved it. And if you are not, it’s probably your own fault. This is what justice looks like. Economics provides the proof (by stating that individuals are self-interested and competitive above all else). It also offers the means for operationalising the justice narrative, by prioritising market competition as a way of determining worthiness. Scientific socialism played a similar role in sustaining the communist totalitarian moral order across many parts of the world after WWII.

With both neoliberal capitalism and totalitarian communism, the narrative held best for as long as it did not sit too uncomfortably with reality. In my native country of Romania, totalitarian Communism didn’t feel awfully scientific or progressive during the hungry years of the mid to late 1980s, when the shops were empty, milk and meat a rare luxury and butter an improbable-sounding invention, the stuff of fairy-tales, surely. The ‘scientific’ bit of socialism felt a bit unlikely when waiting for hours in queues for petrol, so you can drive your Dacia (the only car available), two out of four weekends a month, specifics depending on whether your number plate was an odd or even number.

A similar thing happened in neoliberal capitalist societies in the aftermath of the 2008 crisis. Living standards declined as austerity programmes bit hard. Millions upon millions of people joined the ever-increasing ranks of what Guy Standing termed ‘The Precariat’, a pay cheque away from destitution, living lives of insecurity on low-wage, no-rights, zero-hour contracts. Competing in this callous job market meant that for an increasing number, the reward for worthiness never came. The housing market, clearly an inadequate way of supplying one of the most essential public goods (roofs over heads) pushed a large mass of bodies into ever-shrinking, inadequate, soul-crushing accommodation, rents ever-rising and home ownership a fata morgana.

This affected people from all walks of life, not just the destitute. A few years ago, my senior NGO salary only stretched as far as 85% of our London rent and childcare costs. My reward for worthiness was hand-to-mouth living with a sprinkling of psychological exhaustion and feelings of failure.

The moral order, propped up as it may be by grey-suited economists preaching appropriate thinking, cannot hold indefinitely in dissonance with the lived experience and prevailing mood – one of ever more wintery discontent.

So when Michael Gove cynically told us that people had had enough of experts back in 2016, he was onto something. He knew it with confidence of course, as he was steering a Russian-backed strategy to capitalise on that discontent and shake-up the political (if not economic) consensus. The moral order cannot hold forever if the promised justice looks implausible and undeliverable. If you are looking to gain political ground, it makes sense to cast doubt on the validity of a weakened moral narrative. This is exactly what populist movements have done in Europe and beyond since 2015 (I include Brexit and Trump here). And true to form, the mainstream response was exactly what the economistic neoliberal narrative prescribed: ‘these guys must be some kind of stupid’.

 

A new story is emerging

Our new COVID-19 reality means a return to neoliberal economism will not go unchallenged. When the Netherlands insists on fiscal responsibility before solidarity in the worst crisis Europe has known since WWII, the moral order starts looking distinctly strained. We all know we can’t judge Italy as a miscreant during the COVID-19 crisis, as many did Southern Europe every time it was bailed out after 2008. Its predicament is not a result of stupidity or immorality, it has not breached the moral order. It has simply been terribly hit by a very contagious disease with a high mortality rate. We are seeing the callousness of the neoliberal dogma exposed. The perceived desire and collective need for solidarity means the Netherlands are singing a dissonant tune, from a film that has already finished.

This crisis is the very definition of Laclau and Mouffe’s’s discursive dislocation, a momentous event via which the fabricated aspects of a narrative construction become visible. We see our old dogma in its hollowness. Its political aspects are suddenly obvious, when for decades they were veiled in the illusion of economic science or technocratic common sense. We can see we were making a choice, although we didn’t realise we had a choice. It was our choice to allow a topsy-turvy world where profit came first and justice came never, but we didn’t realise there was an alternative. And we didn’t want to look stupid.

We are creating collective meaning out of shared trauma. After this our societies will not accept private profit as an instrument for delivering social justice. Our new world will be built to deliver the common good. Individuals will not have to compete for survival, they will have a right to thrive and live without fear and humiliation, in a world where our wealth is our common.

This is not utopia. Altruism and community living are the very story of human evolution. Individualist man was humanity’s embarrassing mid-life crisis, all fast cars and inappropriate lovers. As we stare into the rubble of our old world, smoke clearing from the debris, our debts to each other and our planet are clear as day. A new story is being woven, and in this one knowledge from economics or other disciplines will help us deliver on our values, not limit our imaginations. Politics will not disguise itself as technocracy again. This selfish dogma has had its day. We will do much, much better when we re-emerge.

 

Andreea Petre-Goncalves is President and Co-founder of Flare Governance

Follow the Lockdown Diaries on Youtube and all other podcast platforms.

 

 

 

 

By Arabella Yandle

Somerset is beautiful. I have lived here for the majority of the last 23 years so I can attest to that fact, but it is also the loneliest place I have ever lived.  I have lived in some of the biggest cities in the world and in many places in the UK but nowhere have I felt so a lone or isolated than Somerset and the current crisis has made me think again about why that might be.

Somerset is full of communities in the geographical, human dynamics sense of the word.  The population is spread fairly evenly through the county. There are no big cities, no conglomerations, just rural market towns and countless small villages and hamlets. It sounds idyllic and it certainly is picturesque but they are not communities in the social sense and that is what is unusual and gets me wondering about the true nature of community and why it is so difficult to find here. The conclusion I have come to after 23 years, which is thrown into such stark relief in the current situation, is that it is related to class, culture, urban planning and the car.  People in Somerset have either been here for generations or have moved in. The former are a very closed community. You might get a ‘hello’ in the street – you might even get a chat, but you will rarely get through the door and offers for them to come to yours will never get taken up. The vast majority of the people who have moved in are better off so either live in more isolated houses or in the ‘better’ parts of town and don’t naturally mix locally. Lack of public transport and local infrastructure means that you have to drive everywhere. You are likely to work some distance from where you live and if you mix with anyone it is probably work colleagues and again, lack of transport means all the normal after work drinks, meals and making friends does not happen – everything is closed down after 6. The places with any sort of social life might be 25 miles away and if you’ve just driven home, you don’t want to drive back and people are unlikely to ask you even if you are willing to because they don’t think you’d want to. The modern estates that have been built are full of nooks and crannies and curves and are not conducive to leaning over the garden fence to chat with your neighbour. Where you are closer, any attempts to do so would be seen as odd.

So this is partly cultural, no doubt.  Somerset is very uncosmopolitan and the people don’t know how to mix with folk from the other end of the village, let alone foreigners or people of colour. It wasn’t that long ago that the English National Party were almost voted in to South Somerset Council and I recollect having to brief students about terminology it was unacceptable to use on trips to London.  Somerset is a poor area with low aspiration, low wages and high unemployment.  It contains some of the poorest wards in the country as well as some of the most challenging and challenged schools. People with any education or aspiration tend to move away. When they come back it is in retirement, to set up their own businesses or with young families so people of my generation are probably the least well represented. The only other place I’ve been like that is Iowa.

The other factor is sadly related to class. The aspiration of many of the folk who live here and have lived here for some generations is to own a house like other people own and due to the relatively low house prices this is still possible, though becoming more difficult as everywhere else, and when you have found your castle you pull the drawbridge up.  Being part of a community actually takes effort and interaction and the aspirational are wedded to their cars and their houses.  They travel somewhere, travel home and shut the door. The numbers of classes and societies are decreasing year on year as funding shrinks and tend to be limited to daytime stuff for retired folk.  The type of community being lauded everywhere at the moment is a very middle class, cosmopolitan entity that would have formed things like the Womens Voluntary Service and the WI in times gone past. Offering to do something for someone, or lend them some equipment is viewed oddly. Even groups which are normally associated with community like church are isolated.  I have been in the church I currently attend for 2 ½ years and have been to someone’s house for a cup of tea once. To me, a Londoner from a middle class, cosmopolitan background, it’s normal to invite someone round for a cuppa and normal to just drop in to someone else.

So here I am, on a 12 week lockdown, a vulnerable person but not part of the extremely vulnerable group, completely isolated.  I live on a cul de sac with a 96 year old on one side who has four generations of family and a 70-odd year old on the other side with 3. Am I struggling with isolation? Yes, though to be quite honest it is not that much different to my normal life here.  But now I am not even going out to work or going to a café on my own so I get all my ‘community’ on line or on the phone. And I am scared. Scared of being one of the covid victims who die alone. Scared of the decline in my mental health. I have told my doctor I am on my own and text someone everyday just so they know I’m alive and I watch the news feeds of communities with an aching heart. It may not be reassuring and inspiring but this is the reality for me and many others.

 

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‘We need destruction to build something new’ observes Mar in her diary-entry from Andalusia, ‘it’s very powerful to realise the whole of humanity is going through the same process.’ What struck me most about this reflection was that it came in the middle of a catalogue of personal destruction of the most immediate kind – isolation from family, the abrupt end to the job of her dreams, the breakdown of a relationship, loss of loved ones – and ahead, the tremendous uncertainty that comes with unemployment in a country that had barely recovered from the last crash a decade ago.

Nearly a hundred years ago, Joseph Schumpeter – idolised by many on the right as a prophet of the free market – wrote of the ‘creative destruction’ that he said was the essence of a capitalist innovation. Only by allowing sluggish firms to collapse did the economy create the space for dynamic new ones to take their place. By this Darwinian process of constant renewal, capitalism would thus be able to endlessly renew itself.

So I find is so ironic that today, when free-marketers have ruled the roost of politics for decades, they seem more determined than ever to stave off creative destruction. Each time a crisis hits, governments and central banks throw trillions of dollars at zombie companies to preserve a system that clearly seems to be headed towards collapse.  Instead, it is left to a new type of bold thinker, like Mar, to embrace this fearless hopefulness – that in the worst of times, a path forward to a better world might be cleared.

Most off us live in cities, crowded together on a tiny share of the earth’s land mass. Those cities grow bigger by the day, as rural-dwellers join the century-long exodus from the countryside in search of opportunity. More and more, those cities trade with other cities, growing economically more remote from their surrounding hinterlands. And as rural areas and small towns fall backwards, most economic growth happens in cities, where the latest technology and most dynamic industries locate themselves.

These ‘global cities’ embody our age. But like a Goliath toppled by a microscopic David, their strength has overnight turned into their weakness: the tight concentration of human bodies in cities woven into a global web of movement has provided the vectors along with Covid-19 has raced across the planet. You can then add to that volatile recipe an ingredient that characterises global cities, and which Romain touches upon in his diary-entry from Hong Kong – their social polarisation. The more privileged citizens of global cities, who travel internationally for business and leisure, often carry the initial wave of infection into the city. But once there, if it reaches into the cramped, insalubrious neighbourhoods of the poor, it can spread like a wildfire (as Matt’s illustration of the hostel in Qatar revealed). The rich often enjoy the freedom to flee the pandemic by going to their country homes (though as Imke’s observations from Norway revealed, that can open up new social rifts, and create new problems).

After this crisis has passed, there will be a lot of talk about the need to build resilience into the design of the world that results, starting with cities. And as we are seeing, in the age of pandemics, no man is an island. It will be impossible to build resilience for one class and not the other. If we begin to design cities for the people who live in them, and not just for the lucky few who do do business or spend vacations in them, I’d call it progress.