Coronavirus
outbreak
After the crisis, a new world won’t emerge as if
by magic. We will have to fight for it
Neal
Ascherson
What will the landscape look like when we wake from
the nightmare? The fantasies, and anxieties, about the future are already with
us
Sun 19 Apr
2020 09.30 BST
Puzzled man
with an axe on his shoulder looks at a tree with buildings and people on every
branch
‘The landscape after the plague will be
unfamiliar.’ Illustration: Dom McKenzie/The Observer
The French
used to be mad about the cure de sommeil – the sleep cure. Dr Jakob Klaesi of
Bern invented it. Drugged, you pass out for days or even weeks. Then,
cautiously, you are woken up. You are supposed to find you feel quite
differently about things.
Politicians
insist that lockdown under coronavirus is like the experience of wartime. It’s
not – except in one way, which I’ll come to. It’s so quiet, for one thing. War
is noisy. Sirens, soldiers tramping past singing, Luftwaffe engines in the
night sky.
These
lockdown weeks are more like induced sleep. Nine out of 10 of us see and hear
nothing of the nurses and doctors, the bus drivers and key workers. We learn of
their bravery and their deaths only by radio, from a screen or a newspaper left
by a boy in a mask. For most people, life is on hold. A trance descends,
soothed by birdsong, a dog barking, an ambulance in the distance.
What
happens when it’s over? European literature has a genre of “the landscape after
the battle” – the ruins, the hunger and cold, the search for family survivors.
The landscape after the plague will be unfamiliar, but not like that.
In the
first place, emerging from isolation – waking up – must be handled carefully.
It’s the phase de sevrage, weaning the patient from sleep. “This prolonged dive
into the world of dream can allow a patient to exercise their fantasies,
perhaps to discover the links between them,” warns a French doctor. “Harmful
after-effects are possible, provoking in some patients paroxysms of depressive
anxiety.”
The
fantasies and anxieties are already with us. And here one comparison with wartime
does work. The longer the virus emergency lasts, the more the memory of the
pre-virus world begins to grow unreal, unconvincing. It was like that in the
Second World War. “Peacetime…”
Was there
really a Britain, only a few years ago, when you could buy as many sweeties as
you wanted? A time when the work of millions of men and women wasn’t wanted,
when the poor couldn’t afford a doctor, when middle-class families had servants
they could sack when Madam was in a bad temper? It wasn’t just working-class
people who began to ask: “Could we really have lived like that? This war’s
changed everything. Pity, in some ways, but it couldn’t go on.”
A doctor
checks a young boy’s tonsils, December 1935.
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Was there really a Britain, only a few years ago, when, outside the schools
medical service, the poor couldn’t afford a doctor? Photograph: Daily Herald
Archive/SSPL via Getty Images
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Now,
unmistakably, there’s a feeling that “things will never be the same after it’s
over” and “we can’t go back to all that”.
Can’t we,
just? Some of those who govern us can imagine only restoring “their” Britain,
disfigured by inequalities. They will exploit the real and moving solidarity
shown in these pandemic months, as they confront the colossal debts left by
rescue spending. They will impose another “we’re all in this together” campaign
of savage austerity at the expense of social services and the poor.
And yet,
just as in 1945, voices are starting to say “never again”. As in: never again
“austerity”, which leaves people helpless in an emergency. Never again the
emaciation of the welfare state, and the NHS above all. Come to that, never
again neoliberalism. But who will do the politics of “never again” when we open
our eyes? Or are these hopes just “prolonged dives into the world of dream”,
pathetic fantasies dissolving into “paroxysms of depressive anxiety” as Britain
wakes from its corona coma?
The
landscape will look different. Mass unemployment, as hundreds of firms go bust
in spite of government loans, made much worse if the suicidal idiocy of a
no-deal Brexit really happens at the end of this year. Concentration of wealth
and power in fewer hands, as big companies cannibalise what’s left of smaller
enterprises. Bankruptcies devastating those charities and funds that maintained
so much welfare and research as public spending withered under austerity.
Londoners
queue outside a butcher’s shop in 1947.
Yet there’s
new light, too. Neoliberalism is dead, but Boris Johnson’s own path away from
it leads to a UK version of European neopopulism: a powerful nationalist state,
insular and xenophobic, harsh on human rights, big spender on the welfare of
the “left-behind” masses. Rishi Sunak’s discovery of billions for business
rescue, like the cities’ discovery of millions to house their rough sleepers,
shows what was always possible. Debt and deficit soar but – turning Tory
orthodoxy inside out – they seem not so lethal after all. And a dose of
moderate inflation? Why not?
The state
is back. A liberating thought for Labour under Keir Starmer. But a strong
British state in the 2020s – what will that smell like? The historian David
Edgerton, asking himself: “When was Britain?”, answers: not in the high days of
empire, not even in 1940, but in the postwar decades after 1945. Then Britain
became a strictly centralised and planned state. Almost self-sufficient
(“Export or Die!”), it was industrialised as never before or since. Operated by
Tories as well as Labour, this “economic nationalism” only broke down in the
1980s, says Edgerton. In came free-market dogma, the shrinking of the state and
devolution wrenching open the faultlines of the United Kingdom.
That
“strong Britain” left its peoples healthier, safer, better educated and more
equal. But there’s no way back to it. The industrial economy is over. Dragging
Scotland and Wales back under Whitehall control – forget it! Johnson’s “strong
Britain” may amount only to England weakly imitating the repressive populism of
Poland or Hungary.
Yet a great
emergency, like this shared time of pestilence, leaves people sensing their own
power, aware that they can act without waiting for yesterday’s leaders. When we
finally wake up from the long sleep cure, there is a chance to make those
“never agains” more than a fading dream. A chance – but lasting only for a few
months of creative confusion as we all stand up again and look around. “Rise
like lions after slumber,” said Shelley. There is plenty to do, but we have to do
it fast.
• Neal
Ascherson is a journalist and writer
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