Where Do We Go From Here?

Mar 29, 2020 | Buffy The Vampire Slayer, Covid-19 Diary, Dead Water

I’ve mentioned a couple of times that I find myself pondering what things might be like ‘after’. I’ve read odds and ends online and listened to some radio/podcasts along the way. I’m no nearer to reaching any conclusions and wouldn’t pretend otherwise. As Martin Kettle wrote in the Guardian, we simply don’t know what’s coming and should beware of assumptions, especially assumptions that favour our pre-existing preferences. Entrenchment is as likely as change. So this is not a considered post with a concluded view at the end of it, just some notes on what’s rattling around in my head, as much to record them for my own sake as anything else.

And I’m thinking about this from a UK perspective. Along the way I read Ed Yong’s well received piece in The Atlantic: How Will The Epidemic End?  I wouldn’t take issue with the substance of what he says, but a couple of things stood out that I want to comment on in passing.

I wrote here on 8 March that I thought America would be in a particularly bad place with this virus. Yong talks of the US healthcare system, but a substantial part of my concern for the US, where I have friends and family, is that from this side of the Atlantic it doesn’t look like there is a healthcare system in the US. I see lots of private healthcare providers, uncoordinated at county, state and federal level, forced to do the best they can while snagged in the gossamer web of health insurers and political stupidity. Vincanne Adams makes a similar point in passing in Disasters and Capitalism …and COVID-19. As I write, news continues to circulate of States forced by circumstance to compete against each other for vital clinical equipment.

Secondly, one of Yong’s possible outcomes is the one where America leads the way internationally on pandemics and climate change. I think that’s unlikely: it disregards the extent to which the US has squandered what authority it might once have had. Exceptionalism guides the assumption of a leadership role rather than co-operative participation. Leaders need followers, and who is left who would follow the US in this or climate change? Maybe under Obama, maybe under Elizabeth Warren, but both those ships have left the harbour.

Having said that as a preliminary, what’s on my mind? Accepting the caveat that it’s easy to over-analyse and misread the capacity of events to change structural norms, even global events such as this one, I think the following are all up in the air (with all the other things that will occur to me as soon as I press ‘publish’ no doubt). I’ll come back to some of these bullets as I think about them more.

• • Work practices and remote working.
  • Meeting the needs of a large cohort of newly unemployed people
  • Arts and entertainment.
  • Family structures.
  • Modes of social interaction.
  • Retail and the High Street. This was already attenuating but this crisis will be a death blow for many businesses. It will also impact on the landlords of business premises as rents disappear. I don’t expect much more than tiny violins for landlords, but this is part of the financial ecosystem that supports, for example, pension funds.
  • Transport: local, national and international. Just like the liquidity crash of 2008 was amplified by the deep interconnectivity of financial institutions, so this one is amplified by international and national travel.
  • Tourism. Plenty of countries or major cities have sucked deep on the flow of tourist money and become dependent on it. Likewise budget airlines.
  • Pollution: I’m not alone in noticing just how much pleasanter things are without ubiquitous traffic noise, airport noise and clean air.
  • Supply chains and resilience.
  • Economic orthodoxies.
  • General diet and health.
  • Social inequalities: the so-called ‘low skilled’ and underappreciated are suddenly crucial to survival.
  • Structural social inequality: no one can have failed to have noticed the widespread resentment that Prince Charles was able to be tested when health workers can’t, and able to bring his entourage to rural Deeside when us punters were told not to even think of doing any such thing. Gaby Hinsliff wrote a good piece on this: Anger over Prince Charles’s Covid-19 test is a warning sign of divisions to come Nor have we forgotten the activities of Prince Andrew or our appreciation of why Harry and Meghan did the sensible thing and extracted themselves on their own terms.
  • Political orthodoxies. Michael Gove was blathering on again today about Britain facing this as an independent nation. Will the nonsenses of nationalism in an interconnected world facing a global crisis make a dent in Brexit (or for that matter Indy in Scotland)? I don’t know; I tend to doubt it.
    It has to be said, though, and without any disrespect to individual MPs, the last month has put on display for all to see the utter irrelevance of the current Labour Party, partly because of their ludicrously over-extended leadership process that’s kept Great Uncle Chocolate Teapot in post since December.

One of the things that strikes me about that list, by the way, is that many of these are already under strain or changing; the crisis is functioning as a stress test that may, or may not, hasten processes already under way.

Finally, in a typically thoughtful article, Paul Gray, in the context of the NHS in Scotland, but with wider applicability, writes that we can’t go back to the way we were. He points to all the things , thought impossible or too hard just a month or so ago, that are now in place, established with pace and urgency. Telemedicine, long discussed but slowly implemented, and recognition of the key role of pharmacists, flourish when the imperative is JFDI. Implicit in Paul’s thought is a re-assertion of the status of the NHS and the broader public infrastructure of care. I’d like to think that one outcome of all of this will be reinforcement of the NHS (and the BBC). This doesn’t mean put them on a pedestal for uncritical regard, just recognition of their importance as institutions in a society and a reining in of the ideological attack dogs.

added: on reading this through again I realised it was a very Western perspective, and missed out on the impact of the virus in cities in the world that are densely populated with high rates of poverty and meagre health resources. I’ll try to correct this perspective in a later post.

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All is well here. the exercise regime is showing its benefits, though it’s early days yet. And today’s music? It has to be from the greatest hour of television in the history of television’s greatest hours: the cast of Buffy the Vampire Slayer from season 6 episode 7 Once More With Feeling. I’ve written previously about my love for that episode. This is the closing song which gave this post its title.