Big business is desperate to get the country back to work, as are many workers, who are severely feeling the pinch during lockdown. Most Tory MPs can’t wait for an end to lockdown and an end to the current level of public expenditure and tax losses.
But there should be no return to work unless it can be done safely, both on the journey to and fro and at the place of work.
Furthermore, let’s take this opportunity NOT to return to the whole of the normality we suffered before the lockdown.
Looking at much of our pre-Covid life, there should be no going back.
TRIDENT
Let’s not return to building this weapons system that poses a bigger threat to humanity than all the deadly viruses.
But at least it creates jobs. No, not nearly as many as you might think. The steel for the submarines’ hulls comes from France. The nuclear reactors and their cooling system come from the USA. The sophisticated sensor systems are French and Italian. The giant crane, which lifts the boats out of the water for maintenance at their base at Faslane, was built by a US company. The only part of the Trident project which is entirely British is the bill for £31 billion.
But at least it creates jobs at Barrow-In-Furness, where the subs are built, and at Faslane, where they are serviced. At £31 billion we could easily afford to lay-off all the workers and give them very generous pensionsfor the rest of their lives. The workers would no longer be devoting their time to the world’s worst mass-murder machine and we would all be safer.
AIRLINES
90 percent of planes across the world have been grounded.
Apart from moving essential freight, let it stay that way. The alternative is a return to exponential growth in air travel, with its appalling noise and the biggest single source of climate-changing CO2.
Cheap flight global travel is the best possible way of moving around viruses old and new.
Plague bacteria used to be carried by human fleas and were transferred across borders by rat fleas.
Air travel is the present-day rat and flea transfer system for viral diseases.
All air travel should be heavily taxed in order to reflect the great damage it does to the planet.
And all travelers should be tested for infection at airports.
But holiday resorts will suffer. True. The world has been living beyond its environmental means and we all must learn to adjust to a new, better normality.
ECONOMIC GROWTH
We are told that we must have economic growth if everybody is to have enough for a good life.
During the lockdown, the amount of wealth created in the UK by all the work we do and all that is sold has decreased. If the lockdown should go on for another 2 months, the total drop in national production of wealth will amount to about 13 per cent, the worst recession ─ the biggest drop in wealth production ─ in three hundred years. But even when the economy is steaming ahead, there is massive and ever-growing inequality, with stnking rich people on one hand and poor, struggling people on the other hand. And this gross inequality within the UK is reflected even more starkly between countries across the world.
The Thatcherite/Blairite mantra that the wealth of the rich Trickles down to the benefit of everybody has proved to be a myth. The wealth of the wealthy stays where it is and trickles only into their bank vaults.
To a tiny degree our indigenous stinking rich have been brought down a peg or two by the lockdown and they have been screaming the loudest about their suffering bank balances.
It would be a good thing to have a more rational policy on incomes. For a start, the CEOs of all FTSE 100 companies should receive no bonuses and no share dividends to augment their over-size pay cheques. Their share dividends are taxed at only 7.5 per cent against 20 per cent on salary income. They do not pay National Insurance on their dividends. They benefit from this dirty tax dodge and then go on to cop even more by means of their bent accountants’ schemes for evading income tax and living in tax havens. If we put a stop to all this nonsense, the public purse would take in a lot more money and we could reduce this country’s biggest social problem: inequality.
The global elite is estimated to squirrel away each year, by various ruses, some £13 trillion. Small wonder that half the world is poverty-stricken.
In the UK, in the year 2016-17, the total loss of revenue to HMRC, due to tax avoidance, evasion and off-shoring, was £70 billion. Just for comparison, the total amount budgeted for the NHS in 2019-20 is £140 billion.
SOCIAL INEQUALITY
This pandemic has drawn fresh attention to the egregious inequality in our society.
Our income differentials are crazy. Professional footballers have a limited career span, but to compensate for that they and their team managers should not receive Monopoly money salaries. Cutting out that nonsense would give a new lease of life to many struggling clubs. Murdoch is the one chiefly responsible for the appalling distortions in the professional football industry. If foreign football stars are not willing to play for British clubs for less than multi-million salaries, so be it. Go play somewhere else.
A fair income system would reward people according to their qualification, experience and contribution to society. NHS and care workers, at all levels, should be paid more. So should teachers, police and prison staff.
The country cannot afford the social ills created by our low pay, high rent economy.
The planet cannot sustain endless economic growth. People would be content with a secure, fairly distributed sufficiency.
A FAIRER SOCIETY
Rescuing the economy from post-Covid recession must not be done by the imposition of more years of painful austerity. The rich minority would not notice it, because its ills would be borne by the majority.
Covid has drawn fresh attention to the inequalities in our society.
The most bitter aspect of social inequality has recently been revealed in the statistics on life expectancy.
People living in high-rise blocks and the working poor are bound to have less healthy, shorter lives. They tend to get less fresh air, less exercise and are more prone to the blandishments of the junk-food giants like McDonalds, KFC, Pizza Express, Coca-Cola and the brewers.
It is cruel to have children living in high-rise battery cages. It is cruel at any time, not just during a lockdown.
It is not only unhealthy, it is also illegal to compel people to live in the unbreathable air of some of our cities. There must be more rigorous taxation on the most polluting vehicles, especially Chelsea tanks, coupled with strenuous measures to limit the traffic entering city centres.
Over time, town planners should reject central government pressure to increase population density. Instead they should seek to reduce density. The so-called Northern powerhouse initiative could help. Government departments and private industry should be pressured to move north. The aim should be to shift jobs and people away from the over-heated Southeast.
The government, any government must be permanently prepared for disease pandemics, especially as they hit the poorest hardest.
The government will be content to see the country meander back to normality as it was.
The lockdown has demonstrated the abysmal unfairness of that normality and has shown better ways.
BUT are we, the human kind , especially the kind from the wealthy Western world, able to move on so not return to what it was before. Your wish list Colin is very long, quite rightly, and I hear on the media (English and French in my case) that lots of people are saying that when this is all over “nothing will ever be as it was”. I don’t know what they mean by that: yes all of us will have been affected one way or another emotionally / psychologically, physically, financially, culturally, gastronomically, in our way of life, our little daily routines and our indulgences, our everyday expectations, our luxuries, our gadgets. Have they actually asked themselves what it would mean and and more the point, how it would be achieved? (I come from a very poor family and I know what it is like not to have enough to eat or to read). BUT does it mean that collectively, we are prepared to move away from all the things we have been used to prior to Covid-19? Does it mean that we are prepared to not going back to what we now know not to have been good at all for us? How determined are we? And how gradual these changes for a better future would be to make them even half acceptable to the Western population of all ages?
This week I have translated, with Radio France’s permission, a letter from Michel Houellebecq, a famous French author, which was read on the French radio. He says: I don’t believe in statements such as “Nothing will ever be as it was before” and his pessimistic last words are “It will be the same but a little bit worse”.
So how do we move forward as Western nations, as educators, as professionals, as political groups, as affinity groups, as family groups etc…without creating a huge split in society?
A few months ago I found myself talking to a man I didn’t know in a Lidl’s carpark in Pont L’Abbe. We talked about the climate amongst other thing and I mentioned Greta Thunberg, saying how wonderful it was to see that such a young girl had managed to move so many young, and not so young people into a movement which was gathering strength etc…His all demeanour changed immediately he said, in French of course “I am not listening to a 17 years old and having her tell me what to think and what to do. I have done everything in my life, travel the world, created companies all over the world, what could I possibly learn from a 17 years old?” He went on ranting and raving for a little while but I didn’t even try to convince him, I knew there no point. Sadly a few days later I heard the same kind of discourse from a French senator on a TV interview and I thought at the time that these people would never change.
A little bit worse
“I don’t believe in statements such as “nothing will ever be as it was before” “
Michel Houellebecq’s Letter
This original letter was read and published within the framework of Augustin Trapenard’s program “Lettres d’Intérieur” on France Inter 4 May 2020 8.54 a.m
(Translation Gaëlle Graham)
To tell the truth, most of the e-mails exchanged these last few weeks had the prime objective of checking out that the correspondent was neither dead, nor about to die. But, this having been established , one tried all the same to say something interesting, and this wasn’t always easy, as this epidemic’s greatest achievement is being at the same time unsettling and boring. A banal virus related, in the least prestigious of ways, to flu viruses, with survival conditions not quite known, with vague characteristics, sometimes benigne, sometimes deadly, not even sexually transmissible: to sum it up this is a virus without merit. Even though this epidemic was responsible for several thousand deaths in the world on a daily basis, it has nevertheless created the strange impression of being a non-event. In fact, my esteemed colleagues (some of them in any case, are estimable) didn’t mention it much, they preferred to discuss the lock-down situation; and I would like here to add my contribution to some of their observations.
Frédéric Beigbeder (in Guéthary, Pyrénées Atlantiques). A writer in any case doesn’t meet many people, he lives as a recluse with his books and self isolation doesn’t change much for him. I quite agree Frédéric, as far as social life is concerned it doesn’t change anything much at all. However, there is one point you seem to fail to recognise (probably because of the fact that as you live in the countryside, you are less likely to fall foul of what is forbidden under lock-down regulations): an author needs to walk. This lock-down seems to me the ideal occasion to settle an old quarrel between Flaubert and Nietzsche. Somewhere (I have forgotten where), Flaubert asserts that it is only in a sitting position that we think and we write well. Strong protest and mockery from Nietzsche (this must have been at the time when he had started using the expression all over the place): he had, himself, conceived all his work while walking, anything not conceived while walking is rubbish, in any case he has always been a Dionysian dancer, etc… Despite the fact that I am not known for having an excess of sympathy for Nietzsche, I must however recognise that it is he who is right about this. It is very ill-advised to try to write without having had several hours of walking at a sustained pace during the day: without it the accumulated nervous tension cannot be dissipated, thoughts and images continue to churn painfully in the poor author’s head, who soon becomes irritable or even mad.
The only thing which really counts is the mechanical and robotic rhythm of the act of walking, of which the prime motive is not to come up with new ideas (even though it can happen as a secondary effect), but to calm the conflicts induced by the shock of ideas born at the writing desk (and this is where Flaubert isn’t totally wrong); when he talks to us about his ideas conceived on the rocky slopes of the Niçois hinterlands, in the meadows of the Engadine etc…, Nietzsche is rambling a bit : excepting the case when someone is writing a tourist guide, the landscapes one walks across are less important than the landscapes of the mind.
Catherine Millet (usually a Parisian, found herself quite by chance in Estagel, Pyrénées -Orientales, when the travel ban was imposed). The present situation, unfortunately, makes her feel like the “anticipation” section of one of my books, La Possibilité d’une île.
Well then I thought to myself, it is really a good thing after all to have readers because I hadn’t thought about that particular connection, even though it is perfectly clear.
In any case when I think about it again, it is exactly what I had in mind at the time, with regard to the extinction of humanity. Nothing like a great movie blockbuster but something rather dreary. People living in isolation in their cells, without physical contact with their own kind, just a few exchanges via their computers forever decreasing.
Emmanuel Carrère (Paris-Royan; he seems to have found a justifiable motive for travelling). Will interesting books appear, born from this period? He wonders.
I too wonder about this. I have actually asked myself the question, but deep down I don’t believe it. There has been much written about the plague, over the centuries; the plague has greatly interested writers. But in this case I have grave doubts. For a start I don’t believe for half a second statements such as “nothing will ever be as it was”. On the contrary everything will stay exactly the same. The unfolding of this epidemic is even remarkably normal. The West is not for eternity, by divine right, the most prosperous and developed part of the world. All this is over it has been over for quite a while, this is not breaking new. If we examine it closely, even in detail, France is coming out of it a little bit better than Spain and Italy, but not as well as Germany; and there again, this is not a big surprise.
The coronavirus, on the contrary, is likely to have as a main result the acceleration of certain changes which have already started. For quite a good few years now, the bulk of technological evolutions, whether minor (such as video on demand, contactless paiment) or major (working from home with the internet, internet buying, social media) have had as a main outcome (or main objective?) to reduce physical contact and especially human contact. The coronavirus epidemic offers a great “raison d’être” for this powerful trend, a sort of obsolescence which seems to affect human relations, this makes me think of a illuminating comparison which I picked up in a text anti-PMA an anti-PMA text (anti – Medically Assisted Procreation), written by an activists group called the “the chimpanzees of the future”. (I discovered these people on the Internet; I have never said that the Internet was only an inconvenience). Therefore I quote them: “Soon, to make children by oneself, free of charge, at random, will seem just as incongruous as hitchhiking without the web”. Car sharing, flat sharing, we have the utopias we deserve, but lets’ move on.
It would be wrong to say that we have rediscovered tragedy, death, the notion of an end etc…For the last half century, the trend well described by Philippe Ariès, will have been to hide death as much as possible; Well in fact death will never have been so discreet than these last few weeks. People die alone in their hospital room or retirement home, they are buried immediately (or rather they are cremated, cremation is more in the spirit of the time), without anyone around, in secrecy. Death is without witness, the victims are summed up as units in the daily death statistics, and the anguish which creeps up in the population as the total number rises is somehow strangely abstract.
Another set of figures will have become very important during these last weeks, that’s of the age of the patients. Up to what age should they be kept alive and given treatment? 70, 75, 80 years old? This depends apparently on the part of the world where we live; but in any case, never have we expressed with such calm shamelessness the fact that everyone’s life doesn’t have the same value; and that after a certain age (70, 75, 80 years old?), it is as if we are already dead.
All these trends, as I said before, already existed before the coronavirus; they have only manifested themselves with new evidence. We will not wake up in a new world after the lockdown; it will be the same but a little bit worse.
Michel HOUELLEBECQ