I will not rehearse yet again the genesis of the COVID pandemic, but rather precis what happened in the UK. Enough has been reliably established to affirm a series of propositions. I draw here on a paper I published in Frontiers in Sociology in 2022:
- the UK was ill-prepared for a pandemic, having paid too little attention to prior warnings about shortages of hospital beds, equipment and facilities;
- the background to this pandemic-specific lack of readiness was a health system, the NHS, that had been systematically under-funded during the decade of political austerity from 2010- to 2020;
- austerity was a calculated political choice that reflected a Conservative government agenda to open up public sector institutions, including the NHS, to competition from private providers/businesses;
- once COVID entered the UK, and even factoring in the lack of readiness, the governmental response was inadequate in terms of: delayed action, strategic errors, inefficiency and loss of trust;
- COVID has provided prolonged cover both for the assault on the NHS and for other political initiatives;
- Politically, COVID has permitted the systematic pursuit of state authoritarianism.
To these preliminaries should be added evidence of outright corruption (well beyond chumocracy and cronyism). In a chapter in press, co-authored with Benny Goodman and Miranda Scambler, we document and commend the tradition and role of ‘muckraking journalism’ in exposing this corruption, revolving as it did around the inept and crooked Health Minister of the day, Matt Hancock. I return to this theme and comment on the virtues of a muckraking sociology later.
My concern at this point is to broach the idea that COVID represented a kind of ‘breaching experiment’ (after the manner of the American ethnomethodologist, Harold Garfinkel). I first suggested this in my paper in the Health Sociology Journal in 2020. This amounts to a claim that COVID disrupted the social status quo, and in the process revealed in a harsher light the nooks and crannies, faults and fissures of the fractured society. The most obvious way in which this was accomplished was via a sudden and distinct surge in material inequality. John Leslie of the Resolution Foundation was quoted as saying that it is unusual for wealth to increase during a recession but that the impact of events during 2020 and 2021 had ‘turbo-charged’ the gap between rich and poor. In fact, the UK experienced the biggest one-year fall on output in over three centuries in 2020. Overall, total UK wealth increased by £900 billion to £16.5 trillion during the pandemic, but the poor were more likely to have run down than increased their savings. As for the super-rich, the category subsuming my ‘greedy bastards’, the Sunday Times Rich List noted an additional 24 billionaires during 2020-21, making a total of 171, the highest number in the 33 years of the paper’s rich lists. For context, these gains coincided with the UK government’s interventions to pay the wages of millions of struggling citizens.
As for income inequality, this too grew both during the decade of political austerity and during COVID. Interestingly, the typical working-age income level in the UK is £29,437 while in France it is £29,350; however, the poorest fifth of working-age households in the UK are 20% poorer than their French counterparts, while the richest fifth are 17% richer. Overall, the combination of lower incomes at the bottom level of British earners, comparatively low levels of private savings, and a less generous security safety net has meant that UK households were particularly exposed to economic shocks like the COVID crisis.
Given my natural interest in population health, it was no surprise to discover via Michael Marmot and his colleagues that this increasing level of material inequality had a knock-on effect on health inequalities. Moreover, once more, this COVID-related uplift in health inequalities both built on those already documented in relation to 2010-20 political austerity and followed the anticipated tramlines of class, gendered and racial disadvantage. This disadvantage, as predicted, was also spatial, impacting the north and midlands with the greatest severity. I will not stop here to do so, but it is my opinion that this can all be summarised using my idea, previously espoused, of the clustering of asset flows, with strong flows being conducive to health and longevity and weak flows predisposing to poor health and a reduced life expectancy.
In some ways these debates are best conducted in the academic/scientific literature, though it has been important to allude to them here. But I have personal comments about COVID to append too. While keeping in touch with evolving and divergent counsels of epidemiologists, Annette and I, like most other people barring the partying Conservative leadership in and around Number 10, were challenged in our mid-Surrey rural retreat by the series of government-imposed lockdowns. We were of course fortunate to live in a house of our choosing that nestled on the edge of the attractive village of Mickleham. How different our experience of voluntary-to-compulsory ‘confinement’ was destined to be from those families walled into too-small high rise inner-city flats with insufficient resources to pay the rent and to feed, school and entertain the kids, that is, with weak asset flows; and then there were those, mostly women, effectively ‘imprisoned’ with abusers with nowhere to escape to. Such class-related hardships were to be eloquently captured by Lisa McKenzie and co in their Lockdown Diaries, a project I was pleased to help sponsor and support. Inevitably, realising our good fortune brought with it feelings of guilt. To guilt I should add impotence. I was into my 70s by then and suffering from type 2 diabetes, which meant we elected to self-isolate. This meant we were not well placed to offer help to our neighbours. Our daughter Rebecca helped us order food and other essentials online, which was a godsend.
Guilt and impotence are negative emotions, but there were positives too. There was a deceleration in the pace of life, perhaps paradoxically for someone well into retirement. Life was suddenly less structured and punctuated by mundane everyday rituals and activities. I missed ‘café society’, the more so since I had become accustomed to writing different things in different locations. My solitude was no longer tempered by others bustling around me, which I have bizarrely always found conducive to concentration. My study demanded more of me. But back to the positives. I found I had time to stand and stare. I started to look at things, most frequently growing in or visiting our hillside of a garden. And in a quite unanticipated development, I started writing poetry. I had occasionally dabbled before, but with results even I found disappointing. It took me by surprise. I ‘published’ one or two efforts on social media and met with encouragement. What I had noticed whenever I had put pen to paper in the past was that the results always seemed forced. Now the poems began to flow. I have a few observations to make here. First, I have over time found the practice of writing easier; second, I quickly discovered that it was critical to ‘have something to say’; and third, a poem doesn’t have to represent some sort of statement, but rather must strike a chord with the reader. Poems offer a counterbalance to sociological and philosophical exposition and analysis: they speak in a different voice. Not long after my experiments with poetry, Rebecca and I went on to make them available in a selection, Rhythmic Musings, which Rebecca herself illustrated and produced. I harbour no illusions as to their worth, but I found writing them cathartic and diverting. I reproduce two here: the first conjures up the image of my father’s last trip to the South Downs and the second celebrates spring.
A Moment Please
‘Can you give me a minute on my own?’
And he froze like a statue, head inclined,
gazing across the Downs, seeing nothing,
but owning a moment of open space,
thinking nothing, but feeling to his skin,
absorbing nine decades of this and that.
‘Ok, thank you, we can go now’, he said.
The Crocus
The ground is matted,
gouache brown
with slivers of ice;
it’s just stopped raining
and it’s numbing cold.
As if in defiance
of this season
of crystal stillness,
at the earthenware base
of the statue of a maiden,
her thought far away,
there’s a thin etiolated
thread of life,
the umbilical cord
of a single blue crocus.
The petals are bathed
in droplets of rainwater
and it looks pale but pert.
For aeons the crocus
has laid down its challenge:
‘Now let’s think of Spring.’
Over this period of intermittent lockdowns through 2020-21 I predictably experienced a degree of restlessness. My home base was more than comfortable, and the enforced slowdown had its compensations, but our lives seemed to hover between this and that, be it watering the garden, catching up with the news – invariably via the more informative social rather than the mainstream media – or watching TV dramas, going for brief walks, getting dinner, reading or writing, and so forth. There was a slow-burning edginess to my restlessness. Naturally I ruminated on the volatility of the politics that COVID accentuated, but I have already commented on this. There is one further observation. Our village of Mickleham, like many other communities, gathered itself in support of the vulnerable and struggling. Central to this was the formation of a WhatsApp group, which shared local news re-services, online deliveries, local food shops, and so on. Impressively, younger members readily used WhatsApp to offer intensive personal support to those isolating. This was charity in its acceptable form, quite different from the type of bourgeois philanthropic charity that substitutes for tax-funded state services and that Attlee once described as a ‘cold, soulless thing’. Allowing for the fact that I inhabit a mid-Surrey, middle-class enclave, it cut across class, race or ethnicity and gender (without of course dissolving them as structures). People who hitherto hadn’t ‘got on’ buried or put aside their differences and came together. Our local pub, the King Willie, cooked and distributed fish and chips on Fridays (in the process scoring over its rival, the Running Horses). Innovative communal forms, in short, were accomplished, warranting an empirical investigation. I began just such an enquiry myself, tracking inputs into the local WhatsApp group, but I had to abandon the study for lack of time. It is worth recording that the WhatsApp group lives on, though its use has understandably shifted. The focus continues to be on sharing local information about services, events, lost dogs and escaped cows; but the traffic is increasingly focused on a few members who swap unwanted goods (including expensive items of furniture etc). Maybe I should one day return to my study of this transition from COVID-inspired communal solidarity to post-COVID communal swap-shop.