View from the UK: Keep calm – but don’t carry on as normal

We often hear about the butterfly effect where seemingly inconsequential events can reap huge and unpredictable changes well down the line and far away. Now it seems we should also have been looking at bats. 

British journalist Duncan Weldon recently tweeted: “If you’d told me on January 1st that by mid-March I’d be covering a potential global recession from my living room because of something a bat did in Wuhan, I’m not sure I’d have believed you.”

Life in the UK has been utterly transformed in just a matter of days. Last week, I attended packed parliamentary receptions for Ireland’s St Patrick’s Day and Newroz and popped to the pub with my family. Visits to parliament are now banned and MPs are sitting one or two metres from each other. Schools have been closed indefinitely and all exams cancelled. And pubs, clubs, gyms, and theatres must now close. No one knows how long all this will last.

We were often asked to “keep calm and carry on” – that old war-time refrain – in response to terrorism. Now we are being told to keep calm, but not carry on as normal. 

Like many millions, I am now stuck at home and dread the psychological impact of being unable to meet friends and family for many months. Loneliness and a perceived loss of purpose will be major social problems while many watch their incomes dry up. Eye-watering sums of public money in grants and loans are being directed to support businesses and workers in the hope they can pick up the pieces when this ends.

The state is back as an economic actor after decades of playing second fiddle to market forces. Conservatives are crystal clear that the old orthodoxies simply don’t apply in this emergency. Paul Goodman, a former Conservative MP and editor of Conservative Home, wrote about the need to tear up the rulebook with Big State Government on a scale unknown in modern times.

Goodman writes that the economy faces the immediate prospect of a heart attack while global growth may be more than halved, and no one knows how much damage could be caused by the combination of the virus, Saudi-Russian oil strife, high levels of corporate debt, imperiled banks, the lack of international leadership from America, the torpid response of the European Union, and China’s indebtedness. 

The left-wing economist Paul Mason reminds us that feudalism was doomed after the Black Death killed a third of Europe’s population in the 14th century and concludes that “we need a new economic system, which has people’s wellbeing and public health as its main priority, and stabilizes our relationship with the planet.”

Capitalism will probably survive in a modified form, but once unimaginable policies are being mooted across the political spectrum. Nearly 100 opposition MPs are backing a Commons motion urging a temporary universal basic income or an emergency measure to help freelancers and the self-employed affected by the COVID-19 outbreak.

Governments know their primary duty is to look after their citizens and are nervous. After all, Lenin apparently said: “Every society is three meals away from chaos.” British Prime Minister Boris Johnson may have a stonking majority in parliament but that matters less than getting the reaction to the virus right. So far, Johnson’s government has done well and relied heavily on the ballast of outstanding scientific advisers.

The battle against the virus is often compared to World War Two and the famous Blitz spirit for which the slogan “keep calm and carry on” was devised. The virus is not the existential threat that the UK faced in 1940, but the possibility of 250,000 excess deaths drawn from studies of the disaster in Italy focused minds and prompted the abrupt shift in strategy this week. 

Another slogan from the war was “loose lips sink ships” – the modern equivalent of this is when fake news about the virus goes viral on social media. That underpins the need for the political leadership to be very clear in its messaging, again and again.

If this is a total war against the virus, there is another read across. After war-time leader Winston Churchill became prime minister, he formed a coalition government with his Labour rival Clement Attlee. The writer Stephen Bush points out that the curtailment of civil liberties worked best with a Conservative Prime Minister and a Labour Interior Minister. 

The main parties jointly dipped their hands in the blood and worked in lockstep. Goodman says the Opposition is included in many private conversations but may conclude that it doesn’t want responsibility without power. 

It couldn’t work with the current Labour leader Jeremy Corbyn, but he will be replaced in early April probably by Keir Starmer. There should be a temporary national government. Jointly taking and enacting tough decisions is the best means of ensuring measures are taken without an eye to party advantage or disadvantage, consciously or not. By the way, concluding a long-term deal on Brexit before the end of this year – in reality within months – is for the birds, and should simply be delayed for a year.

One day we will have street parties to mark VC Day – victory over coronavirus – and then there will be a radical reckoning in which new ideas of all sorts could have traction. In the meantime, we should jointly focus on the invisible enemy and save as many souls as possible.