As Captain Tom becomes Number One, the other heroes in the world wait to get back to normal – but is normal what we really need?
What’s your opinion? Should we go back to the way things were – read inside – also listen to Hold On (Change is Coming) by Sounds of Blackness …
Well done Captain Tom – you deserved the Spitfire flypast for your 100th birthday. And you deserve the Number One hit with Michael Ball – and thank you for raising more millions for the NHS than most of us can ever imagine.
This charming, affable and a bit flirty old soldier Captain Tom is rightly classed as a real gentleman and a quintessentially British hero.
Yet there are millions more in Britain who are heroes, almost 70 million of us. Millions of adults in UK who have quietly accepted being held hostage in their homes by an enemy of the state that we can’t see and we have almost no weapons to attack.
This enemy’s army, in truth, is made up of tiny spherical particles surrounded by an envelope of fat with club-shaped spikes all over it. Yep, a tiny brain-dead bug has brought most of the world to its knees.
It has also sent a chill through global economies causing markets to cough and splutter in a terrifying state of uncertainty and panic.
But it also has taken away many our human rights, those that throughout the centuries we have fought other armies to make our own..
Yet, in the 21st century we have literally been ‘buggered’.
The main right many of us have lost is the right to be with our loved ones in a time of crisis.
How many of us have had that right taken from us?
And now, as we stay at home – many of us totally alone – we are being patronised about it.
The Government says it thinks the British public are doing rather well in this coronavirus crisis.
Thank you Government!
How nice of you!
Yes, cabinet ministers are said to be ‘astonished’ at how fully we are all complying with enforced lock-down.
And, apart from some as brain-dead as the coronavirus itself, we are not making a fuss.
We are showing common sense.
And so the common man and woman of all ages in the UK, becomes an unsung hero.
Well, the preservation society applauds us all!
But there are two questions we should be shouting from our balconies, banging on about on social media and sending emails about to anybody we can think of!
One – the incompetence we have had to deal with from our leaderless, rudderless, government since Boris got KO’d by the virus?
And the other is, why have we been treated with such condescension and disdain?
For instance, why are we constantly told we must stay at home, protect the NHS and protect lives? We are already doing that!
We are not idiots!
Then there is the determination to keep us in a dark place about when lock-down will end. If we aren’t disregarding the rules now, why would we if we knew what the near-ish future holds for us?
I am writing this sitting in the sun on the balcony of my loft apartment in Central Europe.
I am looking down on couples on their bicycles keeping healthy, couples strolling with their dogs, families BBQ-ing in their isolated gardens, bars and restaurants delivering to our doors – all done with masks, social distancing and dignity.
And the Slovak government generally is keeping us all in touch with what’s going on.
Remember, Slovakia, is a country that came out of communist rule less than half a century ago … and yet looking at the UK, 2,000klm away it looks like it is flying all the flags of a totalitarian state.
It looks like it is using the mushroom method of management to keep us locked up in our homes, more or less in the dark with the klaxon-clarion cries of “Stay in your homes! Protect and Survive!” ringing down the streets.
But behind all this confusion and misinformation we have to accept that – whether it was created in a Lab in Wuhan or not – Coronavirus is an overlap of an environmental and natural problem. And it is socially driven by our need to live in a relatively stable economy across the world.
Looking at climate change… we have to understand the reasons we keep emitting greenhouse gases.
And with coronavirus we also need to understand how world economics relies on us.
I read recently, I can’t remember exactly where, that tackling both coronavirus and climate change is much easier if we put a spoke in the wheel of economic activity.
As far as climate change is concerned it would mean us producing at lot less ‘things’. We would have to re-evaluate how many ‘things’ we actually need.
But one thing is for certain we’d be using less energy and emitting fewer greenhouse gases.
And as far as coronavirus is concerned, it’s people mixing together that spread the infection.
So, reducing this mixing together – even with our relatives – is likely to stop the transmission and lead to fewer cases overall.
Now we have to look at business – obviously businesses are there only to make a profit.
Coronavirus and climate change make this very difficult which means, because of them both, many of us will be out of work, not able to pay our mortgages and basically loose our homes if there is no benefits system left to support us..
Because of the two things we are facing a world-wide economic depression.
And lock-down is bringing depression closer because it is meant to stop people going to work, where they spread the disease.
Economist James Meadway wrote, the correct Covid-19 response isn’t a wartime economy – with massive upscaling of production. Rather, we need an “anti-wartime” economy and a massive scaling back of production. And if we want to be more resilient to pandemics in the future (and to avoid the worst of climate change) we need a system capable of scaling back production in a way that doesn’t mean loss of livelihood.
So, what is the future for us?
Here are four potentials:
- State capitalism means a centralised response, prioritising exchange value 2. Barbarism is a decentralised response, prioritising exchange value 3. State socialism, acentralised response, prioritising the protection of life 4. Mutual aid, adecentralised response, prioritising the protection of life.
State capitalism is the dominant response we are seeing across the world right now.
But Barbarism is likely to be the future if we refuse to extend support to those who get locked out of markets by illness or unemployment.
People will die.
Barbarism is ultimately an unstable state that ends in ruin.
State socialism means the nationalisation of hospitals and payments to workers are not made to protect markets, but to protect life itself.
All sounds really good here, but sadly this can lead to authoritarianism, exactly that which my adopted country as only recently escaped from.
Mutual aid adopts the protection of life as the guiding principle of our economy. However, in this scenario, the state does not take a defining role. Rather, individuals and small groups begin to organise support and care within their communities. It becomes unwieldy and difficult to control.
Then there is dystopia … state capitalism descended in to barbarism.
Right now planes are grounded, people are locked up, and industry is shut.
Yet, there is a plus side and that is that air pollution over China and Europe has improved.
Over China, NASA and the European Space Agency (ESA) spotted a significant decrease in pollution between January and February.
Satellite imagery showed a reduction in nitrogen dioxide – caused by cars, power plants and industrial facilities.
The agencies compared the change before the lock-down in Wuhan on 23 January and during the quarantine between 10-25 February, and found concentrations of the gas had fallen significantly. The reduction was first noticed in Wuhan but eventually across the country.
According to calculations done by Stanford University scientist Marshall Burke, the reduction in air pollution may have helped save the lives of 77,000 people in China under the age of five, and over 70.
And we cannot just ignore this … we need to get rid of both enemies of all our states. We must not ignore the fact that the brainless little virus is actually starting to do that for us all by default.
However, if we do ignore this, state capitalism will step back triumphantly and the whole horror story will start all over again.
Anyway, like most people across the world, I’ve been well behaved.
And funnily enough I’m getting used to it.
As Jeremy Clarkeson said recently; “I used to love going to the pub, but now I’m thinking, ‘Why drink standing up when I can stay at home and drink sitting down?’
He also said: “It was my 60th birthday last weekend and all year I’d been planning a party to celebrate. In the end though. I spent a day in the sunshine with my children and I could not have been happier.”
Well now, there hangs a tale and a lesson to be learned about how things can change.
TAGS: coronavirus, Covid 19, UK, Boris, Captain Tom, NHS, politics, economy, world, global, finance, Jeremy Clarkeson, Clarkson