Yep, a tiny brain-dead bug has brought most of the world to its knees and apparently sent a chill through global economies causing markets to cough and splutter in a terrifying state of uncertainty and panic.
And yet corona virus is simply an invisible army of tiny spherical objects made up of particles in an envelope of cold white sticky fat surrounded by preposterously protruding proboscises.
Hmm, wait!
A little greasy fat thing with no ability to empathise with humanity, only there to perpetuate its own species?
Does that somehow remind you of a politician near you?
But not only has this selfish self-serving little virus stuck it to our financial institutions, it also given those dead-eyed politicians the chance to take away so many of our human rights – rights that throughout the centuries we fought rulers and despots to make our own.
The main right many of us have lost is the right to be with our loved ones.
How many of us have had that right taken away, eh?
Yes, in the 21s-century we have literally been ‘bug-gered’.
And now, we have been made a promise … lock-down is easing.
The way to ease lock-down is, of course, to make us continue to stay at home – many of us totally alone – for another three weeks at least.
However, the Government says it thinks the British public are doing rather well in this coronavirus crisis.
Thank you Government! How nice of you!
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 while Boris was recuperating from the virus, not in his office – shock horror – but in his country home?
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.
Remember, Slovakia where we live, is a country that came out of communist rule less than half a century ago … and yet looking at the UK, 2,000km 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.
Here, in Poprad, the beer gardens are open serving the frothy stuff and food, the shops are open … yep, shoe shops, kitchenware emporiums, haberdashers, chemists, bicycle shops, clothes shops, flower shops, booze shops, book shops, record and CD shops, blue-ray shops … almost everything is open.
We are getting back to normal in this little central European enclave of 5m people..
But the question has to be … do we really want get back to what we had before?
That normal life of boom or bust, zero hours contracts, life for the young – the new hippies – couch surfing with massive student debts and not a cat in hell’s chance of settling down, owning a home, having babies and a nice car and two weeks in Benidorm?
Do we really want to go back to rock-bottom savings rates while banks brag that in the last three months in the UK alone, we – while living in the dark like moles in holes – have not been spending our dosh and our enforced savings have gone and swollen their coffers by 49bn UK pounds?
Well, is that what we want to go back to?
And then there have been major benefits caused by this virus that our politicians have been charging us through the nose for for decades ,,,
And that’s allowing our emphysemic world to breath again!
Surely, we have to accept that the destruction of our world is very simply socially driven by our perceived need to live in a relatively stable economy.
And we want to own things, mainly made out of plastic.
Looking at climate change… we have to understand the reasons we keep emitting greenhouse gases.
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.
So, 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 lose our homes if there is no benefits system left to support us.
Because of these 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 and spreading 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 down 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, a centralised response, prioritising the protection of life 4. Mutual aid, a decentralised 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.
More 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.
Watch the rash of films over the last three decades.
Yet, there is fresh air of future wafting by all our face-masked noses … air pollution over China and Europe improved in the last few weeks..
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 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, #Clarkeson
