The great lesson of 2020: Yes, times change, but decent values will endure

WHEN the bells peal on Thursday night, glasses will be raised with more enthusiasm than usual. The auld acquaintance we all want to forget this year is 2020 itself.

It is hard to think of a year in peacetime when so much suffering was crammed into 12 months.

Covid-19 has been implicated in the deaths of nearly two million people worldwide, 70,000 of those in the UK. The stock market crashed and action to control the pandemic saw mass lockdowns imposed, civil liberties suspended and swathes of jobs and businesses destroyed.

Years of physical and mental health problems have been stored up.

China’s virus isn’t the only reason this year has been so grim. The death of George Floyd in Minneapolis sparked protests, as well as violent rioting, in the United States. China passed a security law snuffing out much of Hong Kong’s remaining democracy. Human rights groups reported 450 cases of torture of fair election protesters in Belarus.

More than 100 people were killed in an earthquake in Turkey, more than 200 in an ammonium nitrate explosion in Beirut and almost 200 men died and more than 100 remain unaccounted for following a mining disaster in Myanmar.

Massacred

Terrorists massacred 89 at a military base in Niger, 24 in an attack on a Kabul maternity ward, 110 in the Nigerian farming village of Koshebe and 54 in a siege on a school in Ethiopia.

A spree-shooter killed 22 people in Nova Scotia, anti-Muslim riots left more than 50 dead in Delhi, a teacher was beheaded by an Islamist in Paris and three people were slain in a Catholic church in Nice.

Misery so routinely followed misery that the morning paper should have come with a prescription for Prozac.

Even among those fortunate enough to remain healthy and have their family go untouched by coronavirus, there is a glum consensus that 2020 was a wasted year, a snatching away of precious time as pointless as it was cruel.

No one could doubt the woe this virus has cost. Families sat helpless while loved ones took their last breath in distant care homes. Children missed one of the final years of elderly parents’ lives and grandparents were kept apart from babies they had longed to welcome into the world.

Yes, the virus is cruel – but the past 12 months have not been wholly in vain. We witnessed humanity at one of its lowest ebbs but compassion sprung abundant.

Britons donated £11.7million to Mail Force, the charity set up by this newspaper, and helped provide 42 million pieces of PPE to frontline workers.

Captain Sir Tom Moore, a centenarian veteran of the Second World War, raised £33million for NHS charities by doing laps of his garden with his walker. Among the facilities to benefit from his efforts is the ‘wellbeing wing’ at Edinburgh’s Western

General Hospital, a place for exhausted nurses to grab a seat and relax during hectic and harrowing shifts.

Celebrities such as Beyonce, Rihanna and Bono gave millions between them, including Scottish-born X-Men star James McAvoy, who donated £275,000 to buy masks for NHS staff.

Empathy need not come with a pound sign. If 2020 has taught us anything, it is that our most valuable commodity is the love and support we give to others.

I wasn’t keen on all the doorstep clapping and some considered it virtue-signalling, but weren’t the virtues it signalled exactly the ones we needed to see? Gratitude for the hard work of nurses, confidence in a national institution, and a weekly nod of solidarity and encouragement to our neighbours.

In my own little slice of the world, community spirit roared to life almost overnight. We dropped off care packages next door and made a point of stopping passers-by and asking how they were keeping. A man in the next street took it upon himself to deliver bread and milk to elderly residents just in case they were running low. In the lead-up to Christmas, the food bank trolley at the local supermarket was constantly overflowing.

Courage

For those who feared old-fashioned virtues of service and altruism had been supplanted by entitlement and selfishness, 2020 was a reminder that even as times change certain values endure.

We saw courage from final-year nursing students who downed their textbooks and volunteered to go onto Covid wards. There was selflessness from low-paid care home workers who, despite having families of their own to think about, went to work every day at ground zero.

Taxi drivers, delivery men and shop assistants, unsung heroes of this pandemic, helped keep people and goods moving and our larders well stocked.

Dedication crossed borders as people who had never met and never will chose the lives of others over their own.

Wuhan doctor Li Wenliang spotted signs of a novel coronavirus in his patients and was first to get the message out to the world. He knew the repercussions from the Chinese state would be harsh but he knew his duty as a medic. He was duly rounded up by police, along with other scientists. Li later died after contracting Covid-19 from one of his patients.

This past year taught us how much hardier we are than we thought, how much character and neighbourliness still nestle amid the hedgerows, and how much public-spiritedness is to be found among those who do the least financially rewarding jobs. 2020 threw its worst at us but brought out our best.

It has been a horrific year and at first we will try to blot it out of our memories. But when it eventually creeps back in we will recall that the horror was not without hope, that good things happened because we determined to make them happen.

However helpless we felt, however frustrated by lockdowns and loneliness, we never gave up.

Incalculable

Nor did our scientists, the first to give the world a vaccine that we pray will end this pandemic. Their achievement will be incalculable in lives saved, families reunited, businesses reopened and economies restored. These women and men toiling away in laboratories, without fanfare and with the odds stacked against them, have put their expertise and patience to use in a way historians will write about centuries from now.

It is no exaggeration to say they helped save the world. We owe them an unpayable debt and ought to be proud that ours was the country where they did it.

If this year often felt futile, we will come to see it was not. Because of the investment made and commitment shown in 2020, 2021 will be the year our vaccine brings the Covid-19 pandemic to a close.

Because of the attention drawn to injustice and discrimination in 2020, 2021 will see further endeavours towards an equal society. Because we spent so much of 2020 at home glued to the TV news, it was impossible to ignore misfortune and mistreatment around the world, and in 2021 the pressure will be all the greater to address them.

Here at home, we have another reason to be thankful. The Government has finally secured a Brexit deal and, barring any last-minute drama, it will pass the House of Commons and largely conclude the UK’s transition out of the European Union. Some of us wish the 2016 referendum had brought a different outcome but democracy has been done and there is now an opportunity to move past the division of the last four years.

Making a success of Brexit will require us all to pull together. Despite the unrepresentative din from social media and the rolling news channels, most Remain voters are ready and willing to do their bit.

This Hogmanay, we would have every right to wish away the departing year, but we should not regret the strength we have gained, the wisdom we have accrued, or the love we have given and received.

The lessons of 2020 are part of who we are now – and 2021 will be better because of it.