David GOODHART
It feels like we’re more tribal than ever, but David Goodhart insists good will out in the end
Covid strife stalks the land. The country that once linked arms to tackle an external threat has descended into fractiousness and bickering: those who are terrified by coronavirus vs the Covid cavaliers who don’t even wear masks on public transport, rule-of-six enthusiasts vs “have we all gone mad?” refuseniks. We have slid from “I’ll do your shopping for you” to “I’ll shop you”.
As the new laws designed to suppress a second wave start to bite, many of us - including. this week, the Archbishop of Canterbury - wonder how enforceable they really are from the centre, especially with huge regional variation and low levels of hospitalisations and deaths in most places. Is the Government now overreacting to compensate for its earlier underreaction?
France has higher levels of new infections, yet has not significantly changed its Covid rules; and this weekend fans are returning to German football stadiums. Are we now an outlier not only in Covid deaths, but also in Covid conflict?
An increasing number of us have experienced an unpleasant incident, or have witnessed one, over pandemic norms. And many of us feel confused and anxious. In a post-deferential world, with a plethora of information sources, who can we trust and believe?
Polly Mackenzie, head of the Demos think tank, speaks for many when she says the surge of solidarity and fellow feeling of the early pandemic has frittered away. Last week, Demos produced a poll claiming that Covid divides are now greater than Brexit ones: 58 per cent of mask wearers have negative attitudes towards non-mask wearers. What a surprise! Who likes those creepy, smelly things?
Obviously, the pandemic has been a troubling time and it might become worse. But I still think it has revealed more positive than negative things about community life in Britain – and that legacy will linger.
For a starter, we really have all been in this together: rich/poor, black/white, old/young. But it has been a collective event that has touched everyone in one way or another. And not only has the public been more altruistic and dutiful than many expected, as statistician Sir David Spiegelhalter has observed, there has also been a flowering of small-scale neighbourliness and acts of kindness. Think of the hundreds of thousands of Whatsapp groups that have sprung up all over the country as well as the national volunteering effort. I certainly know many of my neighbours better and local old people who were invisible to me before.
It is true that family life has been stretched to violent breaking point in many cases, but overall far more people have rediscovered the consolations and reassurance of family. That same Demos poll found that nearly two thirds of parents said the pandemic had been good for their relationship with their children.
At the national level, we have collectively underwritten the livelihoods of millions of workers in an enormous (and popular) act of collective solidarity and publicly recognised the work of some of the lowest status, yet “key” workers who maintain the hidden wiring of our lives. Perhaps I am suffering from
Covid confirmation bias – the tendency to see your own assumptions about how the world should evolve confirmed by the pandemic – for I have just published a book called Head, Hand, Heart that argues that many of our contemporary troubles can be found in the allocation of too much reward and prestige to just one human aptitude: academic/analytical intelligence.
Obviously, high intelligence is as valuable as ever, but that is no excuse for our current misalignments. The graduate bureaucracy grows ever more bloated while we suffer big shortages in skilled trades and technician-type jobs (Hand) and recruitment crises in nursing and adult care (Heart).
The definition of a successful life has narrowed to getting a good degree and then into a cognitive-professional career, and, with 40 per cent of jobs (and all the best ones) graduate-only, it is no wonder people still clamber on the conveyor belt. But it now turns out that the knowledge economy does not need so many knowledge workers, even before AI really hits, so we have a generation of students with the wrong skills and disappointed expectations.
But there are several ways in which the pandemic should enable, in the language of my book, Hand (manual/ craft work) and Heart (care and emotional work) to claim back some of the prestige and reward they have lost to Head in recent decades.
At the most macro level, the crisis has been the hour of the nation state and national social contracts, at least in Europe. National democracies will claim a greater say in the next phase of globalisation. There will be some reshoring and shortening of those long, vulnerable supply chains. Lowest-cost globalisation, which regrets the closure of the manufacturing plant but sees it as a price worth paying for cheaper goods in Bluewater, will no longer win the argument so easily.
This next phase will place more stress on localism (following
Archbishop Welby), social stability and fairness; it will be more sceptical of the claims of the Head and the treadmill of the achievement society, with its apotheosis in our once helter-skelter global metropolitan centres.
As I was writing the book in 2019, I would not have dared to imagine the public appreciations of the Hand and Heart workers that became the dominant image early in the crisis. In a partial inversion of the status hierarchy, many of the truly key workers turned out to be people who did not go to college and do not manipulate information.
The care economy has been at the centre of the crisis, and that in itself will prompt some re-evaluation of economic and political thought. Just as old attitudes to large-scale government debt, and even printing money, have had to be revised even by conservative politicians, so we may be pushed to reconsider our attitudes to productivity, and even the idea of the economic sphere.
Rich Western societies already spend a large part of GDP on care, health, and welfare; this share is likely to increase in the wake of the crisis. And, surely, we need to more openly acknowledge that what we want in many parts of the care economy, from ICUS to elderly care homes, is lower productivity, not higher. We want fewer beds per nurse, not more. This is true in large parts of the Heart economy, in health, and in education.
And if we are to upwardly revalue the public care economy, and fund better the Cinderella parts such as elderly care, then what about the work done in the domestic economy of the home looking after the young and the old? Should that not also be valued more, too, and not seen as a domain of limited opportunity to escape from as soon as possible?
This is how I see the crisis as readjusting the status balance, and it will reinforce an unusual coalition – a small-c conservative preference for the local, the national and the family, along with a social democratic preference for higher social spending and modest collectivism, plus a renewed concern for green issues.
The pandemic will leave many scars – but it may also help nudge us toward a better balance of Head, Hand and Heart.
We have slid from ‘I’ll go shopping for you’ to ‘I’ll shop you’