We’re either lazing in the sunshine or cowering in the dark – and both must stop
AS DEFENCE Secretary, Gavin Williamson went eyeball to eyeball with Vladimir Putin. And as Chief Whip he managed to keep Theresa May’s dysfunction al administration together with sticking plaster. But nothing prepared him for the challenge of reopening Britain’s classrooms. ‘ He needed all the skills he learnt in the whips’ office to get the teaching unions on board,’ an ally conceded.
In the end the key to breaking the impasse was an unprecedented conference call between union heads and the scientific ‘A-Team’ of Chris Whitty, Patrick Vallance and Jenny Harries.
‘It’s the only time in the entire crisis we’ve set up a sector-specific technical panel,’ a Department of Education source explained, ‘and it worked. The union heads came away realising their members were no more at risk than people in any other profession’.
The debate is over. Last week, we decided as a nation to send our five- and six-year-olds back to school. So if it is safe for them, and safe for those who care and educate them, it is safe for all the rest of us. We cannot tell our children to go out to learn and play while we all continue to cower at home.
Actually, we aren’t all cowering. The Government table of ‘ key workers’ required to keep the nation functioning has been amended. And it’s a very long list. It includes staff in banks and building societies. Oil, gas, electric, water and sewage workers. Key staff working in t he nuclear, chemicals and telecommunications industries. Charity workers. People running the justice system. Religious staff. Even journalists.
UNTIL now, we have been content to stand at our doorsteps once a week and applaud our national heroes. But the time has come for us all to stop clapping them, and join their ranks.
When the crisis started, lockdown was the appropriate response. The risk of the NHS collapsing. Hundreds of thousands dead. The implosion of civil society. These represented a clear and present danger.
But now the risk register has been updated. And we can no longer ignore the new dangers that stand before us. Impending national economic implosion. Predictions of 6.5 million job losses. The social, health, mental health and public order crisis that will follow.
Inside No 10 there is acute awareness of this looming catastrophe. But Boris and his Ministers feel paralysed. Trapped in the trashcompactor of public opinion.
First is a terror of being seen to have ‘ moved away from the science’. In the past week this was exacerbated by claims of splits between Ministers and their experts over the very modest transition from Stage Four to Stage Three of lockdown. ‘These split stories are b******s,’ one Westminster official tells me. ‘They’re not coming from SAGE, but from a couple of individuals. There’s still a SAGE consensus and we’re following it.’
However, one Minister is more sceptical about the nature of some of the discordant briefing. ‘ We know the experts are getting ready to split from us.
‘They’re very aware the advice they gave us at the beginning of the crisis is going to come under heavy criticism when this is over. So they’re going to try to buy themselves some cover. But that’s politics.’
A second major problem is that, for a significant section of the population, the coronavirus crisis is no longer a crisis at all. Instead, it’s become the longest bank holiday in UK history.
The parks are full. Social distancing is a distant memory and the police have given up attempting to move on anyone breaking the regulations. Groups of 20 to 30 people partying in the sun are now as common a feature of Covid-19 Britain as the ubiquitous queues for a cup of coffee.
As one MP laments: ‘Rishi Sunak was attacked for wanting to wean people off furlough payments. We can’t say it publicly. But if you’re furloughed, you’re having the time of your life.’
And then there is the other great obstacle – fear. For every person basking in the lockdown sunshine, there is someone else barricaded behind closed doors, genuinely terrified this modern apocalypse will claim them or their family.
Terror that is being accentuated by a new narrative that claims the significant falls we’re seeing in infection and mortality rates are merely precursors to a deadly ‘second wave’ of the pandemic.
‘It’s driving us mad, to be honest,’ said one Minister. ‘All we’re getting at the moment is, “You can’t do X, you can’t do Y. What about the risk of a second wave?” We know there’s a risk. There’s a risk of walking down the street. But we can’t just stay in lockdown for ever.’
We can’t. Which is why this has to be the final month of national imprisonment. It can no longer simply be about ‘following the science ’. We know the risks associated with reopening society. But they now have to be balanced against the risks of not reopening society.
On Wednesday, chief boffin Sir Patrick Vallance said the R number – the rate of infection that has achieved quasi-religious status as the metric for assessing the UK’s pandemic response – would need to be kept as low as possible for when we enter the new flu season in October.
Which may be good science. But it is also impractical science. We can fight a virus, but we cannot wage perpetual war against a phantom. If the new flu season brings new threats, we will deal with them. But we can’t destroy the economy and social fabric of Britain in a misguided attempt to save ourselves from a hypothetical enemy.
We also need to shift the focus from saving life to reclaiming our lives. There is nothing this wave of the pandemic can do to our bodies that’s half as deadly as what it is currently doing to our minds. We are simultaneously atrophying and panicking – lazing in the sun, or trembling in the dark.
So let us take our national placebos. Don the masks. Implement rigid social distancing. Download the apps that will allow us to order our pints without interacting with the bar staff. If that’s what it takes to get us back to normality, so be it.
NONE of these measures will be sustainable. We’ll quickly tire of covering our faces. A couple of days back in the office will soon expose social distancing to be nothing more than a theoretical fantasy.
We will soon remember that pubs and restaurants and shops only survive by attracting customers, not treating them as plague-carriers.
But we’ll be back. And once we’re back, however much we kick and scream, normality will reimpose itself upon us.
We will also come to realise a deeper truth. That while we have talked a good game of national struggle and sacrifice, the reality is that in the main we have been relying on others to make those sacrifices on our behalf.
It’s not just been the nurses and doctors who have been serving on the front line. We’ve been asking banking assistants and shelf-stackers and binmen to take the risks we have not been prepared to take ourselves.
It’ s time to make the fight against coronavirus a truly collective national effort. ‘Our real fear is even when we reopen everything, a lot of people will still be too scared to go out,’ a worried Minister admitted.
We have to show that such fears are groundless. Drop the obsession with impenetrable R numbers. Ignore t he already redundant colour- coded lockdown phases. And park fears of a ‘second wave’.
Because if we don’t, the wave of job losses, collapsing business and social disorder that follows in their wake will sweep us all away.
One day soon our children will turn to us and say: ‘What did you do in the fight against Covid-19?’
Our response cannot be: ‘I sent you out amongst the virus, then hid myself away at home.’