Features

The American economist and historian Robert Higgs noted long ago that during the 20th century the various wars, and the various declared equivalents of war, such as against drugs and viruses, regularly led to permanent expansions of state power. Power is the ability to coerce physically, war being the pre-eminent coercion. There has to be some reason that citizens of the UK and US are coerced to pay about 40 per cent of GDP for the wars and other activities of the state, whereas a century ago they paid about 10 per cent. Further, the state’s recently expanding regulation of many private activities — literally a million regulations promulgated by the US federal government, for example — calls on citizens to pay indirectly, too.

On Saturday evening, Christians will prepare for an Easter unlike any other. With every church closed, from St Paul’s Cathedral to the meanest country chapel, Anglican worshippers will be directed to a website where lay leaders, priests and bishops will hold a ‘virtual vigil’ ending at dawn on Easter Sunday. In Westminster Cathedral, the mother church of Catholics in England and Wales, a deacon will sing the great Easter proclamation known as the Exsultet. But this year, when the final syllable dies away, he will look out into the nave and see row upon row of vacant seats. It’s faith, but without the faithful. It’s happening the world over. This week Jewish families were forced to celebrate the Passover Seder without guests for the first time.

Less than three weeks after Andy Burnham was elected mayor of Greater Manchester three years ago, the city was hit by the terrorist attack that claimed 22 lives at an Ariana Grande concert. Now Burnham is facing a very different sort of crisis as corona-virus sweeps through the north-west. Manchester is about two weeks behind London in the epidemic curve. We had first met in his office to talk about the city and its politics. But that was at the start of last month — my questions, and his answers, were quickly overtaken by events. When we speak again, this time over Skype, much has changed.

The world as we have known it for the past 40 years has come to a stop. We have a supply chain crisis, a demand crisis, a labour market crisis and an oil price crisis. The second crash that people were long predicting has arrived — but against the backdrop of the Covid-19 threat, it seems like a second-order story. The pound has already hit its lowest rate for decades, and more shocks may occur in the bond and currency markets. How long the disaster will last — or how much worse it will get — is anyone’s guess. Thanks to the virus, events which earlier this year would have been scarcely conceivable have come to pass.

We have seen crashes before, recessions and depressions, but nothing like this. Our fear of coronavirus has hindered and halted every aspect of daily life. We look out of our windows and barely recognise the country we’re in: police film dog-walkers and pour black dye into lagoons to deter swimmers. We wait in queues for empty-shelved supermarkets. The stock market collapses, surges, then collapses again. None of the old rules make sense. Welcome to the world of Coronomics. If this were a normal recession, the remedy would be simple: encourage people to go out, spend money and boost the economy. But today’s public health concerns require the government to repress the economy, while trying to keep it afloat at the same time.

As we contemplate the havoc being wrought by coronavirus, most of us see mainly sickness, death and economic ruin. Dr Rupert Read, spokesman for the climate protest group Extinction Rebellion — plus sometime Green party candidate, and associate professor of philosophy at the University of East Anglia — has rather a different view. In this pandemic, he writes, ‘there is a huge opportunity for XR… It is essential that we do not let this crisis go to waste.’ Read’s thoughts are set out in a paper entitled ‘Some strategic scenario-scoping of the coronavirus-XR nexus.’ The paper is not meant to be widely read. ‘NB, this is a confidential document for internal XR use, NOT for publication!’ he writes at the head. Small wonder.

It was sunny on Monday so I took the children swimming in Mousehole harbour. It was almost empty but a woman sanding a boat on the quayside scowled at me. She couldn’t hear the children’s Cornish accents, which might tell her that I live here. There have been tensions for years between native Cornish and the incomers who buy houses and drape them with nautical-themed junk. With pandemic, they have developed into hostility. A sign appeared on the bus stop in Mousehole: ‘If you have travelled from a hotspot area outside Cornwall (like London) you are putting vulnerable people in this village at risk of death. Please come back when the virus peak has passed, until then travel is selfish and unkind.’ But it was grey and windy that day, and the sign blew away.

When times are hard it helps to remember those who’ve endured far harder times. I remember my friend Manfred Alexander, who escaped from a concentration camp and hid in my grandfather’s flat in Berlin during the second world war. The month he spent alone in that apartment was far harder than any self-isolation I’ll ever face, yet he survived and prospered. Manfred Alexander was born in 1920, into a bourgeois German-Jewish family, and became friends with my Gentile German grandfather in Berlin in the 1930s. Growing up in Berlin, Judaism wasn’t a big part of Manfred’s identity. It was only when he was expelled from school for being Jewish that he learnt who his Jewish classmates were.

From the moment when Boris Johnson announced that the country was moving from containment to ‘delay’ in handling coronavirus, the world’s biggest healthcare organisation has been on a war footing. What doctors like me have witnessed over the past days and weeks has been nothing short of extraordinary. Trusts in the NHS declared a ‘major incident’ on the evening of the announcement, and emergency plans swung into action within hours. By the time I came into work the next morning, managers, who had been up all night, had already started to implement profound changes to the way in which the hospital and services were run, and this continued over the following days. It was replicated in every hospital across the country.