Money

The book The Social Distance Between Us – that deserves and needs to be more widely read, certainly by those in the UK’s higher echelons – is full of simple, logical and clear views that really show the true picture of Britain.

One of its passages about Covid-19 stood out and is quoted below and showed, as I have liked to think for a long time, the money is always there, just not necessarily the (non-social class) intention to help or change the very systems (and prejudices) that actually exacerbate the issues the state then says it can help assist and fix but doesn’t want (or see the need) to admit to.

The Covid-19 crisis, as many have stated repeatedly since its emergence, merely accelerated a process which was already well underway – the political, social and economic decline of Britain. While the ominous cloud of coronavirus continues to lord over us all, casting its unending shadow over our lives and livelihoods, the true character of British society has been laid so utterly bare that, in the years to come, the painful revelation may prove to have been the slenderest of silver linings.

So, what have we learned? Well, we learned that class remains the primary dividing line in society. This was evidenced early in the crisis when half the country moved onto Zoom, while the other half delivered them alcohol, sex toys and bread-makers. This was evidenced in the higher rate of infection in communities that depend on public transport, struggle to access healthcare services, where housing is of a lower quality and too many people are crowded in too little space. This continues to be evidenced in the level of exposure of essential workers not simply to infection but also to unemployment, mental health crises, the grief of loved ones dying and to perishing themselves.

We learned the state interventions are actually OK – as long as they are targeted disproportionately at the livelihoods of economically viable, politically lucrative, over-mortgaged sections of the population, whose ‘stay-cations’, credit cards, gas-guzzling cars and gym memberships must be covered at all costs. We learned that some people are trustworthy enough to receive non-means-tested state handouts by the tens-of-thousands while others must wait an arbitrary number of weeks for benefits that are not enough to live on. We learned that after a decade of austerity (which left tens of thousands destitute, homeless, hungry or dead, the ‘magic money tree’ we were told didn’t exist was not only real but had blossomed so prolifically that the state was able to fork out millions providing discount Nando’s over the summer. We learned that ‘community’ and ‘looking after your neighbour’ are more important than individualism and self-interest and that when politicians use their public platforms to emphasise social solidarity and not division, and that it’s OK to regard ourselves as more than rats in a race, the national mood can shift quite dramatically from mean-spiritedness and distrust to compassion, empathy and harmony. We have learned that any crisis which might befall the middle and upper classes will be rapidly escalated to the status of a public health emergency within days but that drugs deaths, rough sleeping, child poverty and femicide, epidemics spanning decades, still do not qualify for this special designation.

We learned that governments ‘follow the science’ when it is politically convenient but that leaders actively ignore and dismiss the science when it comes to issues that affect the vulnerable, like drug addiction and poverty-induced child neglect and abuse, or human social connection.

You could give every rough sleeper a home with the money the government wasted on things that didn’t work. You could reduce the attainment gap for a fraction of the cost of the furlough scheme. You could cut child poverty and drug deaths by thousands by closing off the tax loopholes that allow the wealthiest and best connected to squirrel away billions. Before this pandemic, people would have called you a loony for suggesting – after the financial crash for example – that the government should step in and just pay people’s wages until a crisis blew over, but when the interests of the affluent and the wealthy are threatened, what was once deemed dangerously radical suddenly becomes a simple matter of common sense.

Darren McGarvey The Social Distance Between Us