(Edited on 30th July 2020 to add Newsnight video)
What's becoming clearer and clearer to me is that we're being led by a UK government which has a deadly ideology. Of course that was always true because of the government's criminal inaction on the climate crisis, but the corona virus pandemic has shown it to be true on a smaller scale of this particular crisis.
I think this video of an interview with government adviser John Edmunds is really instructive.
I think the key part of the interview is from about minute 9. At 13.40 he says, "It is hard to imagine we would do that [take restrictive measures] here in the UK.... I don't think anybody looked at it [lockdown]... it was difficult to imagine just how easy the lockdown was... that people actually would go along with it."
In other words we didn't go into lockdown as early as we should have done (which most people seem to be saying now would have cut our death toll by a half, if not three quarters) because of what we believed about human nature. In other words those making decisions thought that people were basically selfish, and would not restrict their freedoms, would not make sacrifices to save lives. Therefore they believed the lockdown would not work.
They were surprised by how much people were prepared to make sacrifices. They were surprised by how good we were because their ideology was based on the idea that human beings are basically selfish.
That wasn't a scientific assessment. It was a theological one. The decision not to go into lockdown earlier was based on a Thatcherite neoliberal ideology that people are basically selfish and want the biggest freedoms to do whatever they like regardless of the consequences. As John Edmunds says repeatedly in that video - it was a failure of imagination. They just couldn't imagine that people would be prepared to make those sacrifices. They were entirely blind to the potential of human nature.
They were wrong. The British public were prepared to make very large sacrifices for the sake of saving lives.
It demonstrates how deadly that political/theological ideology is. It is an ideology that is literally responsible for the death of about 50,000 people in the last few months.
I wonder if we will get a reckoning about this. And if we're prepared to learn the lessons from this crisis, and apply it to the climate crisis.
Video from Newsnight in July 2020 that deals with this:
What's becoming clearer and clearer to me is that we're being led by a UK government which has a deadly ideology. Of course that was always true because of the government's criminal inaction on the climate crisis, but the corona virus pandemic has shown it to be true on a smaller scale of this particular crisis.
I think this video of an interview with government adviser John Edmunds is really instructive.
I think the key part of the interview is from about minute 9. At 13.40 he says, "It is hard to imagine we would do that [take restrictive measures] here in the UK.... I don't think anybody looked at it [lockdown]... it was difficult to imagine just how easy the lockdown was... that people actually would go along with it."
In other words we didn't go into lockdown as early as we should have done (which most people seem to be saying now would have cut our death toll by a half, if not three quarters) because of what we believed about human nature. In other words those making decisions thought that people were basically selfish, and would not restrict their freedoms, would not make sacrifices to save lives. Therefore they believed the lockdown would not work.
They were surprised by how much people were prepared to make sacrifices. They were surprised by how good we were because their ideology was based on the idea that human beings are basically selfish.
That wasn't a scientific assessment. It was a theological one. The decision not to go into lockdown earlier was based on a Thatcherite neoliberal ideology that people are basically selfish and want the biggest freedoms to do whatever they like regardless of the consequences. As John Edmunds says repeatedly in that video - it was a failure of imagination. They just couldn't imagine that people would be prepared to make those sacrifices. They were entirely blind to the potential of human nature.
They were wrong. The British public were prepared to make very large sacrifices for the sake of saving lives.
It demonstrates how deadly that political/theological ideology is. It is an ideology that is literally responsible for the death of about 50,000 people in the last few months.
I wonder if we will get a reckoning about this. And if we're prepared to learn the lessons from this crisis, and apply it to the climate crisis.
Video from Newsnight in July 2020 that deals with this:
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