Month: March 2020

David Runciman on what the Covina-19 crisis reveals about democracy, politics, power and order:

Under a lockdown, democracies reveal what they have in common with other political regimes: here too politics is ultimately about power and order. But we are also getting to see some of the fundamental differences. It is not that democracies are nicer, kinder, gentler places. They may try to be, but in the end that doesn’t last. Democracies do, though, find it harder to make the really tough choices. Pre-emption – the ability to tackle a problem before it becomes acute – has never been a democratic strength. We wait until we have no choice and then we adapt. That means democracies are always going to start off behind the curve of a disease like this one, though some are better at playing catch-up than others.

Heartfelt piece by headteacher Jules White in today’s Guardian

Schools need more cleaners to complete regular hygiene work and deep cleans if there is a short-term closure. So give us access to agencies who must prioritise schools… Sats tests in primary schools should be abandoned in the current circumstances. We must also consider children of real disadvantage: schools are often their place of sanctuary and constancy…. Urgent help is required for children who have to deal with disability. Schools need emergency resources to help these most vulnerable young people, and now.

Farhad Manjoo in the New York Times suggests that the Coronavirus pandemic could lead to fixes to society:

“As the coronavirus spiders across the planet, I’ve been thinking about the illness as a very expensive stress test for the global order — an acute, out-of-nowhere shock that is putting pressure on societies at their weakest points. Some nations, like Iran and perhaps Italy, are teetering under the threat; others, like South Korea, are showing remarkable resilience. The best ones will greet the crisis as an opportunity to build a more robust society, even better prepared for a future unseen danger. The worst will treat it as a temporary annoyance, refusing to consider deeper fixes even if they somehow stagger through this crisis.

… What we’re learning is that our society might be far more brittle than we had once imagined. The virus has laid bare our greatest vulnerability: We’ve got the world’s biggest economy and the world’s strongest military, but it turns out we might have built the entire edifice upon layers and layers of unaccounted-for risk, because we forgot to assign a value to the true measure of a nation’s success — the well-being of its population.”

I’m less optimistic. I think countries like Britain and America will “stagger” through this pandemic, congratulate ourselves for surviving despite the odds and then have a justification for another decade or more of austerity and further cuts to public services.