Why we're probably Coronaf***ed

I’m pleased to finally have something positive to say about Coronavirus, the Tories, and our current political situation.

Only kidding! We’re f*cked.

Here’s why.

1. People ain’t realising sh*t. The idea that finally ‘the people’ would realise they have been had, and rise up against their capitalist oppressors, demand a universal basic income, a greener society, a decentred economy, and proper investment in public services – a sort of COVID Futurism – was always pretty far-fetched. Our societies, and their political ideologies, are very resilient. They’re designed to avoid change. Is global, untrammelled capitalism, which has long relied on ‘crisis capitalism’ to bolster itself, likely to survive 2 months of a half-arsed (in the UK and US) lockdown? Hmmm. Especially since at the moment the main thing on people’s minds is how soon they can get a perm and a Big Mac.

2. Those who dream of a return to a welfare state or a even universal basic income, by referring to the post-War welfare moment, are wrong. And I know you’re probably sick of hearing this, but here we go again. The parallels with the Second World War used on all sides of the debate are flawed in so many ways – that was nearly 6 years, with our infrastructure destroyed, and a society used to a militaristic lockdown with legal enforcement, and bombarded with daily ideology about a nation pulling together. Not just a few rainbows, and credulous dickheads banging pots in a doorway three months after voting for the privatisation of the NHS by a man who hid in a fridge. There was also the imminent threat of an alternative after WWII – countries going Red, with a massive military machine ready to support them, across the globe. That alternative made it pretty vital to the powerful that some change was made to avoid the alternative. Now, there is no alternative.

But haven’t people had to think about the importance of life and come together as one? Well, more on that shortly, but the sense of ‘all together now’ in the War was a) greatly exaggerated, and b) was hugely bolstered by mass deaths and visible destruction in WWII. There have been no bombs, no Blitz, no immediate and obvious daily threat to life. People who die, or even sicken, disappear into hospital, can’t even be visited. Or they avoid going to hospital and are never counted. The bodies are squirreled away without funerals. They may seem more like disappearances than deaths for those not intimately affected. When people come back from the brink, people wonder if this whole thing is a hoax. They didn’t do that when Fred Bagshaw had his legs blown off by a doodlebug. The sense of overwhelming change by an encounter with imminent mortality has not been forthcoming for most.

3. Things can change back SO easily. After WWII, women whose lives had changed utterly – working in factories, being the main breadwinner, joining the army, doing all sorts of jobs unimaginable before – thought their arguments had been won. Nope. Back in the kitchen with you. Massive ideological backlash, desperate to re-centre society on its previous models. Never underestimate how temporary social change can be.

4.     The NHS mythology has largely worked. Even NHS doctors are getting f*cked off with it now, but nobody is listening. The NHS is already being further privatised. The switcheroo of clapping for pay, charitable donations and gratitude, in place of investment or PPE, has worked very well indeed. Congratulations to Dominic Cummings on that. Captain Tom and his cheerleaders at the Express and Mail have made the NHS a charity. The myth of the NHS has come to stand in place of the actual NHS.

What’s more, anything is now possible, because the Tories have realised what Fox News and the New Right have – that you can do anything as long as you say certain words. We are more in a post-truth world than ever before. The use of myth to replace reality has been discovered, again, as a winning strategy by the most immoral people who have ever ‘led’ us.

5.     Democracy has been asleep, if not suspended. All of this is made easier by the fact that over the last two months, we have had no opposition, no democratic accountability, and news which has focused entirely on panic and drama rather than politics. I can hardly begin to think about all the horrific things we are going to find out the Government has done, over the next year or so. Contracts given to cronies, and Public Health functions destroyed deliberately by the Tories in 2010 being replaced by SERCO, will be the least of our worries. Remember that in the background there are silent preparations for Brexit happening, with legislative horrors being allowed to fly under the radar. And they have deliberately – yes, come on, deliberately – manoeuvred us into an now probably unavoidable Brexit crash out.

Furthermore, the terrifying thing is that this Government has been so laughably incompetent (literally going around spreading the virus by shaking hands in a hospital. You could not make this shit up). And indeed, every bit as bad as we feared. (Same with Trump.) And the problem is that they will realise that they can literally get away with, if not murder, the culpable homicide of many many thousands of people.

6.     Social distancing has allowed a new era of social atomisation of communities into individual consumers, with nothing left to connect us except arm’s length commercial transactions which no longer even have to be glued together by politeness, eye contact or a thank-you. Think about it: drive-in burgers, and occasional jaunts to the garden centre in our cars; manual labourers bringing you takeaways as you let in the cleaner via the ginnel, but they may not use the bathroom. Internet shopping and streaming media without any possibility of meeting others outside of those transactions – save through capitalist-mediated social media platforms harvesting your data. It is a neo-liberal wet dream. How easy it would be to continue it. 

7.     Social distancing has changed our psyche – which could be made permanent. Interpersonally, social distancing has created a crackle of deep animosity, fear, and loathing between human beings in the city, who eye each other suspiciously as spreaders of disease, or obstacles to obtaining resources. People fight over whether to wear a mask or not. People cough on each other to show dominance. The mental health toll of the crisis has left people withdrawn, less able to relate to each other in person. Indeed, I’ve heard many people saying they are anxious about socialisation again as it’s been so long. Essentially, Thatcher’s idea that there is no such thing as society, just collections of individuals – and consumers – is becoming the main achievement of Coronavirus. How easily will we go back?

And meanwhile, the ideology and myth of community and care has prevailed. ‘We’re all in this together’ TV ads by banks currently evicting people, or getting them into insurmountable debt. Cuddle emojis from Facebook, which would have the same chilling portentousness as if they had come from a python. And its worryingly fascistic public performed rituals (the clapping and rainbows). These have replaced the real thing of community with a grotesque marketised parody of itself. Saying we care about community and worrying about old people strangely goes hand in hand with stockpiling bogroll and hand sanitiser and price gouging on Ebay.

8.     The economic fallout is just what the nastiest, most diabolical capitalist scumbags have long wanted. Of course it has also had very major negative effects on the economy for some, but very much not for others. Replacing some markets with alternative markets, and actively increasing consumption on some things, even as others lose their market, is the stuff of capitalist opportunism. This is the ‘disruption’ that the entrepreneurs/ exploiters of our age crave. Depressions are often just redistributions. The top 1% still thrive.

That will also sit alongside a new ability to realign rights and living standards to Victorian conditions that we are seeing in, say, the US in their rising unemployment, or in the UK with the manual labourers told to get the f*ck back on the tube. So we can look forward to an employers’ market to end all employers’ markets – a perfect storm for the scummiest scumbags to clean up.

Jacob Rees-Mogg, for example, whose hedge fund has been pushing this as a fantastic opportunity for investors (which is probably true if they are new) will be tweaking his nipples and panting - after all, he is the son of the figurehead of crisis capitalism. As Guardian writer Andy Beckett noted, William Rees Mogg’s book ‘The Sovereign Individual: The Coming Economic Revolution and How to Survive and Prosper in It’, beloved of Silicon Valley entrepreneurs and the ERG, uses a quote from Tom Stoppard’s Arcadia: “The future is disorder.” To be clear, this is seen as a cause for celebration. For the Rees-Moggs, and many modern capitalists, their desired future of the world and their rightful place in it only comes after some kind of huge crisis, which concentrates all the more wealth into the hands of a chosen few and allows a new world order which they can control entirely from gated communities and strongholds in places like New Zealand. If this sounds like a conspiracy theory, well, okay, fine, but it’s not mine, and it’s not a theory. It’s actually just kind of… well… a conspiracy. Rees-Mogg’s dog whistles about Soros and international elites (nudge nudge) are nothing compared to the actual avowed plans and desires of his ilk.  

So if you’re thinking that all of the Neo-cons are worried about this big fall in the economy, just remember – for every few Richard Bransons, there is a Jeff Bezos, whose fortune has risen by £40bn over the last two months – but still doesn’t want to pay sick pay for his US workers.

Meanwhile, his US employees of course have no chance of working elsewhere now there are 40m unemployed in the US, so they’re over a barrel.

Furthermore, if corporations cut their wage bill as well as their income, or even better, more of the former and less of the latter, this is a fantastic opportunity to increase their wealth, realign their market, and make massive increases in profitability. American billionaires, it has been reported, have made an extra £434bn during the crisis.

So Richard Branson and his sad whiny wheedling for a handout, or some overexpanded high street restaurant chains complaining about loss of covers, are small-fry compared to Bezos, Zuckerberg, Gates, etc. It’s the hyper-wealthy who lead capitalism at this stage. The people who think they play with the big boys because they sell pizzas or fly a few jumbo jets are just nostalgic for the 20th century. Bankers get bailed out, not Boeings and burgers.

9.     The environment may be even more f*ckeroonied. Everyone has been swooning about the sound of the returning birds (including me), and the peacefulness in the streets. I’ve been marvelling at the foxes and squirrels in my garden. Well, that has gone within a matter of days. (I worry about the many comments a few days ago about how quickly the environment recovered when we stopped polluting it for a couple of months. No need to stop, then!)

But also, it’s been made extremely clear that public transport is almost entirely off limits for quite some time. It’s only a matter of time before the next (corona?)virus hits. We are realising – as if we didn’t already know – that mass transit systems, especially in cities, are filthy disease-superhighway hellholes.

So what is the answer? On your bike and walk, says Boris Johnson, who works from home, lives five minutes from the Houses of Parliament, and gets a car anyway.

And how will one get to the newly reopened garden centre? One will drive the Jag of course.

How will one get to work, should one have to? Again, it’s going to be the car. As Gary Numan once predicted, the car may become ‘the only way to live.’

BUT WAIT! Won’t we all be working from home? Well, no, we won’t ALL. Who is going to do your perm or flip your burger or pack up your fuschias at the garden centre? But for those of us who do….

10.  Middle class professionals’ working lives may get much much worse. Currently middle class professionals enjoy a level of autonomy in the workplace that working class people could not imagine. That is because they have generally so well-absorbed the prevailing economic ideologies that they can be ‘trusted’ to be ‘professional’. But working from home and its supposed ‘autonomy’ has given employers a fantastic opportunity to improve productivity, and get more out of people for less. They won’t need offices. People will work as well as live at home. They will start earlier and finish later. With no physical separation between work and home, the mental separation – and certainly communication separation – becomes even less.

Furthermore, with the increasing use of technologies like Slack and Zoom, we are now reaching a 100% surveilled, totalised workplace. Don’t answer your slack message within 30 seconds? Hmmm. Are you really working? Time for a Zoom call with HR.

Going out for lunch? No, meetings are scheduled at any time – simply because you have no excuse to not be there. Why aren’t you at your desk - it’s only 10 paces to the kitchen? A break at the water cooler? Leave those cats alone or your ‘Slack’ will give you away.

None of which is to say I don’t want to be able to work from home. But here is the problem - every opportunity for ordinary people to improve the quality of their lives is pretty much an opportunity for predatory market capitalism and its reigning oligarchs to steal it back. That is essentially what ‘profit’ is. Every advance or gain is stolen and turned into something for the few, not the many.

Not a conspiracy

Let’s be clear. I am not suggesting that any of these things are a conspiracy. I’m not suggesting that coronavirus was invented in a lab by Dominic Cummings and Michael Gove. Although frankly if they’d thought of it, they probably would. The point is Milton Friedman’s (and he is a pretty good source if you’e looking at how right wingers destroy the world, something about horses and mouths):

‘Only a crisis - actual or perceived - produces real change. When that crisis occurs, the actions that are taken depend on the ideas that are lying around.’

Milton Friedman, Capitalism and Freedom, 1962

People who look for conspiracies in the production of crisis events are looking at the wrong thing. The problem is the ideologies and the power structures that pre-exist any crisis. Because those are what will determine the response, and the shape of the world that follows. The people who though that 9/11 was an ‘inside job’ failed to notice that some shitty awful thing is always about to happen. The point is to be ready when it does. And that was what Rumsfeld, Cheney and co. did.

So

Here is the thing. People need to stop waiting for a ‘great realisation’ when we all come to consciousness and suddenly demand what is rightfully ours. It ain’t happening. And if anything, crises like these tend to hugely benefit those in power.

And here is the other thing. When these things happen, you need to have rulers who are in some way benevolent and not entirely selfish. Oopsy.

Saying that your government ‘will surely’ now ‘have to’ do X or Y ignores the fact that, once you have voted for them, they don’t have to do a damned thing. Your one choice is that moment you vote. After that, everything is at the whims of the people you gave absolute power. And if their whims are utterly selfish - well.

Now what?

So what are we going to do to make these things not happen?

I have two suggestions.

1) Destroy the 3 most virulent sources of right wing propaganda in the U.K. and the US. It’s 2 newspapers in the U.K. and a TV station in the US. They are far, far, more powerful than any political party in the world. Concentrating energy on them is a prerequisite for any lasting social change. To change them will change people’s perception of reality and open up the only possible source of change - the ballot box.

2) Support whichever left wing - even centre left - party is possible.

In that order.

More on which later. I need a drink first.

Killing with kindness: How ‘Raising Money for the NHS’ will kill it

I’m struggling as the political news gets worse every day. It’s no fun being proved right, as Cassandra found out. Remember, they all told her to stop being negative and look at the wonderful acts of kindness and generosity right in front of her. And then, boom, a thousand Greeks came out of a horse’s arsehole and slit everyone’s throats. And that, my friends, is a better fate than what awaits the NHS.

More myth, ritual, ideology

The mythologies are increasing. The Dad’s Army cosiness of the elderly retired Colonel puttering up and down his garden to ‘raise money for the NHS’. The perfect mythic resonance - Second World War, already a myth. Add this to the existing myth, more resonance, more mythologising. Joe Wicks ‘raising money for the NHS’ - on every TV, every newsfeed.

The chilling weekly religious ritual of clapping in the street for the NHS - simply to show others in the street we ‘care.’ (What, are there nurses everywhere walking down the street? Is it for them? Don’t forget people started doing this in other countries to clap for actual heath workers who were walking past.) A spontaneous act of appreciation has been co-opted as a tool by those in power to reassure you, to ensure that you are thinking right, ‘thinking of others’, being good. Don’t question. Don’t act. Its institutionalisation, its aestheticisation, its mythologisation, its ideologisation as a form of ritual, is a tool of control, of developing groupthink. Boris Johnson’s doorstep Thursday ritual is a two-fingered salute to the money, investment, to any kind of strategy to undo the endless damage caused to the service over the last 10 years.

Raising money: why charity?

So everyone is ‘raising money for the NHS.’

TELL ME: What are they raising money for? What will it pay for? What IS this ‘NHS’ they are raising money for? WHY are they raising money for a service paid for and publicly funded by taxation?

And £20m? What will that pay for? Why is the Government so pleased about this when it is a drop in the ocean?

The answer is: because it will help to end its funding by taxation. Of course, (I presume) that is not Colonel Tom’s intention. But it sure as shit is that of the mainstream press, the politicians, the people who profit from public sector dissolution. The slow, strategic, turn of our conception of that institution, of how we view, conceive, believe in that thing, is exactly why this has the hegemonic legs it has.

As I warned before: this appeal to human charity; this turning of the virus into a story of titanic human struggle against cruel and capricious nature, is very quickly coming to sit alongside a story of things that ‘simply must be done to protect and save the NHS. That thing we all agree we love and venerate, right?’

Here’s how it goes:

• Privatise the NHS to ‘help save it’

• Ration treatment to ‘ensure it isn’t overwhelmed’

• Get the ‘support’ of big business to make it more ‘efficient’ and ‘protect it’ - from itself

This is the Orwellian doublespeak that has served the neoliberal right for decades - ‘saving Medicare for future generations’ was Gingrich-era doublespeak for cutting medicare in the US.

The charity trap

“Ooh Cecily, I had a simply maaaaarvellous time looking at the poor people in my hospital. Isn’t it wonderful to think my 0.000000001% of my income made such a huge difference the three people they were able to treat? Now let’s eat a swan.”

The whole nation is walking into a trap. The more people choose, with their donations, with their Facebook likes or cuddle emojis, to normalise the idea that the NHS is some heroic voluntaristic enterprise built on personal heroism, sacrifice, and generosity, the quicker it dies. Because charity relies on voluntarism. But basic health care to avoid your population drowning in in their own lung fluid cannot be voluntaristic.

When people portray this as a great step forward, and a sign of our community coming together, can I ask you: what do you think was there before the NHS?

The answer is: the Dowager Countess giving silvery nothings to a little local hospital that treated the deserving poor, as long as she was on the Board, and got the recognition she wanted. And chose who got treated. That is where we are now headed.

There are far more recent precedents: the ‘Big Society’ spoke about voluntarism and charity and community activism, but was simply a way in for massive private sector providers. ‘Any willing provider’ was said to be charities and local community groups. Bollocks. It was SERCO and Reed and ‘social businesses’ such as A4E. ‘Big Society’ meant ‘Shrinking State’.

Guess what’s in the news

And so we see in the Guardian that the UK government is ’using pandemic to transfer NHS duties to private sector’. ‘Critics claim Matt Hancock has accelerated dismantling of state healthcare’ (The Guardian, Mon 4 May 2020 20.25 BST)

The Tory government is trying to give all its vital new test and trace contracts to SERCO - and refusing to reinstate the public health departments they gutted in 2010 that would have been the first line support from the start of the crisis. (You know, the experts in epidemiology….)

So while they’ve been praising NHS key workers to the hilt, they’re actually further privatising it. Which goes to show exactly what I was saying: the myths are deliberate attempts to obscure the political reality with trans-historical sentimental bullshit. And the classic - and this is the sadistic, mendacious strategy of Dominic ‘Thanatos’ Cummings - is that the population are willingly, nay gleefully, collaborating, and accelerating this process.

’Community,’ not ’Society’; Sentiment, not Social Justice

“Marie Curie is closer to our NHS workers than Florence Nightingale. She died horribly from an entirely preventable disease due to a lack of PPE too.”

But neither is a substitue for a social democracy.

Meanwhile, as I said: Boris Johnson’s illness, the clapping in the street, all of this will be used to hide, and eventually directly to justify, the dismantling and privatisation of the NHS. And the gross sentimentalisation - the rainbows in windows, the schmaltzy TV music, the we-are-all-in-this-together nonsense, the enduring Florence Nightingale mythology (actually Marie Curie is closer - she died horribly from an entirely preventable disease due to lack of PPE at work too), is a fig leaf, a mask, a grinning, gurning shit-eating smile as you stick the knife in the heart of the people of the UK.

Even more chillingly, what seems to me to be happening is a classic Thatcherite switcheroo: ‘community’ in place of society. Remember Thatcher’s ‘Care in the Community’? Another morsel of Orwellian doublespeak. Nothing to do with care. Nothing to do with community. From a person who emphatically and avowedly did not believe in society. Highlight and foreground community; highlight and foreground ‘care’ - stick a cuddle emoji on it - and hey presto, you gut mental heath services and slash the NHS. The Tories have long form in dismantling society and replacing with community - by which they mean, Capital.

Globally, we are seeing a sentimentalisation that obscures an enduring lack of genuine social care, and sometimes, obvious and wilful escalation of social injustice (in the US especially). It is the mythology of care that stands in place of giving a shit about anyone but yourself; the sentimentality that stands in place of society, that is the real virus. It will kill many, many people.

So, what’s the answer?

Well, it’s too late for now. You have 5 years of this at least. There may be very little left after that.

But we can only stop voting for these grotesques, these parasites, these predatory beasts.

And all the good will in the world - the Colonel, the hot TV exercise presenter, the people who genuinely do believe that we need a more equitable society that actually cares about people - is no good if everyone votes for the people who have happily let thousands of vulnerable British citizens perish for want of a bit of cash.

So when you next have a choice: Don’t give your money to the NHS. Pay your taxes. Give your vote.

Covering up Coronavirus

The mythology that covers up the social reality - and makes the status quo seem natural, and unchallengeable, and prevents real social change - couldn’t have been more perfectly expressed than what happened recently in Catford.

The local pub, boarded up, had slogans daubed on its walls shortly after the lockdown. Local leftwing activist graffiti. ‘Covid Futurism’ ‘Economy of Care’ ‘Basic Universal Income’ ‘Bury Capital’.

Within two weeks, the activist graffiti had been replaced by the property owner with corporate-sponsored, state-sanctioned-style messaging ‘street-art’ graffiti’ by corporate artists Nathan Blackmore/Harry Bowen, whose work is already plastered on every building site in London to ensure actual graffiti can’t appear. Again, perhaps the two artists are genuinely committed to nice things like the NHS. But the thrust - the way cultural hegemony is acting here - is clear.

Each one a little NHS figure. Each one trumpeting a soothing mainstream message of the moment. Stay Positive! (Meek and mild.) Think smart! (Think the right things, those which you have been told by your masters.) Stay Safe! (Because you’re fucked if you get the virus as we no longer have a health service.) Care for others! (Because we don’t.)

If you wanted evidence of the mythological cover up of the Covid crisis of capitalism it would be hard to look further than actual street art about soclialism being literally covered over by corporate street art about the myth of the NHS hero.

There’s another question, about strategy.

One thing you might ask is: what would people who aren’t into radical politics make of the first lot of slogans? Who will understand ‘Covid Futurism’? ‘Basic Universal Income’ doesn’t have the same ring to it as ‘Stay Safe’, does it?

One thing we have to note is how powerful, how effective right-wing mythology is, because it hooks itself onto things people they can easily read, easily understand, and which seem true because they are connected through signs to everything we have been exposed to since we were born. One thing left wing activists need to do is think harder about what myths we can make, and use, to combat those of the right wing.

It’s no use being sniffy about it. The evidence of our history, and our present suggests that myth is simply how we learn, think, and relate to our social reality.

It’s all the more difficult when left wing totems such as the NHS are taken away, and turned into symbological weapons to degrade and dismantle the very thing they were originally meant to stand for.

The Myths of Coronavirus: An epidemic of bullshit

When the Government named the massive hospital they were building, in an Abu Dhabi-owned building, ‘Florence Nightingale Hospital’, I spat out half of my last remaining gin and tonic. (Never mind toilet paper; I’ve heard there’s a Fever Tree shortage.) The minute that name was out there, you could see the media messaging strategy being formed. The narrative of the selfless individual heroic nurse is a brilliant (if rather obvious) way to hide the massive socio-economic failure of austerity that helped to bring us to this point.

Myth Today

French structuralist/ post-structuralist Roland Barthes should be the man of the moment . His book Mythologies provides a more pertinent than ever analysis of the use of generic, intertextual, highly emotive stories and images, which often seem to have lasted for time immemorial. They are recirculated endlessly by our cultures: by the press, by images, text, by stories. He calls these myths ‘a type of speech’ or discourse - a type of heightened speech and imagery designed to create and secure ideology. Most of all, they persuade us that what is cannot be otherwise. Nostalgia is rarely far away. History is one of its most common tools.

The Tories have always been the most astonishing purveyors of myth - as conservatives, they operate at myth’s heartlands - blood and soil, history as an anchor, as tradition. And myths act as a way of persuading people that the way the world is, when it is under conservative control is not just ‘the way things have always been’, but also ‘the way things have to be’.

The word here is an ugly one, that Microsoft’s spellchecker always underlines: dehistoricisation. It’s the process of turning what is history, and hence the product of specific conditions (in the Marxian sense, as made by men, albeit not in conditions of their own choosing) into something which is outside of history, and beyond man’s direct influence. It tries to turn ideology, politics, economy, and the decisions of humans into things which are as natural as gravity or the music of the spheres.

World War Two

Dominic Cummings and Boris Johnson are dab hands at this, although they are really only doing what Tory culture, since its inception, was born to do. It was no accident that Barthes was initially writing at the height of Gaullism. If there is a change, it is perhaps simply the sheer effrontery of its obviousness, its cynically fully-awake deployment - and the fact that it has been so enthusiastically swallowed by the public in the last three or four years. Cummings and Johnson aren’t enormously imaginative. But they don’t need to be. Myth simply builds on existing stories, and works to recirculate them repeatedly so that they become stronger and stronger. They can then be deployed to any ideological purpose - usually nefarious.

As we know, Brexit was all about Plucky Little Britain standing up against the rest of the world. And now, the myth of WWII has been relied on to explain the bungled and nonsensical strategy of tackling coronavirus, just as much as it was for justifying the economic meltdown likely to follow Brexit. There have been ongoing suggestions in media briefings of a war footing, personifications of the virus to the extent that it sometimes seems that Coronavirus is a sentient villain like Adolf Hitler. It worked all too well. There was even a veritable charcuterie counter of Gammons telling people that they were not privy to the Government’s secret strategy because this was a time of war - you couldn’t let people know all your tactics! Yes, don’t let the virus know, that sneaky little blighter with a silly moustache and only one ball.

The thing about myths, about dehistoricisation, is that they pull away all of the political, social, and economic contingenciesof history just to create a useful story. The British myth for all seasons is that we will pull through this because we pulled through The War. We have all seen, I’m sure, the Baby Boomer obsession about how ‘everyone pulled together’ in WWII. The rich man in his castle, the poor man at his gate, ‘we’ all came together and forgot ‘our’ petty differences - and because of that, after the war, we were more united as a country, a kinder nation where we looked after each other. And then we decided, in one fell swoop, to create the welfare state to show what kind of a wonderful nation we are.

Meanwhile, I’m tired of hearing people tell me, as an accepted truth, that the stockpiling of toilet paper, and the growth of a black market in hand sanitiser and face masks, is evidence of how far we have fallen as a nation since the second world war, in our kindness and human decency. This myth of WWII also helps those who feel nostalgia about a world that existed before the young ’uns ruined everything with their rudeness and Hippety-hop music and racial equality.

Any scant look at historical records and sources beyond propaganda will tell you this is false (or go for a brilliant and exhaustive look like ‘Austerity Britain’ by David Kynaston). In reality, the black market was everywhere, and viciously gouged everyone. A whole new class of exploiters grew up (the infamous ‘Spiv’). The wealthy lorded it over the poor and resented the fact that working class people’s standards slightly improved - and now one had to struggle to get a pheasant for the weekend. Meanwhile, crime, especially petty theft, went through the roof, especially immediately after the war when there were fewer police and people in authority around. The welfare state after the War was resisted tooth and nail by the middle classes and the upper classes, while the upper classes dreamed of a revolution that would overthrow the new Labour government by violent means. Many of the working classes thought the welfare state was a bad idea because it gave people something for nothing - helping the undeserving poor.

And let’s not forget that even the oldest believers in the myth of WWII don’t eactually remember the war - or do so only as much as I remember the seventies: for them, Woolton Pie and Air Raid shelters, for me, white dogshit and Tom Baker Doctor Who. They only know the constructed mythology which appeals to a togetherness that never happened. This is ideal for creating a blindness to class, and injustice, and to suggesting that the world is simply getting worse because people are just awful nowadays.

So the history can go hang - the important thing is the mythology; its cultural half-memories and deployments based on a notion of isolation against outside assault in a time of war, and of a nation’s triumph.

And as Cummings and Johnson show, this kind of mythic recirculation is extremely useful.

Florence Nightingale, Suffering Servant

And so we come to the second myth of the Coronavirus crisis: the toiling, selfless nurse, the Florence Nightingale who is there to help us and care for us at those unavoidable moments of human tragedy. This is a newer one in the Cummings-Johnson arsenal, and much needed at a time when all the conflicts and crises of the socio-economic strategies of the last 10 years are coming to a head. Boris’ sudden hospitalisation could not be more perfect, and is just the kind of happy happenstance that the Cummings evil bullshit machine looks forward to exploiting.

Let’s not forget that Florence Nightingale Hospital has been built because the NHS didn’t have anything like the capacity to deal with all the people about to get seriously ill from the crisis - especially when the strategy was herd immunity, no wait, something else, no wait, herd immunity, no wait, Florence Nightingale. In other words, the hospital, and most of all, the myth of the suffering noble nurse, is a rhetorical answer to the fact that they have deliberately and systematically rendered us unprepared for a crisis such as this over the course of the last 10 years.

This crisis is at least partly a result of the Tory party’s brutal decimation of our NHS and social care systems. Same in other neoliberal countries. The pandemic is not a natural disaster. It is one that has been allowed to happen, in the form it has, by social and economic structures and ideological decisions. (Decisions that, remember, the population voted for a matter of weeks ago, against the alternative of massive NHS reinvestment, renationalisation of public services, and increased workers’ rights.)

Nurses who are rushed off their feet, sobbing, and even dying, aren’t doing that because they are society’s guardian angels whose role in humanity is to save us from tragedy outside of our control. They are underpaid, underprovided, and there are too few of them. They are often treated like shit. They can’t even get their training paid for any more - which is one reason there are so few of them. They are being told to go back home and that we don’t need their services if they are foreign, because they are not earning sufficient money for the powers that be - money which those self-same powers have declined to pay them.

The pandemic has happened like this because a Tory Government cut public health provision, social care, local authority budgets, staffing, and equipment for the NHS, beyond the barest bones. Just as they closed hospitals, and now tell vital migrant key workers to go back where they came from (okay, another year, but no more, mind you).

This crisis is not a natural fact like gravity or God’s plagues. This is a result of the deliberate destruction of our public sector. Meanwhile there is a gleeful rubbing of hands from some quarters by those who profit from disaster capitalism such as the hedge funds popular with some members of the ERG.

As ever, it is a marvellous distraction to wax lyrical about the myth of the Lady of the Lamp guardian angel as if this crisis, and those health professionals, were some transhistorical, transcendent law of nature. But never forget, they are suffering like this, and we are suffering like this, because of untrammelled, unrestrained, vampiric capitalism. And capitalism is not a force of nature. It is a creation of man.

Why do we swallow this?

The final question is: why do we buy this? Well, first of all one of the strengths of myths is that they tend to be attractive, well-structured stories, or images which we find gratifying aesthetically as much as anything. They also base themselves on what has gone before, creating an unbroken line with the beliefs and myths we grew up with. Therefore they ‘feel’ true because they are deeply connected to (and formed part of) the ways in which we learned to understand the world.

But I think especially now, it’s both more, and less, than that. Many of the population and the public at large are buying into, and welcoming, these myths because they have a lot of skin in the game. That is because ‘we’ the people have chosen exactly this, via the ballot box for at least 10, perhaps up to 40 years. So while the populace may partly be having the wool pulled over its eyes, some of these myths are a welcome self-delusion. They allow us to avoid the confrontations with our own culpability and blame, since many of us have - a matter of weeks ago, most recently - casually, and callously, given these vampires, incompetents, thugs and ideologues, the licence to do these terrible, terrible things, via the ballot box.

And which, until people finally stop voting for them, they will continue to do - for at least 5 years from now.

And make no mistake - the myth of the Florence Nightingale who saved Boris - white, from New Zealand, no visa issues - will be rolled out every time the next cut comes. ‘As you know, Florence Nightingale SELFLESSLY SAVED MY LIFE. And that is precisely why we must sell another bit of the NHS to Richard Branson….’

A list of every MP who voted against a nurse payrise

Caponata and WWII

Overwhelmed with guilt about wasted food: a bunch of parsley and half a box of passata went off before I could eat them all. Meanwhile I can’t get soap or eggs.

So in a fit of anxiety, I am making a confit of on-the-turn red peppers and aubergine, with onion and garlic and basil, to use with pasta later this week, probably when I’m completely fuckfaced on Friday night, as I intend to be.

Meanwhile, I have learned a lot about myself in the last week, which has been a bit more depressing than the last.

1) a cheese toastie is never not amazing, no matter how often you eat it.

2) cheese toasties makes things better without exception even if they are still not ideal. This is also true of a cold bottle of Birra Moretti.

3) I am quickly turning into a Second World War housewife, with constant anxiety about providing for husband and children, and a near fanatical fear that waste helps the Hun.

Except - have you seen the actual lives of people in WWII, and especially in austerity by 1947? I mean, okay they were allowed out, but take a look at the food they were eating...

Still, they probably had soap. They probably had to eat it.

On the subject of WWII, can we ditch the Boomer rosiness about how everyone pulled together in WWII. Um, no they fucking didn’t.

The newsreels and GPO films and newspapers said they did, because they were under the control of the Government. In reality, the black market was everywhere, and viciously gouged everyone - while everyone took part. A whole new class of exploiters grew up (the famous ‘spiv’), the wealthy lorded it over the poor and resented the fact that working class people’s standards slightly improved, while the upper classes now had to struggle to get a pheasant for the weekend.

And crime, especially petty theft, went through the roof, especially immediately after the war when there were fewer police and people in authority around.

In other words, baby boomers (and those who would use them), who of course don’t even fucking remember the war, know about it from the rosy second-hand memories of their parents, and dim childhood viewings of the nostalgic ideological apparatus from the war itself of an experience they never had. And then of course, post-war ideological deployments of appeals to a togetherness that never happened.

Well, that was bracing. It started off about aubergines.

And yes, I know it’s not a real caponata. I couldn’t get fucking celery.

Caponata: our greatest weapon against Adolf Hitler.

Panic on the streets of London

Round here, it’s become customary to start every conversation with people with a sort of pause and a shrug of disbelief and mutual bafflement - and laugh nervously when someone asks how you are.

Our rear-end of a panto-horse Prime Minister refuses to announce closures - or say definitely they aren’t happening. At the moment, with suggestions that these things may at some point happen, every day feels like the last, so people feel they can never be ready enough. That’s why everyone is stockpiling. The sense of impending doom is hugely exacrbated by uncertainty and the profusion of negative possibilities. The crackle in the air in the food shops is unbearable.

Yesterday I felt tremendous sympathy for the cashiers in Tesco - they are really on the frontlines. It struck me that whether it’s nurses, or supermarket cashiers, or transport workers, or gig economy delivery drivers or retail and hotel workers - the people who are losing out are the working classes as usual. God only knows what people are going to do when they get laid off. Owen Jones shared a letter that had been sent to a hotel worker that simply told them their ‘services are no longer required.’ It said that any holiday they had taken beyond the accrued would be reclaimed from their wage packet, and that they had to move out of their hotel accommodtion immediately. Homeless, penniless, in a pandemic. How can we accept this? We voted for this, over and over and over.

The cashier in Tesco seemed so exhausted, and when someone asked her 'Why is everyone doing this?’ she said 'Because people are bleedin' animals, that’s why' and carried on scanning. The woman before us ran off without paying.

Meanwhile at Catford Food and Wine, a horrible little man with a face like a walnut is selling hand sanitiser for £8.99 for a small bottle with a sign that says 'Coronvirus Killer'. When a woman politely questioned it, he shouted ‘If people don’t like it they can fucking get out.' I’ve always thought romanticising small local businesses was complete cack. They are often the scummiest of all - no PR to worry about, after all. And at this stage, they know they are the final failsafe before the pasta - yes, even the Happy Shopper seven years out of date spaghetti - is gone.

In the grocer further up Rushey Green yesterday, a gentleman was standing behind the meat counter and then roaming the shop tidying shelves, with a racking, gut-wrenching persistent dry cough. He was covering his mouth with a dirty hankie which looked filthy even for the best of times. This was in-between shuffling packets. It’ll be a toss-up between cholera and Coronavirus at this rate.

Politically, as with the last economic crisis, quantitative easing is going into the banks' shareholders' pockets to shore up flagging profits. And the money to businesses is being used to offset their losses while they shed staff anyway. Is it willful and determinedly cruel - as in, Tories genuinely do only care about hedge funds and bankers? Or negligent? Or total stupidity? Or perhaps that strange confluence of all three called ideology?

Meanwhile it’s confronting for all of us, I’m sure, to discover the psychological nature of imprisonment. (And it hasn't even started in this country.) Exactly the same situation and location feels completely different when you are told you can't leave. A hotel room in a five star hotel, your wonderful home you've spent years making - if you are there because you have to be, the ants start crawling under your skin.

One thing I do know: looking at the trolleys full of cake, noodles, pasta, and bog roll, the next epidemics are going to be scurvy and chapped arses.

Some people are just scum, plain and simple.