I am writing this post as a reminder of how lockdowns were policed/regulated.There seems to be a collective amnesia with many people exclaiming that we ‘never had a proper lockdown’ and we should have just ‘locked down earlier and harder’ etc.
Covid is an awful virus and presents terrible social harm and mass deaths. Lockdowns also present terrible social harm and contributes to many other deaths and facilitates abuse. Yet the competing and complex social harms have never been acknowledged by those pushing for LD (hat tip here to those modelers and advisers who make every effort to communicate with the public and who do identify these harms, I am so sorry you are spoken over).
Unsurprisingly, the left-wing columnists who enjoy screaming about ‘Tory genocide’ and how the government are corrupt (but we should hand them more power) are silent.
If we accept that austerity is violence then lockdowns which exacerbate those inequalities are also violence.
The problem is that middle-class people make the decisions that inform policy. They make assumptions that ignore informal economies of care, crowded multi-gen housing, inability to self-isolate etc etc.
Yet very very few social scientists have offered a meaningful class analysis during this period, instead preferring to moralize about ‘staying at home’ that has relied on the transference of risk to working class workers (those magic Amazon orders and food deliveries have elves apparently).
The cartoonist Max Gustafson summed up the classed divisions of covid restrictions here:
‘[W]e must evaluate the state’s overreliance on police systems to handle its non-criminal problems because what the pandemic has shown us is that using the police to address health concerns transforms citizens in need into criminals to be confronted. (Dewey, 2021: 68-69)’.
This meant you could not buy your child a pair of shoes whilst already in store getting your food shopping, but the magic warehouse labourers could deliver your magic parcels.
The dehumanization of workers during this period meant people were happy to have their services but unhappy to allow them into their home to go to the bathroom.The closing of public toilets during this period was a huge equality issue.
Of course during all of this those in power have ignored the rules and had party upon party. They ate cheese and laughed in the garden of downing street as people were banned from visiting their dying loved ones. People said goodbye via Facetime if they were ‘lucky’.
At the same time people were calling the police on their neighbours for running twice a day. Intelligent people were working out 1 hour radius walks from their doors so they would not ‘break the rules’.
The farmer involved also told the BBC: “People are walking up and down this path that is not 2m wide. I needed to close the path off to stop coronavirus. It’s ludicrous with this virus and people supposed to keep 2 metres apart.”
This is the authoritarian state that citizens were complicit in. It is perfectly acceptable to be concerned about Covid and to also be concerned about this massive overreach of powers.
When a Met Police officer spotted the woman’s work he accused her of vandalism and said there would be ‘anarchy’ if incidents like this went unpunished. He added: ‘I can’t help the law. We’re going to be ticketing soon to stop people congregating – is that wrong too?’.
Targeting people from meeting outdoors safely means displacing people to much riskier indoor settings. Many people devised a mental health strategy so that they would not need to access A&E in a crisis, using informal economies of care and support.
The Health Secretary at the time Matt Hancock said he “absolutely backs the police” in relation to the above.
“The challenge here is that every flexibility can be fatal. You might look at the rules and think to yourself, well it doesn’t matter too much if I just do this or I just do that”.
We were fining people for doing the responsible thing and meeting outside, whilst those who rule us allegedly had party after party, transgression after transgression.
December
22
plasticdollheads 