The way it needs to be

Photo by Pixabay on Pexels.com

In the whole of Europe, the UK is looking like it’s suffered the worst death rate from coronavirus so far. In the world we are second only to the US. This doesn’t sit well with those who would paint a picture of Albion’s God-given superiority. There are story-tellers who have had a go recently, with mixed results. But if all else fails – and death is a hard thing to sell – you can always try playing it down.

The morning these figures broke, the majority of the UK press chose to ignore the main story. Instead, they went with news of the assistant chief medical officer. He’d been caught flouting his own social distancing guidelines and had resigned. It was a silly thing to do, and a poor example, but it was hardly the most important headline of the day. Thus, the A-list story-tellers are revealed again as accomplices in the great game. They are PR gurus, not journalists.

But if we can see through all that, what the past weeks and months have shown us is that we were under-prepared. We were under-funded, and we ignored the hard lessons learned by the rest of the world. More, the conclusions of a pandemic planning exercise carried out in 2016, and which predicted the pickle we’re in now – were disregarded.

This should come as no surprise. The British approach to impending calamity is always to ignore the drums, and muddle through. We do this with a mixture of blissful ignorance, bombast, and real-politik. And, when the shit hits the fan, like it always does, we display a certain cold blood in dealing with it. We count the bodies. We shrug, we move on.

Now, the death rate has levelled off. The health service is still on its knees, though not flat on its back as we had feared, and a new story is emerging. Those who pay for the politics want us to focus elsewhere. So they engage their A-List story-tellers to flesh out their post-coronavirus narrative. And it goes something like this:

It’s time to wind back the money, to open the shops. The public are addicted to their free time and their State handouts. They are becoming fat and feckless. We have decades of austerity ahead now to pay for it. They should get back to work, and what are we all worried about anyway? It’s just a bit of flu. You’ll only die from it if you were weak or old to begin with. We must get back to normal, to the way things were before.

The other story, one struggling to take shape, is that things cannot settle back the way they were. We should take this opportunity to build something new from the ruins of the past. We have a chance to tackle the nightmare of climate break-down and inequality, build something new from the ruins. We need to change the economy in ways that won’t leave us so exposed to calamity next time. But, whilst laudable and emotive, it’s a narrative that fails to find any traction among the A-list story-tellers. You’ll only find it on the more obscure and leftist media back-channels, run on a shoestring.

Death is a tricky business, definitely a hard thing to sell, especially when it’s obvious the risks of dying are not shared equally.  I’m not sure how that story will play out. A severe global recession, and mass unemployment look like certainties. It’ll also be a good time to sneak a hard BREXIT over line, because in the midst of this chaos, who would notice? Or care?

Beyond that, I cannot say. I’m approaching my seventh decade, yet I am still naive in the ways of the world. I have learned sufficient only to stand aghast that even in the midst of such an unprecedented crisis, we are battered by a storm of wanton spin. But I do know this: the truth never surfaces in the world of current affairs, that what is often touted as truth is too often the product of an equation weighted by its omissions. Never let the truth get in the way of a good story. It is the story that counts: how plausible, how resonant to the emotions, a story spun in exchange for power and votes.

I know which story of the future I prefer. And I shall continue to sing my lament in the face of those A-Listers we all listen to, yet who never seem to tell it the way it is. Or the way it needs to be.