thoughts on not keeping calm and carrying on
Though it’s wonderful to see an articulation of appreciation for our health service, I’m not sure one minute of noise is enough. After all, beyond the raging sound of pots and pans, stamping feet, and frustrated clatter, there is ultimately silence. To me, that silence looks like half-promises, unfulfilled capacities and exacerbated vulnerabilities. It looks like systemic failings, gross incompetency, botched statistics, and the disconcerting quiet of a politics without accountability. It looks like mythic blitz spirit, unfaltering faith, and hopes and prayers that glorious leaders can flatten the curve or rule the waves quicker than you can say keep calm and carry on. I’m not sure there’s much to stay calm about. I don’t think we should carry on seeing the world through an economic and political framework that sees donating spare change as an antidote to fastidious underfunding. A framework that actually, even goes so far as to ensure that a fraction of that change contributes to the upkeep of Branson’s Virgin Islands. A framework that legitimises inequality by its very definition, or that sees an old man drag himself around a garden, pouring out energy like a long overdue pint. A sticky and heavy weight of responsibility that ought not to be his.
This government’s coronavirus rhetoric feels to me not just misguided but ignorant, and dangerous. As politicians labour to perfect the futile war cabinet talk of battles and fights, we are pushed to forget the real enemy; systematic attacks on public services that have worn away our capacity to cope, left the most vulnerable with nothing, and totally disintegrated any sense of a communal spirit that might extend beyond historic myths or performative and self-congratulatory acts. It feels more than a touch ironic to indebt your life to a public service that you have been complicit in the decimation of. Or to offer public service staff a shiny new pin badge, whilst ramping up surcharges for international healthcare workers disproportionately affected by the pandemic. Or for politicians to applaud workers with the same shiny happy enthusiasm they brought to voting against paying them properly. If it’s true that coronavirus is the great equaliser of people, then capitalism is working double-time to discriminate on its behalf. Perhaps, when we’re donating to help the most vulnerable in this country, we might spare, alongside our change, a thought towards calling for fundamental, radical action.
Those calls though, will mean nothing, if those in power aren’t held accountable. As others have urged, liberty and equality mean nothing without accountability. And forgive me, if I hope that the politics of accountability might extend beyond Piers Morgan. It’s my belief that a man who hacked phones for profit might not be the best candidate to hold those in power to account.
To keep calm and carry on is to endorse a culture of personality and complicity, in which politicians can clap, smile, and pose with their newborn to rapturous applause, without ever facing the direct consequences of their actions. If this pandemic can change anything, I’d like to think it could encourage people to leave behind empty emblems of national strength, and look instead to forge a world wherein caring means much more than clapping.