I’M following Robert Macfarlane, the author of Underland, The Lost Words and much more and his Word of the Day is: “cantilevered” – meaning of a structure, situation or person, extended out over a void, held in place and kept aloft by support that can scarcely be seen, hanging on despite the downwards draw.
That’s where we find ourselves, extended over a void huddled around screens, baking our shepherd’s pie, working out with Joe Wickes, trying to connect on Facebook and Skype and Jitsi and Zoom.
Denial is a coping method and a well-worn one. It’s our default setting. We are used to shielding ourselves from the climate reality by pretending it’s not happening but this is proving more difficult to avoid.
Levels of denial about the scale of the crisis differ and the problem is not helped by a media that seems to think its purpose is to act as a cross between Vera Lynn and Nicholas Witchell. The BBC as a sort of cheerleader for the Government isn’t a new phenomenon but it’s one of the many things that become more blatant in crisis.
At times of 1000 deaths a day and with our criminally under-funded NHS lacking the kit it needs, we need more than ever a critical media to hold politicians to account.
At times this week it didn’t really seem clear who was running the country with the BBC News telling us that Boris Johnson was a “larger-
than-life character” as if this was, somehow, relevant or appropriate in our global pandemic. The best they could do on Wednesday was to tell us that he was “conscious”, as if this was some sort of great boost to all of us finding it difficult. “Oh well, times are hard, but at least the PM’s actually conscious.”
Good Morning Britain ran a piece about a 15-year-old cadet in Cheshire called Chris who was making “30 protective visors a day to be supplied to NHS staff, including his aunt Joanne”.
What should be a badge of shame was turned into a good news story to cheer us up.
I don’t want to know about Boris’s “spirit”. I want to know why we aren’t testing, I want to know why people are still flying into this country, I want to know where the ventilators are, why they’ve not issued hand sanitisers, where the PPE masks are and on and on. I don’t want to re-live The Blitz through the lens of some
insane patriotic broadcast journalist interested in the nation’s morale.
What we face in this precarious position is a public health crisis that has a long way to go and that we know little about. It hasn’t fully hit the USA yet and the consequences of that experience landing on a deeply divided society with no pubic health system and a public armed to the teeth are terrifying.
We haven’t seen it sweep through the global south yet and the consequences of that are difficult to comprehend.
If the economic hit is as seismic as is being predicted – and there is no real reason to think otherwise – then we will have to support people to avoid destitution.
In this light we need to make some drastic cuts and reforms to pay for all of this.
In a report this week by Will Fitzgibbon and Ben Hallman explaining how #OffshoreFinance works and why it matters, they estimated that the World Health Organization’s budget is $4 billion and that each year tax havens swallow up 200 times that amount.
They write: “With the help of lawyers, accountants, white-shoe professionals and complicit Western governments, the wealthy and well-connected have avoided paying trillions of dollars in taxes. The rest of us cover the difference — or, more commonly, can’t, leaving treasuries bereft of monies needed to build roads, schools and tackle existential threats like climate change and global pandemics.
“By some estimates, about 10% of the total output of all the economies in the world is parked in offshore financial centres, held by shell companies that exist only on paper. The cost to governments, in lost revenue, is estimated to exceed $800bn a year.”
So the first and the most obvious reform we need to make is to stop this grand-scale larceny. For that we’ll need a different set of politicians. But the second thing we need to do is wake up from our state of denial and cancel a whole number of projects that probably never should have been commissioned in the first place. In no particular order: the Trident replacement (£205bn), HS2 (£106 bn), Hinkley (£22.5 bn), Crossrail ( £18bn), Brexit (Brexit is costing the UK £500 million a week – or £26bn per annum, according to research by the Centre for European Reform), the Monarchy (£350m) and restoration of the Palace of Westminster at a cool £6bn+.
There. I’ve just found the country £383bn down the back of the sofa. We’ll need every penny.
We’ll need to change the nature of the economy. But there are many things that these funds could be usefully channelled into. We can call this: Doing Everything That We Should Have Been Doing Anyway.
From creating the re-localised resilient circular economy we only talked about, to reclaiming our food system to being fit for purpose, to creating a universal basic income scheme, to building public housing and creating a viable net-zero economy. Proper zero-carbon transport systems, viable cities and an economy based on being rather than shopping will need some changes.
The transformation ahead of us is something none of us have ever seen before, and the chronic failures and consequences of our denial culture have made it much more difficult than if we had faced these realities long ago. Instead we have jollied along with Casino Capitalism and we’ll have to do it all anyway. Let’s get on with it.
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