England rallies round the flag while putting workers in peril

The UK is now the European centre of coronavirus. Just like we were already the European centre for money laundering and mercenary companies and post-imperial buffoonery. These things aren’t unconnected. Each of them is the result of the British state, and its passionate relationship with a blossoming Anglo-British nationalism.

It’s been widely reported that the British lockdown started too late, that our frontline staff don’t have sufficient PPE and that our testing regime is perhaps better described as a dalliance with monitoring.

Alongside this is the story not-much-reported. This weekend, my openDemocracy colleague Caroline Molloy argued that the idea that Johnson has put Britain into lockdown is largely a lie.

There are no sanctions for most English employers if they fail to comply with social distancing guidelines. While Scottish and Welsh companies are required to follow lockdown rules by laws laid down in our parliaments, for most English firms, they’re more of a suggestion.

Testimony from thousands of call centre workers, gathered by Professor Phil Taylor at Strathclyde University and reported on openDemocracy, shows these sorts of loopholes have led to a dire situation. More than half of those surveyed said they had been designated as key workers by their bosses. But the vast majority said they didn’t believe their work was critical, that their employers were just saying that to make them continue working, whatever the cost.

The number of people designated as key workers is around 10 million – between a third and a half of the UK workforce, depending on which employment stats you believe.

Most journalists continue to talk as though Westminster has shut the UK down.

In reality, in England, they’ve shut down the parts of the economy that middle-class people see, while workers in warehouses, call centres and building sites are told they have to keep clocking on, with devastating results. Last week, a trade union organiser who works with call centre staff told me he’s had numerous reports of people dying of Covid-19 after being made to go into work, often in dangerous conditions, without social distancing.

The impact of these failures is distributed brutally by race as well as class. A third of coronavirus patients have been people of colour, meaning they’re twice as likely as white people to be hospitalised with the virus.

This is partly due to the hundreds of thousands of British Asians staffing the NHS, partly because many of those on the hidden frontline, in call centres, warehouses, and factories are disproportionately from ethnic minority communities, and partly because racism

produces deep health inequalities, and so a greater preponderance of underlying conditions among marginalised groups.

In a context where different communities suffer differently, the structures of our democracy matter more than ever. Democracy, after all, is how we pool our collective wisdom about rapidly emerging situations and negotiate between us about how to respond.

The British state – with its House of Lords; its unrepresentative voting system; its centralised and increasingly privatised state; its doctrine of sovereignty which sees power flow down from “the crown in parliament”, only eventually to the people; the revolving door between its civil service and the “big four” accountancy firms and its network of Overseas Territory tax havens – has a strong tendency to bend towards the interests of the powerful.

AND for the powerful – who have already spent the last decade moving towards the self-isolation of gated communities, rural retreats and offshore dependencies – profit lies in sending as many of the rest of us as possible out to work. For the rest of us, our primary interest is in staying alive, and extending lockdown, something the vast majority support, according to the latest polls.

Why then, in England, do they get away with this? Opinion polls also show Johnson and the Tories riding high. The simple answer is what people call the “rally round the flag effect”. But it’s worth pulling this apart, and thinking about what it really means.

I spent the week before the December election wandering around the north of England

asking people how they felt about politics, and then spent February doing the same around central European countries falling to the authoritarian right.

Overwhelmingly – perhaps unsurprisingly – voters told me they didn’t believe in “politics”. From Hartlepool to eastern Hungary, people talked about politics as though it was a far-off reality TV show.

They may sometimes get a vote, but they don’t get to decide the format or function. And generally, they think it’s crap: most have stopped paying much attention. The problem with this is that “politics” in this context is just another word for “democracy”, or, at least, democracy as experienced now.

When I asked people what they did believe in, something became clear. As they lose faith in the idea that we should make our collective decisions through the political structures they have now, people often fall back on other, more traditional social structures as ways to run society.

A woman I spoke to in an area of communist-era “panelák” housing on the edge of Prague, for example, said she didn’t believe in politics. She did believe, she said, in the family.

And so she voted for right-wing parties, which she believed promoted the family.

How this plays out is defined by culture, and so varies by country. But in England, with its particularly deformed democracy (here in Scotland, our parliament acts as a bit of a buffer), the consequence of a clearly broken political system is a turn towards Anglo-British nationalism, and its core doctrine: that posh people should rule over us.

And so my Italian friends should begin to understand that the dangerous leadership of a bumbling buffoon like Boris Johnson isn’t an exception for modern Britain, but its logical conclusion. And that piles of body bags won’t necessarily mean that English voters lose faith in his government. Instead, they may well incite ever more rallying around the flag.