We can't hide behind the bunting - let's face up to what's happened to Britain | John H... - 0 views
www.theguardian.com/...in-covid-19-crisis-nationalist
nationalism exceptionalism UK tory elitism incompetence pandemic
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Whatever its recent feints towards communitarianism and economic activism, the Conservative party seems unable to shake off its attachment to a vision of go-getting utopia, and its resultant contempt for a public that looks to the state for help and fails to match up to its ideal.
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This credo, of course, took hold in the Conservative party during the leadership of that era-defining grocer’s daughter, Margaret Thatcher. Under David Cameron and George Osborne, the same basic beliefs endured, while the party once again chose its leaders from the ranks of the wealthy and entitled. The result was Thatcherism taken away from its petit bourgeois roots and revived by public schoolboys whose determination to hack back the state was made all the more zealous by both arrogance and ignorance of how most people live.
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The results are now plain to see: after a decade of austerity we went into this crisis in a state of disastrous social fragility; and the innate Tory distrust of collectivism and state intervention – which Johnson shares, whatever his rhetoric – has surely been a big part of the reason it has been so badly handled.
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In England in particular, there is a strand of the national culture expressed by the mixture of hectoring optimism and insularity of the rightwing press, and reducible to the idea that the supposed British way of doing anything is necessarily the best
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Even now, 21st-century politics is still less about hardened matters of success and failure than these expressions of culture and history, and the sides they force people to take.
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These things play into deep elements of the English psyche, shot through with the lingering traces of deference and always ready to be manipulated by Tory politicians.
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we will sooner or later have to confront the fact that we have not just the highest death toll in Europe but a broken social settlement.
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We cannot go on like this, with deep inequalities of race and class constantly exploding before our eyes, the need for food banks extending into the distance, and voices at the top willing us back towards the very social and political dead end that ensured the virus has had such a disastrous impact.
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In the great surge of spontaneous collective action that has greeted Covid-19, there are the seeds of something better, but we should not underestimate the obstacles in the way: nostalgia, mythology and the banalities of politicians desperate to manipulate such things in their own interests as their failures become inescapable.