Times of upheaval are always times of radical change. Some believe the pandemic is a once-in-a-generation chance to remake society and build a better future. Others fear it may only make existing injustices worse. By Peter C Baker in The Guardian
Everything feels new, unbelievable, overwhelming. At the same time, it feels as if we’ve walked into an old recurring dream. In a way, we have. We’ve seen it before, on TV and in blockbusters. We knew roughly what it would be like, and somehow this makes the encounter not less strange, but more so.
Every day brings news of developments that, as recently as February, would have felt impossible – the work of years, not mere days. We refresh the news not because of a civic sense that following the news is important, but because so much may have happened since the last refresh. These developments are coming so fast that it’s hard to remember just how radical they are.
Cast your mind back a few weeks and imagine someone telling you the following: within a month, schools will be closed. Almost all public gatherings will be cancelled. Hundreds of millions of people around the world will be out of work. Governments will be throwing together some of the largest economic stimulus packages in history. In certain places, landlords will not be collecting rent, or banks collecting mortgage payments, and the homeless will be allowed to stay in hotels free of charge. Experiments will be underway in the direct government provision of basic income. Large swathes of the world will be collaborating – with various degrees of coercion and nudging – on a shared project of keeping at least two metres between each other whenever possible. Would you have believed what you were hearing?
It’s not just the size and speed of what is happening that’s dizzying. It’s the fact that we have grown accustomed to hearing that democracies are incapable of making big moves like this quickly, or at all. But here we are. Any glance at history reveals that crises and disasters have continually set the stage for change, often for the better. The global flu epidemic of 1918 helped create national health services in many European countries. The twinned crises of the Great Depression and the second world war set the stage for the modern welfare state.
But crises can also send societies down darker paths. After the terrorist attacks of September 11, government surveillance of citizens exploded, while George W Bush launched new wars that stretched into indefinite occupations. (As I write this, the US military’s current attempt at reducing its troop presence in Afghanistan, 19 years after the invasion, is being slowed by coronavirus-related complications.) Another recent crisis, the 2008 financial crash, was resolved in a way that meant banks and financial institutions were restored to pre-crash normality, at great public cost, while government spending on public services across the world was slashed.
Because crises shape history, there are hundreds of thinkers who have devoted their lives to studying how they unfold. This work – what we might call the field of “crisis studies” – charts how, whenever crisis visits a given community, the fundamental reality of that community is laid bare. Who has more and who has less. Where the power lies. What people treasure and what they fear. In such moments, whatever is broken in society gets revealed for just how broken it is, often in the form of haunting little images or stories. In recent weeks, the news has furnished us with countless examples. Airlines are flying large numbers of empty or near-empty flights for the sole purpose of protecting their slots on prime sky routes. There have been reports of French police fining homeless people for being outside during the lockdown. Prisoners in New York state are getting paid less than a dollar hour to bottle hand sanitiser that they themselves are not allowed to use (because it contains alcohol), in a prison where they are not given free soap, but must buy it in an on-site shop.
But disasters and emergencies do not just throw light on the world as it is. They also rip open the fabric of normality. Through the hole that opens up, we glimpse possibilities of other worlds. Some thinkers who study disasters focus more on all that might go wrong. Others are more optimistic, framing crises not just in terms of what is lost but also what might be gained. Every disaster is different, of course, and it’s never just one or the other: loss and gain always coexist. Only in hindsight will the contours of the new world we’re entering become clear.
The pessimistic view is that a crisis makes bad things worse. People who study disasters – and especially pandemics – know all too well their tendency to inflame xenophobia and racial scapegoating. When the Black Death came to Europe in the 14th century, cities and towns shut themselves to outsiders – and assaulted, banished and killed “undesirable” community members, most often Jews. In 1858, a mob in New York City broke into a quarantine hospital for immigrants on Staten Island, demanded that everyone leave and then burned the hospital down, fearful that it was putting people outside at risk of yellow fever. Wikipedia now has a page collating examples from more than 35 countries of “xenophobia and racism related to the 2019-20 coronavirus pandemic”: they range from taunts to outright assault.
“In a totally rational world, you might assume that an international pandemic would lead to greater internationalism,” says the historian Mike Davis, a renowned American chronicler of the disasters incubated by globalisation. For Davis, who wrote a book about the threat of avian flu in 2005, pandemics are a perfect example of the kind of crises to which global capitalism (with its constant movement of people and goods) is particularly vulnerable, but that the capitalist mindset (with its inability to think in terms beyond profit) cannot address. “In a rational world, we would be ramping up production of basic essential supplies – test kits, masks, respirators – not only for our own use, but for poorer countries, too. Because it’s all one battle. But it’s not necessarily a rational world. So there could be a lot of demonisation and calls for isolation. Which will mean more deaths and more suffering worldwide.”
In the US, President Trump has tried hard to brand the new coronavirus as inherently “Chinese”, and to use the pandemic as a pretext for tightening borders and accepting fewer asylum seekers. Republican officials, thinktanks and media outlets have claimed or implied that Covid-19 is a man-made Chinese bioweapon. Some Chinese officials, in turn, have pushed the conspiracy theory that the outbreak came to China by way of American soldiers. In Europe, the Hungarian prime minister, Viktor Orbán, recently announced: “We are fighting a two-front war: one front is called migration, and the other one belongs to the coronavirus. There is a logical connection between the two, as both spread with movement.”
When you’re fighting a war, you want to know as much about the enemy as possible. But it’s easy, in the rush of crisis, to put in place surveillance tools without thinking about the long-term harm they might do. The scholar Shoshana Zuboff, the author of The Age of Surveillance Capitalism, reminded me that, prior to 9/11, the US government had been in the process of developing serious regulations designed to give web users real choice about how their personal information was and wasn’t used. “In the course of a few days,” Zuboff says, “the concern shifted from ‘How do we regulate these companies that are violating privacy norms and rights’ to ‘How do we nurture and protect these companies so they can collect data for us?’”
For governments looking to monitor their citizens even more closely, and companies looking to get rich by doing the same, it would be hard to imagine a more perfect crisis than a global pandemic. In China today, drones search for people without facemasks; when they are found, the drones’ built-in speakers broadcast scoldings from police. Germany, Austria, Italy and Belgium are all using data – anonymised, for now – from major telecommunications companies to track people’s movement. In Israel, the national security agency is now allowed to access infected individual’s phone records. South Korea sends texts to the public identifying potentially infected individuals and sharing information about where they’ve been.
Not all surveillance is inherently malign, and new tech tools very well might end up playing a role in fighting the virus, but Zuboff worries that these emergency measures will become permanent, so enmeshed in daily life that we forget their original purpose. Lockdowns have made many of us, sitting at home glued to our computers and phones, more dependent than ever on big tech companies. Many of these same companies are actively pitching themselves to government as a vital part of the solution. It is worth asking what they stand to gain. “People have a hard time remembering privacy rights when they’re trying to deal with something like a pandemic,” says Vasuki Shastry, a Chatham House fellow who studies the interplay of technology and democracy. “Once a system gets scaled up, it can be very difficult to scale it back down. And then maybe it takes on other uses.”
The prime ministers of both Israel and Hungary have effectively been given the power to rule by decree, without interference from courts or legislature. The UK’s recently rolled-out coronavirus bill gives police and immigration officers the authority – in place for the next two years – to arrest and detain people suspected of carrying the virus, so that they can be tested. The US Department of Justice has, since the outbreak began, filed a request with Congress for a new rule that would allow judges to suspend courtroom proceedings in emergencies, creating the possibility of people being jailed without ever being able to formally object. “Those of us who follow the police know how this goes,” said Kevin Blowe of Netpol, a UK group focused on protest rights. “These powers get put in place, and it sounds reasonable enough at the time – and then very quickly they’re applied for other purposes that have nothing to do with democracy and nothing to do with public safety.”
In a 2008 report on the legal aspects of pandemic response, prompted by the increase in pandemic flu outbreaks, a team of historians and medical ethicists assembled by the American Civil Liberties Union bemoaned a common tendency – resurgent, in their view, since 9/11 – for government to address public health problems using mindsets more appropriate to tracking down criminals. This suspicious mindset, they argued, ended up most affecting racial minorities and the poor. Tactics like these can make fighting the disease harder, by driving a hard wedge of distrust between government and citizens. As the report put it: “People, rather than the disease, become the enemy.”
There’s another school of thought that looks at crisis and sees glimmers of possibility. For thinkers in this camp, the example of the 2008 financial crash looms large. But where, from their view, 2008 led to defeat – with the broad public giving up a great deal while a small few profited – Covid-19 might open the door to political progress.
“I think we’re just so different to how we were before we saw the aftermath of the 2008 crash,” said the American writer Rebecca Solnit, one of today’s most eloquent investigators of crises and their implications. “Ideas that used to be seen as leftwing seem more reasonable to more people. There’s room for change that there wasn’t beforehand. It’s an opening.”
The argument, in its simplest form, is this: Covid-19 has revealed the political status quo to be broken. Long before anyone had heard of the new coronavirus, people died of diseases we knew how to prevent and treat. People lived precarious lives in societies awash with wealth. Experts told us about catastrophic threats on the horizon, including pandemics, and we did next to nothing to prepare for them. At the same time, the drastic measures governments have taken in recent weeks testify to just how much power the state does have – the extent of what government can accomplish (and quickly!) when it realises it must act boldly or risk being seen as fundamentally illegitimate. As Pankaj Mishra recently wrote: “It has taken a disaster for the state to assume its original responsibility to protect citizens.”
For years, in mainstream politics the conventional line – on everything from healthcare to basic living expenses such as housing – has been that even if the world has its problems, expansive government intervention is not a feasible solution. Instead, we have been told that what works best are “marketplace” solutions, which give large roles to corporations motivated not by outdated notions like “the public good” but by a desire to make a profit. But then the virus started spreading, governments spent trillions in days – even going so far as to write cheques directly to citizens – and suddenly the question of what was feasible felt different.
From this perspective, the task today is not to fight the virus in order to return to business as usual, because business as usual was already a disaster. The goal, instead, is to fight the virus – and in doing so transform business as usual into something more humane and secure.
In her 2009 book, A Paradise Built in Hell, Solnit used case studies of disasters – including the 1985 Mexico City earthquake, the 2001 terror attacks and Hurricane Katrina – to argue that emergencies aren’t just moments when bad things get worse, or when people inevitably become more scared, suspicious and self-centred. Instead she foregrounded the ways in which disasters opened up human reserves of improvisation, solidarity and resolve, pockets of purpose and joy, even in the midst of loss and pain. The book was not a call to celebrate disaster – but to pay attention to the possibilities it might contain, and how it might shake us loose from old ways. In Solnit’s telling, “official” disaster responses had a tendency to muck things up by treating people as part of the problem to be managed, not an invaluable part of the solution.
Sometimes this mismanagement is a result of mere incompetence – other times it is more sinister. In her 2007 book, The Shock Doctrine, the Canadian writer Naomi Klein laid out a dark account of crisis politics. In Klein’s view, there is always Disaster 1 – the earthquake, the storm, the military conflict, the economic slump – and Disaster 2 – the bad things that people with power subsequently get up to, such as ramming through extreme economic reforms or gobbling up post-crisis opportunities for self-enrichment, while the rest of us are too dazed to notice. (In fact, Klein argued, these people sometimes engineer Disaster 1 to get the process started.)
Unlike Solnit’s book, The Shock Doctrine doesn’t have much to say about the resilience of everyday people when everything goes horribly wrong. (Indeed, Solnit directly criticised Klein for this omission.) But the two books fit together like puzzle pieces. Both address crisis not in terms of what inevitably – or “naturally” – happens as they unfold, but in terms of choices that people make along the way. And both were well-timed to contribute to the political conversations taking shape in the rubble of the financial crash.
In 2008, days after Barack Obama’s election, his chief of staff, Rahm Emanuel, famously said: “You never want a serious crisis to go to waste.” Today’s leftists, for whom Obama mostly represents disappointment, are prone to agree. They feel that, in the wake of recent crises, they lost, and now is the time to make amends. If, facing a pandemic, we can change this much in a few weeks, then how much might we change in a year?
For anyone making this argument, the contrast between 2008 and the present crisis is striking. Compared to the opaque financial crisis, with its credit default swaps and collateralised debt obligations, the coronavirus is relatively easy to understand. It is a dozen crises tangled into one, and they’re all unfolding immediately, in ways that cannot be missed. Politicians are getting infected. Wealthy celebrities are getting infected. Your friends and relatives are getting infected. We may not quite all be “in it together” – as always, the poor are hit worse – but there is more truth to the idea than there ever was in the wake of 2008.
In this, the optimists believe, there is hope that we might begin to see the world differently. Maybe we can view our problems as shared, and society as more than just a mass of individuals competing against each other for wealth and standing. Maybe, in short, we can understand that the logic of the market should not dominate as many spheres of human existence as we currently allow it to.
“More people are in a position to connect the dots,” Klein said. “It has to do with people’s experiences; for people of a certain age, their only experience of capitalism has been one of crisis. And they want things to be different.”
That screaming buzzsaw noise in the background of this conversation is the sound of the climate crisis. If 2008 is the disaster that Klein and like-minded thinkers want to avoid repeating, climate change is the much bigger disaster they see coming – that they know is already here – and that they want to fight off. Indeed, in the years since publishing The Shock Doctrine, Klein has made climate change her central focus, framing it as the paradigmatic emergency that must be wrenched from the clutches of fossil-fuel profiteers and their enablers in government.
Although Covid-19 is likely the biggest global crisis since the second world war, it is still dwarfed in the long term by climate change. Yet the two problems have suggestive similarities. Both will require unusual levels of global cooperation. Both demand changes in behaviour today in the name of reducing suffering tomorrow. Both problems were long predicted with great certainty by scientists, and have been neglected by governments unable to see beyond the next fiscal quarter’s growth statistics. Accordingly, both will require governments to take drastic action and banish the logic of the marketplace from certain realms of human activity, while simultaneously embracing public investment. In other words, to think of this new level of state intervention as a temporary requirement is to ensure that we continue barrelling down the path to climate disaster.
“We’ve been trying for years to get people out of normal mode and into emergency mode,” said Margaret Klein Salamon, a former psychologist who now heads the advocacy group The Climate Mobilization. “What is possible politically is fundamentally different when lots of people get into emergency mode – when they fundamentally accept that there’s danger, and that if we want to be safe we need to do everything we can. And it’s been interesting to see that theory validated by the response to the coronavirus. Now the challenge is to keep emergency mode activated about climate, where the dangers are orders of magnitude greater. We can’t think we’re going to go ‘back to normal’, because things weren’t normal.”
The analogy between the two crises only goes so far. There is no getting around the fact that the impacts of climate change are more gradual than those of Covid-19. Most people do not feel they or their loved ones could die from the climate crisis this month, and so emergency mode is harder to activate and sustain. As Salamon pointed out to me, if we truly accepted we were in a climate emergency, then every day the news would lead with updates about which countries were reducing their emissions the fastest, and people would be clamouring to make sure their leaders were adopting the policies that worked.
Illustration: Nathalie Lees/The Guardian
But it is not unimaginable that the experience of Covid-19 could help us understand climate change differently. As the virus has reduced industrial activity and road traffic, air pollution has plummeted. In early March, the Stanford University scientist Marshall Burke used pollution data from four Chinese cities to measure changes in the level of PM2.5, a particularly harmful pollutant that attacks the heart and lungs. He estimated that, in China alone, emission reductions since the start of the pandemic had in effect saved the lives of at least 1,400 children under five and 51,700 adults over 70. Meanwhile, people around the world have been sharing their own anecdotal findings online – stories of sweet-smelling breezes, expanded bike lanes and birdsong returning to neighbourhoods – in a way that almost resembles a digitally distributed Rebecca Solnit project: people catching glimpses, in the midst of a disaster, of a future they know they want and need.
Alongside these hopeful signs, a far less heartening story is unfolding, which fits Klein’s “shock doctrine” framework. Disaster 1: Covid-19. Disaster 2: the dismantling of even the meagre existing rules designed to protect the environment. On 26 March, following lobbying from the energy industry, the US Environmental Protection Agency announced that, in recognition of the pandemic’s effects on the workforce, it will not punish violations of pollution regulations so long as companies can link those violations to the pandemic. China’s environmental ministry has started waiving inspections that assess the environmental impact of industrial facilities. And advocacy groups funded by the plastics industry have launched a public relations blitz on behalf of single-use plastic bags, spreading the unproven claim that the virus is less likely to stick plastic than to the cloth fabric of reusable bags. Looking back at the crisis of 2008, we can see that emissions dropped then, too – only to rebound drastically in 2010 and 2011.
Salamon believes that one lesson of the coronavirus crisis is the power of shared emotion, which has helped make possible radical action to slow the pandemic. “I’m not talking about people giving each other medical expertise. I’m talking about people calling each other up and saying: ‘How are you doing? Are you scared? I’m scared. I want you to be OK, I want us to be OK.’ And that’s what we want for climate, too. We need to learn to be scared together, to agree on what we’re terrified about.” Only then, she said, would governments be forced to act. “It’s good that we’re entering emergency mode about the pandemic,” she said. “But unless we also do it for climate … ” She didn’t finish the sentence.
What kind of actions would it take for the optimists’ vision to materialise? The historian Philip Mirowski, author of Never Let a Serious Crisis Go to Waste: How Neoliberalism Survived the Financial Meltdown, warns against complacency. “The left thought it was so obvious to everyone that the crisis revealed the utter bankruptcy of a certain way of looking at the economy,” he told me. “And it wasn’t obvious to everyone, and the left lost.” How do we prevent the world from going back to a version of the way it was before Covid-19, with the virus vanquished but all of the old ongoing disasters still unfolding?
“The political outcome of the epidemic,” said Mike Davis, “will, like all political outcomes, be decided by struggle, by battles over interpretation, by pointing out what causes problems and what solves them. And we need to get that analysis out in the world any way we can.” One major obstacle, of course, is social distancing, which certainly hinders many time-tested methods of waging such struggles, such as political canvassing and street protest. “The biggest risk for all of us,” said Klein, “is going to be frittering away this time sitting at home on our social media feeds, living the extremely limited forms of politics that get enabled there.”
Davis hoped protesters would find their way into the streets sooner rather than later, and speculated that a street action with all the sign-holding participants spaced 10 or 15 feet apart would make a dramatic media image. He lives in Pāpa‘aloa, a small community in Hawaii, and as our conversation wrapped up, he mentioned that he was planning to spend part of the afternoon doing his part by standing by himself on a street corner, holding a sign. He hadn’t decided what to write on it yet, but was thinking about “SUPPORT THE NURSES’ UNION” or “DEMAND PAID SICK LEAVE”.
Solnit told me she was taking heart from all the new ways people were finding to connect and help each other around the world, ranging from the neighbourhood delivery networks that had sprung up to bring groceries to people who couldn’t get out, to more symbolic interventions, such as kids playing music on an older neighbour’s porch. The Italian political scientist Alessandro Delfanti said he was finding hope from a post-outbreak wave of strikes roiling Amazon warehouses in the US and Europe, and also the steps that workers across different sectors of the Italian economy were taking to help each other secure equipment they needed to stay safe.
What happens next might depend on the optimists’ ability to transport such moments of solidarity into the broader political sphere, arguing that it makes no sense to address Covid-19 without at least trying to fix everything else, too, creating a world where our shared resources do more for more people. “We don’t even have a language for this emotion, in which the wonderful comes wrapped in the terrible, joy in sorrow, courage in fear. We cannot welcome disaster, but we can value the responses, both practical and psychological,” Solnit wrote in A Paradise Built in Hell.
The world feels awfully strange right now, but not because – or not just because – it is changing so fast and any one of us could fall ill at any time, or could already be carrying the virus and not know it. It feels strange because the past few weeks have exposed the fact that the biggest things can always change, at any minute. This simple truth, both destabilising and liberating, is easy to forget. We’re not watching a movie: we’re writing one, together, until the end.
Be it Amitabh Bachchan or Virat Kohli, India’s rich and famous are quick to lecture or follow PM Modi’s diktat. But selfless charity is missing among most Indians writes KAVEREE BAMZAI in The Print
Migrant workers in Delhi trying to get back to Uttar Pradesh amid the nationwide Covid-19 lockdown | Photo by Suraj Singh Bisht | ThePrint
The modern world is facing its worst crisis in coronavirus pandemic and what are Indian celebrities doing? Well, many clapped and banged pots and pans on 22 March at 5 pm following Prime Minister Narendra Modi’s call, and filmed themselves while doing so. Others are showing us how to do dishes and clean the home, participating in mock celebrity bartan-jhadu-poncha (BJP) challenges. The rest of the world is trying to help find a cure for the deadly virus or providing monetary assistance to the poor or arranging equipment for medical workers, underlining yet again the generosity gap between other countries’ and India’s elite.
Tennis star Roger Federer donates $1.02 million to support the most vulnerable families in Switzerland during the coronavirus crisis; India’s former cricket captain Sourav Ganguly gives away Rs 50 lakh worth of rice in collaboration with the West Bengal-based company Lal Baba Rice, in what is clearly a sponsored, mutual brand-building exercise. Chinese billionaire Jack Ma donates one million face masks and 500,000 coronavirus testing kits to the United States, and pledged similar support for European and African countries; Amitabh Bachchan uses social media to spread half-baked information — such as ‘flies spread coronavirus’ — and wonders if the clanging of pots, pans and thalis defeats the potency of the virus because it was Amavasya on 22 March (he later deleted the tweet).
Hollywood’s golden couple Blake Lively and Ryan Reynolds announce they will donate $1 million to Feeding America and Food Banks Canada that work for low-income families and the elderly; while Indian cricket and Bollywood’s beautiful match Virat Kohli and Anushka Sharma get into familiar lecture mode, asking everyone to “stay home and stay safe”. This follows Anushka Sharma’s earlier run-in with a ‘luxury car’ passenger where she ticked him off for violating PM Modi’s diktat of Swachh Bharat.
Where the rich are charitably poor
What makes rich and famous Indians so quick to lecture, especially on issues in congruence with government initiatives, but so loathe to help the poor desperately in need? The 2010 Giving Pledge by Warren Buffet and Bill Gates, to which five wealthy Indians are signatories, was meant to give a gigantic push to philanthropy worldwide. This was followed by India’s then minister of corporate affairs Sachin Pilot making it legally mandatory for companies to put aside charity funds for Corporate Social Responsibility (CSR) projects, making India the first country in the world to pass such a legislation. This year, an attempt to criminalise non-compliance was eventually softened after an uproar from corporates.
Philanthropy is up. According to Bain and Company’s annual Philanthropy Report 2020, domestic philanthropic funding has rapidly grown from approximately Rs 12,500 crore in 2010 to approximately Rs 55,000 crore in 2018. Contributions by individual philanthropists have also recorded strong growth in the past decade. In 2010, individual contributions accounted for 26 per cent of private funding, and as of 2018, individuals contribute about 60 per cent of the total private funding in India, estimated at approximately Rs 43,000 crore.
But in a prophetic warning, the report underscored the need for philanthropy ”to now consciously focus on India’s most vulnerable” and called for targeted action for the large population caught in a vicious cycle of vulnerability — precisely those worst hit by the coronavirus pandemic.
“The disadvantaged,” it said, “are unable to adapt to unpredictable situations that can push them deeper into vulnerability, such as climate change, economic risks and socio-political threats.” Even Azim Premji, who recently made news by committing 34 per cent of his company’s shares — worth $7.5 billion or Rs 52,750 crore — to his continuing cause, the public schooling system in India, has not set aside anything specific for those affected by the coronavirus. India’s second-richest man was the first Indian to sign The Giving Pledge.
Vaishali Nigam Sinha, Chief Sustainability Officer at Renew Power, started charity a few years ago to promote giving. Her experience has been less than happy. Indians, she finds, have refrained from planned giving for broader societal transformation. “Giving is individualistic and not driven via networks, which can be quite effective as we have seen in other parts of the world like the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation. And in India, giving is usually done to get something back – to god for prosperity, to religious affiliations for advocacy of these platforms, and to government for business returns. Wealthy Indians need to learn to give in a planned way for greater social impact and transformation,” she says.
Little surprise then that India was ranked 124 in World Giving Index 2018 — and placed 82 in the 10th edition of the index compiled by Charities Aid Foundation looking at the data for 128 countries over the 10-year period.
All of us are in the same boat
But it’s not about celebrities or wealthy Indians alone. We are all in it together. Special planes are sent to bring back Indians stuck abroad due to the pandemic, but labourers and daily wage workers are left to walk hundreds of kilometres to reach their villages. Doctors treating coronavirus patients will be applauded but not allowed to enter their homes.
JNU sociologist Maitrayee Chaudhuri calls it a potent mix of selfishness, self care and entitlement. ”We have a complete disregard for people on the margins and on whose labour we sit. It is all about us and our safety,” she says. This communal selfishness is very different from the churning in the 19th and early 20th century, which led to enormous social reform movements. The slow and meticulous destruction of ‘secularism’, ‘socialism’ and ‘liberalism’ has helped. As has the rise of neoliberal ‘individual self centredness’. “Not to talk about smartphone dumbness,” she adds. There is an absence of empathy everywhere, filled instead with the noise of thalis being banged and bells being rung to show symbolic gratitude to those who serve us.
The examples of those who are giving are few and far in between. There is comedian Kapil Sharma, who is giving Rs 50 lakh to the Prime Minister’s Relief Fund and southern superstars Pawan Kalyan, Ram Charan and Rajinikanth. But in general, our stars have chosen to share very little. Former cricket captain M.S. Dhoni, for instance, has been reported to have donated Rs 1 lakh to a charity trust in Pune, which led to some criticism and a counter from his wife Sakshi, even though it wasn’t immediately clear which incident she was alluding to.
India Inc hasn’t fared much better either. When PM Modi asked everyone to show their support for health workers fighting coronavirus by applauding them, one of the country’s most proactive industrialists was among the first to tweet his support, and also one of the first to be trolled for it. He quickly responded by offering to manufacture ventilators, among other things. Reliance is reportedly donating a hospital for coronavirus patients, weeks after Isha Ambani had hosted a Holi party on 7 March — when the number of coronavirus cases had rapidly begun to rise. Her mother, after all, is the queen of giving, contributing to an array of eclectic causes, and has been honoured for it by getting elected to the board of New York’s Metropolitan Museum of Art in 2019 or by becoming the first Indian woman in 2016 to be elected to the International Olympic Committee for supporting the sporting dreams of seven million Indian children.
But for India’s corporate class, it took a nudge from the Principal Scientific Adviser K. Vijay Raghavan to remind them that healthcare and preventive healthcare are covered under Schedule VII of the Companies Act: “Hence supporting any project or programme for preventing or controlling or managing COVID19 is legitimate CSR (CSR) expenditure.” He also quickly got an office memorandum issued by the Ministry of Corporate Affairs a day later.
Elites’ capitalist worldview
Is there a kindness deficit in India’s business elite as well, which mirrors the lack of empathy of the country’s middle class? Business writer and bestselling author Tamal Bandyopadhyay says there are exceptions but culturally, the Indian business community is not exactly fond of opening up its purse on its own unless there is a compulsion. “Even when the companies are compelled, they find ways to evade it. We all know how many of them handle their CSR activities through creation of trusts. When it comes to buying electoral bonds, the story is different.
“Similarly, some of them get excited and rush to do certain things to express solidarity with the government in power. For instance, when the push is on digitalisation, there are takers for adopting towns for digitalisation in constituencies which matter. Essentially, most of them don’t believe in doing things no strings attached. Of course, there are people who believe in doing things quietly but they are exceptions,” he says.
In Western nations such as the US, philanthropy has deeper roots, with the practice essentially starting through donations to religious organisations. By the late 19th century, there was a rise of secular philanthropists such as Andrew Carnegie and John D. Rockefeller, which Stanford professor Rob Reich has noted as being controversial and one way of cleansing one’s hands of the dirty money.
In his book Just Giving: Why Philanthropy is Failing Democracy and How It Can Do Better (2018), he has noted: “Big Philanthropy is definitionally a plutocratic voice in our democracy, an exercise of power by the wealthy that is unaccountable, non-transparent, donor-directed, perpetual, and tax-subsidised.”
A similar critique has come from Anand Giridharadas, whose Winners Take All: The Elite Charade of Changing the World makes the argument that the global financial elite has reinterpreted Andrew Carnegie’s view that it’s good for society for capitalists to give something back to create a new formula: It’s good for business to do so when the time is right, but not otherwise. According to Reich, philanthropy works when it is able to find a gap between what governments do and what the market wants.
Few people exemplify this better than Bill Gates, who has for long donated to the cause of global healthcare. The Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation has already contributed $100 million to contain the virus, which he declared a pandemic even before the World Health Organisation did. The Foundation’s newsletter The Optimist is also performing a key role in spreading critical information about the Covid-19 pandemic and dispelling myths.
Indian philanthropy isn’t secular
In India, the twain of religious giving and secular funding has not met. Management expert Nirmalya Kumar calls it a sensitive subject and says it is related to the philosophical concept underlying Indian religions such as Hinduism, Buddhism and Sikhism that believe in reincarnation. “Our soul starts life again in a different physical form based on the karma of previous lives. As such, as has been sometimes articulated to me, the lack of charity is an unwillingness to interfere with the consequences that God has determined appropriate. Who am I to come in between the person and their God?”
But the Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh (RSS) is traditionally known for engaging in social seva (not just swayam seva , or self service), evidenced by the Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP)’s decision to feed five crore people during the 21-day lockdown. Sikhism has a well-developed tradition of Guru ka langar, and it was on full display at Shaheen Bagh when ordinary Sikhs served food to people protesting against the Citizenship Amendment Act (CAA) and the National Register of Citizens (NRC).
Some business families also do philanthropic work, among them the Nilekanis, the Murtys and the older Bharatrams (their founder Lala Shri Ram founded Delhi Cloth Mills and set up several educational institutes like Shri Ram College of Commerce and Lady Shri Ram College). Radhika Bharatram, joint vice chairperson, The Shri Ram Schools, recalls growing up in a middle class, progressive home where her sister and she were encouraged to volunteer at the Cheshire Home and Mother Teresa Home. Marriage, she says, brought her into a home where making contributions to society was in the family’s DNA and she is now involved as a volunteer with organisations such as Delhi Crafts Council, Blind Relief Association, SRF Foundation, the CII Foundation Woman Exemplar Programme, and Cancer Awareness Prevention and Early Detection. What drives her is empathy: When “you come from a position of privilege, there is joy in making a difference to someone else’s life”. She says it motivates her when the purpose is greater than the individual.
Unfortunately, the middle class and the elites have tended to keep self interest above public interest. In the new world after the coronavirus pandemic, this is one attitude it must change.
Francesca Melandri in The Guardian tell us what to expect during a lockdown
I am writing to you from Italy, which means I am writing from your future. We are now where you will be in a few days. The epidemic’s charts show us all entwined in a parallel dance.
We are but a few steps ahead of you in the path of time, just like Wuhan was a few weeks ahead of us. We watch you as you behave just as we did. You hold the same arguments we did until a short time ago, between those who still say “it’s only a flu, why all the fuss?” and those who have already understood.
As we watch you from here, from your future, we know that many of you, as you were told to lock yourselves up into your homes, quoted Orwell, some even Hobbes. But soon you’ll be too busy for that.
First of all, you’ll eat. Not just because it will be one of the few last things that you can still do.
You’ll find dozens of social networking groups with tutorials on how to spend your free time in fruitful ways. You will join them all, then ignore them completely after a few days.
You’ll pull apocalyptic literature out of your bookshelves, but will soon find you don’t really feel like reading any of it.
You’ll eat again. You will not sleep well. You will ask yourselves what is happening to democracy.
You’ll have an unstoppable online social life – on Messenger, WhatsApp, Skype, Zoom…
You will miss your adult children like you never have before; the realisation that you have no idea when you will ever see them again will hit you like a punch in the chest.
Old resentments and falling-outs will seem irrelevant. You will call people you had sworn never to talk to ever again, so as to ask them: “How are you doing?” Many women will be beaten in their homes.
You will wonder what is happening to all those who can’t stay home because they don’t have one. You will feel vulnerable when going out shopping in the deserted streets, especially if you are a woman. You will ask yourselves if this is how societies collapse. Does it really happen so fast? You’ll block out these thoughts and when you get back home you’ll eat again.
You will put on weight. You’ll look for online fitness training.
You’ll laugh. You’ll laugh a lot. You’ll flaunt a gallows humour you never had before. Even people who’ve always taken everything dead seriously will contemplate the absurdity of life, of the universe and of it all.
You will make appointments in the supermarket queues with your friends and lovers, so as to briefly see them in person, all the while abiding by the social distancing rules.
You will count all the things you do not need.
The true nature of the people around you will be revealed with total clarity. You will have confirmations and surprises.
Literati who had been omnipresent in the news will disappear, their opinions suddenly irrelevant; some will take refuge in rationalisations which will be so totally lacking in empathy that people will stop listening to them. People whom you had overlooked, instead, will turn out to be reassuring, generous, reliable, pragmatic and clairvoyant.
Those who invite you to see all this mess as an opportunity for planetary renewal will help you to put things in a larger perspective. You will also find them terribly annoying: nice, the planet is breathing better because of the halved CO2 emissions, but how will you pay your bills next month?
You will not understand if witnessing the birth of a new world is more a grandiose or a miserable affair.
You will play music from your windows and lawns. When you saw us singing opera from our balconies, you thought “ah, those Italians”. But we know you will sing uplifting songs to each other too. And when you blast I Will Survive from your windows, we’ll watch you and nod just like the people of Wuhan, who sung from their windows in February, nodded while watching us.
Many of you will fall asleep vowing that the very first thing you’ll do as soon as lockdown is over is file for divorce.
Many children will be conceived.
Your children will be schooled online. They’ll be horrible nuisances; they’ll give you joy.
Elderly people will disobey you like rowdy teenagers: you’ll have to fight with them in order to forbid them from going out, to get infected and die.
You will try not to think about the lonely deaths inside the ICU.
You’ll want to cover with rose petals all medical workers’ steps.
You will be told that society is united in a communal effort, that you are all in the same boat. It will be true. This experience will change for good how you perceive yourself as an individual part of a larger whole.
Class, however, will make all the difference. Being locked up in a house with a pretty garden or in an overcrowded housing project will not be the same. Nor is being able to keep on working from home or seeing your job disappear. That boat in which you’ll be sailing in order to defeat the epidemic will not look the same to everyone nor is it actually the same for everyone: it never was.
At some point, you will realise it’s tough. You will be afraid. You will share your fear with your dear ones, or you will keep it to yourselves so as not to burden them with it too.
You will eat again.
We’re in Italy, and this is what we know about your future. But it’s just small-scale fortune-telling. We are very low-key seers.
If we turn our gaze to the more distant future, the future which is unknown both to you and to us too, we can only tell you this: when all of this is over, the world won’t be the same.
When this is all over, there is likely to be a new social contract. Which way will we go? asks JANAN GANESH in The FT
This year is the 70th anniversary of George Orwell’s death and the 150th of Charles Dickens’s. Never spellbound by either (“The man can’t write worth a damn,” said the young Martin Amis, after one page of 1984), I was inclined to sit out all the commemorative rereading. And I did. But then the crisis of the day took me back to what one man wrote about the other.
More on that in a minute. First, you will notice the pandemic is putting large corporations through a sort of moral invigilation. Ones that rejig their factories to make hand sanitiser (LVMH) or donate their knowhow (IBM) are hailed. Ones that behave like skinflints (JD Wetherspoon, Britannia Hotels) are tarred and feathered.
Companies have to weigh how much discretionary help to give without flunking their narrow duty to survive and profit.
This is the stuff of Stakeholder Capitalism or Corporate Social Responsibility.The topic has been in the air all of my career. It has been given new urgency by events. It is the subject of much FT treatment.
And Orwell, I suspect, would see through it like glass.
In a 1940 essay (how spoilt we are for round-number anniversaries) he politely explodes the idea of Dickens as a radical, or even as a social reformer. His case is that, for Dickens, nothing is wrong with the world that cannot be fixed through individual conscience.
If only Murdstone were kinder to David Copperfield. If only all bosses were as nice as Fezziwig. That no one should have such awesome power over others in the first place goes unsaid by Dickens, and presumably unthought. And so his worldview, says Orwell, is “almost exclusively moral”.
Dickens wants a “change of spirit rather than a change of structure”. He has no sense that a free market is “wrong as a system”. The French Revolution could have been averted had the Second Estate just “turned over a new leaf, like Scrooge”.
And so we have “that recurrent Dickens figure, the Good Rich Man”, whose arbitrary might is used to help out the odd grateful urchin or debtor. What we do not have is the Good Trade Unionist pushing for structural change. What we do not have is the Good Finance Minister redistributing wealth. There is something feudal about Dickens. The rich man in his castle should be nicer to the poor man at his gate, but each is in his rightful station.
You need not share Orwell’s ascetic socialism (I write this next to a 2010 Meursault) to see his point. And to see that it applies just as much to today’s economy.
Some companies are open to any and all options to serve the general good — except higher taxes and regulation. “I feel like I’m at a firefighters’ conference,” said the writer Rutger Bregman, at a Davos event about inequality that did not mention tax. “And no one is allowed to speak about water.”
What Orwell would hate about Stakeholder Capitalism is not just that it might achieve patchier results than the universal state. It is not even that it accords the powerful yet more power — at times, as we are seeing, over life and death. Under-resourced governments counting on private whim for basic things: it is a spectacle that should both warm the heart and utterly chill it.
No, what Orwell would resent, I think, is the unearned smugness. The halo of “conscience”, when more systemic answers are available via government. The halo that Dickens still wears. You can see it in the world of philanthropy summits and impact investment funds.
The double-anniversary of England’s most famous writers since Shakespeare meant little to me until the virus broke. All of a sudden, they serve as a neat contrast of worldviews. Dickens would look at the crisis and shame the corporates who fail to tap into their inner Fezziwig. Orwell would wonder how on earth it is left to their caprice in the first place.
The difference matters because, when all this is over, there is likely to be a new social contract. The mystery is whether it will be more Dickensian (in the best sense) or Orwellian (also in the best sense). That is, will it pressure the rich to give more to the commons or will it absolutely oblige them?
Lindsay Cook and Lucy Warwick-Ching in The FT
Coronavirus disruption has changed our day-to-day lives beyond all recognition. Millions of households face difficult choices about their personal finances as they seek to rebalance their budgets and manage the cash flow crunch.
Many will seek refunds on services they have committed to pay for, ranging from education to commuting costs and membership of gyms and clubs, which cannot be provided during the shutdown. Others are seeking refunds or insurance payouts on holidays and flights they had booked.
In such unprecedented times, it pays to know your consumer rights, but these must be weighed against warnings from smaller businesses that failure to pay for services could result in their financial collapse.
Private school fees
The final bell rang on Friday March 20, when the government announced it was closing schools to tackle the coronavirus pandemic. Experts say it is unlikely pupils will return before the end of the summer term and parents with children at fee-paying schools are asking whether they still have to pay.
Some 615,000 children attend independent schools in the UK, with annual fees as high as £45,000 for boarding schools and £25,000 a year for some London day schools.
Under normal circumstances, the next payment date would be for the summer term due at the end of the Easter holidays in April. So will they be expected to pay?
“This is a hugely difficult time for everyone,” says Julie Robinson, chief executive of the Independent Schools Council. “Schools are under immense pressures and this is one of the issues that will be dealt with at school level, depending on their individual policies and contracts with parents.
“We hope parents will bear with schools who need time to clarify government support measures and take stock of their situation and ongoing operations. They are focused on the welfare of their school communities and ensuring continuation of teaching and learning.
“Independent schools are fortunate to have access to effective online learning resources, enabling them to continue education remotely using technological solutions.”
Parents facing financial difficulties should contact their school as soon as possible, says Neil Roskilly, chief executive of the Independent Schools Association. All independent schools offer financial help to families, and while it is usually offered when a child enters a school, it can be extended to those families whose financial circumstances change.
Most private schools have funds available for this situation and can also defer fees if there is the prospect of future employment. This should be over a costed and reasonable timescale, usually is up to 12 months. Schools rarely charge interest.
To help bridge the gap between parental incomes and fees, more than £1bn a year is now provided in fee assistance to over 175,000 students, with about half allocated through means-testing.
“Schools are trying their best to maintain a ‘continuity of education’ via online technology and most parents we have spoken to understand that, and are choosing not to withhold fees,” says Mr Roskilly. “But in some cases, where schools have money in reserves, they are considering returning some of those fees to parents.”
Ellie Spencer, associate solicitor in the commercial dispute resolution team at law firm Goodman Derrick, says: “Parents are paying for a service and they might be able to argue that the school is not providing that service. Even if the school is providing online teaching, this is not the whole service, so parents might be entitled to a discount.”
Private nurseries
Parents of children at private nurseries in the UK can pay about £1,000 a month for 50 hours a week for a child under two, but in London, the average Ofsted-rated facility charges between £70 and £85 a day.
Parents typically pay monthly for nurseries so most are receiving bills for April now when children are already at home.
Nurseries are reacting to the closures in different ways. While some are charging full fees, others are offering discounts for all and some cutting costs specifically for families who have suffered a severe loss of income.
Nurseries have contracts with parents that are entered into when the child starts and the terms and conditions tend to require parents to give a month’s notice. They also usually require parents to continue paying fees during an emergency closure, but previously these have tended to be for a few days because of problems with the building.
Purnima Tanuku, chief executive of National Day Nurseries Association, says: “Whether parents continue to pay fees when a closure is outside of a nursery’s control will depend on the agreements between individual nurseries and their parents. We’re pushing the government hard to offer sufficient financial support so nursery businesses can remain sustainable.”
One parent with two children under five at nursery contacted FT Money to say: “I've just received my monthly £2,000 bill with no offer of a discount. It seems that parents — many of whom can now not go to work — are expected to keep the nurseries going without receiving a service.”
Lawyers say parents should negotiate. Edward Macey-Dare, a litigation and employment partner at Lee Bolton Monier-Williams, says: “Remember, nurseries are going to be under severe pressure as a result of the coronavirus situation and, if they play hardball, they are likely to face numerous parents giving notice to withdraw their children. It seems to me, therefore, that parents have the upper hand in this situation when it comes to negotiating a reduction in fees or more favourable payment terms.”
But others warn that without the financial support, private nurseries could collapse. “Some childminders and nurseries have asked parents to continue to pay their fees to retain their children’s places, even if they are not permitted to offer them childcare services,” says Lynne Rowland, a tax partner at Moore Kingston Smith.
“This is perhaps understandable in the absence of clarity over how the special financial measures apply. But the government should consider offering families full tax relief for these costs, which for many families are as essential as their mortgage or rent payments.”
The government has said that funding for early years entitlements covering up to 30 hours of childcare will continue during any periods of nursery closures. Some nurseries are encouraging key workers to continue sending their children into nursery so they can continue to access this government funding.
Rail season tickets
For many commuters the cost of their annual season ticket is their second biggest monthly bill after their mortgage. To get the best deal, many pay upfront for the year, possibly with an interest-free loan from their employers.
Train companies say annual season tickets will be refunded pro-rata, but to get any money back commuters must have 12 weeks remaining on them. This is because they effectively get 12 weeks of free travel on an annual season ticket. Monthly season tickets need at least six days remaining and weekly ones at least two days. The £10 administrative fee will be waived.
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Someone who bought an annual season ticket for £4,980 at the beginning of the year should be able to get a refund for six months’ travel or £2,490. Refunds should be paid within 28 days. Full refunds can also be claimed for advance and off-peak tickets booked but not used — apply via train company websites.
Transport for London is slightly more generous. It requires six weeks to remain on annual season tickets, seven days on a monthly ticket and three days on a seven-day ticket, and does not charge an administrative fee. Apply for a refund via its website.
Many commuters pay to guarantee a place in their station car park by buying an annual season ticket. A typical permit costs over £1,000. Apply online for refunds to the company that runs the car park.
Sports subscriptions
With no live football likely until June at the earliest and many other major sporting events cancelled or postponed, subscribers to Sky Sports can pause their sports subscription online and it will automatically resume when live football and other major sporting events return.
A message on Sky’s website reads: “While we expect that many of the recently postponed sports events will eventually go ahead, if you wish to pause your sports subscription in the meantime you will not be charged a fee to do so or be held to any notice period.”
BT Sport says that customers on its new “flexible TV” package can pause their subscription and make other changes by logging on to bt.com/tv.
BT says: “For now, we have been busy working on a revised schedule for BT Sport which will include variations of popular shows such as Premier League Tonight, live WWE, Rugby Tonight, BT Sport Films and ESPN Films, recent boxing events and classic football, rugby and other sport fixtures from across the years.
“We understand that this is a difficult time for customers and if they wish to discuss their BT Sport contract or other options, would ask they give us a call.”
When it comes to live sporting events, season ticket holders should check the terms and conditions of their clubs. Tickets for postponed games are usually valid when the game is finally played.
For example, Arsenal’s terms and conditions read: “The club reserves the right to reschedule any match or, if necessary, play the match out of view of the public, without notice and without any liability whatsoever.”
Manchester United’s say: “Where any match is cancelled, abandoned or postponed the club shall have no liability whatsoever to ticket holders,” although ticket holders would be entitled to attend rearranged matches.
Live events
People who had secured Glastonbury tickets have been told that their £50 deposits will be rolled over to next year, after this year’s festival was cancelled.
People with tickets for shows and gigs that have been postponed may find they can only get refunds if they cannot attend the new date. For example, tickets for Trevor Noah at the O2 centre at the beginning of April can be used at the rescheduled shows in September.
Gym membership
Gym members who may have found it difficult to end membership contracts in the past could find that their fees stop automatically.
Virgin Active is automatically freezing all memberships at its clubs with no fees to pay until they reopen. It is crediting members with any fees that have already been paid for April and will also credit for March 21 to 31. Its social channels @VirginActiveUK remain open with advice on workouts to do at home.
Gymbox says that for as long as its clubs are closed there will be a freeze on monthly memberships. No payments will be taken for April and any future months it is closed, and fees for time lost in March will also be credited.
Competition in the gym market means many clubs charge on a month-to-month basis, but fixed memberships could prove trickier to cancel — check the terms of your contract to see if a percentage of your fees could be refunded.
University costs
The Student Loans Company says that university students will still receive their loans for living costs at the beginning of the summer term as scheduled, and their tuition fees will be paid directly — regardless of whether their university or provider has made alternative arrangements for teaching.
Universities UK says that while it understands that missed teaching time was “unsettling” for students, universities moving teaching online “does not amount to a closure”. However, many students will have left their campus and student accommodation and returned home to their parents.
This week, Unite, the UK’s largest student accommodation provider, said it would allow students to leave their tenancies early. They will not have to pay their rent for the final term if they tell Unite that they have left or are leaving by 5pm on April 10.
Unite charges an average weekly rent for en suite accommodation of £138 outside London and £221 in the capital.
Unite says: “We are also very conscious that some students may need to extend their stay with us, for example, international students who may not be able to return home due to travel restrictions or those estranged from family without the traditional support network in place. For these students, we will do everything we can to support them beyond their tenancy period at no extra charge.”
University-owned halls of residence may be more willing to issue a partial refund if students have moved out, but private student landlords are less likely to offer any leniency. Many parents will be obliged to keep paying if they offered to act as rental guarantors.
Flights and holidays
If your flight or package holiday was scheduled before April 16 and is cancelled, you do not have to accept a voucher or credit note or be forced to rebook. You are legally entitled to a refund.
The advice not to travel abroad from the Foreign and Commonwealth Office (FCO) also means you should be able to claim from your travel insurer for consequential losses, such as booked hotel rooms or car hire.
When flights and holidays are cancelled, airlines and travel agents are obliged to issue refunds or allow you to rebook for a future date. Under the Package Holiday and Linked Travel Regulations 2018, holidaymakers are also due a full refund.
However, consumer group Which? has found that many companies are ignoring this requirement and are only offering consumers credit vouchers or the chance to reschedule.
Martyn James of Resolver, a free online complaints company, says: “If the hotel, holiday pr flight has been cancelled then you should get a refund as it’s not you, it’s them.”
If firms insist on providing vouchers instead of refunding, he says: “Ask the firm to send you the terms and conditions where it says they can do this. If you don’t think it’s fair, make a complaint.”
British Airways says it will rebook or refund for tickets under its “Manage My Booking” facility. Ryanair has removed its flight change fees on all bookings next month.
Airlines are experiencing an extremely high volume of calls. BA, easyJet, Ryanair and Virgin Atlantic are asking that only passengers who were due to travel in the next 72 hours call or message, so they can help those needing urgent rebooking.
Most travel insurers will ask you to seek a refund from the travel firm first, but if your policy covers you for cancellation, then you can make a claim.
Airbnb says that reservations for stays and experiences made on or before March 14 with a check-in date between then and April 14 will be eligible for a full refund. If a hotel has closed, you are also due a full refund.
If airlines or holiday companies will not pay for cancelled flights or holidays, those who paid by credit card should be able to get compensation under Section 75 of the Consumer Credit Act. But if the hotel is still able to offer the accommodation you are unlikely to get a refund because the provider has not broken their agreement with you.
For bookings after April 16, the situation is less clear. Holidaymakers will have to wait to find out if their flights are affected and what the FCO advice is on travel at that time.
A decade of cuts has ripped apart the safety net. People on decent salaries hit by the Covid-19 fallout are in for a shock writes Polly Toynbee
‘People confronting universal credit’s obstacles may join the half who find themselves propelled to local food banks.’ Photograph: Oli Scarff/AFP/Getty Images
Millions of people are about to discover something they didn’t know about British life. There is no longer a safety net. People who have paid tax and national insurance for years and never been near the social security system will be turning to it in their hour of need; yet far too late, like trapeze artists falling through the air, they will find that the net beneath them has been lowered dangerously close to the ground and is badly torn.
If these people once believed relentlessly misleading tabloid tales of benefit scroungers, they will have a rude awakening. They will find that when Iain Duncan Smith turned the screw on social security in 2012, he was right to warn claimants: “This is not an easy life any more, chum.” As if it ever was.
The chancellor, Rishi Sunak, has done well to honour 80% of wages for those “furloughed” from shut-down businesses – up to £2,500 a month. No one knows how many that covers and at what cost, but it was a macroeconomic necessity. One worry is the incapacity of the HMRC workforce, with 15,600 staff cut and 157 local offices with local knowledge closed: can they pay the wage subsidy to companies in time to save them? Many firms could still close, sending millions into unemployment.
The 15% self-employed are urgently seeking a matching plan, with the Treasury under intense pressure for a rapid response. Most of the self-employed are low-paid: their median income is just £10,000, according to Paul Johnson of the Institute for Fiscal Studies. Some won’t qualify, if they have earning partners. But many will have been forced into sham “self-employment” by tax-cheating companies. They will be desperate – and angry. The Resolution Foundation wants them paid 80% of average earnings over the past three years – or they will work through illness, rather than starve on £94 a week sickness benefit, says the RSA Populus poll.
Let’s hope that injustice is fixed. But even then, watch the shock as millions fall on the untender mercies of the Department for Work and Pensions, to discover what happened to benefits in the past decade. While never over-generous, by 2010 Labour had greatly lifted living standards for low earners, especially for children: Gordon Brown’s tax credits raised a million children and a million pensioners out of poverty. Since 2010, according to new research by Kerris Cooper and John Hills, a professor at the London School of Economics, children have lost a quarter of the support they had; chancellor George Osborne and his successors took out a staggering nearly £40bn from benefits. Never “all in this together”, Osborne justified it by raining down abuse on low-paid families. The hypocrisy: as the current editor of the London Evening Standard, he ran Christmas collections for poor families! The Resolution Foundation predicts a third of children falling into poverty by 2023.
Some cuts were secretive, uprating benefits by a meaner CPI not RPI inflation rate, a four-year freeze, and axing council tax support. Some made a noise – such as the bedroom tax, costing some families £14 week for a spare room. An early case was a Hartlepool family whose empty room belonged to their recently deceased 10-year-old. Housing benefit for renters was cut brutally. Introducing the two-child limit was exceptionally unjust.
New claimants confronting universal credit’s obstacles may join the half who find themselves propelled to food banks. Many new arrivals will join the 60% of claimants falling into debt and rent arrears while waiting at least five weeks for first payments. As with HMRC, a stripped-down DWP workforce is at risk of being overwhelmed. Some talking to the Treasury are shocked to find its staff clueless about the meanness of a benefits system they have cut and cut again. That explains Sunak’s sudden extra £20 a week and slight easing of housing benefit: they had no idea.
Torsten Bell, head of the Resolution Foundation, says people on £50,000 salaries have been anxiously asking him about benefits rates. They’re in for a shock, he says. Unlike the previous tax credit system, universal credit only allows savings of £6,000 (it takes steep deductions from savings up to £16,000). People hoping this is only temporary will be distraught at having to use up their rainy-day funds, often saved for years for a deposit on a home. The foundation is lobbying urgently to have this savings means-test dropped.
Hills says a couple with two children will get £266 a week. And take from that £115 – the average amount that housing benefit falls short of rental payments. Many new claimants will run up rent arrears. Expect them to plunge immediately into poverty, miles below the £384 minimum income standard for a family of four, says Hills.
Some singles will get a shock too. Under-35s will be living on £73, and only funded for a room in a shared flat, in the cheapest third of rentals in the area.
Many who see themselves as middle class will confront the reality of Britain’s nonexistent safety net. It is, says the IFS’s Paul Johnson, “extraordinarily low”. One piece of advice from all these experts I’ve talked to: apply immediately, to limit these delays and debts. “Too many will wait, borrow from family, deny it’s happening to them, feeling the stigma. Apply at once,” says Torsten Bell.
These millions discovering DWP brutality at first hand will no longer be deceived by the old poison shaming those on benefits as loafers, frauds and “not people like us”. Benefits offer penury, not a life of Riley. Rishi Sunak has been lavishly praised, not least for his empathic language: “We will be judged by our capacity for compassion”. But his compassion will be judged by how far he keeps benefit rates below the most basic poverty line.
Horror over the west’s failure to contain Covid-19 will pale by comparison if it sweeps the developing world asks Nesrine Malik in The Guardian
‘The ebola epidemic of 2014 is still fresh in the mind in sub-Saharan African countries.’ A man wears a mask while shopping in Johannesburg. Photograph: Luca Sola/AFP via Getty Images
Though Africa has fewer coronavirus cases and a slower rate of infection than the UK, many countries in the continent have passed dramatically more extreme measures to prevent its spread than Britain has. In my birth country of Sudan, after only one case and one death was registered, all schools and universities were shut down. Several other nations, such as Egypt, have taken the ultimate precaution and closed their airports.
There is no denial here, no mixed messaging, and no unfounded promise of how soon we will send the virus packing.
The tough and timely action is borne less out of political maturity than it is bitter experience, and an awareness that already overburdened public healthcare systems cannot sustain an onslaught. The ebola epidemic of 2014 is still fresh in the mind in sub-Saharan African countries; it was an experience that showed prevention and containment are the only hope of fending off thousands of deaths.
If we are concerned about the failure to contain the virus in western Europe and the US, multiples of that horror await in the developing world. With few means of medical intervention, and several other risk factors such as malnutrition, high population densities, communal living and lack of access to water and washing facilities, the rates of mortality could dwarf what has been seen so far in the west. And economically, the virus risks ushering in an ice age. There are no war chests, no stimulus packages, no insurance payouts.
There is little data about the impact in Africa of previous pandemics such as the 1918-19 Spanish flu (except from South Africa where, because of troop movements, 6% of the population perished). But we do have the experience of economically similar south Asian countries to go by. It is estimated that up to 30% of the entire fatal toll of the Spanish flu came from a single country, India. And in Africa it appears that the countries that suffered the highest casualties were those most exposed to global flows of people and capital – the ports or thoroughfares for troops on the move, and for sea and land labour.
There is something painfully predictable about how coronavirus was introduced to the continent. Well-off travellers to the rest of the world returned from holidays and business trips carrying the virus, as did infected tourists. In Egypt, the first cases of Covid-19 appear to be linked to one cruise ship, where locals who served the tourists contracted the disease.
The spread of the virus on the continent sits in the crosscurrents of travel and financial flows that expose African countries to the sharp end of globalisation – one where the flow of people is encouraged into the continent for business and tourism, and severely restricted out of the continent even for the wealthy and well connected.
It is the recurring theme of how the pandemic has played out so far. The poor, the uninsured, the disenfranchised, the information-poor and the less mobile are sitting ducks. Many western economies, including the US and the UK, have slowly pushed these people to the margins, while restricting employment benefits such as holiday pay, sick leave, and private insurance to an increasingly exclusive class. One of the reasons the British and US governments have been so slow to provide free testing, medical care and bailouts for those who’ve lost work is that these inequalities are now hardwired into the system. They cannot be undone overnight even when lives depend on it.
The global economy is set up in much the same way, with winners who hoard the spoils, and losers who scratch around for the leftovers. If wealthy single countries cannot scramble to save their own people, there is no hope for any effort to extend help to countries with a fraction of the resources.
But here is the tragic catch for those who think that this structural imbalance is not our problem. In this instance, national and international inequalities cannot persist without everyone losing. The realisation is just beginning to dawn upon lawmakers that the rich cannot be barricaded against the poor, no matter how high the barriers to the fortress are. Limiting the spread of the virus entails ensuring that everyone in the pool, be it local or global, is given the ability to test, self-isolate if need be, and receive treatment.
Yes, to some extent this is a utopian aspiration. But it is also essentially pragmatic. We cannot extol the virtues of small government and global societies without grasping that the risk to the majority cannot be halted from spreading: viruses do not distinguish between classes and nationalities.
Just as work and public life cannot be shuttered for ever, borders cannot be closed indefinitely. African countries are moving fast against coronavirus, well aware that they are on their own. But barring a miracle, or a pandemic Marshall plan by wealthier countries, if the virus explodes in poorer countries, the cataclysm will engulf everyone.