Coronavirus is the new Brexit – another battlefield in the never-ending culture war

The Leave and Remain armies haven’t been demobbed. They are regrouping in new theatres of combat

Cooped up in my own little “WFH” lazaretto, I’m spending too much time on Twitter. Then again, it’s all some of us have left after the pubs were cordoned off and normal human social interaction was replaced by something called Zoom.

It has its uses, though, Twitter, and I am struck by how many of the same vicious tribal divisions we suffered during the Brexit crisis are being reproduced in this Covid-19 crisis. The Leave and Remain armies haven’t been demobbed; they are regrouping to fight new battles, prosecuting the never-ending culture war in new theatres of combat.

To take a rather extreme example, I offer yesterday’s Mail on Sunday spread – I discovered it via Twitter, of course – under the headline “Did Barnier Infect BoJo?” This is what my colleague John Rentoul calls a “question to which the answer is no”, or QTWTAIN. It referred to a meeting between Barnier and the UK’s Brexit negotiating team, supplemented by a flowchart and no clinical or other evidence whatsoever.

I suppose the answer to the question might better be: “Maybe, but he might also have got it when he was shaking hands with everyone on a Covid-19 ward”. In fact the writers surpassed themselves with a supplemental QTWTAIN in the opening paragraph: “Could this be the ultimate revenge for Brexit?”

It is indicative and telling in the easy conflation of Brexit and an entirely apolitical microorganism.

So what do we see now? Like Brexit, each tribe has its own dogma, heroes and experts. For the corona-sceptics the heroes are, once again, Boris Johnson and Donald Trump. The corona-sceptic dogma is that we should not sacrifice personal liberty and the economy in the name of what is probably an overstated threat best dealt with via herd immunity.

It has its favourite scientists and studies: the ones that are upbeat about finding “cures” and minimising the “excess” death toll, arguing that coronavirus is merely bringing deaths of those with underlying conditions forward a bit (so that’s sort of all right then, it is implied). They like the studies such as the Oxford analysis that suggests many of us have had the disease without realising it.

There are outriders in this gang too, familiar to us from past arguments – including Tim Martin who has implied that you can’t get Covid-19 in a Wetherspoons pub. These people blame China for the “Chinavirus”, wanting a “reckoning” later on; they mock Brussels’ difficulties in coordinating EU member states. Their allies in the press write articles (such as that one in the Mail on Sunday) and think pieces entitled “The self-pitying ‘woke’ generation needed a war – and in coronavirus they’ve got one”.

The other side, the corona-istes, criticise Johnson and Trump for being complacent, pointing to the better records of Germany and Korea in tackling the outbreak. They stress the deadly nature of the pandemic and point to Imperial College scientists who suggested that there would be maybe 250,000 deaths if the government didn’t change course (which of course it did).

This tribe claim the trillions spent on rescuing the British economy during this unprecedented time shows that Jeremy Corbyn was right all along (he agrees), and that the wicked Tories left the NHS too weak to cope. They regret that the British didn’t join the joint EU ventilator procurement programme, and their heroes are the clinical staff who speak out about shortages of masks and gloves.

The divisions – cultural and generational – are as visceral as they were under Brexit, but, so far, much less evenly matched. Unlike the painful irreconcilability of the 48-52 split, recent polls suggest that Johnson is enjoying the support of three out four voters during this crisis, with a vast lead over his opponents. That is one reason why you shouldn’t pay too much attention to social media, I suppose.

The irony is that the politicians themselves are, this time round, far more collegiate and consensual than the Brexit leaders ever were, and the two cultural tribes still are. The Tory Matt Hancock and Labour’s John Ashworth are like brothers in arms, constructively battling to defeat a common enemy.

Johnson, going out on the biggest spending spree since the Second World War, semi-nationalising the economy, has dropped the “Venezuela socialism” jibes against Corbyn. John McDonnell is not so far away from Rishi Sunak these days. Party politics has in effect been suspended, and the Brexit argument shelved.

Our political leaders, remarkably, seem to want to work together, stop the bickering and call a truce in the culture wars. Maybe they should point out to their various followers in the press and the keyboard warriors on social media that there’s a ceasefire on?