The scale of state intervention in response to coronavirus may change Britain forever

Now we know that state spending can be turned on, who will ever again get away with claiming there is no magic money tree?

Just before Britain went into lockdown this week, the health secretary Matt Hancock was asked why some people were still ignoring the government’s coronavirus advice. He didn’t know, he said, adding: “It’s very selfish.” Following the rules, he insisted, would help the country get through this terrible crisis as quickly as possible. His remarks came after reports of “total fury” across government about the public flouting of social distancing rules, as pictures emerged of last weekend’s crowded parks, beaches and markets.

The government’s willingness to blame the public must be placed in the context of its own inconsistent and unclear messaging over coronavirus. Vital information has been delivered vaguely or shared via anonymous press briefings, while communications specialists are aghast at the multiple errors of a political operation previously lauded for its election- and referendum-winning slogans.

But none of that stopped a cascade of social media criticism echoing Hancock’s bewilderment at an apparently selfish and ignorant public, for whom there is now a freshly coined term: covidiots. The urban dictionary defines this as someone who ignores public health warnings or hoards goods – the hallmark purchase being toilet roll.

What’s striking about this condemnation is how uniformly it cleaves to the idea of individual responsibility that underpins Britain’s free-market state system. For nearly 40 years, beginning with Thatcherite individualism, successive UK governments have subscribed to a social and economic model that winds back state responsibility and brings personal choice to the fore.

By this script, structural factors such as class, wealth or status are vanished, since success or failure is entirely down to individuals: the motivated and aspirational thrive, while the lazy and feckless fall. The characterisation of covidiots as selfish and stupid is a riff on the same theme, and not a million miles away from the Cameron-era Conservative narrative of strivers versus skivers – intended to separate those deemed deserving of welfare benefits from those abusing the system.

Some of those refusing to stick to coronavirus guidelines – thereby placing us all at risk – may well be thoughtless and selfish. But what makes this appraisal of them so consistent with the premises of free-market individualism is that the worst intentions are the measure by which everyone is judged.

Britain’s welfare state is what a system looks like when it is shaped by precisely such assumptions: testing everyone to the point of cruelty for the sake of preventing some notional abuse, even as people suffer needlessly and the system grows more expensive and inefficient. Chancellor Rishi Sunak’s welcome coronavirus compensation package has slashed key Conservative spending shibboleths, yet assumptions over entitlements and intentions permeate even these unprecedented policies.

After all, it would be far easier to roll out a universal basic income and deal with those who are too wealthy to qualify by taxing them. But rather than risk setting a precedent, or handing out state cash to those who may not meet criteria, the chancellor’s delivery system is means-tested, making it more bureaucratic, time-consuming and in some cases patchy.

Meanwhile, tabloids rail about selfish shoppers stripping supermarket shelves, but it turns out the reality is more complicated: we may be shopping to make up for the 40 per cent of food we would ordinarily consume outside of our homes. (Granted, this does not explain the toilet roll panic-purchasing, over which theories abound.)

Ministers moan about ignorant commuters on crowded London trains, but again, the glitch is not necessarily due to bad character. Service is less frequent because 30 per cent of tube staff are off sick with the Covid-19 virus or other illnesses. Construction workers are still commuting because the government has not said they should stop working – and there are 300,000 construction workers and 250,000 NHS staff in the capital (according to the mayor’s office).

Others, self-employed or gig workers, may still be travelling to work because they have slipped through the holes in the coronavirus economic safety net. The multiple factors operating here suggest that, rather than railing at the bad decisions people make, it is more instructive to examine the bad options that potentially generated them – even if that means a few selfish idiots might, for now, escape opprobrium

The terrifying pandemic has necessitated such an enormous scale of state intervention it might be tempting to think we can’t go back to the old ways once it is all over. Given our dependence on a functional, well staffed NHS why would anyone in future agree to slash funding for it?

Now it is clear that society’s essential workers are healthcare professionals, teachers, cleaners, delivery drivers, shelf stackers, bus drivers, rubbish collectors and more, who would begrudge them decent pay and working conditions?

Now we know that state spending can be turned on, who will ever again get away with claiming there is no magic money tree? And now we realise that society is only as strong as the protections in place for the most vulnerable, why wouldn’t we insist on a social security system that embodies that?

It is, of course, too early to say. And the blame games of the past week suggests it is all still up for debate. If politicians and chunks of the public are willing to put current failings down to selfish individualism, it may prove hard to prevent a return to state models premised on such appraisals. In other words, it isn’t enough for the ravaging free market system to crumble. The assumptions upon which it was built have to fall away, too.