---
title: "&#8220;In the British state&#8217;s response to Covid-19, the unthinkable became thinkable&#8221;"
date: "2022-04-06T11:52:51+01:00"
modified: "2022-04-06T11:52:51+01:00"
url: "https://rationalists.org.uk/2022/04/06/in-the-british-states-response-to-covid-19-the-unthinkable-became-thinkable/"
post_id: 7294
categories: ["Uncategorised"]
---

# “In the British state’s response to Covid-19, the unthinkable became thinkable”

*![Will Davies](https://rationalists.org.uk/wp-content/uploads/sites/2/images/Will-Davies-photo.jpg)*

*Professor William Davies is a sociologist and political economist at Goldsmiths University in London. He has written widely on neoliberalism, happiness science, environmental politics and anti-expert politics. His latest book, “[Unprecedented? How COVID-19 Revealed the Politics of Our Economy](https://mitpress.mit.edu/books/unprecedented)” (Goldsmiths Press), authored by Davies, Sahil Jai Dutta, Nick Taylor and Martina Tazzioli, was published in March.*

**The book, which you wrote together with colleagues from the Goldsmiths Political Economy Research Centre, makes clear that Covid has given greater clarity to several striking and uncomfortable truths about the workings of the British state and its economy: the central role played by a “shadow state” of “contract rentiers”; the shape and geography of inequality here. You’ve studied political economy and statecraft for decades. What, if anything, has struck you as especially remarkable over the past two years?**

One thing that’s been astonishing is that an economy that had long been organised around housing, as a driver of inequality, a focal point of macroeconomic policy and a cultural obsession, was able to become even more so, to the point where one now has to recognise that houses and households are the pivotal institution of British capitalism.

I mean this in a number of ways. Firstly, Covid-19 saw yet more house price inflation internationally, caused by the asset-purchasing programmes of central banks and a stamp duty holiday in the UK. But, by virtue of the injunction to “stay home” and the rapid expansion of digital platforms over the previous decade, “home” became a place of work, education, consumption, entertainment and retail. It also hugely intensified certain political dynamics of households, in terms of where financial surpluses and deficits occurred, and crucially where surpluses and deficits of time in the household occurred. In financial terms, this is evident in how certain households built up huge savings over the course of lockdowns, seeing as their opportunities to spend suddenly disappeared, whereas others fell more deeply into debt. But the issue of time was also significant: certain people (those furloughed, without children or caring responsibilities) found themselves with unprecedented levels of free time, to bake bread or watch Netflix, whereas others were under intense pressure to juggle responsibilities arising from home-schooling and home-working. Evidence shows graduate mothers were doing more work in the evenings and at night than any other demographic. None of these processes is entirely new, but they have been ramped up even further over the last two years. What we don’t know is what the longer-term legacies of (what we term in the book) “hyper-domestication” will be.

**Has the UK – both the government and the public – responded as you would have expected?**

Nobody knew what a policy response to such an event would look like, though one could have guessed that central bank asset-purchasing would be part of the mix, as so many economies in the Global North were already addicted to these policies. Beyond this, however, the last two years has been an astonishing revelation of what governments are actually capable of. Firstly, there is the use of their own balance sheets to borrow and spend, without raising the cost of borrowing, something that was deemed impossible for the previous decade. This paid for the furlough scheme, something that was also unimaginable only a few weeks before it was unveiled, but could now reshape how we think about welfare.

Then there were the various local interventions. The Everyone In scheme, which initially aimed to get 5,000 people off the streets, but had by May 2021 moved 37,500 people into Covid-secure housing. The designation of ‘essential worker’ status (for instance in terms of whether an employee’s child was offered a school-place) demonstrated that it is possible for policy-makers to distinguish social value, something that neoliberal intellectuals have spent a century denying. Even in schools, where things were very tough for teachers, they acquired a level of autonomy and demonstrated a service to local communities that teachers and unions have long argued for, but which have always been dismissed by central government and the press. In all these ways, the unthinkable became thinkable.

**What was it about the particular nature of the pandemic itself, as opposed to other crises, that lent it what you describe as a “photosynthetic” function, “feeding tendencies that already existed, while also illuminating them”?**

This is a very interesting issue. We adopted the metaphor of “photosynthesis” because we recognised that the pandemic isn’t just an ordinary economic crisis. In many ways, it exacerbates tendencies that were already there (as in the example of the household economy and housing), but by virtue of it affecting everybody, had a powerful political effect in raising consciousness and visibility of these tendencies. Crises aren’t always like this. The Global Financial Crisis of 2008 was the biggest of its kind since the 1930s, and yet if you owned your own home, were retired, or employed in a senior position, it didn’t really hit you much. Thanks to policy choices, the costs were pushed towards the young, public sector workers, local government and those dependent on local government. The politics of the pre-Covid decade was shaped by these divergent experiences.

With Covid, some got rich out of it, many died, and nobody could entirely ignore it. It had a clarifying and politicising effect, the consequences of which I suspect we’ve not yet seen. The type of state, labour market, care infrastructure, society were unavoidable matters of concern, across ages, classes and geography.

**One point the book makes early on, when discussing the cronyism in government around the awarding of Covid-related contracts, is that proximity to the British state – if not the Conservative Party itself – “now represents a business model”. Is this a marked change in the nature of government-to-business relations in the UK?**

I think there were three things going on here. The first is that the British state has been a source of revenue for a whole industry – public service outsourcing – since the late 1980s. This has been well-documented by the likes of CRESC and Brett Christophers, who classifies “contract rentiers” as one of the major forms of rentiership at the heart of British capitalism. When a Minister has a major policy problem, you can count on two hands the possible consultancy firms and service providers who they will turn to to solve it.

Secondly, the post-Brexit Conservative Party and Johnson leadership is evidently far more relaxed about helping its donors and friends, from positions of power. We shouldn’t exaggerate the purity of British politics pre-Johnson, but we know that the state operates in a more clientelist way than it did only a few years ago, as is often associated with ‘populist’ regimes. The third is that the emergency of Spring 2020 and onwards clearly deepened this tendency, as exhibited by the “VIP Lane” that was discovered through which Covid contracts were awarded without usual procurement procedures. So again, something “photo-synthetic” occurred, in that features of the British state that had become sedimented over the previous 30 years – and others that were features of the past five years – were suddenly thrown into the limelight, and amplified.

**You also make the point that one of the great tragedies of the pandemic is the priority accorded to the nation and to national policy-making. Why is this to be lamented?**

Because the pandemic is a singularly global event. It’s hard to conceive of anything that could have brought so many people, across so many national and cultural boundaries, into such simultaneity like this. That is a consequence of jet travel, and it is the first airborne pandemic since jet-based business travel and tourism engulfed the entire globe. That it has also occurred in the context of the internet and social media adds to the intensely global sensibility that it has generated, much as Benedict Anderson wrote of how “print capitalism” enabled the rise of nations in the 18th century, by bringing members of large territories into a single chronology of experience.

Responses would ideally be global as well, in terms of vaccination and protection of the vulnerable. Instead, we saw what Adam Tooze has described as an “Olympics of national governance”, in which each nation pursued its own distinctive path. I guess this had benefits from an experimental point of view, but it also saw drastic escalation of border controls, with dire consequences for refugees, and some frankly racist hierarchies of which nations were perceived to pose greatest risk to others. As Tooze has argued, none of this bodes well for the larger global crisis of climate breakdown.

**The book notes the central role played by data and data platforms in critical decision-making processes around the Covid-19 response. How does this transform state power?**

Data, in its 21st century digital form, has been crucial to pandemic responses in societies such as the UK. This is true for the somewhat botched track-and-trace system, in which the Covid-19 app, venue check-ins and ubiquitous QR codes became an attempt at rolling out surveillance. This was met with considerable hesitancy, made worse by anxieties surrounding the use of NHS data, meaning that the system never really delivered. In countries that experienced SARS, such as South Korea, such platform-based surveillance was far more advanced, with considerably greater state enforcement. Vaccine roll-out was enabled by data analytics provided by firms such as the controversial Palantir. Then there is the ongoing question about what access data and AI firms might attain as part of their services to the NHS.

These public-private partnerships are unlike many outsourcing contracts, as they grant private platforms and data analysts a form of sovereignty over us, not only in terms of surveillance, but in terms of making crucial decisions over our movements and freedoms. The geographer Louise Amoore has identified this in relation to electronic borders, operated by what she terms an “consultocracy”, that is, power and decisions in the hands of IT service providers. The capacity to sustain certain forms of movement and market, under exceptional conditions, is conditioned by the handing over of powers once unique to the state, into the hands of commercial data analysts. This is why companies like Palantir provoke such unease.

**The whole experience has polarised many over the question of public vs. state power. Anti-vaxxers and anti-mask wearers, often but not always rather “anti-state” in their orientation, are derided as selfish and self-sabotaging; those who comply with the rules are conversely seen as complicit in supporting a widening of state and para-state powers. Was there ever a safe middle line to tread between personal health and personal freedoms?**

I think there was, but one shouldn’t become too seduced by hindsight. We can all look back on some of the excesses of lockdowns (closed playgrounds, bans on sitting down in parks) and wonder what the hell was anyone thinking. But there was intense fear at the time of something entirely novel. Nobody in a position of expertise was advising in favour of moderation, because the great fear was the situation witnessed in Lombardy, of hospitals completely overwhelmed. I think children’s wellbeing, education and longer-term prospects should have received far more attention and priority, but that reflects as much on warped generational priorities as anything else.

**As someone who was writing widely, long before the pandemic, on various manifestations of state overreach, how have you, in your own day-to-day life, grappled with this tension between accepting measures that are intended to protect public health – mask wearing, handing over of high volumes of personal data, tighter border controls – and relinquishing of personal freedoms? How have you thought this through and reasoned with its outcomes?**

It’s extremely difficult, because I have sufficient confidence in the scientists advising the government, and even sufficient confidence in many senior figures in the government, to accept that measures were introduced according to the best balance of evidence that they could come up with at the time. We know that measures were introduced too late in Britain in March 2020, and that had they been introduced sooner, then deaths would have been fewer and freedoms restored sooner, but that’s a different issue. We were broadly living in a very fallible utilitarian experiment, never conducted before, and I don’t believe anyone knew with very much confidence what was the best way to make trade-offs. In that sense of real-time decision-making, with a lot of “noise”, it did resemble a wartime scenario. Some measures, such as mask-wearing, became overloaded with moral symbolism on both sides.

I have tried to remain sceptical, without falling into traps of conspiracy theory. The difference between scepticism and cynicism is not always easy to maintain, but one thing that is always worth doing is identifying and calling out those who are themselves acting cynically and opportunistically, including politicians, businesses and other elites, who have exploited a collective tragedy for their own benefit. The Left was also guilty of this at times, arguing for things that resembled a “left-wing” agenda in certain respects (such as “zero Covid”) but which failed to acknowledge the facts of Britain’s situation. The claim that because the government is a Tory one, it actively wants to kill people, or that schools should never have opened until Covid had disappeared entirely, is not a useful way of understanding things in my view.