Back in the saddle

One of my most active files (almost 200 pages long) bears the title “Lockdown Diary” and consists of the urls of (and excerpts from) articles about the extraordinary and shared experience of the Covid19 pandemic. I draw, of course, on material which is basically in the English language – although both Le Monde and Die Zeit give me feeds (daily in the case of the former; weekly for the latter).

 A few of the articles stand out for the scale and originality of what they attempted just after I went offline viz

- John Gray’s long piece in the New Statesman

- a superb Guardian Long Read;

- Duncan Green’s great overview (in early April) on Covid 19 as a Critical Juncture

- an important article which explored the variety of ways states responded to the pandemic and what this says about public trust 

I find it highly significant that the two countries with the highest death rates are the countries which gave us neoliberalism; pride themselves on their ”exceptionalism”; have adversarial ”first past the post” electoral systems which disdain attempts at consensus; and a transactional approach to business which insists on paring costs down to a bare minimum – regardless, as Paul Collier argues recently, of its possible effects on social resilience. This article by an Italian living in the UK makes a similar point    

The warning bells about the virus started when North Italy started to close its borders in late February. It was March before my blog started to make references to the situation but PC problems meant my posts have had a 2 month gap 

Although we are still only in the first stages of the pandemic, 28 May was the day I felt I was being overwhelmed by the analyses – even if they made for powerful reading.

First Anthony Barnett - who has the gift of smelling “critical junctures”. To Charter 77, constitutional change, Brexit, he now adds Covid with this long piece Out of the Belly of Hell which places the crisis in the context of a 50 years crisis.

And then another paper with a similar time perspective - Shooting the Rapids – Covid19 and the long crisis of globalisation (The Long Crisis 2020)