Coronavirus in the UK: a Brexit "stress test"?

A country’s culture tells us a lot about how it reacts to a crisis. When the Coronavirus hit Italy, the government put the entire country in quarantine (this literally being the place where the term “quarantine” was invented). When the Coronavirus came to Britain, the government’s approach has been one of “Keep Calm and Carry On” (as though stiff upper lip is a coherent strategy against a pandemic).

The advice the government is following comes from its Chief Scientist, who is in fact a behavioural scientist. This makes one wonder if Britain's official reaction to the Coronavirus isn't then turning into a kind of mass behavioural science experiment imposed on its population. 

Britain’s strategy rests not only on a lot of counter-intuitive thinking; it is also the dead opposite to what the rest of the world seems to be doing. Why?

Libertarian “behavioural science”

There is an attitude of “let things run their natural course” at work here, which is a mentality shared by proponents of laissez-faire Libertarianism. The “behavioural science” aspect of the government’s strategy is about “nudging” human behavior rather than through implementing drastic measures that could cause panic. In other words, the government wants the British population to be acquiescent and placid; fatalistic, almost, about the coming epidemic.

The government naturally has its own reasons for not wanting to create a panicked population, but the strategy here also seems to rest on some aspects of British culture as well. Fatalism and stoicism are two aspects of the British psyche that have been honed through different “crisis points” over the centuries, most recently the Second World War. Boris Johnson’s grave demeanour during these Coronavirus press conferences, feels deliberately designed to engender morbid acceptance of what is to come. In another (probably deliberate) way it feels like a quietly-knowing echo of the kind of “blood, toil, tears and sweat” of Churchill fame (which at the time definitely did not reassure everyone at all, by the way). Thus we have the national leader implicitly evoking the nostalgic spirit of “national struggle” and ultimate sacrifice, with the latter being seen as an inevitable consequence of the former. Those at the most risk, the elderly and the infirm, are already being made to be seen by the wider population as, to an extent, helpless victims of viral “natural selection”.

The scientific strategy seems to rest on allowing most of the population to be exposed to the virus naturally, with people’s own immune systems given time to fight it off. In this sense, the government seems to have already accepted that the health care system is unable to cope, and is encouraging people to “look after themselves”.

The fact that this strategy goes against all the official WHO advice and the responses of most other governments in the world is telling. It tells us the British government approach is a combination of Libertarian thinking backed up by the fatalism inherent in the British psyche. One wonders if some in the government haven’t already seen the “learning potential” from taking this “ideological strategy” to a pandemic outbreak to see how the same strategy could be used across the country more widely to deal with the political effects of Brexit next year.

Coronavirus: an opportune Brexit “stress test”?

If people can acquiesce to losing, for example, potentially half a million people on the back of ideological “science”, what else could they accept?

The dark echoes that this fatalism to mass death leads to need no explanation. Already Britain is a country where homeless people are left to die on the streets or in seclusion in the countryside and some of the disabled live in starved penury; people acquiesce as people are made homeless and the disabled starve thanks to government indifference. Such things are accepted, so it isn’t hard to see how that same population could accept potentially half a million dead as “one of those things”.

This is a society that has been “nudged” for the last ten years to accept what was once unacceptable in a civilized society. The British government’s approach to the Coronavirus has all the hallmarks of being ideological in its nature, against the approach recommended by the world’s health authorities. The ideological project that is “Brexit” intends to radically transform the structure of British society. Already weakened by a decade of austerity and welfare “reform”, those social structures are only supported by a government that seems willing to let a viral outbreak dissolve much of what’s left of British society’s communal bonds. 

With so many already homeless, so many disabled left to their fate, why would care about the old and infirm dying in a viral outbreak? This would be Darwinian "natural selection" on a national scale.

By making people acquiesce to the idea of half a million dead as somehow “feasible”, it psychologically prepares them for the ideological mayhem that a Libertarian “Brexit” would inflict on them afterwards. Worn down by a decade of austerity and a year of viral deaths, whatever ideological plans the government has for “Brexit Britain” would be accepted as almost trivial by comparison. There would be no effective opposition left.

In this sense, there could be a very discreet (and deliberate) psychological strategy behind the government’s “laissez-faire” attitude to the Coronavirus outbreak (as their strategy is so plainly at odds with every other country’s): using the outbreak as a way to “stress test” specific structural aspects of society, while weakening public resistance to the radical (and at one time, unthinkable) social change to come afterwards.

The “national struggle” that the Coronavirus is now being portrayed as by the British government evokes the jingoistic spirit of Britain’s mythologized past on one hand and the stoic fatalism in the British psyche on the other. The acceptance of the radical ideology of Brexit after the national trauma that an ideological approach to the Coronavirus could inflict could well be something the government is banking on.

The “ideological laboratory” that Britain has been for the last ten years seems to be stepping up in its approach, with Brexit as its endgame; in the case of the Coronavirus, using Britain’s population as expendable “guinea pigs” seems like just the logical conclusion of that when applied to medical science.

Finally, there is the idea of the virus as a "test of national character". By being able to deal with the Coronavirus with its own ideological approach, it implies that Britain can deal with any kind of adversity. The mythology of Britain's supposed exceptionalism fits the Coronavirus outbreak into the narrative of Brexit.