Rishi’s Jeremiad Against ‘Sick-Note Britain’ is a Sick Joke, Given His Role in Paying People to Stay at Home and Not Work During the Lockdown

Rishi Sunak trades freely – too freely – in the idea that he is a decent man doing his best with a terrible hand. In a speech earlier this month at the Centre for Social Justice, he invoked it again. Sunak was baffled as to why, on top of everything else, 2.8 million people are now permanently out of commission due to illness, double the number since 2020. “In the period since the pandemic, something has gone wrong,” he said.

The euphemism has a double meaning. Sunak is too polite to spell out the link between lockdown and the rise in long-term illness: that people took their cues from a two-year enforced halt to all commerce and started phoning it in. And if the cause isn’t interrogated, if it really is down to simple selfishness and ill will, then the issue can be turned into an old pre-pandemic set piece – of welfare bums versus the productive citizenry.

Like most people, Sunak would sooner forget about lockdown. Caledonian Road, the new state-of-the-nation social realist novel of 2020s Britain, is set not during lockdown, but in 2021, its furtive aftermath; and the event takes a firm backseat to that new and fresh theme of middle-aged public intellectuals getting cancelled. Can’t we now just treat the whole thing as a freak spasm, and try to pick up where we left off?

No, let’s not. For anyone under the age of 50, lockdown was the marquee economic event of their life. It meant the greatest upward transfer of wealth in human history. It bankrupted a fifth of American small businesses. It put the final nail in the fiscal coffin of those terminally luckless millennials who graduated just after the crash of 2008. And it’s almost entirely responsible for the current rash of inflation, having fried global supply chains long before the attack on Ukraine. In Britain, it meant the borrowing of £300 billion, wiping out 10 years of fiscal retrenchment in a month.

Lockdown brought about the final insolvency of Britain’s social model. It showed that a large tranche of the British middle classes have no economic function. It destroyed some people’s livelihoods by decree and enriched others, and in so doing stretched the idea of a relationship between hard work and material reward – always a dubious one – so far as to finally snap. It showed that to treat modern British society as a sort of elaborate swindle against the young is a better heuristic than most.

And so it’s galling for Rishi Sunak, the procurer of this lockdown debt, to now invoke individual gumption, enterprise, and bootstraps – however feebly. He cannot chide the British people for responding to a system of disincentives that he himself had a large hand in creating. He cannot demand that Britain’s working-age population, locked down and indebted over a virus whose effect on them was a rounding error, now redouble their efforts to help pay back the debts taken on.

To call Rishi’s measures to counter this new idleness Victorian, as many have, is only to take him at his own conceit: that any of this has anything to do with the ‘case for free markets’ as traditionally understood. This is a highly selective appeal to economic liberalism, used only to perpetuate a system of debt vassalage to the aged.

This is the case for free markets in 2020s Britain according to people like Rishi Sunak: all the old mundane tyrannies of the boss and the foreman, but now with the constant adding of expensive humanitarian commitments for which the public must foot the bill. The state reserves the right to nationalise all wages on a whim, but this should never trouble traditional capitalist models of employment, and citizens can be duly flung back into the old 9-5 to make up the cost.

Lockdown destroyed liberal ideas; the failure of lockdown destroyed statist ones. All that remains now in Britain is a frantic winding back of things to the way they were, come what may; in other words, to pay down this debt in a way that preserves the particular rentier social model of 2020s Britain. This idea is not a liberal one, or a statist one. It has no internal logic of its own. It simply picks and mixes between the two in such a way that the status quo always wins.

As a program it is almost entirely without precedent. The folk history of Britain has always been that collective sacrifice is followed by concession. Here’s how the story goes: Britain is class-bound, hide-bound, antiquated and ineptly governed; but in the hour of crisis the nation closes ranks and pulls together, and the old banger is somehow kept on the road. Bailed out, the British establishment is then forced to make concessions to those it has misruled. The Great War is succeeded by universal suffrage; the Second World War by the Beveridge Report.

Lockdown has been the first break in this pattern. Britain’s rulers cast COVID-19 as a bona fide national crisis, and – what’s more – a crisis that was beyond their abilities to solve. In the moment of disaster, Britain’s working population, as ever, showed the solidarity that was asked of them, and suffered a series of bizarre iniquities that we are only beginning to grapple with now.

But for the first time, no social concessions were made. The British people have shuffled into the post-lockdown era shabbier, poorer, and without even the pretence of some reimagining of society to follow. It’s all been more akin to the end of the Napoleonic wars than to VE Day.

The pandemic was the first crisis in modern British history that’s been followed by a real and conscious attempt to restore the status quo ante. Everything is to snap back into place – only with more debt, lower incomes, and every stupid social privilege confirmed.

Herbert Asquith once called for “business as usual”: that the liberal society of the Edwardian era might pass through the Great War unchanged. That is manifestly not what those telling the British people to get back to work now have in mind. No, the current attempt at social restoration is being led by those who simply like the idea of discipline, for its own sake; that someone, somewhere, should be being mobilised for some purpose. It finds its expression in the program of the moderate Tories: austerity without a small state; wage-labour without wages; national mobilisation without national feeling. This is the idea of collective sacrifice as an end in itself.

Too much has been made of ‘schoolmarmism’ as the essential spirit of English tyranny; not enough of our own homegrown Junkerdom. These are the people, on TV, on the radio, in the newspapers, whose counsel is always for the nation to get a grip, and to roll up its sleeves – to what purpose no one can say. These are the people who called for the harshest measures against those who refused to stay home during lockdown; and now call for harsh measures against those who decline to leave their homes and look for work. Shut people in their houses for two years; then bark at them to get “On yer bike”; then march them off to the conscription office.

It is no exaggeration to say that these people will destroy what remains of liberalism in Britain after the pandemic. The attempt to restore old labour relations to pay back debts incurred will not work. Nor should it. The British people were told exactly how much they ought to value hard work and individual enterprise in 2020. They were told, also, exactly how much reward they could expect for their unprecedented generosity and forbearance during those months. Until there is a recognition of the epoch-making fiscal transfer that took place from young to old in 2020, as well as some mitigating transfer in the opposite direction, then Britain’s working population is not obliged to be a party to its own robbery.