what will the big fish in the little pond do?

horsemouth made a resolution last night to play the 12 string for one hour a day. (he moved it up to premier position on his guitar stands and it has been looking at him reproachfully with its great big headstock). make sure he keeps to it. that boy's a born slacker. 

democracy was founded by a tyrant.(i.f.stone) in saramago's ex-capital city they have undermined democracy by casting blank votes.(horsemouth is nearly finished reading seeing). in blindness (the book that takes place four years before the events of seeing)  everyone goes blind (as if from an infectious plague) society crumbles into a herd and beyond a herd into a hellish 'each against all'. 

(horsemouth made some efforts to read day of the triffids  to see what the post-war british take on this would be, but he bounced off).

seeing is full of an engaging comedy as the president, the prime-minister and the interior minister vie for position. the government's strategy out of the epidemic of non-voting is to admit to the trauma of the months of the blindness, to peel back that repression (clever move) and start the nation talking about it. 

the blindness becomes the event that explains and forgives the epidemic of blank votes and permits the re-incorporation of the rebel capital back into the state. (that anyway was the plan) . 

there is some more engaging comedy as 3 policemen (paralleling the president/ prime minister / interior minister, horsemouth now realises) are sent to  interrogate the one possible suspect (the one woman who did not go blind in the epidemic).

horsemouth was listening to a R4 series on the 'spanish' flu pandemic at the end of WW I. now this was almost totally removed from collective memory. in some ways (ok ok some people remember their grandparents mentioning it).  this happened because it lacks battles and generals and geo-political objectives, it does not fit in to a narrative of development and growth, and then again more 'stuff' happened after it - the roaring twenties, the depression, WW II, the cold war, the consumer boom etc. etc. 

further it was a a time before a fully developed 'national' health service in the UK existed (one developed enough at least to issue death certificates and take a measure of 'excess deaths'), and a national media, when people were often unaware of what was happening in the next town. when death though disease was a private matter that largely happened at home. 

now the question is what kind of historical repression will be associated with the covid pandemic. (not that there won't be another flare up this winter and each successive winter).

of course the main covid lie will be that the lockdown was not necessary. here horsemouth ignores what he takes to be the straight-forward conspiracy model, that there was no covid, the people who died died as a result of vaccination with poison by a government aiming to reduce the population to permit their 'great replacement' with a more docile worforce from abroad/ andor confine the native population in their homes, working from home etc. . 

the argument that lockdown was not necessary or indeed counterproductive  is an argument that can be had within the bounds of reason (reckons horsemouth).  much of the excess death is caused by disease going untreated, by a  backlog of treatment, some of that due to lockdown itself, some of that due to overloading of the NHS by the extra burden of covid. 

this has taken a service that nearly fell over each winter as a result of flu and made it more likely to fall over.

within this argument there are two threads - one asserts a counterfactual efficacy, that the measures were not necessary (that COVID was only really a threat to the aged and infirm) and that this can be measured and shown, - the second is an argument about freedom, about the biopolitical extension of state power into people's lives on medical grounds being encouraged by the pandemic. 

now here in laissez-faire slap-happy britain horsemouth sees little sign of the second, 'you must stay at home yes, (and party) er. china yes. here the desire to get back to playing the game they understand is the ruling ambition (and so we soon had rishi sunak delivering pizzas). 

 

the next covid lie will be that it had no effect on the national health service and was not in any way a 'final straw'. now GDP can be calculated in many ways (it is basically any money spent), so if healthcare gets more expensive that will contribute to GDP - it will stop being a matter of 'the burden of taxation' and start  being a matter of increased profits. the restructuring of the NHS (in line with earlier privatisations) is a major political project that will produce many contracts and opportunities for wealth grubbing. it is corporate activity that will look good on the balance sheet, the cost of it will be born by the workers as insurance payments.

COVID is in many ways the first tremor of the bigger  wave that is coming out of the natural word to upset our politics and plans for development. that wave is climate change. 

we are being sold a model of green growth, that there will be enough solar panels to go round (and a wind farm if not on every hill then on every flat bit of water) and capitalism will continue on seamlessly, by being wonderfully inventive and responsive to customer demand. BP (british petroleum) will have a green logo and it will all be like tellytuby land. 

but there is also the real danger of a top-down de-growth where the costs of the changes necessary to keep the business afloat through the climate crisis are born entirely by the workers not as a sunny upland of transition and new highly-paid jobs but as a reduction in living standards (raised power bills produce lower usage for greater profits lest we forget).

some will wish to pretend that it isn't happening. that all we need to do is reduce green levies, frack for more gas and build nuclear power plants. and with ever increasing carbon emission we will advance into the future.

a friend once described brexit as the british ruling classes desire to be big fish in a little pond. what will the big fish in the little pond do?

saramago once wrote a novel the stone raft where the iberian penninsula splits off from europe and sets sail to discover its destiny (a better metaphor for brexit horsemouth has never seen). the portuguese refer to us as their oldest ally but it is our great similarities (as ex-empires grown small) that in fact unite us. 

they are in fact ahead of us. they are our future.