Rearticulating consensus: a note on post-crisis ideologies

The spring breeze has beckoned a lighter lockdown, and now there's murmurs of a post-crisis politics.

Here's the lay of the land: air pollution had reduced drastically worldwide, to the extent that it is visible from satellite. People are being encouraged to live their lives more locally than before and the aviation industry is suffering historic lows in passenger numbers. All this, says the optimist, points to a decisive environmental moment where we can take action to create a new status quo, a new normal where these behaviours are maintained.

While I don’t disagree that the above would be a positive, seismic change, it is arguably a mischaracterisation of the ideological status quo. Leaving this crisis with a message that is all about climate, a la ExtinctionRebellion, is missing the point around how people have really experienced the COVID-19 pandemic. I am looking to clarify here why economic behaviours, and not environmental ones, are the ones likely to be most accepting of change in the post-crisis world.

Let’s examine how environmental norms have changed recently. The behaviours that people have adopted, such as flying less and living more locally,  are a product of lifestyle changes. These lifestyle changes are not choices but by and large necessities in response to government advice and legislation across the developed world in response to COVID-19. People are not changing their behaviours because their attitude towards the environment has changed; it is instead simply a happy side effect of large-scale infringement on individual liberties. Neither has the government advice and legislation causing this change been put in place with environmental change in mind. Delaying the spread of COVID-19 is the reason why planes can’t fly, and why fewer people are taking regular car journeys. In fact, governments have also created negative environmental externalities as a result of this crisis. The forced disposal of goods that have not been consumed are one example: 70 million pints of beer have gone to waste, according to one estimate.

While the way we are living our lives under COVID-19 is definitely having a positive environmental impact on balance, it is not wholly intentional, nor is it something that will naturally continue post-COVID. While I don’t wish to deny that the relative ease of transitioning to widespread teleconferencing and the reduced use of automobiles won’t make people think more about their habits in future, they did not change those habits for inherently environmental reasons, neither could the government employ a lockdown like this for those same environmental reasons. The ideological drive is simply not present. Pressure groups agree that a concerted effort will be required if we wish to convert this exceptional state into a new normal; the public has not suddenly lost the urge to go to the Costas, or drive to work; it’s simply that they can’t for the minute.

It is a different story if we are speaking economically. If the environmental case shows a change that is disconnected from the ideology with which it aligns, the economic case is very much in alignment. In the UK, Rishi Sunak’s furlough scheme for workers that might otherwise have been left unemployed has a predicted cost of £14bn a month. Broken down, that is more per month than the NHS received from public coffers in the last financial year. Economic policy – unprecedented, seismic fiscal policy – has been brought in to deal with an economic problem.

So in terms of creating lasting change – institutional change – it will be much more accessible from an economic point of view than an environmental one. The way that the furlough scheme, self-employed grants and business loans have disarticulated the previously staid Conservative position on fiscal responsibility have opened the gates to a rearticulation in the name of carefully managed state welfare, a fairness that could be further pursued through a more stable national insurance for individuals or extended enterprise grants for businesses to help wrench the UK out of a post-COVID depression.

The historical example of Britain after World War II has been bandied around in opinion pieces as testament to how a country can change radically following immense hardship. However, this example can also be worked into another proof that post-COVID, we are thinking economically, not environmentally. If the changes instituted by the Attlee government after the war were olive branches, those branches had roots. The most ambitious council housing projects of the 20th century helped tackle the impact of the blitz on the British built environment. The creation of a national insurance programme – paid for by a punitive loan from the United States – helped families settle back into expected economic rhythms following the return of more than 2 million servicemen.

Large scale council housing, the foundations of the latter-day welfare state, and, crucially, the NHS, can all be seen as answers to wartime problems. These were not immediately available solutions; indeed, they required huge, unprecedented loan schemes. Even then, the range of free services was scaled back in the 50s as financial pressures increased from without.

Still, Ed Miliband’s dad bemoaned the post-war government for its lack of ambition in building a new post-war consensus. Regardless of any potential cynicism around what could have been achieved, the primary successes of Attlee were also resolutions to wartime struggles. That is not to say that all of them were, but the ones we recall most immediately – on health, housing and welfare – redressed specific and timely issues.

In a world after COVID-19, we will, inevitably, be asking similar questions around consensus-building, a new normal, and, indeed, how cynical we are going to be in terms of what we achieve. But to draw comparisons between the climate emergency and COVID-19 is to extrapolate an extreme from the suffering that people are really experiencing at the moment. Even if it is proven that air pollution is connected to infection rates, the relevance of COVID-19 to the environmental case remains secondary. When we finally meet again, we should be thinking first of the severe economic consequences that lockdown has had on our day-to-day, from furlough, to lost opportunities, to business collapse.

Unsurprisingly, the single biggest policy solution to the problems of the post-COVID world is a Universal Basic Income. And I think that a pro-environmental, pro-Green New Deal politics can be built with UBI as its backbone. But the mistake would be in not putting the economic case at the forefront when we regroup and rebuild. To understand the scope of the crisis is to understand its solution, and the first step in building a successful consensus around it.