In my previous post, I showed that working class Britons have borne the brunt of our rulers’ responses to covid, the war in Ukraine, and inflation. I also suggested that this result is puzzling, given that as of early 2020, the working class seemed to be in the political ascendancy. At this time, the government, parliament, and the opposition had a material interest in, and appeared committed to, improving the working class lot. One possible explanation is that, while our rulers really wanted to promote “the interests of ordinary working people”, circumstances overtook them, making it necessary to impose lockdowns, engage in a proxy war against Russia, and raise interest rates. My aim here is to demonstrate that this explanation doesn’t stand up. Alternatives were available and Britain’s working classes didn’t have to lose out.
The ruling elite has to a large extent framed its policy choices as unavoidable. During the pandemic, then prime minister Boris Johnson stated that “there is no alternative” to lockdowns – or rather, the only alternative is “medical … disaster”. The government’s opponents within parliament and the media vigorously assented to this view. Their only complaint was that the Johnson administration didn’t impose lockdowns quickly enough, that it was “too slow and behind the curve”.
Elite rhetoric on Ukraine has followed the same broad pattern. Johnson stated that there is “no alternative” to conducting a proxy war against Russia and that its impact on our living standards is the necessary “price of freedom”. Both of his successors – the short-lived Liz Truss and the current prime minister Rishi Sunak – have reiterated this position. Again, ostensible opponents of the government have largely fallen in line, with criticism limited to matters of degree rather than kind. The Guardian’s Simon Tisdall writes that we have to suffer – the “less wealthy” in particular – to prevent the “disaster” of Russia’s “lawless butchery” prevailing. His only objection is that current policy isn’t “enough to bring Putin to heel” and so Britain and other NATO members should “use their overwhelming power … to force Putin’s marauding troops back inside Russia’s recognised borders”. Not proxy war but direct war.
The same broad pattern is also evident in elite discussions of inflation. These have for the most part portrayed monetary tightening as the policy for bringing inflation under control. As the Financial Times’ Martin Wolf states, an interest rate hike leading to “rising unemployment” is “the way to end entrenched inflation”. While Wolf accepts that this “cure” points to “grim times” ahead for the UK, he insists that the only policy debate to be had is “how big a weakening [of the economy] will be needed”.
In the rhetoric of the ruling class, then, lockdowns, proxy war with Russia, and tighter money have been necessary measures. The pain has been unavoidable insofar as the available alternatives (medical disaster, Russian tyranny, rampant inflation) would be worse still. In this version of reality, Britain’s working classes had to suffer more than others. But should we accept this version of reality?
As noted in my previous post, the policy response to inflation mischaracterises the issue. Monetary tightening implies that the cause of the present crisis is an excess of aggregate demand. However, the main drivers of the current price rises are supply-side shocks stemming from lockdowns and the war in Ukraine, and corporate profiteering. In raising interest rates, policymakers are at best treating symptoms; they are not, as the likes of Wolf would have us believe, delivering a cure. Moreover, this mischaracterisation conceals alternatives which could tackle the root of the problem. As the economic historian Tim Barker writes, “public investment [to address] supply-side issues should be seen as a form of anti-inflation policy”. That is, instead of destroying demand, government could focus on supply enhancing measures, such as expanding port and energy capacity. And as Isabella Weber argues, to “buy time” for these measures to take effect, controls could be introduced on the “specific prices that drive inflation”, which would also stymy corporate profiteering. So, tighter money to shrink the economy isn’t a necessary course of action but an active choice.
Our stance towards the Ukraine war hasn’t been unavoidable either. In March 2022, not long after Russia’s invasion, Ukrainian president Volodymyr Zelensky declared that his country was prepared to accept neutrality (i.e. that it wouldn’t become a member of NATO) in exchange for security guarantees; he also said that there would have to be a negotiated solution to the status of Donbas and Crimea. Talks taking place at this time between Ukrainian and Russian diplomats were making progress. Zelensky noted that “the positions during the negotiations already sound more realistic”, and Russia’s foreign minister, Sergei Lavrov, stated that “there is some hope of reaching a compromise”. Yet in early April these talks collapsed.
Boris Johnson visited Kiev on 9 April. According to Ukrainian officials, the then prime minister came as the spokesperson of the “collective west” and had the following message for Zelensky: even if Ukraine was “ready to sign some agreement … with Putin, [we] are not”; the west believes there’s a chance to “press” Putin and it wants to take it. Though much about this episode remains obscure, it seems more than coincidental that talks between Ukrainian and Russian diplomats broke down three days after Johnson’s visit. We may therefore infer that our government, in conjunction with other western powers, deliberately shutdown what may have been a viable diplomatic route out of this conflict. It chose to prolong this war, at a major cost to the living standards of its own people, especially those on low-incomes.
Of course, we could go further. Since the end of the Cold War, NATO has been expanding eastwards: Czech Republic, Hungary, and Poland joined the military alliance in 1999, and a number of other eastern European states – including the former Soviet republics Estonia, Latvia, and Lithuania – gained membership in 2004. In 2008, it was announced at NATO’s Bucharest summit that Ukraine (as well as Georgia) would become part of the organisation. Unsurprisingly, Russia has seen NATO’s expansion as a threat.[i] The Kremlin specifically views Ukraine’s membership of the alliance as “an existential threat” that must be thwarted. Hence its demand for written guarantees from the US that Ukraine would never join NATO, and its resort to war when these weren’t given.[ii] But it could have been different. As commentators such as John Mearsheimer, Richard Sakwa,[iii] Susan Watkins, and Richard Wright have argued, if the west had been more open to Russia’s security concerns, this outcome – with all its death and suffering – could have been avoided.
We can also challenge the ruling elite’s narrative on lockdowns. Far from averting medical disaster, it’s not clear that this policy had any noteworthy effect on covid infections. The epidemiologist and SAGE member Mark Woolhouse suggests that infections in the first wave of the pandemic were in decline prior to the mandating of lockdowns in March 2020.[iv] A recent systematic review on the effectiveness of this policy concludes that “lockdowns have had little to no public health effects” – though it notes that they’ve “imposed enormous economic and social costs”.[v] Another study shows that our response to the pandemic was guided less by the covid situation and more by “policies of other countries”. The primary stimulus for lockdowns came from a “propensity to copy” rather than the actual threat of the virus.[vi] Such research calls the ruling elite’s version of reality into question.
What’s more, other, less materially damaging, options were available. Sweden’s government didn’t impose lockdowns on its citizens to anywhere near the same degree as in countries like the UK. As the epidemiologist Emma Frans notes, over the course of the pandemic, Sweden has had one of the lowest total excess deaths in Europe and its “children [haven’t suffered] the learning loss seen in many other countries”. An alternative proposal in the UK was “focused protection” – the idea of targeting measures on the fifteen percent of the population deemed vulnerable to covid, instead of society-wide lockdowns. This proposal was either ignored or denounced as “unethical” by the ruling class.[vii] But it was based on reasonable assumptions: that covid posed little risk to the vast majority of people, and that we would have to live with the virus.
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Contrary to the rhetoric of our rulers, the policy responses to covid, the war in Ukraine, and inflation haven’t been necessary. Alternatives were available and Britain’s working classes haven’t had to lose out. The question of why they have borne the brunt therefore remains.
[i] Benjamin Abelow’s How the West Brought War to Ukraine offers a clear and compelling discussion of this issue, https://medium.com/@benjamin.abelow/western-policies-caused-the-ukraine-crisis-and-now-risk-nuclear-war-1e402a67f44e
[ii] John Mearsheimer, “Why the West is principally responsible for the Ukraine crisis”, The Economist, March 19, 2022
[iii] Richard Sakwa, “Sad Delusions: The Decline and Rise of Greater Europe”, Journal of Eurasian Studies, Vol. 12, No. 1, 2021, pp. 5-18
[iv] Mark Woolhouse, “The case against lockdown as a public health intervention”, Journal of the Royal College of Physicians of Edinburgh, Vol. 52, No. 1, 2022, pp. 12-13
[v] Jonas Herby, Lars Jonung, and, Steve H. Hanke, “A Literature Review and Meta-Analysis of the Effects of Lockdowns on Covid-19 Mortality”, Studies in Applied Economics, No. 200, January 2022, pp. 1-62
[vi] Abiel Sebhatu et al., “Explaining the Homogeneous Diffusion of COVID-19 Nonpharmaceutical Interventions across Heterogeneous Countries”, Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the USA, Vol. 117, No. 35, 2020, pp. 21201-21208
[vii] Mark Woolhouse, “The case against lockdown as a public health intervention”, Journal of the Royal College of Physicians of Edinburgh