The infantilism of locking down to ‘save Christmas’

It seems, then, that this latest lockdown has been instigated simply to protect two very questionable institutions — the National Health Service and Christmas. Both have a certain historicity about them and were widely liked. Both, too, have become bloated and hideous caricatures of what they once were.

There is a certain infantilism about the repeated demands to ‘save Christmas’ which conjures up the image of serious adults — Chris Whitty, for example, or Sir Patrick Vallance — hanging up their stockings on Christmas Eve and jumping up and down on the bed in excitement at five o’clock the following morning. There is no Santa Claus, Patrick. There is no sleigh and the elves have been long ago furloughed. It all comes from Argos, mate. Hark! The herald angels sing, bring me iPads, bring me bling. Once it was two days to spend with your close family — which, with any luck, is what will happen this year once Michael Gove has extended the lockdown to 2024. More recently it’s become a two-week pig-out mammon-fest in which one’s credit cards are maxed out: as I mentioned last week, so many of our problems are the consequence of affluence rather than poverty.

One of the good things about that first lockdown was that we spent far less money purchasing utterly egregious crap. For a fairly large proportion of the population money was suddenly saved, rather than squandered on disappointing restaurant food, petrol, flights to awful places and so on. If it is simply that sort of stuff which is keeping our economy afloat, then Covid is the very least of our problems. As a country we have £45 billion more of personal debt than we did ten years ago, as people decided to follow the lead of the government and borrow with what they fondly imagine is impunity.