Every week I go to my local Tesco and I’ve come to
know some of the staff quite well. They have had a very good crisis. For a
couple of weeks there was panic buying, but the staff remained capable, friendly
and calm. Soon after that stock was back to normal. A one-way system was
introduced, some perspex screens were introduced to protect the cashiers. I
learned to go shopping when the store was less busy, but otherwise Tesco has
been completely normal. It has been a model of how to keep the economy going during
the crisis.
Lockdown is easing a bit quicker in England than in
Scotland, more shops are opening more people are going back to work. At some point
in the summer we may find that pubs and restaurants begin to open. It might one
day be possible for men to meet women and not be continually two metres apart.
But when the last lockdown measure is eased, there will still be one further task.
That task will be to open schools and universities.
Every now and again when I look out of my window, I
see the local primary school going on a class outing. Each of the children has
to wear a fluorescent yellow bib. It would be far too dangerous for them to go
for a walk if they weren’t wearing one.
It may have been for the best of intentions, but Britain
became obsessed with keeping risk to the minimum. I think this happened precisely
at the time when almost all of the illnesses that might have killed us in
childhood had been cured.
At the beginning of the twentieth century most people
would have lost siblings to illness or accident. Adults who caught disease like
cancer were pretty much doomed. Women died in childbirth. There were wars and
there was poor sanitation. Life expectancy was much lower than it is now. But British
people didn’t make much of a fuss about it. We took our chances.
But no longer. Every risk has to be minimised and if
someone dies, we look for someone else to blame and if possible, sue. The media
is desperate to accuse the Government of killing people. Will you apologise for
killing 25,000 people because you didn’t introduce lockdown a week earlier? These
same people will accuse the Government of heartless killing if it can be proved
that easing lockdown just a little bit faster than was wise leads to the death
of one person. After all that one person was someone’s father, brother or son.
This is childish. It would have prevented us doing anything
in 1940, let alone what we actually did. It would have required a health and
safety audit on each little ship, a navigation course for each owner and we
would have picked up precisely nobody form Dunkirk’s beaches because nobody would
have dared risk the wrath of Beth Rigby.
But where previously we were willing to take risks, sometimes
great ones, because they were necessary, now we are more risk adverse than ever.
What colour bibs should we all wear after Covid?
The Government stay at home campaign, plus the media’s
constant dwelling on the illness and the gory details, means that lots of us
would prefer to stay at home forever. But while all of us are scared there is a
distinction between those whose wages depend on businesses making a profit and
those of us who don’t.
Shop owners, pub owners and every worker who realises
that if the company he works for collapses he will be out of a job are desperate
to get back to work as soon as possible.
People like me who work in higher education are quite
happy to do our research at home and communicate with others by means of video
conferencing. I spend less time travelling to work. I get much the same amount
done. I have more time to write. What’s not to like? I prefer lockdown to the
world before.
This is why schools and universities will be the last
places to open. The Government pays our wages and will continue to do so. We
face few of the financial risks that businesses face, and we look down on
profit as something rather vulgar.
Nearly everyone in teaching or in higher education is
a Guardian reader and there are powerful unions which will do everything in
their power to keep their members from going back to work because it would be
unsafe for them to do so.
The truth is that every single teacher in whatever form
of education is far less at risk than every supermarket worker. Each cashier comes
face to face with customers of all ages some of whom will have been infected.
Schools and universities are full of pupils and students who are the least
likely to become infected and infect others.
But while Guardian readers will profess solidarity with
supermarket workers the last thing, they want is to have to work like them.
This is why your child will be the last to go back to
school and university even when everywhere else is packed inches from each
other.
Teachers will be doing this for the benefit of your children
or to paraphrase:
Suffer the little children to stay away from me.
