We’re publishing a short piece today by Lockdown Sceptics regular Sinéad Murphy, a Research Associate in Philosophy at Newcastle University, in which she praises a new book by Toby Green. Called The Covid Consensus: The New Politics of Global Inequality, it’s an exploration of why the lockdown policy has commanded such support from people on the left and right of politics, in spite of its catastrophic consequences. In particularly, why has the left been so enthusiastic about lockdowns when it was obvious from the beginning that the world’s poorest people would suffer the most as a result of the policy? Dr Murphy thinks this book is the perfect cure for those who’ve been lobotomised by pro-lockdown propaganda.
We might think that the time is passing for this book; we are on the way out of lockdown, after all. But Boris Johnson’s murmurings last Monday, that the reduction in cases and deaths in the UK since the end of January is due, not to the injections but to the lockdown, surely signal that the likelihood of another lockdown is very high. And we ought not to forget that the conditions of our lives at this moment, even in the midst of the easing, continue to be more restrictive than any in history.
In fact, The Covid Consensus could not be more timely. Its coming out only shortly over a year after the onset of societal and personal conditions deeply erosive of energy and purpose is worthy of our grateful acknowledgment.
Sinéad’s piece is worth reading in full.
Incidentally, Toby Green is a senior lecturer in Lusophone African history and culture at King’s College London and is author of The Rise of the Trans-Atlantic Slave Trade in Western Africa, 1300–1589. We will be publishing a piece by him about his new book shortly.
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Unfortunately, the review doesn’t tell us much about the book.
But :
“we are on the way out of lockdown”
Really? – I hadn’t noticed.
I think it is tongue in cheek.
If so, it is certainly not evident from the text quoted above.
Rather it seems as if the tongue were in another part of the anatomy altogether!
The people who need to read it, won’t.
Quite agree, however I think a lot of people are niether lockdown sceptics or zealots but went along with it because the government said it was needed and the MSM backed it and censored alternative points of view/facts. Some of these people may read the book and become lockdown sceptics. It isn’t nescersary to convert hard core lockdown zealots, they simply need to be marginalised by becoming an irrelevant minority.
I think it will take years and more than one book before the majority of people are lockdown sceptics, probably until the likes of Ferguson, Whitty, Bojo, etc have passed away or at least retired from public life, but every little helps and is a step along the road.
A big ‘thank you’ to my favourite contributor to LS.
I would have thought the question why lockdowns are accepted by left and right is irrelevant. The virus is new, so the politics concerning it will be new. There is a perceived threat, and lockdowns are perceived as a defence against that threat. What is odd is that lockdowns seem to be a preferred intervention rather than a counsel of despair. The development of vaccines has been expedited, but for some reason the development of other interventions has not. As vaccines are inadequate on their own, it seems blindingly obvious that they must be supplemented with other interventions, a combined attack on the threat. The failure, or even refusal, to expedite alternatives to vaccines and lockdowns makes it very hard to argue with conspiracy theorists, as has been pointed out elsewhere.