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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