Covid-19’s relentless immiseration of the British working poor was laid bare last week in a report released by the Office of National Statistics. Surveying the impact of the first lockdown, the ONS found that the biggest falls in pay and hours were at the bottom of the earnings scale. Young people and part-time workers were clobbered particularly badly. Two million employees earned less than the statutory minimum wage as a result of being furloughed. The revision, reduction and planned abandonment of furlough payments by Rishi Sunak – until last week’s U-turn – has contributed to an ever-rising toll of redundancies.
Across Europe and in the US, as a double-dip recession looms, the story is a similar one. The biggest victims of lockdowns and curfews have been blue-collar workers, the self-employed and those whose livelihoods depend on servicing the better-heeled in the metropolises of early 21st-century capitalism. Hairdressers, bar workers, shop workers, taxi drivers and waiters were all on the frontline of the battle against the R number. If you have to leave home to do your job, you are probably in trouble. If you are securely ensconced in the better-paid knowledge economy, and able to retreat to the virtual world of Zoom, you’re probably still in business.
As European societies head into versions of Lockdown 2, this contrasting tale of two economies – one insulated, the other exposed to the vicious winds of the pandemic – continues to play out against a backdrop of moral exhortation and instructions from governments. Businesses and individuals sink under an ever-growing burden of debt, as further Covid crackdowns are recommended. Protests against restrictions have turned violent in Italy and Spain.
No wonder a politician as closely attuned to the politics of resentment as Nigel Farage has spotted an opening. Familiar social faultlines, exposed since 2016, have not been buried by the pandemic, so much as given new and fresh definition. Covid has widened the already yawning divide between better-off graduates and the non-college educated. Regional inequalities have deepened and familiar tensions between north and south re-ignited. Economic desperation has corroded the sense of national unity that prevailed during the first wave. Farage, in common with the increasingly restive right of the Conservative party, now hopes to rebrand the insurgent populist coalition that delivered Brexit. If all goes to plan, in 2021, Reform UK, the new model Brexit party, will write new anti-lockdown lyrics to old tunes.
For patronising and unaccountable Brussels bureaucrats, see over-confident elite scientists, manipulating dodgy data. Remember the moralising sermons on the ethics of freedom of movement, delivered by virtuous professionals employing foreign cleaners off the books? Now, the argument will run, listen to the condescending injunctions to wear masks, do the right thing and stay at home – brought to you by graduates with large gardens and the latest laptop. The declared mission will be to liberate the post-industrial working-class from the condescension, moral censure and opprobrium of those who can live by stringent Covid rules, because they are insulated from their worst effects.
The same phenomenon, in different forms, is beginning to play out across Europe. “The daily bombardment with infection numbers is clearly designed to scare people,” says Alexander Gauland, the co-leader of the far-right Alternative für Deutschland in Germany. In Italy, where formerly healthy small businesses in the south are falling into the hands of mafia, the League leader, Matteo Salvini, and Giorgia Meloni, of the far-right Brothers of Italy party, have questioned the scientific evidence behind the curfews and regional restrictions that have triggered protests across the country. In France, the former partner of Marine Le Pen, Louis Aliot, is one of the leaders of a shopkeepers’ resistance movement opposing the new lockdown imposed by Emmanuel Macron.
Earlier this year, there was a view that, unlike after the crash of 2008, or the refugee crisis of 2015, the Covid-19 pandemic was an event that played to the strengths of a managerial, pragmatic approach to politics. In dealing with a novel virus, which menaced public health to an extent not seen for 100 years, the virtues of competence and expertise would triumph over ideology, bombast and baseless assertion. The knife-edge results of the American presidential election suggest a messier, less palatable truth: for those fearing poverty and destitution, the transgressive folly of Donald Trump on his release from hospital, unmasked, defiant and reckless, carried a widespread appeal and even a message of hope. The virulence of the second wave has undermined confidence and trust in the mainstream political classes and their experts.
The politics of the second wave will, as a result, be treacherous and complicated. In Britain, Boris Johnson will continue to chart a chaotic course between opening up and shutting down. From his backbenches, an ever more rebellious combination of “levelling up” red wall Tories, fiscal hawks and libertarians will pressure him towards the former course. Sir Patrick Vallance and Chris Whitty will counsel caution.
For the liberal left, there are distinct challenges that come with the moment. Once again, this time in the context of Covid, the populist right is monopolising the language of class, weaponising it for use in another culture war. The resilience of the Trump vote, despite the evident flaws in the character of the man himself, has deeply impressed some British conservatives. “What are the lessons for Boris Johnson?” writes the editor of the Sunday Telegraph, Allister Heath. “The first is to realise that the politics of the west are now all about class and education. The Tories can only win again if they maintain or increase their grip of working-class voters. That means, among other things, a Covid policy that doesn’t condemn them to permanent impoverishment.”
A nascent anti-lockdown movement, led by the Faragian right and fellow travellers within the Tory party, will try to consolidate the cultural takeover that began with Brexit. The response should not be merely to point to statistical charts or scientific studies, decry fake news, deprecate anti-vaxxers and ridicule false allegations about shadowy elites. Nor should it be to focus, as Angela Merkel did in the Bundestag at the end of October, on the “lies and disinformation, conspiracy theories and hatred [which] damage not only the democratic debate but also the fight against the virus”. Even though that might indeed be true. After too often demonstrating a tin ear for the preoccupations and perceptions of the post-industrial working class, the liberal left cannot afford to make the same mistake again. In the short term it must lobby for far greater social protection for those worst hit by the economic fallout of Covid. Beyond that, it must develop a radical politics that can build on the sense of togetherness and solidarity that was present in the spring. Class and Covid will be a dominant theme of a difficult winter. It must not be left to the divisive opportunism of Nigel Farage.
• Julian Coman is a Guardian associate editor