By Michael Talibard
I FIND it strange that people reflecting on recent years, and sorting remembered events into order, will so often place them “before Covid” or “after Covid” – and also that they blame Covid for all manner of evils.
Strange, because it seems to me that the key event to mention and the real culprit was not Covid but Lockdown. Are we to say that this choice of words makes no difference, because Covid necessitated Lockdown? I don’t think it did. In my opinion, the Lockdown we got was too severe, it was dotty, it did more harm than good. Do I hear gasps of disbelief, or did you feel that too?
Hang on, you may say, the theme of this series of articles is supposed to be age discrimination: what has the Lockdown got to do with age? Oh, it has plenty to do with age! In Lockdown, the young suffered for the sake of the old, whether the old wanted this or not.
The age group most at risk from Covid-19 was the very elderly. Data for the first (and worst) year of the pandemic show this: adding together all of the age groups up to age 74, the UK suffered 52,000 deaths; then just within the one age group 75 to 84, a further 56,000; and in the last age group of 85+ there were 72,000 deaths. So clearly the broad picture is that Covid killed mostly the weak and the elderly – members of my generation. By contrast, the malign impact of Lockdown was very much on the young.
Let’s take some examples of that: when you close all the pubs, clubs and restaurants, whose jobs are lost? Primarily those of young people; some of them will never find their way back into employment. When you close schools, especially infant and junior schools, you damage children in a way you can never repair. They need to learn together, to socialise, and they need to do that at the right stage of their development. You can never put that back in place.
I felt guilty about all this at the time, and I know from talking to friends that I was not alone in feeling so. As an octogenarian, I would far rather have been left to take my chances. I really did not want to be saved at the expense of the young: it was too great a cost. After all, I felt, it is perfectly normal for us oldies to die, if we must: that’s OK.
Sadly, however, I lacked the courage to defy the law, and so gave acceptable minimum compliance to each new regulation as it appeared.
It was principally my generation which they were seeking to protect, but as always, we were not consulted. Instead, the death-aversion, the over-commitment to longevity which grips our middle-aged rulers held sway as usual. They meant to keep us alive at all costs!
Among other evils resulting from Lockdown was its severe economic impact: in the US, for example, the losses were in the trillions of dollars, and this continues to have political consequences. As I write this piece, Donald Trump is in the first few weeks of his second term as American President. The biggest factor in determining his election, as is confirmed by many studies of voter motivation, was widespread dissatisfaction and worry over the US economy.
If a lot of poorer American voters wanted to blame the Democrats for the hardships of the Lockdown recession, that was not entirely unfair. After all, it was Biden and his advisers Levine and Osterholm who in March 2020 reversed Trump’s more laissez-faire approach to lockdown, and brought in tighter federal controls. I think Trump had been getting it roughly right.
Anyway, thinking nearer home: I would prefer to have seen governments (including ours) offering advice, as did Sweden, rather than compulsion. And such advice should have included the aim of living as normal a life as possible in those difficult circumstances.
Jersey’s hospitality industry may never recover: the people it was employing have in many cases returned to their native lands. It is much the same with building, and other trades. In those two damaging years, Jersey lost 2,000 people of working age, and we are still struggling to fill some of the gaps. And of course, as elsewhere, our children suffered real harm when their education was withdrawn.
So in my view, Jersey’s Lockdown must sit alongside our maimed, impoverished proposals for assisted-dying legislation among the bad decisions arising from the short-sighted death aversion of our middle-aged States Members. If they think they are already as wise as they will ever get to be, I suggest they wait and see. When older, they may come to regret much of what they have decided during their time in power.
Michael Talibard, who is now in his 80s, is a retired teacher and former head of English at Victoria College. He founded the Jersey branch of U3A and was its chairman for 20 years.
