Lockdown: Five Years On
Five years ago, we were at the start of the COVID-19 lockdown. I don’t think anyone is throwing an anniversary party.
Boris Johnson’s speech announcing a temporary lockdown was broadcast on March 23, 2020, and came into effect on the 26th. I watched it in the pub, knowing already that I wouldn’t be seeing some of my friends for a long time.
On April 16, the lockdown was extended for another three weeks. We were told the worst had passed. By this time, old colleagues from the NHS had reached out, sharing concerns about the spread of the virus and asking if I had a copy of the old pandemic plan. For those unaware, the NHS had developed and drilled a comprehensive response plan for a highly contagious respiratory disease after SARS. That work was lost in the disastrous Lansley reorganization.
Restrictions remained in place until the end of June, though local lockdowns continued in some parts of the UK throughout the summer. There were further national lockdowns on November 4 and January 6, with restrictions finally lifted in March 2021.
I spent the first lockdown doing online yoga and studying for a diploma in contemporary art at MoMA in New York. The second lockdown? Wearing tracksuit bottoms and drinking cocktails. The third? God knows.
Things weren’t too bad for me. My business pivoted to making hand sanitiser for the NHS, allowing my employees to come into work at least once a week, albeit under strict conditions. That small semblance of normality kept us sane.
And my blog turned into more and more quizzes, which I have never stopped loving. This quiz on Covid restrictions got loads of views:
But Covid also changed our politics, and that change is still shaping our political landscape.
Power
The pandemic placed events and power in conflict with each other.
For some, the horror of the virus made them lean towards authority—seeking a force strong enough to protect them, to bend events to its will, to rewrite the rules. Others, like me, preferred to live freely with events and accept the consequences.
This won’t be the last apocalyptic threat my generation—or my children—will face. Climate change, environmental degradation, and the unchecked power of corporations have made the world riskier. And the greater the risk, the greater the temptation to turn to power for protection. Not the fragile, bounded power of democracies, but the pure, unchallenged power that only authoritarian states can provide. The kind of power that seeks to stop history in its tracks, to prevent new crises, new terrors, new changes.
When the next virus emerges, or a city is destroyed by a dirty bomb, or some lonely, disaffected kid escalates from school shootings to something even worse, more and more people will ask for the protection of absolute power.
That might sound absurd, but after every school shooting in the U.S., instead of disarming, Americans buy more guns. They seek out the most brutal and primitive power—even as it kills their children. The NRA, once committed to fighting government tyranny, now smiles approvingly as a real tyrant flexes his flabby limbs in the White House.
Loneliness
“What prepares men for totalitarian domination in the non-totalitarian world is the fact that loneliness, once a borderline experience usually suffered in certain marginal social conditions like old age, has become an everyday experience of the ever-growing masses of our century.” — Hannah Arendt, The Origins of Totalitarianism (1951)
Banned from human contact, we turned online. Many of us were angry and lonely, and we found others who were just as furious. We fed off each other’s anger.
The online world makes it easier to find people who share your rage. Hannah Arendt called this negative solidarity: an unorganized mass of furious individuals, contemptuous of weak rulers and their rules. This is the raw material of totalitarianism, which thrives in the absence of human connection.
This was in contrast to the positive solidarity many of us had, particularly with front line healthcare workers.
When we meet people face-to-face, it’s hard to think the worst of them. We see reminders that people aren’t so bad after all. But remove that daily contact, and it becomes easier to believe the worst. And believing the worst is what makes authoritarianism flourish.
If you poison people’s relationships—with themselves and others—by making them so cynical that they can no longer trust their own judgment, then you’ve laid the groundwork for tyranny.
Privacy
With lockdown, most of us saw a huge increase in our time spent online.
One key element of authoritarian regimes is the erasure of the divide between public and private life. The state knows everything about you. From its perspective, you have no secrets. For those of us who value privacy, this is a terrifying prospect.
The right to privacy—the ability to keep the state out of certain aspects of our lives—is a key difference between a democracy and a dictatorship.
At its core, Englishness is about privacy. Our unofficial national slogan might as well be mind your own business.
But online life has eroded this. We now expect social media companies to know everything about us, to harvest our data, to tailor our experiences. People laugh at me for taking steps to stay private, for ensuring my digital footprint is minimal. They tell me it’s better to let the algorithm know more, so it can serve up the right content.
Worse, we don’t just accept the loss of privacy—we actively share our intimate lives online, curating our revelations for maximum effect. And we’ve normalized the idea that those who step out of line can be flagged, monitored, and punished.
Rationality
This might all sound irrational—why would people choose to be oppressed to escape the chaos of events?
If humans were purely rational, casinos wouldn’t exist. Betting shops at least offer the illusion of an edge—maybe you know a horse’s form better than the bookie. But a casino? The house always wins. It’s not pure luck—it’s worse than that.
We all operate with bounded rationality. When life is stable—steady job, family, holidays, a future—you make steady choices. But when that security is threatened, chaos becomes more attractive than order. If you believe the system is rigged against you, why not smash it up?
Why Does This Matter?
The obvious answer is that I see authoritarianism as a far bigger threat than any specific crisis. I’d rather rely on myself than some dictator to save me.
Five years on negative solidarity has won over positive. If we attempt another lockdown an angry mass of people will refuse to comply, even if it means the disease spreading.
But it’s also personal. I lost a friend online—swallowed up by far-right conspiracy theories. I see others drifting toward authoritarian politics, fed by a diet of online disinformation.
And I don’t want to lose any more.