Between the rain showers, we went for a walk yesterday. Our route took us, pretty much, round the edge of the village and we ran into a few folk, had a few conversations. it was pleasant and, as we stepped back home, the sun was shining, birds sang and it all seemed pretty good. A fine June day you might say.
I got to thinking about those conversations and some of the things people said make me worry. Not one friend we met whose business has been completely trashed by the lockdown and associated restrictions - "we're not expecting to have any business at all this year" was the rough analysis. I suspect this message will be repeated again and again as small businesses in hospitality, entertainment, events management and travel ponder a future that is probably more terrifying than the folk planning our post-coronavirus world imagine.
No it's not just these folk or the thousands of small traders - shops, pubs, market stalls, concert venues and suppliers to all these good folk - who will shut up shop because they can't make the ongoing restrictions work for their business and their customers. Lot's of people will watch as their big national and multinational competitors, often those who've agitated for ongoing restrictions, suck up business while they wonder where their next work is coming from. Pub landlords will look in anger at Wetherspoons opening their huge cavernous boozers, able to run table service apps and queuing systems that are literally impossible for a little local pub.
No it's not just these folk, nor is it the annoyance at Bradford council badging Goit Stock falls as a top ten destination when there's no parking, no provision for visitors. It's a great place and I love it but the villages can't cope when hundred's arrive from across the North because the Council thoughtlessly describes it as a place to visit, a destination. This is the same Council that closed all its parks for no good reason, has done nothing to open its museums and galleries, and prefers virtue-signalling with coloured lights on City Hall to helping local folk get on.
But no, it's not that either. The thing that troubled me most was a throwaway remark - "we'll lose all the benefits of lockdown". I didn't say anything but, you know, there are a whole lot of people out there who think lockdown is great. From the "nature is healing" nutcases through to those who like the fact that travel restrictions, closed pubs and silenced cafes made their village "more peaceful". I worry that these voices, along with a new collection of people made terrified of every cough or sniffle, will prevail and the restrictions will remain.
The 'new normal' they call it. A world with a new set of petty restrictions and controls. A whole new bunch of rules for the worst sort of local councillor to get excited about enforcing. An avalanche of regulations, bans and vaguely worded control orders for police and pretend police to wave in the faces of people doing nothing worse than enjoying themselves in what jumped up jobsworths and worrywarts think is the wrong way or at the wrong time.
We'll see a load more access and parking restrictions making city centres the exclusive playground of their own residents rather than destinations. Or, in the case of failing centres like Bradford, a desert of empty shops, increasingly derelict buildings and half-let offices, all interspersed by the grand regeneration projects funded by slabs of central government cash or rash unsistainable council borrowing. Projects that allow local leaders to pretend that it's all fine, that the place isn't dying, and that this magic bit of government cash will make all the difference.
The high status public sector people in towns like Bradford will cluster round the few remaining successes, telling each other that this is the start of a renaissance, that it's all great, and that those pointing to the emptiness, decline and dereliction are just 'talking down the city'. And then the public sector elite return to their day jobs planning response to climate change, designing regulations and limits on business, and dreaming up new ways to marshal people so as to maintain "social distancing". There's no place in their world for the slightly rough suburban pub with its karaoke, quiz night and occasionally raucous behaviour. No place for cheap weddings or a tray of butties and pies for a funeral tea. No place for crowds (or at least not the wrong sort of crowds).
Everywhere I hear people telling me it won't be the same again. And every time I hear this, a little piece of me dies. The idea that we make illegal - regulate away - the pub filled to bursting on bonfire night or packed with happy football fans fills me with sadness. The thought that, as the rain breaks up a June day, people can't crowd into a high street cafe, laughing and buying cake while they wait for the skies to clear. This is the world those advocating a "new normal" want to destroy, all in the name of a hypothetical risk and the deranged idea that government can make us safe by regulation.
A semi-lockdown badged as the "new normal" will not merely destroy the leisure economy but will signal that only approved leisure and pleasure is allowed. Welcome to a world where a cafe is full with a dozen people, where theatres remove half their seats so they can open, where everyone is encouraged to wander round in jerry-built, home-made hazmat suits, and where the hug, the high five and the scrum at the bar on a Saturday night are things of the past. Welcome to a new authoritarian world filled with tracking apps, cameras, face recognition and thousands of gauleiters eager to help enforce this drab, soulless and depressing world.
So no, I don't want your 'new normal'. I will rebel where I can, campaign where I am able to get it changed and keep shouting that this is not right and is destroying so much that is good about our country. I would say that the government has failed us but the truth is that government always, regardless of rhetoric or supposed ideology, wants more controls, more limits and more power over the lives of ordinary people. Coronavirus gave those fussbuckets, worrywarts and jobsworths the chance to get these controls and they absolutely love it.
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