Eurasia Press & News
Calm in a crisis used to be a national characteristic; now we panic at the drop of a hat. A loss of trust in the elite is to blame.
An alarming number of Britons seem to have acquired a proclivity to act in a way we used to believe was alien to our character and our culture: to engage in mass panic.
Despite, or perhaps because of, our prime minister saying there was no need to panic buy fuel for our cars, millions at once did so. One even panicked to the extent of lining a bucket with a plastic bag to fill it with petrol (do not, as they say on Blue Peter, try this at home), there having been panic-buying of jerry cans.
Eighteen months ago, early in the pandemic, when told there was enough lavatory paper, dried pasta and flour for everyone, people descended on supermarkets and stripped their aisles of lavatory paper, dried pasta and flour. We are the people that came through the Somme, the Slump, the Blitz, Suez and the legion horrors of the 1970s (including petrol shortages). What has changed? Our national character has suddenly degenerated. The pandemic, and politicians, may be to blame.
Last year the Government sought to terrify people into obeying its lockdown strictures. It wasn’t just the promise of five-figure fines for people gathering in groups outside their “bubble”: it was the threat of serious disease and death for those who ignored the order.
Many rational people felt it was an absurd exaggeration. The clip from Zulu (another example of our not panicking when things became really grim) of Jack Hawkins’s hysterical character yelling at those brave men defending Rorke’s Drift “you’re all going to die!” circulated on social media. We were encouraged to regard every other human being as a chemical weapon. Some became unhinged: and to this day some continue to wear masks in the street, and shun physical contact with others, even though most have had two vaccinations, and deaths have fallen.
At least Covid was a matter of life and death, so ministers and officials may have felt justified in encouraging fear, even if it encouraged panic. There was no such excuse in 2016, when George Osborne led his ludicrous “project fear” about Brexit. He contributed greatly to the defeat of his campaign. Even that recently, the public resented attempts to frighten and manipulate them. But now, perhaps because of what opinion polls say is their low opinion of the honesty and competence of the Government, too many panic as a first, and not as a last, resort when trouble arises. For this substantial group, life has become a precarious, not to say dangerous, business: there is no calm risk assessment, and it is every man for himself.
I remember queues at petrol stations after the oil price shock in 1973; then the crash in the stock market, inflation at 26.9 per cent, the trades unions running the country, Denis Healey running to the IMF to beg it to bail us out. We weren’t happy, but we kept our heads. We didn’t metaphorically fill buckets with petrol, or cupboards with bog rolls. We just bided our time and elected Mrs Thatcher. We were still the sort of people depicted in that famous photograph, admittedly staged, of a cheery milkman walking through rubble with his crate of bottles during the Blitz. Then, Britain could take it.
But the power of mass media and the absence of statesmanship shown in the generation of fear over Covid seem to have bred a change of character. It reminds one of the collective hysteria after the death of Diana, Princess of Wales, when briefly it seemed millions lost faith in the monarchy. Remnants of that hysteria linger in our DNA: and the ease with which we now panic suggests we have lost our nerve.
That was never what it meant to be British. With food shortages threatened, we must take a deep breath and pull ourselves together, before we pull ourselves apart.
