Afterword
April 2020
As this book goes to print, we are in the midst of a global pandemic. Hundreds of thousands of people have died of coronavirus and many more are sick. Across the world, responses to COVID-19 have exposed and entrenched existing social and economic inequalities. The UK government’s initial response, which aligned with a strategy of herd immunity, cast people deemed ‘unproductive’ or ‘unskilled’ under late capitalism as ultimately disposable in service of the economy.1 This mode of necropolitical governance put the country’s poorest, sickest, oldest, and most insecurely employed at acute risk. Their position was revised on 16 March when the Imperial College COVID-19 Response Team demonstrated its catastrophic implications: approximately 250,000 people would die in the UK if more significant restrictions were not imposed.2 The country finally went into lockdown on 23 March. This disregard for the vulnerable was underscored by the failure to properly report data on people dying from coronavirus in care
homes in England. The devaluing of marginalised lives, and erasure of deaths, is not a significant step change for the current government, but witnessing it concentrated in a singular catastrophic event illuminates the blatant violence of the UK state.3
Throughout the pandemic the government has intensified its rhetoric of individual
responsibility: you must stay home, you are responsible for saving lives, you must not unduly burden the NHS. While it is reasonable to ask people to take every action they can to protect themselves and others, this persistent and singular emphasis on the role of the individual as paramount to the UK’s response to the virus distracts from the numerous failures of the government: the failure of the UK government to procure enough ventilators despite multiple opportunities to collaborate with European partners to do so, the failure of the UK government to provide personal protective equipment to frontline workers, the failure of the UK government to address the disproportionate impact of COVID-19 on Black people and people of colour, the failure of the UK government to implement community testing and contact tracing, the failure of the UK government to follow World Health Organization guidance and take timely steps to lock down the country, and the failure of the UK government to protect many of the most vulnerable people in our society through sufficient shielding and support services.
As the economic fallout of the pandemic begins to unfold, Jobcentres have become another frontline of the crisis, supporting people to access social security in order to/and survive the impact of job losses or wage reductions. Between 16 March and 6 April the Department for Work
and Pensions received 1.2 million Universal
Credit claims, they would normally expect 100,000 claims a fortnight. To fortify the economy, Rishi Sunak, the current Chancellor, introduced a £1000 per annum increases in both Universal
Credit and Working Tax Credit payments and reversed the freeze on Local Housing Allowance for 12 months from March 2020. However, the freeze on benefit payments since 2016 means people are still struggling to survive on insufficient funds. Further, the five-week wait between applying for Universal
Credit and receiving money has consistently been shown to lead to extreme hardship. The huge influx in people claiming Universal
Credit has brought greater scrutiny to the welfare
system as those made redundant as a result of COVID-19 cannot access immediate or sufficient funds to deal with the crisis. This failing system is all we have to stop millions of people laid off due to coronavirus shutdowns falling into abject poverty
, joining those whose prior encounters with Universal
Credit have already firmly locked them into destitution. For those in employment, the government have pledged to pay 80% of workers’ wages up to £2500 per month for staff furloughed by their employer, in a bid to assuage companies moving to make many more redundant. Latterly, self-employed workers (with a year of tax return data) were also supported under the same policy, although they will have to wait until June to access any subsidised wages. To date, short-term and zero-hour contract workers so celebrated for their agility in the neoliberal labour
market have been abandoned by the government and left vulnerable by precarious working conditions. With a disintegrating social security net and a lack of employment regulation, precarious workers and claimants have been left disenfranchised, impoverished, and acutely exposed to the impact of COVID-19.
In the cultural sector, an industry predicated on freelance and gig economy workers, Arts Council England
have made £160 million of emergency funding available for organisations and individuals to weather the financial impact of the virus. While artists and producing theatres have been making performances available to audiences online, much socially committed arts practice is intrinsically premised on conditions the virus prevents (community gathering and embodied collective action). Yet such projects occupy a distinctive position between social provision and creative work
, so are better placed to intervene in communities in moments of crisis. Across the UK, there has been a concerted effort among socially committed arts organisations to amplify the social work which they undertake. Health and social care
staff have made desperate pleas for the personal protective equipment they need in order to be safe at work. In response, Tangled
Feet have donated scrubs from their 2015 production Care, one of many arts organisations donating costumes to staff in need. This bears repeating; during a global health crisis, theatre companies are donating costumes to provide protection for healthcare workers due to the insufficiency of response from the UK government. Tangled
Feet have also moved their mindfulness project for young people experiencing anxiety or isolation online; Clean Break Theatre
Company have instigated Write2Connect, a new project sending messages of solidarity to incarcerated women who are now in their cells for 23 hours a day due to the outbreak. Helix
Arts and Women and Theatre have moved materials online, the former delivering Make It Happen (a training programme for artists wanting to learn about running community-led projects) and the latter releasing audio recordings of monologues from Starting
Out on Spotify. Beyond the organisations I have looked at in this book, women’s theatre company Open Clasp are collaborating with partners on Scran4theFam, a soup delivery service for older people and families in the West End of Newcastle. Slung Low, a theatre company based in Leeds, are now the lead organisation in their area responding to referrals from Leeds Council helpline.4 Throughout the UK, socially committed arts practitioners are finding creative ways to respond to community need and cultivate direct action.
More broadly there has been a renewed appetite for collective action, most clearly manifested in the establishment of COVID Mutual Aid groups across the country.5 This level of grassroots community mobilisation is unparalleled in recent times. Further, while problematic, the government’s programme of fiscal support has constituted a substantial investment in the welfare
state and a deepening understanding of its vital importance. There are then some pockets of radical potential in the tragic circumstances we find ourselves. It is possible that citizens will refuse to return to established patterns of work, consumption, and under-resourced welfare
systems. Calls for the implementation of a universal basic income across the world, and closer to home in Scotland, are increasing. There is a broader awareness of the punitive nature of the social security system as increasing numbers of the population discover the safety net of the welfare
state has been severely eroded. The proportion of vital frontline workers who would not qualify for residence in the UK under the government’s new points-based immigration system has both underscored the systemic racism and hostility experienced by migrant workers and our dependence
on these same people. The manifold possibilities of more accessible home working for those with disabilities
or caring commitments are now irrefutable. The public demand for greater investment in our health and social care
systems, and the people who work within them, alongside an increased awareness of the insufficiency of the social security safety net could lead to significant pressure to invest in the state once more. Standing on the precipice of social change, we could usefully look to the body of artistic practice produced over the last decade to understand how we might resist the demonisation of the poor, use cultural practice to cultivate collective action, deploy anonymity as a representational strategy, and use performance as a way to reorient our relationship with work and welfare. Above all, we must go further and use every resource (creative or otherwise) at our disposal to support one another, revitalise social welfare
systems, and hold the governments to account.
We should, however, remain vigilant to the co-opting of this crisis by the ruling world order. As we feel our way through these uncertain times, the reach for parallels becomes increasingly alluring and offers the potential to equip ourselves for the fight that is to come. Given the seismic shock coronavirus has inflicted on the global economy, the financial crisis of 2008 looms large in discussions of the economic fallout to come. We must remember how that crisis was retrospectively packaged—not as an exposure of the exploitation and inequality that underpins a neoliberal structure—as just a blip in the machine: banks were bailed out, order was restored, economic and social inequality increased, poverty
was punished, people at the bottom paid (and still are paying) the price. In April 2020 UK banks have been empowered by government loan guarantees to offer mortgage holidays to homeowners, business interruption loans for small businesses, and interest-free overdraft and credit facilities for the duration of the crisis. Once again individuals and small businesses will have to take on substantial amounts of private debt, to shoulder the burden of this crisis, while banks, landlords, and large corporations stand to profit from it. As we move towards a global recession and prolonged period of high unemployment, renewed talk of austerity programmes has begun to take hold. Even as the government writes off historic NHS debts, injects resources into the welfare
system, and dishes out money to save the economy, it does so with the proviso that high taxation and cuts to public spending mean we will all be paying it back for years to come. We must resist this burdening of those at the bottom, we must act collectively and reformulate the distribution of wealth, and we must demand a welfare
system that protects us all.