What is driving the cost of living crisis? It’s not a trick question, or it isn’t meant to be. Most people would naturally say rocketing energy bills, heading now for fivefold what they may be in a normal year; climbing like ivy, snaking and clinging, smothering everything and blotting out the light. The equivalent, says a despairing Greg Jackson of Octopus Energy, of whacking 9p on income tax overnight; more than many mortgages, rents or the nursery bill that once felt crippling. Others may mention rising food prices or the cost of filling the car. But not everyone sees things that way.
It was a few weeks ago that I first started noticing a sudden rash of social media accounts, all hammering out the same bitterly aggressive message: if you supported lockdown, don’t come crying to us about this winter’s looming economic catastrophe, because it’s all your fault. “If you tittle-tattled on your neighbour and demanded longer, stricter lockdowns, this is on you,” thundered the influential Conservative lockdown sceptic Ben Goldsmith – brother of the international environment minister, Zac Goldsmith, and until recently a nonexecutive board member of Defra – when the Bank of England bowed to the inevitable this month and forecast a recession. It was, he tweeted, “jaw-dropping to see the peddlers of lockdown … complaining bitterly now as the country is handed the tab”. Although less jaw-dropping, perhaps, than blaming curtain-twitching neighbours for an economic crisis pushing up to half the country towards fuel poverty.
Shortly afterwards, the former Tory MEP and Telegraph columnist Daniel Hannan declared that “the massive extension of state power during the lockdown – the uniquely generous furlough scheme and other grants that ministers boasted of at the time – are the direct cause of our present problems”. A scheme that saved countless jobs now finds itself rebranded as the reason you’re afraid of losing yours.
The former Tory (and subsequently Ukip) MP Douglas Carswell agreed: “Will those that demanded lockdowns to deal with Covid and net zero to limit CO2 emissions be held accountable for trashing the UK economy?” Talking of things that have blown a hole in GDP lately, all three men were Brexiters. But anyway this is your fault, you understand, not theirs; your fault for having the nerve not to want to die of Covid.
For good measure, last weekend Nigel Farage cited an unexplained rise in excess deaths – in a summer of soaring waiting lists and ambulances taking hours to reach heart attack and stroke victims – as proof that lockdown had been a “disaster”, although NHS waiting lists were rising well before Covid hit, and ambulances are backed up outside hospitals at least in part because beds are full of people who can’t leave for lack of a social care package. Crumbling public services? That’s probably your fault, too.
These may seem fringe voices, isolated straws in the wind. But anyone who watches GB News, follows lockdown sceptics on Facebook or moves in certain libertarian circles will be increasingly hearing the argument that the “real” cause of the cost of living crisis is an unholy alliance of mask wearers, Keir Starmer, the perennially hated experts, Greta Thunberg and other bogeymen of what used to be called the smug liberal elite, still prevailing in some inexplicable way over those actually in power for the past 12 years.
That angry refrain is being picked up and repeated. Even Liz Truss, ever alert to a prevailing wind, now says that in cabinet arguments about lockdown she was always “on the side of doing less”. According to polling this month for the influential research consultancy Public First, the war in Ukraine still tops the list of perceived causes for the cost of living crisis. But 39% of those intending to vote Tory named debts incurred during Covid, far more than those who blamed the drive to reach net zero, suggesting that blaming lockdown for all our woes may find a readier audience. But how ready, exactly?
It’s increasingly hard to imagine any new Tory government surviving long in a world of inflation potentially topping 18%, no matter how widely it tries to spread the blame, and the most likely outcome remains that voters won’t forgive Truss for the shock of bills landing on doormats. Yet the one narrow window for survival she would have is to find a scapegoat: an ingenious way to draw the fire, which could split and confuse a still volatile anti-Tory vote much as culture wars have previously done. Like all the best con tricks, perhaps the idea of blaming lockdown incorporates just enough grains of truth to seem plausible to some.
It’s true that the pandemic weakened our economy, just as Brexit did before it. Months of missed schooling have left their scars on a generation of children, and lives may well have been tragically shortened by NHS treatment delayed or symptoms missed at the height of the pandemic. There are inevitably bills to pay, too, for supporting the most vulnerable through it.
But the alternative to a government-imposed shutdown in March 2020 wasn’t, as its critics seem to imagine, pluckily carrying on as usual. It was a rocketing death toll and a chaotic shutdown by default: schools sending children home for lack of teachers to teach them; pubs and restaurants going bust as customers deserted en masse; a potential collapse of the NHS, triggering widespread panic. Lockdown was the least bad of some awful choices, and, if ministers are guilty of anything, it’s neglecting the aftermath. They failed to fund catchup lessons on the scale their own adviser advocated and have barely dented the NHS backlog. Now you want to tell us this was all our fault? Do me a favour.
This argument is an energy-sapping, time-wasting, gaslighting rabbit hole, when the reality is that all roads out of this winter’s crisis lead via solutions to the unsustainably high energy prices predominantly driving it. Since most of the available options are anathema to small-state Conservatives, it’s not surprising they’d rather change the subject. But rehashing old grievances about lockdown won’t keep a single pensioner warm this winter, and if all this sounds like the last desperate thrashings of a dying regime, that may be exactly what it is.
Yet, that said, it’s still a warning flag. It’s a reminder that historically the trend has often been for economic shocks to push electorates towards the populist right; that when times are tough, people don’t always blame the obvious culprit; and above all that, for Labour, nothing is ever in the bag. Sometimes, it’s the ostensibly ridiculous arguments that cry out to be taken seriously, if only to better pull them apart.
Gaby Hinsliff is a Guardian columnist
