George Monbiot: People want a greener, happier world now. But our politicians have other ideas
Of course, we would all like to leave the
pandemic behind, with its devastating impacts on physical and mental
health, its exacerbation
of loneliness, the lack
of schooling and the collapse
in employment. But this doesn’t mean that we want to return to the bizarre
and frightening world the government defines as normal
Out there somewhere,
marked on no map but tantalisingly near, is a promised land called Normal, to
which one day we can return. This is the magical geography we are taught by
politicians, such as Boris Johnson with his “significant
return to normality”. It is the story we tell ourselves, even if we
contradict it with the very next thought. There are practical
reasons to believe that Normal is a fairyland to which we can never return. The
virus has not gone away, and is likely to keep
recurring in waves.
But let’s focus on another question: if such a land
existed, would we want to live there? The polls consistently
suggest we would not. A survey by
BritainThinks a fortnight ago found that only 12% of people want life to be
“exactly as it was before”. A poll at the end of June, commissioned by the
nursery provider Bright Horizons, suggested that just 13% of
people want to return to working as they did before the lockdown. A YouGov
study in the same week revealed that only 6% of
us want the same type of economy as we had before the pandemic. Another survey
by the same pollsters in April showed only 9% of
respondents wanted a return to “normal”. It’s rare to see such consistent results on any major issue…
https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2020/jul/21/greener-happier-world-politicians-boris-johnson-consumerism-planet
