Coronavirus isn't a bucolic writing retreat—but a time to address deep inequalities in our society

Mainstream discussions of inequality tend to overlook the economies of time and space. We talk about the housing crisis, but still through the lens of shelter, which is a basic necessity of survival, rather than thinking of home as a place of comfort, prosperity and relaxation. We talk about job creation, but only through the lens of financial provision, rather than thinking of purpose, routine and stability. Of course, we should tend to these immediate concerns before anything else, as well as the question of income distribution and assets. But by ignoring the secondary and tertiary impacts of inequality—the differing relationships we have towards leisure, freedom and hope on account of our social standing—I sometimes worry that we also fall foul of neoliberal thinking, with its tendency to reduce everyone to a market actor. If it wasn’t abundantly obvious: inequality isn’t just a factor of bank balance, but the ease and comfort with which we are able to move through the world.

Rarely, if ever, do we hear mainstream discussions about leisure per se, and its essential role in the body and the human experience. But like so many things, the coronavirus epidemic is changing that, throwing into sharp relief the disparities that exist between people in terms of how they structure their lives. We are also seeing the exposure of a previously latent prejudice in the way that people relate to their communities. The temporary flight of many people from London and those lamenting the fact that the city no longer serves their very specific social and leisurely needs reflect—in fairly callous terms —the luxury of disconnection and individual concern. Not to mention, second homes.

It speaks of a privilege in being able to view the world exclusively through the lens of personal gain and strategic advantage, whether that advantage comes from a high salary or the legacies of wealth that underpin so many artistic careers in the form of property and unpaid internships. On Twitter and in opinion pieces published in the broadsheet media, commentators ask: Why should I live here if I can’t socialize in the way that I used to, or if I have a better quality of life elsewhere? Which would be less galling had these people not been complicit in the process of gentrification that made the city so prohibitively expensive for more established communities in the first place. And I should be careful to distinguish between opportunists and those people with compromised health who might retreat to somewhere more remote out of sheer necessity.

I have to be careful here too, because I moved to London in 2009 after growing up in Birmingham. I moved here to pursue a career. But I also understood that this was a serious decision with consequences for the local community. To abandon that community, after contributing to its soaring house prices and rental market, as soon as things get tough, seems unthinkable. Particularly at a time when so many of us are trying to establish new ways of mutual aid, community and belonging.

In relation to London specifically, we see the same, tired cliché being rolled out: that this is a hostile and impersonal place, where human connection is scarce and the opportunity for communal endeavour infinitesimal. I marvel at the lack of self-awareness in being unable to see that it is fly-by-night gentrifies who create that very phenomenon. A similar principle also applies to the countryside. Not only has this been reputed to endanger local communities, but as one person on Twitter put it, the retreat speaks of a “tendency to view rural communities as there to facilitate your comfort,” rather than serving as places in and of themselves, where lives are lived in all their complexity. City dwellers like to think of the countryside in opposite terms to the urban environment; as non-places, offering convenient respite from the all too vivid proportions of the city. But the local communities themselves don’t see things in this way, and their offence is certainly warranted.

Outside of geographical debates, we’ve also seen the emergence of people who view the lockdown and humanitarian crisis as an opportunity for a holiday, or a chance to further their careers. This attitude has been lampooned for its lack of sensitivity, perhaps most successfully by journalist Imogen West-Knight’s satirical construct, the Bougie London Literary Woman. She, like so many real authors, see the global pandemic, responsible for mass deaths, as a chance to flex her creative muscle—and document it online. “Whether I can bear to be 50 miles from the Thames for weeks on end remains to be seen,” she writes, although there is some comfort in being “reunited” with her harp: “Perhaps a little concert for the villagers would raise spirits?”

But taking matters of decorum out of the equation for a second, this phenomenon also exposes the great chasm that exists between people who have the time and freedom to seize on these experiences for personal advantage, and those of us who are plunged into a state of economic uncertainty, and fear. So oblivious to the latter are those people who post endlessly about the creative opportunities—the chance to reconnect with their creative pursuits, launch an app or develop a new hobby—that they often judge these critiques as unfair. Or to use their preferred term: unkind.

This response speaks of a total misunderstanding of how profound an impact inequality has on the material realities of people’s lives. Of it not just being a simple case of the haves vs. the have-nots, but between those who conceive of reality as something they have a stake in and an ability to control, and those who don’t. In an era of widespread, casualised work, which disproportionately affects minority and low-income people, time is not something we are alienated from voluntarily, but by necessity and in larger and larger quantities in order to survive. To put it plainly: “me time” does not exist outside of the comfortable milieu of middle-class existence.

To commandeer the language of equality and class struggle with lighthearted gestures towards ‘community’ and ‘connection’ is both crass and somewhat harmful to the real project of fighting for equality, particularly when it is uttered by people with second homes, who have profited from the gargantuan surpluses of a capitalist system in overdrive, and who enjoy the luxury of being able to escape at the first sign of struggle.

Capitalist thinking reduces our view of the world to one of individual conquest and opportunity. This way of thinking doesn't work in the face of a global pandemic and it won't work with the on-set of various challenges connected to climate change. To view the lockdown as an opportunity for personal gain, or escape, is to ignore the bigger lessons that are being taught by these unprecedented events.

These are lessons that show us how interconnected and dependent we are on one another, that highlight the invaluable contribution of service personnel, delivery people, key workers and carers of all sorts. They are lessons that highlight the need to radically reassert the value of society and to prove Thatcher wrong. To flout these lessons is not just foolhardy and myopic, but disrespectful to those on the frontline of the struggle. The thousands of people who have already lost their lives and the thousands more who continue to risk their lives every day in the name of never turning away, or putting themselves first