What Tony Benn's diaries tell us about lockdowns

I'm currently reading Office Without Power, Tony Benn's diaries for the period 1968-1972, and there is much that is interesting in it.

One of its main themes is ministers grappling with UK industrial policy. This was a period of strikes, government aid, some job losses and great acrimony between trade unions and management. What struck me was the way the government, which lest we forget included the formidable likes of Benn, Roy Jenkins, Jim Callaghan, Denis Healey and of course Harold Wilson himself - real heavyweights compared to our current plywood Cabinet - hopelessly floundered on industrial relations. This group of very intelligent men (and one woman, Barbara Castle) were totally unable to get out of the mire and make British industry competitive again, storing up long-term pain. 

Castle came out with her paper In Place Of Strife to try and stem the difficulties; prices and incomes policies of various uselessness came and went; discussion at the top table was endless, as ministers tried and failed to get to grips with Britain's decline.

They were, essentially, prisoners of their ideology, and it was not until 1979 that the British government started to properly address the root cause of the malice by substantially weakening the trade unions, cutting taxes, lifting exchange controls, privatisation, and ceasing pumping money into the economy that was only causing inflation and decreasing living standards. It gave short-term pain for huge long-term gain, and it took enormous courage underpinned by belief.

What does all this have to do with our current semi-lockdown hell? Because like then, we have a group of floundering suits ('experts') in Downing Street who are simply unable to break out of group-think and cannot see over the hedge that they themselves constructed. They are stuck in the same sort of paralysis in their reaction to Covid as most governments in Britain were between 1945 and 1979 in relation to industrial policy. Whitty, Vallance and the rest might look to the common observer as knowing what they are doing, but they really don't: they are prisoners of their own very narrow, specialist outlook on life.

Why oh why, cried the 64-70 Labour Cabinet, is our shipbuilding industry still in decline when we keep giving it subsidies? We know, let's give it more subsidies, that'll solve the problem. Why oh why, cry Boris Johnson's government, can we still not control the virus despite all these lockdowns? We know, let's have more lockdowns, that'll solve it.

And just as Britain paid the price in slow economic growth and eventual mass unemployment, we are also paying the price in a debilitating social landscape, a horribly atomised society, a wrecked health service, crucifixion of civil liberties, and more - including coming mass unemployment.

Incidentally, in Benn's book there is not a single mention of the Hong Kong flu, which is estimated to have killed between one and four million people in 1968 and 1969. Back then we weren't as sentimental, decadent and hypochondriac as we are now.