In the second episode of the Pimlico Journal Politics Podcast, Political Editor Christopher Bright is joined by Managing Editor George Spencer to take a look back at the events of 2020 — the COVID Pandemic, the George Floyd riots — and the effect they had on the economy, politics, and political culture.
The first half of this episode is available to all readers.
If you have questions you’d like us to answer, comment below or email us at submissions@pimlicojournal.co.uk.
EDITED TRANSCRIPT BELOW.
CHRISTOPHER BRIGHT: As the new year begins, there’s a tendency to look back at the year before and take stock of its impact in the light of distance. As newsworthy as 2025 was, we felt it would be worth casting our minds a little further back to 2020. From the COVID lockdown to the George Floyd riots, 2020 saw the birth of more than one genuinely novel trend which continues to shape the world today. There’s a good chance that for many of you listening to this podcast, it was the year you first became interested in more radical ideas, as it was for much of the Online Right.
Six years on, despite living with the legacy of 2020 every single day, there is very little discussion of its events and their legacy. This is understandable to some extent. Politicians, with the notable exception of some in Reform, almost unanimously supported lockdown, going against the advice of experts, whilst the British people, despite the occasional #FBPE piping up that they rather actually enjoyed lockdown, want to forget that it ever happened. Whilst litigating the arguments of a half decade ago may not be a useful political strategy, it is certainly necessary to remember those events and understand their impact if we wish to understand the political moment of today
How did lockdown shape political culture? What were its effects on us? And how do the policy decisions that were taken then impact us now? I'm Christopher Bright, Pimlico Journal’s Political Editor, and I'm joined by Managing Editor George Spencer.
George, what was your abiding memory of 2020?
GEORGE SPENCER: So I remember just prior to lockdown being announced, it would have been in early March of 2020. And I was still in Sixth Form at the time. 2020 would have been the year that I did my A-Levels and graduated. I was out in Leeds with a bunch of friends for an 18th birthday party. And it was slightly quieter than normal, but still quite busy. And there was a very strange sense of kind of the first few scenes of an apocalypse movie, where everything was still basically going on as normal, but everybody knew something big was coming down the pipeline. Only a few days later, lockdown was announced.
And that first lockdown was an incredibly strange experience. And I think that was exacerbated by the fact that whilst everybody had their life suspended, [this was especially true of] people in my year in particular, [because] there was really nothing to do with your time. It was clear from the moment that COVID became a big deal — even prior to the announcement of lockdown — that A-Levels were not going to go ahead as scheduled and, of course, none of us had started university in our year at that point and so there was genuinely nothing to focus on [because there was no point in studying], nothing to do and that kind of led to a very strange environment where there’s all this stuff going on in the world — especially for me living in a rural area, where it was difficult at the best of times to get together with friends and family in person.
It led to a very strange sort of suspension of life as an individual. There was a great deal going on, all sorts of things happening in the news, and I sort of adopted this position as a spectator, looking out on the world from my childhood bedroom, whilst everything immediately outside the window was perfectly quiet and still, but the world around it seemed to be burning down. Of course, as things dragged on, that strange novelty — which was by no means a good thing, but [at least] had its own kind of interest to it — obviously wore off. And by the time you get towards the later lockdowns, and certainly the lockdown that happened at the beginning of 2021, I think that had transitioned into a pretty deep dissatisfaction with the state of life at the time.
CB: Yeah, I think that also reflects my experience. Over the six months of the first lockdown, there’s absolutely no doubt that I became far more ‘online’ and far more radicalised.
Casting your mind back to January and February of 2020, you were obviously broadly on the right of politics then. What was your response to the initial reports of COVID from China and Wuhan? It’s often forgotten, but it was the right who initially raised the alarm on COVID. Nancy Pelosi famously went to Chinatown in San Francisco, hugging Chinese people to prove that there was nothing to see here; that nothing was going on.
What do you remember about that time?
GS: Yeah, well, I think I had a slightly different journey into this than a lot of people. And of course, for many people, 2020 was really the year in which they started to be interested in more right-wing ideas. I think I had kind of come to that point slightly earlier.
And so yes, absolutely. In the beginning of 2020, it was absolutely the right that was raising the alarm about COVID. Donald Trump was the only [major] politician who was arguing for a hawkish response. And, as you say, it was the Democrats — and the left more broadly — who were saying that it is basically xenophobic to be concerned about this virus because it comes from China. I think there were a lot of people on the right who want to retcon that period because shortly afterwards there was a substantial switch. Of course, it’s true to say that it was the right that [eventually] picked up the mantle of resistance to lockdowns. But at the time, and certainly with the fog of war and it not being clear quite what the virus heralded, there was a great deal of worry.
CB: I think to some extent, even though I entirely regret my attitude towards COVID [when] it first emerged, it was understandable. The British right in particular, far more so than the American right, [having] just fought the 2019 general election, and... many of the [supposedly] more radical exponents of the British right were talking about things like ‘state capacity’. I remember this was the time where ‘British Gaullism’ was very much in vogue online [Julian Jackson’s immensely popular A Certain Idea of France: The Life of Charles de Gaulle was published in 2018]. So it’s understandable that upon the arrival of a virus like COVID, people thought this is the time the British state needs to act. It needs to act early and it needs to — for instance — close the borders. It’s a great irony of 2020 that despite the fact that we underwent a six-month lockdown, the borders were never closed. Heathrow Airport remained fully open for the entirety of 2020.
George, why don’t you recap for us the events of 2020?
GS: So in early January, reports start coming out from China of some new virus that’s hitting, particularly, the city of Wuhan. At the very early stages, this is not necessarily in the mainstream news. It’s instead something that’s coming through sources such as 4chan and /pol/ […] but also coming through other kind of more niche, less politically-radical news sources. It’s only later in January that sort of the average person on the street starts to really hear about it, and that’s as footage starts to come out from Wuhan that indicates that the Chinese government is taking it far more seriously than it first appeared.
That’s very much aided by the fact that Wuhan is naturally a very foggy place, which gives it this strange sort of apocalyptic air. You see videos of cars trying to leave this city shrouded in fog and being stopped by military barricades. And this sort of mirrors the fog of war, because of course the Chinese government is hiding exactly what’s going on there, and there’s reports that people are being sealed inside their houses; there’s reports of lots and lots of people dying. It’s all very up in the air what exactly is going on. As we start to get towards February, and the beginning of February, you’re starting to hear more and more cases of the virus in different places. And by the time you get to about 10 February, you’ve got ten cases in the UK, twelve in the US. And at this point, there’s still kind of speculation about whether it is going to come here. [And if it does,] are we going to be able to contain it? What’s going to happen?
By early March, it’s very clear that it’s not going to be contained in Britain, or [indeed] anywhere else, and by this point you’ve started to see the virus really start to take hold in Italy. Now, it wasn’t known at the time exactly why Italy seemed to be having such a bad time of it. Of course, now we understand that that’s because Italy has such an [old] population, and of course, with a large number of Chinese migrant workers [many of them in the leather and textile industry, especially in Prato, near Florence, the first European epicentre] in Italy, it was more quick to pick up the virus than other places in Europe. Meanwhile, in Britain, it becomes clear [that the virus is] not going to be contained. And so the month of March is this strange kind of liminal period where it’s clear that something major is going to have to be done, but it’s not clear what that’s going to be.
Over a period of just two weeks, we go from a widespread sense that any kind of lockdown is just completely unthinkable in Britain to a sense that it’s completely inevitable. And, by 24 March, Boris Johnson gives an address to the public and and orders the British public to stay at home. ‘Non-essential’ businesses close.
Crucially, though, herd immunity is still the official policy of the government. The lockdown is framed as giving the NHS time to prepare for a surge in cases, and also as trying to ‘flatten the curve’ of the COVID epidemic and ensure that there is a smaller peak of cases so that NHS capacity can better deal with it.
CB: Yeah, I remember that time in March when the news suddenly turned towards trying to get James Dyson to build a thousand different ventilators to save the NHS as an emergency precaution. As it ended up, the NHS didn’t need any more ventilators. And in fact, all of this talk about allowing the NHS time to prepare sort of went nowhere. At no point was the NHS actually overwhelmed by COVID. Care homes were. But not the NHS.
GS: Yeah. And there was talk at the time about the Nightingale Hospital scheme and all of these kind of things — and of course, the Nightingale Hospitals never actually got used other than for, I think, literally a single-digit number of patients.
So the lockdown is announced. It’s initially a three-week lockdown. It turns into three months. And during that three months, we effectively have weekly, or more often, press conferences. And every time they come out, we’re watching them trying to see [what will happen]. Are they going to end the lockdown? How long is it going to continue? It ends up lasting all the way until June.
CB: I think this period in April and May is very interesting because this is the peak of banging the pots for the NHS. Even Nigel Farage was out there in his cords banging the pots. And it’s also a time where there’s almost a collective hysteria about lockdown. I remember very vividly listening to Any Questions and the former UK Supreme Court Justice, Jonathan Sumption, someone who previously was a completely respectable figure, the sort of person Rory Stewart would just love... He went on to Any Questions and challenged the idea that lockdown was worthwhile, saying that he didn’t want his grandchildren to sacrifice for him, and that maybe it wasn’t worth locking down and costing the economy hundreds of billions of pounds just to save all people for maybe one or two years.
GS: And fundamentally, raising the prospect that the state should not view all people as fundamentally fungible because an older person has less life left to live and a younger person has to be prioritised for that reason.
CB: This is something which everybody in Britain in 2019 would have agreed with… and yet suddenly, I remember very vividly listening to Any Questions and everybody started howling at him. It was as if he’d said some anti-Semitic slur live on the BBC!
GS: But I think a crucial part of this was that a great number of people became basically very excited to have sort of a struggle of their own. Much in the same way that a lot of middle-class people really enjoyed the Donald Trump era, the first Donald Trump presidency, because it gave them something to resist against. It gave them a purpose. It made them feel like, you know, the resistance in Occupied France, right?
Equally, the experience of COVID gave these people the sense that they were participating in something that was deeply meaningful, deeply unusual. And of course, crucially: how best to fight this war? Sit at home in your gardens! Which, of course, they have ample access to.
CB: Enjoy a nice glass of wine.
GS: And enjoy a nice glass of Sauvignon Blanc, yes.
So then, just before the lockdown ends, in late May, you have the death of George Floyd in Minneapolis. A wave of protests begins, first in Minneapolis, and then sweeping across the United States, and over to here, and eventually all across the world. In fact, I believe there were George Floyd protests in Japan, I’m not sure exactly what the motivation there was, but… On 7 June, Edward Colston, who was a major foundational figure in the growth of Bristol and participated in the slave trade, his statue is pulled down and thrown into the river.
And this is all going on whilst lockdown is still in place. There’s obviously a great deal of consternation about this. There’s a letter signed by about one hundred medical professionals in the United States that confirms their view that ‘racism’ is a sufficient ‘public health crisis’ to justify the violation of lockdown rules in order to protest it. It is still a month later in late June that the first nationwide lockdown ends. A few local restrictions remain in place in Britain, but by the beginning of August the government is actively encouraging everyone back out onto the streets. That is best represented by Rishi Sunak’s signature ‘Eat Out to Help Out’ policy, where all food in pubs and restaurants is 50% off throughout the month of August.
Of course, this is done when the vaccine is still a long way off. There is no indication [whatsoever] at this point that the vaccine is what is required in order to lift lockdown [or indeed that a vaccine would even be developed at any reasonable pace]. Of course, predictably, this leads to another rise in caseload, especially as we start to get towards winter. And by 5 November, a second national lockdown begins. That lockdown would last only four weeks, until 2 December, as political pressure to ensure that we’re not locked down over Christmas begins to build. And it’s really over the second lockdown that some political resistance starts to build up. But the shortness of it means most people still kind of feel that [the lockdown is] justifiable. Then after the second lockdown is lifted, you have a three-tier system of restrictions, where different areas operate under different kinds of constraints.
But as Christmas draws closer, the caseload is getting higher and higher. There’s more and more panic. They allow Christmas and New Year’s to pass. But by 6 January 2021, a third national lockdown begins. That lockdown would last until March 2021, but restrictions were not fully lifted until later in that summer. Economic activity certainly didn’t get going properly until then.
CB: We’ll talk about the political impacts of these lockdowns and how it was a radicalising moment for many, not just on the right, but on all sides of the political spectrum in a moment. But I think it’s worth dwelling on the fiscal impacts of COVID.
Now, many of you will probably have heard these figures before. But it’s worth emphasising just how insane the economic legacy of COVID is: £300 billion, at least, it’s estimated to have cost the government. ‘Eat Out to Help Out’ is estimated to have cost £840 million. To what extent, George, do you think the government is still grappling with the legacy of COVID today?
GS: Well, very much so. Of course, the government wasn’t exactly in a fantastic fiscal position going into COVID. We had a relatively high historic debt-to-GDP [though this was just beginning to turn around], as did most governments in the Western world following 2008. And of course, that was never solved in the intervening period. But what COVID and the money that was spent during COVID really did was remove any headroom that there could have been. It pushed that debt from being unsustainable to being directly and immediately disastrous. And that’s been a problem that every government since has basically tried to deal with, because both on the left, which is looking at fiscal stimulus, and on the right, which is looking at tax cuts — neither of those options have been available to any government since COVID because the debt burden is so high, and therefore the budget is so constrained. Interest payments are now reaching levels higher than the education and defence budgets combined. It has clearly reduced the optionality for the British government.
And I think it’s had a deeper impact than just taking tax cuts and fiscal stimulus off the table. It’s made it very difficult for the British government to spend any money in any way to pursue any kind of industrial policy, or any kind of strategy to restore growth to the economy. And, of course, we’re seeing the results of that now. We have record high gilt yields. We have the highest tax burden since World War Two, and yet the government still is not able to invest any more in public services, is not able to improve the outcome of the things which it provides. And so we are living very much in that legacy of the money that was spent during COVID.
CB: Yeah, I think that’s definitely true. It’s also massively impacted productivity. I don’t want to sound like Jacob Rees-Mogg or a Telegraph columnist, but obviously the rise of working from home has had a major impact on the British economy. But also people have gone on to welfare and never gone off it.
GS: And that’s particularly been a problem with young people in a way that it never was before. Part of that is the declining state of the graduate economy. But of course, all of this is connected. It is the loss of any productivity gains over the period of COVID; it is the collapse of the economy during that period; it is the rise of working from home — which, despite what everybody wants to say, has clearly been a massive loss in productivity. And so all of this has come together to create a new and larger than ever class of people who are unemployed, underemployed, low productivity. And they’re all paying the price for this now in the form of lower than expected wages, in the form of hampered career progression. And we’re starting to see the political impacts of that as well.
CB: I want to read this quote from J’accuse, which I think summarises very well the political impacts of this period:
COVID is, justifiably, called the worst policy failure in history. Literally nothing has been gained from COVID. Nothing was built, nothing was gained, and no lives were saved. On the other column in the balance sheet, under a big red minus sign, the future happiness of millions has been irrevocably diminished. So many people were radicalised during lockdown. In 2020, every normal person was suddenly forced to live the life of a NEET.
In 2019, despite the shocks of the previous decade, it was still possible to argue persuasively that the world is as it is because of powerful impersonal structures which had arisen inevitably and rationally. In 2020, these people watched in horror as every iron law of necessity, every copybook heading, and all the wisdom of the wise was broken, torn apart, and transgressed purely to advance the interests of old people. It was as if an entire generation suddenly saw the skull beneath the skin. This was what society was really about. These were the real material conditions behind the superstructure.
I read this out because it neatly summarises my own thought process in 2020. Prior to COVID, I was a relatively standard Conservative. It’s not that I was naïve to the fact that the state was in desperate need of reform, or that I had complete faith in existing institutions, but I essentially thought there were good reasons to wish for the restoration and survival of British institutions which served a useful purpose. I think that change in my own thinking mirrored a similar change in a lot of people over that time.
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GS: I think the crucial thing that was revealed to many people in 2020, and which very few had previously understood, was that their model of the political structure under which we live was fundamentally wrong. Prior to 2020, almost everyone took for granted that the state and its institutions were fundamentally neutral, effectively a platform for arbitrating interests between different groups and individuals, which didn’t institutionally privilege any particular outcome. I think, importantly, there was a sense that there was a kind of balance in this; that policy reflected, albeit an imperfect, median between various voter concerns.
And you can see that reflected in the tone of pre-2020 populism, in which there was a demand from certain sectors of the population to be ‘heard’ by those institutions. That demand presumes that being heard by them is possible. There’s no point sending a message through voting for Brexit if you don’t think that message can be heard. (transcript continues below paywall)
