Get Out While You Can

          Although it was forty years ago, I remember clearly the day I moved to Manchester. The sun was shining and the people were welcoming. But, back then, there were no pavement cafés at which to sit and enjoy the summer. That changed over the years, as ever more holidaymakers returned from southern Europe having acquired a taste for the al fresco culture of our continental cousins. Lately, with motor traffic banished from many city streets, there has been an explosion of the trend. Cafés and bars have spilled outside to fill the space creating, to a large extent, an unsightly mess, a hastily martialled collection of scrappy, battered furniture huddled behind chunky red and white plastic traffic barriers, with only a few plant pots arranged here and there in half-hearted attempts at glamorising the experience. The arrangement is, of course, makeshift, a chance for the desperate hospitality sector to make hay while the sun shines. Nevertheless, despite it being a clumsy attempt to recoup revenue, it is welcomed by customers who have missed face-to-face socialising.

          Of course, it will come to an end with the onset of winter, which is likely to precede the availability of a vaccine – though I hear that the Russians are already trialling one. At first I thought it mere competitive propaganda but, on reflection, Russian scientists may well be ahead of the game. Remember Sputnik? The fact is that there is a residual pool of taxpayer-funded research facilities that survived the collapse of the Communist Party and continues to operate for the benefit of the state rather than private profit. Compare this with the situation in the West, where ‘Big Pharma’ companies lay claim to be at the forefront of medical research, when the reality is somewhat different. Freighted as they are with their primary commitments to ever more generous dividend payments and constantly rising share prices, they have adopted a business model based on cutting R&D costs, patenting small enhancements and marketing me-too drugs to a privatised healthcare industry. They may be well placed to manufacture in huge quantities, but they are not motivated to innovate, despite their protestations otherwise and their concomitant justification for high drug prices to subsidise R&D. * The West also has government-sponsored laboratories, but they have been reduced in circumstances, ravaged by neo-liberal dogma which has insisted that the privatisation of everything is better than State control of anything. Thus have we arrived at a point where the State, having sub-contracted all its responsibilities to the private sector (don’t get me started on Serco!), no longer has the in-house expertise to manage national crises such as this pandemic.

          Despite this, the day will come when the corona virus is under control – one way or another – and we will all be at liberty to indulge, once more, in that mind-expanding experience of travelling, perhaps to places where pavement cafés are abundant and stylish. But this period of staying-put has had its pros and cons: restricted travel – especially flying – has highlighted the extent to which we need to reduce our air-miles to meet carbon targets while, on the other hand, public transport, the hopeful eco-saviour, has lost the ground it had gained from private car usage; staying at home has been good for those whose interests are solitary and stationary, such as the consumption or creation of reading, listening and viewing, while it has been tiresome for those who like to participate in sports, or the sociable arts of conversing, communicating and real-time flirting. All in all, staying at home may be comfortable – productive, even – but it is hardly the stuff that memories are made of. For that, we really do need to get out more.

* Mariana Mazzucato, The Entrepreneurial State