Britain sees itself as a stable country, and also as one that’s good in a crisis. So it has mixed feelings about national emergencies: it dreads them, understandably, but a corner of the national psyche is fascinated by them – and even sometimes relishes them. This ambivalence has haunted our culture and politics since the end of Britain’s last great, successfully navigated national emergency: the second world war.
Since 1945, British or British-set novels, films, speculative documentaries and television dramas have repeatedly imagined the suspension of everyday life in the face of catastrophes, from economic collapse to social breakdown, environmental disaster to nuclear war. From the horror movie shocks of the 2002 film 28 Days Later to the heartbreaking delicacy of Raymond Briggs’ 1982 anti-nuclear graphic novel When the Wind Blows, Britain has been good at scaring itself about the future.
Sometimes, these bleak visions have been lightened with satire. In The Family Arsenal, Paul Theroux’s 1976 novel about terrorists in a disintegrating London, the American writer mocks the assumption of some Britons that crises can always be overcome with stoicism and ingenuity – just as our national myth depicts our experience of the second world war. One of Theroux’s English characters yearns for “a cleansing holocaust” and the harsher, more regimented world that would follow: “He rather enjoyed the thought of deprivation, candlelight, shortages, paying with official vouchers.”
But in other postwar disaster fictions, the premonitions are almost too awful and accurate to contemplate, especially now. The 1975 BBC drama Survivors, about the grim struggle to rebuild British society after a pandemic, opens with the transmission of the lethal virus across the world from China.
Consuming all this dystopian culture has readied us — a little — for the new world we’re in now. The emptied streets and supermarket shelves, the suddenly grave politicians and threats to suspend civil liberties, are not completely unfamiliar. “The end of the world,” wrote the German author Hans Magnus Enzensberger in 1978, had become “ever present” in the imagination of the west — a “film playing in our heads”.
In Britain since 1945, as in other western countries, there have also been sporadic actual emergencies. These have caused fear and disruption, and sometimes significant economic and social damage. The dock strikes of the late 1940s, the more widespread strikes of the 1970s, the riots of the 1980s, the fuel tax protests and foot-and-mouth outbreak of the 2000s, the riots and Brexit turmoil of the 2010s - all triggered public panics and hasty government interventions.
Often, the latter were presented with a disproportionate amount of political theatre. “The government is determined to ensure the survival of this nation,” the prime minister Edward Heath told television viewers grimly in 1973, in a special broadcast to announce the relatively mild and temporary restriction of electricity supplies during the three-day week.
Yet at the time, even the most minor of these episodes often seemed frightening and momentous. I remember travelling during the 2000 fuel protests, when petrol stations across Britain quickly ran dry, and being spooked by the thinning traffic, by the feeling of entropy setting in. The NHS began to struggle, some schools had to close, and some supermarkets rationed bread and milk in response to panic buying. The Blair government’s popularity — previously impregnable — rapidly collapsed. But the crisis was resolved in just over a week. How minuscule it seems now.
The media, especially the tabloids, have played a big part in Britain’s national mood swings during emergencies since 1945. Probably the most famous British political headline of all is “Crisis? What crisis?”, the Sun’s lethal summary of prime minister Jim Callaghan’s response to the 1978-9 winter of discontent. In fact, Callaghan never said those words: asked by a reporter from another tabloid to accept that the winter’s wave of strikes was causing “mounting chaos”, he refused to fall into that trap. However cleverly exaggerated, the Sun’s headline also expressed a kind of entitled rage – at the prime minister’s reluctance to sum up the whole situation in the black-or-white melodrama of a tabloid front page.
In the past few days, we’ve seen a similarly impatient urge to declare that Britain’s coronavirus crisis will end in triumph or disaster. After Boris Johnson’s typically optimistic and less than convincing press briefing on Thursday, the Sun’s headline was: Bug off: Boris Johnson says we can ‘send coronavirus packing in 12 weeks’. Such confident statements by the press and politicians are probably not going to age well.
Whenever Britain comes out of this crisis, the attitude of our media, politics and culture to national emergencies is probably not going to be the same as it was during what now seem like alluringly calm years between 1945 and 2019. Britain probably won’t romanticise and dramatise crises as much as it did then. Arguably, it was an indulgence — a kind of extended and over-elaborate psychological rehearsal for a really big crisis, when we should have been making more practical preparations.
Genuine national emergencies, we are now learning, can be drawn-out, both terrifying and boring, hugely dangerous, and utterly disorienting. We may not want to experience another one – even in fictional form – for a very long time.
Andy Beckett is a Guardian columnist
