Christmas: We need to stop shaming the public for forming festive bubbles

Whether it’s tears of sadness, relief, ­frustration or just plain old ­exhaustion, nine months into pandemic-living is a c­ollectively emotional time. And no ­emotion has been quite so universally felt as anger. At a time when inequality and injustice is deeper and more visible than ever, anger has the potential to be the most productive response: the motivation people need to stand up and be counted.

And yet, as is so often the case, it’s a ­feeling that has suffered from widespread misdirection, both unwitting and wilful. Despite all the talk during the initial lockdown about how we’re “all in this together” (cue: High School Musical flash mob), an undercurrent of almost gleeful pitchfork-wielding against rulebreakers has run throughout the pandemic.

So, it was entirely predictable that when the option of visiting indoors at ­Christmas – albeit within narrow limits – was ­officially sanctioned, the gut reaction for many ­people would be to question the moral character of their fellow citizens. “Why, if you care about people with long-term health conditions, or the elderly, or essential workers, are you happily ­declaring your plans to celebrate Christmas with the whole ­family?” Or “why, if you care about people’s mental health and the long, hard months that they’ve already endured in near isolation, are you questioning the sense in easing the restrictions?”

Whatever “side” you’re on, it amounts to the same thing: taking out your anger on other people who are virtually powerless in the face of what’s happening. Is there anything more quintessentially “2020” than seeing people who probably agree on pretty much everything of substance come close to falling out on social media over whether or not people should be having their ­parents round for Christmas dinner?

It would be funny, if it wasn’t all so depressing. It’s depressing because there was, and still could be, a chance to take a bad situation and turn it into a catalyst for progress, but there is a real risk that this opportunity will be squandered because people are too busy fighting amongst themselves to present a challenge to the people calling the shots.

And it’s even more depressing because it’s just one more example of how the institutions of power deflect attention from themselves by encouraging people to blame each other for their problems. Both the UK and Scottish Governments have, in their own ways, driven forward a narrative around the pandemic which places more emphasis on personal responsibility than on the impact of high-level decisions or the need for systemic change.

The Tories being Tories, their ­approach has naturally been more brazen and lacking in basic empathy. Just this week, health secretary Matt Hancock ­questioned why so many people “think it’s acceptable to soldier on and go into work if you have flu symptoms or a runny nose, thus making your colleagues ill”. He even pointed out that people in Britain are “peculiarly unusual and outliers” in this way, yet somehow failed to mention that the UK has the lowest statutory sick pay as a proportion of average earnings of the 37 countries in the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD).

It’s more convenient to question why individuals won’t just “do the right thing” than to acknowledge that we already know the answer and it has nothing to do with people being thrilled by the idea of spreading disease or some innately ­British work ethic.

Back in September, it was just weeks after the Eat Out to Help Out scheme had ended that government minister Kit Malthouse was encouraging people to engage in another traditional national pastime: calling the police on their neighbours. As though clamping down on rogue rulebreakers was going to be the solution to a spike which had blatantly been caused by the UK Government literally bribing people to gather in busy, indoor places to help businesses recover before it was ­remotely safe to do so.

While the Scottish Government has been more tactful in recognising the challenges that people are facing in keeping to restrictions, it has also played its part in hammering home the message that if people would only obey the rules, restrictions would be eased more quickly. The trouble with this is that it makes public health measures sound like a punishment for being naughty, and the restoration of normal civil liberties like a reward for being on your best behaviour. It also sets up the belief that, if infection rates don’t go down, this is necessarily the fault of ­individuals who aren’t following the rules.

It’s true that we all have a role to play in doing whatever we can to reduce the opportunities for the virus to spread. But the decisions which result in genuinely wide-reaching consequences are not the ones made by your annoying neighbour who had a whole seven adults in their ­garden when they were meant to be ­adhering to the “rule of six”.

It’s the ones made by governments: about when and where to ease restrictions; about their public messaging; about the financial support offered to ­individuals, families and businesses to make it ­easier for them to make the “right” choices; about the cost-benefit analysis of things like keeping schools open in Tier 4, or of allowing formerly shielding teachers to be forced to work face-to-face in close contact or choose to eat into their limited sick leave to protect themselves.

The fact that we are so often sidestepping these conversations in favour of questioning the actions of Davey down the road is, as they say, “why we can’t have nice things”. Nice things like ­“building back better”, like valuing our ­essential workers, like creating an ­economic ­system that doesn’t come at the expense of ­people’s physical or mental health, and like taking meaningful action to support the people who were already in crisis ­before this crisis began.

So, forgive me if I sound like the Grinch who has come to steal Christmas, but the mixed messages over what we can and should do over the festive period feels a lot like another attempt to shift ­responsibility on to the general ­population and away from government. First Minister Nicola Sturgeon has said that staying home should be the “default” position and that people should make “informed choices” about whether they really need to visit relatives or go indoors.

But after weeks of advising that ­abiding by stricter measures in the meantime would increase the chances of being safe to enjoy a comparatively normal ­Christmas, it would be naive at best to expect people to treat the relaxation as anything less than the green light they’ve been ­explicitly told they were working ­towards.

If indeed there is a spike in cases in ­January, as predicted by health experts like Professor Devi Sridhar, this shouldn’t be blamed on the people who chose, when offered, to take up the option of ­forming a Christmas bubble, because by the ­assessment of strangers or ­acquaintances or their own government, they didn’t ­really need to. It shouldn’t be, but at this point it feels inevitable that it will.

Since I definitely won’t be having a “normal” Christmas, I’ll skip straight to the New Year’s resolutions. I hope that in 2021 we can all resolve to spend a bit less of our energy complaining about how those teenagers at the park were ­definitely not two metres apart, and learn to ­channel our anger into a more useful pursuit: holding governments and the powerful account.