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“Coterminous with the Covid-19 crisis has been a global ‘infodemic’, as responses
by governments, political actors and publics have met, meshed and competed in
the multi-dimensional media spaces formed by mass self-communication. One
of the many strengths of this volume is its multiple disciplinary lenses, deployed
to ask a question of strategic importance: has the pandemic reinforced existing
relations of power and dominance? The book will prove a significant asset for
researchers in many fields as they meet the challenges bequeathed by events that
have dominated news agendas over the past two years.”

Professor Jake Lynch, University of Sydney, and Leverhulme Visiting Professor, Centre
for Trust, Peace and Social Relations, Coventry University, UK
POWER, MEDIA AND THE
COVID-19 PANDEMIC

This edited collection provides an in-depth, interdisciplinary critique of the acts

of public communication disseminated during a major global crisis.
Encompassing contributions from academics working in the fields of politics,
environmentalism, citizens’ rights, state theory, cultural studies, journalism
and discourse/rhetoric, the book offers an original insight into the relationship
between the various social forces that contributed to the ‘Covid narrative’. The
subjects analysed here include: the performance of the ‘mainstream’ media, the
quality of political ‘messaging’ and argumentation, the securitised state and
racism in Brazil, the growth of ‘catastrophic management’ in UK universities,
emergent journalistic practices in South Africa, homelessness and punitive
dispossession, the pandemic and the history of eugenics, and the Chinese media’s
attempt to disguise discriminatory practices. This is one of the first comparative
studies of the various rationales offered for state/corporate intervention in public
life during the pandemic. Delving beneath established political tropes and state
rhetoric, it identifies the power relations exposed by an event that was described
as unprecedented and unique but was in fact comparable to other major global
disruptions. As governments insisted on distinguishing their own propaganda
from unregulated disinformation, their increasingly sceptical ‘publics’ pursued
their own idiosyncratic solutions to the crisis, while the apparent sacrifice of a
host of citizens – from the most dedicated to the most vulnerable – suggested that
inequality and exploitation remained at the heart of the social order.
Power, Media and the Covid-19 Pandemic is essential reading for students,
researchers and academics in media, communication and journalism studies,
politics, environmental sciences, critical discourse analysis, cultural studies and
the sociology of health.
Stuart Price is Professor of Media and Political Discourse and Director of the
Media Discourse Centre. He is the author of a number of monographs includ-
ing Brute Reality (2010) and Worst-Case Scenario? (2011) and Editor (with Ruth
Sanz Sabido) of The Legacy of Dissent (2015) and Sites of Protest (2016). Recent
publications include Journalism, Power and Investigation (2019) and “8M and the
Huelga General Feminista, 2019-2020” for The Routledge Companion to Political
Journalism (2021).

Ben Harbisher is Senior Lecturer in Teaching and Research at De Montfort

University. He is Deputy Director of the Media Discourse Centre and Chair of
the MeCCSA Practice Network. He has published in several academic journals
and edited volumes, with lead articles in the Journal for the Study of British Cultures
and Hard Times. Other published works have appeared in Surveillance and Society
and Critical Discourse Analysis. Dr Harbisher is also Lead Academic on the interna-
tional #SDGFilmfest, which is a collaborative research project between the UK
and South East Asia.
POWER, MEDIA AND
THE COVID-19
PANDEMIC
Framing Public Discourse

Edited by Stuart Price and Ben Harbisher

Cover image © Shutterstock
First published 2022
by Routledge
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© 2022 selection and editorial matter, Stuart Price and Ben Harbisher;
individual chapters, the contributors
The right of Stuart Price and Ben Harbisher to be identified as the
authors of the editorial material, and of the authors for their individual
chapters, has been asserted in accordance with sections 77 and 78 of the
Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988.
All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reprinted or reproduced
or utilised in any form or by any electronic, mechanical, or other
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recording, or in any information storage or retrieval system, without
permission in writing from the publishers.
Trademark notice: Product or corporate names may be trademarks
or registered trademarks, and are used only for identification and
explanation without intent to infringe.
British Library Cataloguing-in-Publication Data
A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library
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ISBN: 978-0-367-70630-2 (hbk)
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In memory of Rivers Barry, at various times Lecturer in English Language at
Somerset College of Arts and Technology, and Lecturer at Bridgewater and Huish
Colleges. Formerly Chair of Nynehead CC and President of Cullompton RFC.



CONTENTS

List of figures xii

List of tables xiii
List of contributors xiv
Acknowledgements xviii
Introduction xix

PART I
THE PANDEMIC: HISTORICAL, MEDICAL AND RACIAL CONFIGURATIONS 1

1 Killing fields: Pandemics, geopolitics and environmental

emergency 3
Graham Murdock

2 Biopolitics, eugenics and the new state racism 22

Ben Harbisher

3 The subsumption of racial discrimination: The

representation of Chinese mainstream media of the
maltreatment of African nationals in Guangzhou during the
Covid-19 pandemic 55
Zhou Yang and Na Yuqi


x Contents

PART II
POWER, CRISIS AND REPRESSION 69

4 The cultural politics of crisis in the UK 71

Ben Whitham

5 UK universities during Covid-19: Catastrophic

management, ‘business continuity’ and education workers 86
Stuart Price

6 Covid-19, police brutality and the systematic targeting of the

black and disadvantaged population in Brazil 123
Fernanda Amaral

PART III
JOURNALISM, INFORMATION AND STRUCTURES OF ARGUMENT
DURING COVID-19 137

7 Just following the science: Fact-checking journalism and the

Government’s lockdown argumentation 139
Jen Birks

8 The burden of responsibility: Investigative journalism in

South Africa during the Covid-19 crisis 159
Allen Munoriyarwa

9 “It’s just a little flu”: Covid, institutional crisis and

information wars in Brazilian journalism – the Folha de São
Paulo newspaper 175
Thaiane Oliveira, Rodrigo Quinan, Juliana Gagliardi, and Afonso
de Albuquerque

PART IV
BRITISH POLITICAL DISCOURSE DURING THE PANDEMIC 191

10 The BBC and Covid-19: The politicisation of a pandemic? 193

Sumaya Alnahed

11 How the UK Government ‘turned on a sixpence’ to change

its story: A discourse analysis of the No.10 daily coronavirus
news conferences 206
Ruth Garland
 Contents  xi

12 Mortality, blame avoidance and the state: Constructing

Boris Johnson’s exit strategy 220
Leighton Andrews

PART V
HOMELESSNESS AND DISPOSSESSION DURING THE PANDEMIC 235

13 Has homeless rough sleeping in the UK and Europe been

solved in the wake of the Covid-19 pandemic? 237
Jo Richardson

14 Leper Islands: Coronavirus and the homeless ‘other’ 249

Simon Stevens

Index 263
FIGURES

0.1 and 0.2 Police tape used to cordon off children’s play area,
Victoria Park, Leicester, 27 March 2020
Photo: Stuart Price xxi
4.1 ‘#allinthistogether?’ Author’s image of a
supermarket f loor sticker in Leicester, the
deprived, and majority-BAME, English Midlands
city hit particularly hard by the pandemic. 74
5.1 Bristol, UK. 26 February 2020. The University
and College Union (UCU) lecturer strike,
supported by students and other local groups.
Credit: Mr Standfast/Alamy Live News. 95
6.1 Anti-Bolsonaro Protest, Rio de Janeiro, 2019
(Photograph, Fernanda Amaral) 129
7.1 Political argumentation in Government’s public
communication on dealing with Covid-19, pre-
lockdown 142
9.1 and 9.2 Image of similitude analysis with halo from the
opinion articles of Folha de São Paulo (03/01/2020
to 07/19/2020). Note: Generated using Iramuteq
software. 183


TABLES

10.1 Responses to question about whether the BBC has held

the UK Government to account for its handling of the
Coronavirus pandemic 199
10.2 Responses to question if the daily Coronavirus government
briefings were tightly controlled 199
10.3 Frames in the sample 202
10.4 Tones in the sample, tone scale ranges from supportive of
Government to oppositional to Government 203
11.1 Topic guide for official No 10. pandemic briefings 210


CONTRIBUTORS

Sumaya Alnahed is Senior lecturer in Journalism and Course Leader for BA

(Hons) Journalism and BA (Hons) Broadcast and Digital Journalism, University
of West London. Her research involves analysis of news media representations
through an evaluation of the impact of social, political and cultural influences on
news production. Interests include framing analysis, Middle Eastern news, coverage
of elections, social movements and social change, and representations of diversity
and inclusion in mainstream media. Her work has covered the Arab Uprisings,
Al Jazeera, the BBC, Brexit, and the Coronavirus pandemic. Recent publications
include “Breaking the Language Barrier? Comparing TV News Frames across Texts
in Different Languages”, Special Issue: Framing War and Conflict; and War, Media, &
Conflict (December 2018).

Fernanda Amaral is a researcher at the Media Discourse Centre (MDC – DMU/

UK) and holds a doctorate in Media Discourse from De Montfort University. Her
work focuses on voice poverty, state violence and social movements, especially in
marginalised communities and their struggles to produce counter-narratives sup-
ported by digital tools.

Leighton Andrews is Professor of Practice in Public Service Leadership and

Innovation at Cardiff Business School. He teaches, researches and writes in the
fields of government, public leadership and innovation, and regulation and gov-
ernance of media, social media and digital. His most recent book is Facebook,
the Media and Democracy (Routledge, 2019). Other recent publications include
“Reluctant Europeans – the BBC and European Media Policymaking 1992–1997”
in International Journal of Cultural Policy; Political Norms and the Nolan Rules
in Political Quarterly; and a Working Paper for CREATe, the UK Copyright and
Creative Economy Centre on Facebook Regulation. Leighton was formerly


 Contributors  xv

Minister for Education and Skills and Minister for Public Services in the Welsh
Labour Governments from 2009 to 2016, and a Deputy Minister from 2007 to
2009. He was Assembly Member for the Rhondda from 2003 to 2016. He was the
BBC’s Head of Public Affairs in London from 1993 to 1996.

Jen Birks is Associate Professor of Media at the University of Nottingham and

Co-Convener of the Political Studies Association Media and Politics Group. Her
research focuses on the role of the publics and civil society in political media and
communication. Her most recent monograph is Fact-checking Journalism and Political
Argumentation (2019).

Afonso de Albuquerque is Professor of the Graduate Programme in

Communication at Federal Fluminense University, Leader of the Laboratory of
Media and Democracy (Lamide) and Productivity Researcher at the National
Council for Scientific and Technological Development (CNPq).

Ruth Garland spent 28 years in public sector strategic communications before

starting her PhD in Media and Communications at the London School of
Economics (LSE) in 2012. She was awarded her doctorate in February 2017 for
her thesis “Between Media and Politics: Can Government Press Officers Hold the
Line in the ‘Age of Political Spin’?” She spent three years as a media lecturer at the
University of Hertfordshire, managing the Media and Journalism MA in 2019–20.
She now lectures at Goldsmiths and the LSE. Her research focus is on public com-
munication and the relationship between media and politics, taking an interdisci-
plinary approach that encompasses media sociology, political communication and
public relations. Most recently, she has analysed the UK and Scottish government’s
Coronavirus communication strategies.

Juliana Gagliardi is a post-doc researcher in the Graduate Programme in

Communication at Federal Fluminense University.

Ben Harbisher is Senior Lecturer in Teaching and Research at De Montfort

University. He is Deputy Director of the Media Discourse Centre and Chair of
the MeCCSA Practice Network. He has published in several academic journals
and edited volumes, with lead articles in the Journal for the Study of British Cultures
and Hard Times. Other published works have appeared in Surveillance and Society and
Critical Discourse Analysis. His academic work includes surveillance studies, textual
and discourse analysis, terrorism, extremism, and public order. Dr Harbisher is also
the lead academic on the international #SDGFilmfest, which is a collaborative
research project between the UK and academic institutions in South East Asia.

Allen Munoriyarwa is Research Fellow in the Department of Media and

Communication at the University of Johannesburg, South Africa. His research
interests are in journalism and news production practices. He also researches on big
xvi Contributors

data and digital surveillance and has published widely in these areas. He is currently
coordinating a research project exploring the growth of digital surveillance prac-
tices in Southern Africa, under the auspices of the Media Policy and Democracy
Project (MPDP).This is a joint University of Johannesburg and University of South
Africa (UNISA) research project.

Graham Murdock is Professor Emeritus of Culture and Economy at Loughborough

University, UK. He studied at the London School of Economics and the University
of Sussex before joining the pioneering Centre for Mass Communication Research
at Leicester University, where he developed the first Master’s degrees in commu-
nication and media studies in the British university system. Later, he moved to
Loughborough University to launch the teaching and research programme in
media and cultural analysis within the School of Social Sciences and Humanities at
the Loughborough (East Midlands) campus. Professor Murdock has taught widely
outside the UK, having held the Bonnier Chair at the University of Stockholm,
the Teaching Chair at the Free University of Brussels. He has also been a Visiting
Professor at the Universities of Auckland, Bergen, California (San Diego), Curtin
Western Australia and Mexico City. Recent books include, as Co-Editor, Money
Talks: Media, Markets, Crisis (2015), New Media and Metropolitan Life: Connecting,
Consuming, Creating (2015, in Mandarin) and Carbon Capitalism and Communication:
Confronting Climate Change (2017).

Yuqi Na is a PhD graduate from the Communication and Media Research Institute,
University of Westminster. Her main research interests focus on the political econ-
omy of the Internet, digital discourse and Internet policy.

Thaiane Oliveira is Professor of the Graduate Programme in Communication at

Federal Fluminense University, Leader of the Laboratory of Investigation in Science,
Innovation, Technology and Education (CiteLab) and Productivity Researcher at
the National Council for Scientific and Technological Development (CNPq).

Stuart Price is Professor of Media and Political Discourse and Director of the
Media Discourse Centre. He is the author of a number of monographs including
Brute Reality (2010) and Worst-Case Scenario? (2011). He is the editor (with Ruth
Sanz Sabido) of The Legacy of Dissent (2015) and Sites of Protest (2016). Recent pub-
lications include Journalism, Power and Investigation (2019) and “8M and the Huelga
General Feminista, 2019-2020” for the Routledge Companion to Political Journalism
(Morrison, Birks and Berry, 2021). His chapter on the context of the Catalan crisis
appears in Austerity and Working-Class Resistance (Fishwick and Connolly, 2018).
Current work includes a new study of the US Capitol incursion of 2021, and col-
laboration with Dr Ben Harbisher on two forthcoming books.

Rodrigo Quinan is a PhD candidate in Communication at Universidade Federal

Fluminense.
 Contributors  xvii

Jo Richardson is Professor of Housing and Social Inclusion at De Montfort

University, Leicester. She is also a Trustee for World Habitat and Vice President of
the Chartered Institute of Housing; you can follow her @socialhousing.

Simon Stevens works at De Montfort University (simon​.stevens​@dmu​.a​c​.uk). He

is a political philosopher/theorist with a focus on concepts of power and order but
is also interested in the politics of pedagogy: specifically in decolonising political
theory modules and the idea of a ‘canon’. His other interests include the study of
homelessness: in particular, the othering of homeless people and hostile strategies
in public space. His 2017 essay on this subject, which won the Independent Social
Research Foundation international essay competition, appeared in Organization
Studies. He is now working on a forthcoming monograph with Vernon Press. He
also runs a podcast with physicist Dr Adam Sroka, called “what do you think about
x?”, which focuses on sociological and political ramifications of new technologies,
allyship and identity politics.

Ben Whitham is Senior Lecturer in International Relations at SOAS, London,

before which he worked Politics in the Department of Politics, People, and Place
at De Montfort University, Leicester. At De Montfort, he was a member of the
Centre for Urban Research on Austerity, the Media Discourse Centre, the Stephen
Lawrence Research Centre and the Global Inequalities Research Group. He holds
a PhD in International Politics (University of Reading), an MA in International
Relations and Globalisation (London Metropolitan University) and a BA (Hons) in
Politics (University of East London). Ben’s core research interests are in global (in)
security, inequalities, intersectionality and the cultural politics of crisis. Recent pub-
lications include, with Nadya Ali, the article “Racial Capitalism, Islamophobia, and
Austerity”, International Political Sociology,Vol. 15, No. 2 (2021) and “A Postmodern
Neo-Marxist’s Guide to Free Speech: On Jordan Peterson, the Alt-Right, and Neo-
fascism”, in Charlotte Lydia Riley (editor) The Free Speech Wars (Manchester: MUP).

Zhou Yang is a postdoctoral fellow at the Department of Sociology, the University

of Hong Kong. He obtained his PhD in Media and Communications at the LSE
with a thesis entitled “Nongmingong Going Online: An Ethnography of the
Mediated Work and Life Experience of the Chinese Working-Class in ‘Digital
China’”. His doctoral research looks at how migrant peasant workers in China
experience the digital transformation of the Chinese economy in the realms of
both production and reproduction. In the meantime, he also writes extensively
about African nationals in China and actively participates and leads related activism.
ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

We would like to thank our editors at Routledge – Jen Vennall, Natalie Foster, and
Suzanne Richardson– for their patience and kindness during the gestation of this
project. In addition, we appreciate the support and enthusiasm of our colleagues and
associates in the Media Discourse Centre, including Fernanda Amaral, Abbes Amira,
Zoe Armour, Gurvinder Aujla-Sidhu, Ahmed Bahiya (Baghdad), Terry Bamber,
Armadeep Bassey, Jennifer Carrizo (Madrid), Marco Checchi, John Coster, Rhys
Davies, Brian Dodds, Alexandra Halkias (Athens), Max Hanska (Berlin), Candy
Hernandez (Jakarta), Ali Hines, Pervez Khan, Jason Lee, Jamie Lochhead, Joe
Morris, William Njobvu, Lisa Palmer, Glyn Pegler, Ruth Sanz Sabido, Tiania Stevens
(Sydney), Giuliana Tiripelli and Ben Whitham. We also owe a debt of gratitude to
our contributors for their swift responses and forbearance as we worked on the book.
During a period of exceptional uncertainty and dislocation, education work-
ers, in common with so many others, faced a host of challenges. If those in the
Higher Education sector were not immediately successful in attaining their goals
(an end to casualisation, pay inequality and excessive workloads) then at least their
experiences aligned them more closely with those who deserved universal respect:
the ‘essential workers’ who kept the health service and the economy afloat. These
renewed forms of solidarity will be essential in the coming months and years as
we begin to appreciate the full magnitude of the threat caused by the corporate
destruction of the environment: Covid-19 was just one symptom of this disaster.
[A note on the dedication to Rivers Barry (1955–2020), Stuart’s colleague
from Somerset College of Arts and Technology: Rivers was a Lecturer in
English Language, known for his erudition, humour, and exceptional generos-
ity. An admirer of Chomsky’s theories of language, he worked for several years
in agriculture, and in a variety of manual jobs, before attending Birmingham
University as a mature student].
Stuart Price and Ben Harbisher, Media Discourse Centre,
De Montfort University, UK

INTRODUCTION

Political time and pandemic time: states of emergency

During the successive waves of the Covid-19 pandemic, leading politicians
tried to impose ‘political time’ on the development of the disease, assigning
it some form of intentionality and, in extreme cases, imagining scenarios
in which it could be seized and forced into submission – the British Prime
Minister, for instance, announced in April 2020 that the country had begun
to “wrestle [the virus] to the floor” (Proctor, 2020). It soon became clear,
however, that pandemic time followed its own rhythms of mutation and
would never conform to the deadlines sketched out in the official calendar:
the insentient power of the novel coronavirus could not be understood, still
less controlled, through whimsical references to physical combat and human
determination.
In the early pre-vaccine period, it seemed that the only way to forestall what
could become an ‘existential’ crisis, was to adopt a more stringent and holis-
tic approach to managing the disease (Farrar and Ahuja, 2021). To this end,
on 16 March 2020, the Director General of the World Health Organisation
called on governments to adopt a set of integrated measures to slow the spread
of infection, while lamenting the fact that “we have not seen an urgent enough
escalation in testing, isolation and contact tracing – which is the backbone of the
response” (WHO, 2020). The WHO argued that an in-depth defence against
airborne contamination should not just depend on social distancing, the cancel-
lation of public events or obsessive emphasis on handwashing: while social media
sites were packed with videos of people timing their ablutions by singing the
verses of ‘Happy Birthday’, vital measures like the use of masks, the creation of
a viable test and trace system, and the proper ventilation of buildings, were not
accorded the same importance (Kale, 2021).


xx Introduction

As some governments began to take scientific warnings more seriously, state-

sponsored narratives (portraying the virus as a conscious enemy that could be
defeated after a protracted ‘war’) were soon accompanied by a determined cam-
paign to address a more tangible target – the conduct of the people themselves.
One simple strategy, readily available to most nations, was the use of lockdowns.
These could be imposed either through the introduction of new legislation or by
the mobilisation of existing emergency powers. On 13 March, just days before
the plea made by the WHO, the Spanish Government used exactly this blunt
instrument, declaring a state of alarm, one of three options for emergency rule
available under Section 116 of the Constitution. An article in El Pais noted, “a
state of alarm has only been implemented once before, since Spain returned to
democracy at the end of the 1970s: in 2010, when a wildcat strike was staged by
the country’s air traffic controllers” (Cué et al., 2020). Italy, one of the countries
that suffered most under the first wave, began by placing first Lombardy, then
14 other Northern states, into strict quarantine. It was in this region of Europe
that the disease had made its first most dramatic impact. The whole of Italy was
locked down by 21 March.
Declaring that they were reacting to scientific guidance (see Chapter 7, this
volume), governments had in effect called a halt to routine existence, preventing
extended human contact and stopping anything but the most essential move-
ment. The UK imposed its nationwide order to ‘stay at home’ on 23 March, an
instruction which came into force three days later. On the same day, 26 March,
South Africa followed suit (see Chapter 8, this book). Russian cities were placed
in various forms of curfew by the end of the month, while Brazil’s President
Bolsonaro bucked the trend, attacking the decision of mayors and state governors
to impose restrictions, and accusing them of criminal behaviour (Paraguassu and
Simões, 2020). The US, subject to the usual tension between federal and local
state authorities, responded patchily, exacerbated by Donald Trump’s unpre-
dictable behaviour. According to one report, “individual states … began lock-
down measures at different times”, so that California and New York began “on
19 March and 22 March respectively”, while “Georgia became one of the last to
implement such measures, on 3 April” (BBC, 2020).
Despite the fact that some of the more draconian responses were now being
used to protect public health, it was impossible to disassociate them from the
legacy of state repression. The Spanish context was the protracted recovery from
Franco’s Dictatorship (1939–75), and the suspicion that the much-vaunted tran-
sition to progressive modernity was fraudulent or incomplete. Spain was not
alone in suffering from the ruinous effects of deep-seated iniquities: at the end
of July 2021, some 16 months after the Spanish Government had declared a state
of alarm, the authorities in New South Wales, Australia, sent 300 troops into
Western Sydney. The declared intention was to help the police enforce stay-at-
home restrictions, on a population that included a significant number of indig-
enous inhabitants. This prompted one resident to remark that it was “a sign of
a continuation of the militarised and policed response to this entire outbreak”
 Introduction  xxi

(Rachwani and Allam, 2021). As he saw it, the deployment of soldiers made “a
statement about the nature of the problem, and the problem is us, the people who
live in western Sydney. They’re saying the problem isn’t the vaccine rollout or
their failure to support people, the problem is our compliance” (ibid).
Governments also proved adept at revisiting established executive powers
or procedures, irrespective of the political orientation of the party in control.
In the US, immigrants’ rights organisations and the American Civil Liberties
Union were taken aback when President Joe Biden allowed America’s Centers
for Disease Control (CDCs) to extend the ‘temporary’ use of a section of the
Public Health Safety Act known as ‘Title 42’. This edict enabled the state to
block the entry to America of ‘non-citizens’, but under Biden’s predecessor,
Donald Trump, it was used to deport migrants. Trump’s argument was that their
removal would thwart the spread of the pandemic in state detention facilities
(Rouhandeh, 2021).
Under Biden, the renewal of Title 42 was announced by the CDCs, rather
than the government itself. A ‘senior official’ in the administration then made
the disingenuous announcement that the Government was simply “comply-
ing with a CDC order” (Narea, 2021). At the same time, the Department of
Homeland Security revived a policy that authorised immigration authorities to
remove migrant families without a hearing, bypassing the regulation that pre-
vented some from being removed under Title 42 itself.1
Lockdown was, of course, only one of the vital measures that were supposed
to help break the cycle of infection. The original warning about the need to
test and trace, made by the WHO, was not always taken to heart, or was poorly
applied. In the more negligent states, confusion over inadequate public commu-
nication, the inconsistent use of punishments for violating unfamiliar laws, and
the readiness of politicians to avoid blame for their personal conduct, began to
erode confidence, and the controversy over who should take responsibility for
the seemingly endless catalogue of poor decisions became much sharper as the
death toll mounted.

FIGURES 0.1 and 0.2 Police tape used to cordon off children’s play area, Victoria Park,
Leicester, 27 March 2020 Photo: Stuart Price
xxii Introduction

The belated response of many countries then became a major point of conten-
tion (Farrar and Ahuja, 2021). In Britain, the danger of “a pandemic virus” had
for some years been at the very top of the list of officially recognised threats to
the nation, but, in practice, it had “slipped to the bottom of the government’s
list of actual concerns” (Calvert and Arbuthnott, 2021: 16). In the US, the role
of Donald Trump in dismissing the threat of the virus, and then prevaricating
over the federal response, caused, according to one source, the unnecessary loss
of 36,000 American lives (ibid, and see “The global human cost: infection and
mortality”, below).
In Italy, lawyers acting on behalf of families that had lost relatives to Covid-
19, argued that the disease had been spreading for weeks before the first incident
was officially recognised by the authorities (Giuffrida, 2021). In a parallel case,
the World Health Organisation had privately expressed frustration over China’s
delay in passing on vital Covid-19 data, though in public, it had praised the
efficiency and speed of the country’s response (Associated Press, 2020). Once
nations were in lockdown (and their reliance on poorly paid ‘keyworkers’ to
move essential goods became ever more visible), political elites turned their
attention to the day-to-day management of the crisis.

Models of passive citizenship: ‘unregulated’

vs official communication
This was a period when most types of public gatherings were made illegal –
those who attended prohibited events or gatherings could be dispersed, fined or
arrested. Cultural events, sporting fixtures, religious processions, street protests
and public meetings were all curtailed or restricted. In their place, social media
use (albeit under the conditions set by ‘platform capitalism’) 2 assumed an ever
more significant role (Wong et al., 2020; Molla, 2021). Usually regarded by
citizens as an unexceptional part of everyday interaction, or as a means of cre-
ating like-minded political or social networks, the executive class took a more
sceptical view of these channels. To those responsible for government ‘messag-
ing’, the ready availability of alternative conduits of communication presented a
challenge not only because conspiracists and fascists use them to spread misin-
formation (the official rationale for hostility to social media) but because, what-
ever the precise nature of the content, they circulate a vast array of unregulated
material.
This censorious, bureaucratic attitude to information was rife within vari-
ous governments (Farrar and Ahuja, 2021; The Economist, 2021). It seemed as
though anything that lay beyond the boundaries of official discourse was seen as
a dangerous electronic supplement to the ‘ungoverned spaces’ (those supposedly
underdeveloped regions of the world) that were subject to military intervention
by powerful states. Meanwhile, night after night, ‘mainstream’ news passed on
the grim statistics of Covid-19 fatalities, accompanied by social parables and cau-
tionary tales. In the UK, disgruntled business owners, prevented from opening
 Introduction  xxiii

their venues, featured heavily in these reports, but the opinions of workers were
rarely sought.3
The regular appearance of authoritative individuals, however – political fig-
ures accompanied by medical experts – was a major feature of media coverage,
which drew its basic data and analytical frames from government news confer-
ences and ‘Q&As’. These ritualistic communication practices, which tried to
give the impression (mediated by journalists and other professional interlocutors)
of an exchange between the political elite and the people, were not the unique
product of the pandemic emergency. As a form of theatre, they were seen by
some leaders not just as an opportunity to disseminate information but as a vital
tool for the maintenance of social cohesion.
The notion of offering a timely and productive connection between ‘the
public’ and officialdom was not, in fact, a particularly controversial stance and
was shared by a number of influential social psychologists, some of whom acted
as government advisers. These experts also, however, expected the guidance
offered by the authorities to be consistent ( Jetten et al., 2020), in order to attain
a “strategic clarity” that was often notable by its absence (Reicher, Channel Four,
14 July 2021).
The problem was not just the preferred mode of communication. In those
electoral systems where citizens are constituted as a largely inactive public, for-
mal announcements (as well as news interviews, political speeches and the press
conferences mentioned above) are employed to maintain the basic communica-
tive etiquette associated with systemic democracy. In unexceptional times, they
act as routine forms of reassurance that there is a genuine connection between
‘leaders and led’. So, for example, politicians will often call for a ‘national debate’
on certain issues, knowing full well that the arena within which such delibera-
tions are conducted is to a large extent controlled by forces with which they are
familiar, and over which they can exert some considerable influence.
The basic approach, seen again during the pandemic, was to hold the citizen
at arm’s length, while opinion is ‘nudged’ in a preferred direction.4 Although
manipulative intent was sometimes laid bare in exchanges between journalists
and other professionals, and between reporters and ‘ordinary’ folk, the transient
moment of disclosure was not designed to encourage the growth of an independ-
ent perspective. At times, it was as though viewers or listeners had been invited
to imagine how they too might participate in the secretive, faintly glamorous
behaviour of the political elite, and to remove themselves temporarily from ‘the
public’ to which they were supposed to belong.
Official acts of communication were nonetheless meant to provide the listener
with a reliable guide to standardised forms of conduct that would benefit the
wider social collective: self-restraint and consideration for others were promoted
as desirable practices that should, ideally, become universal. A number of laud-
able individuals, often engaged in charitable and/or apolitical activities, were
used to symbolise this form of altruism (see Chapter 10 in this book), and these
stories were widely disseminated in the news.5
xxiv Introduction

Elite rhetoric and scientific data: an

‘autonomous’ public and the political class
By comparison to the broad social patriotism ascribed to pandemic role models,
the equally ‘moral’ impulse that motivated people to oppose the imposition of
legal and quasi-legal constraints was, as argued above, condemned or misrepre-
sented as the dangerous manifestation of fringe beliefs. The aim of governments
and corporate power was therefore to get their audiences to treat obedience
to lockdown rules as a judicious response to a moral imperative, while stop-
ping short of encouraging groups to see themselves as autonomous social actors,
endowed with the inalienable right to exercise judgement on the political/economic
elite itself. This, however, is exactly what happened, as people compared their
own willingness to exercise restraint with the seeming inability of political exec-
utives and their unelected operatives to follow the same rules (see Chapter 11,
this volume).6
Though forced to play second fiddle to government rhetoric, the parallel
appearance of a scientific narrative also encouraged the development of the inde-
pendent adjudication that made elites uncomfortable. The ‘public’ had access to
a wealth of pandemic-related data and were provided with some key insights that
could be used to test the plausibility of official utterance. This was the case with
the publication of infection rates, the number of hospitalisations and the tally of
deaths. Anyone who followed this tripartite analysis over time could use it to
calculate the relative success of state intervention.
The widespread dissemination of the ‘R’ number – the Reproduction rate of
the virus, measured by the average number of secondary infections produced
by one individual who had the disease – is another example of a formula that
provided a useful guide for calibrating the actual level of danger, as well as the
performance of government.7 In the UK, the emphasis placed on this simple
calculation seemed to decline as the pandemic spread. Nonetheless, access to
scientific approaches, however flawed and subject to revision, provided the
citizen-analyst with material standards of proof against which subsequent
rounds of political chicanery, and the behaviour of national leaders, could be
measured.
Besides this form of critical apprehension, the collective, largely unmediated
and hard-won experience of frontline workers was also at variance with the
airy confidence evident in many administrative proclamations. When, to take
a notorious example, then UK Health Minister Matt Hancock insisted (BBC
Reality Check, 2021b) that Personal Protective Equipment (PPE) was readily
available to NHS workers ( just when these professionals were reduced to wear-
ing bin liners and re-using face masks) then the chasm between patrician truth-
claims and the frontline perception of actual need demonstrated the limitations
not only of public health discourse but of official wisdom per se. Employees
might well fail to perceive the ‘bigger picture’ supposedly available to managers
and politicians, but this would not alter the simple fact that, if the kit was not
 Introduction  xxv

ready for immediate use on the Covid-19 wards, self-congratulatory reference to

the existence of huge stocks of PPE was bound to be seen as a grievous affront
(Clarke, 2021).
This case was just one among many that illustrated a stark contrast between
two diametrically opposed conditions – a simple reality (the raw truth that
under-resourced personnel had to confront the effects of the pandemic) and a
fiction (the stubborn insistence that things were under control). In their book
on the handling of the crisis, Ashton and Morris used the term “rhetoric of
preparedness” (2020: 9) to describe the complacent repetition of bland reas-
surances. It was Hancock who, as early as February 2020, announced that “our
world-class NHS is well prepared to manage these types of incidents [the spread
of Covid-19]”.8
Engagement in these routine acts of justification (Boltanski and Thévenot,
2006) is one of the principal functions of the political class, but dominant political
agency is not based solely on utterance. Influential politicians are also empowered
to initiate significant events and thus to create new situations designed to serve a
variety of goals. The outbreak, therefore, was treated by some public figures and
business leaders as a special opportunity to advance their interests, such as secur-
ing votes, increasing income, seizing government contracts, enriching associates
or dominating rivals (IBM, 2020). On some occasions, public rhetoric was used
to distract attention from a substantive condition, while at others it accompanied
or prepared the ground for an event. Trump’s ‘march to the Capitol’ on 6 January
2021 – just 2 days before the highest spike of Covid-19 infection ever recorded
in the US (New York Times, 2021) – is an example of such premeditated and
self-serving activity 9 (see Price, 2021).

Economic disasters: Covid-19 and employment

While the more doctrinaire world leaders seemed loath, in the face of reality, to
alter direction, arguing, for instance, against universal mask-wearing and social
distancing (a tactic used by Trump to create a clear distinction between loyal-
ists and enemies), the sudden disruption of life showed how seemingly robust
assumptions could be thrown into doubt. Abstract conceptions of ‘the economy’
were replaced by an insight into how chains of production, distribution and
exchange were sustained – not by frictionless technological efficiency but by
sheer human effort and fragile, last-minute logistics. In confronting the cri-
sis, the immediate response of some national polities was to maintain this basic
engine of production and distribution, while protecting a suddenly vulnerable
market by underwriting workers’ wages.
In the early phase (March to May 2020) of the novel Coronavirus outbreak,
employment retention schemes in the ‘developed’ nations were said to be sup-
porting “about 50 million jobs” (Organisation for Economic Co-operation and
Development, 2021). This, according to the OECD, amounted to some ten times
the number sustained by governments “during the global financial crisis” (ibid).
xxvi Introduction

Another report, issued by the International Labour Organisation, noted that such
support did not necessarily maintain standards of living, because, as a direct
consequence of the pandemic, “monthly wages fell or grew more slowly in the
first six months of 2020” (ILO, 2021). The crisis was “likely to inflict massive
downward pressure on wages in the near future” while the earnings of “women
and low-paid workers” had been “disproportionately affected” (ibid).
After the initial shock, a supposedly miraculous, post-pandemic economic
resurgence appeared, in which the leading nations showed “the strongest global
recovery from any of the five global recessions in the past 80 years” (World Bank,
June 2021: 9). The upturn was not, however, experienced by less wealthy coun-
tries or by the most deprived social groups within the more prosperous states.
Extreme differences in the strength of national economies, together with general
market volatility, were the dominant characteristics of this period: in response
to the unchecked spread of the later Delta variant, US stock crashed in value, a
mere month after the World Bank had celebrated an apparently impressive and
unexpected boom (Rushe, 2021).
Partisan machination, as suggested above, did not cease because the world was
under the uncertain rule of the pandemic. The apparent increase in anxiety over
the threat of inflation was a prime example, not just of economic uncertainty but
of political manoeuvring. Described by one financial analyst as no more than the
natural response of markets and an indication of “whiplash economics” (Strauss,
2021), it was characterised by others as evidence of Right-wing scaremonger-
ing for the purpose of economic retrenchment (Blyth, 2021). The notion that
the working classes would, yet again, pay for ‘the bosses’ crisis’ was a common
perception.
As the gap between rich and poor continued to increase, the basic functions
of the economy were, as argued above, maintained by a class of ‘key workers’,
who were exposed to the virus because they were unable to afford the luxury of
isolation – the only protective recourse available before the arrival of vaccines.
In many countries, the daily struggle to survive forced people to treat the risk of
infection as a secondary consideration. The rise of ‘pandemic solidarity’ among
some of the most disadvantaged groups and their advocates (in which resources
were pooled and alternative forms of organisations created), became a worldwide
phenomenon (Sirin and Colectiva Sembrar, 2020).
The managerial caste and the rich, meanwhile, took ‘social distancing’ to
new extremes, removing themselves further from the common order of experi-
ence. A small cabal of business and tech moguls took this principle to ridiculous
lengths, as they queued up to spend a full ten minutes at the very edge of space
(McCarthy, 2021). While the wealthiest of the world’s inhabitants were able to
recoup any financial losses they might have experienced during the lockdown,
billions of the most wretched would, according to the predictions of one charity,
remain in the direst of circumstances for “more than a decade” (Oxfam, 2021).
Addressing such issues, Davis argued that “immunologically there are two dis-
tinct humanities” (2020: 36).
 Introduction  xxvii

The global human cost: infection and mortality

Even the world’s affluent residents, though statistically less at risk than the poor
(Reeves and Rothwell, 2020), were forced to encounter the reality of a phe-
nomenon that represented a more immediate threat than any ‘peripheral’ social
distress – distant earthquakes or overseas wars – that they might previously have
ignored. The virus, likened (as we have seen) to an ‘invisible foe’ that threatened
human life in general, was a transnational catastrophe that demanded a different
type of media coverage than that typically devoted to a local or regional distur-
bance. In this sense, reportage had to assume a global and broadly humanitarian
form, more akin to that generated by the climate emergency, a comparison that
was reinforced by the link between the rampant destruction of natural habitats
and the inter-species transmission of disease (see Chapter 1, this volume).
Public healthcare systems, degraded under the rule of austerity (Chapter
4, this book), were soon hard put to meet the challenges of widespread illness
(Blackburn, 2020). States that had abandoned the responsibility of health forced
their citizens to depend on insurance schemes and private provision: these sys-
tems, in contrast to (even partially privatised) government provision, were less
well-equipped to manage the crisis (Williams, et al., 2021). Success in containing
the virus and limiting the number of casualties depended, especially when vac-
cines were not readily available, on the existence of well-organised hospitals with
critical care beds and uninterrupted access to medical oxygen. In many nations
– such as India, Pakistan, South Africa, Zimbabwe, Brazil, Jordan and Nigeria –
adequate oxygen supplies were difficult to source and maintain (Gilbert, 2021).
“Vaccine hesitancy”, a phenomenon that was particularly noticeable in the US
because of its political context and partisan inflection (Laughland and Glenza,
2021), was another major contributor to an unnecessarily high rate of mortality.
Within some regions of the world, there was a clear difference in the care
given to those identified as citizens and individuals whose status was compro-
mised by their subjection to illegal occupation by a dominant power. Israel,
praised for its determination to vaccinate its nationals and residents, was also
notable for its failure to address the urgent needs of those living in Gaza and the
West Bank (BBC Reality Check, 2021a). The dismal conditions created within
repressive regimes certainly multiplied the effects of the pandemic, further illus-
trated by the coup in Myanmar: in a statement issued by United Nations Special
Rapporteur, Tom Andrews, the UN noted that the military junta lacked “the
resources, the capabilities, and the legitimacy” to address the crisis (UN, 2021, my
emphasis).
By early August 2021, WHO estimates placed the number of global deaths
from Covid-19-related illness at 4,235,559 individuals, with 198,778,175 con-
firmed cases of infection (World Health Organisation, 2021). Yet the massive
under-reporting of fatalities in some countries suggested that the true scale of the
calamity was much greater. India alone was thought to have suffered in excess
of 3 million deaths, according to a report that appeared in July (Singh, 2021),
xxviii Introduction

while an article in the British Medical Journal, in May of the same year, argued
that the global total stood at twice the official figures (Dyer, 2021). Predictions
at the time suggested an overall toll, by September 2021, of some 9–10 million
dead worldwide.

Beyond the news agenda: transnational

catastrophes and ideological rupture
If the often execrable management of the Covid-19 outbreak exposed the fun-
damentally inequitable character of the transnational social order, the dystopian
aspects of life in a globalised economy were already entrenched in public con-
sciousness. Although it seemed the coronavirus outbreak was eating the news
agenda alive, other notable events were not entirely subsumed by the crisis. Like
any ongoing circumstance, however persistent and serious, the relative promi-
nence of Covid-19 was still determined in part by two conditions: the vagaries
of the ‘news cycle’ (see Chapter 7 and also Chapter 10, this volume), and the
apparent determination of politicians to interrupt the flow of events with new
topics of conversation whenever their competence or sincerity was questioned.
News items were, however, often discussed in relation to the effects of the
pandemic, offering a major opportunity for their audiences to make significant
links between stories that were usually compartmentalised. In some cases, a pop-
ular critique of patriarchal, racialised capitalism began to emerge (see Chapter
4 and also Chapter 2, this volume), producing a partial ideological rupture with
the ‘system world’.
The cataclysmic reappearance of “extreme environmental events” (Meyers,
2010) was particularly significant in altering public perception. Generally
accepted, at least by rational observers, as the product of human activity,10 the
immediacy of the climate crisis was clearly visible in 2020 and 2021, as wild-
fires raged across the Amazon, Australia, North America, Greece and Turkey.
Combined with the pandemic, these disasters brought political questions to the
fore. In both cases, the actions or inactions of ‘elite social actors’ were blamed
for the deterioration in both health and the environment. Yet, the climate emer-
gency and the pandemic (Chapter 1, this volume) unfolded in tandem with
another highly publicised form of excess, one that also seemed to have developed
beyond rational control – the sometimes brutal but often routine victimisation,
across the world, of women, migrants, the homeless, the medically vulnerable
and poor “citizens of colour” (see extensive discussion in Chapters 2-4, 6, 9, 13
and 14 of this book).
This systemic abuse was highlighted through the global circulation of mate-
rial like the video of George Floyd’s murder, but ‘racially aggravated’ assaults
by police had long been framed (by critical social movements like Black Lives
Matter) as a form of state-sponsored violence. Calls for the defunding of law
enforcement, which caused some consternation, were actually no more than a
measured response to a situation in which police had not only adopted highly
 Introduction  xxix

dangerous arrest and ‘restraint’ techniques but also acquired tons of lethal kit
leftover from America’s wars. Supplied through the US Defence Department
programme 1033, this distributed “over $7 billion worth of excess military
equipment to more than 8,000 local law enforcement agencies across [the United
States]” (Brancaccio et al., 2020). The war materiel received by local police
organisations included armoured cars, high-velocity assault weapons, grenades
and personal ‘tactical’ equipment.
Reports on the dispersal of gatherings that breached lockdown regulations –
particularly where these crowds were organised as a deliberate challenge to the
rules – demonstrated the imbrication of protest events with both the pandemic
and authoritarian responses to its control. In late July 2021, for instance, Australia
experienced widespread anti-lockdown protests. In Sydney, one of these dem-
onstrations was “brought to a violent end by police” (Smee, 2021). Even more
alarming were the reports from Myanmar (see above), in which the sheer ruth-
lessness of the military junta was exemplified by the persecution of medical per-
sonnel, on the basis that they had opposed the coup of 1 February 2021. In one
incident, “several doctors active in the civil disobedience movement went to
make a discreet house call, they thought, for a desperately ill patient”, but they
had been tricked: “it was a trap set by the military [which] took them all into
custody” (Sullivan, 2021). The drive to control the population was more than
merely reactive, however, since it grew from the long-held desire to increase
centralised state control and surveillance. An Amnesty International study found
that “in at least 60 countries … authorities have adopted punitive and coercive
measures that have not only resulted in violations of a range of human rights
but also divided societies and failed to tackle the health crisis” (2020, my emphasis).
If extreme repressive measures could be applied to subject populations by
‘rogue states’ such as Myanmar and Israel, irrespective of their formal status as
(respectively) an undeclared dictatorship and a self-declared electoral democracy,
then this reinforces the belief that authoritarianism can thrive despite the routine
assignation of legitimacy or illegitimacy to specific regimes, since it is the state
formation itself that seems capable of degrading public life, with or without the
excuse of an emergency.

Moving swiftly on? The Covid-19 narrative,

‘wellbeing’, and immovable events
The overt use of extreme violence by states against internal opponents (as opposed
to the disguised exercise of institutional force) often indicates the structural and
ideological weakness of a ruling cabal. In contrast, ‘sophisticated’ polities like
the UK seem to take pride in a form of unspoken consensus. As a country of
devolved parliaments that lacks a written Constitution, Britain relies upon a first-
past-the post political system and a concomitant form of (dis)engagement. At
times, this passivity has allowed politicians to express extremely aggressive views
without popular censure but, during the pandemic, leading members of the
xxx Introduction

Conservative administration used a more empathetic tone, having been trained

to ‘speak reasonably’ and even to employ the language of inclusion and care –
though it stretched credulity to hear PM Johnson declare that the use of ‘stop and
search’ powers should be considered “a loving act” (Dodd, 2021).
Some of the sillier interruptions to the ‘Covid-19 narrative’ (like Matt
Hancock’s self-inflicted fall from grace, or Dominic Cummings trip to Barnard
Castle), were actually quite revealing: instead of the much-vaunted psychologi-
cal exhaustion of the population, it was the elite which got bored. A variety
of powerful social actors (such as politicians, public contrarians and self-pro-
moting entrepreneurs) had lost patience with the restrictions placed on their
ability to, for instance, dominate the headlines, increase the excessive girth of
their business empires, pass lucrative contracts to their allies, and reinforce their
networks. While medical professionals warned against throwing caution to the
winds (Anonymous, 2021; Middleton, 2021), advice on shifting the agenda away
from the pandemic was readily available from the private sector. A contributor
to Forbes magazine addressed the question of how to break through the barrier
of ‘Covid-19 themed’ news coverage, noting with impressive insensitivity that
“everyone right now is talking doom and gloom” but going on to recommend
that businesses create “a story about how your product or service is helping/can
help people cope with the madness” (Amendola, 2020).
Getting back to ‘business as usual’ soon became a major trope in the main-
stream media, while expressing concern for the ‘wellbeing’ of others was a
regular feature of political address. The ‘mental health’ agenda was most often
articulated by those politicians who argued that the economy needed to get back
on track, based on the argument that the effects of lockdown were even more
damaging than the pandemic itself. The near-ubiquitous reappearance of this
stance in public debate, was challenged by research that suggested that social
restrictions had made little negative impact on the nation’s health (Grover, 2021).
Delayed treatment for urgent health problems, however, caused by the need to
make Covid cases the priority, caused exceptional distress and increased rates of
mortality.
There were, meanwhile, other serious and ‘immovable’ occasions (like the
anniversaries of momentous events), which could not be side-lined by the pan-
demic. Significant international developments were bound into the media calen-
dar and replicated in bulletins in accord with established news values (Bednarek
and Caple, 2014). In some cases, they provided ruling groups with an opportu-
nity to distract attention from major policy failures, but in others, the opposite
effect was obtained – the reinforcement of the suspicion that the system was in
crisis. The loudly trumpeted military adventure in Afghanistan, for instance,
underlined the latter: as it was wound down in 2021, after 20 years’ fighting,
it had cost not only between an estimated $815.7 billion (Debre, 2021) and $2
trillion (Myers, 2021) but also more than “a hundred million dollars of Western
government funding” which had been invested in the “development of liberal
democratic journalism” (Relly and Zanger, 2017).
 Introduction  xxxi

After the fall of the capital Kabul, on 15 August 2021, a swift retrospec-
tive assessment decided that victory in Afghanistan had never really been essen-
tial for the survival and reproduction of universal Western values – yet some
240,000 lives had been lost during the decades when this goal was used to justify
the Western presence. As the Taliban swept the Afghan army aside (Graham-
Harrison, 2021), a conflict once described as an existential struggle seemed to be
regarded as no more than a regional disappointment, on the basis that the state
would never quite meet the standards of ‘governance’ the invading powers had
imagined possible. The Afghan withdrawal was not, of course, the end of wars,
post-imperial occupations and counter-insurgency.

Cumulative disasters, class relations

and the ‘world beyond Covid’
The persistent coincidence of armed conflict, racial injustice, increasing alarm
over environmental degradation and the staggering effects of the pandemic on
class, racial and gender divisions, suggested a cumulative slide towards a gen-
eral catastrophe, which no talk of ‘resilience and recovery’ could offset. If a
protracted form of extinction had really become a more immediate threat to
humanity then, as argued above, those most exposed to, and least protected from
these exigencies, would endure the earliest and severest impact. In times of crisis,
workers are always reminded by their own straitened economic circumstances that
their basic function is to absorb the shocks of the system (Price, in Price and Sanz
Sabido, 2016). Blacker (2013; 2019) goes much further, arguing that no one in
employment is safe from the neoliberal landslide. Not only is the suffering of the
manual working class guaranteed, but it appears to prefigure the victimisation of
increasingly precarious professional groups (see Chapter 5 in this book) while,
for their part, financial and rentier capitalists alike seem determined to silence,
corrupt or ‘proletarianise’ collectives they regard as a threat.11 Meanwhile, the
continued reassessment of the role of the ‘working masses’, intersectional forces
(Bohrer, 2021) and/or the ‘dangerous’ precariat (Standing, 2021), has revived, to
some extent, the Left’s intellectual agenda.
One major issue highlighted by the pandemic is, therefore, exactly the ques-
tion of how class relations, labour and political/cultural identity will develop in
a world ‘beyond’ Covid-19. In the hands of vested interests, this post-pandemic
condition will be one in which we ‘have learned to live with’ the infection and
the environmentally destructive practices that produced it. While it is not unu-
sual to find authors who argue that overt state autocracy is unsustainable – Smith
(2020), for example, offers a critique of authoritarian China as an “engine of
environmental collapse” – the exercise of illegitimate authority extends through-
out the liberal social order as well. It is precisely the top-down reconfiguration of
economic effort, and an enforced ‘post pandemic’ recovery, that seeks to ensure
the survival and extension of hierarchical distinctions between principals/execu-
tives and followers/functionaries (Ashton, 2020; Calvert and Arbutnott, 2021).
xxxii Introduction

Throughout the Covid-19 crisis, corporate organisations spread their values

and practices within supposedly public institutions. Pre-pandemic, universities,
schools and hospitals had all been regarded as territories to be conquered. As
governments pretended that high rates of infection were no longer dangerous,
the workforce was reminded of its basic, subaltern function. In seeking to re-
establish a form of corporate hegemony, the standard approach was to emphasise
the concept of leadership. The dissemination of this idea was central to the propo-
sition that leaders had (empathetically) steered their subordinates through a ter-
rible crisis, and that work discipline must be re-established in order to revive ‘the
economy’, and cement the fortunes of middle and upper management.
The supposedly central importance of (agile and flexible) organisational lead-
ership became the dominant theme promoted by corporate publications, and by
managerial or academic blogs devoted to the recomposition of economic life
(Deloitte, 2020; Eppler, 2020; Joly, 2020; McKinsey, 2020; Samans and Nelson,
2020; Chamorro-Premuzic, 2021; Echebarria, 2021; Graf-Vlachy, 2021).
Profitability, social inclusion and managerial control would be maintained or
enhanced, the argument went, within the new conditions set by hybrid working
(in effect, a mixture of ‘remote’ and self-imposed discipline) supported by a pro-
ductivity drive (supplemented, noted above, by a wellbeing agenda). According
to these work manuals and managerial self-care guides, everything in the ‘post-
Covid’ world should be reassessed, except the iron distinction between self-
appointed leaders and their subordinates.

Conclusion: post-pandemic reconstruction –

citizens, public and formal authority
The retrogressive re-imposition of authority offers important lessons for those
determined to recast society in a more radical socioeconomic form – the growth
of a broad but inconsistent oppositional stance is evident in a host of tracts that
discuss the Covid-19 disaster and the possibilities of a fairer or more “ordered”
social order (Blakeley, 2020; Horton, 2021; Malm, 2020; Parker, 2020;
Seedhouse, 2020; Bratton, 2021; Miller, 2021). These, and other recent inter-
ventions, emerge from a range of impulses and traditions, including left electoral
socialism, liberal Marxism, feminist intersectionality and the ‘neo-Leninism’
advocated by writers like Malm and criticised by Price (Chapter 5, this volume).
The first instructive insight is to admit that the opponents of ‘pandemic capi-
talism’ do represent a disparate range of opinions, but also that these differ-
ences are not insurmountable if convivial forms of radical class intersectionality
are pursued. Some of the identity-based divisions are, in fact, the product of
bourgeois and commercial interests, which have taken up diversity, inclusion
and environmentalism as a way of recruiting some of the ‘disadvantaged’ into
their ranks. Yet, in practice, even those formally recognised as full citizens are
divided by the state–corporate nexus into worthy and unworthy subjects, creat-
ing a world where even “to assemble” is to “appear suspect” (Carrigan and Fatsis,
 Introduction  xxxiii

2021: 16). The basic precondition for aspiring to become a legitimate member of
a recognised ‘public’ is not always the possession of a ‘traditional’ racial profile,
but “the ability to afford this as buyers of consumer goods” (ibid). One useful
demand in the ‘post-Covid’ world would be to stop the evaluation of human
beings through assessments of net worth (or the commoner’s version, their ‘credit
rating’) and to end the stifling surveillance and policing of citizens and workers.
If, during the successive waves of lockdown, the declared purpose of police
intervention against protest (see the section above, “Beyond the news agenda:
transnational catastrophes and ideological rupture”) was to maintain order and
protect health, the final phase of a (premature) recovery was the retrenchment
and extension of centralised authority. Citizens face, in other words, the rhetorical
recomposition of post-pandemic socioeconomic ‘normality’.
In the UK, the relaxation of formal restrictions is accompanied by the aban-
donment of basic advice, like wearing masks, that could help prevent the spread
of infection (this, at a time (October 2021) when the virus was still causing some
100-200 deaths a day). Masks were a symbol of the presence of the virus, and
their removal became a (mistaken) demonstration that the pandemic was, in
effect, over. In moving away from strictures and warnings, governments pretend,
with bare-faced cheek, to have returned our ‘freedoms’ (one of Boris Johnson’s
favourite terms), while further restricting our capacity to exercise rights of any
greater import than the paid-for pleasures encouraged by those typical commer-
cial venues (bars, pubs, restaurants, clubs, etc.) that were used, night after night
in news bulletins, to illustrate the suffering of the ‘business community’.
After the initial, and rather limited, depictions of cross-class, national soli-
darity had been undermined by the widespread belief that leaders had actively
avoided the expectations that people, in general, were supposed to follow, the
state–corporate nexus began to promote ‘resilience’ as a way of aligning pub-
lic sentiment and narratives of self-worth with its own objectives. Resilience is
meant to have become the ‘people’s’ term and is readily deployed within many
personal accounts of pandemic survival. The near-ubiquitous reference to this
concept has grown in parallel with – in British political discourse at least – an
unabashed reference to the tortuous process of ‘messaging’. If ‘resilience’ belongs
to the commoner, ‘messaging’ (the creation and dissemination by the political
class, of coherent propaganda) was never meant to be revealed to, or assimilated
by, the citizen. References to messaging provided just the smallest of insights
into the process of framing public discourse.

Contents of the book

The material offered in this book is determinedly critical in the sense that it
assumes the existence of a fractured relationship between formal state/corporate
authority and the bulk of the world’s population. The latter is constituted in the
minds of the elite as a ‘public’ and – during the pandemic and beyond – was char-
acterised, by turns, as receptive, recalcitrant, educated, ignorant, dependable,
xxxiv Introduction

unruly and, in some contexts, disposable. The interdisciplinary assessment of

power, presented in this volume, draws on a variety of events, acts and utterances
in order to place the Covid-19 pandemic in a broader, transnational context. It
encompasses the performance of the media, the machinations of the private sec-
tor, the behaviour of the security state, and the quality of public rhetoric. The
crisis saw national variations in the use of lockdown, the growth in the severity
of enforcement and surveillance, the temporary validation of ‘essential workers’,
and the imposition of ‘sacrifice’ on frontline medical personnel.
In examining these events, we have paid considerable attention to the dis-
cursive articulation of purposes, narratives and the often-unpredictable material
activities that public authority and its critics initiated, promoted or attempted to
control. The book emerges from, and is in sympathy with, those diagnostic and
analytical traditions that underpin the critical social sciences, including contem-
porary media studies, discourse analysis, state theory, feminist perspectives, anti-
racist and decolonialising theory, historical analysis and critical sociology. Our
particular focus is on the activities, procedures, regimes and behaviours gener-
ated by governments and the corporate sector, and interpreted and circulated by
traditional media forms.
Chapter 1, by Graham Murdock, is entitled “Killing Fields: Pandemics,
Geopolitics and Environmental Emergency” and notes that attempts to construct
a pandemic chronology must reach beyond the immediate ‘chain of events’ that
began in China, in December 2019. Murdock notes that a succession of pan-
demic outbreaks stretches back over a century to 1890. He argues that the cur-
rent situation can only be fully understood when we see the ‘wreckage’ caused as
the result of an accelerating environmental catastrophe, propelled by an exploita-
tive relation to the natural world and legitimated by a master discourse of eco-
nomic progress.
Chapter 2, “Biopolitics, Eugenics and the New State Racism”, by Ben
Harbisher, analyses the notion of eugenics and social control in the context of
the UK’s Coronavirus pandemic. The relevance of eugenics to this volume’s
discourse is threefold. First, that the sheer volume of deaths in the UK (which
exceeded anywhere else in Europe) is inexcusable. Second, that the machina-
tions of the modern state are rarely more visible than in times of national crisis,
meaning that the actions of the British Establishment have never been more
transparent. Third, that while ordinary citizens have attempted to question the
inadequate management of the pandemic by the Government, the response from
the Establishment has been to reframe this argument as a matter of national secu-
rity – and thus to clamp down on subversive public opinion from the ‘conspiracy’
fringe.
Yang and Yuqi produced Chapter 3, “The Subsumption of Racial
Discrimination: The Representation of Chinese Mainstream Media of the
Maltreatment of African Nationals in Guangzhou during the Covid-19
Pandemic”. This piece describes Chinese state responses to disturbing incidents
that occurred in early April 2020, in the southern metropolis of Guangzhou.
 Introduction  xxxv

A number of African nationals experienced maltreatment and discrimination,

including the denial of existential supplies like food, eviction from their accom-
modation and the prevention of access to hotels, shops, restaurants and public
transportation. Others were subject to forced self-isolation at home or manda-
tory quarantine in designated hotels. When the story began to circulate, Chinese
newspapers carried rebuttals that, as analysed by the authors, demonstrate shifts
in descriptive categories, revealing state recourse to equivocal and manipulative
communication.
Ben Whitham is the author of Chapter 4, which examines “The Cultural
Politics of Crisis in the UK”. The outbreak of the Covid-19 pandemic in 2020
triggered a global public health crisis. The chapter’s central argument is that
the cultural politics of austerity and of Covid-19 are heavily imbricated within
the UK’s wider cultural politics of crisis. Following some initial methodological
reflections on cultural political economy and critical discourse analysis, two dis-
cursive focal points structure the chapter. First, the chapter explores the erasure
of racialised, classed, gendered and ableist structural inequalities in the experi-
ences of the pandemic, examining the claims that ‘we’re all in this together’.
Second, the chapter discusses the mobilisation of war metaphors and motifs like
‘keep calm and carry on’ and how these function to normalise mass death among
targeted and ‘vulnerable’ (especially racially minoritised) populations, while
simultaneously reinforcing discourses of racialised, contingent citizenship and
the white nation.
Chapter 5, by Stuart Price, is entitled “UK Universities during Covid-19:
Catastrophic Management, ‘Business Continuity’, and Education Workers”. Price
provides an overview of the operational and discursive framework employed by
the ‘senior leadership’ of British universities in those cases where – during the
coronavirus pandemic – it attempted to persuade, cajole or coerce its workforce
and student cohort to return to a ‘Covid-secure’ campus. The larger purpose of
the enquiry is to understand how executive influence is exercised within a sector
that has, in recent years, embraced an aggressive approach to workforce manage-
ment and is now engaged in forcing through large numbers of redundancies. The
Covid-19 disaster offers, therefore, a case study in the particular use of a general
discretionary power, described by its practitioners as leadership but defined here
as authoritarian managerialism, a mode of oversight and direction that already
subsists in hybrid public/corporate institutions.
Fernanda Amaral produced Chapter 6, “Covid-19, Police Brutality and the
Systematic Targeting of the Black and Disadvantaged Population in Brazil”,
which asks how the consolidation of information technology and subsequent
popularisation of sousveillance practices have put police conduct in the spot-
light. Brazil has one of the most violent police forces in the world, and most of
the deaths occur in the city’s favelas and outskirts, against a backdrop of human
rights violations, where murder has become normalised. During the Covid-19
outbreak in 2020, reports of police violence and excessive use of force began
to emerge in several countries across the globe, including England, the US,
xxxvi Introduction

Kenya, Chile and Brazil. Building on previous research, this chapter examines
the increase in police killings in Brazil during the Covid-19 crisis at the same
time as the official discourse completely ignored the health crisis in the favelas
and disregarded the life and safety of the population.
Chapter 7 is the work of Jen Birks. “Just Following the Science: Fact-
Checking Journalism and the Government’s Lockdown Argumentation” notes
that the global Coronavirus pandemic has restored the rhetorical prominence of
‘evidence-based policy making’ in the UK, after the misleading and propagan-
distic argumentation of the EU Referendum and its aftermath. In the run-up
to the Referendum vote, pro-Brexit Conservative MP, Michael Gove noto-
riously claimed that “the people of this country have had enough of experts
[from] organisations [with] acronyms saying they know what is best and getting
it consistently wrong” and noted that he was “asking the British public to trust
themselves”, privileging instinct over evidence. However, when the pandemic
reached the UK, the Conservative government (now led mainly by Brexiteers)
was quick to assert – borrowing a phrase already used in the US by Mike Pence
and Barack Obama – that they were ‘following the science’. The chapter explains
the reasons for this seeming contradiction.
Chapter 8 is called “The Burden of Responsibility: Investigative Journalism in
South Africa During the Covid-19 Crisis” and is written by Allen Munoriyarwa.
Based on interviews with selected journalists in South Africa, this chapter argues
that the Coronavirus (Covid-19) outbreak is a disruptive force that has acted
centrifugally on the journalistic field. Consequently, journalists have been forced
to rethink and re-evaluate established notions of their practices. These include
aspects like ‘journalistic capital’ as represented by their access to and use of
human sources, as well as the value of both inter- and intra-newsroom collabo-
ration practices. Munoriyarwa’s argument is that the professional response to the
outbreak has reinvigorated health news investigative journalism in South Africa’s
newsrooms. Simultaneously, the Covid-19 outbreak has strengthened the adop-
tion of other practices, such as ‘explanatory journalism’ and data-driven report-
ing in South African newsrooms.
Chapter 9 is by Thaiane Oliveira, Rodrigo Quinan, Juliana Gagliardi, and
Afonso de Albuquerque. Its title is “‘It’s Just a Little Flu’: Covid, Institutional
Crisis and Information Wars in Brazilian Journalism – The Folha de São Paulo
Newspaper”. They argue that, beyond being a public health problem, the Covid-
19 pandemic also coincided with a huge democracy-threatening political crisis,
which paved the way for the rise of Jair Bolsonaro and his eventual attainment of
the Presidency. Seen by many as a nostalgic throwback to the dark period of the
military dictatorship (1964–85), Bolsonaro has actively claimed extensive powers
for the Presidency, while contesting the legitimacy of the foundational institutions
of representative democracy, such as the two Houses of the National Congress
(the Chamber of Deputies and the Senate) and the High Court (in Portuguese
Supremo Tribunal Federal, or STF). Besides these attacks, Bolsonaro has also
opposed institutions responsible for producing and disseminating knowledge,
 Introduction  xxxvii

especially in the sciences and the media, while being accused of involvement
with a fake news network using disinformation as a political weapon.
Chapter 10 is the work of Sumaya Alnahed and is an in-depth study of formal
news treatment of the pandemic. “The BBC and Covid-19: The Politicisation of a
Pandemic?” examines the BBC’s responsibility to hold the Government to account
during times of crisis and states that the emergence of the novel Coronavirus in
January 2020 provided such a moment. The pandemic not only presented journal-
ists with a particular challenge but also created a crisis of communication in terms
of how to mediate and explain the virus. As a consequence, the whole process
took on multiple guises: as a public health story, a political narrative, an economic
tale, and an account of the racial disparities and social inequalities in the UK. As
the virus had not yet been fully understood, and was not, therefore, an easy story
for journalists to communicate, this contributed to a confused representation of
health and safety concerns, yet, in addition, helped to amplify the lack of scientific
consensus. This was compounded by mixed ‘messaging’ from the Government in
relation to key issues, such as how individuals should protect themselves from the
virus and which measures should be taken to limit its spread. This motley form of
communication proved confusing to the public.
In the same critical spirit, Chapter 11, produced by Ruth Garland, offers an
analysis of news conferences, entitled “How the UK Government ‘Turned on
a Sixpence’ to Change Its Story – A Discourse Analysis of the No.10 Daily
Coronavirus News Conferences”. The piece notes that Boris Johnson, one of
the least-trusted Prime Ministers in recent history, led a nation which entered
the Covid-19 crisis divided by a legacy of ten years of public sector cuts, nearly
four years of conflict over the UK’s exit from the EU, and a disruptive agenda
that included Government attacks on the BBC and civil service. Hostility to
the freedom of the press and newsgathering was clearly evident within the
new Conservative administration: certain journalists were excluded from
Government briefings and there was an embargo on ministers appearing on
the BBC’s prime morning news programme, “Today”. Johnson, however, had
four important sources of political capital: in December 2019, he won the first
decisive general election victory in ten years; the UK finally left the EU on 31
January; he had consistently expressed support for the NHS; and he had com-
mitted his Government to increase public spending in order to ‘level up’ the
poorest and most deprived areas of the UK, many of whose residents had voted
for Conservatives in 2019 for the first time.
Chapter 12, “Mortality, Blame Avoidance and the State: Constructing Boris
Johnson’s Exit Strategy”, completes the book’s study of UK political and media
discourse. Written by Leighton Andrews, it states that the UK Government did
not want to go into lockdown, delayed the lockdown at the cost of thousands of
unnecessary deaths and, once in lockdown, found it hard to exit while retaining
the trust and confidence of the people. Andrews notes that, historically, successful
public health outcomes generally depend on a collective strategy of active health
control measures and the reshaping of societal behavioural norms. In the case of
xxxviii Introduction

the UK in 2020, a narrative of individual personal responsibility has emerged as

a neoliberal form of governmentality, actively constructed through management
of the government’s narrative capacity, specifically assisted by Conservative-
supporting newspapers, determinedly deploying a selective and highly idealised
story of the Prime Minister’s recovery from Covid-19, and drawing on legacy
discourses of heroic leadership models such as Churchill in World War II.
Chapter 13 was written by Jo Richardson, who asks “Has Homeless Rough
Sleeping in the UK and Europe Been Solved in the Wake of the Covid-19
Pandemic?”. She argues that the Covid-19 pandemic of 2020 exposed the fail-
ures of housing policy in England (and in many countries across the globe).
Housing Benefit costs have risen by 40% in the last decade, according to the
Affordable Housing Commission (2020) report. The size of the private rented
sector has doubled in the last three decades, and during the same period, Right to
Buy Sales have seen over two million properties lost from the social housing sec-
tor. In recent years, ‘affordable’ has lost its meaning in relation to housing. Up to
80% of market rent is not affordable for many, and has created a growing benefits
bill, trapping young people in their parental homes, priced out of their grown-
up futures. Misery has grown for those who cannot access anywhere to live –
rough-sleeping figures have increased by 141% in the last decade. Richardson
reaches the conclusion that Covid-19 has brought housing disadvantages and
social inequalities into stark relief.
Chapter 14 continues this theme. Written by Simon Stevens, it is called
“Leper Islands: Coronavirus and the Homeless ‘Other’”. This chapter theorises
the discourses around the homeless prior to, during and after the first wave of the
Covid-19 pandemic in the UK. It begins by examining how their vulnerability to
the virus was communicated through Covid-19 Government Press Conferences,
which emphasised the emergency provision of accommodation for rough sleepers.
The chapter goes on to explore the prevalence, pre-Covid, of hostile strategies
mobilised in response to the problem of homelessness, to show how it is not, in
‘normal’ circumstances, considered an emergency at all. Stevens uses the idea of
Foucault’s regulatory power to explain the predominance of punishing dispersal
methods and George Bataille’s work on taboo to elucidate the homeless ‘other-
ing’ which encouraged such an approach. This provokes another question: what
is it that makes street homelessness an emergency now? The answer, Stevens argues,
in the shadow of Foucault’s biopolitics, is the public health threat it supposedly
presents, rather than any lasting commitment to ending homelessness.

Notes
1 On occasion, it seems as though the ‘rational’ part of the state system cannot control the
independent activity of its repressive apparatus, while at others, it is clear that politicians
take advantage of the fact that certain powers are devolved, benefiting from disengage-
ment and even feigning ignorance of particular acts. Such is the nature of contemporary
power – negligent authoritarianism has long been a standard mode of executive rule.
2 See Smicek (2017).
 Introduction  xxxix

3 Workers have become invisible in large part because any employee who speaks with-
out the express permission of an employer risks disciplinary action or the sack. For
most established news services, there is no active ethos that would encourage journal-
ists to seek out views that are seen as contentious – instead, ‘vox pops’ on relatively
harmless subjects are used to gesture towards free speech, inviting citizens to assume
essentially de-politicised walk-on parts in a grander drama.
4 ‘Nudge theory’ has become a sub-discipline within governmental and managerial
theory.
5 These very obvious social parables were replicated in the commercial sector, as the
co-operative theme was taken up with a vengeance by advertisers: corporate entities
disguised themselves in likeable, diverse human forms and spoke directly to (literally)
captive audiences of ‘wellbeing’, ‘community’ and ‘mental health’.
6 However, the general ire directed against individual politicians did not necessarily
extend to a condemnation of the systems of power they represented. Although there
were signs in some countries that the more extreme advocates of pandemic laissez
faire, like Donald Trump in the US and Jair Bolsonaro in Brazil, had overplayed their
hands (Phillips, 2021), the political tendency they represented remained a threat.
Ex-President Trump’s use of the terms “Chinese Virus” and “Kung Flu” (Guardian
Staff, 2020) to describe the origins of the Covid-19 pandemic may well have caused
offence, but his continued ability to exert pressure on the Republican Party is con-
siderable (Lowell, 2021). The lazy authoritarians who have blamed external rivals
for their nations’ ills still exercise political influence. The mobilisation of a fantasy
known as ‘Global Britain’ offers a parallel example of grandstanding and political
duplicity. According to this perspective, a comparatively weak rival like Russia
becomes a major enemy or “an active threat”, while the more significant presence of
China (equally aggressive but willing to offer limitless capital gifts), is presented as a
“systemic challenge” (Godwin, 2021).
7 If similar guidelines were ever to be provided for understanding the economy, then
phenomena like corruption – evident in the dissemination of pandemic contracts –
would be understood as an essential motor of capitalism rather than an aberration.
8 In Whitfield and Johnston, 2 February 2020.
9 The fact that Trump assured his supporters that he would accompany them but did
not actually walk to the site in person confirmed the view that he was always able to
extricate himself from the party when it was time to pay the bill.
10 It is no longer, thankfully, regarded as a bit of an intellectual faux pas to refer to a
‘real’ that exists independently of Public Relations depictions of, say, the commit-
ment of multinationals to ‘net zero’ (achieved by buying into the renewable market,
by ‘offsetting’ emissions through bogus schemes or by selling off fossil fuel invest-
ments to smaller companies).
11 The ‘proletarianisation’ of these accidentally constituted groups is the most risky of
the options available to capitalist planners. Reformists and conservatives seem to have
assumed – at least before the 2008 financial crash – that a more prosperous working
class would assume the negligent and selfish attitudes of the petite bourgeoisie: they
did not seem to want to analyse the rapid descent of previously autonomous groups
into the ranks of the precarious.

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