James Meek

At the beginning of the coronavirus epidemic it was gravely expected that the Euro-American countries would hold firm, with their sophisticated healthcare systems based around high-tech hospitals, while the disease would cut a terrible swathe through Africa. The question of solidarity, or the lack of it, would come down to how much or how little the rich countries were willing to give the less well-off. So far it hasn’t happened that way. The formerly colonised countries, with their thinly resourced health systems, have been spared the worst; it is the old colonisers, with their ventilators and ECMO machines, that have suffered. Senegal has had far fewer deaths than France, the Democratic Republic of Congo far fewer than Belgium, Kenya far fewer than Britain. That may yet change. More remarkable is the way the epidemic has exposed a lack of solidarity within Western countries themselves. The debate about the path of global health improvements turns out to be meaningful within countries as well.

The plague may have heightened awareness among the peasantry that communicating with God through a priest and doing their manorial lord’s work for free was something they acquiesced to, rather than the natural state of things, but these were customs and rituals linked directly to essential matters, eternal life and bread. With us, it is the reverse. Our practices, lost not as a direct result of epidemic mortality but the frantic effort to prevent it, seemed when we had access to them to be merely things we did, but can now be seen as substitutes for existential meaning: the office, the pub, the restaurant, the foreign holiday, the cruise. When you aren’t going anywhere, the danger is that you might start seeing the way things are going. Just as medieval peasants wondered whether the world would end if they refused to give their lord their labour for free, we might find ourselves wondering why, if the world is capable of mustering so much financial and material firepower to fight Covid-19 and save businesses from going under, it can’t muster it for other purposes.

Election​ season in the Trapped-Together Kingdom, and people are talking about politicians and parties, sort of. The talk isn’t always talk, as such. To put it another way, when was the last time someone told you a joke? When was the last time you saw a fresh quip inked on the door of a toilet? No, I can’t remember either. But when was the last time you clicked on a link to a...

Iwent​ travelling in Remainia. My aim was to write about St Albans in Hertfordshire, a city just north of London where voters and the local MP are out of sync on the wedge issue of the day. In 2016 the people of St Albans voted heavily to remain in the EU – among cities, St Albans was behind only Edinburgh, Cambridge, Oxford, Brighton and Glasgow in the rankings of pro-EU vote...