ritain is trapped in lockdown purgatory. In Liverpool, where I live, we are back to square one, with an “R” rate estimated to be hovering at or just over 1. That means the vast majority of people have been staying indoors, not sending their children to school, or seeing their friends and family for nearly three months, only to find that coronavirus, and the risk of transmitting it to others, is still in circulation. Now what? Our household of four – two home-working adults, two primary-school age children – is augmented in normal times by many regular visitors. I know from my own early experiences that nuclear families contain pressures and unspoken traumas that can only be relieved by constant engagement with the outside world, but the March lockdown enforced that rigid nuclear model almost without warning. We’ve stayed in our bubble, believing it to be temporary, and were doing all right in lockdown for a good eight weeks, blessed with good weather and a decent back yard, in spite of a troubling suspicion that Zoom calls might come to be regarded as satisfactory replacements for real-world relationships. At times the lockdown has only seemed possible to endure because our household has the resources to make it tolerable. Then the government’s message changed, to the effect that it was the responsibility of individual households not only to maintain social relationships virtually, to educate children and to keep the economy running, but also to “control the virus”. I started to wonder whether there was a method – however buried, however unconscious – in this. After all, who needs society – and its attendant systems of social support – when you’ve got nuclear families and stoic individuals? The lockdown has been necessary, but in the past few weeks, it has begun to feel insidious and wrong. I could only pinpoint the feeling when reading the sociologist Richard Sennett’s 1970 book The Uses of Disorder, which imagines a young girl of the near future growing up in “a neighbourhood that does not permit her family or her circle of friends to be intensive and inward-turning … [there] would be a natural social life that arose out of the necessity for common action”. Common action depends on social life. Whenever people are ordered to retreat from physical society it’s necessary to ask for whom, and for what purpose, they are doing it. At the start the answer was clear: it was for each other, and it was for the NHS. But, then, the hospitals – in most cases – weren’t overwhelmed with Covid-19 patients. Intensive care units, for the most part, were never full. A&E departments emptied overnight, and the Nightingale hospitals were almost never used. It became clear over April and May that thousands of people were dying during this crisis from causes other than coronavirus. To give an example, 10,000 more people with dementia have died than would normally die in the same time period, over and above those with dementia who are known have died with Covid-19. They may have died because, to put it bluntly, an attempt to prioritise the quantity of their lives over the quality has disastrously backfired. My dad, 75 this week, has dementia, and moved into a care home near my house last year. His home is one of a handful in Liverpool that has had no infections so far and, understandably, its staff want to keep it that way. But he’s getting more confused. He hasn’t been outside the home since 22 March. Since my visits have been limited to a quick wave from the porch when I drop off his Guinness and crisps, he spends most of the day asleep and is gradually losing any sense of time and its significance. For how much longer can we be said to be protecting the elderly – and all vulnerable people – during the pandemic while making so little provision for them to be included in society? Both the government and its scientific advisers know that reducing infections in care homes is necessary to prevent a second wave. But what we know is that, throughout the pandemic, the Tories have been consumed with treating a public health crisis as an exercise in political management, resulting in a social and economic crisis of a scale that it shows little interest in acknowledging, let alone addressing. The government’s solution to isolation and unemployment is to re-open garden centres, “non-essential” shops and beer gardens. There have been no major media splashes on re-opening libraries, swimming pools and public toilets, nor government attempts to find – or fund – ways for schools to recommence lessons using outdoor spaces, or for care homes to allow physical visitors. The best we have to show for 40 years of “baseline economic growth”, it seems, is a pathological aversion to the civic sphere. The result is a lockdown twilight zone, where public life and private spirits continue to wither while the idea of being able to go to Next in a car is presented as a return to the kind of normality most people have said they don’t even want. In other words, it’s the worst of both worlds, offering neither the certainty of “stay at home, save lives” nor the messy reality of everyday public life. It underscores and contributes to inequalities that already exist and bends us towards a society based on turning inwards rather than outwards. In such circumstances, where people from black and ethnic minority groups have a vastly higher mortality risk from Covid-19, it’s galvanising and heartening to see Black Lives Matter protests taking place at a time when we are being told to stay in, indefinitely, unless we have a risky job to go to or have an overwhelming urge to buy some compost. Protesters have one clear message: we refuse to live like this, and we refuse to die like this. The coronavirus crisis has widened to expose the effects of social marginality and inequality, and the ways in which race and class work in tandem to compound disadvantage in multiple and lethal forms. Had it taken the pandemic and its repercussions seriously in the first place, the government could have avoided stumbling into an endless semi-lockdown that will put more lives at risk and make countless others miserable. • Lynsey Hanley is the author of Estates: an Intimate History and Respectable: Crossing the Class Divide