Spain has always had a love-hate relationship with the UK. It is the country where we send students so that they can learn English, the current lingua franca of the world. In exchange for our students, Britain sends us their elderly emigrants, who are fleeing the tyranny of English weather. We also receive younger British tourists of questionable intelligence, who spend their vacation in a drunken haze and occasionally jump off hotel balconies.
The scandals in Britain’s royal family are a great consolation to us because they give us a better opinion of certain members of our royal family. Compared to Prince Andrew, Juan Carlos I, our retired king with his legion of mistresses, and elephant-hunting treks in Botswana, is a candidate for sainthood.
We dislike their Yorkshire pudding, are ambivalent about fish and chips, but have great admiration for their high tea. We pity them for their weather but envy their cottages and castles. We love British rock groups, but do not understand why they won’t give us back Gibraltar.
That said, the British refusal to surrender Gibraltar is somewhat understandable. Gibraltar is one of the last remnants of an immense empire, which the sun never used to set on. Fortunately, Britain was intelligent enough not to completely lose its colonies. As a way of preserving a light version of its former empire, Britain created the Commonwealth, which allows former colonies to do their own thing, while still maintaining a vague connection with the Motherland. In contrast, Spain tried to hold onto its colonies by force and eventually lost them all.
Possibly, England had learned its lesson from the American Revolutionary War. However, in retrospect, and in light of the recent behavior of certain sectors of the U.S. population, one wonders if England’s defeat, instead of a national failure, was more of a strategic maneuver, the brainchild of some visionary in the English military, who foresaw that Americans would eventually be hopeless to govern.
Spain’s grudging admiration for England, which probably began with the defeat of the ‘Invincible Spanish Armada’ in 1588, has continued up to the present. We see the British as more heroic. After all, they fought against impossible odds in World War II and even survived the Blitz. Spain, on the other hand, was a ‘neutral’ ally of Germany until the Allied Forces started to win the war, after which we strategically switched sides.
We secretly believe that the British are everything that we are not. And it is true that they seem to get things done better than we do. So it was only natural for us to think that they would also handle Covid-19 more effectively.
However, in times of coronavirus, Britain has had a singular way of dealing with the health crisis. The government initially decided to prioritize the Brexit celebration on 31 January over a possible health emergency that was presumably less of a threat. Possibly, they thought that the Brexit agreement would act as a coronavirus vaccine. Perhaps they believed that the coronavirus would only ravage Mediterranean countries, such as Spain and Italy, whose inhabitants have a chaotic nature, lack anything even vaguely resembling a stiff upper lip, and have no talent for organizing anything more complicated than summer vacation packages.
But as it turns out, calculations went awry. In a classic example of British understatement, a senior Tory admitted, “I think there was some over-confidence.” Even though the earliest documented transmission of Covid-19 in the UK occurred on 28 February, there were no enforced restrictions until 23 March.
Until then, Boris Johnson largely kept Britain open, resisting the kind of lockdown seen elsewhere in Europe. In February, his main concern was that the coronavirus would trigger a panic that would cause unnecessary economic damage.
On 13 March, the grand plan was to build up some kind of ‘herd immunity’, which would hypothetically make people immune to this disease and reduce its transmission. This meant that 60% of the population would need to become infected. Incredibly, on 4 April, a senior government science adviser was still advocating this strategy. On 5 April, the Prime Minister tested positive for coronavirus and had to go to the hospital, where he was given oxygen for various days. Not surprisingly, no one mentions herd immunity any more.
The most damning evidence of the government’s lack of timely response came from the editor of The Lancet, who stated that in January, authorities knew that Covid-19 was inevitable, but did nothing. All February (and part of March) were thus wasted. As a result of not going into lockdown earlier, thousands of people died. Not all of them were old people, who were going to die anyway.
As previously mentioned, soon after serious restrictions were put into place, Boris Johnson contracted coronavirus and was admitted to the intensive care unit at St Thomas' Hospital. The disease that he initially did not take seriously, decided to take him very seriously. When he was finally released from the hospital to continue his recovery at home, the first thing that he did was to publicly thank “Jenny from New Zealand” and “Luis from Portugal,” for saving his life because “it could have gone either way”. He can be consoled by the fact that after he fully recovers, he will have developed herd immunity.
Perhaps this will also lead the Conservative Government to rethink its immigration policies. It is a fact that each year, many doctors, nurses, and pharmacists from other countries (including Spain) immigrate to the UK to work in Britain’s National Health Service. Such workers are obviously needed, especially in times of coronavirus.
However, it is not only a question of healthcare workers, A very dear friend of mine in Liverpool also informed me that several planes had recently been chartered by British food growers to bring in people from Romania to harvest crops. After so much railing that Britain was being overrun with immigrants, suddenly, there are now too few immigrants, and more are needed.
However, the brighter side of any crisis is never found in the government, but rather in the response of private citizens, who face adversity and deal with it in amazing ways.
She mentioned the example of Captain Tom, a 99-year-old World War II veteran. Although he is in reasonably good health for his age, he has to use a walker. His 100th birthday is at the end of his month and his family set up a giving page. The challenge was for him to walk 100 laps of his (considerable) garden before his birthday. The proceeds would be donated to the National Health Service. The goal was to raise 1000 pounds. Yesterday, The Independent posted that up until now he has raised 25 million pounds, and he is still walking.
Finally, she told me that the coronavirus has changed life in the UK for the better, at least in some ways. In this time of social distancing, when she goes out to shop or out for her daily exercise, she has noticed how much more friendly and desirous of conversation people have become. Neighbors are now actively interested in chatting, while they pull the weeds or are enjoying the sun in their gardens. People on the road that she never knew existed now pass the time of day, while they carefully file past, keeping a two-meter separation.
According to her, these little things are the silver lining….a mere gleam, a tinge of evening sun through the clouds of the despair caused by 16,060 deaths in the UK alone. It is to be hoped that when all of this madness has finished, this feeling of closeness will remain, a feeling of closeness that paradoxically was born of social distance.
