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Bagehot
Love in the time of swine flu
Aug 13th 2009
From The Economist print edition
Britain’s long, hot-and-cold summer of uncertainty
Illustration by Steve O'Brien
SUMMERS often have a flavour. There have been summers of love and revolution and, in Britain, of urban
riots and battles between mods and rockers. The country’s most memorable summers include the glorious
one of 1940, when the Royal Air Force repelled the Luftwaffe, the sweltering one of 1976, and, for their
sporting triumphs, 1966 (football) and 1981 (cricket). The summer of 2005 will go down as a time of
terrorism. The current one has a distinctive atmosphere too. It is a summer of apprehension, of
uncertainties in various aspects of public life that have seemed strangely to reinforce one another.
One symptom of the mood is the muddle over swine flu. When the disease first appeared in April, it was
big news. Then the media’s attention wandered—just as the virus took off. As summer arrived, the serious
scaremongering started. There was talk of mass school closures; travellers on the Tube began to reach for
the SARS-style face masks. Parents pondered dispatching their children to “swine flu parties”, to contract
the illness before it mutated. There have been worries over whether the recommended medicine is safe.
Yet now the rate of new infections seems to be slowing (the statistics are so unreliable that it is hard to
say for sure), and the plague seems less threatening.
The same sort of ambiguity—about whether the woe is just beginning or petering out, will be mercifully
brief or utterly ruinous—clouds the economic news too. Take the banks. Some are back in profit and
shelling out controversial bonuses; some have called the bottom of the spiral of bad debts and writedowns
that devastated them. But others are struggling. And despite the government’s huge stake in the
banking sector, businesses, especially small ones, complain that credit is still desperately scarce.
The blurry banking picture reflects the contradictory outlook for the quantitatively eased economy. There
have been encouraging summer figures on house prices, the rebounding service sector, the car industry,
the stockmarket and consumer confidence. But there have also been demoralising numbers:
unemployment is still rising fast, insolvencies are commonplace. The recession is said by some to be over,
but it has been deeper than was once anticipated, and the economy may yet dip again. The Bank of
England shares the widespread doubt and trepidation about its prospects. Meanwhile the government’s
fiscal deficit is prodigious and its debt vaulting, raising the fundamental issue of what kind of state Britain
will be able to afford after the economy has indeed recovered.
One facet of that awkward problem is whether Britain will, in future, be able to fight the sort of war in
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