 You have probably noticed that this lockdown isn't being taken quite as seriously as the previous one. Now in part, this is inevitable. People are less scared of coronavirus this time around. Now they understand what it's about. It's also down to past mistakes from this government. People saw that Dominic Cummings broke the rules and the government defended him. So they think, why should I follow these rules? But in the short term, I think there are also some very simple failures of this government to sort of get people in the spirit of a lockdown. They haven't really bothered with any messaging at all to tell us to stay at home. They sort of had one announcement, oh, we're in a second lockdown. And that was it. We haven't really heard anything from them after that. Now, if what you're looking for is an effective public messaging campaign, which sort of shows you why staying at home is a good thing, why lockdown is necessary, no one has done it better than the Germans, who for some reason are just better at coronavirus than the rest of us. Well, the rest of us in Western Europe anyway. Let's take a look at this, which puts our government to shame. But fate had other plans with us. When the invisible danger threatened everything we believed in, and fate suddenly ended in our hands. Well, that's how we all gathered our courage and did what was expected of us. The only right thing. We did nothing. Nothing at all. We were as lazy as the washbers. Day and night, we lay on our ass at home and fought against the spread of the coronavirus. Our couch was the front. And our patience was our weapon. Sometimes I have to smile a little when I think back to that time. That was our fate. That's how we became heroes back then. In this coronavirus winter 2020. I can't believe I've stayed in all day. Now I get to feel pride. Now I feel civic pride if I have sat on the sofa for 16 hours before going straight back into bed. And I always was a bit surprised that the government weren't really running on this message. Because obviously I don't want to be here downplaying the huge costs, the huge downsides of lockdowns. And I know for so many people it's incredibly difficult. Not everyone can just lie down and be lazy and watch movies all day long. If you've got young children, you've got a difficult living situation. Not everyone can do this. But it does seem to me that the government haven't made or our government haven't made enough of the fact that one of the most important lower cost things we can do. Lower cost by that, I mean human cost over the coming winter is encouraging young people to make the most of sitting on your ass and staying at home. I think that comparison between, obviously it's silly and it's meant to be light-hearted, but the comparison between what do you have to do to rise up to the challenge in a war, you have to put your life in danger. Whereas this time around, our government at least, by hammering home how a lockdown would be the worst thing to possibly happen, I think partly because it's bad for the economy, they almost overstated the point because given that this is probably the biggest crisis that's going to occur in my first 35 years on this world, I don't know when climate change is going to properly hit, then how lucky are we that the response for us, the way we step up, is we just watch movies and read books and read magazines. Again, I'm not saying this is a universal experience, but as it's the most important thing we can do to get us through this winter without having enormous amounts of coronavirus deaths, it just surprises me that the UK government hasn't gone for this same sort of tactic, this same style of saying, no, stay at home, one, it might not be the end of the world for you, and also this is the number one thing you can do to help us survive this particular wave of the pandemic. Ash, I want to go to you. Am I supposed to levels? I mean, is that attractive to you, what that advert is telling you to do to sort of step up for your country, for your nation, for your people, for the world by lying on your couch for 16 hours a day watching movies and getting takeaway? I mean, I've been a leader in this. Years before the pandemic was even on the horizon. I was on my ass doing absolute niche. And where's my medal? You've always been at the cutting edge of global trends, actually. I'm not surprised you're at the forefront of this one as well. As long as they're mostly horizontal. But the reason why that the British government can't speak in that register is because one, it's always been split on the issue of lockdowns. Why we went in late. The, you know, conservative cabinet is written with divides on whether or not the health of the country should be bounced against the health of the economy. It's a false opposition, of course, because, you know, a healthy economy is one where people aren't dying of a deadly disease by the, by the, you know, truckload. But the cabinet is divided. You've also got the problem of internal party management. You've got, you know, back benches who are very, very anti-lockdown. So that's one reason why the government couldn't be convincing and just roll out the advertising campaign and, you know, really try and make that messaging work. The second thing is that they completely emulated their own credibility over the Dominic Cummings affair. So you can't really make the point of, you know, everyone do your bit. Stay at home when the government's chief advisor is raced up to Durham, tested his eyes at Barnard Castle and done a press conference from the Downing Street Rose Garden to tell everyone why it's okay. You also have the unique stupidity of Boris Johnson, because he is a stupid man talking about, I went to the hospital while shaking hands with all the coronavirus patients and then getting coronavirus and ending up in the ICU. So there isn't a figure within the government that can take the lead on this and speak with credibility and with authority. And the third thing, I think, is the specific subversion of the kind of wartime heroism within that advert. And that's why it's so funny and so effective. You see, like, you know, the explosion reflected off of the glasses. Is that this country, this country and its sense of its history, collectively, the nation is high off the smell of its own farts. It really is. And because of the way in which the story of World War II has been turned into a story of British exceptionalism, you know, the sole unique achievement of Great Britain, it means that it's been remarkably flexible and can be bent into whatever the needs of the moment are as long as you emphasise that story of British exceptionalism. So once upon the time, that story of British exceptionalism was an exceptional collective effort. It was something which justified the transformative labour agenda of 1945. But today, it's most frequently invoked with regards to coronavirus as a kind of, you know, I was born in 1958, but don't let that stop, you know, that's not going to stop me telling you how I single-handedly survived the blitz. Therefore, I'm going to throw myself upon the mercy of the pandemic. The logic there, of course, again is faulty. I'm saying, you know, people survived the blitz not by interrupting their day in any way. There were Anderson shelters. People had to, you know, black out all of their lights. There were really strict rules about this kind of thing. You know, so imagine, I don't know, take some lockdown skeptics. You know, you would ask Martin Dobney, for instance, you know, had you lived during the blitz, would you have been up on your roof fixing the Christmas lights to spell out, you know, fuck off, Jerry? No, you wouldn't have. So I think it's also about the way in which that sense of British exceptionalism and the story of British exceptionalism and the way in which World War II is invoked has become actually really corrosive to the collective effort which is needed in order to suppress the virus, right? The virus and its ability to infect people is the kind of cumulative product of all of our social behaviors and we don't have a national story for that, which is powerful, which is dominant, which is hegemonic at the moment. And I think that that's why the Germans were able to produce this advert. There are, you know, specific things about the conservative government, this conservative government, but I also think that there are, you know, longer term historical factors at play as well. I imagine the history of the wartime spirit in Germany is pretty goddamn complicated. I don't really know how it works when they play off that particularly historical analogy. But I mean, in a way though, I think the Cummings thing, I don't think we can overstate the importance of that because the wartime analogy, I mean, that was played on quite a lot in the first round of the lockdown. You remember sort of the BBC changed its entire programming to be this is for a lockdown, you know, you had that. Who's that? Joe Bates, is that his name? Joe Wicks, the PE guy. The PE guy with the long hair, sort of like, you know, parents love him. He was doing the sort of exercise on the television for you to do in your living room. There was this whole sort of, all of Britain's cultural industries and political class sort of came together to say, we're doing something exceptional now. We're coming together to solve a societal problem which needs a collective solution. Let's all do it together. Now I think two things happened, which was one, Dominic Cummings broke the rules. So the message had to transform from we know this is hard, but you can do it. Let's make the most of it too. We know this is hard, which means that we can't expect anyone to follow the rules because they're just too difficult. Anyone using their common sense would break them. Which became basically the government's official position. And also I would link back actually to what you said Ash there, which is that the spirit which was generated in the Second World War in this country did lead to a Labour government who sort of invested in the economy, created a more collectivist economy. And I think basically many people in the Conservative Party freaked out that that would happen again. So they saw that in the first wave, in the first lockdown we had, that was sort of encouraging a collective spirit in the population, people being, people suggesting, oh maybe we should pull together, maybe we should pay essential workers more, maybe we should pay nurses and doctors more. Maybe we should all sort of act as a community instead of being forced to act as these sort of atomistic, individualized beings. And they got freaked out by that, which is I think the biggest motivation actually behind this pushback against lockdown from sort of right wing back benches and obviously from people at the top of government as well. Rishi Sunak doesn't seem to like it very much. And as we've discussed Boris Johnson seems to go along with whoever had a conversation with him. Last, there is a sequel to that advert which is just as good actually. So we're going to show you that now that I'm going to go and get some more thoughts from Ash. 2020, that's long ago. We just got to know each other and we were curious about life, about our common future. But then suddenly everything changed and the whole country was looking at us full of hope for young people. We held our hearts and did nothing. We were shivering around the house, carrying as few people as possible and thus prevented the spread of COVID-19, this invisible danger that threatened not only our country but the whole world. Can you ask me today how we young people were able to walk around the house holding out their hands at that time? Maybe it's true when people say that special times need special heroes. I know God, yes, that's what we were. We were special heroes. We're a common hero and fight coronavirus. Every good public information campaign needs a love story, although I can see why they didn't lead with that because you could watch that and think, well, I would be happy for lockdown if I had a beautiful girlfriend. But if you don't have a beautiful partner, maybe you want to go out. Anyway, Ash, your thoughts on that? Maybe we shouldn't go down that rabbit hole. I didn't think you'd be that happy if you were locked down with your beautiful girlfriend. We could modify that video slightly. My primary romantic attachment in that video was in fact a bucket of fried chicken. I don't care who knows it. The thing about that one, in a way which was different from the first one, which was kind of lazy and a bit grotty, and that was why it was funny, is that this kind of leaned into the exceptional joys of lockdown in terms of being liberated from work. You're just sort of lounging around with people and it's playful. And again, that's hard to cut into when you're a conservative government, which has been invested for the last 10 years of creating as precarious an economy for young people as possible, and also saying you've got to get back into the office. You've got to get back into universities. The entire country depends on you getting a half-priced Nando. What are you doing? Get out of your house. And I think that there is a bit of, it's that strongly conservative instinct within the Conservative Party which is you cannot, under any circumstances, undermine the sense of the inerrant nobility of working till you die. And so nobody wants to touch that, the idea that there are aspects of lockdown, particularly if you have a stable and secure income. If you don't have dependence to look after taking up more of your time, because it is really challenging if you have kids. And there are people who are carers for a family member and when you don't have help from the outside anymore, that's really, really difficult. But if you're in a kind of situation like me and you are in Michael, which is your income's somewhat stable, you've got a stable place to live, kind of all right. We like watching Netflix of takeaways and we're lucky enough to be able to do that for one winter. And there's also the stuff which is fun because you're working from home, which means that you can do your meetings with the camera turned off while you, for instance, try and perfect your recipe for flapjacks, as I've been trying to do.