 We talked about how the communications from the government has been pretty inconsistent last week. Boris Johnson was telling people that herd immunity was what they should be trying to get. I kind of took that as you should go out and get coronavirus for Britain, especially if you're young and fit to try and build up herd immunity. They've obviously shifted their strategy or what they're telling people, but the message. So the message now has changed, so you should do some degree of social distancing. It wasn't quite there last week. That is now the official message, but it hasn't got through to everyone. We are going to go to a clip to someone who is definitely not taking this social distancing idea very well. It's TV explorer Ant Middleton. Are you still out traveling the world? Yes. Am I still shaking hands? Yes. Am I still cuddling fans at the airport? Yes. Am I washing my hands and keeping my hygiene to a high standard as always? Yes. Has my life changed? No. Am I going to let some disease COVID-19 dictate my life? Absolutely not. Get out there. Don't change. Fuck COVID-19. Okay, so what I mean is not al-Qaeda, right? It's not a terrorist using out to inhibit your way of life out of some kind of ideological commitment. A virus isn't al-Qaeda. It's just aggy protein. Okay? It doesn't give a shit that you're making a bold stand of defiance against it when you're out slobbering all over your fans. You're traveling across countries. You're just going, ooh, would you look at that? A fresh batch of host cells. It's complete idiocy. Now, famous people have always been deal-o-stupid, all right? Because you're allowed to be. You're famous for doing one thing. You don't have to be clever all the time. But what you can be is quiet. That's so true. I mean, look, this is a guy who probably thinks you can defeat a virus with a bayonet charge. Or you can send in an Apache gunship to shoot it down. This is biology. You can't say, I'm not going to change my life because of some virus. Well, you have to change your life. And I don't know if we're going to show this other video. I mean, the analogy is... Go on, let's go to this then. He hasn't apologized, but he has followed up with this. So this is just a tweet, right? The cure is a positive mindset. Yeah, the reason why all those nones have been dying in Italy is because they're not positive enough. Mug. It's pure. It's like the pure ideology, sort of neoliberalism. You know, you don't need anybody. You can, like, it's mindset. It's like, mate, this is biology. This isn't fucking mindset. I can't, you know, I can't say, oh, you know what, I'm going to reverse aging. It's physically impossible. It's the exact same thing. You know, if we're going to carry on with the kind of military metaphors, actually, if you're going around as a celebrity, lots of people know you're going around touching people, cuddling people. If they're over 70, you're the equivalent of a biological weapon. You weren't in the S.A.S. You're a dirty bomb with the bad guys. And so anyway, but I mean, this feeds into a broader sort of nonsense. I mean, I don't know if we've got the video from the people up in Harrow, was it? Yeah, so we're going to watch a video now to show how this isn't an attitude which is merely confined to TV adventures with 350,000 Twitter followers. It's also something that you are hearing from, you know, ordinary people with slightly less, slightly smaller egos than that particular guy. We're going to go to this clip now. The Q at a local grocer's Harrow, North London this morning. How is social distancing panning out for you? As you can see, it's fine. No, we're hardly changing at all because if you do that, then you give into it sort of thing. If you do that, you give into it. I think when you give into coronavirus is the point when you're in the ICU and your lungs can't open and close anymore, to be honest. Maybe that's a bit too graphic. It's true. But I was thinking this, right? And it's not just that lady in Harrow. There have been other people who've been invoking the Dunkirk spirit and the Blitz spirit as a reason why you should keep wandering around, licking lamp posts or whatever it is you do. On the one hand, it's completely idiotic because the reason why the generations who defeated Nazism were able to do this was because of a huge amount of self-denial and collective action and thinking of the greater good. When it was the Blitz and it was a blackout, you couldn't go, well, I'm going to flick my lights on and off in the name of personal freedom. So one, that's complete bullshit. But two, these people weren't even alive during World War II. Most born in the 1950s and the 1960s, which then got me thinking is, inshallah, we will get through this pandemic. Navarra media will return to the studios. Maybe a couple of pounds heavier, maybe a little bit more haunted. Life will go on. We'll have kids and then our kids will be the shitty generation constantly invoking coronavirus to justify their own crappy behavior. We were like, hey, you weren't even there. I wanted to talk about how this attitude isn't just, you know, it has come from the top. So Boris Johnson just yesterday, he spoke and said, we'll get over this in 12 weeks and we will send coronavirus packing. Now, that was the kind of language that helped him in the general election. It sort of worked with him when what he was talking about was detaching from Europe. That was very much a political phenomenon. But you can't intimidate coronavirus. You can't stop the spread and catastrophic disaster of coronavirus by telling it to fuck off and by telling it to go packing. It's a nonsense. And I think it is filtering down. Michael, I mean, I don't just think it's, I mean, that's true. It's not just the top. It's not just Boris Johnson. It's not just down in the streets of the government. First, the broader cultural context of the war on terror. That's for 20 years. And people have basically, George W. Bush in the days following 9-11 said people need to keep on shopping. That's how you take these people on. That's how we win is you go down to Walmart and you buy your groceries. And that metaphor has stuck. And that was a metaphor fundamentally for problems that weren't problems. Al-Qaeda ultimately wasn't an existential threat to the United States. It wasn't. It was bad. It was bad what happened on 9-11. But coronavirus could kill if it was untreated. You know, millions of Americans, hundreds of thousands of Americans. Very different proposition. And the idea that you don't alter behavior as a gesture of defiance. I mean, the equivalent here, if we're going to talk about the Blitz, is you've got the Luftwaffe flying over the East End. And like Ash says, rather than turning off your lights, you'd have a street party and you'd say, well, I'm not going to let the Luftwaffe tell me how to live my life. This is insane. This is nutty. And I think it's the outgrowth of, like, talked about already the sort of 20-year cultural animus around the war on terror, but then also a certain understanding of freedom. A certain understanding of freedom which comes from Milton Friedman Hayek. Now, most people have never heard of these guys. But it percolated through to a form of everyday common sense through the neoliberal counter-revolution, through Rupert Murdoch's son, through Margaret Thatcher, through Ronald Reagan. Freedom is smoking indoors. Who the fuck thinks freedom is smoking indoors? Ridiculous. But this is ultimately where you end up. A very nihilistic, very incoherent, often very self-defeating attitude, even when you're confronting problems like, there's coronavirus, climate change. Julia Hartley Brewer talks about, you know, I want a four-liter car, fuck it. Let's destroy the planet as quickly as possible. But that's where it ends up, nihilism. And it's a very strange, distorted understanding of freedom, but we have to understand it as an outgrowth, like I said, a broader continuum, which is decades in the making. The people we've seen on the video will still be, you know, fighting coronavirus in a few weeks and maybe even a few months. What can society do to change their mind and is the only option something that's a lot more state-led and enforced than we currently are seeing? I don't know, but I agree with you, Aaron. I just, I'm not sure how this pans out in the long-term when people really start to feel that freedom that they feel is completely what they're entitled to taken away from them. Can I respond? Because it also sort of sinks up. There's somebody in the comments that said, you know, what is freedom really? And it ties into a really remarkably stupid comment. We probably all saw on Twitter, some guys said, you know, I survived rationing. I can survive coronavirus. You survived a scarcity of food because of rationing. And the point is when you have a pandemic or a war or a major crisis of some kind, then the first thing is being able to survive. And you would voluntarily seek to compromise or limit your freedoms in order to survive. And it does speak to, you know, I don't like to use that word, but boomers, there has been such an absence, a historical absence of these kinds of challenges for so long that, you know, many people have lost the sort of psychological architecture by which to understand it. You know, the last pandemic of this scale was 100 years ago, it was in 1918. Second World War finished in 1945. Since then there have been no real existential threats. So, I mean, something for the historians of the future to talk about, I guess. One of the reasons I think that Boris Johnson isn't doing a more status-communitarian response is because he thinks that that would legitimize status-communitarian responses to crises. So, he sort of said, we can't possibly have a status response to this because the people won't accept it. I think the fear is that there would be a status response and actually the people would celebrate it. And that is what, I don't mean like China-style status response, but even in Italy, it's not like when they've said people can't leave their houses, they're all getting so-called behavioral fatigue and trying to sneak out to the shop and sneak out to the pub. No, what they've done is they've sort of, you know, embraced this communitarian moment in their culture and that's why you're seeing them swing in their balconies instead of protest that they can't leave their homes. The other thing that I thought was ridiculous about this, they're saying the earlier we do it, the sooner people will get so-called behavioral fatigue. But the way that the timing of the consequences of this virus work is that at the beginning of it, yeah, at the beginning of it, people might think, oh, maybe this is too draconian, this measure that's been taken. But by the time you're seeing dead bodies driven down your street by army vehicles, which is what's going on in Italy right now, there's these army vehicles taking coffins from a cemetery in a small town, a whole convoy of them. And when those bodies are building up, people aren't saying, oh, we're sick of these measures. So, yeah, I think that actually a communitarian response would be possible and it's not the reason the government don't want to do it is because they think that could have longer-term political ramifications much as the same way that they're not particularly keen to take the kind of control over industry that would allow ventilators to get made in a more efficient and timely manner than just shout-outs on Twitter. Ash. I mean, so I couldn't believe the ventilators thing. I was just like, we have a shortage of life-preserving equipment and you're putting out a call out on gumtree that I thought we were supposed to be a leading economy. This is insane. But in terms of what can be done to change people's attitudes to what's going on, I think you need three things. You need leadership from the top. You need security and you need cooperation. In terms of leadership from the top, I think Michael's covered it pretty well is that there was mixed messaging. There was a bungled strategy coming from the heart of power. There were conflicting briefings and also there were things which just didn't make sense. So this is very serious. Everyone's social distance but your kids are still going to school. This is very serious. Everyone's social distance but we're not going to close down the pubs. This is very serious. Everyone's social distance but we're not actually going to give you the kind of economic support that you're going to need in order to do that. So then that leads me on to security. People will not self-isolate if they have to choose between staying at home staying at home to stay safe and going out to earn a crust and to keep a roof over their head. Today Rishi Sunak's measures guaranteeing 80% of income up to £2,500 a month for those who are employed is a good step in the right direction. But what about freelancers? What about the self-employed? What about people who were recently laid off? What about people who are worried about paying their rents because there's no legal obligation for a landlord to pass on that three-month mortgage holiday that they're currently enjoying? So all of those things create the kind of economic environment in which then people are able to do the third thing, which is cooperate, act in various ways, which yes, do inhibit certain elements of individual liberty that we all like to enjoy in order to preserve the common good. And in terms of things that we can all do on those three fronts is hammer the government for leadership, hammer the government for better measures because right now they're making it up as they go along. And I think that it's a weird time in which the left can actually shape some really important policy which will materially improve people's lives. And just for the third thing, which is cooperation, is that one of the things that I found just from my personal life is that I had family members who were that bit older and even though were very vulnerable in terms of their health conditions were quite bullish about the idea that they would have to adjust their lifestyle or habits in any way. And then when they saw how seriously I was taking it, like I literally moved into a different house just so I could stay away from people who were immunocompromised so I didn't have to infect them, it started getting them to think about their behaviour as well. Also, I don't think that you can overestimate how receptive the public actually is to government advice. One of the things that was really striking was there was a bit of a channel for reporting done from a gym in Wolverhampton and one of the gym guys was quoting word for word Boris Johnson's appearance on this morning we said, oh I just have to take it on the chin. So words are important, leadership is important and that leadership has to come from the top and it can also be led by all of us. We're going to end this section and we're going to move straight on to the economy and Rishi Sunak but to sort of to bookend it I want to show a clip of the country's leader 17 days ago showing and demonstrating what kind of attitude the people of this country should have to COVID-19. I'm shaking hands because I was at a hospital the other night where I think there were actually a few coronavirus patients and I shook hands with everybody. You'll be pleased to know and I continue to shake hands.