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The problem was not the revelry but the resignation: the alacrity with which so many people simply accepted that the obstacles to getting into work or keeping schools open or running at least a skeleton operation in the office were simply insurmountable, and that the best thing to do was to shrug our shoulders and frolic. Whether the final cost to the British economy of Monday’s shut-down is £1 billion or £500 million, the true pricetag is psychological: the decision to pull a national sickie was taken too easily, without hesitation or a smidgeon of shame.
Sentimentality vied with the language of catastrophe. In a classic example of double-think, the very same people who insisted that the snowfall was a unique disaster in the annals of human experience also screamed that the authorities should be ready for such meteorological events as a matter of course. In London, Boris Johnson handled the situation as well as he could have, and was politically astute to suspend the congestion charge for a day. Certainly, many local authorities could have done more to prepare the roads overnight on Sunday. But the idea that we need an entirely new infrastructure of snow-clearing machinery of the sort used in, say, Ottawa or Moscow is plain daft.
One of the most damaging legacies of the postwar consensus in this country, and one that regrettably survived the Thatcher revolution, is the collective conviction that all problems can be blamed on government and solved by government. The word used most often on Monday and Tuesday was ‘they’: ‘they’ had not done enough to prepare the country for the blizzards. ‘They’ were not doing enough to get the transport system up and running again. ‘They’ had made it impossible for us to get to work.
The least appealing aspect of the global cult of Obama is a 21st-century version of this decades-old reflex. In his most messianic moments, the new President nurtures the spectacularly misguided belief that those who govern us can make it all better: infantilising people at precisely the moment in history that they need to be working harder, doing more to prepare for bleak times, digging deep for reserves of stoicism that, frankly, they did not require in more affluent years. Obama speaks of ‘an era of responsibility’ but his true cultural impact around the world is to encourage precisely the opposite.
On page 24, our own Hugo Rifkind satirises the assertion that we have become Indolent Britain. In its more extreme form, this is indeed a ridiculous claim: most of us are not malingerers, and a few snowballs do not signify the death of the Dunkirk spirit, or the Blitz spirit, or whatever cliché one wishes to deploy. But it is hard to avoid the conclusion that we are becoming more inclined to stay at home, to find excuses not to work and (worst of all) to feel good about our absences. According to the most recent CBI/AXA analysis of employee absenteeism, workers took an average of 6.7 days off sick each during 2007, at an estimated cost of £13.2 billion to the economy. Businesses reported astonishingly high numbers of employees pulling a sickie, palpably exploiting the system to extend holidays or to stay at home during bad weather. Parents infuriated at the extended closure of schools this week will not be surprised to learn that the average public-sector worker took nine days off in 2007 compared with 5.8 days in the private sector.
For all the fashionable political rhetoric about taking ‘responsibility’ — David Cameron’s favourite word — we now inhabit a culture that, through health and safety rules, the red tape of employment law, and the steady stream of EU directives, gives us what marketing men call ‘permission’ to shrug off our obligations. The Spectator is an unabashed champion of life’s pleasures, snowball-throwing high amongst them. But those who play hard need to work hard, too, and there was a whiff of pudgy softness to the nation’s behaviour this week.
As the Iron Lady said to President Bush Sr, this is no time to go wobbly. Whether we like it or not, we face hard times, perhaps for some years, in which tenacity, enterprise and vigour will be the prerequisites of all else. The new President has bequeathed to the world the infectious slogan: Yes We Can. The question our collective conduct this week has posed is: Can We?
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