The moral economy of the pandemic

Tom Barker - Teaching Assistant, Department of Politics and International Relations, University of Sheffield

My concern here, though, is not really with the (il)logic of the situation, but with the various moral responses to it, and what they might tell us about the basic values that continue to underpin economic life in twenty-first century Britain.

Most common have been the expressions of anger and disgust directed towards those engaging in stockpiling with apparently little regard for the needs of others. Perhaps the apogee of outrage was reached when a critical care nurse, Dawn Bilbrough, posted a tearful video of herself online, urging panic-buyers to think twice after being unable to get hold of fruit and vegetables at the supermarket after a 48 hour shift.

Cases of profiteering have also been reported in the press, with fingers pointed mainly at a number of smaller, local retailers and online sellers on sites like Amazon and eBay, for hiking the price of goods such as toilet paper and hand sanitizer. Generally speaking, larger firms like supermarkets have avoided censure, although Mike Ashley, owner of Frasers Group (and no stranger to controversy) was forced to apologise after initially trying to keep his Evans Cycles and Sports Direct stores open, in contravention of government advice. A number of Premier League football clubs, including Newcastle United (owned by Ashley), have meanwhile come under fire for taking advantage of the government-funded furlough scheme for backroom staff while keeping players on full pay.

While we in the UK are no strangers to bad economic behaviour, and publicly expressing our disgust at such behaviour (‘banker bashing’ became something of a national sport in the wake of the global financial crisis), we are less used to the specific kinds of malpractice—stockpiling and profiteering—associated with periods of scarcity. By looking back deep into our history, however, we can find patterns of behaviour and, crucially, a language, to help us make sense of our current predicament.

In his celebrated 1971 article, ‘The Moral Economy of the English Crowd in the Eighteenth Century’, the historian E. P. Thompson explored the responses of the common people to periods of scarcity (far more acute than our own) and, more specifically, their responses to anti-social economic behaviour during these periods. Thompson showed how risings of the people during times of dearth, hitherto dismissed by many historians as mere ‘rebellions of the belly’, were often actually well-organised and carefully conducted operations aimed at making food available to the local community, targeting perceived wrongdoers. 

A common practice during lean periods was for crowds to gather to ‘set the price’ of basic goods, like grain, in response to rising prices. Hungry folk might, for example, band together and confront a local farmer, believed to be hoarding grain or raising his prices to unreasonable levels in order to profit from the shortage.

Thompson’s point is that the ordinary people who participated in these risings were guided by very clear, widely held moral principles concerning fair prices and the social obligations of farmers, millers and others involved in the provision of food during times of hardship. Intimidation was usually part-and-parcel of the crowd’s modus operandi, and theft and violence were not unknown, but there are many recorded examples of crowds behaving with respect and moderation:

‘There are the Honiton lace-workers, in 1766, who, having taken corn from the farmers and sold it at the popular price in the market, brought back to the farmers not only the money but also the sacks; the Oldham crowd, in 1800 which rationed each purchaser to two pecks a head; and the many occasions when carts were stopped on the roads, their contents sold, and the money entrusted to the carter.’

One of the most interesting points of Thompson’s argument is that this conception of the ‘moral economy’—of fair shares and proper economic conduct—was not restricted to the crowd, or even to the common-folk more generally, but could also be discerned in many people higher up the social order. A culture of paternalism existed amongst some sections of the gentry and upper classes which was sympathetic to the plight of the poor during hard times and even tacitly sanctioned, or turned a blind eye, to behaviours like popular price setting as a response to shortages.

Thompson goes on to explain how the moral economy of the eighteenth century crowd harked back to earlier Tudor and Stuart regulations concerning food distribution in times of emergency, and ultimately to medieval notions about the primacy of consumption and provision (over profit) as the main ends of economic life. In the present emergency, the urgent need to keep the nation fed, and the identification of ‘key workers’ like hospital staff and transport workers, is indicative of a renewed focus on the fundamentals of life and the economics of provisioning for the community.       

It is easy to characterise modern Britain—and particularly the modern British economy—as essentially amoral; governed not by ethical principles but by laws, formal rules and, of course, the impersonal operations of the market. The present crisis, however, only serves to highlight how—for all the countless examples of bad behaviour we can point to—our economic life continues to be underpinned, and to some extent regulated, by moral principles of fairness and justice; principles which often become more rather than less prominent during periods of emergency. In the twenty-first century, Thompson’s ‘crowd’ finds its analogue in the rough justice of social media users, calling out individual examples of stockpiling and profiteering. 

To be sure, not all the responses we are seeing at the moment are purely moral in nature. The increase in Universal Credit payments and the government’s pledge to pay workers’ wages, are, first and foremost, pragmatic measures to stave off mass poverty and unemployment, which would only serve to exacerbate the crisis. But there is a sense—evident in the behaviour of ordinary citizens, the introduction of things like elderly-only shopping hours by supermarkets, and yes, even in certain government policies—of a national ‘family’ coming together to support one another in a fight against a common threat. The key question for many people is whether or not this renewed social solidarity and moral purpose can be maintained to help shape the reconstruction of the post-crisis world.