Five years ago today, lockdown destroyed our society. We are still terribly damaged

Telegraph

25-03-2025

In the excellent Apple TV drama Constellation, an astronaut returns from months in space to find her life looks nearly identical to the one she left behind. But something feels weirdly askew. Wasn't her car blue, rather than red? Well, that's how I feel about post-pandemic Britain. At first glance, things look much the same. And yet everything is off-kilter.
Five years on from the imposition of the Coronavirus Act, which arrived on 25 March 2020, we can't talk about a 'return to normal' when a great chunk of employees have never returned to the office in any meaningful sense. A new survey of 12,000 workers across 44 countries found those from the UK spend just two days a week in the office on average – fewer than any other country surveyed, bar the Philippines.
This has had a catastrophic effect on our social and urban structures. It's not just the fact that workplaces are no longer close-knit communities that helped to cement our sense of identity, but the wider blow to the infrastructure that served workers and enabled money and, crucially, purpose to flow through our economy. Just think of the impact on the commercial rental sector, public transport, sandwich bars, shops and the pubs where workers socialised after hours.
I work freelance for a once-large media company. This perfectly illustrates the conundrum. When I first met the founders in 2018 they had a big office in Holborn, with around 100 telesales employees at desks, and had also rented a couple of smaller workspaces in central London. After the pandemic and the rude pausing of the wheels of commerce they ended up with one small office in East London, where their four different ventures 'hot-officed'.
One day it might be a marketing hub, another it was a magazine publisher. The telesales' operatives have gone, replaced by an overseas service. This feels to me like a small parable of how our cities have had the vitality scooped out of them.
But it's the social aspect I mourn most. Three years ago, I took on a university leaver to help on the magazine I edit. I soon felt it was like keeping a polar bear in a tiny concrete cage. He was only required in the office three days a week and, when there, he worked alongside a handful of middle-aged people with kids. In no way was he receiving the apprenticeship (most of us learn best by example) and intense social life I enjoyed when I crash-landed into the media in 1991. And his chance of meeting his future spouse, as I did in 1993 in the GQ office, was rather less than being struck by an asteroid.
So, why do we allow this abominable state of affairs to continue? Why doesn't our government set an example by properly tackling the thousands of civil servants who have never returned to working full-time?
My hunch is we lack the willpower to remedy it because our governing class is mostly Generation Xers like me, who have already reaped the benefits of a functioning workplace. Now, after three decades commuting, many are happy to slob around in joggers, enjoying the properties we were the last generation to afford. A similar phenomenon was observed during lockdown, when the laptop classes were often living their best lives, with little care of what was inflicted on poorer families in cramped urban flats.
The social contract feels broken in many ways, but this is surely one of the worst. We've sanctioned reduced opportunities and isolation for workers (just a PC for company) and then we wonder why there is an epidemic of poor mental health.