Thread by @doctorow

During the Blitz, the UK government was terrified of civil unrest among the underclass and ordered Londoners to shelter from air raids at home, rather than going down into the tube tunnels. Londoners refused and took shelter in the London Underground.

opendemocracy.net/en/opendemocra…

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It's a story that's beautifully detailed with lots of primary sources in Rebecca Solnit's crucial "A Paradise Built in Hell" (one of the major inspirations for my 2017 novel "Walkaway"):

rebeccasolnit.net/book/a-paradis…

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As @PeterMcColl writes in @OpenDemocracy, British elites feared that sheltering in the tube tunnels would make the proles lazy: "[It will be impossible to] maintain the productive capacity in a troglodyte existence deep underground."

eastlondonadvertiser.co.uk/news/politics/…

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Flash forward to the pandemic, and Boris Johnson and his ministers warning that British workers will become "addicted" to idleness if economic support isn't withdrawn, forcing them to seek jobs that don't exist (and if they did, couldn't be safely performed).

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"The Daily Telegraph makes ever more shrill demands that lockdown end and people’s lives be sacrificed. But the assumptions that delayed the lockdown were wrong: most people think their health is their wealth. Polling consistently shows people want lockdown to last longer. "

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"Right-wing newspapers project an unbreakable confidence that they know what people think. That confidence is often misplaced. "

eof/