Last week in The Guardian, in ‘Bereaved families withdraw support for UK Covid tapestry’, Robert Booth reported on the latest developments in official (UK government-led) ‘national’ COVID-19 commemorations. Advocacy groups – despondent at their treatment within the UK COVID-19 Public Inquiry process – withdrew their participation from the commemorative tapestry project commissioned by none other than the chair of the Inquiry, Heather Hallett. Booth’s article rightly highlighted a troubling trend in commemorative initiatives whereby artistic memorialisation efforts are presented and pitted as emotional rather than political by their government sponsors: ‘[designs are] less about what actually happened and more about the emotional impact’. However, it also exemplifies how such a troubling ‘top-down’ depoliticisation of ‘the bereaved’ is reinforced by other stakeholders. Booth reports that tapestry designer Robert Crummy said political issues did not come up in conversations with bereaved families as “they just wanted to talk about the person they lost”.’
I am motivated to write this response because voices raised by COVID-19-bereaved groups themselves tell a very different story – as of course does their very act of withdrawing from the tapestry project ‘in protest’. For example, when I shared Booth’s article on Twitter with a brief comment highlighting my disappointment at the depoliticisation of the bereaved last week, Fran Hall (CEO of The Good Funeral Guide, COVID-19 Bereaved Families for Justice advocate and National Covid Memorial Wall guardian) responded swiftly in approval saying:
‘Completely agree. None of the people I know who are bereaved by Covid have any interest in a twee tapestry offered as a sop to pacify us. We want to contribute meaningfully to the Covid Inquiry that we campaigned so hard for. So far, not so good.’ (Hall, 23 May 2023: Tweet)
Spurring me on to write this response, Hall’s reply characterises the attitudes of justice-seeking advocacy groups mobilising in the wake of the pandemic – whose testimonies feature in the When This Is Over: Reflections on an Unequal Pandemic collection that I recently had the privilege of co-editing with criminologist Amy Cortvriend, emergency planner/co-founder of the After Disaster Network Lucy Easthope and political theorist Jenny Edkins. In this volume, ‘the bereaved’ (whom I refer to in inverted commas due to the problematic conflation of such diverse swathes of society that such a label denotes) have expressed their politics from the very start. They underline how, for example in relation to the civil society activist-initiated National Covid Memorial Wall, ‘the political nature of the wall lies in its position, not in individual statements written on it’. Some who worked with marginalised communities during the pandemic note that ‘what we have done is shown how actually really good politics, and I don’t mean in a big “P”, but really good ways of working, come from a community perspective and come from the community’.
Finally cementing my resolve to write and publish this response was the letter in The Guardian (as a direct reply to Booth’s piece) from another When This Is Over contributor – the poet, author, Children’s Laureate, and possibly the UK’s highest-profile critical COVID-19 case-come-advocate, Michael Rosen:
‘I see that a tapestry is being made to record experiences of Covid (Bereaved families withdraw support for UK Covid tapestry, 22 May). I wonder if there will be room for a scene in which a consultant opens up a box of PPE that’s come into the intensive care unit that I was in, only to find that it’s second-hand and one of the outfits has blood on it.’ (Rosen, 26 May 2023)
Here, Rosen’s short letter summarises my fears very well – that the tapestry will work, apparently ‘a-politically’, to make visible a particular version of events cleansed of the experiences of those who witnessed first-hand the ugliest truths of the UK’s pandemic response. As I state in my own chapter within our volume, and as Rosen saw for himself, the politics of the pandemic was not limited to who turned up, or not, to COBRA meetings in the early days, or who jeered what at Prime Minister’s Questions on Wednesdays throughout, but rather played out inside homes and hospital wards around the country, through the very bodies of us all (as I state in When This Is Over): ‘given the lack of investment in UK health and care services, and particularly in personal protective equipment (PPE) – the very purpose of which is bodily preservation – nurses and carers were quickly and noticeably exposed to COVID-19 and used up in service within a system failing to prevent their expiration’.
In the days following the publication of Booth’s article, advocacy group COVID-19 Bereaved Families for Justice continued to raise their voice politically, exclaiming dismay that ‘only one of our 6,500 members will be able to speak in the first module [of the Inquiry; to be told this] has been incredibly painful, and risks crucial learnings being missed’ and demanding that commemorative inclusion (such as that offered by the tapestry project) must be matched with inclusion into the Inquiry process itself:
‘On the one hand commemoration is important and it will mean a lot to those personally involved, but equally it can in no way be a substitute for listening to our experiences and learning from them. We didn’t throw all we could into campaigning for the inquiry for nice gestures, we did it to save lives and stop others from going through the same horrors that we have.’ (COVID-19 Bereaved Families for Justice UK, 23 May 2023: Tweet)
This response therefore aims to highlight and amplify the ‘politics’ of the COVID-19 bereaved denied and/or minimised by other parties but revealed through our When This Is Over contributions.
Depoliticisation through ‘artistic’ projects aimed at ‘healing’, such as the COVID-19 tapestry project, is an increasingly common yet critiqued practice seen within army/artist collaborations in the 21st century. There are political–societal dangers of attempting to ‘silence’ and depoliticise justice-seeking groups after disaster with reference to long-term ‘fights’ for justice.
Problematically, pandemic times have been rhetorically compared to wartime by world leaders including UK politicians. However, these comparisons have not been confined to political speeches but have rather spilled over into policy and practice through the militarisation of pandemic responses noted in the establishment of everything from (failed) ‘field’ hospitals to the heroisation of those working on the ‘frontlines’ (and duly sacrificed in the nation’s ‘fight’ against COVID-19). In post-pandemic times, the tapestry illustrates how a militarised response is similarly taking place within official UK commemorative efforts. Indeed, in my pre-pandemic research in military museums I found curators depoliticising their very depictions of soldiering, and rather emphasising particular ‘human stories’ aurally and visually at the expense of connecting them to wider geopolitical dynamics. Similarly, in army/artist collaborative performances staged at the Edinburgh Fringe Festival as part of the Army At The Fringe programme, I found performances shying away from ‘the politics’ and instead ‘re-secur[ing] the frame of virtuous war and limit[ing] rather than widen[ing] the space for critical discussion of the purposes, implications and ethical responsibilities associated with soldiering’.
Now, post-pandemic, the similar dynamic of depoliticisation and relegation to representation within ‘artistic’ commemorative projects will make for a poor national tapestry, as families have used their protest of withdrawing to make their political points known. These groups continue to use their albeit marginalised position within the Inquiry process to further destabilise it by threatening to withdraw their support from the Inquiry altogether. This comes in response to the news that Boris Johnson’s WhatsApp messages about the pandemic policing of the Sarah Everard protests were redacted from documents submitted to the Inquiry. Fran Hall comments that the publication of these texts (which the Inquiry has not yet demanded):
‘will also determine whether those of us who are bereaved by Covid will continue to lend this inquiry our faith and hope. It’s definitely a critical moment. Although a moment that might turn into a protracted legal battle that lasts for weeks or months.’ (Hall, 24 May 2023: Tweet)
After coming to know such diverse communities of those affected and traumatised through the pandemic – from the directly bereaved families, to those in contact with the dead and dying in mortuaries, care homes and hospitals, to those trying to keep reaching the most marginalised, deprived and vulnerable UK communities – I have been left wondering how the tapestry designer could be so blind to the fundamentally political questions, feelings and grievances raised vociferously in our book. However, the events of last week have also served to prove my co-editor Jenny Edkins’ point that those most traumatised are ‘refusing to forget or be “healed” but instead demand[ing] social and political change’. Society and politicians should therefore ignore and deny ‘the politics’ of bereaved families at their peril as (to quote Edkins in her contribution to When This Is Over) ‘people are angry at what has happened, at the traumatic betrayal of trust, and the anger can overcome the ambiguity and the grief and lead to political protest’.
Kandida Purnell is Associate Professor of International Relations at Richmond, American University London, Author of ‘Rethinking the Body in Global Politics’ (2021), and co-editor of ‘When This Is Over: Reflections on an Unequal Pandemic‘ (2023).
When This Is Over edited by Amy Cortvriend, Lucy Easthope, Jenny Edkins and Kandida Purnell is available on the Bristol University Press website. Order here for £14.99.
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