Covid Memorial Day is not a good idea – and here's why, by Mark Smith

Designed as a gesture of support for NHS workers, it happened every Thursday at 8pm; people also put rainbows and other pictures in their windows. But not everyone appreciated the gesture, including some health workers, and I think the same problems exist around the idea of a memorial day.

While the clapping was still going on last year, I spoke to a couple of the NHS workers who had doubts – including a nurse who left her job in cosmetic surgery to help out in a Covid ward – and their reasons for questioning Clap for Carers were pretty clear.

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The clapping was well-meant, they said, but it was over-sentimental and a distraction from what was going on. And that makes sense: on the whole, NHS workers are not a sentimental bunch, they’re realistic and hacked off about a lack of money and resources.

The Clap for Carers event also exposed another problem with the pandemic, and a Covid memorial day will surely only underline it: the illusion that we’re united over all of this or that covid has “brought us together”. One NHS consultant complained about what he called “clapping fascism” and the competition to make the most obvious display. Some of those who didn’t clap were shamed on social media. And, as the YouGov poll demonstrated, we’re even divided on the idea of a memorial day.

One of the main issues people have with the memorial day idea is that it comes with most of the same problems as Clap for Carers. First, it creates the illusion of doing something while requiring minimal effort: people are urged, for example, to shine a light by holding a candle or torch or “standing on their doorsteps with their phones” which is only one step up, surely, from sitting on their sofas with their phones. Will people assume they’ve done their bit? Will the people who are refusing to have the vaccine stand on their doorsteps with their phones, I wonder?

An annual memorial day also risks affecting the perspective we’ll need in the years to come. Almost every community and family has been affected by the pandemic, including mine, and obviously, collective acts of remembrance can have great power – I’ve been to many, many remembrance day events including the extraordinary service in Glasgow Cathedral in 2018 to mark 100 years since the end of the Great War.

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But in recent days I’ve also been reading a bit more about the flu pandemic that struck at the end of the Great War and its history can be instructive here. We remember the First World War because it was a terrible failure of humanity but we should remember the aftermath of the 1918 pandemic as a remarkable victory. The Spanish flu had run its course by 1920 without a vaccine and fortunately it did not recur. Not only that, there was an extraordinary economic recovery as well as a social, cultural and artistic boom. Some called it the Roaring Twenties.

More than 100 years on, we need, and should expect, a similar recovery after the current pandemic. I’ve spoken to lots of people who’ve lost their jobs, and their businesses, and their livelihoods, and have struggled enormously and they desperately need the economic recovery that will come after the virus.

We can all take part in it by going into the high street and spending a bit of money. We can also take part by going back to normal as soon as possible. That, I think, would be a better legacy, a better memorial, than standing on doorsteps with our phones.

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