“If China and Covid can’t shake doctrinal globalism, can anything?”
My latest piece in The Critic…
My friend Murat runs two tailor’s shops in the south of England. Having arrived from Turkey as a sole trader five years ago running a little alteration business in Salisbury, he now employs eight people, has a second premises in Winchester, and offers a full bespoke suit-making service. When Covid-19 hit, he and his team of mainly Turkish immigrant craftsmen put their skills at the service of the NHS, making scrubs for Southampton University Hospital as supply lines around the world crumbled in the face of unprecedented demand.
It’s hard to think of two similar sized towns in the United Kingdom more unlike one another than Salisbury and Strabane, yet a similar story played itself out on a bigger scale there. This stronghold of Irish Republicanism on the Tyrone/Donegal border is home to O’Neills, a global sportswear brand that has expanded so far beyond its origins making Gaelic football and hurling gear that they now design and make, among other things, the strip of the Democratic Republic of Congo’s national football team. I know this because I was sat next to a gentleman wearing one on a Lusaka to Copperbelt bus last July, a market trader shuttling goods between his homeland and Zambia. We had no common language and it seemed he had never heard of Northern or any other Ireland, but a boy brought up by the River Lagan still rubbed shoulders, literally, with a man in a jersey made by the River Foyle as we bounced up Central Africa’s Great North Road. O’Neills closed their Strabane factory and made 750 staff redundant a few days before the lockdown was introduced, but within a week had brought some staff back to make scrubs for the Covid-19 ward at the nearby Altnagelvin Hospital. Currently, they are making more than 10,000 sets of scrubs a week, with more than 400 staff back at work.
Here we have two entrepreneurially-minded firms, in different ways on the margins of being British, reshaping their production lines to work for the common good in a national emergency. At the same time other firms reported huge frustrations with bureaucracy and seeming official disinterest as they attempted to respond to the government’s requests to switch production to PPE. This despite the problems in securing supplies from overseas during the height of the pandemic. James Ball reported in this week’s Spectator that Public Health England had indeed acted to top up its depleted PPE supplies in January as the news from China became steadily more worrying. The problem was that the enormous order went to a factory in France, whose government quite sensibly requisitioned all PPE within its borders once the virus struck Western Europe, whatever the EU’s ‘four freedoms’ might have demanded. It is by now almost facile to note how national sovereignty has reasserted itself over globalism during the pandemic. The hoarding of global supplies of Redemsivir by the United States, as the virus is getting out of control there again, is a warning that the NHS needs to urgently shorten all sorts of supply lines during what will be a lengthy crisis with shifting global epicentres.
