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With its fruit-filled orchards, Kent has long prided itself as the Garden of England. But now there is outrage that a couple of bad apples, the districts of Swale and Thanet, have plunged the entire county into Level 3 status when the shutdown ends on Wednesday.
Last week, seven Conservative MPs from across Kent wrote to Matt Hancock, the health secretary, to try to break the tiered system along district or city lines. Although Swale has the highest Covid infection rate in England at 530 per 100,000 people, the Tunbridge Wells rate is less than a quarter and is below the national average.
Hancock rejected the appeal, but in Dover, which has less than half the Swale rate, his decision was not welcomed. The stands made people cry.
“I cried when I heard the news,” said Sandra Malho, owner of La Salle Verte cafe on Cannon Street in downtown. Standing in front of her empty business, she was concerned about the effect it would have on the city in general and her clientele in particular.
“Dover is depressed,” he said. “Mental health is going down. Most of my clients are elderly and lonely. We call it a community cafe, a place where people come to smile. “
Alan Valentine, a customer, said he had trusted coffee since his wife died. “It’s my social life,” he said.
Gillian Campbell, a hairdresser, spray tanner and nail technician, was also concerned about the effect on small businesses like hers. “At this time of year, I’m usually stuck in the holiday season,” he said.
With its famous white cliffs and dominated by a medieval castle, Dover would seem like a beautiful and even prosperous city. After all, it is a major gateway to Europe, thanks to the ferries that dominate its gigantic port. But there are signs of economic difficulties and a strong atmosphere of isolation, compounded by signs of social friction.
Damn! Lyn Beckett barked on King Street, in response to the question of what explains the rapid increase in infection in Dover: it has gone from 42 to 267 cases per 100,000 in a month.
He was referring, he explained unapologetically, to Eastern Europeans, whom he blamed for the spread. Dover has a relatively small migrant population, but several people expressed doubts about foreign compliance with the rules, including Malho, who is originally from Portugal.
Other Doverians blamed schoolchildren outside the school, shopkeepers who did not enforce wearing masks, and alcohol drinkers who mixed illicitly. Kevin Harris trusted me with his trust. “Between you and me,” he said, “China has deliberately done it.”
Having jokingly advised his wife to watch her language, Beckett’s husband Dennis was puzzled as to why Kent should be on Level 3. Bristol, North Somerset and South Gloucestershire are the only other places in southern England that they are at the highest level. “They started by closing Liverpool and these places,” he complained, “and now they’re closing Kent. We have not done anything! “
The potent mix of exceptionalism and self-pity, which often lies at the root of xenophobia, was hard to ignore. Despite being the closest point to continental Europe, or perhaps because of it, Dover voted 62% in favor of abandoning the referendum. If you wanted to find a city that embodied the apocryphal newspaper headline “Fog on the Channel, Continent Cut,” Dover would not be a bad place to start.
Although a no-deal Brexit would lead to an estimated 2% reduction in an already battered economy, few people expressed reservations about that result.
But Dover can also feel separate from the rest of the UK. It is not a great tourist destination, but it is a place that people pass by on their way to another place. It is an arrangement that seems to generate resentment and relief in equal measure.
Scientific evidence shows that areas close to those with a high Covid rate will see their own rates rise. But some still believe that Dover could have been protected and saved from the harsher restrictions.
“I feel like there was an opportunity to create a barrier between Thanet and Medway and then leave South and West Kent open,” said John Harrington, a semi-retired business advisor. Harrington advises on “business survival” and was understandably concerned that level 3 might kill some of them. However, he did not see the looming threat of a no-deal Brexit as something to worry about. Like other locals, he conveyed the impression that all those macroeconomic problems bypassed Dover, as if they were exiting the ferries and onto the M2 or M20 directly.
Erika Voiss, a resident of about 25 years old and originally from Germany, thought that many of her colleagues in the city feared the truck delays and stagnation that Brexit was expected to trigger. “But they don’t regret the decision,” he said, “because it was not a rational decision. It was exciting “.
The most evident emotion in Dover was eager resignation, as prepared for a bleak winter. What was required, Harrington argued, was some positive public relations from the government. I thought there was too much talk about the Treasury deficit as a result of the pandemic and not enough about the benefit of not paying money to Europe.
“I know the bus number was wrong, but it must be a number that someone knows,” he said.
Perhaps someone knows, even whatever the number is, it will not begin to fill the great void in the government coffers. But then again … there may be blue pigs on the white cliffs of Dover; tomorrow, just wait and see.
