It's six years ago tonight since Boris Johnson addressed the nation and placed it in lockdown. It's so long ago that 23rd March has rolled round to a Monday again.
It's easily the most consequential crisis of the 21st century, not just here but around the world, significantly affecting behaviours and killing millions.
But it does feel like we've been having more crises than usual of late, so I wondered if that was quantifiable. I've had a go.
I attempted to list the biggest crises since 2001 and that got somewhat unmanageable. What's catastrophic for some isn't existential for others, so for example the appalling situation in Sudan generally passes us by, as did the Arab Spring and Ebola. So I decided to take a UK-centric point of view. Yes it's parochial, but also hopefully realistic for those of us who live here.
My definition of crisis is 'that bad thing that's always at the top of the news for months'. Some things blow over quickly and some things never quite take hold, but a proper crisis is always hitting the headlines and high in the national consciousness. A crisis tends to repeatedly shunt ordinary news to the end of a news broadcast, so for example atrocious unemployment figures would get a cursory mention rather than being the subject of lengthy analysis. There's a lot of shunting in the news at present because you can pretty much guarantee what the first topic will be.
I considered the period 2001-2026 and managed to trim my list down to just eight overarching crises. They're so overarching that President Trump only gets one category, even though he's triggered all kinds of instabilities.
• War on Terror
• Financial Crisis
• Brexit
• Covid pandemic
• Ukraine conflict
• Gaza conflict
• Trump
• Climate change
(you might not agree, but I really have gone high level here)
I drew up a grid with crises down the side and years across the top, then coloured some of the cells in.
I used red if a crisis was particularly overwhelming in a particular year.
I used orange if it was still a crisis but less dominant in the news cycle.
I used yellow if it was still rumbling away in the background.
And I decided Covid was so extreme it needed its own colour, so that's purple.
I then deleted all the yellow because it was horribly subjective and just getting in the way.
And here's my grid. (you might not agree precisely with my colours, but hopefully the gist is right)
• The top row is the so-called War on Terror, with red for 9/11 and the Gulf War, and orange continuing up to 7/7.
• The Financial Crisis hit hardest in 2007/08, then rumbled away in the background choking growth and inspiring austerity.
• Brexit divided the country in 2016 and the ensuing arguments then dominated UK politics until Boris won his election.
• Covid was two years of utterly atypical restrictions, a national health emergency unsurpassed since 1919.
• Russia's invasion of Ukraine shocked Europe, far more than annexing Crimea had, triggering a prolonged cost of living crisis.
• Hamas's brutal incursion provoked Israel's inexorable demolition of the Gaza Strip, and they're not finished yet.
• Trump's 1st term was disruptive but his 2nd has been endlessly destabilising, peaking (so far) with an ill-thought through attack on Iran.
• And climate change continues to tick away, thus far all 'yellow' so I've uncoloured it, but rest assured its time will come.
These are the themes that have dominated our news over the last quarter of a century. What's disconcerting is that there are long periods when none appear and others where they all seem to pile on top of each other.
The 2000s had two big crises, one in the first half and one in the second. One started with planes hitting a building and the other with a banking collapse, then repercussions snowballed and the world reaped the consequences. The 2010s were much quieter, at least in my categorisation, the sole 'red' being the own goal of Brexit and our collective inability to make good of it. But since then it's been crisis after crisis with only the tiniest gaps, and more recently no gaps at all.
The gap between Brexit and Covid lasted just seven weeks, from 23:00 on 31st January 2020 to 19:30 on 23rd March. But the gap between Covid and Ukraine was gobsmackingly short, with all domestic restrictions lifted at midnight on 24th February and Vladimir Putin announcing his 'special military operation' at 02:30, just 150 minutes later. You likely slept through the last period of crisislessness.
Since then we've only added crises, the Gaza conflict on 7th October 2023 and the re-inauguration of President Trump on 20th January 2025. He's since demonstrated an unerring ability to dominate global headlines by saying outrageous things and occasionally backing them with unpredictably consequential action. What hope does domestic policy have of breaking through when so many egregious conflicts are occurring simultaneously?
There's every chance that the 'Trump 2026' cell will eventually turn purple because who knows how badly the current Iran war might turn out, indeed in a worst case scenario I might be introducing a new colour - black. But it pays not to catastrophise about the future because we have no idea how this will turn out, all we genuinely know is how previous crises turned out and that ongoing crises continue.
If you accept my very-rough UK-centric classification then the news cycle in the last few years has been the most tumultuous of all, with impacts from action abroad forever hitting home. Meanwhile the years 2009-2016 were relatively crisis-free, indeed almost a golden age by current standards. Who wouldn't swap 'ongoing austerity' for 'three simultaneous international conflicts, a cost of living crisis and zero prospect of growth?' It seems we're now a long way from living in a crisis-free year, if indeed my grid ever sees an uncoloured column again.
Equally it pays to remember that things can always turn around for the better. Six years ago the stock market had collapsed, a mutated virus was killing thousands and a libertarian PM was forced to confine people to their homes. It all looked dire, indeed many paid the ultimate price, and we spent almost two years living under previously unimaginable restrictions. But we stuck together, adapted to new conditions and ultimately found a scientific solution that returned us to near normality. Six years ago even the timeline we're in now might have looked unduly optimistic.
Crises are by their nature unpredictable and don't always impact all of us equally, thus are essentially unclassifiable. But yes things aren't great at present, yes they have been better and no, we don't yet know what's coming next.
