COVID-19 and the Politics of Home 

Wednesday 9th February, 2021

Dr Annabelle Wilkins

The Prime Minister’s admission that gatherings were held at Downing Street during a national lockdown has not only triggered anger over politicians partying while the public were not allowed to meet family or friends, but also reveal how the home is at the heart of government. The Prime Minister has insisted that Number 10 is an ‘extension of his office’ and that he believed different gathering were work events. Labour MP Emily Thornberry has argued that Number 10 is ‘the headquarters of government…it is his home - he is responsible for this and he shows no true understanding of just how angry people feel’. Discussions about the ambiguity of the Prime Minister’s residence raise broader questions about the politics of home in the context of the pandemic.

Home has been at the forefront of political and media debate throughout COVID-19. As part of the Stay Home Stories project, I have been analysing how home has been represented and mobilised in ministerial speeches, government guidance documents and media reports. Exploring political rhetoric around COVID-19 reveals how ideas and assumptions about home have been used to construct particular narratives of domesticity, citizenship and national identity.

Home and ‘good citizenship’ in pandemic times

Michaela Benson describes how COVID-19 has brought about what she refers to as the ‘good citizen’ for pandemic times, in which members of the public are expected to slow the transmission of the virus and protect vulnerable people by staying at home and complying with other restrictions. As Benson observes, these ideas of good citizenship depend on profoundly uneven material circumstances. People living in insecure housing, in precarious work, or with limited access to outdoor space face particular difficulties in complying, and have faced stigmatisation for the spread of the virus or prolonged restrictions. 

How does home figure within these narratives of ‘good citizenship’? In an analysis of political rhetoric during the pandemic, Eleni Andreouli and Emma Brice (2021) argue that staying at home has been presented as an act of sacrifice for the good of the country and the NHS, in which citizens are positioned as responsible for the health of the nation. Reading excerpts from politicians’ speeches, it becomes clear that such acts of sacrifice are bound up with particular ideas of home, household and the nuclear family. Speaking in April 2020, for example, Foreign Secretary Dominic Raab said:

I appreciate the impact of these measures is considerable...Whole households, cooped up inside, all week long. Parents having difficult conversations with their young children, who just don’t understand why they can’t visit grandparents or go outside and meet up with friends as they normally do. Families struggling managing home-schooling, and balancing that with working from home (Dominic Raab MP, 16 April 2020).

Feminist scholars have argued that such narratives conflate the home with the household and marginalise the experiences of people who do not fit within dominant framings of household or family. As Ulrika Dahl argues, ‘Those of us with chosen queer kin, who over many years have shared resources, feelings, politics and everyday intimacies beyond marriage and procreation, are not readily covered by the bourgeois idea of the ‘household’ or family’. Ideals of the family were also drawn upon by Dominic Cummings in defence of his trip to Durham during the first lockdown, which he initially claimed was due to ‘exceptional circumstances’ surrounding the need for childcare. While people across the country made sacrifices and faced restrictions on their everyday lives, such discourses show how some sacrifices were portrayed as more important than others. 

Juxtapositions of home and the ‘frontline’

While staying at home has been framed as an act of sacrifice, home itself has been portrayed as a simultaneous space of comfort and confinement during the pandemic. This is shown in contrasting representations of the home and the ‘frontline’ of hospitals and healthcare settings. In April 2020, former Health Secretary Matt Hancock proclaimed that ‘NHS and care staff protect us – every day, while we are safe at home, they go off to work to care for us’. Andreouli and Brice (2021: 5) explain how the ‘confined citizen’ is contrasted with representations of ‘heroic’ NHS workers: ‘Compared to the enforced ordinariness and passivity of staying at home for everyone else, these citizens are extraordinary...They exemplify the spirit of the nation in a moment of national crisis, like ‘frontline’ soldiers in wartime’. These juxtapositions reinforce assumptions of staying at home as passive and safe, suggesting artificial boundaries between the home and the world beyond and neglecting the multiple challenges experienced by people staying at home, as well as keyworkers who have risked bringing the virus into their homes.

COVID-19, the ‘home front’ and national identity

The idea of the ‘frontline’ also exemplifies the use of wartime rhetoric that has featured in political discussion and media coverage of COVID-19. Michael Gove MP described how ‘all parts of our country are coming together to fight this invisible enemy’ (April 2020). Times columnist Ben McIntyre described COVID-19 as a ‘bacterial war’ in which ‘this time the home front is the front line’ (quoted in Pettitt 2020: 2). McIntyre draws comparisons between wartime rationing and panic buying during the first lockdown, as well as a shared sense of camaraderie and sacrifice.

The home and its thresholds have played a central role in many of the pandemic narratives that draw parallels with the Second World War, including VE Day commemorations held in May 2020 and the weekly ‘Clap for our Carers’, in which – in the UK from late March to late May 2020 – members of the public applauded healthcare workers from their doorsteps. Cat Mahoney (2021) argues that both events ‘were employed as a site of transmission for an ‘official’ narrative...and the construction of an idealised British subject that is rooted in conservative imaginings of the Second World War’. Mahoney argues that such processes of commemoration ‘exclude divergent minority voices and experiences of both the Second World War and the Covid-19 pandemic’. Such idealised narratives of home conceal the structural inequalities that have impacted on experiences of home.

Home, citizenship and domopolitics

Home and domesticity are intertwined with imaginings of the nation and national identity. William Walters’ (2004) concept of domopolitics describes the act of governing the state as a home. Domopolitics draws upon imagery of home as a private, familial domestic space, while also enacting a vision of national belonging and domestic sovereignty. Anne McClintock (1993) reveals how particular imaginaries of home and family have contributed to visions of national belonging. Marginalised groups have often been viewed as ‘not belonging’ because they are seen to disrupt normative ideals of domesticity – including asylum seekers, refugees and minoritised ethnic groups. Understanding how the ‘good pandemic citizen’ has relied upon normative ideals of domesticity also highlights how vulnerable or marginalised communities may be excluded from these ideals.

During the pandemic, being a ‘good citizen’ has entailed making sacrifices and following the rules – yet the current controversy around whether or not rules were broken in Downing Street during lockdown also demonstrates how the rules and expectations have been unevenly applied. Reports showing that BAME groups were disproportionately fined for COVID rule breaches underline how some people’s behaviour was policed more closely than others, and how this impacts on racialised and other marginalised groups. 

Constructions of the ‘good pandemic citizen’ rely on sedentary, heteronormative ideas of home, while comparisons with the wartime ‘home front’ reinforce exclusionary ideas of Britishness and national unity. Yet scholarship on home – including on the Stay Home Stories project - has identified that home is an expansive, ambiguous concept that encompasses diverse relationships, practices and imaginaries from the domestic to the global. These wide-ranging understandings enable alternative narratives of home as a site of solidarity and care, while also recognising that home may not be a safe or comfortable place. Such reflections are vital for understanding how home is being reconfigured during the pandemic.