RUNNING SCARED

In Oxford on Thursday, I happened to pass a branch of the Northern Rock bank and, do you know, there wasn’t a single person queuing outside. Nor would there be ordinarily but earlier this week they were doubtless queuing round the block there, as at other branches. Watching the news footage of the queues and listening to the customers’ comments, as hapless as they were arbitrary, I couldn’t help wondering whether any of those standing in line to withdraw their life savings, some of them as far ahead of opening time as 5.00am, ever thought to themselves: “Maybe by contributing to this run on the bank I am actually making the situation worse”.

Panic is a weird mechanism. No wonder the cliché adjective that goes with it is “blind”. No wonder Clive Dunn’s Corporal Jones in Dad’s Army always accompanied his cry of “don’t panic” with a well-drilled pantomime of running in several different directions simultaneously. Panic is not merely unthinking, it is also wholly self-serving. “Panic buying” is stocking up in bulk against imagined shortage. It doesn’t matter to the buyer that his cornering the market in, say, lavatory paper leaves everyone else short, even ahead of the expected drying up of supplies (I use the terms ‘leaves’, ‘short’ and ‘drying up’ with no thought to any relevance to the form or function of lavatory paper).

You might think that it ought to occur to the exampled panic buyer of lavatory paper that, once an actual shortage has set in, his neighbours are liable to start to whisper to each other that he seems to suffer no such shortage, that a deputation – even an unruly mob – could appear at his door, brandishing the unwiped bottoms of their small children and aged dependants and demanding that he yield his selfishly grabbed supply.

When there was a clean water shortage in the west country in the wake of the early summer floods, people were caught on news camera finagling more than their designated share of handed-out bottles and hotly (because embarrassed as well as self-righteous) they argued that they had family duties of some exceptional order. The fact is that panic brings out the worst in people, leading them to clamber over others in flight from the burning building or the stampeding crowd, to shoulder the weakest aside in order to grab the supplies airlifted in for the relief of famine.

A man (a Brit, happily for the news story) managed to tear open the emergency door of the burning plane wreck in Thailand, thereby allowing others to escape as well as himself and, to my surprise, he was hailed a hero when all he did was something natural and obvious. I suppose if you take Hemingway’s definition of courage as “grace under pressure”, the guy was being courageous. At least he didn’t panic.

On the other hand, the two police auxiliaries who declined to jump into a six feet deep lake to help a drowning boy who had himself jumped in to rescue his sister were robustly defended by their superior: they “weren’t trained” to save lives. Is that to suggest that trying to rescue him would have been the panicky thing to do, that phoning for the appropriate service to carry out that function was the correct response, even though the kid died? It’s not exactly a persuasive argument. I’ve never actually been trained to pay my taxes but I dare say the Inland Revenue will fail to sympathise if I try it on as a reason for getting my accounts in late this year, even if I say that I did contact the appropriate service (my accountant) and had to wait for her.

We all act in the heat of the moment and frequently regret it later. Queuing for hours is not exactly the heat of the moment and panic seems an inappropriate term for what went on at Northern Rock this week. But the self-protective instinct that panic betokens was certainly in play here. And it was just as destructive and blinkered as the panic of running about shrieking.

Meanwhile, you wonder how reflective and thoughtful was the BBC news reporter on business affairs, the fluffing, blustering Robert Preston, when he, as the BBC has been telling us all week, “broke the story”. He kept trying to justify it as important because it was “the first run on a British bank in 150 years” but of course the BBC’s coverage was the most influential ingredient in creating and spreading the panic that exacerbated the run. If the Bank of England and the Chancellor were tardy in their remedies for the situation, it was surely because they do not understand – as politicians and professionals for whom television is a marginal matter frequently do not – how influential television is on the inert portion of the population. The viewers may not believe everything they read in the papers but they still think “the camera never lies” and if it’s “on the box” it must be so. All I pray is that no latter-day Orson Welles – needless to say without a soupcon of Welles’ talent – is permitted to attempt a contemporary equivalent of the master’s wireless version of The War of the Worlds. We’ll all be killed in the ensuing hullabaloo.