The government’s coronavirus strategy has never been based on the science; it has been led all along by professional liars and spin doctors based in Downing Street. This is nowhere more apparent that in the latest, universally-derided turn in its lockdown strategy.
But as the saying goes, there is method to the madness, because the new slogan, ‘stay alert’ is deliberately framed to be ambiguous so that there is the greatest possible moral pressure on people to go back to work, with the least possible responsibility on the government for the consequences. As ever, it is a case of profits before people.
Insidious message on official poster
The idea that millions can get to work safely on crowded public transport is a sick joke. As a result of Johnson’s Sunday evening statement, there are already reports of traffic jams because of too many cars, as well as packed trains and buses. The latter will result in many more infections and deaths in the weeks to come. It is all very well for bankers and stock-brokers to continue to make money on their laptops from home, but workers in construction, manufacturing and the service sector are not necessarily in a position to work at home or work safely in their normal place of work either. A cynic might interpret the government’s message like this…”working class people should go back to work; middle class people should continue to work from home”.
Johnson is deliberately blurring the line between workers legitimately furloughed and those who are simply refusing to go back to work. Even the new government poster carries an insidious message, where the red (“stop”) has been replaced by a green (“go”) trim.
For three months every single positive step that the government has taken in this crisis has been too little too late. Even now, weeks after the PPE crisis was first in the headlines, many workers in care homes and essential services are struggling to get the necessary personal protection. The daily government briefings have been no more than daily blagging sessions, “ramping up” this and “ramping up” that, and all the time falling behind the curve of what ought to have been done.
Cutting corners to make a profit
Weeks after the government’s much-heralded target of 100,000 tests a day, there has not been a single day when that target has been met. In addition, as even the Financial Times columnist Robert Shrimsley pointed out, (April 28), “…it was telling that, as deaths rose in care homes, ministers had not considered the high level of staff who could not use the drive-through testing centres because they did not own a car”.
We have drawn attention in other articles and editorials in the past to the ‘British disease’ – the tendency of British capitalists to go for the maximum profit in the shortest time, by cutting corners in service and product quality, and in minimising workers’ wages and conditions. That applies above all in the ‘outsourced’ elements of public services, where the whole public sector is simply an open field of rich pickings for profiteers, who are given rich contracts to provide abysmal levels of service.
NHS labs under-used
The profiteering within the National Health Service has been a major cause of its decline in the last ten years and of its lack of preparedness for pandemic, and it has not diminished in the slightest during this crisis. Even with the government’s testing programme, it is less important whether or not the programme is effective than the fact that the private sector is richly rewarded for even more contracts.
Thus, we have the farcical situation where there are NHS laboratory facilities with a high capacity for processing tests for Covid-19, but which are under-used and now struggling to get the necessary kit and raw materials to do tests. Meanwhile, three big ‘mega-centres’ have been set up with the private sector to be the main sites to process tests.
Likewise with the covid-19 App being trialled on the Isle of Wight. What matters to Johnson and Co is not whether or not the App works – their ‘herd immunity’ strategy is their guiding principle anyway – but that the private company that developed it, run by a friend of Dominic Cummings, can get a tidy profit during the crisis.
Highest mortality figures in Europe
They might as well make a quick buck while they can, because when the dust begins to settle and something approximating to what was ‘normality’ is re-established, there will be a reckoning. It is not an accident at all that the UK has the highest mortality figures in the whole of Europe and it is not something they will wriggle out of easily. It is a clear reflection of the omnishambles that this government has managed.
One would have thought that the mess being made of the pandemic would be a golden opportunity for the Labour opposition to shine. Sadly, that is far from the case. Having dumped the only Labour leader for decades to genuinely excite, motivate and vastly enlarge the party membership, Labour’s right wing have replaced him and his team with the most anaemic and half-hearted opposition imaginable.
Section 44 of Employment Rights Act
Just to take one example, when asked on BBC radio 4, three times if he would advise workers to “walk out” if they thought conditions at work were unsafe, the Labour shadow Home Secretary, Nick Thomas-Symonds, refused to answer. It was a throwback the disgraceful policy of Neil Kinnock who refused to support the miners on strike thirty-five years ago, and indeed to all those right-wing Labour leaders who refused to support workers in struggle.
If Thomas-Symonds had any nous at all, he would have cited, as any shop-steward or union rep could have done, Section 44 of the Employment Rights Act of 1996, which gives any worker the right to walk off a job if he or she feels it is unsafe and for that worker not to be subject to any disciplinary process as a result.
No matter how insipid the response of Labour and trade union leaders might be, however, it will not prevent an outpouring of anger at the government’s abject handling of this pandemic. That response might be muted now, as long as most people are struggling with the lockdown and trying to make sense of the confused messages about its relaxation. But it will find a channel at some point in the future and then the political landscape might be in for a shift on a scale not seen in this country since 1945.
May 11, 2020
