When former Prime Minister Gordon Brown quotes Lenin in the Guardian, you know you are living in extraordinary times. As it happens, the quotation was entirely appropriate. “There are decades when nothing happens”, Lenin wrote, “and there are weeks when decades happen”.
Gordon Brown didn’t say so in so many words, but there should be no mistake about it. We are about to experience events that will have profound social, economic and political effects, not least on the consciousness of hundreds of million of people and on their attitude to politics and politicians. It is the most significant social earthquake since the Second World War. Anyone who thinks otherwise is living in a dream-world.
Ten years of grinding austerity
Every political leader will be judged by their handling of the coronavirus pandemic. Even before the beginning of this year there was a generalised distrust of established politics and politicians. This was a world phenomenon, resulting from a generalised squeeze on living standards – including the erosion of the ‘social wage’ in the form of public services – that has been imposed for the last ten years. While living standards have been pushed down, there has been an obscene increase in the wealth of a vanishingly small proportion of the population. This explains the world-wide rise of so-called ‘populism’ and nationalism, and its effects were seen in the election of Trump and in the Brexit vote in the UK, to name but two examples.
But if there was a generalised distrust of establishment politicians before 2020, the Covid-19 pandemic will make their situation far worse, at least in the longer term. So blatant has been the monstrous disparities in wealth and income between the billionaire/millionaire class and the vast majority of the population that some of the more astute and far-sighted representatives of capitalism have taken fright and have even suggested – hold your breath – that some of them need to pay more taxes!
Morris Pearl, the chair of the so-called Patriotic Millionaires group, put it like this: “Given the choice between pitchforks and taxes, I’m choosing taxes.”. The sense of doom and pessimism that pervades this section of the rich will not be helped by the pandemic. Expect panic, large ‘charitable’ donations from them, as well as a collective hunkering down.
Culling the unproductive baggage
What we are facing in Britain is a disgrace of historic proportions. We are looking at the complete swamping of the National Health Service by this epidemic. The strategy of the Tory government, although unspoken, is to ‘let it rip’ and ride out the consequences, in the hope that infections among younger people will generate a ‘herd immunity’.
A columnist in the Tory Daily Telegraph last week (March 11) let the cat out of the bag. Drawing a comparison with the Spanish flu pandemic of 1918-19 and commenting on the fact that Covid-19 seems to kill a disproportionately larger number of elderly people, he noted that “from an entirely disinterested economic perspective, the COVID-19 might even prove mildly beneficial in the long term by disproportionately culling elderly dependents.”
For the Tories, our parents and grandparents are just so much unproductive baggage that we can just let go. The relatives of politicians, the rich and the well-to-do will not suffer so much, because their risk is minimised by access to private medical care. Rest assured, the tops of society, whatever their age and infirmity, will get round-the-clock medical care when necessary.
If we want so see a picture of what the Tories’ strategy has in store for the majority of us, we need look no further than events taking place in Italy this week, where elderly patients are being turned away from hospitals, effectively being sent home to die because there are just not enough beds, respirators or staff to cope.
In the UK today there are 12 million people over 65. There are 5.4 million over 75 and even 1.6million over 85. Many of these will contract the virus and a high proportion will need hospitalisation. As the headline in the Tory Daily Express (above) suggests, 8 million will need to be hospitalised.
Sent home to die
The problem for Johnson is that the Tory cuts to the NHS for the last ten years (and we might add the New Labour economies of the earlier period) have reduced bed numbers to among the lowest in Europe per head of population.
It might be that eight million need to be hospitalised, but the big majority of them will not be found a bed and will be turned away and left to die at home, without oxygen, drugs or medical support.
If we had a socialist economy, it would be possible to direct state-owned industries to re-tool and shift production from cars to respirators and other vital equipment. It would be possible to draw into the NHS tens of thousands of former nurses, doctors and paramedics and to retrain them appropriately. It would be possible to guarantee the wages, jobs and conditions of all workers who are quarantined or ill.
But because we have a capitalist economy based on private profit and greed we have the obscene spectacle of the NHS paying the private hospitals £2.4m a day to use some of their beds. We have Richard Branson’s Virgin company – the people who sue the NHS when they don’t win a contract – demanding that the government pay out billions to support their failing airline.
No bail-outs to big businesses!
There are no meetings of the labour movement at the moment, but we must use every means available to us – phone, e-mails, social media and video-conference platforms – to put pressure on the Labour and trade union leaders to oppose any bail-outs for big business. We should demand that failing airlines are nationalised, with minimal compensation and by that means alone we can protect jobs and livelihoods. We should demand that private hospitals and clinics are taken over and integrated into the NHS, again with minimal compensation.
Sitting alongside the looming crisis in the NHS, the social care sector is facing a cliff-edge. A third of a million elderly people live in care, many of whom will need acute care in the event that they succumb to Covid-19. In addition to this, the very low-paid staff in this sector are themselves open to infections and subsequent absences or quarantines.
The social care sector needs to be brought immediately back into the public, local-authority sector before the private providers fail, as they inevitably will. Taxpayer money should not be used to bail out private care providers; on the contrary, Labour should demand that local authorities have central grants restored to 2010 levels so they can cope.
On Budget day, the Tory Chancellor Sunak announced £600bn of spending plans over the next five years. It would only take a fraction of this directed to the NHS and local authorities, to put them in with a far better chance of fighting the epidemic in such a way that the majority benefit.
No trust, support or belief in Johnson
Jeremy Corbyn’s letter to Boris Johnson last week included some very important demands, particularly those relating to financial support for workers and those on benefits, for rent and mortgage payers. We do not believe we can extend any support, trust or credibility to anything that this government of millionaires might do.
Whether it is in relation to work, benefits, rents, mortgages or conditions at work, the trades union and the Labour Party must fight to ensure that workers are not made to pay for the Covid-19 pandemic.
Alongside this grim scenario, the tanking of the world economy seems almost secondary. The world economy is going into a recession, perhaps one more severe than in 2008 and its effects will be long-lasting. That too, will add to the insecurity and uncertainty facing the lives of hundreds of millions of workers. “Getting Brexit Done” will be seen for what it really is…a side-show in comparison to the main event and the UK’s departure in December this year may have to be postponed in any case.
We are already seeing unprecedented political developments…and we’ve only just begun.
March 16, 2020
