Much in Labour’s 10-point plan for living with Covid is welcome, but it ignores the immediate crisis – we have to stop people dying from the virus before we can live with it.
More than 350 deaths per day, over 100,000 daily positive cases and nearly 20,000 covid hospital patients is neither acceptable nor normal.
The Tories’ narrative that the pandemic is over, their removal of even the weak Plan B protections (mask-wearing, working from home and the limited use of covid passes), and – even more worryingly – their plans to shortly end self-isolation for those testing positive for Covid, have to be challenged by Labour.
Johnson and Javid’s rejection of infection control measures in order to assuage their right wing backbenchers, is reckless to the extreme, and is based on eugenicist theories rather than any regard for science or the public’s health and wellbeing.
The brilliant NHS vaccination programme has reduced our risk of death dramatically. But there are no guarantees that Omicron’s inevitable successor variants or mutations will not be more vaccine resistant and deadly.
Not only do we need to keep promoting vaccination – including by calling for employers to give staff paid time-off to get jabbed and recover – we need the protective and mitigation measures of a Vaccines Plus strategy.
These include continuing personal protection measures such as:
social distancing and wearing masks in indoor public places, including schools, colleges and workplaces;
setting indoor air quality standards, with CO2 monitors and HEPA filters being installed in all classrooms and indoor public venues;
all NHS, social care, teachers and those deemed at high risk being issued with free FFP2/3 masks;
financial support for all those required to self-isolate or shield, and for businesses and self-employed who are taking a hit from the economic damage caused by the continuing unpredictable high levels of employee and customer absences.
Labour rightly says the test and trace system needs fixing. The first step there must be to dismantle the current discredited outsourced system and hand it (along with the necessary funding) over to the public health professionals in local authorities and the NHS who should always have been in charge of it.
It should go without saying that both LFD and PCR tests must remain free and readily available to all UK residents.
The right to work from home or flexibly has been a long-term demand by many, especially parents and carers, and the experience of the past two years means that now is the time for it to be legislatively enforced.
Adding these immediate essential measures to Labour’s longer-term plans and opposing the UK government’s lethal approach means we can stamp down hard on the virus and make it possible for us all to live our lives without the constant threat of chronic disease or death hanging over us.
But unless and until this deadly virus is suppressed to the lowest levels possible both in the UK and globally, we won’t be able to say we are living with it.
Eighteen months ago, we were applauding our NHS heroes and celebrating a renewed sense of community as neighbours and volunteers went out of their way to help each other.
But today the UK bears a horrific resemblance to countries like Brazil and those red states in the USA where the virus is being allowed to let rip in the name of ‘living with it’, and conspiracy theorists and fascists spread their lies and fantasies through social media to influence those who are fed up with restrictions or nervous about vaccination. This corrupt, contemptuous and callous Tory Government ignores the science, puts profit before people, lurches from one inadequate and tardy lockdown to another, and is now more concerned with placating its hard-line right-wingers and making sure its seasonal piss-ups go ahead than doing everything necessary to protect people from illness and death.
Although it is clear that the majority of the population have more trust in the scientists than the politicians – as can be witnessed by the immediate queues for boosters and the majority who say there should be a Christmas lockdown (Savanta ComRes poll) – without clear, urgent leadership, as well as substantial financial and practical support, the current societal chaos will continue. Shortages, sudden closures and company collapses will get worse as Covid surges yet again.
I have lost count of the number of times I have written or said ‘this government has blood on its hands’. But I will say it again.
It is hard to overstate the scale of the Omicron crisis. Recorded cases are hitting new records every day. Omicron is extremely transmissible and more able to evade existing immune responses. Despite all the talk of Omicron being ‘milder’, there is no evidence of this thus far. And even if hospitalisations and deaths are less than resulted from previous waves, the effect on the NHS and other emergency services is just as dire. Those at work are being stretched beyond exhausted breaking point by the absence of co-workers, and resources are being diverted from trying to catch up on that six million-long waiting list as well as the 7-9 million ‘missing’ patients who have not sought treatment during the pandemic. Omicron will result in yet more avoidable sickness, hospitalisations and deaths.
Before Omicron took off, the UK was already running at about 50,000 new Covid cases a day. Today that has doubled to around 100,000. Lambeth, where I live, has the highest rate in London, itself the Omicron epicentre of the UK, and there has been a 90% increase in the past week. The Mayor of London has been forced to declare a Major Incident to help ease the pressure on the capital’s hospitals. My local hospital, Guys and St Thomas’, where there was a seven-hour vaccination queue last week, has cancelled non-essential services and redeployed staff. GPs, nurses, and community health workers have either been diverted to vaccination centres or are volunteering out-of-hours.
Despite Johnson’s claim that ‘we are throwing everything at it’, the move to Plan B is far too little too late, and most of its measures are ineffective. While the boosters are a real advantage, they will take time to have an effect, and we urgently need to drive down transmission of the virus now. The Tories are refusing to face up to this because any action has a price tag.
The Zero Covid campaign has repeatedly called for sensible mitigation measures – improved ventilation (especially in schools, colleges and workplaces), mandatory mask-wearing in all public places, social distancing, the right to work and study from home where possible with all necessary practical, psychological and financial support, including increased sick pay and the restoration of the Universal Credit cut, for those required to self-isolate or shield. We also need an effective publicly-run Test & Trace system.
The campaign is backing Independent SAGE’s call for an immediate circuit breaker. No one wants to cancel Christmas. But equally no one wants to risk infecting their family. We need everyone to be able to cut down their contacts now. Advice to limit contacts is meaningless for many of us if it isn’t backed up by financial support, and companies compelled to allow workers to stay home. That means grants, VAT relief and the return of furlough so that businesses which lose custom or have to close can afford to keep staff on the books.
We have repeatedly said that we do not favour lockdowns to prevent community transmission of the virus other than as a last resort. The Tory Government’s failure – yet again – to follow scientific advice and to mandate the implementation of the most basic public health protections means that they will be guilty of leaving no other option than to impose one – yet again – in the days, weeks and months ahead.
The emergence of something like the Omicron Covid-19 variant was entirely predictable – and predicted by international scientists, health experts and campaigners. As the heads of both the World Health Organisation and the United Nations have repeatedly said: Nobody is safe until we are all safe.
Since the brilliant and speedy discovery of vaccines against Covid-19, the rich countries of the world have practised vaccine apartheid against the Global South. Repeated calls by South Africa and India, supported by Biden’s USA, have failed to overcome dogmatic opposition by a group of high-income countries including the EU, the UK and Switzerland, to their landmark proposal to temporarily waive intellectual property rights on Covid-19 medical products.
Without that patent waiver, along with a willingness by Big Pharma to share know-how and expertise and for the G7 rich countries to honour their promises to provide funding and equipment from labs to syringes, the people of every country of the world are being condemned to wave after wave of death and disease.
To date, 42.6% of the world’s population has been fully vaccinated. But only 3% of people in low-income countries have been fully vaccinated. Lower middle-income countries have fully vaccinated 26.6% of their people. That’s a huge difference compared with 67.3% in high income countries, and 62.9% in upper middle-income countries.
African countries have administered 234.7 million doses. That means 7.1% of the population of the continent is fully vaccinated.
There isn’t a shortage of vaccines. 9.1bn vaccines have already been manufactured and 12bn are expected by the year’s end – enough to vaccinate the whole world. The problem is one of capitalist politics and distribution.
Here in the UK, we are faced with a government which will always put profits before people, whether at home or abroad. Having let the virus rip since ‘Freedom Day’ on 19th July – and nonchalantly presided over around 1,000 deaths per week and 40-50,000 new cases per day since then – the threat of Omicron has forced it to take some baby steps to look as though it is heeding the warnings of its chief scientific adviser, Sir Patrick Vallance, that they should “go hard and go early”.
Hard? A mask mandate in shops (but not pubs), on buses and trains, and in school corridors (but not classrooms) is hardly hard. All these mitigatory measures and more have been in place in the UK’s devolved nations for months. Early? That’s questionable given that they are the least of the measures that should have remained in place to fight Delta, not wait for the predictable Omicron to arrive.
While we welcome the extension of the vaccine booster programme in the UK – and would welcome it even more if it went hand-in-hand with the UK supporting the TRIPS waiver at the World Trade Organisation – the Zero Covid campaign is not alone in calling for an immediate change of strategy and for less reliance on solely pharmaceutical solutions.
While nobody knows how resistant to the existing vaccines and how deadly Omicron may prove to be, the speed of its community transmission in South Africa shows that it is extremely infectious. To stop not just the spread of Omicron but also of the dominant Delta variant, we have always supported sensible mitigation measures – ventilation (especially in schools), mandatory mask-wearing in all public places, social distancing, the right to work and study from home where possible with all necessary practical, psychological and financial support, including increased sick pay, for those required to self-isolate or shield.
We also need an effective Test & Trace system – and it is very worrying that the government is looking to charge for LFT tests and start dismantling the whole system -which, however inadequate, is all we’ve got, unless they finally recognise that this is best done by local authority public health teams and give them the funding to do it. PCR tests for travellers should be free and carried out priorto travel.
These measures are needed to avoid the lockdown that no one wants. But the government continues to ignore the science, including advice on how to tackle new variants, and to refuse to mandate the implementation of the most basis public health protections. It is their mixed messages, their disastrous policies that could very well lead to another lock down this Xmas as the fourth/fifth wave hits, whether that goes by the name of Omicron or Delta.
The polite description of a strategy which is currently averaging over 1,000 deaths a week, over 7,000 hospitalisations, and the highest number of Covid-19 infections in Europe with over 35,000 daily cases.
Murderous is my non-polite description.
A return to normality?
Only if you think those 1,000+ deaths are normal.
Labour has an absolute duty to the people of this country to call out the Tories for their deadly, eugenicist policies; and Conference is the perfect opportunity for the Leadership and Shadow Health Team to put forward a robust alternative to the government’s disastrous handling of the Covid-19 pandemic.
To date, Labour’s approach has been marked by timidity and mealy-mouthed, piecemeal criticisms. The Tories’ scandalous strategy of ‘living with the virus’ has barely been challenged – and no alternative has been put forward.
The Tory government has ended shielding, furlough, and business rates’ holidays. It refuses to provide adequate ventilation in schools. It has failed to increase the absolutely miserly levels of statutory sick pay and is cutting universal credit. It cannot even bring itself to mandate masks in crowded places. Johnson, Sunak and Javid are acting as if the pandemic is over.
The idea that that we must learn to live with high levels of Covid-19 has to be challenged. It is unprecedented in the modern era for government policy to allow preventable deaths of its own citizens on a mass scale. We do not live with cholera, we do not live with polio, we do not live with tuberculosis, and we do not live with typhoid. Like all these diseases, Covid-19 can be managed, and community transmission eliminated.
Medical science and technology have progressed rapidly in the past decades; the speed at which the Covid-19 vaccines were developed is testament to that, so why on earth should we accepting a strategy which does not just allow, but encourages, people to continue to spread a virulent and deadly disease?
I am a great fan of vaccination – and as socialists we should all be supporting it as a collective societal good. But we must not forget that 20% of adults have not had even one jab – one in five of us; breakthrough infections occur even after two jabs; over 100,000 children missed school last week (a figure undoubtedly heightened by the Government’s delay in authorising teenager jabs); and business and industry are facing unpredictable staff shortages as those thousands sick or isolating can’t work.
Vaccine-Plus
But vaccination on its own is not enough. It must be backed up by a range of mandatory mitigation measures, which focus on protection and support rather than restrictions on activities. They include an effective, local and fully-funded Find, Test, Trace, Isolate and Support operation run by the NHS and local authorities; all workplaces, including schools, colleges and hospitality venues, being made Covid-safe; and continuing precautionary measures including self-isolation, social distancing, handwashing, mask-wearing and good ventilation.
“Unless such protections are implemented immediately there is a serious danger that more intrusive and wide-ranging restrictions will become necessary later”.
When we talk about vaccination we mustn’t just talk about the UK – a global pandemic requires global vaccination.
No one is safe until everyone is safe
Many on the left have questioned whether the UK should be giving boosters and teenager jabs when poorer countries are crying out for vaccines. But the ‘beggar my neighbour’ approach of the rich capitalist countries isn’t really a supply issue. It is political.
Countries like the UK are turning their backs on the poorer parts of the world; countries they have not hesitated to plunder and wage war in for centuries. Vaccine apartheid and cuts in overseas aid go hand in hand. It’s no surprise that a government which refuses to ensure British children are safe when they go to school, hoards vaccines and refuses to support patent waivers, profit restrictions, prices at cost, or sharing technology, science and know-how.
So rather than engaging in a factional civil war, the Labour leadership should be talking about issues that really affect millions at home and abroad. Conference should be showcasing a different approach to dealing with the pandemic that has dominated all our lives for over 18 months, and that has not gone away – however much we all wish it had.
This is an edited version of my article in the Morning Star on 27 September 2021 during the Labour Party Conference.
The replacement of the philandering Matt Hancock by hard man Sajid Javid has opened the way for eugenics to take over the UK’s pandemic policy.
No longer in the land of on-off delayed lockdowns, faulty PPE, dodgy contracts and helping your chums get rich; we are now on Plague Island where the living-with-the-virus, individualistic tough guys survive and the poor, unfit and weak cower and die.
Society has become increasingly polarised – and much nastier – in the past decade.. For me, the way the assassination of Jo Cox by a far-right terrorist in the run up to the Brexit referendum was quickly swept under the carpet was as much a marker of a societal shift as the referendum itself. Instead of our political classes and media seeing that wholly exceptional event as one over which we needed to pause and reflect, the only changes have been an increase in lies, corruption, undemocratic practices, and the denigration of political opponents.
In the early months of the pandemic, while the government’s ineptitude and failures led to the disaster of care home deaths, lack of PPE, increased inequality, and the world beating mortality records, at least (under pressure from the unions) they provided business grants, furlough pay and support for shielders. Civil society demonstrated an unexpected but most welcome neighbourliness and community spirit. NHS and key workers were valued, young mutual aiders helped with shopping, and most people understood we were ‘all in it together’.
But now, 16 months later, that spirit has dissipated as the government has washed its hands of any responsibility for the lives and livelihoods of its citizens. It is as though, just as we are all fed up with the pandemic, they’ve got bored of dealing with it and have decided to move on to all the other stuff they want to do like privatise the NHS, attack asylum seekers and migrants, restrict voting rights and the right to protest. If the pandemic can be depicted as a war with the virus, the government has raised the white flag and gone down the pub.
Government messages are powerful. Personal responsibility is now the watchword. The kind of personal responsibility that can lead to an asthmatic self-employed single mum not being entitled to any sick pay or welfare payments when she catches covid; allow mask-less drunks to spit on transport staff; and encourage a speaker at an anti-vaxx rally to compare doctors and nurses with those who were hung after standing trial at Nuremberg.
Javid is such an admirer of the right-wing US philosopher Ayn Rand that he reads her work twice a year. So the man now in charge of the NHS, the lynchpin of our welfare state, is someone who believes that the only proper functions of a government are the police, the army, and the courts.
Which brings me to ‘Freedom Day’. The past week has been full of news about how the Track and Trace system is forcing workers to quarantine. In other words, it’s doing what it is meant to do. With mitigation measures such as mask wearing, social distancing and handwashing now our personal responsibility, it is the only defence we have against the virus. Despite all its faults – not least SERCO, Baroness Dido and that £37 billion – a functioning FTTIS system is the essential partner to vaccination.
But the failure of government and the press to explain that the avalanche of pings are a direct and predictable result of letting the virus rip through the community, where the delta variant is particularly hitting the young, means that trust in the system has collapsed – more and more people have switched it off and are not bothering to test themselves or their children. No wonder the official statistics in respect of case numbers are being questioned.
I speak to so many people who are in despair. They don’t know who to believe or what to do for the best. The hope the vaccines offered is being undermined by doubt and confusion. Most vulnerable and disabled people are locking themselves down again. This is not cowering; this is common sense.
Last weekend the London Labour conference overwhelmingly backed the alternative strategy of the Zero Covid campaign; based on public health not free market principles. Mitigation measures need to be reinstated; workplaces made safe; practical and financial support provided for self-isolators, and super-spreader events put on hold for a few weeks. Conference also supported an immediate independent public enquiry and the speedy international deployment of vaccines. Delegates called on the Labour leadership to support this strategy.
Ayn Rand said: “The question isn’t who is going to let me; it’s who is going to stop me.” There is no doubt that Javid and Johnson have to be stopped, and that we, the labour movement, have to be the answer.
Einstein is purported to have said that the definition of insanity is doing the same thing over and over again and expecting a different result.
A shiver went down my spine and I thought of Einstein when Johnson said that the Government would be sticking to its Roadmap and planned to lift all restrictions on 21 June.
What has happened to ‘Data Not Dates’?
When the Roadmap was published back in February, it said:
“Before taking each step, the Government will review the latest data on the impact of the previous step against four tests.
The tests are:
1. The vaccine deployment programme continues successfully.
2. Evidence shows vaccines are sufficiently effective in reducing hospitalisations and deaths in those vaccinated.
3. Infection rates do not risk a surge in hospitalisations. which would put unsustainable pressure on the NHS.
4. Our assessment of the risks is not fundamentally changed by new Variants of Concern.”
Test 4 has not been met.
Variant B1617.2 (the “Indian” variant) was designated a Variant of Concern on 7 May (there are rumours that it wasn’t designated sooner so as not to divert attention from the 6 May elections…), and yet Step 3 – the opening up of indoor hospitality and entertainment, and the introduction of the Green List for foreign holidays – went ahead on 17 May. Since then the “Indian” variant has been surging across the UK, particularly in our poorest, most deprived communities. Its speed of transmission is greater than previous variants and, while vaccination seems to be working, 60 percent of the adult population have yet to be fully vaccinated, and the variant is spreading exponentially among younger people.
While young people are less likely to die from Covid, they are highly vulnerable to the devastating and life-changing effects of Long Covid. And they can spread it to their peers and unvaccinated at-risk adults. As the WHO explains: “When a virus is widely circulating in a population and causing many infections, the likelihood of the virus mutating increases. The more opportunities a virus has to spread, the more it replicates – and the more opportunities it has to undergo changes.”
At the moment, the UK’s vaccination programme is in a race against the virus’ ability to spread, mutate and vary to a point where the vaccines may not work. This is why local public health experts are crying out for more vaccines and for permission to vaccinate younger cohorts. Even though the vaccines take time to work, without a functioning Test and Trace system they are this Government’s only defence against Covid.
We are on the cusp of a third wave.
Germany recognises this and has barred UK travellers. Spain and Portugal may soon regret valuing their income from UK tourists more highly than the health of their citizens – understandable though their desire to restart their tourist industry is.
Alongside going ahead with Step 3 and then sticking to their plan to ease all restrictions on 21 June, there has been a marked shift in the Government’s approach. Some rules are being changed to guidance. So, you can only have 30 guests at your UK wedding but you may go on that holiday to an Amber List country – it’s your choice and it will be your fault when you infect your hosts or bring another variant back with you. And not only will you get the blame, you may even get an early morning welcome home knock on the door from Priti Patel rather than a friendly local health worker or mutual aider (she does so love going round with her enforcers, so do give her a hug from us all!).
There is an alternative to waiting for the third wave to hit us – and it doesn’t mean staying in lockdown – although it does mean not throwing those masks away and hanging on a bit longer before hitting the beaches and bars.
That alternative is to pursue a comprehensive elimination strategy, based on tried and tested public health principles, rather than this Government’s chaotic policy of “living with the virus”, with its on-off lockdowns, 4.5 million cases of Covid-19, 127,710 needless deaths (as at 22 May 2021), and untold numbers of people with long-term chronic illnesses.
New Zealand, Australia, Vietnam, Taiwan and countless other countries have pursued this strategy, and it has led to far fewer deaths and much less economic damage. People in these countries are going to cinemas, rock concerts and football matches, enjoying socialising and meeting friends without restrictions.
This is the Zero Covid approach. And it is the surest way to Stop the Third Wave.
We must combine the UK’s mass vaccination programme with
an effective, local and fully funded Find, Test, Trace, Isolate and Support operation run by the NHS and local authorities, providing full financial support and practical assistance to all those required to shield or self-isolate.
all workplaces, including schools, colleges and public transportation, being made Covid-safe, and certified as safe by trade unions and/or public health authorities; and continued working from home to be encouraged and supported;
continuing personal protection and mitigation measures such as social distancing, handwashing, mask-wearing, and good ventilation;
effective measures to address international travel – including free testing and quarantine – based on public health requirements not immigration control;
A major problem is that the lack of real financial and practical support provided for those who are asked to self-isolate means that Test and Trace is increasingly disregarded, as are the lateral flow tests we are being asked to administer to ourselves. If you can’t afford not to go to work, what’s the point of getting tested?
And when you do get to work, the odds are that your workplace won’t be Covid-safe, especially if there is no trade union to argue for protection, but you daren’t complain because you could be fired and not rehired. There have been 3,872 Covid outbreaks in workplaces and 4,253 outbreaks in education settings yet not a single employer has been prosecuted for breaching Covid regulations. The lack of enforcement of proper protection for workers by the Health & Safety Executive is just one of the many outrages of the UK’s handling of the pandemic.
George Monbiot has spelt out the tragedy of the Government’s policy towards the UK’s borders: “During the first three months of the pandemic – from 1 January until lockdown on 23 March last year, 18 million people arrived in the UK from abroad. But only 273 of them were obliged to quarantine. By contrast, across the 12 months to March 2020, 23,075 people were thrown into immigration detention centres: prisons for people who have not been convicted of any crime but are suspected of entering – or remaining in – the country without the correct paperwork. Astonishingly and incomprehensibly, on 13 March 2020 the Government dropped any obligation on passengers arriving in this country to self-isolate. As a result, we know that on 31 March 2020, a week into lockdown, there were 895 people in detention and none in official quarantine.
Only on 8 June was quarantine reintroduced, and even then the system was so leaky and ill-enforced that it might as well not have existed. While other nations imposed strict border measures from the outset, preventing widespread infection, an analysis by the Covid-19 Genomics UK Consortium discovered that, as of 22 May 2020, the virus had been introduced to the UK by travellers on at least 1,300 occasions.”
A year later, things aren’t much better. The stories from returning travellers of the long waits and enforced mingling in the arrival halls of our airports, as well as the recent delay in limiting flights from India, are down to a Home Office and Border Force which would rather persecute and jail refugees and EU citizens than safeguard our collective public health.
Nobody is safe until everybody is safe.
A global pandemic must be fought globally. The UK’s hoarding of vaccines is disgraceful, as is its failure to support vaccine patent waivers and to make substantial donations to Covax. Its cuts to overseas aid are already having a harmful impact on the ability of countries in the global south to protect their populations against the pandemic.
Speedy deployment of vaccines internationally without trade or patent restrictions, funded by developed countries and global corporations, is an essential part of a comprehensive worldwide public health strategy to minimise infections and the mutations/variants they enable.
Labour’s leadership needs to move from supporting the Government’s failed, deadly approach to supporting and advocating the only strategy which can Stop the Third Wave – Zero Covid.
This is a slightly edited version of my speech to Socialist Health Association London on 9 March 2021. SHAL agreed to affiliate to Zero Covid.
Zero Covid is an elimination strategy supported by many scientists and medics – but at the end of the day it is primarily a political strategy.
Professor Michael Baker, the New Zealand epidemiologist, puts it best – ‘Reaching zero cases doesn’t depend on a country’s size but on strong leadership’.
And he’s not talking about the kind of strong men leaders in various countries who think covid is a form of man flu.
I don’t need to tell you about the UK’s leadership – callous, corrupt and incompetent, and sickeningly proud of this country’s world beating death rate and failed economy.
One that puts the wealth of the few over and above the health of us all.
Yet again we are witnessing another rush to ‘open up from lockdown’ – a lockdown which, despite being much weaker than last year’s, has undoubtedly had a major effect on pushing down infection rates.
Even so the virus is just as prevalent now as it was in mid-October, just two weeks before the November lockdown – and reopening the schools is predicted to push the R number up by between ten to fifteen percent. And you don’t need to be a scientist to understand that the virulence and transmission speed of the UK variant along with the other variants and mutations we are now experiencing will drive infection rates up at a faster speed than before.
The government’s strategy is clear – to place all its bets on the vaccine – and then to ‘live with the virus’.
Don’t get me wrong, I am a major fan and advocate of vaccination – but on its own it can only be part of the story. Because a global pandemic means the whole world has to be vaccinated – and that is going to take some time – even without the nationalistic vaccine wars and patent protectionism we are witnessing.
They admit themselves that such a strategy is likely to involve a further thirty thousand to eighty thousand deaths – on top of the hundred and thirty thousand we have already suffered. In fact Whitty has said today modelling shows a further thirty thousand deaths as lockdown eases.
Two hundred thousand acceptable deaths. Two hundred thousand preventable deaths.
No death can be acceptable if it is preventable.
If the government was serious about preventing deaths not only would they
properly fund the NHS and its staff,
provide the highest quality PPE,
scrap SERCO’S test and failing-to-trace system,
provide full financial and practical support to those required to self-isolate, quarantine or shield,
fund local authorities for the crucial work they are doing,
ventilate classrooms and workplaces and make whatever structural changes are necessary to enable safe social distancing,
provide kids with laptops and broadband,
enforce health and safety laws,
deal with cramped and overcrowded living conditions which allow the virus to keep spreading amongst our poorest communities
– and that’s just for starters –
then, even without a zero covid strategy, it might be possible to take them seriously [and stop calling them murderers].
You might say that all sounds very expensive, but compared to the billions this government has squandered and handed over to private companies we can’t afford NOT to do it, not if we value human lives before profit.
No country is living with the virus. But a number have pursued a strategy of zero covid and are living with its near elimination.
Of course we can’t totally eradicate Covid – but reducing and aiming to eliminate community transmission is possible – as we can see from New Zealand’s five deaths per one million population, Vietnam’s nought point four per million, compared to the UK ‘s one thousand eight hundred and twenty eight deaths per million, which even beats Brazil and the USA.
[Oh – and by the way, Vietnam’s population is 98 million compared to the UK’s 68 million]
Which brings me back to Michael Baker. What it takes is strong leadership and a determination to protect your citizens, all of them, not just your chums and their bank balances.
Zero Covid does not mean endless lockdowns. The reverse – it means an end to this cycle of half-hearted on-off lockdowns. It is based on the strategy humanity has pursued for centuries across the world when faced with a pandemic. Track, trace and isolate to stop the spread – then vaccinate if you can. Why is that so difficult this time round? Climate change means more, not fewer, pandemics in the future. We need to learn the lessons and get it right next time.
It’s not too late to urge both Labour and the Government to change their strategy from containment, from living with the virus, to suppression and elimination. Both SAGE and Indy SAGE scientists are already talking about a fourth surge in the autumn hitting the young and unvaccinated if we don’t start getting it right.
And it’s never too late to save lives.
There’s much more I could say – and I’ve probably left some really important things out – but I’ll stop there.
I’d like to propose SHAL affiliates to the Zero Covid campaign. We are a grassroots independent campaign involving community, trade union and political activists as well as health workers and scientists. We have model motions for Labour Party and Women’s Conference and will happily supply speakers to constituencies and trade unions. And we are having a day of action this coming Saturday which we hope you will support.
When, late on a winter’s Friday afternoon, I received a text inviting me to book an appointment for a Covid vaccination I was taken aback by the intensity of my feeling of relief. It was as though a weight had been lifted off me – a weight I didn’t realise had been crushing me down from the time I first learnt about Coronavirus.
I am someone with ‘underlying health conditions’, someone who is ‘clinically extremely vulnerable’. I’ve been chronically ill all my adult life. I have had major operations; years of searing pain; I have lost decades of my life to chronic fatigue; I have been in intensive care and know what steroids and opiates do to your head as well as your body. I didn’t need the government to tell me to stay at home to protect myself. I knew that Covid could kill me and what a Covid death would involve.
Over 2.2 million of us have been stuck indoors, often alone, for months and months. We have received minimal support – relying on friends, neighbours and local volunteers for the most basic help. School children are not alone in needing laptops, broadband and tech help. Short term self-isolators are not the only ones who need a massive increase in financial support.
Our unmitigated joy at the prospect, and then the reality, of vaccination should not be underestimated. Most of us are of an age and/or disability to know and understand pain and grief. We did not expect to escape being counted amongst the hundred thousand and rising who have died an unnecessary, preventable, painful obscenity of a death as the virus has been helped to spread by this Tory government’s inhumane and heartless policies.
And, despite the miracles being wrought by the world’s scientists, we cannot yet be sure that we will escape that fate.
The conventional line is that the Tory government is incompetent – and of course it is. But it isn’t incompetence which very efficiently handed out £21.6 billion worth of contracts for PPE, hospital supplies and an outsourced failed test and trace system to a raft of politically connected companies and individuals; which embraced, and then denied embracing, a herd immunity strategy; which pledged ‘whatever it takes’ funds to local authorities and then reneged on that promise; which spent £840 million on their Eat Out SuperSpreader while refusing to feed kids during half term; which for a decade ran down, underfunded and privatised our ‘world beating’ National Health Service – and then clapped as staff from overseas were shown the door in the name of taking control. None of that was due to incompetence. Rather, it was a brutal demonstration of the dominant political and economic ideology of our times – one based on individualism rather than collectivity, competition rather than mutuality, big business rather than public health – Profit before Patients, Profit before People, Profit before Life.
The death rate is obscene, and all the more so when you discover that it doubled in just 76 days – 76 days which included Christmas and the on-off opening of schools, and this current phoney lockdown. And just look at the lockdown. It designates estate agents as key workers, allows employers to insist workers come in regardless of health and safety on their commute as well as at work, keeps non-essential construction sites working, allows cleaners to go between homes but bans your mum from visiting, leaves the homeless to freeze on the street, keeps nurseries open but closes reception classes, and provides so little support that only a tiny minority of those who must self-isolate if the virus is not to spread further can afford to do so.
Two young men have been fined £10,000 each for organising a snowball fight. But where are the big fines for bosses threatening workers with the sack if they object to being put at risk? The BBC reports that between 6 and 14 January, the Health and Safety Executive (HSE) received 3,934 complaints relating to coronavirus and took enforcement action in just 81 cases, usually a verbal or written warning, with only one company facing tougher action.
Johnson and his ministers are being quite rightly castigated for saying that ‘they did everything they could’, and the list of their failures is getting longer and longer. But we are not seeing any alternative on offer.
The death rate is expected to increase exponentially over the winter months and the age groups being hospitalised and dying are becoming younger. There is a clear danger that, as vaccines are rolled out, the virus will develop the ability to bypass them through mutation, so they either don’t work, or work less well, against new variants.
Our futures cannot rely on vaccines.
They are only half the story – and can only be half of an effective strategy.
Because none of us are safe until we are all safe.
In the UK, the plan is for 14.6 million people in the top four priority groups to receive the first dose of vaccine, then 17.2 million in the next five groups. That leaves 21 million adults who may receive their first dose by the autumn – and their second three months later, by next Christmas. Those figures don’t include children and assume a steady supply of the vaccine will be available.
And, despite a good start to the UK vaccination programme – noticeably run by public sector health experts rather than privatised profiteers – the wheels are already starting to come off. Distribution is erratic, essential second doses are being delayed and, more seriously, we are seeing the beginnings of the vaccine wars, so predictable when we live in a country ruled by protectionists and nationalists, who have just bragged about brokering an acrimonious divorce from our nearest trading neighbour. A mix of EU bureaucracy, vaccine nationalism and the interests of Big Pharma are a potentially fatal combination. And of course this vaccine nationalism isn’t just about the UK and the EU. Just 25 doses of vaccine have been administered across all poor countries compared with 39 million in wealthier ones. I’ll repeat those figures – 25 compared to 39,000,000.
This is a global pandemic. None of us are safe until we are all safe.
An alternative – and additional – strategy to vaccination is essential.
Vaccination has to go hand in hand with a policy of elimination.
That is the policy which has been followed by countries as diverse as New Zealand, Taiwan, Vietnam and Australia. Closer to home, it has also been followed by the Isle of Man, which is now Covid free.
It is not too late for that policy to be adopted here. If it isn’t we will be left hanging around in on-off lockdowns waiting for the death knell for the next 100,000 of our loved ones. And then the next 100,000.
What does a proper elimination strategy involve? It needs a short, sharp, hard lockdown to drive down case numbers combined with and followed up by an effective, public sector track and trace system, comprehensive testing and quarantining for all UK arrivals. Workplaces and shops need to be made safe (the trade unions know how to do this even if employers don’t), with properly funded and supported self-isolation – either at home or in good alternative accommodation – as well as physical distancing and mask wearing. In this way community transmission of the virus can be slashed so that vaccination will have time and space to work and mutation is less likely.
Few if any of those in power seem to grasp that this strategy minimises costs and disruption to education and business, as well as saving the most lives. Instead, Groundhog Day is back – yet again the Tory right are calling for an end to the lockdown and Labour are calling for the schools to reopen. Both anthropomorphise the virus and want us to think it is going to consult its calendar to check term and bank holiday dates – half term maybe, Easter definitely!
The government can do this. It is doing it this week in response to the South African variant – testing, testing, testing (anyone else remember the WHO calling for just that last March?), using local authority public health experts, with Matt Hancock stating that they are coming down hard on the virus and that their goal is to eliminate every single case.
This is the opportunity Labour needs to embrace a full elimination strategy and, rather than piecemeal criticisms, Labour must put forward a detailed and comprehensive package of the measures that should be taken immediately if not just schools but our whole society is to be able to get on with our lives and plan for a better future.
Battered and depressed by the tragic details of the daily news updates and the frustrations of lockdown, it’s easy to lose sight of the big picture – and to forget that the Tory response to the Covid-19 crisis is governed by an extreme right-wing ideology which, when combined with the arrogance and greed of the British upper class, means that their decisions have little to do with saving lives, let alone the NHS.
But there are three key elements of Tory ideology we must not forget as we recoil in horror at what is happening:
Lansley ‘reforms’ (aka as the 2012 Health and Social Care Act), which institutionalised competition within the NHS
Austerity, which didn’t just starve the NHS of resources but led to follies such as the failure to replenish stockpiles of essential equipment despite the recommendations of Exercise Cygnus
Privatisation at every level of the economy, shrinking the state and putting profit before people.
Add to these the poisonous concept of British exceptionalism, cultivated during and by Brexit and given free rein now Boris Johnson and his ‘advisers’ are in Downing Street –the appalling and avoidable result of which is that the UK tops the European death league – and we can begin to understand why we have had to experience:
The herd immunity policy pushed by Downing Street’s eugenicists – more appropriately called the ‘cull the herd’ policy.
The strategy of mitigation rather than suppression; the failure to comply with WHO guidance to test, trace and isolate; and the refusal to lockdown and close borders at a time when it may have prevented thousands of deaths.
Boris’s Nightingale Hospitals – white elephants which diverted resources from existing hospitals and care homes. The questions about who profited from building these have yet to be asked.
The disregard and indifference towards social care and care home residents and workers. Why should we be surprised by this when the Tories have repeatedly failed to come up with any social care policy for years, let alone one which would integrate a sector dominated by private companies with the public NHS?
The refusal to work with Europe, not just on research and procurement, but now on data collection, with the Vote Leave data harvesters deeply involved in Downing Street’s preferred contact tracing App.
Private companies involved at every level – for example Deloitte, G4S, Serco and Capita are all involved in one way or another with procurement and contact testing, with data harvesting a binary choice between the US tech giants and AI firms linked to the Tories’ cronies.
The exposure of the health, wealth and race divides in our society, inequalities which have worsened over the past decade and which are now resulting in increased deaths in poor and multi-racial communities.
Now we must add messaging on easing the lockdown so muddled – as economic libertarianism comes into conflict with the public’s health – that key members of the Government have been unable to explain what we are all being advised to do.
Labour has a historically poor record of confronting the Tories on an ideological level, often letting them get away with pretending they haven’t really got one. Labour failed to challenge austerity until 2015. It tended to treat Brexit as a technical issue to do with trade and EU institutions rather than internationalism and solidarity, and was reluctant to call out its motivating mixture of deeply entrenched xenophobic bigotry, Atlanticism and the demands of a faction of capital. Labour’s response to the coronavirus crisis has similarly focussed on immediate issues rather than challenging the ideological reasons underlying the Tories’ failure to protect the health and lives of all their citizens.
This is to a large extent understandable whilst we are in the midst of the pandemic. Indeed, as one of those tagged with that horrible expression ‘extremely vulnerable’, my most frequently voiced criticism is why aren’t we all shouting louder and louder about the government’s catastrophic mismanagement of almost every single aspect of the crisis. But just as we mustn’t lose sight of the bigger picture in the now, we also need to be looking at it for the future.
One of the most depressing features of the global response to the pandemic has been the lack of international solidarity. Britain has not been alone in pursuing its own beggar thy neighbour policies. Trump’s xenophobia threatens the whole world.
The devastation being wrought by Covid-19 is massive. The global economy is in freefall, and because globalisation and technology have linked the world’s populations like never before, the coming depression will hit everyone. By the time the pandemic is under control, millions of working people across the world will have lost not just their lives or their loved ones, but their homes and their livelihoods. Hunger and destitution will make many desperate. Add the climate crisis to the pandemic crisis and humanity’s future is bleak if the most powerful countries continue to pursue what their strong men leaders perceive as their own national interests and fail to learn the importance of international solidarity and what could be the real meaning and strength of globalisation.
In this country, if it is left to the Tories, their new normal will be a return, with a few tweaks here and there – and with a lot of failed companies and thousands of unemployed workers – to the same old system of profit first people last. To this will be added the spice of a no deal Brexit at the end of the year. As many of us would love much of our lives to return to the way they were just a few weeks ago, it is going to be hard to challenge the ‘Britain will bounce back’ concept.
But we must. Labour has to seize the opportunity to articulate our values, challenge the Tories on an ideological level, and develop a new programme that really grasps the existential challenges the world faces. Our immediate demand has to be that workers neither in the developed north nor the global south pay for the pandemic through unemployment, tax rises and poorer public services. But we then need to go much further than that.
Our last manifesto was written for a different time and for a different economic situation. Some of its policies have shown themselves to be the most vital in the current situation – the much-mocked free broadband, nationalised railways, NHS investment; other policies such as a universal basic income and a national care service are now on the agenda. But our vision has to be even greater than any of those.
Experience during lockdown has shown both the vital role of the state and which aspects of our society and economy are valuable and essential, which are desirable, and which are unnecessary. If we are serious about tackling the climate crisis then that information must be used to inform a new transformative and radical economic and industrial strategy, which goes beyond the Green New Deal and addresses new ways of working, new ways of living, a shift in the balance between the public and private sectors, and the pressing need to alter the whole basis of income and wealth distribution.
The world changed after the 1919 flu epidemic, and again following World War Two. VE Day was not just about an end to the fighting in Europe and the Allies’ collective defeat of fascism. It was a day of celebration and comradeship which paved the way for one of the most transformative periods in this country’s history. That did not happen by accident. We came together and restructured our society and economy to fight the war and rebuild after it, just as we are doing now in a smaller way to cope with the Covid pandemic. ‘No going back to the way things were’ applies just as much today as it did in 1945.
Keir Starmer rightly says we can’t go back to business as usual and that we must go forward with a vision of a better society. But what does that mean? And how do we turn the rhetoric into reality? Across the world most communities have responded to the crisis with kindness, neighbourliness, sympathy and collectivity. We must all, across the Labour movement, now make use of whatever downtime we have, and the way we can now use technology to talk to each other, to brainstorm new, imaginative and progressive ways of living and organising society. We must be ready to #BuildBackBetter; for a future based on our movement’s collective ideas, understanding and experiences; for a future which rejects the Tories’ right-wing virus breeding ground of fragmented public services, greed and survival of the fittest, and is founded on genuine solidarity and socialism.
Labour must demand a Brexit pause while we tackle Covid-19
Covid-19 has exposed the dysfunction at the heart of the British state after a decade of austerity. That dysfunction has been combined with an extreme right-wing ideology, meaning that we have a government utterly incapable of carrying out its primary function – protecting its citizens. This combination has already led to a litany of failures: the foot-dragging initial response; the refusal to follow World Health Organisation guidelines; the failure to requisition adequate and timely supplies and equipment; the adherence to the immoral ‘herd immunity’ policy favoured by eugenicists and elitists; and the current fetish with non-existent antibody tests to identify an immunity that, without a vaccine, has not been evidenced to exist.
Many have been duped by the Tories’ sudden embrace of public expenditure, but the small print shows that it is all smoke and mirrors. Loans and deferred VAT payments mean SMEs and the self-employed gain little other than a bit of time to pay. Waiting on the phone for hour to then wait another five weeks for a Universal Credit payment is no substitute for the immediacy and simplicity of universal basic income or helicopter payments. Statutory sick pay is not a living wage. Utility and rent bills have not been frozen. Thousands are still going to work in non-essential jobs because they have no choice. Mutual aid volunteers are being asked to pay for groceries as people run out of money.
At the end of the day, as with Donald Trump, Tory policies will always be determined by the bottom line – by stock market rather than fatality numbers. We know which side the Conservatives are really on in those ‘economy vs. people’s lives’ debates. We know that by ‘economy’, they mean profit – not our livelihoods, jobs and household bills. The UK’s departure from the EU’s Early Warning and Response System and European Medicines Agency, and the Tories’ refusal to be part of a 28-country purchasing block for ventilators are not just shameful; they exhibit a pig-headed anti-Europeanism and dangerous British exceptionalism that puts ideology before saving lives.
In these circumstances, Labour must be bold. In recent years, Labour was at its best and most popular when Jeremy Corbyn and John McDonnell showed clear and firm leadership. Their anti-austerity policies and the 2017 manifesto are prime examples of that. But Labour has also been at its weakest and least popular when clear leadership has not been forthcoming. The 2019 manifesto was as radical as that of 2017, but was always going to get swamped and ridiculed in an election dominated by Brexit. And here, instead of boldness and clarity, Corbyn’s triangulation and failure to challenge the nationalist and populist nature of the Brexit project was a major contributory factor to our defeat.
Keir Starmer has already demonstrated a moving empathy and understanding of the effects of the Covid-19 crisis on the poor and working class. Now he must also be bold on Brexit. The economic and social fallout from coronavirus will be more than most people can cope with, without adding the unnecessary and human-made disaster that the Tories’ preferred hard Brexit constitutes. Brexit and fighting Covid are now inextricably linked.
The UK will, by default, be trading on World Trade Organisation rules come 2021 if Labour does not demand the virtual reopening of parliament immediately after Easter to agree an extension to the transition arrangements. If it doesn’t, then this Brexiteer government – that just a couple of months ago thought Brexit bongs more important than confronting the deadly threat that they knew we faced – will be more than happy to allow the July deadline to pass unnoticed, just as it has already ensured that the important Windrush Report was buried by Covid-19. Whatever their position on Brexit, every Labour member should now be demanding the government press pause on Brexit and concentrates on saving lives. You can sign Labour for a Socialist Europe’s petition to that effect here.
The majority’s reaction to the crisis has demonstrated the power of community, of working together, of solidarity, of support for our key workers and the NHS. Where the government has failed to act, cash-strapped Labour councils have stepped into the breach magnificently, working with all sections of their local communities to feed and support everyone. Pop-up mutual aid groups have linked up with established voluntary organisations, small businesses have used their imaginations to find ways to help, online entertainment and education has transformed many people’s lives and enabled them to live in isolation.
Thousands of migrants, refugees and EU citizens whose lives have been turned upside down by the Tory Brexiteers have instinctively and generously worked with their neighbours to build community support networks. These are the very same migrants who have been subjected to the Tories’ hostile environment, threatened with deportation, banned from receiving healthcare because of the ‘no recourse to public funds’ rules, and who have been the first UK health workers to lose their lives to coronavirus.
We must not let this profoundly ideological Tory government continue to put lives at risk, nor to use this crisis as their opportunity to further right-wing projects. Labour needs to be offering a future in line with the community strengths and power of collective action that a new generation is discovering. More immediately, we must demand a pause to Brexit so that all of our collective efforts can be concentrated on fighting the pandemic. And once this is over, let’s make sure that we don’t go back to normal.
This article was published in Labour List on 8 April 2020
Joan Twelves 