Labour Outlook – Joan Twelves

More than 200,000 people have died from Covid in the UK during Johnson’s rule, 294 of them in the past week.There are 11,500 patients in hospital with Covid – and the number of hospitalisations is rising, adding to the burden on the already overstretched NHS.

3.5 million people are currently infected – a rise of 30% from the previous week.

The UK has one of the highest death tolls in Europe, with 2,689 deaths per million people.

These grim numbers are rarely reported any more. We have supposedly moved into the post-pandemic era.

Like the Tories, the media have got bored with the Covid plague, now well into its third year. And most of us go along with that because we are all fed up with it as well. We want to socialise, meet our friends and family, go to parties, gigs and demos. Or just down the pub.

And we’ve all got enough to cope with trying to make our money stretch to pay for the weekly food shop, petrol and energy bills without having to worry about finding more to pay for masks or Covid tests.

But we must resist the normalisation of Covid and letting it rip through our society. We cannot and must not accept the continuing deaths, the high infection rates, the reinfections, the disruption to all our lives caused by sudden illness, unplanned absences, shortages, cancelled appointments and holidays. We cannot and must not accept the failure of a government whose first duty should be to protect its population whether that is from disease, starvation or war, especially when there is an alternative to ‘Living with Covid’, an alternative based on well-established age-old measures for protecting communities against infectious diseases through contact tracing and isolation.

Relief at the departure of Boris Johnson has to be tempered by the recognition that, while his famed sloppiness, dishonesty, selfishness and incompetence played their part, the failure of the Conservative government to handle the pandemic is ideological and not primarily a result of him as an individual.

That ideology is embraced by all of Johnson’s potential successors and exposed by their clamour for tax cuts and shrinking the state. Just as Johnson and Sunak have been trying to lay the costs of the pandemic onto working people with their dogmatic refusal to increase pay in line with inflation, so we are witnessing the grotesque spectacle of a line-up of B-list hopefuls competing to cut benefits and public services to pay for their ambitions.

In their parallel universe of voodoo economics, where inflation, food banks, hungry children, homelessness, increasing inequality, industrial unrest, soaring prices, energy and petrol costs, a collapsing pound, climate catastrophe, and most certainly a continuing Covid pandemic, do not exist, economic illiteracy is being paraded around the media studios as a badge of pride.

The crisis in our health service is far less important to them than their own faux-sincerity. Their newly vaunted moral principles and integrity haven’t been much on display in recent months when most of them defended the Partygate lies, the repugnant Rwandan deal and the suppression of dissent.

The NHS is not safe in any of their hands!

Nor is it safe in the hands of the loyalist Johnson quickly shifted from a short stint as his chief of staff to Health Secretary when Javid resigned.

Javid is a eugenicist who washed his hands of Covid almost as soon as he took over, happy for Johnson to cave in to the demands of the anti-vax, anti-mask Covid Recovery Group to remove all mitigations and protections.

Like Javid, Steve Barclay considers Covid over and done with. Back in January he was tweeting: “Now we’re learning to live with Covid, we need to get back to face-to-face working.”

Barclay is deemed to be even worse than his predecessor. The Health Service Journal’s editor, Alastair McLellan, says of him: “A real nightmare, vindictive, arrogant, a bully, hostile to the NHS and all its works, a micro-manager of the wrong things, views NHS management as bloated and profligate …… Never has a politician arrived in the post of health secretary … trailing a worse reputation than Steve Barclay.”

Zero Covid has launched an online letter writing campaign to remind him that Covid isn’t over and that he needs to take action to mitigate the effects of the virus now by implementing basic public health measures to protect us and reduce community transmission.

In recent months, the Tories have relied solely on the vaccination programme – and the vaccines have been crucial in reducing deaths and serious illness. But the current dominant strain of Omicron and its more transmissible sub-variants are breaking through the vaccine barriers so that reinfection is becoming increasingly common. And the vaccines have never been enough on their own. Simple, non-restrictive additional protective measures are needed if we are to stamp down on the virus.

Masks in public places, free tests, contact tracing, social distancing, decent sick pay, Covid-safe workplaces, enforceable air quality standards, Long Covid to be classified as a disability, autumn booster vaccinations for all, funding for research, monitoring and the now urgent development of the next generation of vaccines, and for this disgraceful government to support WTO patent waivers so that we vaccinate the world.

With his cut-price Trumpian populist approach to Covid, Johnson is leaving behind a legacy of social murder, waste, corruption and callousness. He is going as the death toll hits 200,000 deaths. 200,000 avoidable deaths. 200,000 people who have left behind grieving family and friends.

On top of that there are at least 2 million people suffering from Long Covid, possibly facing years if not a lifetime of pain, depression, fatigue, lost dreams and missed opportunities.

Not to forget the 4 million or so of those of us who remain at high risk from Covid and who, notwithstanding vaccines and anti-virals, have been abandoned not just by the government but by the rest of society to continue to shield ourselves in isolation behind our front doors.

Having delayed the Independent Inquiry into his government’s handling of the pandemic for so long, we must not allow Johnson and his chums to escape its judgments as it puts the deaths in care homes, the delayed lockdowns, the corrupt PPE contracts, the billions spent on the failed Test and Trace scheme, the fraudulent bounce-back loans, and so much more, under the microscope of public accountability.

The pandemic has caused untold damage to our society. Everybody bears the scars in one way or other. It has been global in its harm, but it has been so much worse in the UK than it needed to be.

We must not forgive, and we must not forget. And, whoever ends up leading it, we must not let this corrupt and callous government get away with pretending that the Covid pandemic is over. However much we may all wish it away, it is still with us, and it is still killing people.

Published in Labour Outlook 15 July 2022

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.

Joan Twelves

Published by Labour Outlook, 28 July 2021