Covid-19: It's not political is it?

When the current crisis is over, there will have to be changes in the way in which we organise society. Not just because the neo-liberal order has failed (although it has). Or, because Tory incompetence has cost lives (although it has). Or, even, because many people will have died unnecessarily (though they will have).

We have to change because Covid-19 will not be the last such virus. The way in which we are living ensures that further viruses will emerge and, as strange as it may seem to say this, the next one, or the one after that, may not be as benign as this one.

As I wrote last week, the onslaught on public services, particularly health services, was not an accident. It was not just the work of the British Tory Party either. It rather irritates me when people say the Tories dreamed up austerity. They are not that clever. They simply adopted the dominant economic model from Europe and America and followed it with enthusiasm.

But, the current crisis has shown pretty clearly that a policy that luxuriated in depriving the poorest and most vulnerable fatally wounded itself from the start. It has been the most vulnerable who have been most likely to get Covid-19. Dominic Cummings view, if indeed it was his view, that it didn’t matter if a few old people died was odious, but also showed the flaw in his thinking. 

You could argue that a systematic cull of the over 70’s could be beneficial for society. You would have to be entirely immoral to say such a thing out loud but the idea is not without precedent. Malthus argued something similar a while ago. The problem is that viruses of the Covid-19 variety are no respecter of social class or age. As the virus is attacked by healthy antibodies it mutates. That is what viruses do. Once you understand that simple fact it is obvious that the only way to stop it is to deprive it of its breeding ground. In this case, human beings. Hence, what we are now calling “physical distancing”.

That the virus took the World by surprise is down mainly to the fact that ruling elites prioritise economics over anything else. Success is measured by how much you can accumulate, not what social value you add to society. As Marx notes on page one of Capital capitalism can be characterised as “an immense accumulation of commodities”. He describes this as a fetish. It is hard when we look at billionaires and millionaires shielding their wealth whilst letting lower paid workers in their organisations take pay cuts and lose their jobs, to disagree with him. Their meanness is not just a moral failing, which it certainly is, but shows the manner in which commodities and wealth become objects in their own right and not simply the means to an end.

If any good is to come from this virus it is that many people have discovered, albeit temporarily, the value of community and solidarity which the Tories have been systematically undermining since at least 1979. It was Margaret Thatcher we should remind ourselves who said “there's no such thing as society. There are individual men and women and there are families.” And, it was Boris Johnson who said, in reference to that quote, that “there really is such a thing as society”. This damascene conversion is a smokescreen. Johnson and his Eton educated friends have spent the past 40 years doing all they can to promote a naked individualism that benefits their class to the detriment of everybody else.

We now have official recognition that people who serve us in shops are ”essential” whilst so-called “wealth creators” are not. This is a massive shift and we should not under-estimate the power of keep repeating who has been essential during this crisis.

At the same time, many people are already fighting a rearguard action for the system they think they depend on. The idea that the virus was some kind of Chinese plot to bring capitalism to its knees is not confined to the idiot fringe on the web. The Daily Mail, typically, has run a series of vile racist and xenophobic articles whose main purpose is to deflect attention away from both the poor handling of the crisis and the political choices that left all of us exposed.

Many people, most of them Tories by nature, have been maintaining a constant stream of invective against anybody who raises legitimate questions about the policies that have left our health workers facing a potentially lethal virus without the proper protective equipment. The line taken is that we should unite behind the government and not make this into a political issue.

Letter to the Scottish Herald "Keep politics our of the
Covid crisis

As if saying nothing as our health workers are sent like lambs to the slaughter is not a political act. As if ignoring the fact that Tory MPs cheered when they defeated a bill to stop a pay increase for health workers is not political. As if the fact that the UK has only 2.55 beds per 1000 head of population and 8 nurses per 1000 population compared to Germany’s 8 per 1000 beds and 13 per 1000 nurses is some kind of naturally occurring event rather than the result of decisions taken by successive Tory governments. And, as if the fact that the UK spends only €3,566 per person on healthcare compared to Norway’s €6,730, Germany’s €4,271 or France’s €3,847 is just an oversight rather than an act of political vandalism.

No, we must not mention politics. After all, some of those claiming that this has nothing to with politics spent an entire minute on their doorsteps clapping. Surely this absolves them fully for any responsibility for the years of neglect of our public services that they have been voting for. In fact, those of us that have been saying for years, often to people who refused to listen, that the running down of the NHS was a disaster waiting to happen were right. And, we must keep saying so. We cannot afford to let the Conservative Party and its blinkered supporters get away with pretending that this is not a political as well as a medical issue.

Going forward the left (by which in this context I mean anybody who gives a toss about anything than themselves) will find that we will, as ever, be faced with an onslaught by the media determined to prop up the Tories as representatives of a very shaken ruling class who no longer have a strong rationale for the system they support. We have to rely, as ever, on grassroots movements, trade unions and ordinary workers to, at the very least, demand that health workers are rewarded with a substantial pay rise, and that investment in the NHS is not wasted on yet more management efficiency schemes or handed to huge pharmaceutical companies, but spent where clinicians feel it is of most use. It should be no surprise to find that NHS Wales lost out on respirators because NHS England offered more to Roche, one of the Worlds richest pharmaceutical companies who reneged on their agreement with the Welsh in order to extract just a bit more profit for themselves. All in it together? It doesn’t look like it does it?

Decent pay and increased investment may not sound like a particularly revolutionary demand. Probably because it isn’t, but reasonable demands only become revolutionary when the ruling class can’t or won’t accede to them. Increasing spending on healthcare, health provision and training new doctors, nurses etc. will require a genuine commitment to public service that post-virus will stick in their free-market espousing throats. But, it will be a demand they will find difficult to refuse if our voices are loud and united.

The Guardian, 27th March 2020

Others have pointed out how quickly homelessness could be solved when the homeless became walking timebombs threatening not just ordinary people but also the rich. And, that is the point, viruses don’t care if you are rich or poor, British, Italian or Chinese. They are indiscriminate. And, that is one reason why they have focussed the minds of people who under usual circumstances don’t pause to worry about deaths of ordinary workers. It’s not just their chances of contracting the virus, but also that as workers (those who are the real wealth creators) fall victim the opportunities to extract what Marx called ‘surplus value’ are much diminished. You don’t need to be a Marxist to understand that a virulent virus without a known cure is going to be bad for profits and in the long-term for the capitalist system itself. The current lockdown simply cannot be allowed to continue for long. It is too costly.

But, if we want to protect and expand our health services as the crisis recedes, we also need to change the way in which we think about the role of society. For most Tories, the goal has never been no state, but rather a libertarian minimal state. Perhaps they have read Robert Nozick, though frankly I don’t think most Tory opinion formers read anything more taxing than the Telegraph and Spectator which tell them what they want to hear and mirror their particular prejudices. Nozick, a contemporary of liberal thinker John Rawls, advocated that all the state should provide was the bare minimum in terms of security and infrastructure. As far as he was concerned taxation was theft. After all, if you earned the money it was yours and nobody had the right to take it from you. Even if they were intending to use it for good purposes. It seems like a powerful argument and a lot of people, especially wealthy people, like the sound of this.

It creates a World where some people can accumulate huge amounts of wealth, whilst others are on the breadline. What’s worse, the wealthy convince themselves, and the rest of us, that it is through their own efforts and their talent that they are where they are. By extension, if you are homeless, on benefits, indeed even disabled, this is your own fault. You should have tried harder, you should have paid more attention at school. Of course, if they had their way you wouldn’t have a school to pay attention in unless you could afford to pay for it. After all, why should you pay for the children of those lazy idlers to go to school?

It is a pernicious and selfish ideology, but it is at the root of the current disaster. It is why the wealthy have immense wealth and hospitals have no ventilators. It is why some people live in opulence whilst only now are we getting people off the streets where they have been left to exist. I may be naïve but I believe most people do not want to see homelessness, or hear that nurses need to use food banks. Most people do not want to live in a World many where children do not get a meal every day, or one where people can die lonely and afraid because they do not have enough money to put the heating on.

But, I can hear people say, why then do they keep voting for precisely those outcomes? Unfortunately, all of these things are classified as ‘politics’ and most of the time, according to the Hansard Audit of Political Engagement, half the population profess to both no interest in or knowledge of, politics. And, despite social media seeming like a political battleground only 16% contribute to political discussion online. The conclusion can only be that most people are politically apathetic most of the time.

That is a personal failure of people who should take an interest in decisions that affect them, but it is also a failure of those of us engaged in politics that we are, relatively, content to keep on doing politics as normal. We need to be more open to the fact that people have views with which we disagree and rather than lambast them and treat them as the enemy talk to them, meet them where they are and bring them further to our side, by letting them see for themselves how society works against their interests. It is not rocket science. If you describe those who disagree with you on any single issue as ‘thick’, ‘stupid’ or ‘racist’ when they feel that they are none of those things, then you close down discourse not encourage it. 

I am not suggesting we pander to ignorance or intolerance, but that we do not fall into the trap of adopting our own siege mentality. It is not just how we react to people outside the leftish bubble we can be incredibly intolerant of each other. I’ve done it myself recently, my frustration has fallen into just throwing insults at people who disagree with me. You see it all the time on the left people’s dogmatism drives them on. Instead of engaging in constructive dialogue some people adopt a position, often an extreme position, and simply keep repeating it in the hope that everybody will realise how right they are. But, if that is your modus operandi, then you really don’t deserve to win the argument, no matter how right you think you are. Adopting a position and demanding everybody else follows you is not constructive argument it is a form of bullying.

Thankfully, most people are open to discussion and are prepared to have those important discussions in a way which is inclusive and non-threatening. As Covid-19 recedes the task of the left will be to remind everybody of the reasons we got into this situation in the first place. We need to understand what leads to these viruses jumping across species, the evidence is out there, and for what it’s worth blaming the Chinese is entirely wrong. We also need to develop a very real understanding of the way in which our health service has been run down. We cannot possibly elect a Labour government in the next few years to defend and extend the NHS. We need to use public opinion (itself being manipulated by the Tory Comms team) to ensure that we keep up the pressure to bring the British NHS at least in line with, say, Germany.

Quite honestly, the public are open to that idea now, but quite how open they will remain to it once the virus is seen as defeated and any criticism of the Johnson Government is seen as tantamount to treason, is another issue. We should be thinking in terms of mass protests in support of our NHS. We should be writing to the letter pages of the newspapers. We need a trade union movement that protects workers rather than officials. We need a radical Labour Party constantly challenging the Tories in Parliament. We need, in short, to give ordinary people a campaign that they can get behind. It will, because it requires the Tories to commit to public spending and nationalisation, be very difficult for them to deliver. For that very reason we need to seize the moment and use this assault on the most vulnerable in our society and on our heroic health workers, to build a movement that says clearly we are not prepared to let this happen again.