Covid

It has been a difficult second lockdown for Boris Johnson. Currently self-isolating in Downing Street, he has been struggling with two huge challenges. On the one hand his negligent policies have meant there is little prospect of an end to the covid19 pandemic any time soon, despite the promise of a vaccine. The Tories have been forced into another lockdown and an extension of the furlough scheme and are finding it increasingly difficult to balance their interest in opening up the economy with the need to contain the public health crisis.

From the very beginning of this pandemic, the Socialist Review has been very clear that the fatal nature of the Covid-19 virus is not primarily due to the nature of the virus itself, but from the global social contexts it continues to impact upon.

This year ought to have been very different for the environmental movement. 2019 had seen an explosion of environmental activism. Global climate strikes had brought hundreds of thousands of young people onto the streets, inspiring a new generation to radical action over the environment. In the UK, Extinction Rebellion involved tens of thousands in protest occupations around its three demands and created a broad and extensive network of activists around the country.

If COVID doesn’t kill them loneliness will.” Time and again I heard this from care workers as those we care for, already so isolated, spent months in near solitary confinement, in their own homes or in residential care. The cafés, church lunch groups and day services were closed and families were banished. Particularly for older people living alone, often in pain or in grief, lockdown has been devastating. The government initially wanted to allow the virus to rip through the population, only implementing lockdown, too late, to prevent the NHS being completely overwhelmed.

SR: When did you start to realise that things were becoming dangerous?

The Covid-19 pandemic has shone a spotlight on the devastating health inequalities faced by working class people and in particular those from Black, Asian and other minority ethnic backgrounds. It has also revealed how decades of underfunding, understaffing and privatisation have undermined our NHS. So although our health, or lack of it, may sometimes feel very personal, it is clearly shaped by social and economic factors including housing, income, working conditions, discrimination and pollution levels.

This September marked six months since the UK entered national lockdown in response to the coronavirus pandemic. The terror of the lockdown, when thousands of people lost their lives as a result of Covid-19, gave way to an eerily carefree summer with the Tories desperately attempting a return to normality, encouraging people out with the ‘Eat Out to Help Out’ scheme, opening schools and universities and pushing for a return to work even when some people could work from home. The economic picture is grim.

The Covid crisis has led to lockdown measures which have produced big declines in economic activity across the world. Britain has suffered the worst declines of any major economy. In the second quarter of this year, April to June, the British economy shrank by 20.4 percent, the worst slump by far since records began in 1955 and twice the decline in the US economy. There are two reasons why the British economy has suffered much more than others, both of them due to deliberate policies of Conservative governments.

Is there anyone left in Britain, apart from that tiny, tiny minority of individuals with a vested financial interest, who thinks that entrusting to private health capital Britain’s response to the pandemic was ever a good idea? The British Medical Association certainly don’t. Their report published mid-September, The Role of Private Outsourcing in the Covid 19 Response, is an expose and utter condemnation of how contracting out virtually every aspect of pandemic-related services has been an utter and complete disaster.