Should we welcome Boris Johnson’s efforts to relax lockdown and restart the economy?
To be brutally blunt, it does not matter how big or small a recession, or whether it is avoided, to people who are dead.
I am no expert on alternative methods of education, but I do believe other approaches need to be found for now, possibly for a year or longer. Most people can and should work remotely.
But the Conservative Government is determined to open schools so employers can force people back into offices, quite openly for commercial reasons irrespective of the threat of spreading the Covid-19 virus. Their determination to reopen football and other sports grounds and send students back to university are to enable more money making.
Despite the spin, their actions show the Government has always expected no vaccine to be in wide use until next year at the earliest, and no effective treatment. By unlocking the UK early, it is perfectly clear the Government strategy remains “herd immunity”.
A tiny percentage of UK people so far have contracted the virus. You can only achieve herd immunity by forcing huge numbers into exposure to the virus, which in turn means allowing a large number to die or to be permanently disabled by the virus.
Socially, “lockdown” is difficult, but we have shown we can adapt if we have to.
Personally, I love to be able to hop on a train and go to London or Cardiff, or go out for a meal with family or friends, or host a big family Christmas. But I know all those freedoms should not return for some time and, distressingly, may never to the extent we enjoyed them previously. People’s lives are more important.
Economically, there is absolutely no reason we cannot pause the economy for a lot longer or change how we do things permanently. The amounts spent on furlough are dwarfed by other areas of expenditure, and just collecting all the taxes due in a single year would go a long way toward paying for the pandemic. And we have our own central bank, which can issue (“print”) as much money as we need, so we don’t have to borrow to pay for maintaining lockdown.
Yet the £300 billion printed so far (“issued” via “quantitative easing”) during the pandemic has been given to the banks, not used on Covid-19 measures. And the Conservatives are needlessly and criminally killing people by handing “test and trace” to the private sector to make profits, rather than implementing it effectively to save lives.
An effective vaccine may never be found, as in the case of AIDS, for which there is still no vaccine. But there are really, really good treatments, which is possibly what will save us from Covid-19. The Tories are holding out the hope of a vaccine making it all go away just to shut us up, to lull us into believing their narrative, which is quite likely to be reducing the resources available to finding treatments for the virus that actually work.
It is an utter disaster that we find ourselves with a Tory government at this time, but that’s life (and death). Rather than asking ourselves whether they are doing mostly the right thing, but maybe not very well, we should question their true motivation. That is profit.
The Conservative Government’s almost complete inaction, and never ending streams of deceit and lies, on the climate emergency that will end our civilisation, if not worse, is because they care only for profits in the short term (even to the doom of their grandchildren).
Why would capitalists’ motives in a pandemic be any different to their habitual and relentless pursuit of profits? They may hope Covid-19 will fade and disappear, as with SARS, if they actually bother to think that way at all, but why would they care when there is money to be made?
Simply, the Tories have used the pandemic as cover for a series of heists!