Anyone can be forgiven for being confused about the current coronavirus lock-down regulations. They are pretty much an exercise in chaos and confusion.
A post today on Instagram sums up the farce: “In Manchester, you can be sacked for refusing to go and sit with someone in an office, fined £100 for sitting with them at home, and given a money-off deal to sit with them in a busy restaurant.” Instead of a strategy driven by the expertise of scientists and epidemiologists, we have a ‘pick n’ mix’, the net result of which leaves people vulnerable to a second Covid wave more than ever before.
Even the Financial Times last week was asking if anyone knew what the coronavirus rules were any more? “How many people are we allowed to have in our house? How many people are we allowed to meet outside? Is the bubble still a thing? What is the bubble thing again? Can we share food with people? Are we meant to go into our offices to work? Which of the rules are just guidance and which constitute criminal offences if they’re breached?”
As a correspondent in the Guardian asked yesterday, the lockdown rules have reached a point of absurdity – “I can go out with my friends for dinner, but not visit my mother?” What rules as we have had have been seen to be openly flouted by Dominic Cummings, Johnson’s chief adviser, without any comeback. That one single flouting of the rules, according to opinion polls, was the biggest single factor in magnifying public skepticism around lockdown rules.
‘Creative ambiguity’ from Downing Street
In short, there is no coherence at all in the current lockdown regulations and few outside of Downing Street even pretend to understand them. But that incoherence is not entirely accidental, although Johnson has broken all records for incompetence and mismanagement. There is, as the correspondent of the Financial Times argued, a deliberate “creative ambiguity” in the government’s announcements, because it will provide a useful means at a later date to duck its own responsibility for the chaos and instead blame the population as a whole for the second spike, when it comes.
The tone has been set from the top from the very beginning of the coronavirus crisis. Government strategy has been based on lies, subterfuge and empty boasting. Throughout the whole of the lockdown and into the new period of ‘opening’ we have the worst virus testing regime in Europe, ramshackle processes for the distribution of vital PPE and a test and trace system that isn’t fit for purpose. It comes as no surprise that we have the highest Covid mortality rate in Europe, and we are looking at a bleak winter ahead, with a possible second wave of infections worse than the first one.
Lucrative contracts to Tories’ friends
The only unifying feature of the last five months strategy has been the willingness of the government to give out lucrative contracts for the provision of services and goods that are usually inadequate for their purpose. The Covid outbreak has revealed the ‘British disease’ in all its full glory, using public money as a means of providing mega-profits for the private sector, whether or not the services provided are any use at all. When testing finally reached something like a large-scale proportion (albeit still worse than European levels), local NHS labs were ignored, although they had the capacity to process tens of thousands, in favour of privately-managed laboratory facilities set up hundreds of miles away.
Even the shambolic track and trace system is contracted out to the friends of Boris Johnson. The most recent scandal, according to the Guardian and OpenDemocracy, is that the political communications company behind the Tories’ controversial 2019 digital campaign strategy “received a £3 million government contract to work on COVID-19 messaging without a competitive tender and is now negotiating with the Cabinet Office for more work”.
Sleaze on a monumental scale
In any ‘normal’ political period, dishing out billions of pounds-worth of contracts to the friends and supporters of the Tory Party, usually without competitive tendering, would have amounted to a massive sleaze scandal. It is legalized corruption on a monumental scale, but so far at least, the Tories have got away with it.
It is arguably a little inaccurate to talk at this point about a ‘second’ wave of the virus because in reality, the government hasn’t dealt with the first wave properly. The fight against the virus has almost come down to the ‘herd immunity’ strategy put forward originally by Dominic Cummings five months ago.
The difficulties and confusing of lockdown rules wouldn’t be so bad if it wasn’t for the underlying failure of the government from the very beginning to implement an effective test, trace and tracking regime. Listening to the boasting and exaggerations at the daily coronavirus briefings of recent months, we were forever being told that this or that was being ‘ramped up’, or ‘rolled out’; that our systems would be ‘world-beating’, and so on. The reality is that now, months after the original targets, there is still no systematic testing of workers in the NHS and social care and the overwhelming majority of those in ‘key’ industries and services are still not being tested either. Despite the scandals around PPE in the NHS, care homes and other essential workplaces, there is still serious gaps and shortages.
Workers being forced back to work
Four months after going into lockdown too late, the government has pushed for workers to go back to work too early. Removing the ‘shielding’ requirement for vulnerable workers and lowering government assistance for those on furlough will mean that many workers who should still not be going on public transport or going in to work will be forced to do so, or will face the sack. It takes us back to February, when workers in the least secure jobs, with the worst pay and conditions, had no alternative but to go to work whether they felt ill or not. Even with the best case scenario, according to economists, we face a huge rise in permanent unemployment, meaning millions expected to live on near starvation-level welfare benefits.
The whole situation is likely to get much worse when the new school term is due to start. Young people between the ages of 11 and 18 are currently obliged to wear face masks in shops and on public transport, yet come September 1, the same young people will be expected to sit with another 29 in a closed classroom for hours at a time. In those closed spaces they will be expected to be taught by adults – sometimes vulnerable people themselves, but now denied the right to shield – who will be expected not to wear masks or PPE. There couldn’t be a better recipe for the incubation of a second wave of coronavirus.
Ineffective testing, tracking and tracing
The greater tragedy in this whole situation is that there is no effective political opposition to Johnson at the moment. At a time when Labour ought to be twenty points ahead in opinion polls, it is struggling to get ahead of the Tories at all. Labour leader, Keir Starmer, is so determined to prove himself a reliable and ‘responsible’ part of the establishment, that he is offering little or no opposition to the Tories.
None of the outrage felt by workers in key services is being articulated from the Labour front bench, none of the anger at the sleaze and virtually open corruption of this government is reflected in statements from shadow ministers. We expect no better from the Tories than the miserably rotten performance we have got. But we expect more from those who purport to represent the interests of working people.
It seems to be the intention of the Labour front bench to just sit out the next four years while Johnson is in office, creating chaos all around. But that is not a strategy that offers any hope to those working people who will suffer the consequences of Tory policy now or even more in the next few years. The fight against the deadly coronavirus has to mean a fight against this rotten and corrupt government. But the fight against Johnson and Co must also mean a fight for socialist policies and socialist representatives inside the Labour Party.
August 4, 2020
