The Tories have once again been exposed implementing policies ‘too little, too late’. Only one hour after Boris Johnson’s bombastic television broadcast on Monday, it was revealed in the minutes of the Sage committee that he had turned down the advice of scientists who wanted to introduce a lock-down three weeks ago, as a ‘firebreak’ to stop a second wave.
So, as it was with the first wave of Covid, in March, it is the same with the second. The Tories are badly behind the curve and putting the interests of businesses over the health and well-being of workers and their families.
The minutes of the Sage meeting show not only that the scientists were urging the government to introduce “harsh” and “immediate” national restrictions, but, according to the Financial Times report, “scientists warned the government it was becoming increasingly difficult to measure the effectiveness of the test-and-trace system”.
Test and trace a sick joke
The so-called “world-beating” test and trace system, run by the private company Serco, is a sick joke. What it has been is a world laughing-stock, after it was discovered to have been using a version of Microsoft Excel that was thirteen years old. It is only by some miracle that the entire system hadn’t already been hacked and seriously compromised.
The government has now accepted, at least to an extent, the logic of their own failure and is apparently allowing local councils some measure of responsibility for testing and tracing. How much this will be adequately funded, and how much money will be clawed back from the grossly inefficient sharks in Serco, remains to be seen.
The only consistent part of the Tories’ coronavirus strategy has been their determination to milk the national purse as much as they can for their friends in the business community. The privatised test and trace, fronted by a personal friend of Boris Johnson, Dido Harding – someone with zero qualifications and experience in the field – is only the tip of a very large and seedy iceberg.
This week the Good Law Project launched a legal action against the government, calling for a judicial review of its contracting policies. Since the pandemic began, the government has given out £11bn-worth of contracts, mostly to Tory friends and associates in the business world. This is bad enough – when companies with no experience or history in health or related services are having money thrown at them – but around £3bn of the contracts have not even been made public, so MPs cannot scrutinise them.
Legal action against government
“When billions of pounds of public money is handed out to private companies,” said Caroline Lucas, the Green Party MP and one of the sponsors of the legal action, “some of them with political connections but no experience in delivering medical supplies, ministers should be explaining why those companies were awarded the contracts.”
The pity of it is that it had to be a Green Party MP making these comments and not Labour’s front bench. Jonathan Ashworth, Labour’s Shadow Health Minister, has complained about the content of the Sage minutes, describing the contents as “alarming”. But there is nowhere to be heard a full-throated condemnation, by Keir Starmer’s Shadow Cabinet, of the Tory sleaze for costing the taxpayer billions in pounds and thousands in lives lost unnecessarily.
It is not an accident that the test and trace system is shambolic. It is part and parcel of privatisation practice everywhere that companies awarded contracts will cut corners, cut wages to the minimum, fail to train staff and offer a minimal service precisely to get a maximum profit. That is what privatisation is all about, and Labour needs to call out the Tories on these terms, not play clap-handies over secondary issues.
Confusing and contradictory
The latest Covid restrictions, with a ‘tiered’ approach to different areas of the country, are as confusing and as contradictory as ever. Leaving aside the suspicion that some areas with Tory MPs and Tory councils, and with a high incidences of infections, are being ‘let off’ with the same restrictions being imposed in the North, the fundamental objection of workers hinges on the inefficiencies of the government and the hardship it is imposing on local working communities.
Keir Starmer has now joined in the chorus of demands for a national lockdown as a firebreak to slow the second wave. But the key issue is financial support for workers in those areas that are hardest-hit. It is not the case that workers are opposed in principle to lockdowns or restrictions to beat the virus. The problem is that no-one has any confidence in what the government are doing – workers have the worst of all worlds, with restrictions, no reduction in infections and crippling economic hardships on top of everything.
Surviving on a pittance
The chorus of complaints from Labour mayors, councils and MPs in the North of England is not about the principle of restrictions, but primarily because their constituents are feeling a financial fallout, something the millionaires in the Cabinet can only imagine. It is not acceptable, when billions are being thrown around in dubious contracts, for workers to be expected to survive on a pittance, if their workplace is closed.
The new government furlough support offers two thirds of a wage. But the national minimum wage – which in the last twenty years has gone from the exception to the norm in many sectors of the economy – is not enough as it is to have decent standard of living. Two thirds of not enough becomes an insult. Rents aren’t reduced to two thirds. Food and utility bills are not going down to two thirds.
Labour should demand that no worker’s living standard should go down two thirds!
Labour should demand pay increases for low-paid workers, not more punishment!
Boris Johnson has talked about ‘levelling up’ and raising living standards in the North to match those in the wealthier South of England. In practice, by introduction stricter lockdown measures without adequate financial support for workers, he is doing the opposite.
The Tories are a busted flush. Even members of the Tory Party are beginning to wonder if Johnson has lost his ‘touch’. Writing in the Financial Times on Monday, Robert Shrimsley writes, “Johnson no longer looks like a man who really believes in what he is doing. He is losing control of the pandemic; he is losing control of the narrative; and he is losing control of his party. Plans for a better tomorrow ring hollow”, he continues, “if you cannot deliver a functioning test and trace system today”.
Tax increases will be on the way
According to the Institute for Fiscal Studies, Chancellor Sunak is going to have to introduce higher taxes, to the tune of £40bn a year by 2025, to stop the government deficit from ballooning. Government borrowing because of the pandemic, is set to reach 17 per cent of GDP this year, which is the highest peacetime deficit for three hundred years.
Compounding this situation, the general economic outlook of the British economy is dire. UK economic output is likely to remain 7 to 10 per cent below pre-Covid levels at the end of this year. It will still be 5 per cent short by the end of 2024, according to a forecast by Citibank. The British economy is performing more poorly than any other OECD country except for Spain.
Endless austerity
The Tories have no answers to the coronavirus pandemic. They have no intention of supporting workers and their families in lockdowns. They have nothing to offer the millions of workers in danger of losing their jobs permanently, except endless austerity on job-seeker’s allowance. And they have every intention of making workers pay for the health crisis by swingeing cuts and higher taxes in the coming years.
It is time that Labour MPs – beginning with the Campaign Group and left Labour MPs – took up the call for a general election on the government’s mishandling of the pandemic. It is not a question of making this or that ‘correction’ to the direction being taken by the Tory government. Faced with the greatest public health crisis in a hundred years, they have offering only bluster, lies and tons of sleaze. They have no right or mandate to go on. Labour should not be supporting them in any way, as, unfortunately, Starmer’s Shadow Cabinet appears to, albeit with qualifications and caveats. It should be Labour’s job, not to get the Tories out of their mess, but to start a campaign to get them out of office. We cannot wait for four more years.
It is time to call a halt, not only to the Tories’ bungling and corruption, but to the whole rotten system of the ‘free market’ that they represent, and which might offer unparalleled wealth for the ‘Few’ but only pauperisation of the ‘Many’.
October 14, 2020
