Skip to main content

Editorial: Don’t let the Tories ignore the warning signs of a new Covid surge

HEALTH chiefs’ warnings of a Covid winter crisis follow Leeds East MP Richard Burgon’s call for a proper parliamentary debate on pandemic emergency measures.

Britain is registering more new cases of Covid-19 than France, Germany, Italy and Spain combined. Morocco has just banned flights from this country because our infection rates are so high.

The government points out, accurately, that hospitalisations and deaths are at far lower levels than during previous peaks, a tribute to the success of the NHS’s vaccine rollout.

Even so, the 223 Covid-related deaths reported on Tuesday were the highest figure since early March. Ministers say they always expected a rise as autumn begins to bite. 

Yet they should not be allowed to get away with depicting deaths from this virus as an act of God any longer. That’s why Burgon’s call for MPs to have a proper debate on health policy, rather than a routine show of hands for extending coronavirus emergency powers, is so important.

There is an understandable tendency, given how effective the vaccines are proving at reducing the risks of Covid-19 and the huge relief millions feel at being able to see loved ones and socialise in a way cruelly denied us for many months, to want to put the pandemic behind us. 

The Conservative Party have a strong interest in our doing so. Because we cannot lose sight of the fact that its handling of the crisis remains among the worst anywhere in the world. 

Britain’s per capita death toll, at over 150,000, is still among the world’s highest, and even if — tragically — the rapid spread of the virus in some countries initially less affected have overtaken it, it would be absurd to be complacent given the current rise in deaths.

And the causes of the grim total can be found in government decisions (such as the refusal to raise statutory sick pay, preventing many workers from isolating), in the deeper-rooted consequences of 40 years of neoliberalism (an insecure workforce on rock-bottom wages and a health service weakened by privatisation and underfunding) and the interplay between the two (an entrenched bias towards outsourcing public services that facilitated squandering billions on incompetent private-sector players tasked with supplying equipment or running the test-and-trace system).

At each stage of the pandemic, the government has waited until catastrophe is staring us in the face before taking any action whatever. 

From January through late March 2020 it ignored warnings from China and the World Health Organisation of a deadly new virus, taking no action to shield this country or prepare the NHS. 

Its failure to use the first lockdown to build a functioning test, trace and isolate system, combined with a mulish refusal to even consider detailed proposals for enabling socially distanced learning in schools put to it by the National Education Union, resulted in another wave last autumn and another last-minute lockdown.

Most dramatically it ended up cancelling plans to resume generalised classroom teaching only on the day term actually began in January.

Ministers have not learned the lessons — because they are not the ones who have suffered the consequences. 

An insipid opposition refusing to put the case made by the pandemic for fundamental change has let them off the hook. They lead comfortably in the polls and many have been able to use the crisis to enrich friends and families. 

The left and labour movement need to shatter this complacency. Tories will portray anyone raising concerns as killjoys intent on endless lockdowns. 

The reality is that precautions around social distancing now, ending the pointless bid to bully workers back into offices as is happening to members of the PCS union at the Driver and Vehicle Licensing Agency and heeding unions on adaptations for safe schools and workplaces, are the ways to avoid the need for more drastic steps later.

OWNED BY OUR READERS

We're a reader-owned co-operative, which means you can become part of the paper too by buying shares in the People’s Press Printing Society.

 

 

Become a supporter

Fighting fund

You've Raised:£ 13,288
We need:£ 4,712
3 Days remaining
Donate today