IN January 2020 I was preparing to return to my job as an infectious disease researcher.

I had spent the previous month going door to door campaigning for Jeremy Corbyn’s Labour Party in my home city of Nottingham.

During that time I had several conversations on the doorstep where people told me that they were going to vote Conservative because this would guarantee that Brexit would finally happen.

Despite thinking that Boris Johnson was incompetent or might not have their best interests at heart, they were going to vote for him because they believed that he would finally bring about Britain leaving the European Union as they had voted for in the original referendum.

I would reply that I sympathised with their wish for Brexit to happen given that they had voted for it so long ago (bearing in mind that the Labour position on Brexit at that point was so weak and incoherent it was barely worth letting people know what it was, most people laughed in your face if you told them it).

However, I would also ask if they were worried about what the Tories would do to schools or the NHS given another parliamentary term to underfund and privatise.

They usually told me that while this was a concern, Brexit needed to happen, so they were going to vote Tory anyway, maybe for the first time ever.

Perhaps by this point the NHS had been dying for such a long time that no-one really imagined that it could finally cease to function completely.

I mention these conversations because it’s hard not to feel like we still live in the shadow of this failure to wrest control of the state away from the Tories, who are determined to let it wither and fail so that they can replace it piece by piece with systems run with the aim of turning a profit.

Not too long after my return to work in January, the research group I work in had our first Covid-19 working group meeting, to discuss what we knew about the new pathogen and to co-ordinate research that might help responses to the outbreak.

Today, as I write this a year later we are just shy of 75,000 deaths.

I see popular posts on social media chiding people for being sad in the present moment, telling them that they have no right to be sad because people suffered in WWII and kept fighting.

Here’s a fact: almost twice as many people have died of coronavirus in Britain in the past year than from German bombs dropped on British civilians during the Blitz.

It would also be nice if I could say that the future looked unambiguously promising.

Instead it looks like the government is aiming to try to weather the storm until we are able to get enough vaccines delivered.

Between now and the optimistic milestone of mid-February to vaccinate all of the people in the top four vaccination priority groups, thousands more deaths will occur.

It is unclear how much a new, more transmissible, variant of the virus will proliferate despite England’s ever-expanding tier system, which has so far been ineffective at preventing new waves of transmission.

Since last summer, the government has settled on a strategy where people are to return to work if they cannot work from home.

This also requires schools to remain open so that parents are not required at home to provide childcare.

Attempting to control transmission is to be achieved through limiting the ways that people can interact with each other outside of work.

There is nothing inherently safer about person-to-person contact at work compared to outside of work.

For retail workers, it would be safer to see friends outdoors than it is for them to interact with many customers indoors each day.

Yet one of these things is deemed “Covid secure” and is permitted whereas the other is prohibited.

The choice of which activities are permitted or prioritised is ideological.

Every day that workers cannot work because they are at home is a day of lost surplus value for capitalists.

The government was happy to reimburse businesses for lost income for a while last summer, but it is clearly reaching its limit for the amount of subsidies that it is willing to provide.

They know that poverty and desperation will drive people back into workplaces as long as they are open.

From the perspective of the capitalist class, keeping capitalist accumulation going (“protecting the economy”) is more important than preventing people dying from coronavirus.

It is important to understand this point clearly. With the devitalised Labour Party under Keir Starmer displaying no intention of subverting the interests of capital, the primary source of conflict will be between workers who do not wish to be exposed to infection versus bosses who do not wish to sacrifice any of their profits to keep their workers safe (or some businesses have not been asked to close and, without government support, feel compelled to keep operating to prevent collapse).

There were clear traces of this conflict arising in the debate over school closures.

When thousands of children were due to return to school in the new year despite transmission still remaining clearly out of control in many areas, the National Education Union (NEU) had called for schools to remain closed for an extra two weeks.

The worry over school-based transmission is a considerable one, with credible scientific support.

Schools are vast networks between households, offering the virus a potential route of infection even if other avenues have been closed off.

Thankfully children avoid practically all of the mortality associated with infection, but they do live in houses with parents and relatives that do not (as well as the potential for teachers and other school staff to become infected).

The Office for National Statistics estimated that approximately one in every 39 children in Year 7 to Year 11 were infected with the virus on December 12, a figure which has presumably got worse along with the rest of the data.

Some Tories have already begun to reply that they fear the harm on children of closing schools, a claim which would be far more plausible if they hadn’t spent the last decade plunging children into poverty.

Due to the impressive organisation and tenacity of the NEU, along with support from many other major unions such as the CWU, in the third national lockdown announced on Monday the government has moved teaching for non-key worker children online.

The restrictions on personal lives and the requirement that you continue to go to work if you are unable to do so from home remain the same.

With the government reluctant to close schools and workplaces in the face of rising admissions in rapidly filling hospitals, it seems like further life-saving transmission prevention measures in these places will need to be won through the demands of workers and their unions, to which we owe our unwavering solidarity.

Up until this latest lockdown, the decision to lock down Britain has been finally dragged out of an unwilling government through scientists using official channels such as the Scientific Advisory Group for Emergencies (Sage).

If the government begins to ignore scientists through these channels, as it has done when Sage has (albeit implicitly) suggested the closure of schools, then scientists calling for the closure of schools will be stood beside unions such as the NEU calling for the same thing.

I worry that some scientists will feel that a mistaken desire for neutrality and objectivity should prevent them from doing so.

There is no escaping science being political, especially in this current pandemic, and if you refuse to side with teachers calling for school closures (that you agree with) because it is “too political” then you run the risk of tacitly accepting the choices of the government instead.

In another 12 months time I hope I can reflect on more battles for people’s safety that were fought and won.

I hope that we can understand why we were so poorly prepared for this pandemic in terms of what kind of politics we suffered under before it happened, so that we can never repeat it again.

Joel Hellewell writes fortnightly for the Morning Star as part of the Science and Society team.