IT IS A strange fact that the some of the richest countries in the world have some of the worst outcomes in the pandemic, along with other countries like Brazil.  

Given that social conditions, housing and, above all, health services are far better resourced in the richest countries, this can only mean one thing. It is government policy that it is driving the crisis.

Frequently, government claims on the pandemic lapse into unverifiable or even demonstrably untrue assertions. 

“We are all going to get it anyway,” or, “Government cannot do anything about it,” (Biden), or it is a natural phenomenon that we can no more effect than the changing of the tides, in Boris Johnson’s terms, “We just have to ride out this wave.”

This is all entirely false. The virus is a naturally occurring phenomenon. But the huge global disparities in death tolls, and in the numbers suffering serious long-term illness through long Covid, puncture these myths. 

If death by Covid-19 were unavoidable it would naturally fall heaviest on those societies which were least able to offer medical treatment and mitigations. 

But the huge discrepancy lies in the opposite direction. Poorer countries are faring much better, despite their lack of resources, and despite the scandalous lack of vaccine support for them from the rich countries.

The website Our World in Data operated by Johns Hopkins University is indispensable in understanding the trajectory of the pandemic in detail (and much else besides, including climate change). It is highly recommended.

They use the internationally recognised categorisations of countries by income. It is a startling fact that the low-income countries as a group have the lowest cumulative death tolls in the world — 59 deaths per million in total at the time of writing. 

As we ascend the income scale, these totals rise. So, the lower middle income group has 360 deaths, the upper middle income counties have just over 900 deaths and the high-income countries have over 1,600 deaths per million. 

This last total is a huge multiple of the per capita death toll in the poorest countries. This group is the one that Britain belongs to, along with the United States and most of the countries of the European Union.

Rich countries have not faced a more severe virus than the rest of the world. But the combination of social factors, including the frequency of international travel and disastrous policy choices, has led to far worse outcomes.  

Of course, there are always anomalies in large groups. But the huge death toll in Brazil, from a government that slavishly follows the Western neoliberal model, simply reinforces the idea the carnage in the richest and worst-affected countries is a reflection of public policy.

Because that is what is really at stake here. The Economist now estimates that just under 19 million people have died from Covid worldwide. 

This is equivalent to the death toll in a major war (World War I’s death toll is estimated around 20 million). Overwhelmingly, these are in the richer countries.

Shortly after the bailout of the banks in the global financial crisis in 2007-8, the richest Western economies generally imposed austerity. 

One key side-effect was the rundown in the healthcare services. In this country it meant that the NHS was completely unprepared for a pandemic that had long been forecast, with huge staff shortages, high turnover because of terrible conditions and pay, and lacking even the basics in terms of PPE. 

Never forget that it was the Tory Party as whole, former health secretary Jeremy Hunt included, as well as the Lib Dems, who decimated the NHS. 

The upshot was that we had tearful nurses using binbags for protection as the pandemic erupted, and matters have scarcely improved since. 

The government’s response was not to address the crisis of its own making. It did the opposite, and used the crisis to privatise NHS functions, such as Test and Trace, wasting tens of billions on useless services and equipment where, magically, Tory donors and friends were always at the front of the queue.

At the same time, they introduced a raft of authoritarian legislation to increase the powers of the government and the state and to reduce the accountability of both. 

Hard-won rights on voting, right to assembly and freedom of speech are all now under threat. 

Government efforts to divert any emerging opposition to them include the demonisation of refugees, of young black men and of Muslims. 

Deportation flights, pushing back in the Channel and the powers to make black and Asian British citizens stateless are meant to offer a distraction. The measures certainly win plaudits from the bulk of the media.

In addition, austerity is back with a vengeance. The state pension retirement age is being “reviewed” once again, after the Tories reneged on their promise on the triple-lock. 

Taxes and National Insurance have both risen, without any tangible benefit for the NHS and nothing at all for social care. And free-market ideology is causing an absolute crisis in energy costs at a time when real wages are already plummeting. 

Hard-won rights and conditions at work are also being torn up, not least through the dirty practice of “fire and rehire,” or even just the threat of it.

This is the full gamut of reactionary policies that Tories have always dreamed of, stretching back at least as far as the immediate post-WWII period, when they repeatedly opposed the introduction of the NHS and the welfare state. 

It is vital that the left and the labour movement as a whole understands how this is possible. The Tory wish list on reactionary social, political and economic policy has always been there. 

Yet they are only now able to implement Enoch Powell’s policies on race and the Monday Club’s policies on the economy because of their deliberately catastrophic handling of the pandemic.

The policy on the pandemic is not a side-show, as some seem to think. It is the main event. The chaos caused and the uncertainty created are the perfect cover to pursue this agenda. And who is hardest hit, as the government trumpets freedom for the virus?

As the government statisticians at the Office for National Statistics recently made clear, it is working people (especially in the NHS and teaching), poorer people, disabled people and women who are bearing the brunt. 

We know from previous ONS reports, black and Asian people are hugely disproportionately hit.

These are our people, workers and the most disadvantaged and oppressed who are on the front line. The Tories will never stand up for them. So we must.

Diane Abbott is Labour MP for Hackney North and Stoke Newington.