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Parliamentary political-distancing: Rees-Mogg's charade

How ludicrous is the sight of MPs queuing in the quadrangles of the Palace of Westminster?

Rees-Mogg contrived this gathering of the gullible and gormless in order to give his besieged premier the supportive claque he needs when the questioning becomes too searching to bear and when Johnson's body language and temper too obviously exposes his inadequacies.

In doing so Rees-Mogg has subverted the formal myths which sustain the illusion that this diseased institution is designed to hold the government accountable.

By all accounts the 45-minute queue to vote was full of Tory MPs complaining about being forced to dance the Covid-19 Tango before going into the chamber to vote for a procedure which will force them to stand in line every time the government feels obliged to demonstrate the size of its majority.

Any MP falling into the categories which government advice insists remain isolated should be precluded from voting and a good number sensibly stayed at home. According to the same advice, now that the business secretary has gone down with the symptoms of Covid-19, anyone who came in contact with him should immediately isolate. In thus notionally narrowing the pool of active MPs even further the House of Commons becomes more an empty vessel than a functioning parliament.

You have to wonder at the mindset of any MP daft enough to go along with this. The Tories have a majority. Labour doesn't need to play patsy with Rees-Mogg. The millions of workers forced back to work in dangerous conditions and those still sheltering at home would understand if Labour said it was not going along with this nonsense.

Rees-Mogg pretends that these procedures are designed to restore the Commons as the forum where the government is held accountable. On the contrary, his intent is to afford the prime minister protection from those who might actually hold him accountable.

The morbidly suspicious will conclude that this charade has been staged to bring further pressure on public opinion to tolerate a dangerous dismissal of the scientific and medical advice and relax the lockdown rules.

Whenever the government's principal scientific and medical advisors appear alongside ministers they are careful to maintain the appropriate social distance. But critical here is the not-so-subtle political distancing that these eminent professionals are now employing.

Where once ministers carefully constructed each sentence to emphasise that they were guided by the science they now employ formulations of increasing opacity.

The scientific and medical consensus is that the status of the preventative measures should not be downgraded. The reality is that active measures by the government and unsubtle messaging from the monopoly media are in place to drive a further dissolution of the lockdown regime.

There is very great pressure from Labour for the government to publish the findings of a report into the incidence of Covid-19 infection among black and minority-ethnic people.

Already there is a wide understanding that essential workers are especially vulnerable to coronavirus infection. Any further evidence which shows that where class and race intersect workers are even more at risk will not come as a surprise to anyone who works in the health system, the public services, manufacturing, transport or everywhere where employers put profits before people.

This question offers Labour an opportunity to bring home to the nation the way in which racial discrimination has become deeply embedded as a persistent feature of the capitalist labour market, but it also opens the way to a clearer explanation that each pattern of discrimination, every example of oppression and exploitation is rooted in the particular history and class nature of British society.

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