SCOTTISH Labour leader Richard Leonard’s demand for a post-pandemic plan of action that sees government “take a leading role in restructuring our economy” is relevant not just in Scotland but across Britain.
The immediate priority of the labour movement is keeping people safe in a world where company bosses cannot be relied on to prioritise that.
The TUC’s call today for all workplaces to carry out risk assessments before they ask staff to return is therefore the right one — and Foreign Secretary Dominic Raab’s acknowledgement that any early easing of lockdown restrictions could have dangerous consequences is welcome.
Yet that cannot get his government or party off the hook for the terrible march of coronavirus through our society.
Over the weekend the global death toll from Covid-19 surpassed 200,000. Britain’s official figure is over 20,000 — more than 10 per cent of the world total when we make up less than 1 per cent of its population. And a Financial Times study that compared the death rate since Covid-19 hit with that of the same period last year indicated that more than twice as many have died as official statistics suggest.
International comparisons can be misleading — after all, many countries have simply had less severe outbreaks than Britain. But it is also plain, looking at the far better success that countries such as China, Vietnam, South Korea or, in Europe, Germany have had in keeping the infection and death rate low, that thousands are dying in Britain because of political choices.
A PM who ignores warnings, skives national security meetings and listens to dodgy advice about “herd immunity” requiring us to let the disease spread throughout the population played his role in that. But Leonard points to the deeper structural reasons why we were not well prepared for this.
His point that “economic planning is going to be essential” is surely relevant to the scandalous delays in providing front-line workers, especially in the health and care sectors, with personal protective equipment. A manufacturing base allowed to shrivel by successive governments leaves us too reliant on importing medical supplies from abroad at a time when most other countries are, quite understandably, prioritising the protection of their own people.
And so too is his call for a commitment to tackle “inefficiency, waste and exploitation” an important reminder that the “free market” trusted with meeting our needs by successive Scottish and British governments is anything but efficient, whatever magical powers are attributed to it by Thatcherite zealots.
A crackdown on “inefficiency and waste” should never again mean taking an axe to public services, wages, pensions and jobs, as it did under former chancellor George Osborne.
Osborne is already militating for a post-crisis intensification of austerity, claiming that cuts will be needed to pay off the debts we incur keeping businesses afloat and workers paid.
He should be apprised of the fact that his austerity programme, which saw local government budgets slashed by 40 per cent during his chancellorship and by even more afterwards, is one reason that councils are so cash-poor that they warned last week that many will run out of money in weeks if emergency central government support is not boosted.
“Inefficiency and waste” are rampant in a society that pays CEOs and hedge-fund managers telephone-number salaries for work of little or no social value when the key workers keeping our country running struggle to keep a roof over their heads.
Labour’s Keir Starmer pledged, on winning the party leadership contest, that after the crisis “we cannot go back to business as usual.” Of Britain’s underpaid, overworked care workers, nurses, cleaners and porters, he promised: “They were last and now they should be first.”
Labour can build on that pledge by joining trade unions in a national campaign for higher pay, proper contracts, security for renters and an economy geared to the needs of us all.
