Editorial: Lockdown Exit is Not the Priority for Working People – It's Safety
Morning Star, London
Screen grab of Chief Medical Officer Chris Whitty (left) and Foreign Secretary Dominic Raab during a media briefing in Downing Street, London, on coronavirus today
THE coronavirus crisis is already changing our thought processes and our behaviour.
It is extremely difficult to stop touching our face or rubbing our eyes, but doing so must become a normal and permanent part of our behaviour.
This was pointed out with great clarity yesterday by Prof Susan Michie, now the BBC World at One’s go-to expert on behaviour change.
Personal behaviour change is also a change in social behaviour. This cannot come about simply as the result of regulation and law.
The reason why millions of people are behaving in radically different ways is because they are convinced it makes sense and the consequent regulatory regime is seen as necessary and therefore desirable.
Where rules or law enforcement are seen as arbitrary, unfair or unreasonable, no amount of coercive force will command willing acceptance.
This is what has impelled the new guidance given to police in regulating our shopping and exercise regimes and this demonstrates the truth that the relationship between coercion and consent in shaping the way we live and work is constantly renegotiated.
It has taken the Covid-19 infection to turn this dialectical exchange into the burning issue of public policy and politics.
On the ruling-class right in politics and the media, there is a disreputable narrative which poses economic recovery and the resumption of normal industrial, commercial and financial activities as a priority that trumps the necessity to maintain social distancing and the other behavioural changes that are so necessary to control the transmission of the virus.
This neatly turns on its head the immensely telling idea that Jeremy Corbyn wove into the fabric of our politics.
No-one will campaign under the slogan “Profit before People,” but this is the malign idea that drives some of the discussion about the exit strategy that clearly informs government thinking, and which has become a test for Sir Keir Starmer.
According to Britain’s notoriously imprecise, unwritten, make-it-up-on-the-fly constitution, the job of Her Majesty’s loyal opposition is to oppose.
Which raises the question of why the Labour leader is banging on about the government’s as-yet unformulated “exit strategy” when the most pressing problems for working people are the appalling death rate; the desperate situation in our care homes; the lack of adequate personal-protection kit for front-line workers; the complete failure to prepare an adequate plan for testing, isolation and contact tracing, and the uneven provision of short-term financial support for big sectors of the population prevented from working or unemployed.
The answer from the political sophisticates on Labour’s right wing — the New Statesman’s political commentator Stephen Bush, for example — is to claim that “the lesson from Starmer’s short and meteoric rise thus far is that he has a good instinct for anticipating where the political debate will move, and shifting so that the fight takes place on his preferred battleground.
“We saw that plainly enough in Labour’s Brexit wars, a battle in which he was, at one time or another heavily criticised by Remainers and Leavers alike.
“But when the dust settled, it was Starmer’s Brexit strategy that won out: and Starmer who became Labour leader.”
Bush overlooks the uncomfortable fact that this strategy cost Labour the election.
Boris Johnson, with the benefit of his classical education, might remind the Labour leader of Plutarch’s aphorism that one more such victory and we shall be utterly ruined.
For working people the battle that needs to be fought in the here and now is one which makes comprehensive testing, contact tracing and isolation the necessary precondition for the revival of any economic activity or social life that drives people back to work.
Screen grab of Chief Medical Officer Chris Whitty (left) and Foreign Secretary Dominic Raab during a media briefing in Downing Street, London, on coronavirus today
THE coronavirus crisis is already changing our thought processes and our behaviour.
It is extremely difficult to stop touching our face or rubbing our eyes, but doing so must become a normal and permanent part of our behaviour.
This was pointed out with great clarity yesterday by Prof Susan Michie, now the BBC World at One’s go-to expert on behaviour change.
Personal behaviour change is also a change in social behaviour. This cannot come about simply as the result of regulation and law.
The reason why millions of people are behaving in radically different ways is because they are convinced it makes sense and the consequent regulatory regime is seen as necessary and therefore desirable.
Where rules or law enforcement are seen as arbitrary, unfair or unreasonable, no amount of coercive force will command willing acceptance.
This is what has impelled the new guidance given to police in regulating our shopping and exercise regimes and this demonstrates the truth that the relationship between coercion and consent in shaping the way we live and work is constantly renegotiated.
It has taken the Covid-19 infection to turn this dialectical exchange into the burning issue of public policy and politics.
On the ruling-class right in politics and the media, there is a disreputable narrative which poses economic recovery and the resumption of normal industrial, commercial and financial activities as a priority that trumps the necessity to maintain social distancing and the other behavioural changes that are so necessary to control the transmission of the virus.
This neatly turns on its head the immensely telling idea that Jeremy Corbyn wove into the fabric of our politics.
No-one will campaign under the slogan “Profit before People,” but this is the malign idea that drives some of the discussion about the exit strategy that clearly informs government thinking, and which has become a test for Sir Keir Starmer.
According to Britain’s notoriously imprecise, unwritten, make-it-up-on-the-fly constitution, the job of Her Majesty’s loyal opposition is to oppose.
Which raises the question of why the Labour leader is banging on about the government’s as-yet unformulated “exit strategy” when the most pressing problems for working people are the appalling death rate; the desperate situation in our care homes; the lack of adequate personal-protection kit for front-line workers; the complete failure to prepare an adequate plan for testing, isolation and contact tracing, and the uneven provision of short-term financial support for big sectors of the population prevented from working or unemployed.
The answer from the political sophisticates on Labour’s right wing — the New Statesman’s political commentator Stephen Bush, for example — is to claim that “the lesson from Starmer’s short and meteoric rise thus far is that he has a good instinct for anticipating where the political debate will move, and shifting so that the fight takes place on his preferred battleground.
“We saw that plainly enough in Labour’s Brexit wars, a battle in which he was, at one time or another heavily criticised by Remainers and Leavers alike.
“But when the dust settled, it was Starmer’s Brexit strategy that won out: and Starmer who became Labour leader.”
Bush overlooks the uncomfortable fact that this strategy cost Labour the election.
Boris Johnson, with the benefit of his classical education, might remind the Labour leader of Plutarch’s aphorism that one more such victory and we shall be utterly ruined.
For working people the battle that needs to be fought in the here and now is one which makes comprehensive testing, contact tracing and isolation the necessary precondition for the revival of any economic activity or social life that drives people back to work.
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