Consider Keir Starmer's Coronavirus record. His approach to the government has seen Labour, um, shadow the government in most aspects. He quickly grasped calling for a two-week "circuit breaker" during half-term was epidemiologically sensible and politically doable. Not too much damage to kids' schooling, and a quick points win - especially when the Tories would be forced to act by rising infections and hospital admissions, all without straying too far from the government's strategy and remaining entirely faithful to SAGE recommendations. Apart from this, at times Keir has proven even more zealous about opening everything to some level of normality. 30 seconds into the leader's shoes he was demanding a timetable for an exit strategy, and there was the embarrassment of notifying the government that he expected the schools to open on time and sod clinical realities. Where Keir has ventured into criticism, it's been process and details, and the famous focus on incompetence. These are necessary criticisms, but not the be-all and end-all of opposition in the age of Covid.
Limiting criticism to Tory cluelessness is ridiculous for two reasons. It lets whoever succeeds Johnson off for his smorgasbord of sin and foregrounds Conservative reinvention - surely a chief lesson of the 2019 general election no one ever talks about. And second, it's simply not true. Appointing cronies and manifesting incoherence is not a case of Johnson being rubbish, it's systematic, a part-consequence of competing pressures. In other words, it's political. This leads us to asking a similar question about Labour's pitiful opposition. Keir's managerialism is more than a personal quirk, of the UK's leading lawyer seamlessly transitioning into the front rank of British politics without disturbing a single, brylcreemed strand nor any ingrained habits of mind. It's deliberate, and sits within the Labourist tradition.
Consider the latest intervention by way of an illustration. Looking aghast at Number 10's staffing shenanigans, Keir has condemned the affair as "pathetic". Or, to quote him more fully, "We're in the middle of a pandemic, we're all worried about our health and our families, we're all worried about our jobs, and this lot are squabbling behind the door of number ten. It's pathetic. Pull yourselves together, focus on the job in hand." The important part is my emphasis. When Keir confronts Johnson at Prime Minister's Questions, he affects the aspect of an exasperated teacher reprimanding a lazy schoolboy and threatening to send his parents a cause for concern letter. He offers less a critique and more a backhanded form of encouragement to get this right. The pull-your-socks-up discourse makes sense in a pandemic, and meshes seamlessly into Keir's comfort zone of Tory incompetence, but ultimately he's rushing to their rescue. When he says he wants them to do well, he genuinely means it.
The chief beneficiary of Keir's "opposition" to the Tories is the principle of state authority. This is why he, and Labour politicians generally, steer clear of structural criticism or taking the Tories to task for corruption and cronyism. It's either about being "mistaken" and having the wrong ideas, or not being up to the job. Talking about interests and the rootedness of the Tories in Britain's broken political economy raises awkward questions, including the wider legitimacy of the state - with all its laws and ideologies. This must be protected at all costs, not because of deep seated parliamentary cretinism, but because Labourism is fundamentally statist. Labourist politics relies on mass passivity, it's an elite project where the masses vote in the politicians, and they make the changes by passing legislation. This basic assumption, this ontology of establishment politics is responsible for commonalities between the parties and why, when all is said and done, MPs across from one another get on, go to gigs, strike up friendships, and wax lyrically about shared values and having more in common. Keir is not only doing Labourism by not encroaching on state authority, he's actually protecting it by overlooking the criminality and overt sectionalism of the Tories. Any honest politics would join the dots, but the only truth that matters here is the power he might enjoy in Number 10.
Who then is going to speak for the dead? Not asking serious questions about 50,000 deceased persons is as much a structural feature of Starmerist politics as recklessness is of the contemporary Conservative scene. Whoever ends up speaking for the lives lost, it's not likely to be Labour's front bench.
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25 comments:
Keir Starmer is a waste of space. The LOYAL opposition. More concerned with attacking the Labour left than opposing the Tory government that is getting tens of thousands of people killed... again.
Are the similar levels of dead in Spain, France and Italy on the Tories too?
Different countries have adopted different strategies. In Europe, at least, the outcome has been similar. I think you over-estimate the capacity of a democratic government to react in the circumstances.
My own instinct was very much to blame them, because obviously they could have done a lot more a lot better. However, seeing how other countries have performed, I am not convinced EVEN WITH THESE MEASURES they would have successfully combatted the virus without a permanent lockdown which basically halted any activity whatsoever until a vaccine arrived.
Anonymous@08:38 has a point: it isn't just the UK that has failed on Covid, but the entire Western world outside the Antipodes.
Sub-Saharan Africa seems to have suffered minimal impact due to fundamental factors: its population is young, and many of them are subsistence farmers who spend a lot of time outdoors (= lots of Vitamin D) and have minimal contact with the outside world.
Other that however, almost all the Covid success stories seem to be in the Asia/Pacific region. What did they do right that the West did wrong?
* Was it that (like the Africa previously mentioned) they have a slim population? The obese aren't just more likely to die or become seriously ill if they are infected, but they are also better at spreading the virus in the first place (as their lungs have to work so much harder).
* Was it that East Asian countries were able to shut down foreign travel in a timely manner without being accused of racism (as they lack an open-borders movement comparable to that in the West)? Perhaps New Zealand benefited from having a left-leaning PM because of the logic of "only Nixon could go to China"? Perhaps only Jacinda Ardern could seal the borders?
* Was it that in East Asian countries the infected (those who either test positive or show symptoms) are sent away to centralized quarantine facilities rather than being expected to self-isolate at home (which usually fails to protect the rest of their household)?
* Was it that East Asians already had partial immunity to Covid-19 due to previous (undetected) encounters with either a milder version of that virus, or another near-harmless coronavirus?
I'm guessing there's a lot of research being done to answer this question!
You are quite right that Labour's criticism of the Tories is opportunist, and of course fails to ask the question of why the NHS never can and never does actually protect the interests of workers where it contradicts the interest of capital. In other words it steers clear of a class analysis, and a recognition that the state including the welfare state component of it, is a class state that acts on behalf of capital not workers. The reformists of course go along with all the rubbish about the NHS being "our" NHS, when it is no such thing, and if it was, then following the MRSA scandals, the abandonment of old people to lie in heir own faeces, and starve to death, become dehydrated, due to negligence would mean that we ought to be eternally shamed by it.
But, in relation to Covid, its not even clear that the Tories have that direct responsibility. The decision to send old people with COVID back to infect the old in care homes, was not a decision of the Tories, but of NHS hospital administrators themselves. Tory cuts hold some of the blame, but many of the things that could have been done to ensure isolation and so on, come down to simply not acting with basic common sense, by bureaucrats.
Its that which is responsible for all of the deaths of the elderly in care homes and hospitals, together with the ridiculous imposition of lockdowns of the general population 80% of whom are unaffected by the virus, rather than focusing attention on the elderly and vulnerable, and isolating them from it.
«and a quick points win [...] 30 seconds into the leader's shoes he was demanding a timetable for an exit strategy»
It is indeed all about point scoring in the delusion that voters are swayed by that and not by their vote-moving material interests. If the assumption that all that matters is point-scoring with gullible voters, then the opposition can just criticize the government for not delivering the moon on a stick, such as absolute safety with no economic disruption, without any mistakes or corruption either of course.
But that's not politics, it is just craven opportunism, and most voters are not that gullible, and anyhow have other vote-moving issues.
«Keir is not only doing Labourism by not encroaching on state authority, he's actually protecting it by overlooking the criminality and overt sectionalism of the Tories. Any honest politics would join the dots, but the only truth that matters here is the power he might enjoy in Number 10.»
My guess is that it is no so much about himsels, but that there is a whole generation of "professional" Labour MPs who (like Chuka Umunna I think was) are extremely frustrated to be backbenchers and not have had ministerial careers yet, and who look at their counterparts across the aisle and know they got ministerial careers by selling tory policies to tory voters, and want to outcompete them on that.
"When he says he wants them to do well, he actually means it...". With regards to the pandemic this is obviously the position to take. For the Tories to "do well" it means fewer deaths. To wish them to do badly means more people die. This is a moral not political position. Unless I've misunderstood you, your statement makes no sense.
«Are the similar levels of dead in Spain, France and Italy on the Tories too?»
Pretty much yes, just their local tories or more precisely their local "Washington consensus" elites and thatcherites, those grown with the saying saying that "the most terrifying phrase is 'I am from the government and I want to help you'".
«In Europe, at least, the outcome has been similar. I think you over-estimate the capacity of a democratic government to react in the circumstances.xc
Are the governments of New Zealand, Japan, south Korea, Taiwan "province", anti-democratic?
Note that the "quasi-Conservative" ("Labourist") opposition does not make a big fuss of those countries because a convention followed by both the UK press and politicians is that (unfavourable) international comparison are unpatriotic and irritate voters, because of english supremacism.
«they would have successfully combatted the virus without a permanent lockdown which basically halted any activity whatsoever until a vaccine arrived.»
The countries that had better outcomes did not do anything like that. They had efficient, non-thatcherite (not based on "screw-everybody-else") and well organized public health approaches based on collective respect for rules during relatively short periods of hard-lockdown needed to prepare extensive test-and-tracing and focus on specific contagion hotspots, and for example Taiwan "province" has had no lockdown and no COVID deaths for over 6 months, and COVID has been negligible in China for a long time, after the initial period of hard lockdown in hotspots.
Among european countries that have done better than the usual suspects, Germany has done something similar on a smaller scale, and Sweden's "immunity herd" policy has largely relied on swedes understanding the "don't be jerks" idea and being careful about avoiding spreading contagion instead of hollering about "the undeniable and secular freedoms to spread contagious diseases" or "who cares about spreading contagious diseases, I am alright Jack".
It is all about a higher level of civilization, what some call "social capital", where voters (and as a consequence their state officials) are less corrupt; how to control contagious diseases is very well known and has been for millennia, find and isolate hotspots. National lock-downs are only necessary when finding and isolating hotspots is beyond the organizational and civic capabilities of a (thatcherite or otherwise) state, that is when the state is fundamentally meant to be extractive or to protect extractive elites.
'Who Will Speak For The Dead'- Could not be have been said better. If there is not an investigation into why the UK has had such a high death toll we should ask ourselves why... If our MPs don't demand this- It is this which will tell us something about the future of politics in the UK.... What we value. Who will speak up for those that don't have a voice? Value is value.
I think they meant that the Tories' policies won't work (which is true) but Starmer will support them, to protect "the economy", In other words, Starmer's "Labour" is blairism 2.0: Tories with red ties.
Who will speak for the dead?
With 22 times the UK population, China has suffered less than 5k covid19 deaths.That's better than 1/220th of our death rate by population. Our deaths could have been in the low hundreds with a decent government.
Love it or loath it Kier is attempting to steer the LP ship to position it to take power when we have a GE
Hi Phil when is your book coming out? Looking forward to reading it.
Olwen
«Our deaths could have been in the low hundreds with a decent government.»
That would have required a more civilized national culture, the government is just symptom of that. My usual quote about the virtues of democracy:
https://www.theguardian.com/theguardian/2010/dec/11/simon-hoggarts-week
«An old mining MP called Bill Stone, who used to sit in the corner of the Strangers' Bar drinking pints of Federation ale to dull the pain of his pneumoconiosis.
He was eavesdropping on a conversation at the bar, where someone said exasperatedly about the Commons: "The trouble with this place is, it's full of c*nts!"
Bill put down his pint, wiped the foam from his lip and said: "They's plenty of c*nts in the country, and they deserve some representation." (To get the full effect, say it aloud in a broad northern accent.)
As a description of parliamentary democracy, that strikes me as unbeatable.»
«Kier is attempting to steer the LP ship to position it to take power»
The matter is not taking power for the sake of the dreams of a ministerial career for Chuka Umunna clones, but for whom's sake power is taken for, and New, New Labour seems set to take power with the votes of the affluent tory middle classes, and with policies designed for their benefit.
Even that is an illusion: the affluent tory middle classes as a rule won't change their vote from Conservative to New, New Labour merely to get a theoretical improvement in the management of tory policies, they will vote against the Conservatives only if by 2024 the Conservatives have failed them on their vote moving issue.
"«Our deaths could have been in the low hundreds with a decent government.»
That would have required a more civilized national culture, the government is just symptom of that."
I agree with this up to a point. No doubt this nation is stuffed full of covidiots or virus terrorists as I like to call them. More dangerous that any Muslim with a truck, a knife or a suicide vest, and that is a fact.
When the first lockdown ended there was a poll that said over 70% of people were against relaxing the lockdown. This was consistent with every other poll on the topic.
So the government ended the first lockdown because they put profits above public health and they ignored the wishes of the public. In other words they caved into the pressure of the 5 million business oweners and their families and Boffy. In actual fact the entire lying narrative from the political class and the stenographers of the ruling class (known laughably as Journalism) was that people were desperate to end lockdown and get infected with the disease or better still infect dear old granny!
Having said that the government are also trying to strike a balance between science and the genocidal ideas of people like Boffy. I think they would like to just ignore the scientists but that would also have economic consequences, as much of the workforce would be off sick and other parts of the workforce would be watching loved ones die in their beds.
It seems to me that re-configuring the economy to make more people work from home, which incidentally is overwhelming popular, is long over due even without the virus. So why not use the virus as an excuse to get organisations to implement the necessary technologies to enable home working to be as efficient and effective as possible?
The only thing stopping home working is the insane economic 'idea' that we need people to randomly pass shops, stop in their tracks, and go into the shop to buy something they can absolutely do without and do not need.
No wonder it is called the dismal science!
Jenny, it's easy for a totalitarian regime like China's to suppress the virus – they have no qualms about locking up all the passengers of a bus because one of them tested positive for Covid – but are you so afraid of the virus that you would be willing to trust our government with such powers?
BCFG
one thing about all this WFH is that it may revitalise local communities, shops etc - i know we use our local butcher, baker etc a lot more than before.
«it's easy for a totalitarian regime like China's to suppress the virus – they have no qualms about locking up all the passengers of a bus because one of them tested positive for Covid – but are you so afraid of the virus that you would be willing to trust our government with such powers?»
The innocent optimism of this comment amuses me, here is his eminence Lord Sumption, who has a fairly hard libertarian positions, describing the legal powers involved:
https://www.irishtimes.com/life-and-style/people/the-cleverest-man-in-britain-on-why-england-should-resist-lockdown-1.4402266
And the interviewer remarks:
«Most of the lockdown’s legal restrictions are based on powers given to the government under the Public Health Act (1984) to control the spread of infectious diseases. Sumption argues that the government is acting unlawfully, not because it is using the powers in the Act for an extraneous purpose but because it only authorises restrictions on infected people. [...]
The government could have used the almost unlimited emergency powers available to it under the Civil Contingencies Act 2004, which allows the executive to govern by decree. But Sumption points out that the sweeping powers under the Civil Contingencies Act must be renewed regularly by parliament.»
Note that the latter is so similar to the "Enabling Law" of the Weimar Republic :-(.
Note also that “locking up all the passengers of a bus because one of them tested positive for Covid” in the UK would fall under the powers of just the Public Health Act (1984) because the passengers would have to be presumed infectious until contrary proof.
Because that is what works with contagion: find and lock-up the infectious is essential, and if the state does not have the capacity to do so, lock-up everybody.
In practice every government, whatever else they do, reserve to themselves totalitarian powers if needs must, like locking-up those infected or suspected of being infected. How easily they use them depends on expected popular reaction.
I saw photograph of soldiers with automatic rifles manning roadblocks to contain infected areas in Italy. Is Italy a totalitarian state in the same way as China?
«No doubt this nation is stuffed full of covidiots or virus terrorists as I like to call them.»
Oops, that's not my main point as to “a more civilized national culture”, even if that comes after comments on voluntary self-discipline. My main point was that the "best" countries had this:
“efficient [...] and well organized public health approaches based on collective respect for rules during relatively short periods of hard-lockdown needed to prepare extensive test-and-tracing and focus on specific contagion hotspots”
Their higher level of civilization is demonstrated by being prepared for rare but catastrophic contingencies, in having those “efficient [...] and well organized public health approaches”, in having spent effort and money to build an efficient and effective collective response ahead of time. In some countries this is not done not just to keep taxes lower but also to ensure that the state is never seen as having a positive role.
Indeed in the UK many right-wing propagandists have called for the abolition of the "communist" NHS for having been unable to cope with both COVID and its normal workload (without adding that it is because it barely has the resources to cope with its lowest level of summer workload, and is strained by ordinary winter surges, because of political decisions to minimize its cost and make it look bad, a strategy called "crapification").
Even if “respect for rules during relatively short periods of hard-lockdown“ while the public health machinery gets into motion is also needed, and may be in shorter supply in "screw everybody else" cultures, the big deal is the popular willingness to fund and setup adequate and effective contingency operations, and popular support of their operation.
BTW as to "civilization", sometimes the state needs anyhow the help of the population, here is an example:
https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2020-09-17/behind-china-s-epic-dash-for-ppe-that-left-the-world-short-on-masks
"they have no qualms about locking up all the passengers of a bus because one of them tested positive for Covid"
Better the Chinese way that allowing any old virus terrorist to carry on as if nothing was happening.
Actually locking up everyone on a bus where someone had covid is actually called Test and Trace.
Test and Trace does not involve saying to people, we know you have got the virus, would you jolly mind not spreading it to others, pretty please. And please don't go shopping, nudge nudge, wink, wink!
Carty, in my view, actually supports genocide, let the weak, the vulnerable and unlucky die, all in the name of 'freedom'. Carty must have been a real cheerleader for the Vietnam war right, I am surprised he wasn't a member of Rock Against Communism. I bet the sentinel was!
Incidentally has Boffy provided that ip yet?
There seems to be a lot of misinformation about how different countries have managed the Covid epidemic. There isn't a neat pattern of all Europe bad, All Asia good. Nor all developed countries bad, all non-developed good. In fact there is no consistent pattern. If we take deaths per million of population, we find that countries with more than 100k cases, but less than 200 deaths per million include such places as: Germany (152), Turkey (137), Denmark (132), Morocco (129), kazakhstan (101), Phillipines (71), Indonesia (56) Bangladesh (38), Japan (15) and Ethiopia (14). I'd love to know what that list have in common. WHile countries with over 100k cases, but more than 500 deaths per 100k, include: Belgium (1242), Peru (1063), Argentina (781), UK (764), Mexico (761), USA (760), Bolivia (754), Sweden (609), Armenia (603), Iran (497). Again, it's not clear to me what these countries have in common. To say that all European countries have a similarly dismal record, is utterly wrong. At the moment, without any other clear indicators of what might link the relative performances of disparate countries, we can only assume that it is the decisions made by the individual governments of each that is the explanation. There is nothing to suggest this is not a very significant factor, and logic suggests it is very likely to be. So, no excusing the Tories just because, France, Italy and Spain also did badly. Rather, it suggests that there is more in common in their approach than the labels their governing parties choose imply.
«we can only assume that it is the decisions made by the individual governments of each that is the explanation»
That is simplistic: I just read an argument that for countries, like many 3rd world ones, where most of the population is young, would be expected to have a per-million death rate 1/10th (ten times smaller) than most european countries with a much larger proportion of older residents.
«So, no excusing the Tories just because, France, Italy and Spain also did badly.»
Indeed, because south Korea, China-Taiwan, Japan, Singapore also have a similar age profile, and the difference then is that they had a well funded and organized public health approach based on test-and-trace and isolation of hotspots.
Blissex - Of course it isn't the only explanation. But it is one, and I would suggest a very important one (as you seem to agree in your comment later)
The age distributions of the groups of countries I mention are also very different, so cannot account for why the UK and Peru (or Mexico), for example, are both suffering particularly badly. No suggestion of a 10x difference here! Peru and Mexico have 7% over 65 and 27% under 15, compared to UK 18.5% and 18%. Iran, which is also having high death rates, has 5% over 65, and 24% under 15. Meanwhile, among countries doing well, Germany has 21.5% over 65, Japan an astonishing 27%! So, I would suggest that age does not seem to explain it.
Dunno about Peru (an economy and development level inimical to mass-WFH is probably a major culprit) but I suspect obesity was a big factor in why the UK, US and Mexico were hit so badly (and why East Asian countries weren't: Japan doesn't have a surveillance state like South Korea's but still did far better than Germany thanks to its slim population).
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