The Reckless Ending of Self-Isolation

In a piece published by the BBC earlier this month, we were reminded that as well as killing 50 million people globally (220-odd thousand in the UK), Spanish Flu's lingering legacy was a surge in Parkinson's disease in the 1960s among cohorts born between 1888 and 1924. Researchers found they were two-to-three times more likely to develop Parkinson's than those who weren't young at the time of that pandemic. Covid-19 has only been with us for just over two years, but we know already that it can become a long-term illness. Our comrade Ed Rooksby, who passed away this time a year ago from complications arising from long Covid - after experiencing a relatively mild illness initially - reminds us of the debilitating and life threatening consequences this virus poses to some otherwise healthy people. But we're still not talking about the long-term consequences. Covid increases the chances of strokes and heart attacks and it threatens the brain, storing up neurological nasties for later in life.

Knowing all this makes the government's latest announcement all the more unconscionable. As reported last month, Boris Johnson dropped a very big hint that he was considering scrapping the requirement to self-isolate for those who test positive. Nothing to do with clinical requirements or "the science". Everything to do with mollifying the the Conservative Friends of Covid on the back benches in the hope those no confidence letters will keep away from Graham Brady's letter box. Having already been whittled down to five days, Sajid Javid today delivered the coup de grace: all restrictions will be lifted a month early. It's hedged with the caveat about continuing positive data, but since when has this Tory government allowed the epidemiology to inconvenience their political timetable?

Let's be clear what this means. The immunosuppressed and clinically vulnerable have been thrown under the bus by the government. Nothing says "you don't matter" more clearly than not taking their health into account. The Tories are also dooming tens of thousands of the unvaccinated to chronic illness and the risk of death, people who are, for the most part, our people. And that's before we get to the stupidity of allowing Omicron and its newly emergent BA.2 sub-variant to circulate freely. This increases the chance of mutation in even more transmissible, if not virulent directions (again, Covid is not predestined to evolve toward harmlessness. For all the talk of Omicron's "mild symptoms", it is still worse than the original strain). With large numbers triple jabbed, it has the opportunity to "learn" vaccine escape, possibly making it more difficult to combat until the next generation of Covid drugs are available. And thanks to its already tricksy adaptations vis a vis vaccines and ability to reinfect weeks after an initial recovery, contracting it repeatedly is going to wear the body down, making people more vulnerable to other infections, and increase the chances of long-term damage along the lines indicated above. Learning to live with Covid on the terms chosen by the Tories means learning to cope with the long-term illness and unnecessary bereavements of tens of thousands more people.

On the narrow point of ending self-isolation, like all things Covid the Tories are guided by managing the class politics. This has come in two bitter flavours: being careful to ensure the emergency measures implemented in the earliest phase of the pandemic did not open the door to thinking about an alternative politics. Don't expect the state to do you any favours, you're on your own. A point recently underlined by Superspreader Sunak's energy bill "relief". And the other? Making sure the subordination of wage labour to capital returns to as it was prior to Covid. Taking away the legal requirement to self-isolate turns the clock back to the bad old days when employers demanded their staff to be in work come what may, regardless of illness and health status. The Tories are determined to get workers under the watchful eyes of their employers not just because they're the worst idlers in the world, according to the Deputy Prime Minister, but so those city-located workers can start spending again, fuelling retail business growth, more rents, and more investment opportunities for asset-rich interests. The Tories don't want millions of workers to take anything from their brief respite from in-person drudgery, be it alternative ways of working or questioning why they have to spend a good whack of the wage on transport costs.

This is, or should be, a ready made issue for the left. The struggle for decent sick pay and the right to be ill and not have to work for the duration is elementary labour movement politics. But in conjunction with Tory efforts to keep the horizon of political possibility as low as they can, few have risen to the challenge of exploiting the openings the pandemic offered. I.e. The ability and willingness of the state to splurge resources when its system is at risk, the reorganisation of social life, rethinking what work is for, and how naked the Tories' class politics have presented themselves throughout the crisis. Unfortunately, because the labour movement collectively and the Labour leadership in particular didn't or outright refused to rise to the moment, it looks like the government's biopolitical strategy has proven a complete success. They have reset class politics to where they want them, with nary a whisper from the opposition benches. What does it matter that they are storing up a public health calamity for the future when the prize of maintaining the relations of production as is has been achieved?

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