Ideology, Class, and Coronavirus

Picture the chancellor. Strolling through a restaurant without a Covid care in the world. In one hand there balances the thin gruel of the patchy support packages. The other tray, however, appears more weighty. Under the cover's polished dome sits something steaming, but this particular dish carries nothing of sustenance - except perhaps for the yellowing Tory grassroots, as ever crying out for Thatcherite fertiliser. Indeed, under the cover we find a generous dollop of fiscal contraction, cuts for the poorest, and the promise of austerity renewed. At least not yet. As far as Rishi Sunak is concerned, the first dish is the unappetising starter with the main dish - the "need" to balance to books - reserved for the main course in the medium term.

At the Tories' glitch-hit virtual conference, Sunak tried his hand at an old Boris Johnson trick: burble the hyperboles while offering little to nothing. The "overwhelming might" of the British state will be brought to bear on joblessness. Neither will the government cease "trying to be creative" to get the country out of the hole the Tories dug well before the pandemic was a tinkle in an errant bat's eye. There is such a thing as hope too, the chancellor told us and, thanks to the imminent end of the furlough scheme, there is the promise of a "pragmatic" respone to difficulties ahead. Over-promising and under-delivering, he's Johnson's apprentice alright.

At the start of all this, Sunak declared ideology must come second to handling the emergency, but at every step Tory pecadilloes and shibboleths have intruded and overdetermined their cackhanded strategy. They have mismanaged the crisis, caused tens of thousands to die unnecessarily and lumbered more with the lingering, unknown consequences of long covid. It's an instructive lesson in how ideology isn't free-floating hoohah or a set of fake ideas about the way of the world. They are demonstrative of the Tory concern with the health and wellbeing of one thing: the complex of class relations their party is embedded in, and will defend to its last.

Consider the evidence.

Why, no sooner had the Tories announced the furlough scheme, did they openly mull cutting and closing it? Likweise, as Job Centres closed, dole sanctions regime was suspended for 90 days. Yet amid sky rocketing unemployment and vacancies evaporating, the Tories couldn't wait to reintroduce the tranche of conditionalities and penalties in early July. Why? The answer is tediously predictable. Workers need to work, the labour market must churn, and they have to be reminded not to get too comfortable. While plenty of Tories think British workers are a pampered, malingering bunch of shirkers what they fretted over most was the breakdown in labour discipline and with it decades of carefully nurtered biopolitical strategies. In this case, the ideological distaste for state support of workers entirely coincidentally lined up with the everyday management of the working age population. Funny that.

Then we see everyday the debacle of test and trace and outsourcing to obviously unsuitable service providers. As we know, it's been an article of Tory faith since Thatcher onwards that private is best and the public sector is overly bureaucratic and inefficient. Apparently, the competitive pressures of market discipline a priori assures the efficacy of business over anything Whitehall mandarins and local government workers could cook up. Johson and friends are proven true believers in this credo. As far back as June, the Tories had contracted businesses to the tune of £1.7bn, and we have a mess of screwed up apps, two loads of track and trace failures, and egregious misreporting of daily infections. Once again, might the ideology of private sector efficiency, undoubtedly really believed by many Tories, have some sort of relationship to sundry businesses benefiting from Coronavirus contracts backing the Tories, throwing money at them, and chummy social relationships with leading party cadre?

And there is the question of how to pay this. Contrary to Tory dogma, UK state finances spring from the magic money tree in the Bank of England's garden and from borrowing. In both cases they're created and later paid back through taxation (in the case of the Bank, the debt is entirely bogus considering it's an institution of state). The waffle about tax funding public services fits ideological constructs around belt tightening, responsible spending, and disciplining the ensemble of state bodies from the parish council to ministerial office. Having previously labelled public debt a Frankenstein's monster of government "profligacy", Sunak's talking up of careful spending and having to pay back later readies a new dynamic suggestive of future austerity - though given the country's dilapidated state, this will be discretionary spending of the most discretionary kind. Money for pet infrastructure projects and the Tories' mates (as per above), but nothing for our rotting public realm. Just like the schemes unveiled earlier this year in those pre-Covid halcyon days. Small statism, the holy grail of post-Thatcher Toryism, coincidentally underlines everything we've talked about so far. It justifies further rounds of cuts to Universal Credit, the refusal to back anything the Tories feel is politically suspect, and imposes the obligation of debt as the commonsense of the age.

It's abundantly clear the disaster of Tory mismanagement is because their priorities are skewed by the (oft contradictory) pressures bearing on them, and their class instincts and interests as mediated by their ideological precoccupations. It's not enough to slap the label of incompetence on the Tories. It's far worse than that: their incoherence and recklessness, whether it's bumbling Boris or dishy Rishi fronting them up, is guided by one principle: the protection of the British oligarchy, no matter how many have to die.

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