The Tory Surrender to Covid

The Tories and their press like their Second World War similes, so here's one for them. Boris Johnson likes to affect a Churchillian pose, but rather than fighting the Omicron variant on the beaches or, to be blunt, anywhere, he's raised the white flag. But this is something worse then Neville Chamberlain's appeasement policy or, for that matter, the French authorities who declared Paris an open city just before the German army arrived. No, Johnson and his government are the Covid equivalent of Vidkun Quisling and his collaborationist government in Norway during the Nazi occupation. By letting Covid propagate in the schools, ensuring the mask mandates there are strictly time-limited and even dragging their heels on face coverings on public transport and indoors, if Covid was a conscious entity we'd be asking how large a donation had it given to their party.

And I'm afraid our Covid quislings are at it again. In the Sunday Times, we read plans are afoot to do away with free lateral flow tests in the coming weeks. The tests are only likely to be available in "high risk settings" while, simultaneously, the mysteriously over-expensive Test and Trace is to be scaled back further. The period of self-isolation is likely to be reduced from seven to five days to help the work absentee crisis. And all this while the country is posting record infections and between 200-300 deaths daily. Interviewed for the piece, health secretary Nadhim Zahawi said we are "witnessing the transition of the virus from pandemic to endemic", as if this was positive news. He goes on, "vaccines will get better and we are going to have polyvalent and multivalent vaccines by next year." These vaccines, which promise to target the body of the virus as opposed to the spike proteins Covid uses to latch onto and invade cells, are much more difficult for it to evolve around. In other words, Zahawi and the Tories are now fully committed to a silver bullet approach. As it seems are many other countries.

If we want to press the overused WWII button one more time, this is very similar to collaborationists enthusiastically carrying out the dirty work of their Nazi overlords right up until the Allied and Soviet armies roll in. As we saw with Delta before Omicron arrived, the Tories were content to let infections run hot, ensuring unnecessary illness, incapacity, and death, and straining the NHS right at the point exhausted staff could have taken a breather to prepare for the Winter wave that was forecast. Now we're seeing them doing exactly the same thing, except with hospitals overstretched, NHS trusts declaring major incidents, and medical staff being pushed to the brink - with the knock-on effect for waiting times and non-Covid emergencies. Instead of 40,000 - 50,000 infections a day we're at triple or quadruple that, with the flood into hospitals tailing infections. It was all so predictable.

One of the chief conceits of mainstream politics is that the number one priority of government and state is to keep its people safe. The Tories have disastrously failed this test time and again, preferring instead to prioritise capital and property. For the continued health of the wage relation and rent payments, tens of thousands have needlessly died: a clear cut case of social murder. And this is going to continue as we await for the vaccine cavalry. Now, some might not think this matters. We've got to learn to live with the virus, goes the tedious mantra. Here's what that means. Omicron is apparently less vicious than Delta, though the possibility of co-infection and the variants combining is quite likely, but the problem with all the Covid variants is the fact it's more than a respiratory disease. For one, there is nothing to suggest Long Covid is any less likely with Omicron, nor its symptoms less debilitating. Second, it is already well known that survivors are at higher risk of strokes and heart attacks versus other respiratory diseases. It's common knowledge Covid can attack the brain and potentially lead to long-term consequences. Hence the utter stupidity of letting an highly infectious variant run riot in schools where young people's brains are still developing.

The Tories know all this, but they're quite happy to let Covid do its work. At a minimum, it's paralysing the economy they pretend to care about with huge numbers of absences, not least where it matters most - in the NHS. And at worst, tens of thousands more people are going to suffer unnecessarily and die. They are entirely okay with this and the long-term health consequences that will entail, a habit of statecraft that has not altered one iota under the impact of the emergency and, if anything, they've retrenched in the face of the challenge. Unfortunately, with some notable exceptions in local government and Wales, Labour have been useless as well. At best, belatedly calling for the introduction of new precautions, at worst going along with the Tories. The unions have rightly looked out for their own members, and some members of the Socialist Campaign Group did try to push Zero Covid hard a year ago, but there's nothing joined up, no united labour movement-centred collective response. And for as long as this persists, so will the Tories' indifference to the illness and deaths of our loved ones.

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