Revisiting Covid and Class Politics

It's been five years since the government put the country into lockdown as the first wave of the Covid pandemic hit, and on cue the last week or so has had its share of commemorative pieces. Spring 2020 was a peculiar moment, and one many would rather not remember considering the scant trace it has left on popular culture and politics. If anything, as Laura Spinney argues, this disease - which is still killing people - has wound the clock back on science and medicine. Chris Whitty, Patrick Vallence, and their American counterpart Anthony Fauci are subject to death threats. Vaccine scepticism is on the increase, and even mask mandates in clinical settings have been abandoned and left up to individual NHS Trusts to enforce. A future pandemic would find us ill-prepared, and large numbers are unlikely to abide by quarantine and spread mitigation measures, or take up vaccination. This process has gone to an absurd extreme in the US, with a know-nothing anti-vaxxer heading up America's health care, Republican legislatures banning masks in their localities, and Elon Musk tearing up medical research and pandemic preparedness. The very picture of a right wing basket case.

Laura argues that teeing up for future health emergencies is contingent on seeing off their ilk. But it was never widely appreciated why the right, including in this country, produced a policy response the swung wildly from seriousness of purpose to outright hostility toward mitigations. While he was in opposition Keir Starmer never said boo to a goose, and went as far as demanding that the schools be opened and Covid infections be damned. And Boris Johnson himself had to be dragged kicking and screaming into announcing a quarantine, enforcing mitigations, and frequently discarded medical advice in favour of what he thought the politics demanded. Which was as swift a return to the normal, even if it meant letting the bodies pile high. How can sense be made of the catastrophe the Tories oversaw and, even now, remain largely unpunished for bringing upon us?

There were two moments to the Tory response, and both of them were united by the same thing. Regardless of how many succumbed to Covid, what had to be preserved at great cost was the preservation of class relations and ensuring the outcome of the disease did not alter them in any way. This, to my mind, is the most convincing frame for making sense of the gyrations the Tories put us through. From delaying mitigations to the point where most people were deserting workplaces anyway, to lifting them early, to promoting absurd and reckless schemes like Eat Out to Help Out, to ensuring the two subsequent lockdowns and later mask mandates were hardly enforced, to allowing the pandemic response to be driven by anything but "the science".

The first of these moments was, when Johnson finally got round to issuing his stay-at-home rule, making sure the Tories escaped any responsibility for their mishandling of the pandemic. In this they were helped by two unlikely sources. The TUC very quickly pushed for mitigations and a jobs guarantee scheme, which was immediately articulated in parliament by Jeremy Corbyn - who was seeing out the end of his leadership. Meanwhile, the soon-to-be-annointed Starmer gave us a picture of things to come, and not in a good way. The Tories adopted the labour movement's position and effectively underwrote the country's wage bill, increased social security payments, suspended conditionalities, abolished rough sleeping, and made available loans and grants to keep businesses big and small afloat. These emergency measures are what helped the Tories escape the political fall out of not acting sooner. In true Johnson style, they went from lethargy to bull-at-a-gate in moments, and the availability of wage support - which Rishi Sunak craftily tied to employer/employee relations - effectively silenced complaints about mismanagement. Therefore, as Covid ripped through care homes and carried tens of thousands of elderly residents off to premature graves, the impression that the majority of people were supported and safe thanks to timely action ensured the Tories escaped the political consequences of their negligence. It's telling that the only Covid-related difficulties they faced was party gate, which was about Tory hypocrisy and not their handling of the pandemic. In this first instance, the Tories successfully depoliticised an emergency that was anything but apolitical.

The second challenge was managing the political consequences. More than once Johnson tried his imitation Churchill and talked about the nation pulling together as one. But the Covid emergency raised very serious issues for a Tory party determined to run down the capacity of the state. I.e. Suddenly finding untold billions under the Bank of England's magic money tree, arguments around the state not being able to do this or that found themselves riddled with bullets fired by new realities. There was, for a time, a spirit of community and solidarity abroad that was felt by millions, and expressed collectively in thousands of mutual aid groups, neighbourly good deeds, and the doorstep applause ritual for NHS and other frontline workers. On top of that, the mask mandates ran against the grain of the individuating culture the Tories championed. I.e. Mask wearing wasn't primarily about protecting the wearer, but more to do with shielding others from any possible Covid infection they might have. From this standpoint, it was an expression of collective care. Therefore, the danger was that like the disaster of the Second World War, post-pandemic people's political horizons would be raised and the Tories particularly would be out of sorts.

Therefore, no sooner were the lockdowns in force the government continually undermined its own efforts. Johnson kept talking about "freedom day", even while fatalities daily ran into the hundreds. The first thing to come back were benefit conditionalities. Young people were getting scapegoated for spreading infection by not obeying curfews, while these same youngsters were expected to wait on foolhardy diners doing their bit to put the virus about. Bosses were given the discretion following the first lockdown to decide on whether their workers should be in work or not. Schools were opened with zero acknowledgement that infections among pupils could spread to teachers and families at home, causing more unnecessary deaths. Sunak relished the chance to wind down furlough schemes, while ensuring many small businesses - particularly those the Tories didn't favour - missed out on support. There are innumerable instances of the government announcing X, and then contradicting it because the politics of Covid management, in their view, favoured Y. The Tories also allowed several leading backbenchers to fulminate against mask wearing, which helped ensure raised aspirations were but a fleeting moment. And the result, once Johnson had exited the scene and Liz Truss had finished the Tories with her pyrotechnics was the programme of the Sunak government: the continual wearing down of state capacities to better manage political aspiration, while fostering market-based alternatives to public provision for those who could afford it.

Things might have turned out differently. Had Starmer used his period in opposition during Covid's first wave to carry on where Corbyn left off by offering a mix of constructive suggestions and critique, his leadership could have changed the political weather. But then his project was never about contesting the fundamentals, as the last nine months have amply demonstrated. The cuts to winter fuel, the child benefit cap, attacks on the disabled, civil service reductions, demonstrate a Labour leadership whose statecraft is not much different from their predecessors. This is Covid's legacy - a bipartisan agreement that the state should be limited so as to never raise expectations that things might be done differently.

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