Don’t lose sight of the bigger picture – and be ready to build back better

Battered and depressed by the tragic details of the daily news updates and the frustrations of lockdown, it is easy to lose sight of the bigger picture. It is easy to forget that the Tory response to the crisis is governed by an extreme right-wing ideology that, when combined with the arrogance and greed of the British upper class, means their decisions have little to do with saving lives, let alone the NHS.

There are three key elements of Tory ideology that we must not forget as we recoil in horror at what is happening. First, the Lansley ‘reforms’, or the 2012 Health and Social Care Act, which institutionalised competition within the NHS. Second, austerity, which didn’t just starve the NHS of resources but led to follies such as the failure to replenish stockpiles of essential equipment – despite the recommendations of the Exercise Cygnus simulation. And, finally, privatisation at every level of the economy, shrinking the state and putting profit before people.

Add to these the poisonous concept of British exceptionalism, cultivated during and by Brexit and given free rein now that Boris Johnson and his advisers are in Downing Street. The appalling and avoidable result of which is that the UK has the most deaths in Europe. We begin to understand why we have had to experience:

• • The herd immunity policy pushed by Downing Street’s eugenicists, more appropriately called the ‘cull the herd’ policy;
  • A strategy of mitigation rather than suppression – failure to comply with World Health Organisation guidance to test, trace and isolate, and the refusal to lockdown and close borders when it may have prevented thousands of deaths;
  • The Nightingale hospitals – white elephants that diverted resources from existing hospitals and care homes (the question of who profited from building these has yet to be asked);
  • The disregard and indifference towards social care and care home residents and workers – unsurprising when the Tories have repeatedly failed to come up with any social care policy, let alone one that would integrate a sector dominated by private companies with the public NHS;
  • The refusal to work with Europe – not just on research and procurement, but now on data collection with the Vote Leave data harvesters directly involved in Downing Street’s preferred contact-tracing app;
  • Private companies involved at every level – Deloitte, G4S, Serco and Capita, for example, are all involved in one way or another with procurement and contact tracing – with data harvesting a binary choice between the US tech giants and AI firms linked to the Tories’ cronies; and
  • The exposure of the health, wealth and race divides in our society – inequalities that have worsened over the past decade and that are now resulting in increased deaths in poor and multi-racial communities.

Now we must add messaging on easing the lockdown. So muddled that – as economic libertarianism has conflicted with public health – key members of the government have been unable to explain what we are all being advised to do.

Labour has a historically poor record of confronting the Tories on an ideological level, often letting them get away with pretending that they haven’t really got one. Labour failed to challenge austerity until 2015, for example. It tended to treat Brexit as a technical issue to do with trade and EU institutions, rather than internationalism and solidarity – and it was reluctant to call out its motivating mixture of deeply entrenched xenophobic bigotry, atlanticism and the demands of a faction of capital.

The opposition party’s response to the health crisis has similarly focused on immediate issues rather than challenging the ideological reasons underlying the Tories’ failure to protect the health and lives of all their citizens. This is largely understandable whilst we are in the midst of the pandemic. As one of those tagged with that horrible expression ‘extremely clinically vulnerable’, my most frequent criticism is why are we not all shouting louder and louder about the government’s catastrophic mismanagement of almost every single aspect of the crisis. But just as we must not lose sight of the bigger picture in the now, we also need to be looking at it for the future.

One of the most depressing features of the global response to the pandemic has been the lack of international solidarity. Britain has not been alone in pursuing its own beggar-thy-neighbour policies. Donald Trump’s xenophobia threatens the whole world. The global economy is in free fall and, because globalisation and technology have linked the world’s populations like never before, the coming depression will hit everyone.

By the time the pandemic is under control, millions of working people will have lost their homes and their livelihoods. Hunger and destitution will make many desperate. Add the climate crisis to the pandemic crisis, and humanity’s future is bleak if the most powerful countries continue to pursue what their strong-men leaders perceive as their own national interests, failing to learn the importance of international solidarity and what could be the real meaning and strength of globalisation.

If it is left to the Tories, the ‘new normal’ will be a return – with a few tweaks here and there – to the same old system of profit first, people last. To this will be added the spice of a no-deal Brexit at the end of the year. As many of us would love much of our lives to return to the way that they were just a few weeks ago, it is going to be hard to challenge the ‘Britain will bounce back’ concept.

However, we must do exactly that. Labour should seize the opportunity to articulate our values, challenge the Conservatives on an ideological level, and develop a new programme that really grasps the existential challenges the world faces. Our immediate demand has to be that workers neither in the developed north nor the global south pay for the pandemic through unemployment, tax rises and poorer public services. But we then need to go much further than that.

Our last manifesto was written for a different time and for a different economic situation. Some of its policies have shown themselves to be the most vital in the current situation. The much-mocked free broadband, nationalised railways and NHS investment are now on the agenda, as well as a universal basic income and a national care service. But our vision needs to be even greater than any of those.

Lockdown has shown both the vital role of the state and which aspects of our economy are essential. If we are serious about tackling the climate crisis, that information must be used to inform a new transformative and radical industrial strategy. One that goes beyond the Green New Deal and addresses new ways of working and living, a shift in the balance between the public and private sectors, and the pressing need to alter the whole basis of income and wealth distribution.

The world changed after the 1919 flu epidemic, and again following the World War Two. VE Day was not just about an end to the fighting in Europe and the Allies’ collective defeat of fascism. It was a day of celebration and comradeship that paved the way for one of the most transformative periods in this country’s history. This did not happen by accident: we came together, restructured our society and economy to fight the war, and rebuilt afterwards. ‘No going back to the way things were’ applies just as much today as it did in 1945.

Keir Starmer rightly says that we cannot go back to business as usual and that we must go forward with a vision of a better society. But what does that mean? And how do we turn the rhetoric into reality? Across the world, most communities have responded to the crisis with kindness, neighbourliness, sympathy and collectivity. We must all, across the labour movement, now make use of whatever downtime we have – and the way that we can now use technology to talk to each other, to brainstorm new, imaginative and progressive ways of living and organising society.

We must be ready to #BuildBackBetter for a future based on the collective ideas, understanding and experiences of our movement. For a future that rejects the Tories’ right-wing virus breeding ground of fragmented public services, greed and survival of the fittest. For one founded on genuine solidarity and socialism.