The Boris Johnson government's initial response to COVID-19 was the now discredited policy of "herd immunity" — the strategy of letting the virus rip… - Neil Faulkner
" "The Boris Johnson government's initial response to COVID-19 was the now discredited policy of "herd immunity" — the strategy of letting the virus rip through the population, infecting up to 40 million people, most of whom would recover and then supposedly be immune to the virus. The only problem was that this would have resulted in hundreds of thousands of deaths — a prospect the Tories had to abandon in the face of expert denunciation and widespread public outrage. Johnson's change of tack was to move finally towards lockdown, advising against mass gatherings and urging people to avoid clubs, pubs, and restaurants — and most travel — as well as advising older people to self isolate. (And of course, it was only 'advisory' – so that finance capital does not have to foot the bill for hundreds of thousands of insurance claims from small businesses.)
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About Neil Faulkner
Neil Faulkner FSA (22 January 1958 – 4 February 2022) was a British archaeologist, historian, writer, lecturer, broadcaster, and political activist.
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Additional quotes by Neil Faulkner
Without mass testing, tracing, and isolating, you cannot contain. So everything else — the ban on mass gatherings, the school closures, the lockdown measures — all of it, of course, too late — amount to only half a strategy. In fact, all the signs are that they haven't really let go of their callous notion that people with "underlying" health conditions should be treated as expendable. But that is not just a few old people. About 43% of adults are reckoned to have at least one long-term health condition — disproportionately, of course, poorer people.
The Tories have proposed a huge economic package to help companies, but their support for working people sacked, laid off, or forced to self-isolate is pitiful. [...] Nothing is being offered to workers who are simply sacked or forced to take unpaid leave. This includes around 5 million "gig economy" workers, many of them subject to phoney "self-employed" scams, many with "zero hours" contracts. And there are firms like delivery company DPD, which is insisting that employees who self-isolate will still have to pay the costs of renting their vans and equipment. This is the bitter fruit for working people of 40 years of neoliberal attacks on their unions, their employment rights, their terms and conditions of service.
In the immediate period, millions in the , in leisure and tourism, in retail and services, and in aviation are being laid off without pay or fired outright. But the entire edifice of global finance is crumbling and we could easily see a generalised across the entire system. Talk of the irrationality of capitalism is being posted everywhere. Extensive industrial collapse could create millions of unemployed. A banking collapse would impoverish millions more at a stroke. This is what the government's authoritarian new bill is preparing for — a repetition in Britain and on a global scale of the kind of economic and that happened in Argentina in 2001–2, when most working-class and middle-class people lost all their savings and millions lost their jobs. Mass social and political anger could shake the system to its foundations, and those in power are preparing for emergency measures against radical "" — left-wing activists, trade unionists, social activists — liable to lead mass resistance. This, it seems, could take the form of mass detention without trial.
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