Without mass testing, tracing, and isolating, you cannot contain. So everything else — the ban on mass gatherings, the school closures, the lockdown … - 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.)

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.

The new measures involve a lockdown on borders and wide powers to arrest people in the streets who are deemed a virus threat. It also includes new powers against "terrorism" and "subversion", giving it the right to detain people without trial for an unlimited period. The government is going to propose that their new law lasts for a two-year period. The closest parallels are powers in the United States in the and the 1967 Terrorism Act in apartheid South Africa. Section 6 of that Act allowed someone suspected of involvement in "terrorism" — defined as any opposition to the system which might "endanger the maintenance of " — to be detained for a 60-day period (which could be renewed) without trial on the authority of a senior police officer. Since there was no requirement to release information on who was being held, people subject to the act tended to disappear, and of course many of them were tortured and murdered. Why would they want such a draconian law at this time? Until now, the government has come under repeated and sustained attack because of its herd immunity strategy, its staggering incompetence and negligence and its kowtowing to big business at the expense of working people and public health. But things are set to get much worse on several fronts. As the world financial system comes tumbling down and bankruptcies and redundancies begin to sweep the world, we are almost certainly heading for mass unemployment on the scale of the 1930s.