On the whole I'd say that the left is more supportive of the lockdown than the right. Yes I know, left vs right doesn't mean so much any more, but it still means something. The left more supportive of the state, perhaps, vs the right more concerned about individual freedom. I haven't looked, but I imagine somewhere in the Guardian comments someone has said that the right only want to get back to work because they want to make money and don't care about people's lives. And, seen this morning prominently displayed in a window: "Capitalism isn't worth dying for". From the Corbyn school of economics, presumably, where people stay home under a permanent lockdown until everything is guaranteed absolutely safe, while the government prints out the money for them.
Which is odd in a way, because the lockdown might be seen as a left-wing cause. Against the lockdown, that is.
It's clear that the poor are having a much harder time than the middle classes at the moment: stuck in worse accommodation, with worse facilities, desperate for an end to this, and, for many, worried sick about their jobs and their future. We hear almost exclusively now from the middle classes - what books they should read, what films they should watch, and how to keep their kids active and up-to-the-minute with their education. These are the people, generally, who don't have big financial worries, can work from home, and feel perhaps rather smug about how well they're coping. But it's obvious that there's a whole mass of people that we never hear from...destitute, miserable people stuck in lousy over-crowded housing wondering how on earth they're going to cope.
The longer the lockdown continues, the worse it's going to be. Already we can say that it's going to prove a bigger disaster by far than anything we've seen in our lifetimes....for the poor, that is. [Can't use the phrase "working class" anymore.] And that's just the formal economy. The informal economy is going to be almost completely destroyed - here and overseas.
And for what? Who are we protecting? Well, Covid-19 is deadly serious notably for the very old - not at all for the young - and especially for men. So, we're protecting old men, at the expense of just about everybody else. To quote Private Eye's MD again: "Brutally put, 100 percent of us are making sacrifices to save 0.5 percent of us (or less). Children are being harmed to save adults; the poor are being harmed more than the rich..."
You might think this would resonate with the left, but it doesn't seem to. Any mention of ending lockdown is met with cries about sacrificing people's lives on the altar of big business. Even though, as has been endlessly pointed out, it's not a question of the number of lives, it's a question of timing. (Remember "flattening the curve"? That's what we were asked to do, to "protect the NHS". We did it. And here we still are.)
Will Keir Starmer start pressing Boris on ending lockdown? I hope so. He should do, in the name of the people that Labour claims to represent. He did, to be fair, make some noises to that effect some weeks back, asking for the government to set out guidelines for the return of schools and getting businesses back to work. I haven't seen much since. I hope he pushes it more, because I'm beginning to lose faith in Boris ever getting together the necessary determination.
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