Thread by @libcomorg

Good thread on just how bad things are in the UK and how likely it is they'll get significantly worse.

https://twitter.com/dgurdasani1/status/1344333612347494401

On what the government is thinking and what evidence they're considering, it is pretty clear they are prioritising labour discipline above all else. Over lives certainly, but also over capital accumulation during the pandemic.

Whenever there is a discussion of measures that can be taken, it is always about levels of lockdown, sometimes whether schools shoule close. What gets left out is the intransigence over sick pay for people supposed to be self isolating.

This goes right back to abandoning test and trace in March when they had the 'containment, delay, mitigation' bollocks strategy. Throughout the entire thing, no support for people to take time off work to avoid transmission. Keeping schools open is an extension of this.

The 'mass testing in schools' plan is apparently based around testing contacts of positive cases to keep them at school until they test positive - not for finding asymptomatic cases and isolating contacts. A recipe for even more outbreaks at schools.

This strategy of keeping everyone at work/school runs up against the very real physical limits of viral transmission and hospital overload. So we are left with massive lockdowns as a last resort in the face of potential unrest, always with work prioritised over social life.

You're always prevented from participating in any social activity before you're stopped from working. So going for a walk with three people from two households is illegal in tier 4, while schools stay open.

If there was proper income support for people with symptoms and their close contacts (as well as a functional test and trace system since February 2020), then both social life and the economy would be less restricted, but people would be 'encouraged' to take time off work sick.

The furlough scheme and self employment support schemes also very much tied to lockdown as well as keeping people dependent on employers and easily recalled to work.

What appears (and is) chaotic, haphazard, contradictory makes a lot more sense as a strategy of 'labour discipline at all costs' whether individual cabinet ministers are conscious of this or not. It's implicit in every decision and non decision of the past year.

What makes it hard to reason about is that both a liberal and radical conception of the government sees it as guaranteeing the conditions for stable capital accumulation, but we also have to ask on what scale and timespan.

You have the Tories and Labour in an arms race in how much they want kids in school, 'cos Labour loves Labour discipline too, clue is in the name. But where is the discussion about students and teachers wearing masks in classrooms?

From July: Labour came out explicitly anti-mask in schools while pushing for schools to go back to full capacity.

https://twitter.com/PanopticonGaze/status/1344410566798938115

Again I think you can trace this back to labour discipline. That the workplaces staying open shouldn't see any significant improvements in working conditions or even pandemic-specific health and safety measures.