Some reflections on the pandemic and power relationships ; and some thoughts on Conservatism

All epidemiological reports indicate that most people (with some well-advertised atypical exceptions) are abiding by the public health regulations, and yet transmission rates of the virus are still high. Why is this so ? It appears that people are being coerced by their employers into travelling to unsafe workplaces. It is also the case that those who are advised to self-isolate are not being financially supported.

The obvious answers are that home working should be made legally mandatory ; and that there should be generous support for those who have to isolate. Why has the government not followed through on these actions ? Because it is frightened that people will become used to state intervention in the economy to alter power relationships in economic life, and that these changes could be permanent. It feels safer to blame the actions of individuals for spreading the virus.

This is a time of extreme ideological fluidity in the Conservative Party, and therefore of peril for its continued relevance. All the talk of 'levelling up' and 'an end to austerity' and 'taking back control' are increasing expectations that this government will change its spots, and will rediscover the Baldwin/Macmillan/Butler 'one nation' strand of Conservatism, a strain of thought that has, in fact, been moribund for some time. The government's nationalist populism has dictated a form of Brexit which is antithetical to both international capitalist integration and to social democracy (which is predicated on planned capitalist development). The government's policies on the economy after coronavirus depend, as do its plans for post-Brexit economic deregulation, on continuing the deregulated, privatised, marketised, neoliberal economic model which has been the mainstay of the policy stances of both major parties for over forty years. There is nothing in the Conservative Party's history of extreme ideological flexibility which would suggest that it is not able to resolve these intense contradictions. However, this moment of extreme fluidity and instability poses an extraordinary opportunity for the Labour Party, if only it could reject its wrong-headed notion of patriotism as an end in itself, and integrate a sense of renewed national purpose into a project of taking the government's slogans and injecting socialist policy into them.