Left parties are on a Covid roll Senator calls for ‘gig’ employment status
A centrally controlled lockdown with everyone dependent on State welfare is starting to look dangerously normal, writes Eilis O’Hanlon
■ Fine Gael Senator Mary Seery-Kearney has called for a new employment status to be introduced into existing laws to accommodate the flexibility of the so-called gig economy while ensuring protections for workers.
Ms Seery-Kearney’s comments came after the UK’s Supreme Court recently ruled Uber drivers were entitled to employee rights and protections and were not classified as self-employed.
The senator, who has a background in employment law, said the finding could be applicable to Deliveroo workers in Ireland.
“We need to engage with the reality that the gig economy is a new mode of working, while at the same time ensure that it isn’t facilitating a race to the bottom and exploitative of the most vulnerable of workers,” the senator said.
WHEN it comes to elections, the Irish left has had a longer losing streak than the unluckiest gambler in Las Vegas. Voters have always taken one look and said: “Thanks, but no thanks.”
Covid changed all that. Within a year, the basic socialist principle that the State should run everything has become mainstream. The right to get on with business and commerce, or to have a social life that involves going to the pub or a restaurant, and even to have a love life, are now gifts that the State gives you if you’re good.
If you’re not, they can take them away; and not only will we not resist, we will thank them for doing it to keep us safe.
The measures which have been adopted nationwide may be necessary in the short term to contain a pandemic, but they could end up having profound implications for Irish politics in the near future.
With vast amounts being borrowed by the State to pay for lockdown, with little consideration of how it will be repaid, opponents cannot possibly say to Sinn Féin or the smaller left-wing parties in future that they’re being irresponsible for advocating the same expenditure for the betterment of society. That weapon in the armoury of the centre right has gone.
The whole debate has shifted sharply leftwards without the left itself having to do a thing.
The Government certainly seems to have no narrative with which to inspire people, as Taoiseach Micheál Martin’s latest, remarkably feeble and content-free address to the nation attested. Politicians are increasingly weak. It’s easier to keep pushing out the date when “normal” returns, rather than risk being blamed should there be another rise in hospitalisations and deaths. That leaves the left free to adopt Zero Covid as yet another Trojan horse to sneak socialism into the city walls.
To give the left its due, it’s not even pretending otherwise.
Paul Murphy’s former party, RISE (Revolutionary, Internationalist, Socialist, and Environmentalist) pushes for what it calls a “Zero Covid Ireland with Socialist Policies”. People Before Profit, the party Murphy has just joined, is of the same view.
Even Labour Youth now rallies behind a “socialist blueprint for a post-Covid Ireland”.
The merits or otherwise of Zero Covid are, politically speaking, neither here nor there. Many argue that it’s unrealistic to pretend that an open society and economy such as Ireland could ever adopt the sort of draconian measures required to pursue such a strategy. We’re not like Australia and New Zealand, whose nearest neighbours, apart from each other and a smattering of small island states, are thousands of miles away.
Last week, Europe reprimanded six countries — Germany, Belgium, Denmark, Finland, Hungary, and Sweden — for imposing border restrictions which violated EU rules on free movement. They’ve been given 10 days to respond.
Tony Holohan has also said the Irish healthcare system is not strong enough to cope with the measures needed for Zero Covid.
What’s interesting is not whether going to Zero Covid is the right or wrong thing to do, but that it’s turning on a right or left axis. Those to the right and centre are more in favour of a faster unlocking of social and economic life; those on the left are broadly in favour of harder lockdown.
For an opposition, taking such a simplistic position, whilst knowing they’ll never actually have to make it work, has the great advantage of looking like a plan, at a time when the Government seems to have no plan other than to bet the farm on the efficacy of the vaccines.
The latest polls may suggest people are tiring of lockdown, but that would change quickly if the vaccines aren’t as effective as hoped and society is forced to grind to a halt again. Socialism only ever looks appealing in a crisis. It’s not something that people naturally choose for themselves when things are going well.
The left is certainly being cynical in pushing for a harder lockdown whilst knowing that it has disproportionately hurt the poor and the vulnerable, yet enriching billionaires beyond the dreams of avarice. Looked at a different way, it’s not surprising at all.
All wars need some casualties. The sacrifice of the poor is one that the left is prepared to accept.
The young have been especially impacted by lockdown, and they’re the very ones who are most likely to embrace radical action. The world wasn’t working for them anyway.
Vaccines may cut the ground from under the left in the coming months, but that’s not guaranteed either. In the UK, now among the highest vaccinators in the world, the lockdown is expected to continue into early summer and perhaps beyond.
The goalposts keep moving. There’s no particular reason to believe that they won’t move here either. When they do, the left will have another open goal to aim at.
It’s for this same reason that the crossover between Zero Covid and environmentalism is becoming more obvious by the day.
With David Attenborough telling the UN last week that climate change will “destroy entire cities and societies” within a lifetime, many are already asking why, if the world can shut down for Covid, it can’t do the same for the planet.
Where these threads converge is in a conviction that Covid has exposed the limits of free market capitalism, which is a strange conclusion to arrive at, considering that the free market was the first thing to be suspended when Covid struck, and still hasn’t been allowed to operate freely since.
From the start last year, it was agreed by all that basic human needs such as housing and food and healthcare must not be subject to what economist Simon Mair called the “whims of the market”.
What everyone chose to ignore was Mair’s warning that “there are risks to this approach, we must be careful to avoid authoritarianism”.
Paul Murphy claims to oppose any measures to combat Covid that undermine civil liberties.
In practice, it’s already happened, as the Irish Human Rights and Equality Commission acknowledged last week when criticising the Government for “persistently blurring” the boundary between health advice and legally enforceable orders. It sounds virtuous to say that the needs of the group must take precedence over the rights of the individual. It’s just that no system has yet been devised where doing so has not led to disastrous outcomes for both, whilst simultaneously making the poor poorer.
It’s still unlikely that the left will ever win an election outright in Ireland, but it doesn’t need to. It wins by pushing the range of solutions that the public is willing to consider further leftwards. Ideas which were until recently considered extreme could become mainstream very quickly.
A centrally controlled lockdown, with everyone dependent on the State for welfare, is, as one observer noted, “starting to look like the natural state”.
‘It’s still unlikely that the left will ever win an election outright in Ireland, but it doesn’t need to’