Return to work plans will risk heightening divisions
There were already glaring divides. It’s been easy to stay home and save the NHS when you are not obliged to actually go through your own front door in order to get paid.
IF THERE’S one thing that coronavirus has taught us it’s that pandemics don’t judge. They have the potential to affect everyone, from an elderly widow in a care home to the heir to the throne. The Prince of Wales has now recovered from his own brush with the virus, but his 94-year-old mother is still being shielded, presumably in Balmoral.
Scientists say that certain factors suggest a predisposition to contracting Covid-19. Being male, for instance, or clinically obese or suffering from an underlying chronic illness such as heart disease or lung problems. Ethnicity would also seem to play a part in the odds of developing serious complications and dying. There are certain parts of the country, and individual communities, where the impact has been felt more keenly.
However, it is fair to say that with hundreds of thousands of British people directly afflicted and at least 40,000 deaths from Covid-19, our experience of this devastating virus has been largely communal. Until now. If an unprecedented pandemic brought us together in shared suffering, easing the lockdown and getting the population back to some kind of normality risks tearing all that goodwill and community spirit asunder.
Does the Government realise this? On the evidence so far, I’m not sure that the Prime Minister and his Government are well-equipped to cope with the confusion and growing discord.
Their approach, by necessity to a degree, has to be broad brush. They cannot consider the individual circumstances of every single one of us. Or calculate just how easy it is to follow social distancing rules in every workplace. Or indeed, trust us all to respect other people and use some common sense.
Yet they must be careful not to make blithe assumptions from their lofty perch in still-mostly virtual Westminster. The exhortation to continue to work from home if you can has little meaning for factory workers, manual labourers and schoolteachers. Hundreds of thousands are obliged to foray onto the roads and over-crowded public transport in order to join the workforce.
And of course, there are many more workers who have carried on doing their jobs as normal since March; police officers, firefighters, refuse collectors.
Workers like my neighbours. Steve (not his real name) is an on-call maintenance man for our council driving off at all hours to help residents with emergency situations. His partner, Steph (ditto), is a mental health advocate. She has spent the last two months in PPE gear, helping extremely vulnerable individuals, often elderly, into a place of safety. She’s told me some harrowing tales of having to break down doors and coax frightened and sick people into accepting help, often having to obtain a court order to do so. We’ve not all been in this together at all, when it turns out. There were already glaring divides.
And I’ve heard plenty of judgments being cast here; public sector employees at home on full pay criticising selfemployed tradesmen with no recourse to government financial support until June for going out to work (even when practising safe social distancing), for instance.
It’s been easy to stay home and save the NHS when you are not obliged to actually go through your own front door in order to get paid. Yet, I haven’t heard a single Minister properly address the thing that everybody else seems to be talking about this week. It’s too simplistic to call this growing sense of discord a class war. There are plenty of middle-class professionals – not least hospital doctors – who cannot enjoy the safety of working from home.
Yet the Government should be mindful that its new message of ‘get back to work’ risks delineating division even further and causing irreparable damage. There are communities in South Yorkshire where brothers still refuse to speak to brothers because of simmering hostilities from the miners’ strike of the 1980s.
Now imagine this writ large, across the country. It’s not exactly going to help us pull together, especially in a post-Brexit UK which will now be even tougher to navigate than we ever imagined. Many of the new Tory voters swayed by Boris Johnson’s brand of populism at the General Election in December backed him in the understanding that he would reflect their concerns and represent their interests. Most will respect the fact that his job as Prime Minister, and own serious illness, has been extremely difficult. However, this doesn’t mean that he is above reproach.
We all accept that a return to work is inevitable. Most of us will be extremely mindful of ensuring that our own health, and that of our families, is not compromised in doing so. And many of us will also feel that there is one rule for us and one rule for others. The very least that the Government can do in return is to acknowledge this.