Inequality-based health apartheid is emerging in UK
Surreal times here in the UK. A week into lockdown and I have seen some odd things. The Conservative government has gone further than the largesse of stimulus in chancellor Rishi Sunak’s first budget two weeks ago, in effect nationalising the economy by propping up businesses and guaranteeing workers’ wages to save jobs.
Other bizarre things for a peacetime UK are shelves stripped bare of essentials by panic-buyers, a black market in toilet paper, and supermarket queues snaking around the block. But perhaps weirdest of all, the pubs are all closed.
With Prime Minister Boris Johnson and Prince Charles sick from coronavirus, we should be able to emphatically say: “We are all in this together.”
Except the pandemic has starkly revealed that in the UK we are not all in it together. On the contrary, it has revealed an emerging health apartheid, not just between the infected and the healthy but very much between the rich and the poor.
There has already been an outcry about Prince Charles obtaining a test for the virus but health-care workers in the National Health Service not, despite being on the front line of the fight against the pandemic, with not enough protective gear due to budget cuts by preceding Conservative administrations.
Despite the unprecedented fiscal and social measures taken by Boris Johnson’s government in safeguarding the economy and public health, the crisis has very quickly shown up the faultlines of inequality and the impact of a decade of austerity.
While the wealthy have been able to stockpile or retreat to second country homes, a formerly invisible precariat class of gig workers on socalled “zero-hour contracts”, notably delivery drivers, find themselves without meaningful employment rights but at the front line of the pandemic, delivering groceries and takeaways for those with the means to order their daily essentials through an app.
Delivery drivers in the gig economy are in effect locked out of the formal economy, and with no recourse to sick pay are forced to continue working while they put themselves at risk, and potentially others too.
Then there are the multitudes of homeless, who have spilled on to London’s streets after falling through the social safety net, many of them from the working precariat, amid rising rents and cuts to social services. London’s homeless population is extremely vulnerable to the pandemic and many, having developed respiratory and other health problems from sleeping rough, also present a threat to wider public health.
The Tories’ postcrisis austerity-driven economic policy in effect has as its legacy socialised losses and privatised gains. But the unfolding of the pandemic will also be compounded by the government’s response, which has been widely criticised by the scientific and medical community, including the World Health Organisation.
The government has been criticised for not implementing lockdown measures soon enough, initially seeming to advocate a “herd immunity” strategy. But as the numbers of fatalities climbed in nearby Italy and Spain it became clear that the NHS would soon be overwhelmed, and Johnson and his team soon did a U-turn.
Only in the past week have social distancing measures, including working from home, been officially implemented — when it is obvious that the crowded London Underground is teeming with germs.
But the government has also not been implementing widescale testing or delivering a clear and unified message. Johnson was accused of being too cavalier even when giving official advice. Perhaps now that he has tested positive for the virus the prime minister will take things more seriously.
Masie is chief strategist at IC Publications in London, and a Wits School of Governance fellow. She is a former senior editor of the Financial Mail.