This piece was first posted by Peter May on Progressive Pulse, which I publish, and I thought well worth sharing here:
This is an interesting piece, from The Spectator's James Forsyth, on how he thinks this pandemic will change the Tory Party. Even if he's only half right, the future might not be quite as bleak as it looked.
Covid-19, by showing that no hospital is an island, has accelerated the move away from the Lansley reforms issued by the coalition government. ‘We're going back to more of the Nye Bevan model, where the Health Secretary could hear the bed pans clanging on the ward floor,' says one cabinet member. This crisis also means the end of NHS independence. It will now be run from Whitehall as a system.
I cannot understand how anyone with even a shared brain cell thought that a hospital was ever an island or that the Lansley Health and Social Care Act was anything but a disastrous step backward. And as for a Conservative cabinet member even mentioning Nye Bevan…
The piece continues in a surprisingly (for progressives) optimistic vein :
Coronavirus will also make the Tories deal with an issue that they have avoided since it cost Theresa May her majority in 2017: social care. As one government source puts it: ‘If this doesn't trigger action on social care, nothing will.' Allies of the Prime Minister believe he now has ‘the leeway to act on it'.
This period will alter how the Tory party defines who is, and isn't, a key worker. The points-style immigration system that the government devised at the beginning of the year, in crude terms, equated value with wages. But the lockdown has been a reminder that many of those who make the country function are on relatively low pay. There is a sense in government that the policy might have to adjust to this reality.
I'm a bit wary of the ‘might' in the last sentence. It does rather suggest that their policies had previously not been adjusted to reality.
He concludes by mentioning that Rishi Sunak said that everything the government has done during this crisis has been motivated by the ‘simple idea that we depend on each other'.
You don't say. It is remarkable that he thought it not a statement of the bleeding obvious, but an ‘idea'.
Next, they'll be telling us that Brexit was a mistake…
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I have one point to add: we will know they are serious when they defer Brexit
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I’m 63 in May, studied economics in late 70s. My take on all this is just,”wow.”
From IMF telling Denis Healy to implement austerity to a tory chancellor opening the money tap up to 1tr sterling. Samuelson must be spinning in his grave.
Marx’s prediction of how capitalism would eat itself is playing out in front of us. Modern economists are showing a way forward. MMT is the most coherent explanation of how money works at macro level in sovereign currency issuing countries. The policy implications are clear: governments must take the lead in building green infrastructure, boost the economy, create skilled, and hopefully more fulfilling, jobs. Tackling gross income and wealth inequality must be a declared policy objective. We are told that capital will relocate away from those crazy states that do this. I say, call their bluff.
I don’t see those in the Tory party undergoing some sort of epiphany and conversion to humanity as a result of this.
For a start they’d lose a lot of their funding to fight and win elections.
They are funded by financial extremists.
What the Tories are good at is diving deep, binding their time and then popping to the surface again to benefit from some other party’s misfortune (like they did in 2010). I think they will accept that they’ve been caught out and wait to take the consequences or hope to bluster their way through. A weak Labour party and progressives being unable to work together will be a big benefit too.
Thatcherism is after all a long term business – Thatcherism is for life – not just for when you are in power.
They won’t cancel Brexit.
That is why Bozo has been put in cotton wool – to preserve the brand ‘Get it done’.
So have all the faces of ‘Brexit means Brexit’ and ‘Our Countorrry Back’.
So they are not sullied by this avoidable cluster**** of a national response caused by years of slicing and dicing of public services for privatisation.
The msm are doing the full daily messaging – in the old days the likes of Campbell and Coulson and Oliver actually bothered to ‘leave’ their msm organisations and moved to No10.
Now such pretence is old school
LauraK and Peston and team can deliver their Mission Impossible spins without leaving their msm posts in the hands of puppets.
Anyone bothering to compare Germany and UK in terms of testing, no of intensive care beds per million, the death rates?
Not even Starmer and the dodgy new Labour cabinet, who are busy covering their tracks of internal sabotage as Judases to JC as shown by the 800 page report.
They’ll ALL pull together to push through their hard Brexit by the deadline as that is why they are where they are.
Although I agree with the view that John McDonnell was wrong to think about fiscal credibility rules, I do agree with him when he says that the revelations of the 860 page report is possibly the biggest political scandal in British politics for many, many years.
Names must be named, and “heads must fill”. If that means demands for the withdrawal of peerages and criminal investigations for fraud, so be it. And I may well want my subs back!
The legal action also probably destroys Labour as a political party
So we face an era without opposition
It’s an interesting idea.
What next?
Sorry, auto checker again!
I meant to say metaphorically, of course that “heads must roll”.
If Starmer acts on the report, as he should in my view, it’ll end the party. If he doesn’t, so many genuine lefties will quit in disgust it too will end the party. Labour’s gone then, so it’s time for a new party (something I suggested here many years ago) and then the formation of a coalition opposition. That’s if anyone can still be bothered with politics and politicians of course…
Well if there are any truly socialist Labour party members still there they could make the sensible move to the Green Party and develop that as an opposition.
Those destructive new Labour types can shift their sorry a*** over to Lib Dems or Tory – whichever best fits them.
Damascene conversion is not a term I would normally associate with the Tories, and I generally regard the musings of James Forsyth as representing the tail end of tiggerish Tory student politics, but this is an interesting development.
One of the elephants in an overcrowded room is how the New Model Labour Party will respond to this potentially existential threat – after all, the main thrust of it’s election campaigns always comes down to “Save the NHS!”
It is interesting to note that a major issue, currently, is the performance of NHS Logistics, privatised by one Alan “Hammer of Corbyn” Johnson.
I think I shall be looking again at Allyson Pollock’s onetime proposal for a one clause bill that simply restored the NHS to it’s original structure before all the messing about with it began.
You have reminded me to look again at that
Allyson is brilliant
This situation could get much worse as a result of a trade bill that risks getting nodded through parliament next week. Please circulate this petition asking for the NHS to be excluded from the bill and ask people to write to their MPs. This is not a matter of which Party you support. Neither is it just about US corporations getting access. It is about keeping our system NATIONALLY owned so that it can be properly resourced and PPE easily allocated to where it is most needed in times of crisis.
Great shame that the framing of the campaign is not up to date and taking advantage of public mood and emotional support for the NHS. https://www.change.org/p/keep-our-nhs-out-of-us-trade-deals?
I tend to agree with the replies on here, the tories will not change. They might change track for the short term but once the covid 19 is out of the way or not, they will go back to being tories. They are desperate to open the economy again, just look at the soundings of the MSM saying the economy can be open in stages. There is talk about schools and small shops being open in 3 weeks time.
All this with no mass testing, no idea how far the virus has spread in the country. This is irresponsible and the tories do not care. The deaths in care homes, the medical staff deaths etc is massive. The link i am posting advocates letting kids get covid 19 so they can be “immune” to it. The problem is people can get it again and i as a parent do not like idea of my kids getting covid 19, even if they are supposedly do not “suffer from it badly”. The problem is they go home and infect others, they will infect their great grandma, grandparents and their older brother who has crohn’s disease. They author has thought it through but not on this score. It seems herd immunity was never taken off the table. The tories want all of us to get it so they can take the money in off our dead bodies.
https://medium.com/@tepper_jonathan/ground-zero-when-the-cure-is-worse-than-the-disease-3c513d91393d
New word is in town its is called nosocomial. We need to put all the covid 19 cases in one place, ie the nightingale hospitals, instead of sending them to general medical centres around the city. The nightingale hospitals are not being used properly with only a few patients in them. Which is crazy – just send people there who only deal with covid 19 patients etc. Again the FUBAR is happening all over – it makes me think it is happening just the way the authorities want it to be. Herd immunity.
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC88988/
Darren
The Nightingaje hospitals are utterly unable to deal with the complexities
That is why no one is there
They are like the near useless ventilators it was claimed were being built – a PR stunt
Nightingale hospitals will be a success if none are used – hurrah, another winner…