This is the first in a series of papers by members of Greenwich & Woolwich Momentum as a contribution to the debate among socialists and activists in the Labour movement about a socialist response to the unprecedented health, social and economic crisis unleashed by the Corona Virus.

In the last line in one his most famous poems, written after the Easter 1916 Irish Rising, W.B. Yeats declared – “All is changed – changed utterly. A terrible beauty is born.” As this apocalyptic global pandemic pursues its devastating path through society, it is easy to share Yeats’ sense of society living through a radical break with the past but nervous about what the future may hold.

It is difficult to overstate how much Covid-19 has already transformed everyday life. The numbing toll of the number of deaths from the virus – notably in this country – echoes the plague experiences of the medieval age, or the devastation caused by so-called ‘Spanish Flu’ after the First World War. 

No one knows how long the extraordinary measures governments are taking to shield the population against the virus will have to last before life gets back to what is deemed ‘normal’. But for many people going back to normal will mean going back to even greater poverty and inequality than before.

Boris Johnson and his Tory government have failed utterly to respond adequately to the pandemic ever since it first emerged globally. A combination of indolence and arrogance – together with decades of underinvestment in the NHS and social care – led to scandalous failure to secure essential supplies of health protection equipment for front line health and care workers and a nationwide capacity to test and identify potential virus victims.

The price has been paid by the tens of thousands of lives lost needlessly. 

  • Labour should insist on “No return to work without the approval of workplace trade union health and safety representatives.” All government supported companies should be required to introduce elected worker representatives to their boards.”  Labour must demand a full scale, judicial public inquiry. This is something Labour MPs, the wider labour movement and above all Labour’s new leader, Keir Starmer must pursue relentlessly now.

The pandemic is having a devastating impact on the global capitalist economic system. Experts warn that the world economy faces a near one third collapse of production over the next year or two. The International Monetary Fund, the World Bank and national economic institutes also fear sluggish economic recovery with the risk of levels of unemployment not seen since the 1920s.

Moreover, there is a real risk of further waves of the virus sweeping across the globe. This time it might centre on the poorest societies in Africa and Latin America which lack crucial health care facilities and resources. A Second Wave would not only lead to further mass loss of life but require a further period of paralysing “lockdown” and thus deepen the global recession.

A striking measure of the economic shock already delivered has been the immediate and dramatic response of governments across the capitalist world – including the UK Tory government. Virtually overnight the Tories dumped decades of doctrinal commitment to economic ‘austerity’ policies and hard line neo-liberal, free market strategy.

The moderate left social democrat journalist Fintan O’Toole in the Irish Times on April 23, 2020 put it like this – “The bigger force is, of course, the advent of corona communism. The pandemic is transforming the relationship between the State, society and the economy. The public realm has expanded to an extent that even the hard left would scarcely have thought feasible a few months ago. The Government is paying private-sector wages. Disregarded people have become “key workers”. 

The dramatic revelation of our utter interdependence has destroyed the allure of rugged individualism. Priorities have changed – we are getting a terrible lesson in what really matters and what doesn’t. A sense of the fragility of our place in the natural world – our existence as just one part of a much larger complex of living things – has been brought home to us.”

The British state has pumped in astronomic sums of public money in a desperate attempt to limit the scale of bankruptcy among major companies and

avert the collapse of whole industries. Increasingly we live – for now at least – under more of a system of State Capitalism than traditional Free Market Capitalism.

Of course this is all designed to eventually restore the old finance led capitalist system with all the appalling inequality and poverty that accompanies it. Socialists will insist that this crisis demonstrates for all to see that the old system has failed – even on its own terms. No return to the poverty, inequality and neglect of public services will be acceptable.

  • Labour should make it clear: the vast transfers of cash to the private sector must in future come with stringent conditions in support of workers’ rights, protection of jobs, greater gender and racial equality and far greater democratic accountability to the workforce and wider society. Labour should demand that NHS staff and care workers be given a substantial immediate pay rise.

In the midst of such tragedy, it is important to recognise the positive, hopeful and inspiring changes which the Corona virus has brought. The massive popular response in support of NHS and care workers in their fight for elementary safety equipment needs to convert into a wider campaign to restore the terrible damage inflicted in health and all public services since the Thatcher era.

The popular support for the NHS and its workers and the mounting public anger at the way the government has failed to provide for their protection is unmistakable. As time passes, and as anger at the Johnson government grows, this could mutate into popular support for a radical alternative to the system of economic and social inequality and environmental devastation.

  • Labour should commit to the full restoration of funding removed in more than a decade of spending cuts imposed on our NHS by successive Tory governments. Social Care should be fully integrated into the NHS system.

Members and supporters of the Labour Party left have been dismayed and demoralised by the failure to unseat the Tories at the last general election. They have been demoralised by the way Labour’s right wing demonised Jeremy Corbyn leading to that defeat and forcing his departure as leader. But in the era of the Covid-19 crisis, the socialist policies first given expression by Corbyn now have greater relevance and potential impact than ever before.

After Covid-19 – What Future Challenges?

After a crisis on the scale of the world wide Covid-19 pandemic, the global economic and political system will face enormous challenges. It would be rash to suggest that the ruling class will always react in a single, predictable, manner. The world system and the capitalist classes generally are fissured and divided about a range of different and often conflicting responses. It is worth examining these differing strategies which pose different threats and will demand somewhat different responses.

1. Back to a Free Market, Austerity Status Quo?

This has been the favoured response of the mainstream right and centre right after lesser crises such as the 2008/9 banking upheavals.  But this immediate response appears to be economically and politically impractical in the short and maybe medium term. The sheer scale of the looming bankruptcies already hanging over vast swathes of the economy – in the UK and across the world – might make immediate further austerity impractical. 

Popular and militant resistance could threaten the future of a Tory government – even one with a big Parliamentary majority. It would risk divisions in the ruling class comparable with the 19th century Corn Laws Tory split when Tory free traders – with the slogan ‘Cheap Food’ – fought Tory trade protectionists.

An immediate return to classical Thatcherism would involve a rapid withdrawal of state subsidies to the private sector. But this would almost certainly risk whole corporations – indeed whole sectors of the economy – simply collapsing. This is something the Tory right will wish to avoid. Instead they will play for time before returning to hard line free market economics. But that does not mean the alternative Tory option is any more acceptable.

  • Labour should insist that government financial support for ‘furloughed’ workers should continue until they are reemployed at similar rates in new jobs. There should be outright opposition to any return to further austerity. Increased social and environmental expenditure should be paid by the wealthy through a serious crackdown on tax avoidance and through wealth taxes and super-taxes on very high incomes.

2. Consolidation of State Capitalism?

Under this scenario the state governments will have to continue pumping vast sums of money and credit into the system to ensure that whole economies do not simply fragment in chaos. Such a hybrid system of mixed state/private ownership might have to continue for some years to allow time for the private sector to restructure. 

Whatever the short term necessity for the Johnson government to embrace it, such a ‘State Capitalist’ strategy is already starting to generate divisions in the business and economic establishment. State Capitalism may also appeal to far right, potentially authoritarian forces in the Tory party and beyond. This form of authoritarian state capitalism has already emerged in the hard right regimes in Brazil, Hungary, India, Turkey, Israel and in a different form, in Trump’s US administration.

The Tory state will, however, increasingly demand a massive, arbitrary restructuring of employment and living standards. In the name of ‘productivity’ we can expect an onslaught not only on employment levels but directly on wages and salaries in the period ahead.

The combination of State Capitalism and hard right, authoritarian right wing nationalist politics carries obvious threats to civil liberties, democratic rights and even basic human rights. Bellicose nationalist governments and invariably more trade protectionist state regimes are a recipe for increased global rivalry and greater risk of armed conflict.

3. Economic/Social/Green/Democratic ‘New Deal’

Such a transforming alternative society is within our grasp. People increasingly understand the intimate links between inequality, poverty, injustice, climate change and an ever more degraded natural environment. Real change has to integrate all these dimensions in a political and social transformation.

This requires a movement uniting the trade unions and those determined to ensure a post Covid-19 transition to a fundamentally different economic and social system. This will have to reach far beyond traditional social democratic tinkering with economic demand management and limited social reform which has defined centrist social democratic Labour politics for decades.

Covid-19 is also a dramatic warning that capitalist globalisation has not only produced acute economic and social inequality. It has also been perilously undermining our planetary environment and the climate itself. Left unchecked this could now even threaten the very future of our species.

All this demands a strategic and structural change of economic, political and social policy direction. The intertwining of the viral, climate and economic crises call now for strategies consciously designed to build an economically and environmentally sustainable recovery which puts democracy and social empowerment of working people at its heart. It is a challenge which demands an assertion of the latent power of working people to shape new realities at work and in society locally, nationally, across Europe and eventually globally.

The Peoples’ Fight Back Has Already Begun

Since the start of the crisis we have witnessed the remarkable way in which communities have come together to support the most vulnerable and to rally support for NHS and Social Care workers. Literally millions of people have demonstrated not only their support for NHS and social care workers but anger at the loss of lives due to the criminal lack of personal protective equipment (PPE).

Hundreds of thousands have volunteered to keep elderly and vulnerable people in isolation supplied with food, medicines and other essentials. The vast majority of these people have never been political activists. These popular, community based movements should become a key element in a wider united campaign – itself part of a world-wide movement – for economic, social, environmental and political change.

The Covid crisis must propel the trade union movement from protest to organised resistance to the threat to health from grossly inadequate PPE available to NHS and social care staff. Trade unions must give voice to the victims of the planned cuts in living standards, to those at risk of losing government pay subsidies and those at the bottom of the social pyramid without regular social security payments.

These include migrant workers who have played a vital role in ensuring the NHS and social care services meet the terrible challenge of Covid-19. Food growers face a disastrous inability to harvest food at this time because of a shortage of seasonal labour. In some cases these migrant workers are ‘undocumented’ and left without any social rights. In all cases their status should be regularised and their entitlement to state financial aid should be confirmed. White collar professionals and small business people are also at risk but should be encouraged to play a productive role in future community wealth creating initiatives.

Combatting Slump Demands Greater Workers’ Power

One overarching challenge is how to handle the eventual easing of the virus lockdown regulations without risking further damage to the economy. There is a serious risk that employers and the government give lower priority to the health and safety of employees than getting production rolling again.

The Trade Union Congress has condemned any such development. It is essential that workers are involved in agreeing the health and safety arrangements on the shop floor before a return to work. This should not only involve full time trade union officials but elected representatives of the workers in each workplace.

This crisis has shown something obvious but rarely recognised: the potential of using the skills workers have in many economic sectors – think just of car, electronic or aircraft production – to meet unfilled social needs. In fact, as the Covid-19 crisis exposed the grotesque lack of government provision of PPE and crucial medical equipment, the government was obliged to ask some big manufacturing companies to switch production from cars and aircraft to manufacture what was needed.

  • There are clear lessons here. State financial support for companies should come with conditions. One obvious step is to strengthen the role of trade unions in all health and safety issues at work. There should be NO return to work except with prior trade union agreement on all relevant health and safety issues. Where the government has to continue support for private businesses, it should take the form of a publicly owned stake in those companies. Enterprises receiving public support should be directed to the active development of worker cooperatives and community based social enterprises.
  • There should be a comprehensive skills audit of all workers in state     assisted enterprises. This would help part-state owned companies identify and help meet wider unfilled social and environmental needs beyond priority health and social care. There is a rich history of this in the trade union movement – not least the movement led by Lucas Aerospace shop stewards in the 1970s ‘Workers Alternative Plans for socially useful production.’

The recasting of the social character of state economic and investment policy should also help to drive forward and extend Labour’s promised Green New Deal and the fight against climate change. 

However, democratic control over government and state bodies – weak at the best of times – has atrophied further during this crisis. We could face serious threats to civil liberties and democratic rights as a result of the way the state is seeking ever greater surveillance control over our lives under Covid-19 cover.

In this paper we identify only some of the most egregious threats and most obvious opportunities for a fundamental change of political direction. Bringing an increasingly unaccountable state under effective democratic control raises enormous issues for the left. Moreover there is clear evidence of the growing fragmentation of the UK state itself with renewed popular impetus behind both Irish unification and Scottish independence.

The way is opening for sweeping constitutional and maybe even electoral reform in Britain – and especially in England. There is a huge pent up demand for wholesale devolution of power to cities and communities. The new post Covid-19 economy must be rooted in far greater democracy at all levels of the state. The building of a new socially inspired economic recovery should take inspiration from the drive for democratic empowerment of people.

We start with the enormous socialist policy gains made in the Labour Party under Jeremy Corbyn’s leadership. But recent revelations about deliberate attempts to sabotage Labour’s 2017 general election prospects by key right wingers in Labour’s national machine is a wake-up call.

The best way to respond is revitalisation of the socialist currents in the Labour party. That must go hand in hand with active campaigning to empower the organised trade union movement especially among the growing ranks of the precariat in all workplaces. And that means revitalised campaigning in our own communities to give democracy itself a central role in securing economic, environmental and social change.

(JOHN PALMER, IS A MEMBER OF GREENWICH & WOOLWICH LABOUR PARTY AND FORWARD MOMENTUM.)