Herd Immunity and death-trap care homes: have the Tories embraced Nazi values?

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Actions speak louder than words. Chimes of Tory sorrow about Covid-19 clang hollowly across a kingdom of rising death tolls and broken promises: their daily briefings more propaganda than public health information. 

Prompted by the government’s eugenicist chatter about ‘herd immunity’ (reports of which persist), some are wondering if the gap between Tory spin and moral actions warrant comparisons with Nazi Germany. 

Such talk will land as offensive and hyperbolic for some and it’s true that fascism comparisons are wrongly overused in the UK – rarely adding much to any debate.

When enough facts emerge (and this may take years) I doubt they will support direct comparisons to Nazism. Having said that, if we choose to look carefully about what is happening right now, there is much legitimate cause for concern about the direction of travel: the gap appears to be narrowing.  

Suspicion surrounds the ideological drift of this new Tory regime. After ten years in power, the Tories have routed the Corbyn project, ditched all their ‘big society’ frostings and the more moderate wing of the party has been excommunicated.

A large parliamentary majority finds the hard right feeling belligerently above moral reproach – perhaps dangerously so: a feeling that mirrors an alignment with the ‘strong man’ authoritarianism of Donald Trump. Just a few minutes ago, the UK refused to criticise Donald Trump’s withdrawal of funding from the WHO and picked up his attack lines against China. 

Dominic Cummins (an Alistair Campbell / Malcom Tucker figure) has moved swiftly to create a policy making unit of ‘cutthroat enforcers’ to discipline the civil service.  His pandemic position summarised as “herd immunity, protect the economy, and if that means some pensioners die, too bad” has stoked anxiety . Indeed, for about 11 weeks it certainly appeared that UK government policy was for everyone to get infected…and then let natural selection take over.

Not withstanding the belated public volte face by the Tories about ‘herd immunity’, deep question marks remain about what is driving government policy and how truthfully the consequences of it are being reported.

We have relayed concerns before that patients with learning disabilities are being deemed ‘too frail’ for mechanical ventilation and that disabled people are less likely to receive critical care: policies which dovetail with the hostile environment towards disabled people and vulnerable benefit claimants which remain a key feature of Tory austerity.

In a move with all the ugly echoes of ‘bed blocking’ and ‘care in the community’, we now see hospitals discharging elderly patients recovering from Covid-19 back into care homes: places full of people most vulnerable to the disease. NHS guidelines insist this can be done safely, but this relies on non-existent testing capacity and PPE that remains in chronically short supply.  This policy has all too predictably created another epidemic: residential care homes have swiftly become literal death traps for the elderly and their staff. 

Moving the pandemic out of hospitals and into care homes is rather convenient for the government. It avoids politically damaging headlines about overwhelmed hospitals and facilitates manipulation of the figures: as deaths in care homes and in the community are curiously omitted from headline government comparisons with other nations.

The government wails that it is too difficult for it to count dead bodies in care homes, but this doesn’t sit easily alongside the successful programs of other nations that require sophisticated contact tracing of the living: particularly as this appears to be the government’s preferred exit strategy – if they actually have one.    

The government knew about the lack of testing and the lack of PPE, so they knew that discharging Covid-19 patients into care homes risked a horrific death toll: but they did it anyway and are still doing it (although some care homes are now refusing to cooperate). 

This raises suspicion that the policy is at least influenced by a broadly eugenicist agenda and an urgent political need to cover up the consequences of same. Whistle blowers have stepped forward to allege that the lack of testing means Doctors are not recording Covid-19 as a cause of death for elderly residents of care homes which leaves an officially unexplained surge of deaths off the headline death rate.

The embrace of ideology over morality is exemplified in the Tory failure to avail themselves of the EU joint procurement scheme for ventilators and PPE. A party puffed with Brexit bravado could not be seen to rely on EU solidarity for vital equipment: it seems highly likely that people have paid for this parochial hubris with their lives. 

Nazism subscribed to faux scientific theories about racial hierarchy and Social Darwinism and was piteously ruthless towards vulnerable people and minority groups within society. Need we draw your attention towards Grenfell and Windrush, food banks and Tory Islamophobia, Boris Johnson’s casual racism and Tory resentment towards moral reproach, salient expertise and mainstream science? 

The Tory approach to Covid-19 has seen hard right economic ideology, jingoistic exceptionalism and faux scientific claims elevated above the clear and urgent advice of the WHO: as a result tens of thousands have died, with no end in sight.

Much UK government strategy now pivots around covering up the deaths caused by its herd immunity dithering and retains a characteristically callous and immoral indifference towards vulnerable members of society. This may not be exactly the morals and apparatus of Nazi Germany and that distinction should remain clear – but the gap between the two seems to narrow every day…

…it should also be remembered that the holocaust was a ‘final solution’: one for which the Nazis had a number of trial runs.  

Since 2013 I have worked between 4-6 hours a day on this Ad-Free site: trying to give a voice to those without the power or agency to speak out for themselves and uncovering truths that well paid journalists in the corporate media dare not utter.

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Thank you in solidarity with all our readers. John Lynch, Editor.     

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