Workers have always been expendable to the Tories. Will you risk Covid-19 death to defend their wealth?

.

‘Excess deaths’ is the euphemism that now stalks the UK. Today’s grim figures state 32 thousand are dead from Covid-19 but their underlying health condition was being British and predominantly poor.

Throughout British history, the owning class have been frightfully careless about the deaths of outsiders: be they in the mines and satanic mills of empire, WWI trenches, the naked exploitations of the Victorians or the 130,000+ killed by contemporary austerity.

In the seemingly intractable dance of British class, an establishment education teaches that wealth \ agency and vainglorious follies are justifiably built upon the labours of the expendables. Conversely the lower orders are taught to obediently accept their fate.

The cavalier entitlement of the upper class and the resigned trances of the working class are what Tories work tirelessly to protect and extend. This dynamic has been reinforced by decades of recent defeat for the working class but was etched into the very DNA of British society long before that. The neoliberal routs of Thatcherism and Blairism continue today via austerity, food banks, benefit sanctions, the hostile environment and the wholesale capture of public assets by private capital.     

Boris Johnson and his feckless cronies know via their cultural indoctrination that the poor are not important. The civil service and the media will always conspire to hide sins against the expendables and a majority of the working class can be reliably duped into rallying behind the flag and Churchillian wartime rhetoric. 

Harold Macmillan, a Tory toff with an entrenched disdain for the lower orders, famously told the British public that they had “never had it so good” and they agreed, re-electing him soon after with an increased majority. That he chose to upbraid the public during a pandemic that his government had spread due to cavalier incompetence didn’t seem to matter. 30,000 ‘excess deaths’ in 1957 and already 32,000+ in 2020: the names change but the ballroom twirls of the British class system remain the same.

Yes of course Bojo and crew were too engrossed in the champagne pops of their Pyrrhic Brexit victories to care much in February and March about losing some troublingly expensive pensioners to a virus. Tories love their masturbatory bubbles of nostalgia for the empire and British exceptionalism, and they come from a class that has been indulged in such follies for centuries.

Every pukka member of the establishment knows that whatever their feckless incompetence and amorality, they can only commit two real crimes: to damage capital advantages and to allow the working class to find out how badly they are getting shafted.

The recent scrambling and dissembling of the government has the same Tory policy goals as always: avoiding working class discovery and protecting the interests of capital. All efforts in the coming weeks will be similarly directed – and so we come to the big question…

Are you willing to risk your life to protect the assets of the owning class in the UK? Are you prepared to die as a fool amidst a premeditated swap of expendable working class lives for GDP? If you are, then you need not worry: your sacrifice will be greatly appreciated by the state. If not, then you need to watch what the Tories are now up to very very carefully.

Working class peril and establishment indifference are already a reality for the terrified nurses, doctors, bus drivers and shop workers of the UK . Now with haste driven by the harrumphs of the hard right and the leaden fists of capital, the government wants to get your family back into their daily races long before it is safe.

Trade Unions and the public at large are encouragingly skeptical, with 81% against a precipitate easing of the lock down. But millions in the UK simply cannot afford to stay away from work without government support. We should not expect British employers to place safety ahead of profits – that has never been the mood music of the nation.

Whatever the government says about easing the Covid-19 (partial) lock down, it will be (at best) a half-truth: they will be gambling with lives and quite willing to turn the UK into a sacrifice zone if (and most likely when) things go awry.

Oasis famously told us not to place our lives into the hands of a rock and roll band because ‘they’ll throw it all away’. Boris Johnson’s government  has already shrugged off the needless deaths of 32k+ as an ‘apparent success’, how will such a government now treat your life and the lives of your loved ones going forward? How many will be forced to risk death in the weeks and months ahead merely because they are British…and poor?

Are you prepared to play along and let them get away with it? 

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.

I am a home schooling parent on a low income – paying for the domain, web hosting and security entirely out of my own pocket.  

If you found this article useful and could spare us a few shillings to help keep our lights on, it would be very much appreciated.

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

Click here to follow Sodium Haze on Facebook