Tory governments always lead to disasters and crises. Ever since the Labour Party was created, it has been left up to Labour governments to pick up the pieces created by them, and to resolve them. Because of the nature of the Labour Party, as a social-democratic party, usually led by its conservative wing, that has always meant resolving those crises in the interests of capital not labour. The same is happening with this crisis. Labour is going along with the Tory narrative about the need to close down the economy, even though all the evidence indicates that such action is both unnecessary and more destructive than the virus itself. Labour is, at least, calling on the government to ensure that workers wages are maintained during the crisis, in the same way that the Democrats are doing in the US. However, such a demand is impossible to achieve, if production is closed, for any length of time. Its not a question of paying workers money wages, but the fact that those money wages are worthless if wage goods themselves are not produced as a result of the shut down. In short, the wages have nothing to buy, and so it causes rampant inflation, black marketeering, still within the context of workers being unable to buy the things required to sustain themselves. As with all such Utopian demands, the very fact that they are unachievable, and will lead to workers being misled, and, thereby, inevitably disappointed, makes them also reactionary, because they divert workers from the demands they actually need to raise in such conditions, and the failure also leads to disillusionment in those that raise them, leading workers into the arms of the reactionaries who offer simplistic, populist answers such as “blame the foreigners”, “stop free movement”, “shut the borders”, and “end globalisation”.
A Tory government in the 1840's led to the avoidable death and destruction of the Irish Famine that ravaged the Irish population purely as a result of Tory ideological intransigence. Tory nationalism and protectionism, mirrored by the same kind of ideology on the part of its equivalents in Europe, led to World War I. Although, the Liberal, Lloyd George, was Prime Minister at the time the Treaty of Versailles was signed, he was a Liberal dependent on Tory support. It was the same Tory nationalism and protectionism that, via the Versailles Treaty led to the rise of Hitler and Nazism. As Trotsky put it,
"The democracies of the Versailles Entente helped the victory of Hitler by their vile oppression of defeated Germany.”
(Phrases and Reality, quoted in Writings 1938-9)
In the 1920's it was the Tory government of Baldwin that presided over the disaster that was the 1926 General Strike, as the Tories sought to destroy workers living standards to defend capital. It was their nationalistic and protectionist policies, along with those of their fellow thinkers in other countries, that worsened the effects of the economic crisis of the 1920's, and the stagnation of the 1930's, by imposing restrictions on trade that significantly reduced global trade and increased costs of production, in a similar way that Trump is doing in the US, and the Brexiteers, today, seek to do in the UK. It was the Tories that presided over the disaster of Dunkirk at the start of WWII, which led to the effective defeat of Britain, until it was rescued by the intervention of the USSR and USA in the war.
It was again the nationalistic and colonialist nature of Eden's Tory government that led to the debacle of Suez in the 1950's, and which led to the 13 wasted years of Tory government that failed to take advantage of the long post-war boom to properly retool British industry, so as to be globally competitive, instead allowing capital to simply try to screw more surplus value out of British workers using out of date equipment. One example of that was the failure to electrify the railways in the way that European countries had done. In the same way that it was Attlee's Labour government that had to clean up the post-war mess that Churchill and the Tories had created before the war, so it was left to Wilson's Labour government to clear up the mess that Churchill, Eden, Macmillan and Home had created. It was up to Wilson to introduce the policies of the “White Heat of Technology” to retool and modernise British industry, so as to provide British workers with the same kinds of productivity enhancing equipment that their US, Japanese, and European counterparts already enjoyed. 
It was the Heath Tory government that led Britain into the Three Day Week, as they once again sought to devastate workers wages in order to restore profits to capital. It was the Tory governments of Thatcher and Major that led Britain back into the Depression era levels of mass unemployment, in the 1980's, as they again tried to boost profits, by attacking workers wages. It was they laid waste to industrial areas across the North of England, Scotland, Wales and the Midlands. At a time when they could have used massive North Sea Oil and gas revenues to invest in modernising the country's infrastructure and skills, and to facilitate the modernisation of the economy's fixed capital base, so as to raise productivity, they instead used those revenues to finance levels of unemployment that reached over 6 million, which they used a weapon to beat down workers and their trades unions. And, they used those revenues to pay out billions to shareholders and speculators, via the privatisation of large swathes of nationalised industry at knock down prices. At the same time, they let the infrastructure of the country rot, like a Rachmanite landlord.
The NHS was starved of funds, schools were staved of funds, with thousands of schools forced to close and merge across the country. By the time the Tories were kicked out in 1997, the destruction of the health service had reached such levels that the Social Trends Survey found that the percentage of those satisfied with the NHS stood at 55% in 1983, and fell steadily until 1994, when it stood at 44%. It then fell again sharply down to 34% in 1997. After Labour came to office satisfaction rose steadily rising to an all-time high of 64% in 2009.
Of course, for the Tories, the kind of investment that Labour governments have made, to clear up the mess that Tory governments have created, is always considered to be wasteful extravagance, because any money spent on investment is, for them, money that otherwise could have been paid out to their members and supporters as company dividends, interest, and rents. It is why conservative ideology, not just of the Tories, but also of conservative social-democrats, always leads to short-termism, with a concern to maximise these short term revenues and capital gains, for the owners of fictitious capital at the expense of the necessary long-term investment in the real economy. It is why Tory governments, and conservative social-democracy, where it pursues the same kinds of ideology, always leads to disaster and crises, which progressive social-democracy then has to come along to clear up.
Tories created the disaster of the Irish Famine, because they refused to allow starving Irish workers and peasants access to food aid sent to them by British workers. There reason for doing so was that it would depress food prices, and thereby hit the profits of capitalist farmers. As Connolly states,
“The staple food of the Irish peasantry was the potato; all other agricultural produce, grains and cattle, was sold to pay the landlord’s rent. The ordinary value of the potato crop was yearly approximately twenty million pounds in English money; in 1848, in the midst of the famine the value of agricultural produce in Ireland was £44,958,120. In that year the entire potato crop was a failure, and to that fact the famine is placidly attributed, yet those figures amply prove that there was food enough in the country to feed double the population, were the laws of capitalist society set aside, and human rights elevated to their proper position. It is a common saying amongst Irish Nationalists that “Providence sent the potato blight; but England made the famine”. The statement is true, and only needs amending by adding that “England made the famine by a rigid application of the economic principles that lie at the base of capitalist society”...
Had Socialist principles been applied to Ireland in those days not one person need have died of hunger, and not one cent of charity need have been subscribed to leave a smirch upon the Irish name. But all except a few men had elevated landlord property and capitalist political economy to a fetish to be worshipped, and upon the altar of that fetish Ireland perished. At the lowest computation 1,225,000 persons died of absolute hunger; all of these were sacrificed upon the altar of capitalist thought.
Early in the course of the famine the English Premier, Lord John Russell, declared that nothing must be done to interfere with private enterprise or the regular course of trade, and this was the settled policy of the Government from first to last. A Treasury Minute of August 31, 1846, provided that “depots for the sale of food were to be established at Longford, Banagher, Limerick, Galway, Waterford, and Sligo, and subordinate depots at other places on the western coast”, but the rules provided that such depots were not to be opened where food could be obtained from private dealers, and, when opened, food was to be sold at prices which would permit of private dealers competing. In all the Acts establishing relief works, it was stipulated that all the labour must be entirely unproductive, so as not to prevent capitalists making a profit either then or in the future. Private dealers made fortunes ranging from £40,000 to £80,000. In 1845 a Commissariat Relief Department was organised to bring in Indian Corn for sale in Ireland, but none was to be sold until all private stores were sold out: the State of Massachusetts hired an American ship-of-war, the Jamestown, loaded it with grain, and sent it to Ireland; the Government placed the cargo in storage, claiming that putting it on the market would disturb trade. A Poor Relief Bill in 1847 made provision for the employment of labour on public works, but stipulated that none should be employed who retained more than a quarter of an acre of land; this induced tens of thousands to surrender their farms for the sake of a bite to eat, and saved the landlords all the trouble and expense of eviction.”
Similarly, the crisis of the 1920's and stagnation of the 1930's was worsened by the protectionist measures introduced by the Tory government, which were themselves intended to boost the profits of British capitalists by protecting them against competition from foreign companies. The same was true of the protectionist and colonialist policies of the Tories after World War II, which attempted to maintain the Empire and the monopoly privileges it entailed, even as it was being challenged to break that Empire apart by the US. The Tories sought to protect inefficient British capitalists, who continued to refuse to invest in productivity raising equipment, to enable British workers to compete with their foreign counterparts. Instead, those capitalists sought to squeeze every last bit of use out of the old machines and factories, and to sweat the workers that operated them, as the means to extract their profits. Meanwhile, those capitalists continued to drain large amounts of dividends, interest and rent from that surplus value, rather than to invest it productively. Only in the most vital staple industries, such as coal, steel and transport was the required investment put in to enable the rest of British capital to function, but now that investment was put in, not by the shareholders in those companies, but by the taxpayer, as they were nationalised.
Its quite true as Macmillan stated in the 1950's that Britons had “never had it so good”, but that was not due to anything that the Tory governments, during that period had done, or that British capitalists had done. It was entirely due to the normal functioning of the long wave cycle, of the development of newer, more productive more profitable, and higher paying industries, such as car production, domestic electronics production and so on, often established by foreign, and particularly US capital. By the end of the 1950's, the thirteen wasted years of Tory government had not made British industry overall significantly more productive one jot, and setting a precedent for future conservative policy, the one thing it did begin, was to cover that fact by the illusion created by the illusion of capital gains from inflated asset prices. Tory Chancellor Reggie Maudling was the first to begin the process of encouraging property speculation, by inflating house prices.
He was followed, by Tory Chancellor Anthony Barber who created the inflationary Barber Boom of the early 1970's. Then we had the Lawson boom of the 1980's. All of these booms were, of course, not real economic booms, but simply booms in asset prices, artificially inflating the prices of fictitious capital and other assets, so as to inflate the paper wealth of the top 0.01%, whilst simultaneously impoverishing everyone else, by making the cost of shelter and pension provision that much more expensive. It was those policies introduced, particularly by the Thatcher and Major Tory governments, that led to the housing crisis, as house prices rocketed to astronomical levels, that led to the black holes in pension funds, as the prices of bonds and shares also rocketed to astronomical levels, meaning that pension contributions bought increasingly less of them, at the same time that yields on those funds collapsed, and that also led to the financial meltdown of 2008, as inevitably rising interest rates caused those asset price bubbles all to collapse simultaneously. 
The Labour government after 1997, managed to invest in the economy's infrastructure, to repair the damage that 18 years of Tory misrule had caused. Yet, it managed to do so whilst having a budget deficit to GDP ratio that was only half that of the Thatcher/Major years. Where Thatcher and Major managed only 2 years of budget surplus out of 18 years in government, Labour managed 4 years of budget surplus. Yet, the Tories, in their normal method of rewriting history, accuse Labour of profligacy! Labour itself was fortunate after 1997, because the main reason it achieved this feat was nothing to do with the conservative social-democratic nature of its own measures, but was due to the normal operation once more of the long wave cycle. Just as the Tories benefited from a new long wave upturn after 1949, so Blair benefited from a new long wave upturn after 1999. Nevertheless, it was again a Labour government that had had to come in to clear up the mess left by a succession of Tory governments.
And, in 2010, Labour again left the Liberal-Tories with an economy that was well on the way to recovery, following the damage done by the global financial crisis, a crisis that itself was the result of the policies introduced by Tories, and their cothinkers in other countries, during the 1980's and 90's. And, as soon as the Tories took office, we have seen the same history repeat itself. The Tories once more sent the economy into recession and stagnation with their austerity policies. They again began to destroy the infrastructure of the economy, undermining once more the health service, social care, education, roads and other communications, all the time inflating the prices of land, property, and financial assets.
It is that which has now put Britain in a terrible position to be able to deal with the effects of COVID19. But, it is also because the Tories do not understand the real basis of capital, of the source of value and wealth creation (they have even lost the understanding provided by bourgeois writers like Smith and Ricardo) that their idiotic response to COVID19, and the moral panic that has been whipped up around it, is leading to a disaster on an unprecedented scale. The economic and social disaster that is being created by the Tories, in closing down the economy and production will put all previous Tory inflicted disasters in the shade by many, many degrees. No wonder we have the usual idiots photo bombing interviews with signs proclaiming that "Jesus Christ Will Soon Return", though he'd probably be better staying at home, because, if he does return, he will be quarantined by the Tories! They own this crisis, just as they own the crisis that would similarly be inflicted by their idiotic policy of Brexit. It is up to Labour to ensure that the Tories are made to own those crises, and that Labour shares no blame in that. 
Labour should not be going along with the closing down of the economy, which there is no scientific or methodological evidence to justify, and they most certainly should not be going along with Johnson Bonaparte taking full dictatorial powers into his hands for an indeterminate period, powers which will inevitably be used to batter down workers, and any opposition to the idiotic measures and their consequences he is pursuing. Labour should instead be demanding that the at risk 20% be immediately quarantined, and provided with all the requirements they need to get through such a period of quarantine. Labour should follow the advice of Dr. Wodarg, and insist on more scientific, and methodologically sound means of testing whether COVID19 is, in reality, any more deadly than the coronaviruses that circulate in the population every year, as opposed to being simply a different strain of such viruses, as there is a different strain of them every year. The evidence is that its mortality rate is only 0.1%, the same as for flu, and so no more deadly than the corona viruses of past years.
Labour should insist that testing be rolled out extensively, as has happened in South Korea, but, with the virus already having infected perhaps half a million people in Britain, testing to see who has it currently is pretty pointless. What is required is to test who has had it, and who, thereby, has developed immunity to it. The current policy of only testing that small proportion of people who are infected by the virus, and ill enough to require hospital treatment, necessarily gives a vastly inflated figure of the mortality rate, as against the reality. That is why, the actual number of deaths in Britain, whilst devastating for each individual and the family concerned, remains at less than 400, compared to the number of deaths on average from seasonal flu, in any year being 8,000, and the number of deaths from seasonal flu in 2018 being 17,000. Even in Italy, the number of deaths remains at only around 6,000, whereas it has an average number of excess deaths from flu, each year, of around 17,000. So, Italy, the current centre of COVID19 deaths, currently only has mortality from it of approximately a third of its average annual flu deaths. The same pattern appears for China, in respect of Wuhan. The total number of deaths even worldwide, currently, is less than the 17,000 deaths from flu in Britain alone, in 2018!
Of course, this does not mean, as some are trying to say, that coronavirus is being equated with flu. The two viruses are different. What is being said is that the mortality rate for COVID19, at 1 in 100,000 is the same as flu. Moreover, as Wobag says, in any year, around 14% of those who contract some kind of respiratory infection will have contracted a coronavirus. That those affected have contracted a coronavirus, rather than a flu virus, is never picked up, because no one ever tests the millions of people that come down with flu like symptoms each year, to detect whether they have got the flu, or whether they have been infected by a coronavirus. But, if you then only test those that come down with a respiratory disease that leads them to require hospital treatment, you are talking about a much smaller population sample, and a sample, which by nature, is likely to have a larger proportion of people who are also infected by a coronavirus. This is almost like a self fulfilling prophecy. Moreover, people who come down with the flu, are almost all laid low with it, and so have a week off work, stay in bed and so on. In other words, they automatically self isolate. But, for 80% of people, the coronavirus has no symptoms, or only very mild symptoms, so they do not feel ill enough to stay off work, and so on. That is why it can be spread more easily than flu, because those who are infected continue as normal, and infect others at a rate of around 2.5 during the time they are infectious. Yet, precisely because the coronavirus has no serious consequences for 80% of the population, it is meaningless to be concerned about infection rates rather than mortality rates. You may as well say that if there is a head lice outbreak that is likely to affect everyone, you should close everything down, even though the number who are likely to die from such an outbreak is next to zero.
But, the nature of what is going on as a moral panic is witnessed by the fact that these infection rates and mortality rates are broadcast by the media willy-nilly, even though the comparison, even from country to country is conducted on completely different bases. The British media continually place the number of deaths alongside “confirmed cases”, but the confirmed cases figure is meaningless, because only those admitted to hospital, i.e. those seriously ill are tested for the virus. So, the number of “confirmed cases” is 6650. In fact, this number itself, is interesting, because the total number tested was 84,000. So, it is only the 84,000 people admitted to hospital that were tested, and of these only 1/12, i.e. approximately 8%, had the coronavirus, again confirming Wobag's analysis based upon the Glasgow studies. Compared against the 8400 confirmed cases, the 336 deaths looks high, a mortality rate of 4%. But, of course, the 8400 figure is only those that have been tested. Last week, the government's Chief Scientific advisor, Sir Patrick Vallance, said that the actual number of people infected, was probably around 100,000, which gave a mortality rate of around 0.1%. So, with deaths at 336, we would expect that the actual number of people infected by COVID19 stands at something around 336,000 – 500,000, in Britain. What is actually required is extensive testing to identify this half million people, and to see if they are now immune. If they are, there is no reason why they should not be able to go about their business as normal.
And, the way "confirmed cases" in other countries is measured also differs. In China, they have tested tens of thousands of people, but where the test shows that someone has had the virus but showed no symptoms and has recovered from it, they do not classify such an individual as a "confirmed case". That in itself gives a thoroughly inflated figure for the mortality rate, because there are vastly more people who have had the virus and suffered no serious consequences from it, than there are of those that currently have it.
Rather than backing the government's disastrous and draconian measures, Labour should be opposing them, and proposing measures that ensure that production can continue as near as normal as possible. It should do so by demanding measures that enable workers to go about their business in as safe a manner as possible, by ensuring necessary protocols at work, the provision of extensive PPE. In order to ensure such safe working, Labour should be proposing the establishment of Committees of Workers Inspection, based on a beefed up number of properly trained Trades Union Health and Safety reps. It is yet another indication of why we need extensive trades union rights, and trades union membership in each workplace, but in the absence of such unions, workers should create factory, shop and office committees, with their own elected representatives to perform such functions. Indeed, what we need under such conditions is not an extension and power of the capitalist state, especially a capitalist state under the direction of a conservative Bonapartist government, but an extension of workers control over production and distribution.
Rather than supporting the Tory government's reactionary and repressive agenda, and instead of putting forward Utopian demands for wages to be maintained, at a time when production is being brought to a standstill by those same reactionary policies, Labour should be demanding that production be maintained and restored, under a system of workers control. After all, as I have set out many times in the past, all of those companies are, in fact, already socialised capital, and therefore, the collective capital of the workers in those firms. It not unreasonable to ask that the collective owners of that capital exercise control over it, rather than shareholders!
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