Labour's Have Cake and Eat It Lockdown

Keir Starmer has already become a bigger Brexiter than Jeremy Corbyn, abandoning any opposition to Brexit, and calling on Johnson to press on with all haste in pushing through his reactionary Brexit.   He has also adopted the same delusional have cake and eat it, stance of the red-brown Lexiters, and the small state Brexiters, who have claimed that Britain could prosper outside the EU, by having all the advantages of membership with none of the disadvantages, and that it is possible, thereby to build some wonderful social-democracy in one country.  All of that is quite at odds not only with reality, but also with the Six Tests that Starmer produced in relation to Brexit, which would have to be fulfilled before Labour could support it.  Now Labour is adopting the same kind of delusional have cake and eat it approach to the Lockdown.

On the one hand, Labour is calling on the government to implement lockdowns.  Its main criticism of Johnson has been that he did not lock down the economy soon enough or hard enough.  Now they are criticising him for lifting the lockdown too soon, for not implementing severe enough lockdowns in localities and so on.  They will not criticise his policy of telling places to close at 10 p.m., even though there is no evidence that it has any meaning, and is going to cause even more economic chaos.  Yet, alongside their calls for the lockdown policy to be even more severe, even more restrictive, they want the government to lavish largesse from the Magic Money Tree on the economy.  They want a lockdown that if it was to be meaningful would mean that no goods and services were produced, that no new value, no new wealth is created in society, and yet they want the government to hand out, increasingly worthless, paper and digital tokens to everyone, to be able to go and buy all of these goods and services that they have just demanded no longer be produced.

If that is not the definition of wanting to have cake and eat it, nothing is!  It is totally delusional, and its root is not just the fact that Labour, along with all other bourgeois parties, have no idea about how an economy actually functions, it is also based upon a thoroughly unprincipled opportunism that seeks simply to score cheap political points against the government.  Anyone with a brain knows that you cannot close down an economy, stop producing goods and services, without it having a devastating effect, in a very short period of time.  As Marx put it, describing the operation of the Law of Value as a Law of Nature,

"Every child knows that any nation that stopped working, not for a year, but let us say, just for a few weeks, would perish."

In today's economies that operate on the basis of Just In Time production and stock control, with 20 minute delivery times, its no longer a question of weeks, but merely of days.  Supermarkets only have enough supplies to last around 3 days, even if there were not panic buying.  Unless production is continuous, everything on store shelves, petrol in service stations, and so on, would disappear within a week.  Even more, if electricity supply workers stopped work, power would go off in hours, bringing the whole of society to a crashing halt.  If bin workers or sewage workers stopped work, rubbish would pile up, sewage would flow into water courses, and so on, and disease would run rampant, as it did in the 18th and 19th centuries, before industrial capitalism put a halt to such horrors.  The idea that society could function if there truly were a lockdown is nonsense, no matter how many paper notes, or digital units of currency you stuff into people's pockets or bank accounts.

In fact, it does not take a genius to work out that if you do not produce any of these goods, and services, or even if you just produce fewer of them, as a result of a partial lockdown, then if you continue to pump out the same quantity of currency, via furlough schemes and other such insane measures, the only consequence is that all of this increasingly worthless currency chases after these disappearing commodities, so that you get rampant inflation.

Fortunately, when the government did impose its lockdown, earlier in the year, it was largely a facade.  Its quite clear that most of the economy did not lockdown, because electricity and gas continued to be produced and distributed, the water workers, sewage workers, and bin men continued to work, and so on.  GDP is a measure of the new value added by labour, i.e. the amount of additional labour performed, which is divided into wages, profits, interest, rent and taxes.  It fell by only around 25%, indicating that only around 25% of all labour ceased.  So, the amount of goods and services fell by this amount, but it was concentrated in particular areas of the economy, i.e. those involved in direct labour services such as hairdressing, as well as front line retailing.  people were prevented from consuming these services, and so people who worked in them had no work to do.  Its notable that, in all these areas, when the lockdown was lifted, there were significant price increases as consumers flocked back into them, and as suppliers, also faced higher costs.  There were reports that hairdressers, for example, doubled their prices.

But, this impossibility is just what Labour's have cake and eat it lockdown demands.  It demands that the economy be locked down to an even greater extent, that the production and distribution of goods and services be stopped even more abruptly, and yet wants the government to dole out huge amounts of currency to buy up all of these goods and services that it is demanding not be produced.  Any sane person knows that is impossible and calling for it can only lead to disaster.

The opportunist nature of Labour's position is also indicated by its criticism of the government.  Labour has criticised the government for its lockdown purely on the basis that it has not been harsh enough, that it was not implemented soon enough, was lifted too early, and that the government has been incompetent in its application.  It is, of course, true that the government has been particularly incompetent in this, as in most other things, including Brexit.  Indeed, how can anyone believe what they say in relation to Brexit, or have any faith in the prospects for Britain after Brexit, on the basis of the incompetence they have shown over the lockdown, and dealing with COVID.  But, this criticism does not wash in relation to the lockdown.

The reality is that its not just the British government whose policy on lockdown has been a disaster.  Wherever lockdown has been applied, be it France, Italy, Ireland, the US or elsewhere, it has been a similar disaster.  Not only has it caused almost unprecedented economic damage, but wherever it has been applied, no matter how soon it was applied, or how long it was left in operation, as soon as it has been lifted, it has been greeted with a renewed rapid spread of the virus.  Its not just Britain that is seeing that and reintroducing lockdowns, but Ireland, France, Spain, Germany, Italy and so on.  And, the same applies to those countries that used extensive test and trace systems rather than lockdowns.  The only place where this is not happening, is in Sweden where no lockdowns were imposed in the first place, and where, therefore, a degree of herd immunity has been developed preventing any further widespread infections, alongside the more rational behaviour of its population, who have been encouraged not only to take sensible measures, to prevent spread, but to use common sense if they are in a vulnerable group so as to avoid placing themselves in danger of becoming infected.

And, this is inevitable, because lockdowns and test and trace do nothing to actually deal with the virus, to kill it off.  And, as the recent Edinburgh study showed, by slowing the spread of the virus amongst the young healthy members of the population, they act to slow the development of herd immunity, which is the only way of effectively stopping transmission and killing it off.  With a vaccine a year away, the only rational means of achieving such herd immunity is by its natural transmission amongst the 80% of the population not at serious risk from it, whilst ensuring that the 20% at risk can be effectively shielded from it.

The fact is that human coronaviruses were first detected in the 1960's, though they have no doubt been around for much longer than that.  The coronavirus is one that is responsible for the common cold, and every year, it is coronaviruses that are responsible for around 14% of all illnesses described as producing "flu-like symptoms".  COVID19 is simply a strain of coronavirus.  As with all other coronaviruses, it is likely now to be with us forever, circulating within the population, just as every year, we have people coming down with colds, and some of whom, who are vulnerable to it, also die from contracting a cold.  The idea that a lockdown lasting a few weeks was going to see the end of it, in the same way that the scare over Ebola a few years ago disappeared, is simply not going to happen with COVID, unless widespread herd immunity is developed, either naturally via infection, or artificially through vaccination.  We will indeed have to live with it, each year, in the same way we live with colds and flu.  It is simply not tenable to keep locking down the economy every time new infections occur.

Nor is test and trace any solution.  Countries that adopted that have had a similar experience as soon as they relax that regime.  But, the testing and tracing is also a fantasy.  On the one hand, about 30% of all tests produce a negative result, even though the person is actually infected.  That is because the virus may not be present in their nasal or throat cavity where the swabs are taken.  But, also, the number of tests done is miniscule compared to the size of population, and number of people actually infected.  Around 80% of people are asymptomatic when they are infected, a further proportion have worse symptoms but not enough to justify them seeking medical treatment.  All of these infected people are not detected, because they are never tested, and all of them go about their business spreading the virus to other people.  If you only every test and detect about 10% of all infections, its quite clear that you are not going to have any chance of tracing all  of the people they have been in contact with.

In addition, we have seen examples, recently, of young people who have gone on holiday to Italy, and who have not been allowed to return, because they have repeatedly given positive test results, even though it is weeks ago that they were infected, and they have never been ill.  The reason for this is that these young people continue to have some dead virus particles in their body, and the current tests do not detect that the virus is, in fact, dead.  This no doubt explains some of the cases where people who have had the virus, and developed immunity, are reported to have become infected again.  It also means that the current PCR tests will be showing up large numbers of people as being currently infected, who in fact, already have immunity against it.  This again shows why the current tests are next to useless, and why only widespread tests for antibodies or other forms of immunity are worthwhile.

But, all this shows that COVID is going to be with us forever, and so a policy based upon lockdowns or extensive test and trace is not going to work.  The idea that you can keep an economy in permanent lockdown, or keep introducing lockdowns every few weeks is madness.  Its time that Labour stopped playing opportunistic political games, and began to offer a real alternative to these idiotic unsustainable lockdowns.  It should scrap its ridiculous have cake and eat it policy whether over lockdowns or over Brexit.