Media Hypocrisy

On last night's Channel4 News, they carried a very good report on how our kids futures are being utterly destroyed as a result of the close down of schools, which by the time it ends will have deprived them of two years of academic study.  Of course, its being put in terms of exam performance, but that is a minor issue.  The real issue is the fact that they will have lost 2 years of education, amounting to around 16% of their normal education.  Its like sending out a new car from the production line without the wheels.  Of course, as I wrote a while ago, that could be remedied by having all current students stay in school for another two years, to recoup the lost learning, but we all know that is not going to happen.  This means, therefore, that all these future workers will be permanently damaged in theri earning capacity, their labour-power will always be worth less than that of other workers that have not had this deficit in its education and skills, the education being an increasingly important component of that.  But, it also means that British industry will also suffer in its already abysmal level of productivity.

The news report, showing how this, of course, affects the poorest sections of the working-class most, was extremely relevant, and hard hitting.  But, it again shows the hypocrisy of the media.  Who is it, after all, that from the start has been demanding there be an idiotic, unnecessary blanket lockdown of all social activity, including of schools, colleges and universities?  It is the media that a year ago jumped on the COVID news story and turned it into a moral panic, which required that knee-jerk, badly considered measures be adopted, measures which always had to be the most visible, the most extreme, so that those implementing them could protect themselves against charges of not acting soon enough, boldly enough, and so on.  But, the idiotic nature of those measures has been demonstrated throughout, because, having been badly thought-out, they inevitably brought with them contradiction after contradiction, confusion after confusion, which simply led to even greater levels of idiocy.  Now we have a government proposing to jail people for 10 years for not telling the truth about where they have been on holiday, and a bankrupt Labour Opposition that has failed to even challenge them on it!

The policy of blanket lockdowns was idiotic, and the consequences of it have also been idiotic, as well as having made the situation wore rather than better.  The lockdown failed in its prime purpose which was to prevent increased deaths from COVID.  Instead after a year of lockdowns of one sort or another, we have had deaths over the Winter so far, far exceeding the deaths from it, at the start of the lockdowns.  The current lockdown which began in December, has seen the number of COVID deaths rise even during its own operation!

Of course, as I wrote a while ago that has to be drilled down, because a large number of those deaths are not from COVID at all, but people who died WITH Covid, i.e. people who became ill from some other cause, and died from that, but who also later contracted COVID, most of them contracting it having gone into hospital for treatments, as happened, for example, with Captain Tom, who contracted pneumonia, and then later contracted COVID after being treated for it by the NHS.  In fact, more than 25% of people being treated for COVID in hospital, are people who contracted it after they went into an NHS hospital for some other purpose.  Add in the number infected with the virus whilst supposedly being protected from it by care homes, or by other social workers in their own homes, and this accounts for the large majority of people that have died or become seriously ill from it.

The lockdown strategy simply slowed the rate of infection, meaning that the virus was abroad in society for longer, giving it time to mutate, and mutate it inevitably has.  We now have a series of mutations, some making it more contagious, some making it more resistant to antibodies, and now some like the second Kent variant both more contagious and more resistant to antibodies.  That was an inevitable consequence of a lockdown strategy.  It has narrowed the window of possible strategies for dealing with the virus.  What could have been dealt with effectively with a strategy of focused protection, isolating the 20% of the population at serious risk from it, has now been made much more complex, though the only possible strategy that all this is leading to is that of focused protection, because of vaccines lack the capacity to protect the vulnerable, and increasingly fail to stop even infection, the only possible strategy becomes one of focused protection, until the virus has run its course, and the 80% of the population not at serious risk develop herd immunity, and its further transmission is stopped in its tracks.

But, the calls to close the schools, which the media also were prominent in pushing was even more idiotic.  We know that children are unaffected by the virus, and so, other than for those who have some underlying condition that might have made them susceptible, or who live in households where there may be someone who is susceptible, there was absolutely no reason to deprive them of the education they require, and indeed that society requires them to receive.  Nor is there any indication that teachers or school staff are at any greater chance of becoming seriously ill or dying from the virus than any other group of workers.  Why would they?  And, the majority of teachers are in those younger age groups also not at serious risk from the virus.  Those who were in an at risk group could simply have been put on permanent sick leave with full pay, and the teaching unions could have demanded workers control over the school to implement safe working practices.  Its impossible to employ any labour movement measures, of course, if workers are not in work!

Instead, we saw a clear example of the contradictions and idiocy that came from an ill-thought out and idiotic strategy of lock down.  Some kids were allowed to stay in school if their parents were vital workers, but what constitutes a vital worker?  The NHS nurse can't do their job unless other workers produce the medicines, the bed linen, the cleaning products, not to mention the electricity that a hospital requires to function.  All of them require petrol for their cars, drivers on public transport, mechanics to service vehicles and so on.  The whole point about capitalist production for the last two centuries is that it is based upon a total social division of labour, so that no part of the economy functions on its own.

Then we had the idea that kids could be educated at home, the idiocy of which was demonstrated in the Channel4 News programme.  Its not that the idea of home education via the Internet is itself an idiotic idea.  Its not.  In highly technologically developed Singapore, it is already largely a reality.  The point is that it is idiotic if you do not already have in place the kind of highly developed technological infrastructure that a modern economy like Singapore has, and where every household has access not only to computers, but to an efficient, ultra-fast, and reliable broadband infrastructure.  Without that, what you get, as the Channel4 News report showed, is the more affluent families providing for their kids, and the rest being discarded.

Nor can you simply go from school based learning to Internet based learning overnight, because the two things are completely different, and require different methodologies.  The latter is undoubtedly more efficient, but it requires huge amounts of fixed capital and investment in the right kinds of workers to bring it about.  We've seen this kind of arse about face policy making repeatedly.  Take something like planning policy.  Years ago, it was decided that it would be a good idea to discourage car ownership.  So, when new housing estates were developed, planners encouraged builders to reduce the amount of front gardens, and drives available to houses, so that it would discourage households from having more than one car.  The roads on estates were also made narrower.  What was the consequence?  People continued to have multiple cars per household, but now they had to concrete over whatever front garden they had to accommodate them, which encourages rapid water run-off, which increases potential for flash-flooding.  They also just littered the street with the cars they could not fit on their front gardens and drives, which leads to the narrow streets becoming blocked, which prevent access by emergency and other vehicles, like buses, council refuse trucks and so on, and it inevitably leads to conflicts between people as a result of all these difficulties.

Or take cycling.  Councils have been told to encourage cycling, but rather than build physically separated cycle paths, we have cycle lanes simply drawn with paint on to existing roads, which mean they are a death trap, not to mention the fact that in many places, the roads themselves are full of potholes and grids that are lethal.  Both these examples are instances or arse about face policy formation, because they impose the restrictions before providing the necessary measures required to provide the desired alternative behaviour.

The media created a moral panic over COVID, and then on the back of it insisted that governments impose the harshest, most comprehensive blanket lockdowns, as a knee-jerk response.  Now as the inevitable consequences of those idiotic policy decisions become manifest, the media, of course, finds new stories for itself complaining about the inevitable consequences of the very actions it insisted governments had to take in the first place!