Ask anyone who works in London about their job and they’ll almost certainly include the length of their daily commute. The pandemic we’re currently enduring has upped the number of people ‘working from home’ – in the vast majority of cases using internet technology. When all this is over, will businesses and companies do a major rethink about the need for their employees to spend up to four hours every day getting to their place of work? And as they do so, adding pollution to a world that’s already coughing badly? Let’s hope they will.
Remember Theresa May’s ‘magic money tree’? Where Labour’s proposals for state support of the poor, a living wage for those working, a health service that delivers free and efficiently were mocked as unrealistic. The pandemic makes one thing blindingly clear: when there’s a need to have state support of jobs and business, it can make a major contribution. Dare we hope that all the deaths coronavirus has claimed will lead to an adjustment in society, where public health is the starting point for any election manifesto?
When Thatcher said “There is no such thing as society”, a lot of us itched to kick her out-of-reach and out-of-toch backside. Now even a right-wing Tory like prime minister Boris Johnson has made it clear she was wrong : “There is such a thing as society” he has conceded. And what else could he say, confronted by the massive response of retired doctors and nurses and health workers to the call to come back and battle the emergency? Because we are all at risk from this virus, we have developed a closer sense of the many things we share, and the need to reach out to each other in great and small ways, while we’re still stumbling our way through this life.
The sweeping powers which have been granted to the various governments, controlling where we can go, how many people we can go with, how far we can go from our homes – all these must be seen as necessary in the battle against the virus. But when the battle is won, look out. When people get power, they like it so much, they sometimes need a hammer taken to their knuckles before they’ll release their grip on it. You have been warned.
The virus doesn’t know anything about borders. So that once again, the absurdity of a border in Ireland is highlighted. But as I said in an earlier blog, there are those who will try to put blind loyality to Mother Britain before the health of everybody on this island we call Ireland. Unionist politicians here didn’t get the no-border-in-Ireland message; will they continue, post-Brexit, to judge everything in terms of its possible impact on partition? Even when such blind loyalty will result in severe economic/health damage? Tell me it isn’t so. Crises are to be avoided, but when they come, we should extract the lesson that they carry.
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