Herd immunity and Coronanomics

March 22, 2020

NOT UNEXPECTEDLY, Tim Shipman in the Sunday Times is reporting that the true author of Britain’s absurd “herd immunity” strategy was none other than a Mr. D. Cummings: 

At a private engagement at the end of February, Cummings outlined the government’s strategy. Those present say it was “herd immunity, protect the economy and if that means some pensioners die, too bad”.

The entire strategy reeked of Cummings, with its imperious pseudo-logic and its appeal to a sort of “greater good” that only the smartest people (including Cummings himself) could truly understand. 

Shipman is no revolutionary, and he later reminds us on Twitter that though Cummings was certainly one of the authors of the original strategy, he became the most zealous convert to the lockdown mission. 

And Britain has finally decided to shut down pubs and clubs, gyms and schools. The BBC has even suspended filming on EastEnders and other dramas. Newsnight says “there is intervention from the state in every aspect of British life”. 

Corbynomics wasn’t endorsed at the last election but now we have Coronanomics, and this is Coronasocialism run (incongruously) by a libertarian-minded right-wing government now borrowing billions of pounds every week to subsidise wages.  As Harold Macmillan famously said when asked what sort of thing pushes governments off track: “Events, dear boy.” 

State grants will pay 80% of the wages of laid-off workers and universal credit is being stepped up. The government now controls more of the economy than at any time since the Second World War. “This is a good day,” says Ian Blackford, head of the SNP in Westminster. 

And we need to step back and acknowledge that this is an absolutely astonishing development: even the spectral deputy-director of the CBI, speaking over a wobbly Skype connection, agrees that this is a “breakthrough”. People are even raising the possibility of a universal basic income. 

John McDonnell, one of Britain’s few surviving socialists, said, “People are learning lessons from this, about the role of the state, the way in which we have to work collectively, the way in which the market will not deliver solutions to problems like this … If anything good comes out of this, it is the lesson that we need to invest in our public services and have a fair taxation system to allow this to happen.”