Ivonne and Bunny’s posts made me think: what would be needed for a good outcome from all this - apart from as many people surviving the outbreak, of course, but I was thinking a bit further ahead to how things might be better organised when the immediate threat has been dealt with. So here are a few suggestions to make a start; they’re in no particular order:
A wholesale reform of the tax system, involving taxing all the firms (Amazon, Google, Twitter etc) that export their profits to tax havens - because they benefit from all the infrastructure of the country but avoid paying any proper contribution towards it;
More generally, scrapping the devious use of tax havens to disguise ownership of, for example, property; the ownership of vast amounts of property in London and elsewhere are hidden in layer upon layer of shell companies based offshore, again to avoid tax;
Clamping down on the vast amounts of dirty money from, for example, Russian oligarchs, that are laundered through the banking system here;
Providing state support in bailing out firms that are at risk of bankruptcy in the current (or any other) crisis only to companies that are properly based here, and only by taking a significant state stake in them;
Scrapping austerity, which has hit the poorest hardest (and acknowledging the lie that we are “all in this together”);
which in turn would mean resuming adequate levels of funding in public services, and not just the NHS (which government ministers, with sickening hypocrisy, are currently - but for how long? - waxing so sentimentally about);
Resuming adequate levels of training of nurses and other health and care service personnel, instead of leaching on countries that desperately need to retain their own trained staff but which “we” are stealing from them;
Producing the long-promised but never appearing strategy for care services;
Wholesale reform, from top to bottom, of the Home Office and immediate scrapping of the “very hostile environment” for immigration and especially of the appalling Empire Windrush scandal;
The end of the racket in charging migrants excessively, and especially of the huge charges for using the NHS by people (and their families) who come here to work in the NHS and who already pay for it in their taxes;
Reducing our reliance on huge arms sales to rotten regimes like that of Saudi Arabia - and saving the jobs of the skilled workers by retraining them to work on the green economy;
A complete rethink on how we live and work: reducing, for example, so much of the unnecessary travel for work, because we are finding that, with video conferencing/Zoom/ etc, that it’s perfectly possible for very many people to work from home;
Which would lead to a major reduction in car use and a consequent permanent reduction on the atmospheric pollution that is damaging so many lives;
Which, in turn, would need serious action to reduce the level of traffic in a way that hasn’t yet been seriously contemplated;
Which, in turn, leads to the biggest reform that’s needed and which has been forgotten in the coronavirus pandemic: serious work to tackle the global warming emergency. So much has been done to deal with the pandemic, which shows that when the determination is there, a problem can be solved.
And much, much more...
But will all (or any of) this be done? I hope so, because if it isn’t, the world will be in a very serious place indeed.
Richard Carter ● 2382d