‘Boris Johnson is poised to rip-up the work-from-home guidance on Friday,’ says the on line Sun, adding that it gives ‘bosses the green light to welcome staff back to the office.’ It continues, ‘He is planning to hold a Downing Street press conference to tell millions of Brits that it will be safe to return to the office next month.’ There’s lots more like this, all of which gives the distinct impression that somehow the decision to work from home is being taken by the worker and not the management. Indeed, we’ve heard plenty of this ‘workers refusing to leave the comfort of their own homes’ nonsense from the likes of Graham Brady from the Tory 1922 committee to Daily Mail blowhard and Florida resident Richard Littlejohn.
The Sun has plainly been briefed by ‘sources’, who will either be prime minister Dominic Cummings or someone acting on Cummings’ instructions, in order to persuade workers that it’s now safe to ‘return to work’, as if home-workers have been sitting at home on full pay watching repeats of antiques shows. I live with someone who has been putting in regular ten hour days so I do not recognise this scenario.
Having been responsible for one of the highest death tolls in the world, for some reason I am not entirely convinced Cummings and Boris Johnson have our best interests at heart. They want to persuade it’s safe for people to travel to work. The Sun says, ‘Instead the public will be told to use public transport outside of rush hours – between 9am and 4pm and after 8pm and encouraged to walk and cycle if at all possible during peak times.’ So basically, you can travel between 9am and 4pm and then wait until 8pm onwards if you don’t finish by 4pm. Yes, I can see the appeal and logic of this. The very fact that government is going to explain that public transport is safe to use except when it isn’t will surely appeal to millions of workers, not to mention working in busy offices where social distancing is all but impossible. COVID-19 hasn’t gone away – far from it – but Cummings and Johnson are pretending it has. Why?
As ever, it’s about the money, money, money. With vast swathes of our city centres appearing like ghost towns, the government is understandably concerned about the businesses and jobs that will be at risk. If no one is working in town, who will visit Greggs, McDonalds and Pret? Who will go shopping in the city centre shops and we all know what is going to happen to those shops when no one is shopping?
Cummings’ problem is that people followed his advice all too readily. In March, his pet monkey Boris Johnson told worried Brits that ‘You must stay at home.’ For once in a lifetime full of lying, Johnson had told the truth and for once people believed him. Now, with the virus still well above the levels when he told us to stay at home, he says it’s now safe. Even someone as simple as me can see a problem with that.
I don’t have a solution for all this stuff. I can sit here on the sidelines giving my opinions, unencumbered by any responsibility to fix it. I don’t have a great deal of the scientific and health data, not least because the government now makes no effort to tell us, but I can’t help feeling that attitudes have changed forever. Based upon little more than anecdotes, it strikes me that many people working from home have been at least as productive as they would have been at work. By staying at home, they have contributed to lowering pollution levels and improved their own lives by not having to spend large periods of time just travelling to work. I am not convinced that everyone wants to go back to how things used to be, especially if in work terms, there is no need for them to do so.
This suggests to me that our so called leaders, and their army of highly paid advisers, need to plan for a new way of doing things. No more journeys on packed trains and buses, or sitting in daily gridlock; a world where the actual lives of people come first. A new way of doing things that can be a bit of everything. It was always going to happen, as the march of the machines gradually negated the need to have actual people making things and the internet made it easy to do things from the comfort of our own homes.
Finally, the Sun says this:
A Government source said: “The key message to the public is that we now have the virus under control, and where there are local outbreaks we can act quickly to stop the virus spreading.
“It is safe to open up the economy in a much bigger way.
“The public will be told that it is fine to go back to work, shops, and eat out in restaurants, pubs and cafes, as long as they socially distance and wear a mask if needed.
“Test and Trace is capable of putting out local fires.”
They key message is a lie. The virus has been suppressed because people have changed the way we do things. Since Cummings went on his jolly to Durham, many of us have, like him, interpreted government rules to suit our own lives, but we have generally ensured social distancing and prioritised the well-being of others. But COVID-19 hasn’t gone away. It may be ‘fine to go back to work, shops, and eat out in restaurants, pubs and cafes’ but it is not necessarily safe. And Tory peer Dido Harding’s piss poor privatised Test and Trace system, which was a few weeks ago reaching 80% of the contacts of the 25% of infected people they were able to track is now only reaching 70%. It is a matter of fact that Test and Trace is not capable of ‘putting out local fires’.
After listening to Boris Johnson at PMQs yesterday making a joke about underpants, when asked by Keir Starmer about the families of COVID-19 victims, I would not trust him and his government to run a bath, never mind ensure the safe return of workers to their offices. 70,000 deaths so far tells its own story.
