probablyasocialecologist:

Britain seems headed towards the worst death rate in Europe.

Undoubtedly part of the reason for this is that we moved too late to enforce a “lockdown”.

But the other reason is that we don’t actually have a lockdown. The government has allowed people to continue to go to work – and allowed bosses to make people continue to go to work – far more than we’re being led to believe, and far more than most of the media seem to have noticed.

“Stay home”, Boris Johnson told us when he announced the lockdown a month ago. Only travel to work “where this is absolutely necessary and cannot be done from home.”

But who defines what’s “absolutely necessary”? Unless you work for a non-essential shop or leisure facility (that was closed by order on 23rd March) the answer is always, “your boss”.

Offices, factories, warehouses and (in England) construction sites may all remain open. None have been designated as ‘non-essential’. It’s also been left entirely up to the bosses to decide whether it’s “possible” to do a job from home, and whether to take the government cash to furlough some or all of their workers. Or whether it’s “absolutely necessary” for some or all of its workers to come in. Call centre workers and numerous other groups of workers, meanwhile, have been labelled “key workers” at the stroke of a ministerial pen, irrespective of what they are actually doing – leading to reports of deaths from suspected COVID-19.

It’s not even really accurate to talk about ‘loopholes’ that employers are exploiting. More like a legal void, that the government hopes the media class won’t notice. The baristas and bookshops aren’t there, and who really knows anyone who works in a call centre, factory, or warehouse? When Patrick Vallance’s slides at last Thursday’s Covid press conference revealed that 49% of those still working, are working from home, no-one piped up on Zoom to ask where the other 51% were, or why the government’s official survey hadn’t asked that question.