Coronavirus: Neoliberal fail

If Corbyn was PM and had overseen 20,000-40,000 deaths, the media would probably be demanding a military coup to oust him.

This idea, that I've seen many espousing, that the media has been too critical of Boris Johnson & co is absolutely nuts! The media has been awful.

Whatever party was in government, I’d want a decent media to hold them to account. That’s meant to be their job. But sadly our media is extremely politicized - in favour of neoliberalism - the ideology that has taken over everything these last four decades.

The government has been so terrible in responding to this crisis largely because of that ideology. Tories, especially, are neoliberal ideologues. They think the market always knows best, and they hate the state, (unless it’s being used to wage war/bail out banks/cut tax for the rich!). The kind of state intervention needed for a crisis like this, on the side of working people, is completely out of their comfort zone.

The 10 years of austerity we just had was all about destroying the state, even more than has already been done by successive governments since Thatcher. It’s led to an NHS that’s more overstretched than it otherwise could have been, and it led to reports that said we were unprepared for a pandemic, being ignored, because ‘there’s no money’. Which is nonsense - what there’s been none of is the political will to distribute resources appropriately. Because the market is meant to do that, (it does the opposite).

Thanks to these years of neoliberalism, even the most competent people in government right now probably wouldn’t have been able to handle the crisis particularly well. But for sure, socialists would’ve done a far less awful job!