Now is not the time to sacrifice public health at the altar of ‘the economy’

Almost everyone now faces agonising choices about how to trade off their own personal financial and health risks – or, worse, risky situations over which they have no meaningful choice. Is it safe to go back to local shops, and will they still be there in three months if I don’t? Is it safe to send my children back to school, and how am I supposed to keep working if I don’t? Should I reopen my business and risk my health, or keep it closed and risk bankruptcy?

The absence of an effective track and trace system means that we have little information with which to make these choices, and that almost all activities carry some level of risk. But since the choices are now technically available to us, we will increasingly be asked to take responsibility for the consequences.

The row about schools reopening is a case in point. The government insisted this was about educational inequalities, while its opponents said it was really about getting parents back to work. But the underlying story is one of risks and responsibilities being pushed onto individual parents. It quickly became apparent that up to half of all parents weren’t going to send their children back to school anyway – and that low-income parents were more likely to keep them at home, which could actually exacerbate inequalities. Since that was now to be their choice, employers were even less likely to offer flexibility – leaving many families facing severe financial and emotional strain as they tried to juggle work and childcare.

The government has now delayed the full reopening of primary schools, in a victory for parents and teachers who pushed back against this attempt to foist risks onto them. But it is still not supporting parents to deal with the resulting pressures. Meanwhile, nurseries are still reopening, offloading huge risks and costs onto the sector with little public outcry. Parents face dilemmas about whether to send their children back or try to sustain an increasingly impossible juggling act. Nurseries face decisions about whether and when to reopen, and whether to charge fees to parents who choose to keep their kids at home. Many fear they will not survive the year, as some parents pull their children out altogether (most nurseries are only financially viable at full capacity). Childcare workers – many of them migrants without recourse to public funds – have little choice but to return to work in a setting where infection risk is almost impossible to manage.

This is a microcosm of what is now happening across the economy. In this new phase of the crisis, as in the first phase, the risks do not fall on all equally. This is another reason we must resist the narrative of ‘saving the economy’. Just as with the government’s crisis interventions, we must ask: saving what, and for whom? Getting GDP ticking back up may benefit those who already win under our unfair economic system. It will not benefit the low-income workers, disproportionately women and BAME people, who are forced to put their health at risk because the government is no longer supporting them to stay at home. The invocation of ‘the economy’ as a unified entity obscures these imbalances of wealth and power.

Of course, it’s nothing new for a government to push ‘choices’ onto individuals while ignoring the power imbalances that constrain those choices. Decades of neoliberal policies have shunted risks onto individuals for everything from old age and sickness to unemployment – precisely the risks that the welfare state was founded to help us share. The pandemic has exposed this as a disaster, not only for those directly exposed, but for the whole of society. If precarious workers can’t afford to isolate, we all suffer, because our health is interdependent. If millions of workers are thrown out of their jobs, we all suffer, because our economy is interdependent too.

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