Statement to the International Meeting of Communist and Workers Parties
30 September 2020
COVID, CAPITALIST CRISIS AND
THE FIGHT-BACK BY THE
WORKING CLASS MOVEMENT
Liz Payne
Chair, Communist Party of Britain
This year’s meeting of the world’s 80
Communist and Workers Parties was
postponed as a result of the pandemic. Party
statements prepared for the meeting are
being published meantime.
By late 2019, before COVID-19 had
appeared on the horizon, the economies
of the wealthiest imperialist countries,
Britain included, were hurtling towards a
new and serious slump, a further
manifestation of the continuing
irresolvable systemic crisis of capitalism in
the aftermath of the 2008 crash. Now we
face the pandemic. Its impact in Britain has
been gravely worsened by the systemic
cuts to Britain’s welfare state and by a
government determined to regulate the
crisis on the terms set by big business.
Pre-pandemic, millions of working class
people in many parts of the world, were
being lined up, as always, to pay the
heaviest of prices for an economic
depression they bore no responsibility for
creating – through massive job losses and,
for those in work, huge pay cuts, sharp
deterioration in conditions and continuing
enforced dependence for increasing
numbers on low-paid, insecure work.
These plans are now, under the cover of
COVID, being ruthlessly enacted. In
Britain, the Office for National Statistics
anticipates that 7.5% of the workforce will
be unemployed by the end of the year, up
from 4.5% in July. State provision of health
and social care systems, education,
utilities, sanitation, and other crucial
public support services, already lifethreateningly inadequate, will take a
further hit, while privatisation of
everything seen as potentially profitable
will continue apace.
The new economic crisis compounds
historic issues. From 2010, a decade of
EU-instigated austerity, driven by a
ruthless Conservative government and
their Liberal Democratic Party backers
devastated public services and
fundamentally undermined democracy by
putting whole swathes of decision-making
out of the control of working people and
their communities into the hands of the
private sector. Large parts of health and
social care provision and most schools
were removed in this way. Other services,
the least potentially profitable, were kept
in the public sector but run down to
dysfunctional levels. Still others were
abolished altogether.
At the same time, major areas of decisionmaking were further embedded in the
very undemocratic, pro-big business
machinery of the EU, whose treaties,
strictures and regulations stood squarely
in the path of any Westminster-initiated
changes allowing Britain to invest in its
own industry, create real jobs, end
austerity and legislate to meet the needs
of working people and their families. The
democratic deficit, although well hidden
by the mass media, became increasingly
obvious and, according to reliable polls,
the main reason why the people of Britain
voted for Brexit in the June 2016
referendum was to restore sovereignty.
In Britain before COVID, people had been
getting poorer, including a quarter of all
children, four million, being raised in
poverty by early 2020, and a million and a
half pensioners without enough to live on,
choosing between heating and eating,
according to trade unions and the
National Pensioners’ Convention. Wages
had fallen so low that many working
families were commonly dependent on
benefits to supplement their income,
including poorly paid employees of the
government department that administers
the payments of benefits they had to
claim. Public sector workers had suffered
pay cuts in real terms in each of the past
ten years. The unemployed could scarcely
live on the punitively low level of support
available through the notorious universal
credit system, and many workers could
not afford to stay off work when ill, given
the low level of statutory sick pay.
Thousands of families were living with
food scarcity and cases of malnutrition
were steadily rising, with several million
affected and thousands using foodbanks.
Suicides were increasing, especially among
young men, and homelessness people
were dying on the streets.
Throughout the last decade, Britain’s
foreign policy has been equally inhumane.
Firmly positioned as the number one ally
of US imperialism, and nurturing this
“special relationship” at every opportunity
economically, politically and militarily –
Britain has been ruthlessly pursuing an
aggressive strategy of intervention and
war across the world, supporting some of
the most reactionary governments,
tooling up its own “defence” with stateof-the art killing technology, enhancing its
string of military bases across the globe
and securing the most lucrative of arms
trade contracts. From 2015, Britain has
given £1 billion to aid the people of
Yemen but, during the same period, sold
£6.5 billion of weaponry to Saudi Arabia
with which to bomb them. The
government sheds crocodile tears for
people suffering and dying in the pandemic
but spends vast sums with its military
industrial complexes, including the £205
billion for the renewal of the country’s
Trident nuclear defence and a £65 million
contract, signed in July 2020, with Airbus,
to enhance its capacity for cyber warfare.
This money must be for welfare not
warfare.
By the middle of the decade, the
opposition of broad sections of working
people to austerity measures, and
government conducted almost exclusively
in favour of a tiny elite, started to reach
worrying levels so far as the ruling class
was concerned. Within the Labour Party
from 2015, a strong bid was made to
defeat the right wing and centre ground in
its ranks and bring the Party to power
under the leadership of Jeremy Corbyn,
on a socialist-leaning, rather than social
democratic manifesto propounding the
use of Britain’s resources, including public
funds, to invest in a more equitable future
which provided for the full spectrum of
people’s needs (For the Many, not the Few).
This attracted hundreds of thousands to
take out Labour Party membership –
including many young people and others
who had little or no previous involvement
with organised politics – with millions
more supportive of a shift to government
in favour of working people.
The ruling class, using every instrument of
state power at its disposal, has put
concerted effort into ensuring that a leftled Labour government would never
come to power. They did so by sowing
division amongst Labour supporters on
every issue, including scuppering any
possibility, at least in the short to medium
term, of securing a people-orientated
Brexit from the EU. Their efforts came to
fruition in the December 2019 general
election when the Conservative Party
defeated Labour under Corbyn’s
leadership to gain a huge 80-seat majority
in parliament. This, for the present, saw
off the Labour socialist left as potential
challengers for control or even strong
influence at Westminster and precipitated
a Labour leadership election, bringing
right-leaning reformist barrister, Keir
Starmer, to head up the parliamentary
‘opposition’. As 2020 dawned, the ruling
class felt that it could again sleep safely;
they have not been disappointed.
The arrival of COVID-19 found a public
health service unable, because of
privatisation and cuts, to cope with its
pre-pandemic load. Services had been
reduced, waiting lists were dangerously
lengthy and even appointments at doctors’
surgeries hard to get. The winter overload
on hospitals created annual crises and
2019-20 was no exception. On the eve of
the pandemic, there were 40,000 nursing
staff vacancies in Britain.
The pandemic immediately shone a light
on the desperate state of the health
service, care system and public
infrastructure after a decade of austerity
and cuts, and the ever-widening gap
between the poor and the wealthy. The
government on behalf of the ruling class,
has done everything to protect the
interests of the monopolies and big
business throughout the crisis and
seemingly abandoned whole sections of
the working class to the virus and to
poverty and deprivation. It insisted that
some seven million ‘essential’ workers – in
health and care, teaching, food distribution
and retail, public transport, waste disposal
and emergency services – continued to do
their jobs and that schools opened to look
after their children while they did so. They
were not provided with the protective
clothing and equipment they needed and
went to workplaces day after day exposed
and scared. These same essential workers
are collectively amongst the worst paid in
Britain. Many fell ill and too many have
lost their lives.
Older people were locked down in care
homes as the virus ran unchecked. Many
died struggling to breathe, separated from
their families, in pain and fear. Across the
country black people have
disproportionately lost their lives,
predominantly due to a range of socioeconomic factors and concentration in
employment sectors and at levels most at
risk; this is in turn the result of a history
of racial discrimination and economic
super-exploitation of black workers, as
highlighted by the Black Lives Matter
protests during the summer.
At the time of writing, a second
catastrophic wave of the virus is building
in Britain with almost 20,000 new cases a
day and the figure for daily deaths
continuing to rise. The total death toll is
now 41, 988 and Britain, with a population
of 65 million, has one of the worst
COVID-19 death rates per 100,000
people in the world at the same time as it
ranks as one of the richest countries.
All this was not inevitable, and the
working class will hold the British ruling
class to account. To protect the economy,
the government was slow to move to
lockdown in March 2020 and it again put
the economy, rather than people’s safety,
to the fore in lifting the restrictive
measures, urging people back to unsafe
workplaces, even when they could safely
work at home; opening shops, bars and
restaurants: sending a million students
back to universities and generally
encouraging people to go out and spend,
spend and spend. The results have already
been fatal, and the worst is yet to come.
The chaotic competition of private firms
and consequent lack of planning and
organisation, together with the
unquenchable quest for profits of all
private enterprises from small businesses
to monopolies, such as the giant
pharmaceutical companies, have
destroyed the potential of diminishing risk,
alleviating suffering, finding a vaccine
urgently and meeting other desperate
needs of the people. What can be
achieved is phenomenal. We have seen
how, in record time, mega-hospitals with
state-of-the-art equipment and facilities
can be built, how quickly production lines
can be switched to turn out life-saving
equipment and how scientific and medical
research can be speeded up and
harnessed to combat the pandemic.
Working people have the skills,
knowledge, and expertise to make
undreamed of advances, but capitalism has
been unwilling bear the cost.
Refusal on the government’s part to pay
for what is desperately needed has
shocked many, given that the national
debt has risen above £2.2 trillion and the
annual deficit above £60 billion. It has
rushed to save businesses and the
economy but flatly refused to borrow to
do the things that are needed most. These
include a vast expansion of the network of
coronavirus test centres and laboratories
for analysis: the move back from a
“COVID-only” to full hospital service as
soon as possible; conversion of vacant
buildings in order to run health and
education safely with social distancing in
place; the running of more buses and
trains to reduce the risk of infection for
people using public transport and
provision of support services for those in
difficulty and danger during lockdown,
such as vulnerable and isolated elderly
people and women imprisoned in their
homes with violent abusers. People are
being thrown suddenly into worklessness
and poverty. Income support can and
should be provided for all who need it,
together with a secure home, free from
fear of eviction.
Boris Johnson’s government has shown
itself at best incapable and, at worst,
criminally unwilling to deal with the crisis,
even though a pandemic was long
anticipated and national and local plans,
developed, tried, and tested. It has
attempted to deny any responsibility for
its multiple failures, while at the same time
shifting blame onto workers and their
families, criminalising individuals, and
encouraging people to spy on and report
their neighbours for infringing regulations.
At the same time, government ministers
have broken pandemic laws with impunity.
The ruling class’s mass media has used the
pandemic to divide and weaken the
working class by scapegoating various
groups – young people (who party and go
home to infect and kill their
grandparents), black people and old
people (who catch the virus in greater
numbers and drain health service
resources), relatives (who for lack of
alternatives breach regulations to visit and
care for loved ones) and even the unclean
(who don’t wash their hands often or well
enough and touch their faces with
contaminated fingers). Everyone is
accused and becomes a butt of anger,
except those on whose shoulders blame
must rest.
The ruling class in Britain hopes that
COVID-19 has finally got the labour
movement and all working people off its
back, driving home the defeat of socialists
in the parliamentary Labour Party,
dampening the upsurge in progressive
thinking that has characterised recent
years and preventing regular mass
mobilisations and demonstrations, now
banned, from coalescing into an organised
extra-parliamentary, anti-big business
alliance. The virus and its aftermath will
provide the bourgeoisie with the perfect
excuse for the coming financial
catastrophe, and masking what would
soon have become obvious to all, that
capitalism is in the throes of systemic
failure which it cannot remedy. The
pandemic did hasten, broaden, and deepen
the oncoming economic crisis, but it did
not cause it. Every effort will be made to
hide this from the people.
The Party’s immediate demands are for all
possible resourcing to be applied to
limiting the spread of the pandemic
(especially by identifying those with the
virus and tracing their contacts) and
developing a vaccine. All workplaces must
be safe, whatever the cost, and everyone
must have enough to live on, including
food and shelter. Jobs must also be
preserved and the multitude of companies
using the pandemic as an excuse to
reduce the labour force according to prepandemic plans must be exposed. A major
feature of standing against the ruling class
will be building from grass roots up, a
strong trade union and labour movement,
including the organised unemployed,
together with mass campaigns for peace,
equality, and justice. We must also be
vigilant against the abuse of powers the
executive has accorded itself during the
pandemic and which can potentially be
extended indefinitely and used against a militant working class.
The Communist Party of Britain has used events in its Centenary year to expose the ruling class’s role in dangerously mismanaging the pandemic and failing to spend on people’s health, safety, and livelihoods.