Covid-19 has exposed the UK’s social crisis

During this, after this, we have to start being straight with eachother about meritocratic ideologies. Of blind faith in free market capitalism. How those narratives are a straight up political choice to ignore the most vulnerable.

In ‘times of need’ everyone, even Donald Trump and Boris Johnson agree categorically that a big state supporting their citizens is necessary. But millions of people have been in ‘times of need’ for decades. Last year over 1.5 million people in the UK needed to use a food bank. 1 in every 200 Brits are homeless. Privilege enhances the narrative that if you just work hard you can achieve anything, and everyone else who struggles deserve to be where they are.

Now that well paid workers are being let go, freelances and consultants no longer have a salary to pay rent, millions don’t have any savings to fall back on or parents to support them, we are being dealt a very harsh lesson about what society is all about. Every struggling person has their own story, but many, many are due to systemic, societal failures, not their own.

‘Not fixing the roof while the sun was shining’ means the government made a brutal political choice to not invest in people’s lives when they had the economic power to do so, to enhance workers right to reflect an modernising economy, to help the vulnerable have a chance of success. To give NHS staff workers and teachers salaries and living conditions which reflect their fundamental importance to society. To give ‘key workers’ a salary that they could live on without still needing to use food banks. Instead they called some of them ‘low skilled workers’, stripped them of dignity, underfunded them and allowed the spread of a narrative of them being ‘scroungers off the state’.

Now that the definition of being ‘vulnerable’ has spread to include people from all classes of society, we now have people asking for the government’s help. We have Trump seriously considering giving all Americans $1000 to help them through this crisis. We’re switching on about how extortionate our rent rates are. The insufficient number of hospital beds and doctors, the low number of social care staff, is all now becoming a damming critique of the last decade of cuts.

I definitely have no intention of political point scoring, but the hypocrisy in plain sight - while we are STILL ignoring the MOST vulnerable cannot be left without criticism. While I have gratitude for the government beginning to step up, the spotlight is shinning intensely on the real affects of individualistic, conservative and free market values, and is drastically informing us, that we live in a society, and we are dependent, and are meant to help each other.