Everything is political

I notice a lot of people saying we shouldn’t politicise the virus, or that making a political point in a crisis isn’t the right response. This assumes it is possible for something not to be political. Just because we don’t see the political dimension of something, we imagine it isn’t there. This does not help us.

Everything we are allowed to do, required to do and forbidden to do is held by laws that have been decided on through our political systems. There is no area of our lives where this isn’t relevant. Alongside that, the rights, freedoms, obligations or the lack thereof for companies, wealthy individuals, landowners, and politicians also impact on us.

There are so many ways in which lockdown and the virus are inherently political issues. Funding decisions over the last ten years have undermined the NHS. Political ideas about Europe have cost us protective gear and ventilators. Treating the economy as more important than lives has killed people. These are all political choices. The degree to which we are battered by all this, the number of people who die and the economic damage we take are all tied to political choices. The crushing of whole areas of economic activity – arts, leisure, self employed folk, is a political choice that will have long term consequences. Funding billionaire tax dodgers while letting small businesses go to the wall, is a political choice.

Everything about the virus is political. The decision to not treat it as a political issue is also a political issue. If we insist on not being political about it, we do not call politicians to account. We accept that they could not have done better – and they so clearly could. We accept that the political decisions creating the context for our poor handling of the pandemic, were not important. That’s really dangerous territory. What do we think politics are for, if not for creating the framework in which we all operate? If that framework fails us – as is happening now – ignoring the political part of that is an act of powerlessness, of our abdicated responsibility as well as theirs.