THE UK has already lost more money in the current pandemic than would have been the cost to stockpile the equipment necessary to treat people properly. This is a systematic problem because the Tories put profit first.

They then spin fairytale fantasies that doing what’s best for profit will be in some magic way will be what’s best for society. We are living through concrete proof that this system is a failure.

Thanks to medical science, humans know that viruses are always present and they are always mutating. Periodically we will be confronted with viruses that are deadly to our health. Society faces the social cost of dealing with that. Stockpiling ventilators, beds, test kits. Under capitalism that is not a private cost so nobody is required to do it. Corporations don’t want to bear those costs.

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The government is reluctant to step in because in order for them to meet the costs they need to tax businesses. The Tories want to be seen as “business friendly” so have run down finances for the NHS over the last 10 years. The social cost of this is the woeful and inadequate response to the Covid-19 outbreak.

We should not accept the self-serving logic of corporations. They and their compromised economists put an arithmetical face and rationalise a self-serving process. They say private capitalists should not be regulated by the government with what is profitable for them, no matter what the social cost.

The biggest proponents of the current failed neoliberal system are so-called “centrists”. This is a misleading term which applies to paid schills who want to siphon up income and wealth to the 1%. In this economy the choice is either to favor them instead of the 99%.

What the Tories have created is oligarchy. Aristotle observed that oligarchies turn themselves into hereditary aristocracies.

Alan Hinnrichs
Dundee