Firebreak Lockdowns for Flu: Why we should be worried

There are now contingency plans being drawn up for firebreak lockdowns over winter - primarily in relation to flu. This should concern us a lot.

I have repeatedly warned of a political risk arising from 18 months of compulsory social distancing: namely, that such policies cease to be regarded as extreme emergency measures, and instead become bog-standard public health instruments.

The significance of this should not be underestimated. The idea that basic sociality - that having friends over to your flat - should *generally* fall outside the remit of government regulation, is a good one. It is also a rather old idea.

Don't get me wrong. I supported lockdowns in 2020 and the renewed intensified lockdown in January 2020. These lockdowns were necessary to deal with the fact that people were dying at a truly catastrophic rate. More importantly, the application of lockdown measures to deal with a once-in-a-half-century pandemic may not do too much to adjust our *general* right to socialise as we please, since by definition these are measures to be applied once every 50 years.

Applying lockdown measures to deal with diseases that have always surged every year for the last hundred years takes us into different territory.

And there is a political side to this. According to one Downing Street source, one factor which may necessitate firebreak lockdowns over winter is an NHS "staffing crisis". One thing you'll notice about the right is that they tend to be well into the idea that wages are determined by supply and demand until there is a shortage of labour. At this point, they will shift to talking about a "staffing crisis" as though it is an act of god. Yet to any sane observer, the NHS staffing crisis is intimately connected with the government's scrooge-like pay policy for NHS staff. This in turn is not simply fuelled by their desire to save money. Rather it reflects the fact that NHS workers account for a significant portion of the national workforce, and therefore NHS pay-settlements impact the balance of power between labour and capital across the whole national economy.

So what I am getting to is this. Governments may find it politically more desirable to plan for potential surges in demand by have some "firebreak lockdowns" up their sleeve, rather than invest in excess capacity and pay workers enough to maintain that capacity. Thus the NHS will be "protected" through greater powers of social control rather than decent pay.

We do need to be aware that the way in which we talk about Covid lockdown measures feeds into the politics of future lockdowns. A lot of people seem to have slipped into the idea that any public health benefit whatsoever justifies ongoing lockdown measures, and any potential harm whatsoever means that reopening should have been pushed back.

We need to step away from this. We need to reassert that compulsory social distancing represents an unusual form of state coercion, than can only be justified by emergencies of atypical dimensions. Other we face the general institution of a new form of social control.