The British Prime Minister Boris Johnson is no stranger to making stupid remarks, a fact that was borne out by his declaration on March 23, 2021 that the Covid-19 vaccine success the UK has enjoyed is due to capitalism and greed. The truth is that the vaccine success that the UK has enjoyed – and the disastrous mishandling of the pandemic by the country’s government beforehand – underline the necessity of state welfare.
It is possible that Johnson is so lazy and ignorant that he does not understand that the vaccine that AstraZeneca is responsible for developing and distributing was created by a team of scientists at the Oxford Vaccine Centre in the University of Oxford. Nor that $1.7 billion worth of public money was invested into the creation of said vaccine. But if that is the case, then it further illustrates his unfitness for office – an unfitness that has been exhibited again and again over the course of the past year.
The U.K. economy, which he repeatedly attempted to restart with one ill-timed easing of lockdown measures after another, is poised to suffer the worst recession of any major developed country. His government’s incompetence in handling the pandemic – from the inability to supply PPE that exposed care workers and health staff to infection in the pandemic’s early stages, to the undermining of the government’s messaging of ‘stay home’ by Johnson’s special adviser Dominic Cummings deciding to take his family on a day trip to Barnard Castle in northern England – has not inspired confidence. And this incompetence has resulted in the U.K. having a death toll of 126,755 as of March 27, 2021. Only the United States, Brazil, Mexico, and India can claim worse figures.
For all the Johnson government has bleated about “our precious NHS”, the fact is that Britain’s welfare state has been systematically weakened since the 1980s by successive Tory governments pursuing the same greedy capitalist ‘ideals’ that Johnson himself championed – and New Labour’s reign under Blair and Brown between 1997 and 2010 did little to alleviate this pursuit of neo-liberalism. In consequence, Britain’s health and care sectors have been left severely weakened in the face of this pandemic – a fact that should be a source of shame to British society.
State welfare should be provided for all, and not just in cases of extreme need such as that caused by Covid-19. It has to be more than merely a safety net, and should be realized as far as economic realities will permit it. Ideally, the state should provide free education, healthcare, unemployment and sickness benefits, and old-age pensions for all. The basis for judging how civilized a society is should be how it treats the elderly – a basis which damns the U.K., which as of January 2021 has a toll of more than 25,000 care home deaths caused by Covid-19.
A truth that Johnson and Tories like him seem oblivious to is the fact that since state-owned and state-run welfare services are the property of the nation, they should be available to all. This reflects the responsibility that a nation has to its citizenry; after all, if everyone pays tax and National Insurance, everyone should have access to free welfare. Even if they conceded the above, however, Tories would attempt to argue that while society is responsible to all its members, not everyone should receive welfare if they can afford private healthcare, education, and pensions. All state benefits should be subject to means-testing, ensuring that only the truly needy get them.
However, there is no good reason why private education, private healthcare, and private pensions should exist. Indeed, the state monopoly of the welfare state should be absolute – by centralizing welfare and acquiring economies of scale, the state can provide a more efficient welfare system, and thus ensure fair and equal treatment for all citizens. The best resources can then be allocated to the public system rather than siphoned off by the elite who can afford private healthcare and private education.
There is no point in pointing to Sweden as an example of a welfare state that failed to cope with the pandemic – Sweden’s famed social-welfare programs have suffered in recent years from a combination of budget cuts and market reforms, the very same ‘remedies’ touted by every British Prime Minister from Thatcher to Johnson. This, combined with the same ‘herd immunity’ recommendations that Johnson himself was sympathetic to in the pandemic’s earlier stages, set the stage for Sweden achieving the 12th highest per capita death rate in the world by October 2020.
In the face of all this, the need to push for state welfare is clear, and we should not be dissuaded by the myth that we cannot afford universal welfare – countries with capitalist economies are growing year on year, and thus an increased welfare bill can be paid. There is truth, however, in the contention that the cost of the welfare state is rising more rapidly than the rate of overall economic growth, so paying for new and expensive drugs and medical techniques is onerous. However, it is not true that the only way to solve this problem is through private investment and private health insurance. On the contrary, a system of progressive taxation – lacking in many Western countries due to the idiocy of privatization – would provide the state with the resources needed to address the problem.
Suffice to say, we cannot expect this from a Johnson government – or much else.
Image credits: Dominic Alves and Sam Saunders