2020 — Gratitude and Anger

It’s too early to make a call about whether we’ll look back on 2020 as the year from hell or as the year in which things started to become even worse and what we thought was hell was merely hell’s reception area.

And was what befell us this year completely unforeseen? Well, yes, in some ways. But a pandemic was becoming increasingly likely as ecological damage continued, and its effects could be — and were — fairly accurately modelled both at the economic and health levels by large numbers of both national and international health organisations. In other words, the scale of the detrimental effects of this particular pandemic are a result of political decisions. And if we look especially at the UK and the USA — where the death toll and the economic impact for anyone already living on benefits or one pay check away from eviction and food banks — we can see that it is more than political. The profits-led, private-industry-focused, and corruption-riddled responses to the pandemic have been driven by ideology.

When the Tories and other parties of the neoliberal death cult talk of the economy they don’t mean the health of the nation as a whole. Their idea of economy is the profit-gobbling transnational corporations that destroy the planet, shatter communities when they shift production in search of smaller overheads, seek to continually depress wages, and campaign feverishly against the rights — and safety — of workers.

Living in the UK now means living in a country that is likely to see one of the world’s highest…