unherd.com
The Covid-19 class war - UnHerd
J_Bloodworth
8-10 minutes
Catastrophe is a great leveller. Plague, revolution, war… they all reduce inequality. But as lockdown lengthens into months, it’s clear that Covid-19 is different. It is going to entrench difference. The lives of working-class Britons, unlike those of their wealthier counterparts, will not stand still while the economy is frozen; they will worsen.
In ordinary times, there are correctives to inequality. Education, for example. For some children, life is roughly sketched out before they even pull on their first school uniform. According to the Sutton Trust, children from the poorest fifth of families are almost a year (11.1 months) behind middle-income families in scores on vocabulary tests by the time they are five — often because parents do not have the time or resources to read with them at home. Schools exist to reduce this gap; they give poorer children the opportunity to pull level with their better-off peers.
With Covid-19 shuttering schools, all pupils are having to ‘learn’ from home. Inevitably, those disadvantaged pupils are falling behind. Wealthier parents are more likely to have the resources to home educate their children — or pay for tutors. Meanwhile, private schools are better equipped to facilitate distance learning. According to a survey by the pollsters Teacher Tapp, 27% of teachers in private secondary schools had worked with online video conferencing, compared with just 2% of teachers at state secondaries.
https://unherd.com/2019/12/brexit-has-exposed-our-education-apartheid-2/?=refinnar
While children are losing out in lockdown, so, too, are their parents. The old class divide of the 20th century was crudely defined as existing between those who worked with their brains and those who toiled with their hands. The contemporary divide, for the foreseeable future at least, will be between those forced into potentially unsafe working environments and an office class who have the relative luxury of working from home.
Data from the ONS illustrate the gulf between these two groups. Men working in the lowest skilled occupations — security guards, bus drivers, shop workers — already have some of the highest Covid-19 death rates. While frontline healthcare professionals such as doctors and nurses do not appear to be at significantly increased risk of death from the virus, those working in social care are, with rates of 23.4 deaths per 100,000 males and 9.6 deaths per 100,000 females. These roles are low status — as one carer told me when I worked in the sector while researching my book Hired in 2016, most care workers are “treated like glorified cleaners”. Now they are classed as ‘key workers’, even as the Government fails to provide enough Personal Protective Equipment.
Boris Johnson’s dilemma is unenviable. The notion that the lockdown can go on indefinitely until a vaccine is found is a popular misconception. According to YouGov, more than a third of the population (37%) believe the Government should wait until there are no new cases of Covid-19 at all before beginning to ease restrictions. But for every month we are locked down, the economy will take years to recover.
So informing people, as the Prime Minister did, that people can work if it is safe for them to do so, isn’t some dastardly Tory plot to give the virus an opportunity to wipe out the elderly and vulnerable. It’s an attempt to keep the economy moving. It is an unhappy consequence of the crisis that the manual and professional workforces face very different levels of risk.
This is compounded by the fact that inequality affects your risk from Covid. Men born in the most deprived areas of Britain can expect almost 20 (18.6) fewer years of good health compared to those born in the least deprived areas. These inequalities are even worse when it comes to black and ethnic minority Britons. Disadvantaged groups are therefore more likely to experience complications if they catch the virus.
But getting people back to work is a necessity. So what’s the solution?
The Covid-19 class war - UnHerd
J_Bloodworth
8-10 minutes
Catastrophe is a great leveller. Plague, revolution, war… they all reduce inequality. But as lockdown lengthens into months, it’s clear that Covid-19 is different. It is going to entrench difference. The lives of working-class Britons, unlike those of their wealthier counterparts, will not stand still while the economy is frozen; they will worsen.
In ordinary times, there are correctives to inequality. Education, for example. For some children, life is roughly sketched out before they even pull on their first school uniform. According to the Sutton Trust, children from the poorest fifth of families are almost a year (11.1 months) behind middle-income families in scores on vocabulary tests by the time they are five — often because parents do not have the time or resources to read with them at home. Schools exist to reduce this gap; they give poorer children the opportunity to pull level with their better-off peers.
With Covid-19 shuttering schools, all pupils are having to ‘learn’ from home. Inevitably, those disadvantaged pupils are falling behind. Wealthier parents are more likely to have the resources to home educate their children — or pay for tutors. Meanwhile, private schools are better equipped to facilitate distance learning. According to a survey by the pollsters Teacher Tapp, 27% of teachers in private secondary schools had worked with online video conferencing, compared with just 2% of teachers at state secondaries.
https://unherd.com/2019/12/brexit-has-exposed-our-education-apartheid-2/?=refinnar
While children are losing out in lockdown, so, too, are their parents. The old class divide of the 20th century was crudely defined as existing between those who worked with their brains and those who toiled with their hands. The contemporary divide, for the foreseeable future at least, will be between those forced into potentially unsafe working environments and an office class who have the relative luxury of working from home.
Data from the ONS illustrate the gulf between these two groups. Men working in the lowest skilled occupations — security guards, bus drivers, shop workers — already have some of the highest Covid-19 death rates. While frontline healthcare professionals such as doctors and nurses do not appear to be at significantly increased risk of death from the virus, those working in social care are, with rates of 23.4 deaths per 100,000 males and 9.6 deaths per 100,000 females. These roles are low status — as one carer told me when I worked in the sector while researching my book Hired in 2016, most care workers are “treated like glorified cleaners”. Now they are classed as ‘key workers’, even as the Government fails to provide enough Personal Protective Equipment.
Boris Johnson’s dilemma is unenviable. The notion that the lockdown can go on indefinitely until a vaccine is found is a popular misconception. According to YouGov, more than a third of the population (37%) believe the Government should wait until there are no new cases of Covid-19 at all before beginning to ease restrictions. But for every month we are locked down, the economy will take years to recover.
So informing people, as the Prime Minister did, that people can work if it is safe for them to do so, isn’t some dastardly Tory plot to give the virus an opportunity to wipe out the elderly and vulnerable. It’s an attempt to keep the economy moving. It is an unhappy consequence of the crisis that the manual and professional workforces face very different levels of risk.
This is compounded by the fact that inequality affects your risk from Covid. Men born in the most deprived areas of Britain can expect almost 20 (18.6) fewer years of good health compared to those born in the least deprived areas. These inequalities are even worse when it comes to black and ethnic minority Britons. Disadvantaged groups are therefore more likely to experience complications if they catch the virus.
But getting people back to work is a necessity. So what’s the solution?
