DAN HODGES: The Left don't care about Costa staff losing their jobs - they just want Covid to wreck capitalism.
It is The Guardian – inevitably – that has been leading the sneers. ‘As millionaires inside and outside of government lean on us to stop working from home, what are we really missing?’ the bible of woke Britain intoned last week.
‘If you want to feel like you’re in an office again, just wad a packet of wet wipes down your toilet and, at 4pm every Friday, throw away all the milk that’s left in your fridge. That’s all you’re really missing.’
All you’re really missing so long as you’re not one of the 1,600 Costa coffee workers who were told on Friday that they’re about to be dumped on to the dole queue. Or the 3,000 staff of Pret A Manger who were handed their P45s a week earlier.
A Costa Coffee store is pictured above. 1,600 Costa workers were told on Friday they would lose their jobs. As ever, there’s an element of raw snobbery in the glee with which these redundancies have been greeted
But, hey, as the liberal Left’s edgy new mantra goes: ‘Who wants to die for a Pret sandwich?’
Except it’s not just going to be the baristas and sandwich-makers who feel the pain.
According to the Confederation of British Industry’s (CBI) most recent assessment, last month’s perceived recovery on the High Street was a dead-Covid bounce. Britain is now heading for its worst job cuts since the financial crash.
The CBI’s quarterly employment balance – which measures the number of retailers laying off and hiring staff – has dropped to minus 45, down from minus 20 in May.
But liberal Britain couldn’t care less.
The 7,000 job losses at M&S, the 2,500 at Debenhams, the 3,500 at Virgin. All a price worth paying to maintain our new, Covid-secure ‘work-life balance’.
The CBI’s quarterly employment balance – which measures the number of retailers laying off and hiring staff – has dropped to minus 45, down from minus 20 in May. But liberal Britain couldn’t care less. An M&S store is pictured above
As ever, there’s an element of raw snobbery in the glee with which these redundancies have been greeted.
As one MP pointed out to me: ‘The service sector jobs are the wrong sort of jobs. The kids of Guardian leader writers don’t rely on this sort of work. Maybe for a summer job. But that’s it.’
There’s also some not-so-subliminal racism at play. As one Minister said: ‘The problem is a lot of these workers are migrants. So no one gives a s*** about them.’
And, of course, there is the grand conspiracy theory. None of this really matters. UK plc will absorb these losses and adapt. All that’s really at stake are the profits of the big inner-city landlords, who stuff the Tory Party’s coffers with gold. Some of whom – nudge, nudge, wink, wink – are also Russians.
In our Covid-obsessed world, where legitimate concern about a dangerous virus has been lost beneath a form of collective mass hysteria, this tin-foil progressive populism is gaining some traction.
But it obscures the real agenda behind the thinly veiled rejoicing over the impending collapse of the service-oriented British economy.
In the wake of the financial crash, a new concept – ‘disaster capitalism’ – was on the lips of every liberal academic and commentator.
The theory posited that this massive shock to the global economic system would be leveraged to open the door to more free-market deregulation and a full-blown assault on social protection.
Now many on the Left see Covid as the opportunity for payback. A chance to unleash ‘disaster socialism’. Or, for the more moderately minded, ‘disaster Milibandism’.
As The Guardian again helpfully explains: ‘Since the pandemic began, societal changes that were supposed to be impossible have happened with relative ease. Workers were sent home overnight and it now seems that many can do their jobs, if not fully remotely, then at least partially from home.
‘Already, many people are talking of moving away from big cities.’
‘Societal changes that were supposed to be impossible’ is actually code for ‘We’re going to use Covid to take a hammer to capitalism in a way we were prevented from doing by the voters at the 2015 and 2017 and 2019 Elections’.
In the eyes of many on the Left, the new normal can now be Jeremy Corbyn’s normal.
And if the dole queues have to swell by a few million to usher in this new utopia of home-working and locally sourced latte, so be it.
But to be fair to the liberals, they’re just trying to ensure a good crisis doesn’t go to waste.
What’s inexplicable is the way Boris Johnson and his Ministers are giving them a free hand to commit their economic and social vandalism. Last week was billed as the week Boris would launch his drive to get Britain back to work.
Until, at Thursday’s lobby briefing, when the Prime Minister’s spokesman proudly announced: ‘There has never been a back to work campaign.’ Mail
