Hancock: "It's your actions now which can make a difference."

Plays down prospect of immediate introduction of new restrictions.

Few doubt the public must play its part. But legitimate questions about whether the govt has made/is making public's task harder in two key respects:

1) For some there's still a major economic disincentive apropos self isolation. Sick pay still poor. Savings for many exhausted.
Imminent prospect of Universal Credit cut would make this worse. Some people have fallen through the gaps of government support throughout. Though government support for (effectively) laid off people, a full economic bargain to universally support self isolation still...
...does not exist. Rishi Sunak just made a statement to the House which offered nothing new on any of these fronts.

And 2) The job for individuals is now made harder as a result of prevalence as a result of the delay in full lockdown in most of the country between the...
...point ministers were informed that the new variant had greater transmissibility (December 18th) and full lockdown (early January). We can't interrogate the micro decisions of the public alone, we must look at the macro decisions of ministers too.
And many argue that the pattern we've seen on three occasions is one of delay in introducing measures til nearly or at the last possible moment, which adds to prevalence, means test and trace is yielded useless and makes the task of the public all the more difficult.
The focus on compliance then, though important, is a bit of a futile (and potentially counterproductive) one when it's divorced from the overall context (economic and virological) that individuals are making those decisions in.
In other words, though Matt Hancock is right when he says 'It's your actions now which can make a difference', it applies just as much (if not more) to ministers in the decisions they're making now and in the past too.
Hancock hints to this idea, saying "the new variant makes everything so much harder"

This is presumably why SAGE recommended national lockdown on 22nd December- but that wasn't enacted by ministers (in England) until last week.

More from Lewis Goodall

Some quick thoughts on what we just saw

Firstly hardly a unique insight but hard to overstimate the difference between the two last inaugurals. America has meandered sharply along its political arc.

Biden's rhetoric reached high. Every sentence seemed purposefully...


...constructed to negate every political and personal characteristic of his predecessor.

And insofar as he's not Trump, that he does accept, cherish and understand democratic norms, institutions and conventions in a way that Trump never could, Biden will make a real difference.

He will change the tone and tenor of politics, not only in America but across the West. As I've said before, just replacing Trump is a substantial victory for him and will earn him praise from historians.

But that aura will disappear quickly. A governing project it will not make

But how much praise he receives and stature conferred by posterity will depend on what happens next.

Because the big overarching question for me, watching this, is which of those two inaugurals, Trump or Biden's, is going to seem unusual in the future.

The relief that many are feeling is predicated on a type of politics ending. But it is at least as possible that it is Biden ..not Trump who is the last gasp of something. Is it Trump who is the dying embers of a dying, increasingly powerless old white America...

More from Economy

Interesting thread, but I don't think ecosocialists or degrowthers are arguing that if German socialists had come to power the world would be green by now. Socialism is not automatically green. Eco-socialism is what it says - a green version of socialism - to be tested /1


The historical counterfactual also in not totally convincing. So let's assume Germany and Europe went socialist. The world economy would have evolved exactly the same way it did? 🤔 I doubt it, this is too deterministic. Examples: /2

We do not know if the transition from coal to oil would have taken place when it took place, the way it did. From Timothy Mitchell we know that oil was a fix for capitalism to bypass the labour strikes of coal workers. One would think that socialists would treat workers better /3

We also do not know if socialist governments would strong arm the Middle East the way capitalists did, starting wars to secure cheap oil, and setting up puppet governments. One would want to think that Rosa Luxembourg would not go down that path..../4

We also do not know if they would have continued colonial unequal exchange, extracting raw materials as cheap as possible from the rest of the world. Without cheap oil and cheap materials, it is anyone's guess if GDP and CO2 would be where it is now. /5

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