WHATEVER the outcome of this pandemic, it will have provided a graphic demonstration of the human suffering of getting our priorities wrong. Let me set the mood by citing the tortuous and ineffectual financial packages devised by states to provide ordinary people with enough money to live on during the crisis.
Virtually everyone has a bank account nowadays, so why did the Treasury not simply instruct banks to provide us all with an overdraft to match perhaps 80% of the average income into their account for the previous three months? Time enough once the emergency is over to write off or repay any inappropriate abuses.
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The answer of course is that the establishment mind does not think like that, nor do the banks exist to serve society. It is symptomatic of the faceless and unaccountable powers which drive our government to decide that the NHS is already under such financial pressure that to have even contemplated a policy of building and mothballing sufficient hospital accommodation and facilities to meet a potential pandemic or other emergency would be “uneconomic and unprofitable”.
The fact that the construction industry had ample capacity and would be delighted to undertake such a building programme was not relevant to the financial interests which run the government.
Looking further afield, the same philosophy controls the IMF and the World Bank, which will not lend credits to South Africa to rebuild the disgusting overcrowded shanty towns which serve to house four-fifths of the population. How many are going to die there? There is of course no shortage of funds for Trident or the US military or to impose sanctions on Iran and Venezuela or any other regime which dares to contemplate running their affairs differently.
The truth is that money nowadays is purely a symbol of the state and its citizens, which guarantees the transnational private banking corporations which control the credit system.
And for as long as we continue to vote for politicians who are prepared to kow-tow to these financial elites, the lessons of this pandemic will go unheeded.
Ronnie Morrison
Helensburgh
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