Comment: From Hurricane Katrina to Covid-19

[From London Socialist Historians Group Newsletter 70 (Summer 2020)]

Like George W Bush with Katrina, Boris Johnson discovers ‘People we didn’t know exist’ 

 When Henry Mayhew started the series of social investigations into the London working-class in 1849 that was to become London Labour and the London Poor he laid out a prospectus in the Morning Chronicle. He wrote of investigating the ‘large and comparatively unknown body of people’ who comprised the labouring poor who lived in slum housing often in insanitary conditions with at best uncertain employment.

He set a pattern that has emerged at times of crisis since.

When Hurricane Katrina hit New Orleans in 2005 revealing a government and president in George W Bush that was not only unprepared to deal with it but had reduced funding previously for measures that might have helped, the  Federal Emergency Management Agency’s Michael Brown said, "We're seeing people that we didn't know exist’.

The former Guardian journalist Gary Younge who reported from New Orleans at the time recently made the link to the situation now.

The pattern of Katrina has indeed been echoed in the government’s handling of the COVID-19 crisis.

Only after sustained pressure by a few media critics did the government agree to publish the daily totals of deaths in care homes. These were and remain sadly substantial. Some have argued that the residents of homes were not hospitalised when seriously ill but left and cut again, and housing conditions which are far from ideal as to die where they were to avoid the NHS being overwhelmed. An independent inquiry will need to examine that as well as the failure to provide adequate PPE for workers in the homes.

Yet, picking up on Younge’s point, another perspective might be that the government didn’t really know what the scale of the problem in care homes was and, based on its earlier herd immunity strategy, now changed, believed that numbers of the elderly and vulnerable would die anyway.

Reality has a way of intruding into right-wing ideological fantasy strategies, as George W Bush found out in 2005.

This came recently with the publication of details, broken down to local authority areas, by the Office of National Statistics of all COVID-19 deaths from 1 March to 17 April. This wasn’t some exercise in constructing a league table of deaths - important though it is to record every death and value every life. Rather it focused attention on where COVID-19 deaths had been particularly high and implicitly invited discussion of why this might be.

Of the 11 areas with the highest death rate everyone was in London The pattern of poverty, housing and health identified 171 years ago by Henry Mayhew in London’s poorest districts continues. The highest UK COVID-19 mortality rates per 100 000 population in the UK are in the  London Boroughs of Newham 144.3, Brent 141.5, Hackney 127.4, Tower Hamlets 122.9 and Haringey 119.3.

Philip Glanville, the Mayor of Hackney, quoted in the Financial Times on 2 May argued that “the links between inequality, poverty, ethnicity and health” were the key to his borough’s death rate of 127 per 100,000.

Indeed these are people, overwhelmingly poor, workingclass, many from ethnic minorities, who have suffered years of Tory austerity, of public services and the NHS cut the cost of homes in London has soared and Tory policies, meaning little council housing has been built. Yet these same people are those who keep the NHS going, who drive buses and tubes, who clean streets and work in supermarkets. They are low paid but as the last two months have underlined absolutely essential.

The Tories may not have known such people existed, but they do now, and political change is on the agenda.

Keith Flett