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I think this campaign, whilst undoubtedly well-intentioned and containing much of value, ultimately gets the emphasis badly wrong. Its first demand is straightforwardly a mistake, in my view. https://zerocovid.uk/
“Full national lockdown until infection rates are near zero” could mean “full lockdown for a year.” That’s not operable, in my view, nor is it a demand the left/labour movement should make.
Apart from anything else, it says to the millions of workers (food couriers, supermarket workers, healthcare workers, transport workers) who *can’t* work from home: “You carry on exposing yourselves to risk to service the rest of us, while we lock down at home... indefinitely.”
I also think “full lockdown indefinitely” is insensitive to the serious social costs of lockdowns. We might assess that they’re sacrifices that have to be made to avoid ultimately worse consequences, but we still need some nuance in how we present things.
Emphasis matters here. The social provisions demanded in the campaign’s fourth point, such as full sickness/isolation pay, are *much* more important for the labour movement to agitate around. Lockdowns can’t work without them anyway, so those demands should be front-and-centre.
There’s also a question of agency and power. “Full lockdown until zero” is a demand on the government... but what’s the leverage for winning it? Mass demos? Kinda cuts against the demand. Strikes? But the workers whose strikes would have most impact can’t work from home anyway...
The additional advantage of agitation around demands like full sickness/isolation pay, or workers’ control of workplace safety measures, is that workers can get hold of that and build campaigns and disputes around them in the workplace.
Maybe you can launch a petition or lobby MPs to demand “full lockdown until zero covid”... but it doesn’t really build power or organisation. I’d even say it points in the direction of a kind of top-down statism. Clearly we need a state response to the pandemic...
...which will, by its nature, inevitably to “top-down”, but socialist agitation in the labour movement isn’t just about saying what we want the state to do. It’s also about building power “from below” in order to win concessions we need “from above”.
Finally, while there’s obviously stuff we should learn from other countries’ responses, I’m not convinced the actions of a much smaller island nation (NZ) or states with a much greater police/surveillance apparatuses (CHN/SK) are directly replicable, nor would I want them to be.
TL/DR: “Full lockdown until zero Covid” badly misplaced as a demand; better to focus on demands like full sickness and isolation pay, workers’ control of safety measures, rent freezes, bans on evictions, alternative quarantine accommodation for those who need it, etc., instead.
