As of Monday evening, the UK is on a form of lockdown in a bid to slow the transmission of the COVID-19 virus. Briefly, this is what you can and can’t do for as long as the lockdown is in force: UK coronavirus lockdown: what you can and cannot do. At the time of writing, the legislation to enforce this will be going through Parliament today (Wednesday 25.3) before they shut early for Easter.

At the moment, construction is one of the ‘key’ industries that’s allowed to carry on as normal. So while the authorities get agitated about three or more people gathering together in a public park, they’re turning a blind eye to construction workers crammed onto a drastically pared down tube service in London and having to stand way too close too each other at the morning briefings before the commencement of work. Social and physical distancing measures designed to prevent transmission of the COVID-19 virus seem to be expendable in face of the ‘need’ to build yet more expensive apartment blocks in London that ordinary Londoners will never be able to afford. This is what happens when you have a project of making London a welcome destination for global investors to park their wealth.

When people see images of construction workers travelling on packed tube trains, it shouldn’t really come as any surprise that a fair few will see the blatant hypocrisy at work here and start to question why they should have to observe the lockdown protocol. Money talks – people are seeing that and won’t forget or forgive what may come as a consequence of this. As a bit of an aside, the same goes for shit employers such as Sports Direct and Wetherspoons to name just two, the landlords still acting like arseholes and the price gougers making a fortune from massive mark ups on items such as bog rolls, hand sanitisers and the like. We’re starting to get the feeling that after all of this is over, there may be a bit of a reckoning to come.

Will the lockdown intensify? If the currently fine weather holds out over the weekend and people feel like a walk in the park (we would advise exercising distancing protocol) and the authorities don’t like what they see, namely people socialising, then yes, we can expect one. However, even if the government decide that for their purposes, an intensification is needed, the cops have already made it pretty clear they don’t have the numbers for widespread enforcement. What we may see is some selective lockdown enforcement ‘theatre’ in a prominent location in a bid to try and nudge the population into compliance. We suspect the authorities are hoping it will piss down with rain this weekend…

‘Why let a crisis go to waste?’ This is something we’ve heard people say in relation to the powers the government are assuming in their bid to maintain some kind of a grip on the COVID-19 crisis. Is the assumption of those powers a consolidation of their control or are they a desperate bid to plug the holes that seem to be emerging all over the place as the system goes into a bit of a meltdown? Those with a conspiratorial viewpoint may tend to see it as the former. The increasing number of people who can see that the capitalist system is tattered, broken and not fit for purpose tend to see what’s happening as a desperate plugging of holes.

Trying to forecast how things will pan out in a rapidly changing crisis is a mug’s game. When we look back to the start of this month, it’s looking back at a different world. A lot of what we took for granted just three weeks ago has gone. Three weeks from now, we could well be in a very different situation from the one we’re in now. What is a reasonably safe assumption to make is that there will not be a return to how things were at the start of 2020. The fatal flaws of a broken, dysfunctional capitalist system have been laid bare for all to see. The spontaneous emergence of mutual aid and solidarity groups we’ve seen offer the glimmer of a better, equitable, sane and sustainable world. Whatever shite gets thrown at us over the next few months, let’s hold on to the possibilities for radical change that are starting to emerge…