 to which business was going on as usual, not because of irresponsible working class people going to parks, but because businesses were allowed to continue as usual was demonstrated very clearly by this picture which was tweeted by Dan Dobson this morning. And this is, you know, a full, a full room full of people who have gone to work on construction sites. So the tweet reads, construction sites are open as usual across the UK. This photo was taken 20 minutes ago on a site at Waterloo, so sent it sometime this morning. Contractors are refusing to shut sites until the government force them so they don't fall foul of any contractual clauses. And so this, I mean, this represents better than I suppose any tweet and image I've seen over the last three weeks, the fact that the government strategy, which has been based on advising businesses to do XYZ or advising landlords to let their tenants off if they're struggling to afford rent this month is, it was always ridiculous and it was ridiculous because what working class people need in this situation is rights, not advice. If you've been told to avoid large crowds or whatever, but then your boss is telling you that you have to go into work, otherwise either you'll be disciplined or you won't get paid. And the only way for you to get to work is on a busy tube train, then it's obviously a complete nonsense that we've got a media class and a political establishment, which is trying to blame the, I mean, the shitshow that we're going to see over the next two, three weeks on people not effectively following advice, because there will be so many people, so many people who have contracted coronavirus over the last three weeks or given coronavirus to someone vulnerable over the last three weeks, because they were doing what they had no choice but to do, which was to go to work. Can I also say, let's put ourselves in the shoes of one of those flower sellers in Columbia market. Let's say you employ a young person weekends on a Saturday, Sunday shift, God willing, you pay them a living wage, you're a good employer, etc., etc. You've already lost a load of money. Like I say, you're already in the red, you already know, your business is probably going to go under water this year, but you need to sell flowers on the Sunday and somebody has happened to take a picture there. And then your, you know, your employee says, well, can I come on Sunday? Well, look, I'm already out of pocket. I'm paying you a living wage. My business is going to go under this year, unless the government is specifically saying we can't do business, we're open as usual. And I'm very rarely defend, you know, a major construction conglomerate or multinational Balfour Beach or whatever, that might be administering the contracts at Waterloo, however it may be. But people are answerable to other people in supply chains, whether it's Transport for London, whether it's Balfour BT, whether it's a regional local body, etc. And if there isn't a message very specifically from the top, you cannot work in these places these times, unless you are these particular people, then people will do it because in a market economy, money makes the world go round. And particularly when we've got the environment, like I say over the next couple of months, potentially even years, people will be looking to get every last minute of working that they can, right? I mean, you know, the next quarter, we measure economic activity in quarters, it's three months, a quarter of a year. The next quarter in the United States, you're looking at in some projections, some say minus 15, some say minus 25, contraction of economic activity. There's never been that level of economic contraction in America in peacetime history. You know, it's the sort of economic contraction you'd expect in a war. And so of course, people are going to push boundaries in the days and weeks preceding that they are. In terms of this, who had to go to work this morning when they would have probably much preferred to have stayed at home and when medical advice would have told them to stay at home for their own health, but also because, you know, there are young people moving around who aren't at risk of what aren't our high risk in any case of having serious or facing serious consequences from coronavirus, but should be staying at home anyway, because you're in danger of spreading it to vulnerable people. And we could all be carrying it, we don't know. So people who didn't want to go to work, but had to go to work this morning, I put out a tweet today to ask for stories. I'm just going to get some of them up to show you how sort of like widespread this is and how unnecessary so many instances of people going to work today were. So Sarah, widely tweeted, yep, social media controller for a car company pressed to work from home was denied, just in case all other staff request to work from home too. I have a company laptop and do not require being in the office. Right. So we've got a government who for three weeks, well, for months, actually, not just for three weeks, but for months has seen this crisis coming hurtling towards us all. And for at least the last three weeks, we've been, we've been able to see what's going on in Italy. And we've been able to see how big this crisis will be if we do not prepare three weeks later today, this morning, this morning, you had people who were forced to go to work, to work on a social media job, on a laptop, in case a bunch of other people in that workplace also wanted to do the right thing, which was to work from home when they physically could. And it just seems, it's just insane that we've had a new cycle all weekend about the fact that too many people went to the park on Sunday and potentially walked within a meter of each other when the government has allowed it to be the case that people who are social media controllers for a company. So someone who sends tweets that they had to go to work at rush hour on the tube this morning, potentially giving coronavirus to people with a vulnerable person in their household, potentially giving it or getting it from an NHS worker, because the NHS workers are saying, you know, they're also on these tubes at rush hour. Like this is, it's just the height of irresponsibility. And we really have to make sure that this fuck up cannot get blamed on too many people who went to the park. Can I just say that Michael, what's your opinion here? Would you blame the employer or the government? Or is it a bit of both? Because let's say that employer is just juggling so many things, they're not that plugged into the news, they might watch the six o'clock news once every week, they might see a snippet of a front page, you know, unless and the last thing they heard about coronavirus was Boris Johnson saying, take it on the chin, because whatever we think about him, one of his political gifts is having this ability to evoke metaphors that, you know, quite deep in British culture, take it on the chin is a really strong piece of imagery in British English. And I think that's the last kind of thing that people would remember. Another one was about rice, sort of like vermicelli, when he was talking about broadband networks is a really evocative way of using language. And so, you know, do you blame the employer? Do you blame the government? And I think it does boil down to ultimately, these people have immense concentrations of power. The reason being, they're elected by all of us as holders of public office to act in the public interest, the public good. And so, you know, blame the employer to some extent, I mean, clearly the employer is being an idiot. By the way, that job is social media control for a car company that should be remote 90% of the time anyway, maybe that's one good thing that can come out of this crisis is that many more people understand the actual, the superiority of remote working. Often you can concentrate better, you can do more deep work in an environment which is quiet, which isn't an open plan office. But ultimately, I think we have to blame the government here. You know, I like you say, we have to avoid morality tales. And, you know, on the left, we like to sort of criticize bad bosses, etc. And we'll keep on doing that. But I think when it's a public health situation like this, when it's a pandemic, you have to have enforcement and very strong, affirmative, propositional language, not urging, not asking, not pleading. And so I think in the complete absence of that, I think, you know, all the blame has to go squarely on the government. Well, I think the buck obviously stops with the government. And also, I mean, we've been told for decades that free market capitalism works well, and it works well, because when you have companies who are trying to be as productive as possible and make as high profits as possible, so long as they don't break the law, that's supposed to lead to, you know, optimal outcomes. And so if you are a business owner, you've been trained to believe that, look, my job here, it's the whole point of shareholder value, like shareholder value. So business owners have a legal obligation in many cases to maximize shareholder value. And if you as a boss think that maximizing shareholder value means that you have to make a social media officer take the rush hour to like take the tube at rush hour in the middle of a pandemic to work, because that's how you think you're going to get, you know, the most content out of them that day, then as a profit maximizer, that's what you're supposed to do. I mean, I assume boss is an idiot. And if you, you know, I don't think he would be putting the dividends of his shareholders at fret by saying, you can work from home today, it sounds like he's a job's worth. But he should follow me on Twitter. And he should, you know, he could stay a bit more informed. Exactly. But I think you're 100% right that this, you know, the buckstop to the government and the idea that you can advise businesses and hope that, you know, that will be enough is for the birds. It was always ridiculous. The government should have realized it weeks and weeks and weeks ago. I just want to go through a few more of these tweets because it is shocking, you know, what jobs people were sent to today. Matteo Tiratelli, he says, my mate worked in an auction house for ancient coins, and they're still going in. So on Monday, so this evening, we've had this momentous occasion where, you know, the prime minister announces an unprecedented lockdown. We are in, you know, the worst global pandemic since 1918. And three weeks into this crisis, when we've already got more than 300 people dead, and we're potentially, you know, a week away from the deaths being in their thousands, we've got people who are on the tube at rush hour this morning to go and sell ancient coins. I mean, presumably they've been around for millennia. You know, you didn't have to go into work and sell them this morning. And obviously that's not a moral claim about the person who went to work. He was told to work by his boss. And the nature of employment in capitalism is that if you think you know better than your boss, you still have to do what your boss says. And that's the situation that so many people have been put in today and been put in over the last few weeks. I mean, there's lots of there's lots of kind of blurred boundaries about what is socially necessary work, you know, in terms of what constitutes care work, you know, clearly cleaners are hugely important parts of the economy. You know, what kinds of cleaning labor is going to be, you know, is urgently necessary, right? What kind, you know, what kinds of cleaners need to be out there? Clearly you want refuse collection, etc. But in terms of the fundamental workers that now need to be treated as you know, people who absolutely have priority in being able to continue to do their jobs. Look, antiquarian coin dealers are absolutely at the bottom. That is absolutely not socially necessary work. Kind of insane. I mean, almost like you raised it for a reason. It's ridiculous. It really makes your point exquisitely well. And, you know, no shade to people who sell ancient coins. It's a completely legitimate way to, you know, pass your time and to make a living. But when you're in the middle of a global pandemic, people who sell ancient coins should not be going to work. I want to go just to one more example. I'm not going to go to all of them because there were loads, but graphic nine, which is from Kat. And this was probably the most outrageous one of them all. So Kat writes, I've had to commute to work on two crowded buses each way. Open plan office with shared computers. So hot desking. Oh, my God. I have chronic respiratory conditions, including severe asthma. But they said to come in as I don't have flu symptoms. Meanwhile, bosses, six fixed salaries, working from home. This single tweet, this single reply tells you so much about this crisis and tells you so much about modern capitalism, right? So as we said on Friday's show, and what Torsten Bale, his director of the Resolution Foundation was quite good at sort of bringing to light last week, was that whilst all of this was based on advice, whilst people who were on, you know, the tube at rush hour last week were quite likely to catch coronavirus, but had been advised to stay at home. The people who were able to take that advice were wildly disproportionately likely to be higher earners. So he found that in the top 50% of earners, one in two people could work from home, you know, they did the kind of jobs that could work from home. And also they probably had, you know, the kind of power in the workplace that meant they could, they could ask for that and get it only one in 10 of people in the bottom half of the wage spectrum could work from home. So these people who've been forced to get on two buses a day, even if they have respiratory problems, because obviously the government haven't introduced any new rights, which say you're right in the workplaces that if you've got asked, you don't have to go to work over the past two weeks, it's all been based on advice. And because it's been based on advice, it's going to have shocking consequences for public health, which we're going to see over the next week or two. And it's been, I mean, presumably really distressing for a lot of people who are in vulnerable situations or who live, and this is the big one, people who live with people. So there'll be many people who, who don't have respiratory problems like cat has, but who live with someone who does. And so I think why am I going to work to do my, my desk job, which I could quite easily do from home, but my boss isn't letting me. And every time I'm going out and coming back, I am putting in danger my partner or my mom or my kid, who is more vulnerable to the consequences of coronavirus. And this is what the government's delivering over the last three, three weeks has made inevitable.