 The January lockdown seems to be working, with COVID cases going down and hospital admissions leveling off. However, the epidemic could be declining faster, and the government recently released this advert to try to encourage people to keep following the rules. Come in the eyes and tell them you're doing all you can to stop the spread of COVID-19. Stay home, protect the NHS, save lives. I mean that's obviously a powerful advert. Of course, as we always say, we do advocate that people follow the rules, it's very important to follow lockdown rules. But the whole campaign does leave a bit of a bad taste in the mouth, and that's because yet again, it's government messaging which blames individuals for the government's failure. The slogan, look them in the eyes and tell them you're doing all you can to stop the spread of COVID-19. Now this is an advert from the government, and Boris Johnson is the person in the country who has the most responsibility for not doing all he can to stop people dying from COVID-19. If he had gone into a lockdown two weeks earlier when the scientists had advised, then we would have peaked at 30,000 cases a day instead of 60,000 cases a day. Potentially we could have had half the number of deaths in this wave. I mean, quite likely we could have had less than half the number of deaths in this wave if he'd taken earlier advice from Sage, for example, the circuit breaker, for example, a test and trace system that worked. So to then make this also individualized about the viewer who's watching this advert, who's supposed to feel guilty for the deaths that will continue, they're going to continue above a thousand a day for potentially quite a while. They're still on an average of over a thousand a day, and that's probably not the fault of the person watching that advert, but that's kind of what they're trying to get you to believe. Anyway, again, none of this is to say ignore the advert. With estate agents construction workers and call center operatives being asked into work by their bosses, that's clearly one of the big failings of this government in terms of the lockdown not being as strict as it could have been. As I say, cases are going down, but they could be going down faster. And it's in that context where bosses are asking their workers to go into work, that this variant of that advert is particularly gross, let's say. So it says, look him in the eyes and tell him you really can't work from home. No, obviously, if you can work from home, work from home. If you're someone who's going into, well, you can't go into the central London Starbucks, but if you're self-employed and going into some office that you don't need, some shared office that you don't need to be in, a bit of an unusual scenario anyway, don't do that. But if someone is going into work when they could work at home, what's more likely to be the case is that their boss asked them to go. That's normally why people go into work. It's because their boss asked them to go. That's how the economy works, but the government hasn't been very strict on bosses. The government have been very lax on bosses, in fact. They sort of said, we advise you to encourage your workers from home, but there's no demand, there's no requirement. And as we know, there are many industries which aren't essential, which are continuing at this point in time. Now, Shelly Asquith, who works on health and safety for the Trade Union Congress, she summed up the problem with this ad when she tweeted, this is out of order. Unions are hearing from thousands of frightened workers every week who are being forced to office jobs they know can be done from home, but face the sack if they refuse. Blame the bosses. We've talked a lot about how the government sort of blame individuals to distract from the actions of themselves and their sort of lax attitude to bosses. But I haven't seen it being quite so explicit before that they're blaming workers for the spread of coronavirus. I mean, were you surprised by that advert? It's kind of just the most brutal expression of how this entire crisis response has been run. And I completely agree with Shelly. Firstly, that poster campaign should not be directed to everyday people who have had unclear messaging, who have, you know, many of whom have followed irresponsible lockdown policy. For example, people who went to shopping centers and went to restaurants in that sort of early part of December when that was open in London. And also, as you mentioned, people who are forced into going into work. A campaign like that should be directed towards MPs and specifically Boris Johnson. It should be saying, you know, look him in the eyes and tell him that we should take coronavirus on the chin. It should be look him in the eyes and tell him that it was okay to open restaurants and shops while we still have thousands of infections a day. And we were entering winter season for the NHS, just so companies could make their Christmas bottom line. How about look him in the eye and tell him that we don't have enough money to furlough people and that we shouldn't furlough them because it would disincentivize people from working, which is a direct quote from Ian Duncan Smith. Because those are actually the people and those are actually the policies that are accountable for the crisis because those are the people, because, you know, not workers who are going into work because their boss has the power to make them go into work. And, you know, I know so many people, multiple people who are not only going into work, having to go into work when they don't need to work, but even for those who do have to go into work are working in unsafe conditions and whose managers are making incredibly irresponsible decisions in order to make a bottom line. And there's absolutely nothing those workers can do to report or flag that irresponsible behavior from an employer. There's no mechanism to correct that. And Shelley bringing up the context of, you know, how unions have been treated in this is really, really important because unions like, you know, the National Education Union, like the Fire Brigade Union, you know, these are the institutions that have actually done the work and taken leadership to keep workers and, you know, their broader communities safe and whose struggle has likely saved thousands of lives. Like the any use fight to stop kids going back to school likely saved thousands of lives. And they had to do that in the face of demonization of stigmatization from the press and politicians. So, you know, that is like, and the fact that that's that part of that story gets lost. And the fact that the unions, they're not just fighting for, you know, this abstract idea of, you know, the workers, but they're fighting for the safety of the broader community as well. And, you know, I think that you mentioned that, you know, this is about sort of shifting blame from the government. And I think that that's true. But I also do think that there is an element here of embedding this broader principle that when you have times of crisis like this one, the response to that has to be through policing and punishment. So, you know, we've heard a lot from Priti Patel about how, you know, this myth that it's, you know, reckless individuals breaking the lockdown is the reason why we have this this we're in this position that is being used as a precursor to essentially increase policing powers, increase the ability of police to sort of find people on the spot. And so the idea is that we respond to this through punishment and through policing, rather than through an ethic of care and an ethic of support, which is kind of much more what the unions were fighting for. And yet they got so demonized. So I think that there is the question of, you know, the sort of immediate strategy of like, we've really fucked up here, and we want to just create a narrative that can kind of confuse people and get people to blame each other rather than us. But I also think it's in the ideological fabric of we respond to these things by punishing individuals and by through this carceral system, rather than by having the principle of care and support to enable people to do what they need to do in order to keep themselves and their communities safe. If you want to tune into a new show that doesn't blame workers, it doesn't blame ordinary people for the coronavirus crisis we are currently in, then please do subscribe to Novara Media and Tisgisau Ecolive every Monday, Wednesday and Friday at 7pm. And we hold the powerful to account, not the public. Right, the advert we've just shown you, it was gross from our perspective. Unfortunately, it hasn't caused a massive backlash in the wider population. The one we're about to show you has. So this was another ad put out to encourage us all to stay at home. And we can get it up. As you can see, we have four household seen on the left. You can see you've got a family sitting on the couch, on then you've got a parent holding a baby, then a parent homeschooling their children, and then a parent cleaning the house. Now, if you are particularly eagle-eyed, what you'll notice is that all the chores are being done by women. A woman is homeschooling, a woman is caring for the baby, and a woman is cleaning the house. The only man to appear is lounging on a sofa. So this has caused quite rightly quite a lot of outrage because it seemed as deeply sexist. The government in this case have responded to that backlash by pulling the ad. They've said, oh, it doesn't actually represent what we think about women. Let's go to some of the backlash because it didn't just come from campaigners, although that was, you know, there was a lot of backlash from campaigners, a lot of backlash on social media, but it also came from Tory backbenchers. So this is Caroline Noakes, who chairs the Women's and Equality Select Committee. She tweeted the image saying, someone signed this off. Now, Dana, I want to bring you in because this advert is clearly offensive, but also, you know, are we potentially missing a trick by talking about the advert as being offensive when actually the representation it makes of households during lockdown isn't necessarily that inaccurate. So the force that society found women were twice as likely to have taken unpaid time off as a result of the pandemic than men. And the IFS, that's the Institute for Fiscal Studies, found that in the spring lockdown, women were only able to do one hour of uninterrupted paid work for every three hours done by men. So it's an offensive advert, but also is the reality even worse? The reality it's representing is what's offensive rather than the poster itself. And, you know, women in general, even outside of the pandemic, have had to take on much larger amounts of unpaid care work as a result of austerity and, you know, the defunding of the care service and the devaluing of care as, you know, a kind of work. So it's really actually kind of annoying to see Tory MPs who are absolutely fine with all of the economic policies that have burdened, you know, especially working class women with huge amounts of unpaid care work on top of the wage labor that a lot of working class women do, getting up in arms about the reality that they help to create being represented in a poster. And, you know, but in the case of the pandemic specifically, so that's kind of a broader comment about austerity and its impact on women. But, you know, in the case of the pandemic, we have this situation, you know, and especially because outside care services, you know, even if we did have a well-funded care service, it would be restricted in how much we could have relied on that in this particular moment. But we can still see highly gendered concepts of work, which is basically why are women having to take unpaid time off in order to fulfill their increased care responsibilities as a result of the pandemic. That is not an accident that women have had to do that and, you know, have therefore had to accept to cut in their wages and have because they've had to take unpaid time off and also has left them less time to, you know, take care of themselves and sort of make sure that they are rested, etc., in order to take on all of this work. So that's not an accident. And that is again part and parcel of the government's, you know, complete disregard for the realities of how this pandemic is going to have knock on effects, especially for marginalized people like working class women. This is work and it's work upon which our economy and our society relies. Now, obviously, to an extent, the gendering of this work as sort of feminized is related to how that work is represented. So in that sense, I guess representations like the one in this campaign kind of matter, but if what you really care about is making the lives of women, you know, sort of structurally easier, then you'd be much better off supporting the actual material policies that would do that, rather than getting angry on Twitter about a poster, which is very easy to do, but ultimately, it's kind of meaningless. Some of the easy things the government could have done, which would have limited the, you know, the unequal outcomes of lockdown, because you often hear the lockdown skeptics, the likes of Julie Hartley-Brew, who say, oh, I'm against lockdowns because they have an unequal effect on the poor. But then you don't hear them backing any of the actual policies that would mean that lockdowns didn't have an unequal effect on poor people, because obviously, obviously no one thinks lockdowns are a good thing, but you need to stop this incredibly deadly virus. And what the government could have done, for example, is given people the right to claim furlough. So if you had, for example, you know, if your kids have come off school, you say, look, I want to devote a bit more time to homeschooling than I would be able to do if I continue doing my work. So can you furlough me? And it turns out that TUC did a study into this. 70% of women who asked for furlough were declined it. So you have people who are, you know, in the government's words, trying to do the right thing, which is trying to keep the education of your kids tiding along. I mean, this TUC study was specifically about women. So I don't know what the numbers are when it comes to men. But you're saying, look, I want to make sure my child's education continues as best as possible throughout this period. So I want to be furloughed during this period. The boss says, no, often the boss had said no, because they said it would make us look bad, or because then other people might get an idea that they could get furloughed. So you can see how completely the wrong attitude has been sort of spread from the top down from the government down to say, you know, if possible, keep on working. And if that means you have to work twice as much because you're doing a job and looking after your kids, so be it. It didn't need to be like that.