 coronavirus is a respiratory disease, one of the main things or presumably this is the main equipment you need at the ICU bed for someone with coronaviruses that is the ventilator that keeps them breathing. But what is it? It pumps oxygen into the lungs, does it? So there's like a change in pressure as you breathe in and as you breathe out and then you have oxygen exchange and like oxygen is going in and carbon dioxide is going out and essentially it's a machine that does that on your behalf because you are unable to do that because you're so unwell. The government has realised they're short of ventilators and their response. Again, well this is Matt Hancock talking about ventilators. We start with around 5,000 ventilators. We think we need many times more than that and we're saying that if you produce a ventilator then we will buy it. No number is too high and we're working with companies, we've been working with them for some time, both to buy ventilators that are available but also to switch over production to ventilators and other critical equipment like personal protection equipment for instance. But the ventilators are the big thing. They're relatively complicated pieces of kit. I couldn't make one but they're not so complicated that the advanced manufacturing that this country is so good at now can't be able to turn its production lines over to. The reason I say that is a kind of neoliberal response to this crisis is what he's saying is if you can make it, we'll buy it. In the war economy, in the Second World War, the government didn't say, oh shit, we need more planes because the Germans are going to try and invade us. If you can make a plane, we'll pay you a good price. They understood that especially in a period where the markets kind of breaking down because they're about to have economic collapse, you can't just say, oh, we'll buy it. Whatever you want, we'll pay for it. You need to start managing supply chains and if we're going to have a bit of a war economy, you need to take responsibility for creating those ventilators. Before I go to you both, I also just want to introduce, so he was saying that the government have been speaking with businesses about how they can refashion their production line so that they create ventilators instead of whatever else they create. Robert Peston tweeted an hour later that morning, I just spoke to Warren East, Chief Executive of Rolls-Royce, one of the UK's most advanced engineering companies, and he says government has not contacted him yet to discuss whether his or his supplier's facilities can be repurposed to make the many thousands of respirators. As we were saying earlier, this is a crisis that government have known about for two months at least, and they presumably have known for two months that they won't have enough ventilators if they want to infect 60% of the people with coronavirus, and yet they haven't even spoken to anyone. It's very similar to last week, I think it was Matt Hancock again, actually, who said, I think it was on question time, that we've spoken with all the supermarket chains to talk about how they can ensure supply during this period, and then a journalist asks, the boss of the major supermarket is like, no, they haven't got any contact with us at all. It seems like we have a government that freaks out every time a journalist asks them a question, makes up something that they haven't done. I mean, it almost seems like the only reason they are now talking about ventilators is because someone asked them a question about ventilators, and then someone in the back room was like, oh, fuck, yeah, we haven't thought of ventilators. So let's now look at what the response has been. So you've got, instead of obviously they're on the back foot here, what they have done in response to this deficiency of ventilators is tweeted. So we can get Nadine Doris last night, so she is a health minister who I think got coronavirus and recovered. She said, the PM is calling for a national effort for ventilator production. We have received many offers to make ventilators and parts. If you can manufacture, call the business energy and industrial strategy business support helpline on 0300 456, blah, blah, blah, a dedicated team to receive your call will start at 10 a.m. tomorrow. Then later in the day, Matt Hancock calling all manufacturers who can support our national effort for hashtag coronavirus ventilator production to help contact government business support team, then the number and the email is like, I've been in meetings where the action point at the end of them has been let's do a call out on Twitter. You know, it's like we're short of something. Let's do a call out on Twitter. Those were meetings, you know, back in 2010 of anarchists arranging a demo. This is cabinet ministers who've had a meeting been like, fuck, there aren't enough ventilators to keep the population alive. Let's do a tweet. And, you know, I'm glad they tweeted. I'm glad they tweeted because whatever means possible, please get some fucking ventilators made. But the fact that this is what the government are resorting to is terrifying. The war effort metaphor. Britain in 1940 was the world's largest manufacturer of fighter aircraft. Isn't that remarkable? And in 1941, Britain made more fighter aircraft than the USSR, the United States and Nazi Germany. How did they do it? They went to Supermarine with the Spitfire, for instance, and they said, what workers do you need? What sites? What tools? How quickly? They were requisitioning private houses in Southampton on the South Coast, as where a lot of the parts of the Spitfires were made. They would go into Laundrette's because they had, you know, very high voltage sort of power supplies, which is rare. It's the 1940s. And they were, sorry, we're taking your Laundrette, we're ripping out all the things. We're going to, this is now going to become a Spitfire, you know, wing production plant. That's what you have to do in a crisis. You can't like, I mean, it's just, it's chalk and cheese. Right. And I think in order to do that, you need time and we've just not bought ourselves time. There's a really good quote from a guy called Dr. Hannidge, who's from the Harvard School of Public Health, who says, and paraphrasing, but yes, keeping people safe means self-isolating if you develop symptoms. But people are also passing on the virus for a couple of days before they start to develop symptoms. So unless we start to bring in proper social distancing measures, which are really enforced by government, then we're still going to have this spread of disease and we're still going to see exponential growth. And when we could be bringing in something that we've seen has worked in other places, why aren't we, we need to buy ourselves time. If we're going to be building more ventilators, then why don't we just buy ourselves time now? Rather than just saying, oh, we've just had this like inevitable loss of life. It almost feels like there's this inevitability to it. When we know that we can intervene, we've got, we've got a national national health service. That's amazing. We've got a public health system that is ready to go. We've got some of the best expertise in terms of healthcare, in terms of public health, and in terms of manufacturing, I think, in the world. Why aren't we responding better? It does seem like they're protecting the economy at the expense of anything else. There was an interesting moment today in the press conference where Boris Johnson was asked about the problems in the markets, et cetera, and does this compare to 2008? And what Boris Johnson said in response was like, oh, look, this is very different to 2008 because the problems that the financial system are having aren't systemic to the financial system, doesn't bring into question the market. I'm sort of paraphrasing that. He said it doesn't bring into question the financial system. So it will be fine after all of this has ended. And how I interpreted that and what that seemed to me like was, look, coronavirus isn't the fault of capitalism. It isn't the fault of free market capitalism. So ultimately, nothing should change. And so our aim is to get through all of this without having done anything which fundamentally threatens the private ownership of all the businesses in this country and their right to do whatever they want to increase a profit, et cetera. I mean, it's a system that has some merits to it, but it doesn't really work when you're responding to a crisis on this scale. It doesn't work in an all out war. And it doesn't work in a situation where you're going to have hundreds of thousands of people needing intensive care in a hospital. So it's just they're thinking on the wrong paradigm. And that's the only way that it seems like you can explain the decisions they've made when they say, oh, many of your family will die. It's because they've said, well, to be honest, we've looked at all the options and we're ruling out that because we think requisitioning the factory would be a bit much. And we've ruled out keeping people in their homes and sort of telling businesses to close and pay full sickness pay, because that would be a bit much. So given all the things we've ruled out, sorry, but lots of your family members are going to die. Also, there's no actual institutional memory for the Tories doing this. So I mean, people don't sort of think about this. But when Britain's economy was at its most centralized, was under a Tory, under Winston Churchill, you had the phony war between 1939 and 1940 comes in, you have Dunkirk, all that stuff. And that's actually when the economy was also shifted as well. They were like, right, we need to stop farting about, let's do things properly. And that generation of right wingers, and they weren't socialists, they came out of the First World War. The Tories introduced the Department of Health. They created the BBC, the National Electricity Board, I think in 1926, they had a record of creating state institutions. Whereas these guys, Nadine Dorries, Matt Hancock, for 40 years, right wing ideology has said, the state is terrible at everything. And they've believed that it wasn't like some PR thing. They thought the state could not do anything. And so, you know, even if they wanted to do all the things they're saying, I don't think they'd have the first inkling as to how to do it.