 Throughout the coronavirus pandemic the government have made the same mistake over and over again. Back in March they entered a lockdown too late in a self-defeating bid to protect the economy and most recently they made the bizarre decision to loosen a lockdown four weeks before a Christmas free-for-all. In between those two fateful decisions was another disastrous mistake. Back in September, when the government should have been closing down the rest of the economy so that students could safely go back to school, they instead, in hoc with their friends in the press were actively trying to bully people back into their workplaces. Aaron and I discussed this at the time and what you'll notice is another theme which has been present throughout this crisis. When the Tories have made poor decisions it's usually because they're prioritising defending the interests of their wealthy mates. After almost six months of the majority of Britain's young people remaining out of schools this week they have finally returned. That's a good thing and we should still be backing wholeheartedly the union's campaign to make sure that that goes as safely as possible, that the resources are provided to teachers and schools so that we don't see another coronavirus spike because kids have gone back but ultimately six months out of mainstream education for most kids was not a good thing. It was regrettable but and it seems like at this point in time the unions and the government both seem to be somewhat agree that they have to go back now so that the framing of the debate is now how safe is it going to be when they're back and that is really what we should all be discussing. What the political class should be debating on television and on the front pages of the newspapers are how are we going to make sure that this incredibly necessary thing which is that kids go back to receive the education that they need goes by without creating an appalling second spike but that is not how they are greeting this moment. It's not their focus as kids go back into their classrooms no instead what they are using is this opportunity as one to blackmail workers back into their offices so we're going to go to a Daily Mail front page from this morning and so they write they're back at work where is the rest of the UK so they're saying if the kids have gone back then why haven't the adults gone back if the kids are brave enough to go back to school why can't the adults suck it up and go into their offices and the reason this is a terrible argument is one why would you force anyone to go back into their offices if they don't need to if it's an unnecessary risk but also they've completely misunderstood the relationship between kids going back to school and workers going back into their offices because quite in contrast in indirect contradiction to the idea that because kids have gone back workers should go back in fact no it's because kids have gone back workers should not go back because as we've been told over the last six months completely correctly this idea of the reproduction rate of coronavirus the r-rate that goes above one if we do too many things at the same time so if we want to make sure that our kids as is necessary can go back to school without causing a second spike what we have to do is make sure that all the unnecessary things we stop doing so what we should be saying is so that our kids can safely go back to school and so they can safely stay in school if you can continue working from home do it but that's not what they're saying and they're not saying that purely because they want to back up the interests of commercial landlords and in some cases their own business models so i want to go to another headline now and which is from the evening standard so this is edited by former chancellor george osbourne owned by russian billionaire and now lord afghany lebedev and they went with a very similar headline to the mail but they also had this this comment today a new london should begin careful to contain covet but ready to return it's up to each one of us the magic which makes london is in terrible danger a ghost city is no city at all i can read that say oh this is about the general good of london what we want is people to go back to work so that the remarkable energy that makes london great can be re brought about can be can be made live again now that's bullshit because if people if people wanted london to go back to the way that it was before they would be going back to work right now but what you have realized now is that one people value their health more than you know going into their offices and making sure that can continue operating at a profit and that potentially people getting up at 6 a.m getting on a pat tube going to work spending a bunch of their wages on on lunch was not quite as magical as george osbourne and of getting lebedev might have believed but why would they want you to go straight back because in the economy where people you know have a work life balance maybe they work for three days at home two days in the office what aren't they reading so often the evening standard who's advertising revenue falls lebedevs the russian billionaire who's now a lord so we have our media class who are supposed to be informing us about how this country can best contend with coronavirus who instead are putting their petty interests of short-term profit ahead of the public ahead of the public good and calling it news you know you you couldn't make it up this is i suppose the more obvious argument put forward which is you know ridiculous and the more subtle argument as to why people need to go back into their workplaces other than to relight the magic of london is to save jobs this was an argument made by ex-tory health minister jerry hunt this morning on the k burly show let's take a look you think that the government did too good a job when it comes to lockdown and that people thought if i stay at home i'll live if i go out i'll die and now they don't want to send their kids back to school well i think what we have in this country is a very sophisticated educated electorate who understand health issues very well and when the instructions were clear and they were very very clear about staying at home people complied but we're also very inventive and creative and i think a lot of people found that it was much easier to work from home than they perhaps thought it would be and so that's why it's proving a bit more of a struggle to get people to go back to work because people obviously find it's a lot more productive if they're not having to commute but as charays coffee was saying earlier on your show the big problem is all those jobs in city centres that depend on people going back to work i think there's also someone who ran their own business for many years there's a creativity you get a buzz in an office which you don't get when you're doing meetings over zoom or or microsoft teams and there's only so long that you can carry on working completely remotely before you start losing the kind of fizz and excitement that you get in a really good workplace so i think people will want to go back to work eventually i hope it happens soon so obviously the headline line from that interview was Jeremy saying that people want to go back into the office for the excitement and fizzle and you know the obvious response being as there ever been anyone who looks like they suck more excitement and fizzle out of a room than Jeremy Hunt someone who looks permanently constipated and struggles to smile i mean we don't actually have to speculate as well because it just so happens that before Jeremy Hunt was an MP he was co-founder and co-director of the company Hot Course and one of his employees there was Luke Turner now an editor at the music magazine The Quietus um Turner worked as an admin at the organization and had this to say about the firm what made it the worst three years of my life was the working environment and the expectation put onto the staff by Hunt and other managers when a deadline approached we were expected to work late into the night for no overtime or recompense rarely we were thanked for our labours there was a general air that we should be grateful for the remarkable opportunity that this endless admin offered there was certainly a different attitude towards employees who'd been to private school or oxbridge than to the rest of us in such a high pressure environment yet producing such mundane work stress levels rose i know of good friends and colleagues who suffered near nervous breakdowns from the experience of working in such a vampiric moral and confidence sapping operation everything was secondary to the operation of the business so that was written back in 2012 about working in an office under the management of Jeremy Hunt he's now on the television saying people should go back to work because of the excitement and the fizz i mean have you ever been to a place which has got less excitement and fizz than the average open plan office right actually there's there's a wealth of literature about this where if we were to actively design places where people were constantly distracted unable to be productive unable to concentrate unable to do what Cal Newport and academic who specializes on precisely this topic calls deep work uh we would have the open office uh open plan office and what this is all about and this is really important again this is not about capitalism wants us to go back to the office many firms would actually love to get rid of their office full-time you hear i'm hearing this repeatedly actually from friends who work in businesses and they're saying remote working works great we're not going to renew the lease that's happening a lot and to keep them competitive to save money they're very happy to outsource office costs to their staff right that's not a progressive thing by the way but they're happy to do it this is not about maximizing the interests of business even this is about maximizing the interests of rentiers people who own the office blocks the landlords and this is an important fracture within british capitalism about where is value being not created captured and it's not by enterprises that you know are creating sort of new goods and services overwhelmingly it's by the rentier class by the landlord class really important point so this idea of us all going back to work yes okay you would get pre-off-life support but the people it would serve the most are the landlord class are we're going to we're going to reveal something about jeremy hunt's relationship the landlord class in one moment first of all i want to go back to that jobs point because it is going to be the politically most relevant argument which is made which is to i suppose essentially guilt people blackmail people say you have to go back to work otherwise these people potentially on lower incomes and yourselves will lose their jobs the obvious sort of example here what's going to become i suppose the the archetype of the job that will be lost if people do not go back to their offices in the same numbers as before is the person working at pret then we have to ask are those jobs really worth saving and that does not mean should these should the people who who are in those jobs if they lose their jobs they obviously have to be fundamentally supported we need retraining system we need a green industrial revolution that means that jobs come about that people actually want to do and which actually add value but do we do we want to encourage the public to risk their health to risk the r-rate rising above one and schools having to close just to save the pret economy now there was a great article in the ft by sarah o'connor this is not a socialist publication who was saying no we don't want to save the pret economy so the article's headlined goodbye to the pret economy and good luck to whatever replaces it cities will not die their benefits could become more diffuse with well-paid workers spreading into the rest of the country i recommend reading it great piece so she writes high housing costs were particularly problematic for the low-paid workers who made the city's run increasingly only migrants seemed willing to accept low wage jobs cleaning offices or making coffee in 2017 pret's director of human resources told parliament that just one in 50 of its job applicants was british later that year the financial times interviewed a pret worker from romania who woke up free am to commute an hour and a half from east ham to the branch in waterloo she was paid 16 000 pounds a year now obviously there were some people that will use that that argument that one in 50 people who are applying for a british in a sort of xenophobic way that's why we need brexit so that we have british people serving british sandwiches but obviously the implication there is not that too many foreign people are applying for jobs at prep it's that the conditions are so low that people you know with higher expectations about what they should be earning because they were brought up in this country won't work there because they're not willing to get up at free am in the morning commute two hours to work for 16 grand a year and probably pay about half of that to again a rentier so this is you know this is not the best we can do when someone says the alternative to us going back to the status quo as it was before is mass unemployment you know call their bluff the alternative to us going back to how things were before is we have a government that takes the responsibility to bring about an economy that actually works for ordinary people not pays them shit wages to have fundamentally a miserable life doing things that they don't particularly value and you know ultimately paying half of it the rentier Aaron how do we win this argument that we don't want to go back to the economy as usual we want jobs but we want them to be better than they were before yeah it's an important question i think one of the incredibly predictable response you get from this is well actually rentiers are really important because pension funds are tied into the rent economy and if we get defaults from commercial rents then you know that little old lady her private pension it won't be paid right this isn't true pensions okay a index they invest a bunch of companies they spread the risk okay so for every commercial property company that's going to collapse and yes the returns won't come from that they're also investments in zoom or hand soap dispensers right so firstly that argument isn't isn't remotely correct secondly we need to have a conversation about a four-day working week i think this is the best way right now to manage everything in the medium term you don't even need to necessarily it's a long-term measure you say we're going to move to a four-day week we're going to have the state top up people's wages carry on furlough effectively i think for significant parts of the economy and perhaps muck about with you know tax brackets tax bans and so on have something resembling a ubi not a ubi something resembling a ubi a really good threshold for for people basically to to have you you can make ends meet on about three days work a week which presents much much country particularly london isn't true secondly this is going to have a really big impact on london huge impact on london we don't really know how much right now property prices are still high rents are actually falling hackney's rents are falling because airbnb the airbnb economy just like pratt you know it's really suffering there's a huge increase of supply for properties all these these flats that we're going to be let you know rented on airbnb for two days three days one week two weeks all of a sudden they're saying well look actually let's just get a secure tenant in there for six months much more secure we'll get our money so that means that uh renter renter falling now the question for a young person is this and i don't know the answer if you were 18 or 19 michael would you start university this year i wouldn't i certainly wouldn't move to a city to then do my lectures online if you're a recent graduate would you live in a large city like london and try you know try and make that break i don't think i would and so i think you know the longer this crisis goes on i think we're going to have a really big break with the kind of status quo common sense that we've had for the last 20 30 years which is if you want to get ahead you have to go to a major metropolitan areas particularly london now right now there's no alternative right if you're a young person you want to get ahead well okay what else do you do that's you know that's a 64 million dollar question but it's not going to be uh the the previous kind of status quo ante which is go to london get an internship get your foot on the ladder nobody's going to be saying that for potentially two three years that's a huge rupture for a generation of young people entering the labor market and ultimately what's his about is giving people more options because obviously you know i want anyone who wants to move to london and go to universities to be able to do that but the idea you should have to move to a mega city to get up in the career ladder and in the process spend half of your income on on rent is is ridiculous i want to take us back to hunt briefly because as we've mentioned one of the main people who are going to lose out if people don't go back to their office spaces in the same numbers as they had before is commercial landlords because what many businesses are realizing as Aaron has mentioned is that they can save money on on rent by getting people to work from home either the whole time or or half of the time i mean i'm personally in favor of sort of two two days in the office three days at home so you sort of get some of that socializing without all of the commuting and all of the pressure um but someone who will lose out because of this is jeremy hunt because yes he is something he did not mention in that sky interview a commercial landlord um i saw this mentioned on twitter today i had to fact check it so i went to the register of interests you can see the incomes of all parliamentarians and this was on jeremy hunts so land and property portfolio value over a hundred thousand and or giving rental income of over ten thousand pounds a year so on there he's got half a share of a holiday home in italy he's also got seven apartments in south hampton but in the middle there half share of an office building in london so this man is a commercial landlord and you might say half share of an office is that that bigger deal now let's look at what what this office is and also how it came about because it tells you something about the man jeremy hunt again uh so the office is it's a big office in hammersmith it was and potentially still is i'm not sure occupied by hot courses that's the company that jeremy hunt created he was co-director co-founder of that now the the way that this building came to be in the ownership of of jeremy hunt and his co-director was that it was paid to them in dividends so the company instead of paying out money uh in cash in dividends to its co-founders paid out this property and then what happened after that is that hunt rents back the property to hot courses his company at the time and they did this according to the telegraph to avoid tax um so this scheme the kind of thing that ordinary people don't do you don't transfer someone a a a building to then rent it back yourself this is the kind of thing that only the one percent do um it saved hunt and his colleague a hundred thousand pounds each according to the telegraph but that is not enough to keep the man happy he seemingly wants people to risk their lives their health um so that he can keep making money on his hammer smith office block