Richard Branson asking for £7.4 billion
to bail out the airline industry,
principally his company,
the same man who sued the NHS.
I think what should happen is the
government should simply move in,
and take over the controlling stake
at minimum cost on no cost.
The Virgin Care should be immediately
requisitioned into the NHS.
He should become a pariah
in British and global society,
for being someone who's profited
out the National Health Service,
and now at a moment of need he's asking
for more money for his airline business.
We should not be paying to rent
beds at £2.4 million a day,
from the private sector to relieve
the pressure on the NHS.
That should be requisitioned from them.
The government has the power to do
that if it lacks any particular power,
Parliament can pass the primary
legislation within 24 hours.
In fact with the private hospitals they
ought to be being shamed not paid.
They should be being shamed
for not having a month ago,
already volunteered any capacity they
have to the National Health Service,
in the interests of the public
health of everybody in Britain.
The coronavirus has cast a lie on every
single aspects of our society.
The economic relations,
the class inequalities,
migration, capitalism, big pharma.
Everything is seen in a new light
and we have to respond to that.
I think it can lead to great empathy
with people around the world,
and an urgency to act and to act
in a way which knows no borders.
The virus knows no borders our
solidarity should know no borders.
We'll see the best of humanity and
we'll see the worst of the behaviour,
which is encouraged by
the capitalist system.
We have to base our response
I believe as a society,
on building up the best side.
Both because it leads
to practical measures,
and effective steps now
against the virus.
but also that it poses the
question of an alternative.
I'll give you an example the health
secretary Matt Hancock;
he said Britain has a high level
of engineering skill,
we want anyone who has the
manufacturing capacity,
to shift to producing ventilators
and oxygen tents and so on.
Now if you think about that this is a
Tory government saying something,
which has been a propaganda
point from the left for decades.
Stop making f-16 fighters make kidney
machines and medical equipment.
Now that I'm sure he's not where
the government wants to go,
but they've opened the door to that
something seriously to fight for.
That in the next 6/8 weeks we will need
many, many more ventilators,
then we have in Britain.
The lead-in time means that that
shift has to take place now.
There are many, many examples
in Britain as to why we can't rely,
on the government in
times of emergency.
Flooding in parts of the country,
the tragedy, the atrocity that
happened at Grenfell Tower.
Where the government
steps back we step in.
We need the communities
cohesion and solidarity,
but we need also to take control
of the big resources,
the big concentrations of capital.
Because the problem is you
can have great empathy,
and solidarity in a
neighbourhood.
But if you haven't got the 
material resources,
you've not got a lot to work with.
So we need to marry
the two together.
The way that capitalism works
is that a tiny number of people,
have control over the means
of making wealth,
and the means of
sustaining health,
and they only allow those to be used by
us if they can make a profit out of it.
If they cannot make a profit out of it
they blackmail us browbeat us,
do not allow us to use the resources
that is essentially what capitalism is.
At this moment we need to move
in the opposite direction.
I don't know which is
worse to contemplate;
is it that they can think quite calmly
about killing lots of people,
and maybe that having
some economic benefit.
In The Telegraph newspaper one
journalist thinking out loud,
about how if lots of older people died that
we wouldn't have a social care problem.
Or whether what's worse is that they would
prefer to save lives want to save lives,
but that their own structure and ideology
means that they're incapable of doing it.
I'm not sure which is worse deliberately
killing lots of people,
or being bound by an ideology
and a capitalist structure,
which necessitates the
deaths of lots of people.
But either way we have to challenge 
what it is that they're doing,
and the underlying logic of it.
We'll have to see what happens it's
not going to go back to normal,
how much capitalist normality is restored
to some extent is down to us.
It's down to how much can we move
in a radically different direction.
in the course of the practical extraordinary
measures to meet the crisis now.
If we can do that I think we
can have a ratchet effect.
Creating some new normalities,
some new normalcy about what
we expect in the society,
and how we behave in the society.
If we can do that then tragic as
this is it will be something,
which perhaps can help us move
to the place we need to be.
The hope comes from
people coming together,
a couple running a corner shop
in Scotland distributing,
coronavirus packs of hand sanitiser,
hygiene products and masks,
to everybody in the
village who's vulnerable.
If you're worried about
going out to the shops,
if you're in one of the very
vulnerable groups,
there will be people
who want to do that.
I've got friends who are self isolating
in a very vulnerable category,
who've been contacted by complete
strangers to say they'll go to the shop.
There are more ordinary people
with common decency,
more of us than there are the
likes of Richard Branson.
I'd really urge you to support
Double Down News on Patreon.
Times like this, things are
going to move very, very rapidly.
We need news sources
that we can trust,
news sources which are going
out to get the stories,
and amplify the voices which are often
suppressed in the mainstream media.
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