Labour’s coronavirus conundrum

Labour chairman Ian Lavery has expressed hope that the coronavirus crisis could provide his party with a ‘great opportunity’. Lavery’s comments have been attacked for being in desperately poor taste. For on one reading, here was a leading Labour figure sounding upbeat over how his party could take political advantage of a global pandemic. The reality is however slightly different. Lavery undoubtedly expressed himself in a crass way but he was actually hoping the crisis would see Labour members help bring people together and organise community activities to alleviate the crisis. But Lavery’s comments – and the reaction to them – establish, as if we did not know, that politics never goes away. And for the official opposition any national crisis presents opportunities as well as dangers. There is always a tension on the opposition benches, between serving the national interest and promoting its own partisan interest.

There have been many false comparisons between the present crisis and the Second World War.