In her excellent speech @maitlis is quite right - not just the awfulness of the ‘fighting’ metaphor but that #COVIDー19 doesn’t hit people equally, but disproportionately the poor - but doesn’t ask *why* so many rich and powerful people keep saying it. (Short thread) https://twitter.com/ed_son/status/1248021250267656192

The point is that they *feel* that the coronavirus hits them as hard as it does others, because, unlike many other things, they can’t buy their way out of it. It can still hit them - see the celebs, see Boris Johnson - whereas almost nothing else *does* hit them. 2/n

So senior journalists and politicians can talk about austerity without worrying about it ever really harming them. They can treat Brexit as a game because they know they’ll be fine whatever the outcome. They won’t be deported, lose jobs, be subject to hate as a result. 3/n

They can even effectively buy their way out of much of the damage from climate change - which again hits poor countries and poor people much harder than rich countries and rich people. 4/n

So the fact that the virus can hit them *at all* makes it feel like a leveller, like it doesn’t discriminate, even though it does. It discriminates in a different way, and less, than the other things that are a big deal and deeply damaging for poor and vulnerable people. 5/n

So it’s only *now* that they notice that the NHS has been stripped bare, derided, insulted and underfunded. It’s only *now* that people like Piers Morgan notices that the anti-immigrant mantra of the last decade of politics is actually deeply wrong and massively damaging 6/n

So now they clap for the NHS, whilst for the last twenty years they’ve supported (if politicians) or largely ignored (if media people) the way it’s been treated. Now they care about nurses and doctors, bus drivers and delivery workers. Now they say things must change 7/n

And you can bet your bottom dollar that as soon as this crisis is over they will go back to exactly the way they were. Oh, some nice words for a few months, but basically back to the same stuff. /ends