The removal of our freedom, the destruction of public services, and the impoverishment and surveillance of millions of workers is not an unavoidable consequence of the New Normal but the scorched earth on which the 4th Industrial Revolution is being built. https://www.gov.uk/government/speeches/the-4th-industrial-revolution

Just as happened during the First Industrial Revolution, when millions of were forced off the land and into a highly regulated life of repetitive factory labour, the working class must first be impoverished before they accept the new conditions of labour and existence.

And just as the body of the 19th-century worker was regulated and regimented by the discourses of hygiene, criminality and efficiency to which factory work and urban life subjected it, governed by the clock, monitored by the foreman and oppressed by the policeman . . .

. . . so the millions made unemployed by the destruction of their livelihoods during the coronavirus crisis are being subjected to the surveillance, monitoring and control of their 'bare life' under the regulations, programmes and technologies of the UK biosecurity state.

In this biosecurity state, in which AI-technology is at once policeman, judge and jury, our digitally monitored 'homes' will become the prisons in which we will be quarantined should we fail to comply with the obligations of health monitoring and tracing . . .

. . . just as much as the workplace to which we will be confined until we have met our designated quota of productivity, paid in coupons that will monitor and control both the extent and the content of our expenditures.

The long cretinisation of the Left has prepared the way for this moment. This is its crowning ignominy: that, confronted with the most authoritarian and long-prepared revolution in modern history, to a totalitarian present that is now upon us, it denies that it is even happening.

In this speech, delivered by the Health Secretary 2 years ago when he was Minister for Digital, he said: 'The Fourth Industrial Revolution will change the kinds of jobs needed in industry. Our strong view is that as a nation we must create the jobs of the future. . . .'

'. . . Digital revolution brings with it disruption. The risk is not that we adopt new technologies that destroy jobs. The risk to jobs comes from not adopting new technologies. Our task is to support redeployment not unemployment.'

If you still believe this vast upheaval, immiseration and destruction is in response to a virus that is so deadly you have to be tested to know that you have it, you should reflect on the words of Auden that 'History to the defeated / May say Alas but cannot help or pardon.'