Coronavirus puts the most risk on the hardest workers – and the government isn’t on their side

Matt Hancock told the Commons that no one will be penalised for ‘doing the right thing’. But looking at statutory sick pay for those in self-isolation, it seems like a punishment to me

At some point in recent years, major events took on a remarkable knack for dividing the population and coronavirus will be no different.

Covid-19-based apartheid will be between those who work for a living and those who type for a living. Self-isolation, for example, poses minimal risk for those of us who pay the bills by firing out a few snarky words about politicians. Truck drivers, hospital workers, cleaners, kitchen fitters and so on, will not be so fortunate.

Naturally, this most recent national cleavage will fall principally on economic grounds. Remarkably, at the end of a hundred years during which the UK has mainly been governed by a party whose core belief is that the harder you work, the more you’ll get on in life, the precise opposite has come to pass. Now, it is very much self-evident that the harder you work, the less you earn.

And so, Britain’s actual workers, as opposed to its typists, find themselves at the sharp end of an epidemic the rest of us get to quietly avoid. A cleaner rarely gets paid when their clients take a holiday, never mind if they go on holiday themselves. A self-isolating one, doing the decent thing, can expect to earn precisely zero.

Trying to solve this unsolvable problem was the latest thing to summon health secretary Matt Hancock to the despatch box of the House of Commons.

“No one will be penalised for doing the right thing,” Hancock said, looking up at the back benches as he did so. David Gauke, Ken Clarke, Dominic Grieve all let out a wearied laugh. Well, we must assume they did, because they weren’t in the House of Commons, having been penalised at the last election for doing the right thing, which is to say, standing up for their actual beliefs, the very thing that politics is meant to be about. The thing, to labour the point, that Hancock found himself unable to do, and yet remains mysteriously un-penalised.

That is unless you count this as having been penalised. Which is to say, standing up in the House of Commons, doing your level best to reassure tens of millions of the country’s lowest-paid people that they’ve definitely got nothing to worry about if they have to take several weeks off work, which absolutely none of them will have believed for a nanosecond.

So far, the reassurance they have been given has come from the Department of Work and Pensions, rather than the Department of Health, that has stressed that universal credit will be made available to help those unable to work. At this point, one tends to reach for some sort of hyperbolic analogy. You know, it’s like telling Chernobyl victims that ibuprofen will be made available to help.

But none are sufficient because there is simply nothing so discredited as universal credit. It is its own worst-case scenario. Seeking to reassure someone that everything will be fine by using the words “universal credit” – well, in horror movies, this is the breathless moment when it turns out the calls are coming from inside the house.

What are the numbers exactly?

Well, “self-isolating” workers are entitled to £94.25 a week in statutory sick pay. You can’t live off that, however hard you’re not working. Still, not something for typists to worry about.