From Ekua Bayunu, Member of Greater Manchester Socialist Health Association, and selected candidate for Hulme in the next Manchester City Council elections.
When I joined SHA a couple of years ago I wanted to focus my energies on action against inequalities in the health systems around race, particularly in mental health. We now have evidence of the toxins that were seeping into us from the right, distracting us from actually building effective socialist action on health issues here in Greater Manchester.
Skip forward and we are slap bang in the eye of the storm of the Covid 19 pandemic and still searching for some strength in our unity to make a difference to our communities. Many of our members are fully immersed in either working on the frontline, in providing care in our institutions, or in volunteering in mutual aid groups, many doing both and I send love and admiration out to us all.
We lost my neighbour, an elderly Somalian man, to the virus on the last weekend in March. It felt like the storm that was brewing had just swept in and taken one of ours before we barely knew it was coming. Then the statistics started coming in. We are dying in inexplicably large numbers. We? I’m a woman of African heritage, my community is African, South Asian, Working class.
My close friend, a street away, is a nurse working at MRI, already stressed by the lack of PPE, worrying about her family, the risk she posed to her 3 daughters and husband at home, when she got ill two weeks ago, together with two colleagues from her ward. They got tested. She doesn’t have access to a car, and the only testing is drive-through. No you can’t walk in. No you can’t get in a taxi! She started talking to us about wills and supporting her daughters and all the worries she has for them. Her eldest also works as a nurse, the youngest is only 10. Her cultural background is Turkish, and she knew she might die.
She is in recovery, but the statistics get worse and worse. The demand for action grows as do the questions and desire for investigation. I read articles in the silo of my social media accounts and watched as it began to break slowly into mainstream media. At first I thought: they are holding back on the narrative, because it doesn’t suit their agenda to highlight how many were dying in service to us all who were from Diasporan African, Asian and other minority communities. We entered this year with forced deportations built on a narrative that these were the communities of criminals and spongers on the state. Suddenly the NHS workforce were our heroes, they put out ads supporting these workers and most of the workers were white. Did you all notice?
Then as the statistics leaked into a wider societal consciousness, I became openly worried. Information being fed via the television is so absent of any real analysis that it actually begins to shape a eugenicist narrative, which the Prime Minister does little to distance himself from. Our deaths are not real sacrifices based on years of inequalities in education, health care, housing and employment, but gives out a message of our inherent weakness and inferiority! And whilst we all are shut in, angry, confused, needing to have something or someone to blame, in the place of blaming this government for its lack of care in putting profit over people, it is easy to discern they are creating a diversionary agenda.
It is becoming increasingly clear BAME people are dying disproportionally, on the wards, driving our buses, cleaning our streets, in our care homes. They are presented as the problem, when they are the heroes and victims of the pandemic. Last week the government finally pulled together a commission with PHE to investigate the causes of BAME people dying disproportionally. Do we all assume that the why will lead to how to stop this? To a solution to help us? I can’t.
Posted by Jean Hardiman Smith on behalf of Ekua Bayunu, Member of Greater Manchester Socialist Health Association