Unions aren't the bad guys – they’re the ones stopping employers killing you as you go back to work

If companies are allowed to put profit over people, as too many are still apt to do, then we’ll be in lockdown again

As the debate about reopening the economy heats up, we’ve been treated to a tired and tuneless chorus of ill thought out union bashing from influential Tory MPs, leader writers, talking heads and columnists.

All these concerns about people’s lives! They’re just obstructionism! Um, um red tape! They’re trying to prevent Britain getting back to work again! Think of the economy!

It speaks volumes about the mindset of the Conservative Party, and Conservative commentators, that they’ve still got their heads stuck up a 40-year-old … perhaps I’ll leave it up to your imagination.

During more normal times, sensible employers, and sensible trade unionists, have mostly rolled their eyes and got on with living in a real world that has passed the witless inhabitants of the Tory benches by.

But there’s nothing normal about the times we’re living through courtesy of the spiked ball of RNA and proteins that causes Covid-19, the morning star flail that’s crashed into the human world.

It will change it in ways that we can’t predict. But will it change the worst instincts of the Conservative Party? The latter looks like a tough nut to crack even for this most vicious of microbes.

Pity the British workers the government is preparing to order out of isolation. They may be needlessly put at risk thanks to the emergence of a brain dead narrative.

And that creates a problem because if they’re put at risk, the bounce back that the more optimistically minded economists believe is possible, will be put at risk with them.

Worker safety and economic recovery aren’t mutually exclusive. They’re intimately connected. In the new coronavirus age, you can’t have one without the other.

Some employers, the good ones, already get that. They’ll take note of whatever the government comes up with, but they’ll make their own assessments and decide upon their own procedures.

The really smart ones will speak to their employees, and to unions, with a view to formulating them and keeping their people safe and their businesses open. That’s what they were already doing on a range of issues before this godawful mess got started.

Trouble is, not all of them are in that category. There have been repeated instances of boneheaded behaviour from bad bosses during the lockdown when the daily death toll was rising, and the government was belatedly scared into seeing some sense.

Goodness only knows what’s going to happen when it’s (partially) lifted.

This explains the need for sensible guidance that doesn’t contain the great gaping holes that the woolly language of Whitehall is apt to create, and that can inspire confidence in people who’re being asked to roll the dice on getting back to work.

As Chris Witty, the chief medical officer for England, has repeatedly made clear, the virus isn’t going anywhere anytime soon. There’s no puff of magic Sars smoke for it to vanish into, as the latter, and it’s even nastier cousin Mers, did.

We don’t have a vaccine, and despite health secretary Matt “mind your tone when you question me” Hancock’s attempts to fiddle the figures – I’ve been hearing reports about some very sharp and very stupid practices in health trusts with the aim of getting the numbers up to make him look less bad – Britain’s testing has been falling woefully short.

This government keeps banging on about how it’s been diligently listening to the medical and scientific advice, chiefly because it wants to have some scapegoats lined up for when the inevitable round of inquiries are launched.

Well that advice has been pretty clear about the dangers of fresh outbreaks. Witty has in fact warned that a second burn in winter may be worse than what we’re currently experiencing.

That becomes all the more likely if sensible precautions are sacrificed on the altar of economic expediency and a lumpen narrative that still thinks its funny to make jokes about “elf ‘n’ safety” even though no-one’s laughing anymore.

If the unions are shut out, and employers are allowed to put profit over people, as too many are still apt to do, then we’ll be in lockdown again, and the calls of nightingales will be once more heard over those buildings swiftly adapted to serve as temporary hospitals.

It might be unpalatable to some in government, it might require distributing some valium among the occupants of the government’s back benches, but one of the best ways of that happening is to bring the unions in from the cold.

Beer and sandwiches at Number 10? Prosecco and a healthy wrap would be just as good. But whatever it takes.