AS THE daily death toll mounts, government failures in its response to coronavirus are exposed more and more. Workers on the front line have paid the price with their lives, as have far too many others.

Yet, appallingly, the Prime Minister on his return to work spoke of the “apparent success” of his government in tackling coronavirus. That’s despite Britain being on track to have one of the world’s highest death tolls.

Adjusted for population, we have four times more deaths than Germany, over 60 times more deaths than South Korea and over 75 times those in Australia and New Zealand. If this is success what would failure look like?

The reality is that the government has been behind the curve from the start. Failure after failure has cost lives — and the Labour Party and wider movement must be clear in pointing this out if we are to secure the changes needed to prevent further loss of life.

The lockdown was unnecessarily delayed, opportunities to secure enough protective equipment for front-line staff squandered and there was a failure to properly “track and trace” the virus, as has been done in other countries with lower death tolls.

But far from learning those lessons, we have Tory grandees and donors calling for the lockdown to end on the front page of The Sunday Times. The lockdown, of course, has hit profits, but it has undoubtedly saved lives.

Across the labour movement, we need to resist any attempts to end the lockdown until it is safe for our communities to do so. This week New Zealand eased its lockdown. But only once its cases had been reduced to single figures.

We too need to be approaching very low levels of new cases before lifting the lockdown, not the thousands of new cases we are still witnessing daily. Otherwise, there is a real danger that the virus will grow exponentially out of control again.

The priority of the government must be saving lives. Everything must also be done to stop this public health crisis from becoming a social and economic crisis for millions of people.

This crisis has brought into sharp focus the failings of a decade of austerity and a 40-year period dominated by marketisation, deregulation and privatisation.

Weak public services, a broken social care system, a woeful lack of workers’ rights, a hollowed-out social security system and a dysfunctional housing market are the result. All this has contributed to us being ill-prepared to deal with this crisis.

In his Budget speech, the Chancellor said that we enter this crisis from the position of economic strength. But for many, that could not have been further from the truth, nor was it the case for our public services.

While the Chancellor has provided welcome additional support in recent weeks, it falls far short of what is needed.

Families across the country were struggling to get by before this pandemic. Many are now in crisis. Their bills have not stopped, even if their ability to pay them has.

Many were on poverty pay before the coronavirus crisis. Now some are receiving just 80 per cent of the minimum wage on furlough. The government must act immediately so that no-one is left on less than the minimum wage during this crisis.

We urgently need to see action over the shockingly low level of sick pay. It should be increased to real living wage levels, and we must ensure that millions of low-paid — mainly women — workers can access it too.

We also still need to see much more support for renters, starting with rent suspensions, and social security set at levels that families can live on, not levels designed to punish them.

These are all essential measures that our whole movement can fight for. But the coming economic crisis, which by some estimates will be worse than the Great Depression, will require the socialist left to set out more ambitious plans for the society we wish to see.

Free-market extremists will be doing just that. Anyone familiar with Naomi Klein’s book on disaster capitalism will be fearing how those free-market ideologues intend to reshape society out of this crisis in the interests of the 1 per cent.

The Chancellor recently said that the financial support for those affected by the coronavirus crisis will need to be paid back at some point, which felt like softening up the public for further austerity.

There must be no question of us repeating the injustice of the past decade where working-class people had their wages frozen and their essential services cut. When we draw up the list of who should pay, at the top must be the super-rich, who have profited from a decade of tax giveaways from the Conservative Party.

This crisis has underlined who we really rely on: workers deemed unskilled or undeserving of proper pay rises just a few weeks ago are shown to be the heroes of our society.

So, when this crisis is over, we have to build a country that treats those workers and working-class families across the country with the respect that they deserve, and which they have been denied for far too long.

Richard Burgon is Labour MP for Leeds East.