When Tony Blair says "I am terrified by the economic damage we are doing with every week this lockdown continues" he's clearly framing the virus as a threat to capital, rather than a threat to public health.
It was this exact same capital-first mentality that drove the Tories into their reckless pseudo-scientific "herd immunity" strategy of simply letting the virus spread untraced through the population in the hope of minimising the disruption to capitalism.
It was always self-defeating bollocks of course, because allowing the virus to spread unchecked through the population obviously means spreading it through the essential workforce too.
If there's one thing we should all have learned from this crisis, if we didn't know it already, is that it's not the 'financial genius' of corporate billionaires and city speculators that keeps Britain running, it's the labour of ordinary people.
Which means that letting the virus rip unchecked through your workforce is actually an extremely poor and utterly self-defeating strategic move if you want to minimise the disruption to capitalism.
Blair has obviously recognised this error, which is why he's banging on about the importance of testing, but it's absolutely telling that he's framing the need for testing as an economic argument, rather than a public health one.
He's actually saying the right thing, but for the wrong reason.
Blair knows perfectly well that capitalism simply cannot function without the exploitation of the workers, because if the workers were actually paid what their labour is worth to the functioning of the economy, then the likes of nurses, hospital cleaners, supermarket staff, delivery drivers, bin men, posties, utilities workers, transport workers ... would be getting paid an awful lot more, meaning fewer unearned profits for billionaires, and lower salaries for reckless city speculators.
Capitalist economies continually undervalue the labour of essential workers, and massively overvalue the worth of capitalist exploiters and financial gamblers, and this crisis is drawing this problem into sharper focus than ever before.
The longer this crisis continues, the more obvious it's going to become, even to the desperately hard-of-thinking, that the capitalist system is not just profoundly unfair, but also responsible for a decade of dangerously running down our NHS and public services in order to lavish endless tax cuts and handouts on the aforementioned billionaires and city speculators.
What this crisis is showing us is that we desperately need to redress the balance, to rebuild our public services, to recognise that essential workers deserve significant pay rises (especially after an entire decade of Tory wage repression), to repair and improve the social safety net that the Tories have spent the last decade wantonly vandalising, and to actually invest in our public infrastructure, rather than allowing Westminster elitists to carve it up and distribute the pieces to their exploitative capitalist mates to profiteer from by renting it back to us at a far higher price than they paid for it.
And when it's over we're going to hear a lot of right-wingers, from Tories through to Blairites pushing for a return to "business as normal".
They'll want to bring back "more of the same", and with another dose of austerity fanaticism to ensure that the economic cost of the crisis is once again loaded onto the poor and ordinary (including all of the essential workers who carried the rest of us through it), so that the corporations, city speculators, exploitative landlords, rip-off privatised utility companies, and greedy bankers can get back to living off the backs of the rest of us.
They'll want to bring back the same hopelessly broken capitalist model that's delivered two absolutely devastating economic crises in the space of just 12 years.
Last time we let them get away with using the 2008 bankers' insolvency meltdown as an excuse to load the cost of it onto the backs of ordinary people through austerity extremism, wage repression, social safety net vandalism, public service cuts.
We'd be damned fools to let them get away with it again.
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