ast week, the Lancashire Post carried a feelgood yarn about an awesome British success story. “It’s aircraft crusing for BAE Methods – with a bit of assist from Carol Vorderman”, ran the headline, accompanied by an image of the smiling former Countdown maths whizz sitting within the cockpit of a aircraft.

Lancashire’s largest personal sector employer had “designed and constructed a ventilator” to help therapy within the coronavirus pandemic, and so they’d finished it with a little bit of assist from the beloved TV character, who stated that her small personal aircraft had delivered a number of the important elements.

You needed to learn to the top of the article to search out out that, in reality, the world’s sixth largest arms-producing firm had merely manufactured 2,700 ventilator components, and that “ventilator design didn’t ultimately go ahead to full-scale manufacturing because of the drop within the want for ventilator know-how”.

All of which represents one other nice day on the workplace for the communications staff of an organization that made $21bn in gross sales in 2018 – 95% of them to army clients – and whose Storm and Twister plane have been key to devastating Saudi-led assaults on Yemen, which have killed 1000’s of civilians and contributed to what the UN calls a “humanitarian disaster”.

The phrase coronavirus has entered our vernacular within the house of some months – now it’s additionally swiftly turn out to be a shortcut to model self-awareness and imprecise company caring, with many corporations fast to leap on board. A Who’s Who of polluters, tax dodgers and outsource vultures are urging us to #StaySafe, pumping out soft-focus branded content material that makes Forrest Gump appear to be an episode of Chernobyl.

In a neoliberal society during which personal corporations must undertaking a picture of public-spirited compassion, a worldwide pandemic means back-to-back technique Zoom requires company communications groups. The mission goal is: how will we appear to be legends with out impacting our earnings?

Greater than that, these are sometimes companies that helped create and revenue from the weakened public companies and diminished requirements of dwelling that the outbreak of Covid-19 has served to reveal, and which have hampered the UK’s response. These feelgood items of PR, then, are workouts not simply in making it appear to be companies are combating the disaster, however that additionally they are positively not culpable in having helped worsen it.

We’ve got turn out to be used to sportswashing, greenwashing, pinkwashing and even wokewashing. We at the moment are within the first wave of coronawashing, during which companies journey over themselves to clap for key staff, earlier than packaging the footage up into transferring nuggets of shareable content material and selling them on a number of social media platforms. Within the background, these identical corporations are asking for presidency bailouts and making the most of a disaster to push for beneficial laws and the slashing of rules which might be extra needed than ever.

And so we’ve Holly Branson, doing her greatest Ivanka Trump, tweeting about Virgin ventilator design whereas her father, Richard, lord of the boomers, strikes on from taking authorized motion against the NHS to pleading for presidency cash.

Then we’ve HSBC, which, amongst a lot else, has been closely fined within the US for facilitating tax evasion and money laundering and was discovered to have “helped clients dodge tens of millions in tax”. The banking big is now exhibiting its caring facet by filling newspaper promoting pages with messages of assist on this time of disaster. But on the identical time it has determined, at Ramadan, to dam donations to a Palestinian aid charity.

In the meantime, on YouTube, in a video entitled Thank You For Not Riding, plaintive piano traces soundtrack footage of strange folks of their properties throughout pandemic. It’s not till you get to the top of this transferring tribute to the widespread man that you just realise it was made by Uber, an organization with a litany of questionable work practices, which is now utilizing coronavirus sick-leave measures to argue in opposition to giving its drivers employee status.

Examples of coronawashing are in all places. Amazon, the selfless buddy who does a favour for you behind the scenes after which tells you and all of your mutual mates about it, was just lately “revealed” as a “thriller £250,000 donor to UK bookshops”. Amazon’s CEO Jeff Bezos makesmore than $8m each single day. His firm has been deemed “worst” for aggressive tax avoidance and has lengthy been extensively blamed for the destruction of the very impartial bookshops it’s now so generously and mysteriously donating to.

A key factor of coronawashing is, in fact, the efficiency – being seen to be supportive within the face of a nationwide and international tragedy. Primark donated “care packs” to workers at London’s new Nightingale hospital, established to deal with coronavirus, however in Bangladesh it was cancelling manufacturing of $273m-worth of goods, leaving already immiserated staff destitute. (Within the face of hostile publicity, Primark reversed its place.)

All of which remembers a line from, of all folks, Peter Buffett, son of investor billionaire Warren. In an essay entitled The Charitable-Industrial Complex, Buffett described taking on a few of his father’s philanthropic work and discovering himself sitting across the desk with energy gamers “looking for solutions with their proper hand to issues that others within the room have created with their left”.

It is a neat description of the coronawashers: these companies clearly weren’t liable for the worldwide pandemic, however they spent many years eviscerating the general public sphere, which, in flip, has lowered the state’s means to answer large-scale issues. Now they hope to be patted on the again for throwing out some free change and clapping the NHS (in an inspiring social media clip that you could like and share).

• Oscar Rickett is a journalist and author