Let me preface this with the following - this is a global crisis and there are no easy answers. There are tough decisions to be made and balancing the impact of closing down the country in order to minimise spread of the virus while protecting the vulnerable and our (criminally underfunded for years) health system alongside the impacts to health created by isolation, people not seeking treatment for other conditions, financial stress and unemployment is not a choice I envy anyone having to make. However, if you have campaigned ruthlessly and mercilessly to get yourself to the position where you have to make those decisions, then you have to make them. You also still have to abide by public scrutiny. Now is not the time to give the government a free pass so “we all need to pull together” or because (even more infuriatingly) “they’re doing the best they can”.
Avoiding The Tough Stuff
If Boris Johnson really was doing the best that he could, surely he would have attended more Cobra meetings at the start of the crisis (1), attended the eight conference calls with EU heads of state to discuss a concerted EU approach (2) and not spent two weeks off worrying about his divorce (3). Combined with his general propensity to avoid being seen doing the duties of Prime Minister as much as possible (and what greater emblem of that approach is there than the point where he hid in a fridge on the election campaign trail in order to avoid being questioned), this does not paint the picture of a man doing the best he can. However, he’s more than keen to be compared favourably to his personal hero Churchill which brings me on to the next point.
War Rhetoric
There’s a strong need in this country to equate everything back to the Second World War which is frankly baffling to anyone outside of the UK. Any opportunity is taken to invoke “Blitz spirit” as a shorthand for “just put up with this because people had to put up with things in the war”. The difficulty with this rhetoric is that we’re not at war. Phrases like “stay alert” are meaningless when applied to an invisible virus. We don’t need pluck and common sense; we need crystal clarity in the communications that we receive from those in charge. We also need clarity on how the virus is progressing.
Test, Test, Test
The repeated call we’re seeing from other countries across the world is that, in order to be able to work out how the virus is progressing, you need to be able to test for and trace its progress. The UK has singularly failed in this regard and so it becomes almost impossible to say how and when we can safely start to reopen the country as we have no real way of tracking the virus’ progress. Instead, we get the usual tactic of “number salad” in which the government keeps throwing out figures which change not only in terms of the total itself but also in terms of the metric. Case in point - the daily testing figure. Set at 250,000 per day on 25th March (4), revised to 100,000 per day which they pledged to hit by the end of April (5) and then only achieved by counting numbers sent out in the post as a test completed (6). What’s worrying is that they pick a number to sound impressive and then fail to achieve even that. Even more so though is the obsession on having an arbitrary target to hit as a measure of success so that they can then put that on a poster listed “Our Achievements”.
The other side to this approach is to simply drop a measurement when it no longer shows what they want it to as they have done in the last week with the comparison charts showing number of Covid-related deaths in our own country compared to the rest of the world.(7) I understand the argument that those numbers are hard to compare based on different measures - if that is the case then they shouldn't have been used in the first place.
The "Peter Principle" In Action
The "Peter Principle" (for those who don’t know) is a management concept that states that people tend to rise to the level of their own incompetence. As it stands, we currently have an entire cabinet full of people who adhere to that principle. This is what happens when the Tory party throws its support behind a figure who has got himself elected on a single standpoint (“get Brexit done”) and who then staffs his cabinet with sycophantic cronies rather than people who are actually competent at their job. To give an example, Dominic Raab was questioned on Monday by R4 Today reporter Mishal Husain about the latest announcement and asked some very specific questions to help clarify things (8). He failed to answer them so spectacularly that he had to be corrected later that day (9).
Not My Fault
What all of this adds up to is a government that is not capable of making or unwilling to make these tough decisions so have been preparing themselves to lay the blame squarely at the public’s feet. If the virus now spikes again, it’ll be because we didn't follow the new rules, because we didn't use “common sense” (one of the many repeated phrases currently being deployed) and not because of a failure to provide much needed detail on the government’s part.
What we need at the moment is clarity of communication, coherent rules and a government that has the conviction to take action. What we’ve currently got is confusion and a government that leaks its plans to the papers in order to judge public response so that it can maybe change its mind once there’s an outcry. It's this approach that leaves us with situations where you can't visit your family but you can now go to a house viewing (10). Leadership is the thing that is sorely lacking here (as opposed to a desperation to be in power at all costs) and we’re going to have to hope that as many of us as possible can come out of the other side of it with as little damage as possible.
OK, rant over. I'll probably talk about cartoons or something tomorrow.
(1) Not necessarily compulsory for him but would have shown that he was taking the situation seriously 'Did the government really ‘brush aside’ coronavirus fears in January?' Article
(2) “Between February 13 and March 30, Britain missed a total of eight conference calls or meetings about the coronavirus between EU heads of state or health ministers - meetings that Britain was still entitled to join. Although Britain did later make an arrangement to attend lower-level meetings of officials, it had missed a deadline to participate in a common purchase scheme for ventilators, to which it was invited.” 'Special Report: Johnson listened to his scientists about coronavirus - but they were slow to sound the alarm' Article
(3) 'Boris Johnson agrees divorce settlement with Marina Wheeler' Article
(4) 'Britain’s coronavirus testing scandal: a timeline of mixed messages' Article
(5) 'Coronavirus: Matt Hancock sets aim of 100,000 tests a day by end of April' Article
(6) 'Has the government really hit 100,000 tests a day, and what happens next?' Article
(7) 'Coronavirus: Keir Starmer says government suddenly dropped global comparisons as UK ‘hit unenviable place’ ' Article
(8) 'Foreign Secretary Dominic Raab outlines govt plans to begin lifting England's lockdown.' Article
(9) 'Dominic Raab adds to confusion over changes to UK lockdown rules' Article 1 'Dominic Raab contradicts government's own advice on returning to work' Article 2
(10) 'Coronavirus: Estate agents given green light to reopen after lockdown grinds sector to a halt' Article
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