Politics

How the government tried to pin the plague on the public

Ministers have taken the astonishing decision to excoriate an innocent public rather than own up to mistakes

October 01, 2020
 WIktor Szymanowicz/NurPhoto/PA Images
WIktor Szymanowicz/NurPhoto/PA Images

The rate of infection is rising again. Spreading through a population who were told the worst was behind them. On 22nd September, Boris Johnson fumed with mock profundity and Blitz borrowings that there have been “too many breaches, too many opportunities for our invisible enemy to slip through undetected.” If the point of such overwrought wartime metaphors was to make us all feel like traitors, those “opportunities” for subversion were entirely of Johnson’s own making.

At every critical moment of this agonising plague year, the British government has tried to pass off blame for its catastrophic failings to the public. Faced with the deep shame of taking responsibility for one of the highest Covid-19 death tolls in the world, Tory ministers and their legion of advisers have sidestepped and scapegoated instead.

Right from the start, in the spring, the government fundamentally misunderstood the point of a total national lockdown. Such drastic measures are supposed to stall the contagion and strangle its dispersion, buying time for authorities to fashion a rigorous test-and-trace system and a battery of coherent long-term restrictions. Only these would allow for a safe and controlled return to semi-ordinary life. Yet lockdown was sold—is still being sold—as an end in itself. Stay inside for a bit, and it will all go away.

In reality, it took almost four months for a shambolic testing system to emerge, with its companion tracing network following another two months after. In late August Health Secretary Matt Hancock, flushed with false confidence, advised anyone “in doubt” about their symptoms to “get a test.” And when the programme, administered by such notoriously competent entities as Deloitte and Serco, began to crack and crumble in September, Hancock blamed the understandably frightened and justifiably cautious among us for taking “inappropriate” tests which caused an “increase in demand.” In other words, it’s your own fault you can’t return to work (which you were told to do because the economy is cratering), not ours for asset-stripping national infrastructure. This is the same Matt Hancock who, when faced with a massive shortage of protective equipment for healthcare workers, warned those workers not to “overuse” the “precious” supply. Not worthy of protection, then, only of blame.

Those months were attended by the inanity of the daily press conference, stultifying in their sameness (“As of today, 37,159 people have…sadly…died. Next slide please…”). On the hour, some official or minister or adviser would dutifully report that the government’s policy was crystal clear. On 25th April, Priti Patel insisted the message “has been clear and consistent from day one.” Yet all the while police associations, local councils, business interests and union leaders were loudly and repeatedly demanding greater clarity and consistency. Even parliament’s Joint Committee on Human Rights deplored that “lockdown regulations contain unclear and ambiguous language.” It wasn’t until 9th September that Johnson finally admitted the labyrinth of rules had indeed become “complicated and confusing.” That didn’t prevent him from alleging that the elderly were doubly at risk because “too many care homes didn’t really follow the procedures”—even after his government dumped 25,000 patients out of hospital right into those unsafe residences.

Contrast this with the elegant simplicity of, say, New Zealand’s public messaging, with its quaint “bubbles” (which formed a central plank of their national response from the beginning) and ubiquitous, well-defined alert levels. The Tory version, debuted early in the crisis, was roundly mocked for looking like the Nando’s spiciness scale and never seen again. In South Korea, among others, the emergency alert system was used to send vital warnings and updates to every mobile phone in the country. In the UK, there has only been one such message, on 24th March, announcing the first lockdown—perhaps one of those rare examples of social necessity outweighing privacy considerations. Even then, the government had to ask service providers individually to send out the message. Its own emergency system has never functioned.

The chief culprit in this mangled response has been the Tory party tendency to use its own election PR machine to game out the popularity of its policies—in the middle of a public health disaster, no less. Over the last nine months, when the situation demanded decisiveness, the public has been used as a real-time focus group. Often, a version of a rule change has appeared in the press attributed to some unnamed source—only to be tweaked later, after most of us have already absorbed the original idea and taken it as law.

Recall early May, when the banner slogan was changed from the sensibly commanding “Stay Home, Save Lives to the vaguer “Stay Safe, Save Lives”. Word appeared in the media of an easing of the original lockdown restrictions—the possibility of picnics in the park, sunbathing, perhaps even pubs and schools returning. The prime minister confirmed these rumours and planned for an official announcement a few days later. By which time the initial speculation had already taken root. The announcement turned out to be for another announcement, and it took another month for pubs to reopen.

The monumental “success” of Rishi Sunak’s Eat Out to Help Out scheme over summer only reinforced the general feeling that things were soon going to be back to normal—and that we should all behave as if it was. In fact, normality will not return before a vaccine is successfully developed and widespread inoculation takes hold. Still, there is no guarantee.

Of course, what broke the back of any kind of sympathy was news of Dominic Cummings’s jaunty roundtrip to Durham. That revelation, and the defensive government posture it created, emerged at exactly the same moment we were being subjected to these ever-shifting, ever-more incomprehensible expectations. For now, the status quo seems to involve various regions of the country ping-ponging in and out of various shades of lockdown—with social consent understandably breaking down all the time.

No amount of rhetoric about “freedom-loving people” and living “without fear” can obscure the fact that the government wasted the extraordinary solidarity and tolerance that came with the pandemic, then built a bewildering thicket of rules, restrictions, guidelines and obfuscations that even they, in their supreme intelligence, can’t understand. This peculiar kind of arrogance can only come from those who believe they are born to rule: that they can excoriate the innocent in the middle of a crisis, and still expect their vote.

James Robins is an award-winning journalist and historian. His first book, “When We Dead Awaken: Australia, New Zealand, and the Armenian Genocide,” is out in November