Covid: a case of UK state failure
To describe the initial UK response to the Covid pandemic as a massive “public health failure”, which a parliamentary report does, is to blunt the truth. In reality, the shocking failure to protect people lies at the door of the state as a whole.
The parliamentary report, although it talks of “major deficiencies in the machinery of government”, puts this down to a “fatalistic approach”, “groupthink” and lack of information sharing. In some places, the report actually blames government scientists for giving the wrong advice, thereby side-lining elected politicians from accountability.
While all this is probably accurate, the extent of the disaster is more significant and damaging.
For decades now, the UK state has prioritised market-led “solutions” as the answer to a range of challenges. What the report calls the “machinery of government” has been directed towards this end, outsourcing responsibility to agencies and other remote bodies.
Public Health England, for example, was starved of investment and reorganised in a chaotic fashion. So PHE and other bodies were found wanting when the pandemic struck, as the report makes clear:
“For a country with a world-class expertise in data analysis, to face the biggest health crisis in 100 years with virtually no data to analyse was an almost unimaginable setback.”
PHE told the MPs it had formally studied and rejected the South Korean approach, yet declined to produce any evidence, such is the disarray within the organisation.
While the National Health Service responded brilliantly to the pandemic, it had been starved of investment, weighed down by the cost of privately financed schemes and lacked a unified plan of action.
Into this toxic, decaying administrative environment the final straw was a Tory government led by a blustering populist. He found decision-making best left to others like the unelected Dominic Cummings and the host of libertarians who run Downing Street.
You could argue that herd immunity, which was government policy until late March 2020, was the equivalent of this neoliberal, market-led approach to social challenges. The UK state was, in effect, treating Covid as if were a private, individual affair.
Only when the pandemic threatened to overwhelm the NHS, did the Tories change tack and order a compulsory lockdown.
Even now, the UK has the highest Covid infection rate in Europe, principally because the Tory government couldn’t wait to “open up the economy”. Mask wearing, for example, is a shambles because Johnson pandered to his right wing and abandoned any sort of guidance.
The disastrous reaction to Covid in early 2020, which cost many more lives, especially among the vulnerable and elderly than would otherwise have been the case, can be added to a lengthening list of other state failures.
These include the state’s refusal to take serious and fundamental action over climate change, its inability to provide decent, affordable housing for millions, the lack of a proper policy of care for older people and the absence of social and racial justice.
And the way it’s going, you will be able to include a shortage of heat and light together with rising food prices on the list.
Covid has confirmed that the present UK state is not fit for purpose. It’s barely democratic and hardly accountable. Scandal after scandal shows a level of corruption not seen in the UK for a couple of centuries. The pre-determined bias towards corporate and financial interests is self-evident.
Real democracy is when political and economic power is in the hands of the people. Achieving that means remaking the present state from top to bottom.