With support for a public inquiry into the UK’s handling of the coronavirus at roughly 70%, today’s newsletter explores where blame has and will be assigned when it comes to the pandemic. In The Twitching Net Curtain and the Cost of Blame, Charlie explores who the public blame for the UK’s response to the coronavirus pandemic, and what is forfeited when we see the individual as the enemy at the cost of holding power to account. In Hiding Behind Ideology Millie looks at why liberalism alone cannot be held to blame for Boris Johnson’s mishandling of the pandemic.
P.S This is our first issue. Constructive criticism welcome, but be kind.
The Twitching Net Curtain and the Cost of Blame
Charlie Cooke
This week, as the UK anticipates the reopening of pub gardens next Monday as part of the next major step in the government’s roadmap out of lockdown, calls for a public inquiry into the government’s handling of the pandemic have grown to include the former head of the civil service and one of the government scientific advisors, alongside the hundreds of thousands of bereaved family members. And with public support for such an inquiry in the majority, the government can no longer hide behind vague platitudes about learning lessons.
But if you’ve followed the polls tracking peoples attitudes towards the governments handling of the coronavirus, the robust support for an inquiry may seem somewhat perplexing. Here are two Yougov polls. The first from December, just ahead of Christmas, when we all frantically made new plans in the wake of the news that Christmas was to be decidedly un-merry that year
Over half the people polled believe that the public were to blame for that particular spike in coronavirus cases, despite infectious new variants and an ‘Eat Out to Help Out’ scheme that, according to one Warwick study may have driven new infections up by 17%. Another poll from January returns a similar result.
Despite the now legendary scandals surrounding PPE procurement, Dominic Cummings’ eye test, and the lack of COBRA meetings attended by the Prime Minister at the beginning of this crisis, alongside unforeseen circumstances like the so-called Kent variant, our instinct as a culture continues to be to lay blame at the feet of the individual. 500 words is too little to interrogate the sociology behind this phenomenon but Marxists would refer to it as an aspect of what Engels called ‘false consciousness’: reproducing the systems of our own oppression by focusing our energy on each other and not the so-called ‘elite’.
And beyond the polls, anecdotally we all know and understand this instinct. It’s what’s often referred to as the twitching net curtain. Its the desire to take pictures of people in parks and scold them on social media, or talk in hushed tones about how many people you think are coming in and out of your neighbours house.
Our lack of trust in our fellow citizens also appears to, in turn, drive support for more draconian legislation. If you’ll allow me a few more polls. In February, Yougov asked respondents if ten years in jail was a proportionate response to deliberately lying to avoid quarantine. 51% agreed it was. In other polls, 67% of Britons supported the proposal to put plain clothed police officers in bars and clubs, and 56% of respondents thought pubs and bars should require a vaccine passport to enter.
Following the massive, unprecedented success of the vaccine rollout in contrast to the chaotic scenes coming from the EU’s vaccine programme, the post-coronavirus narrative is already forming and it seems to be a picture of a country that has navigated this extremely difficult and unpredictable pandemic as well as it possibly could. Whenever a Cabinet Minister is asked about the timeline for an inquiry, they immediately launch into extolling the virtues of the vaccine programme. This spin actively papers over the truth of the many government failings to highlight the one bright spot in the response. The side effect of this story is that the only people left for us to blame is each other
So as an inquiry is swept into next year and the news cycle moves on its worth remembering the scandals, incompetence and cronyism - and not your neighbour who broke the rules to have a cider in the sun. By blaming each other we absolve the government of responsibility for the almost incalculable damage the coronavirus has done, including almost 130,000 deaths. And at the risk of sounding cloying, It’s bigger than the pandemic. Nothing changes if we’re too busy blaming each other for the structural issues we face.
And so to one final poll: in January of this year a YouGov poll asked Britons if they’d been following the rules well. 91% said they had. When asked if other people in their local area had been, however? Just 56%.
Hiding behind ideology: why liberalism isn’t a viable explanation for Johnson’s mishandling of the pandemic
Millie Cooke
Boris Johnson believes he was “let down by his own liberal instincts” when it came to his handling of the pandemic. At least that’s according to Fraser Nelson in the Telegraph.
The ‘liberal instincts’ Boris Johnson references here is more commonly referred to as ‘neoliberalism’, an approach characterised by free-market capitalism, deregulation, and minimal government spending.
It makes sense that this would contribute the shortcomings in our pandemic response. The UK’s shortage of PPE can surely be linked to excessive faith in the free market and it doesn’t take a professional contact tracer to track the monumental failure of NHS Test and Trace back to outsourcing. A deep-rooted ideological belief in supporting freedom would make you reluctant to strip an entire nation of their liberty in the name of public health.
But I’m sceptical. Firstly, because there is an awful lot that can’t be explained by a belief in freedom. It wasn’t liberalism that undermined public trust by allowing Dominic Cummings to remain in his post after thattrip to Durham, nor was it liberalism that caused the prime minister to brag about shaking hands with hospital patients just days before we were finally sent into a national lockdown. In the early days of the pandemic, liberalism cannot explain why Johnson failed to attend five Cobra meetings which were essential to our Covid-19 response. Johnson’s laid back approach to government and his tendency to play fast and loose with the rules also cannot be put down to liberalism.
But - although delaying lockdown for 5 weeks looks a lot like the result of a man grappling with a deep seated commitment to his political values – Johnson, in practice, has never shown a real commitment to the ideology he claims let him down.
Yes, he regularly pays lip-service to liberalism, railing against the “continuing creep of the nanny state” during his leadership campaign and, on issues of public health, arguing that “the more the state tries to take responsibility for the problem, the less soluble the problem will become.” (This one was taken from an article entitled, ‘Face it: it’s all your own fat fault’. Given the government’s latest drive to tackle obesity, it’s safe to say that this has not aged well). But historically, Johnson has comfortably betrayed these liberal values countless times before.
The liberal support for the rule of law doesn’t seem to be of interest to Johnson, who has been accused by the EU of breaking international law multiple times throughout the course of the Brexit negotiations. Just last month – but certainly not for the first time - his government was found to be in ‘scandalous’ breach of the ministerial code when they failed to publish ministerial interests for more than nine months. His typically liberal support for free speech, which so often emerges in discussions about cancel culture and Churchill statues, is nowhere to be seen when the conversation moves to press freedom, with Johnson’s government having rejected more Freedom of Information requests than ever before. And with the Police, Crime, Sentencing and Courts Bill having passed its second reading, it seems that Johnson’s liberalism doesn’t extend to the right to protest either.
Given the slightest push, the PM is happy to turn his back on liberalism. So why did he choose the pandemic as his chance to stick by it? It seems odd that Johnson let liberalism betray him when he has betrayed liberalism so many times before.
The sting of all of this lies in Neil Ferguson’s assessment of lockdown 1.0: if Johnson had simply done as he has so often done in the past, but just one week earlier, then 20,000 lives might have been saved. That seems like an awfully big push to me.
So before we lay blame at liberalism’s door, perhaps we should start by examining the actions of the prime minister, who has been widely known to ignore his briefing notes.