TO coin a phrase, the British government seems to be at “sixes and sevens”, an English idiom used to describe a condition of confusion or disarray. In one way this is probably a fair description but look deeper and many of the government’s actions under the leadership of Boris Johnson on both Covid and Brexit have distinctly worrying undertones.
Let’s clear up one thing first. To date the UK’s vaccine roll out, albeit so far mostly single doses, under the auspices of the NHS has been a very welcome success story.
And this is not, as Johnson and members of his cabinet have repeatedly and disingenuously claimed, been made possible because of Brexit, a narrative designed to polarise further division between the UK and EU.
If vaccines are a success story and offer a ray of hope in these troubled times, the same cannot be said for the government’s abject and, at times corrupt, handling of the Covid pandemic crisis over its first year.
Johnson’s “policies” and decisions have lead to one of the worst per capita death rates of any country in the world and the worst performing economy during the pandemic of any G7 country.
The Resolution Foundation think tank reported this week that delaying the winter lockdown caused up to 27,000 extra deaths in England, and it accused the government of a “huge mistake” which should be central to any public inquiry into the UK’s handling of the pandemic.
In its assessment of the past year, the Foundation says delaying the start of the latest lockdown until January - despite hard evidence of fast-rising cases before Christmas - led to around a fifth of all fatalities caused by the virus. It believes these could have been avoided if restrictions had been put in place in early December, as had been recommended
While it praised the vaccination programme and financial support for firms and workers, the Foundation said the same mistakes on lockdowns were repeated “three tragic times” - in March, September and December 2020 - precipitating longer and more onerous lockdowns.
In the spring of 2021, as we look back on a year of turmoil and sadness, one could be forgiven for thinking that memories are short and we have not only forgotten that we have been in this before but forgotten too how we got here. This is the UK’s third national lockdown and both of its forerunners were promised to be the last.
One also can’t help thinking that the Government is somewhat over-reliant on vaccines solving the crisis, with Johnson offering no insight, for example, into how he plans to make vitally needed improvements to his national Test & Trace system, which we learnt last week is now costing a staggering £37 billion.
This is Monopoly money on a mega scale and is a sum that seems almost impossible to justify whichever way you look at it, particularly when other countries have developed efficient and successful Test & Trace systems for a fraction of the cost.
And despite the government insisting on calling it “NHS Track & Trace” - another less than casual piece of deliberate mis-speak - the system is not led by healthcare staff but is run by Dido Harding, friend of health secretary Matt Hancock and wife of Tory MP John Penrose, through the private firm Serco which, according to its recent financial results, is doing very nicely thank you.
If Johnson’s roadmap out of lockdown for this spring feels a little too premature and date-driven then perhaps it is. Based on 2020 we should remain wary. After all, he has already proved to be the popularist master of raising expectations unrealistically and over-promising.
Of course, in such tumultuous times, people do need something to look forward to. But it should not be at the mercy of a government which never learns from its mistakes, either deliberately or through serial incompetence.
Ultimately, the un-vaccinated should not be going to nightclubs in June, only for us all to return to national lockdown at the end of carefree summer. In the end, the only thing worse than hope is raising false hope.
Against this backdrop are on-going and increasingly transparent and dishonest attempts to bury the corpse of a failing Brexit in the cemetery of Covid.
During his tenure the prime minister has repeatedly lied to Parliament, to the Queen and her citizens, bent the rules, broken international law and broken the ministerial code on multiple occasions. The British government is overtly corrupt and it goes back on its word. Can it be trusted on anything it says, does or signs?
So far it has seemed that when Johnson and his government break the law at home they largely get away with it. But when international law is broken (especially when it reneges on an agreement like the Northern Ireland Protocol which was only recently negotiated, signed and hailed as a great triumph), we should not be surprised when the EU and countries like the US react adversely.
And all this after a month in which the government was keen to cover its dirty Brexit tricks by almost any means possible, not the least of which was buying editorial space in mainstream newspapers to run a number of disingenuous pro-Brexit news stories.
These actions do mean, however, that the government is becoming sensitive to the growing realisation that in reality Brexit is proving as damaging to the economy, if not more so, that the much derided “Project Fear” tried to warn back in 2016.
Such developments may only elicit a resigned shrug from the general population, especially given the more immediate impacts of Covid, but it is suggestive that Brexiters are aware their propaganda battle is being quickly eroded.
It is perhaps in this context that the government’s astonishingly dishonest Brexit ‘advertising’ campaign of recent weeks can be better understood.
On many levels it was designed to hoodwink the unsuspecting public because the campaign primarily consisted of placing paid-for stories in newspapers, including the Independent, the Daily Mail, The Sun, the Evening Standard and the Metro, along with hundreds of local newspapers.
To all intents and purposes they appeared to be legitimate news stories and it was necessary to look very carefully to see that these were billed as written ‘in association with the UK government’ or as ‘sponsored articles’.
At one level it is almost laughable but on another it does suggest a certain amount of desperation on the part of the government to create and promote dubious ‘good news’ narratives about Brexit.
The ground is clearly being prepared for a trade war with the EU, which shows that many in governance are ideologically determined to permanently toxify UK-EU relations, however badly that affects the country and its international reputation.
In some ways, the entire Brexit and Covid stories both come down to a gluttonous insatiability - a type of privileged greed, gestated by the right-wing and aligned with the inability of the British political class to impose any dietary restrictions on itself, and thus making way for an increasingly regime-like governance.
Caption: The Downing Street "briefing room" commissioned by Boris Johnson at a price tag to the taxpayer of £2.6 million. It looks like a standard hotel conference room along with cheap chairs, so one wonders why it cost so much? Note the 'Henry' vacuum cleaner on the right-hand side.
