Having witnessed the remarkable response on the part of large sections of the general public to government mishandling (and worse) of the coronavirus pandemic. The combination of intellectual lethargy and political apologetics indicates the almost congenital incapacity on the part of some people to even learn lessons the hard way. The warnings were issued and were promptly ignored, the ills predicted and worse have come to pass, and people seek reassurance in a fake unity behind the very agencies of the debacle. I feel the need to write a post hammering those who are accusing critics of politicizing the coronavirus crisis. There is a need to be critical when addressing the scandal and crime of government complicity in this crisis and its depth. Failure to be anything other than critical gives these incompetent - and actually culpable – architects of death and disaster licence to carry on.
The entire event, from crisis to response, has been utterly lamentable, with a useless – and that is being charitable – government propped up by a tame, lame media and cheered on by a delusional public. But we should have known when so many people elected Boris Johnson, a proven liar, as Prime Minister. Because he is ‘a character.’ Johnson has been predictably useless – again, that is being charitable. And chaotic in response. And the media, led by the BBC, has gone into hardcore ‘tonic-for-the-troops’ propaganda mode. And people bereft of political acumen, intellectual insight, and moral sensibility fall for it. They wallow in the ersatz communal feeling. It reassures them, comforts them in face of discomforting facts and realities. They are children, not adult citizens capable of engaging in the hard business of politics determining the effective and judicious management of common affairs.
The figures on deaths in the UK from Covid-19 are horrendous, just under 1,000 (counting only those who have died in hospital, the real figure will be much higher). This, despite the fact that the UK government had months to prepare for its arrival, and ample opportunity to learn from the experience of other countries, offering lessons both positive and negative.
Prevarication, ideological blindness, mixed messages, insufficient testing, appalling shortages of PPE, 10 years and more of austerity and underfunding the NHS, ignoring the findings of the 2016 pandemic review. THIS is what Johnson and the Conservative Party have achieved so far. THIS is political!
Whichever way you look at it, the response of the UK government to the coronavirus pandemic has been catastrophic. And so many, of course, choose not to look. They say that ‘it isn’t time for politics,’ and accuse critics of ‘playing politics’ and ‘politicizing’ the issue. It is this accusation of politics and politicization that needs to be firmly checked and rebutted. More than ever it is imperative to forge and sustain a critical counter-political voice. And I mean counter-political, in the sense of checking the clear, but covert, politics of those espousing ‘non-politics.’ The truth is that by taking politics out of an issue, the intent is to take it out of public controversy and insulate power from challenge and circumstances from change. And whatever the denials say, that is a deliberately and determinedly political act. The attempt to put politics on ice is an attempt to preserve the status quo and its representatives from legitimate questioning and challenge.
The situation is remarkable. My dad used to say that things would change and people rise up only when things got really bad. He lived long enough to see ‘things’ going from bad to worse, and still no change. Because too many do not learn the right lessons. Instead, harsh experience reinforces the very errors that brought crises about in the first place. This leads to any number of bitter ironies. We seem to have raised an anti-public that has been groomed to vote and act against its own best interests, give its support uncritically to those who despise them, and reject and even vilify those who seek to help them. Even now, with nearly one thousand deaths a day (counting only those deaths in hospital), too many are unable to connect the dots. A useless – at best - government culpable in a tragedy, scandal, and crime, and a complicit apologetic media, and too many unwilling to seek information from outside these sources. I've been accused of politicising the issue. 'It's not a time for politics.' I'd like to know where these people were when it was a time for politics - the poor decisions and non-decisions leading to this. And I want to know if these people will be around in the aftermath. The truth is it always a time for critical questions, and a critical counter-public is more important than it ever was. Mainstream politics and media are culpable and complicit. How depressing to see the media to go into "tonic for the troops" mode engineering an ersatz unity and community and how easily many fall for it.
It’s sad to say this, but horrible truths have to be faced. Very many people are without any redeeming qualities. They have not only been dehumanized, but desoulled. There seems to be nothing left in them to work with. They don’t even learn the hard way. Instead, disasters and crises reinforce the very vices that were implicated in their occurrence. For redemption there has to be contrition. No contrition, no redemption. The tragedy is that we seem to be dealing with people who are beyond redemption. They are so thoroughly poisoned and poisonous that, even when caught out clearly, they turn and condemn others, evade responsibility, shift blame. From the very beginnings of this crisis, these were the people who were in denial or downplaying the threat. Instead of recognising the seriousness of the threat, they took every political opportunity to blame communism in China and even express a barely disguised glee at the trials and tribulations of ‘socialist’ France and Italy to warn of the failures of their socialized healthcare systems. America has become the first nation on Earth to record 2,000 deaths in one day. Not that long ago, these people were boasting of “only” 21 deaths, showing how America, through merely observing good hygiene, without the need for ‘government’ diktat, has avoided the worst. Now that America has been hit hard, these people are still spinning the facts, attributing the high figures to other illnesses, ‘they would have died anyway.’ And still blaming China, communism, socialism, atheism, liberalism, Democrats, Obama, Bernie Sanders, gays, anyone they don’t like (and that’s a lot of people).
Lying political leaders, bad governance, unsound science, and their goons in the media culpable and complicit in crisis, leading the herd in a show of uncritical patriotic support, making people themselves culpable in their own demise. The government has been inept, its mind first and foremost on economics, and utterly pathetic and chaotic in its response. The media plays its part by going into full-on tonic-for-the-troops propaganda mode, and the people lap it up, having voted it in in the first place. We are seeing a generation and more of people who have been groomed by predators to vote against their own best interests. And far from learning the lesson through hard experience, even when loved ones and frontline workers are dropping like flies, they are still unable to connect the dots. They are unable to join the dots because they are incapable. A class understanding is severely lacking. I keep returning to Paul Mason’s argument in ‘Chaos is being normalised. It is all part of Boris Johnson’s pernicious plan’
‘Few are prepared to address the material roots and class dynamics of this crisis, because nobody taught them to do so. But they are clear.’
As for Johnson’s ‘pernicious plan,’ people were warned, and still voted the toxic buffoon in instead of Corbyn. Why people stood in need of a warning is even more instructive. Johnson’s words and deeds ought to be have been more than enough to tell people what kind of man they were dealing with. What are we to make of people who are still celebrating him as a ‘character’? It is simple: they have the political mentalities of infants, not citizens; they are people who have never grown up intellectually and politically. So they fall for fakes and surrogates and spectacles and shows, for cheery faces, clowns, and pantomime acts.
It is remarkable isn’t it? There is clear criminal culpability on the part of this government and past governments committed to neoliberalism, deregulation of collective provision, and the dismantling of the public realm, and yet there are large sections of the people who cheer them on. The public has been corrupted. I argue for virtue ethics and for the cultivation of the virtues as qualities for successful living, for the cultivation of the intellectual as well as the moral virtues, and for their practice in communities of practices. It sounds very high-minded to many raised in a liberal age in which each individual is deemed free to choose the good as he or she pleases. The people who defend this libertarian freedom as subjective choice miss the fact that human beings always live in a social context and that there is always a form of education, training, and socialization going on. Instead of an overt cultivation as with virtue ethics, there is a covert training that is akin to grooming. So many people are looking at the behaviour of those flouting the rules on lockdown and social distancing and are asking how so many could be so stupid and so selfish. The reasons are obvious: decades of a political and media culture that has actively cultivated stupidity and selfishness and celebrated it as the height of personal freedom. This is the cultivation of the vices. If you want an alternative, you will have to take the virtues and their cultivation in an appropriate habitus seriously.
For people living in the UK, the facts are deeply alarming, terrifying even. The last thing we need is people in need of reassurance falling for blatant lies and apologetics, and turning on critical voices. But that is precisely what seems to be happening. Critical voices are concerned to identify the truth. Truth is imperative. Falsehoods here are deadly.
There is no mystery as to why the British death figures are so out of step with other countries. The government listened to medical experts who planned everything as if it were a rhinovirus in which herd strategy sometimes works and is seasonal, and then someone decided it's a SARS like virus, and Coronavirus is a very different kind of virus. They had it all wrong, and made all the wrong choices and decisions for political and economic reasons. They found the theory that fitted their political and economic concerns. Herd immunity was suggested by a small minority of advisors and it fitted the priorities of the anti-government ideologues in government.
We can refer to neoliberalism and austerity and the way that these have divided societies and raised inequality to record levels, weakening resilience. People are vulnerable as a result of inequality. We can refer to the underfunding of the NHS, which has been struggling for a decade and more to even cope in normal times. The anti-government ideology of the politicians and the complacency of the people.
To over a decade of the underfunding of the NHS we can add the callous embrace of 'herd immunity' with the intent of saving the economy at the expense of the lives of ‘a few pensioners,’ then the sudden about turn when the government realised how many would die and that the Conservatives would rightly be blamed and never be elected again (and that you can't have a functioning economy when most of the work force is infected and isolating. We should also underline Johnson's constant trivialising of the issue, his cheery bluff demeanour alternating with tough-guy rhetoric, his insane decision to refuse help from the EU because the UK is so self-sufficient. I could go on. The same points apply in an American context to Trump and his supporters. In a line, we are talking a remarkable combination of ideology, incompetence, and callousness. The UK should actually be doing far better than the rest of Europe for the reason that a) the UK has had time to see the problem coming and learn from experience and b) it is an island, like the places that have had the most success in dealing with the problem (e.g. New Zealand and Taiwan).
New Zealand cut off their borders immediately, Germany is testing, Korea is contact tracing. The UK government, like the US government, is ideologically indisposed (frankly opposed to) against taking the radical action required to protect and preserve lives, and mainstream politics and media has been disinclined to call them out. This is where the appeal for national unity and community feeling serves to intimidate critical voices and induces people to temper and even silence questions and objections.
We should not be afraid of plain speaking. Lies, cover-ups, and duplicity cost lives. There is a need to tell the hard truth: we are dealing with nothing less than the manslaughter of the elderly and vulnerable and the endangering of the lives of those delivering frontline services as a direct result of government prevarication, ideology, incompetency, lack of foresight, and long-term undermining of public services.
The parallels with climate crisis are clear and alarming. The prevarication, incompetence, the ideological opposition to radical government action mirrors the lack of effective action in addressing climate change and its effects. Rather than admit the need for collective intervention and action through government agency, the ideologues prefer to downplay or merely pay lip service to the fact there is a crisis and maintain the pretence for public consumption that they know what they're doing and are doing enough. Now we see that it is about reassuring the children, and succeeds precisely because too many adults are indeed children rather than citizens capable of serious political engagement. The body politic has been corrupted, selfishness and stupidity in the form of individual self-assertion has been engineered into the social fabric, fracturing the public from within.
Peter Kaan asks: ‘Is it wrong to hope that clapping and saucepan-banging might also be seen as a movement that declares: “We love our NHS. We hate what the Tories, in their ideological savagery, have done to it”?’
It isn’t wrong. But you have to ask how many of those who are making the most noise here voted for the Conservatives instead of Corbyn.
I shall quote Dr Anthony Matheson here:
“You would think that, during the Covid-19 crisis, doctors are at a premium and are being snapped up with open arms by the NHS. Unfortunately, that seems not to be the case. I am a UK- and NHS-trained doctor, and for the past six years I have worked as a senior emergency medicine doctor in the NHS. I am also an NHS-qualified GP. Since mid-January I have been working as a civilian doctor for the Ministry of Defence.
When I saw the strain that the NHS was under, I felt it was my professional and moral obligation to offer my services. You would think that this would be fairly easy. The General Medical Council has been contacting doctors who have given up their registration in the past three years and they are being granted temporary registration if they wish to volunteer. But there is nothing on the GMC website directing registered doctors on how to volunteer.
The British Medical Association, the trade union representing doctors, has been of no help either. When I asked about this subject I was sent a couple of links to generic career advice and advertised jobs pages.
Other routes – eg Google searches, posting on LinkedIn and even some direct approaches to hospitals – have all been equally fruitless. I must say that I am at a total loss as to how I go about volunteering to work in the NHS in this time of crisis. Any help or advice that can be offered by anyone would be much appreciated.
Dr Anthony Matheson
Dumfries, Dumfries and Galloway
And this from Peter Kaan:
Pro-NHS to the core (and now retired after 30 years in psychiatric nursing in the NHS), I feel angry and cynical in ways I wish I didn’t. When “clap for carers” began, I was very moved, and of course there is something beautiful about the collective outpouring of gratitude. But the neglect and underfunding of the NHS have been screamingly obvious in every period in which the Conservatives have been in office. The drive to privatise is in the Tory DNA. Sure, they are talking the talk now – how could they not? – and doing the right thing vis-a-vis the NHS, but this is only temporary.
So is it wrong to hope that the clapping and saucepan-banging might also be seen as a movement that declares: “We love our NHS. We hate what the Tories, in their ideological savagery, have done to it”? To borrow from a recent demo placard: how can we symbolically and practically “rage, rage against the lying of the right”?
Peter Kaan
Exeter, Devon
I like that: “rage, rage against the lying of the right.” Although cool criticism that focuses on the facts of the matter should be enough, because the truth is plain.
Then there is this on the aftermath. After the financial crash we had a decade or more of austerity. The crash will be bigger this time. Given that austerity has weakened society so much as to render to many vulnerable, another dose may be enough to finish the victims off. And maybe that is the very point, ‘disaster capitalism’ with Social Darwinism at its heart.
“Unlike John Crace (Rishi Sunak ditches the straight-talk for lessons from the old school, 8 April), I found Rishi Sunak’s “most terrifying utterance” his throwaway reference to his giveaway billions “having to be paid for”. If the recent history of the financial crash and bank bailout is anything to go by, we all know who will be doing the paying.
How many years of austerity can we look forward to this time, to preserve our society’s unequal status quo? How many low-paid workers in essential services, currently being eulogised by ministers for saving the nation, will end up footing the bill? How many individuals and small businesses will go to the wall while the usual tax-avoiding millionaire suspects survive in splendid state-subsidised isolation? How much longer will it take to accept that we can’t go back to business as usual? People won’t put up with it. The planet can’t put up with it.
Karen Barratt
Winchester
So now I come to those people who are outraged at the way that the pandemic is being ‘politicized,’ those who accuse critics of ‘playing politics,’ and who claim that ‘it is not time for politics.’ Those arguments are invariably accompanied by statements that the UK government is ‘doing a good job’ in difficult/unforeseen/unpredictable/unknown circumstances. It is pure apologetics and pure bunkum. And it is a plain attempt to silence criticism, delegitimize alternate political voices, and freeze us within a national unity firmly behind the architects of this disaster. The invocation of a war-time spirit and collective feeling is part of the political intimidation. We are not at war. These war metaphors are treacherous. I criticize them thoroughly in relation to the climate crisis, and I criticize them thoroughly here. This is the view in the Lancet. War metaphors ‘suggest there will be a simple victory or defeat. They emphasise treatment over prevention. And they encourage the view that criticising government strategy is somehow unpatriotic. The Lancet is receiving many messages from front-line health workers reporting “bullying”—bullying National Health Service (NHS) staff by threatening disciplinary action for raising concerns about workplace safety, testing, and access to personal protective equipment. “I never thought I lived in a country where freedom of speech is discouraged”, wrote one doctor. The NHS is fortunate to have a Duty of Candour, endorsed by professional regulators: “As a doctor, nurse, or midwife, you must be open and honest with patients, colleagues, and your employers.” For those who believe now is not the moment for criticism of government policies and promises, remember the words of Li Wenliang, who died in February, aged 33 years, fighting COVID-19 in China—“I think a healthy society should not have just one voice.” (From The Lancet).
What we make of those words depends on whether we think the problem is one of saving lives or preserving political and economic power. The Chinese suppression of critical voices was a humanitarian disaster. But the regime remains in control.
It shouldn’t be too difficult to form the right conclusion here. Ignoring WHO advice, flirting – and worse – with herd immunity, slow and chaotic response make it crystal clear that... the Government is responsible for infection and death:
“This was a drill. Code-named Exercise Cygnus, it took place in October 2016 and involved all major government departments, the NHS and local authorities across Britain. The modelling for the outbreak was prepared by the same team that is tracking the all-too-real Covid-19 pandemic now. .. it showed gaping holes in Britain’s Emergency Preparedness, Resilience and Response (EPRR) plan.”
The government was warned when Lansley cut services for the Tories in 2014:
"“The next pandemic,” the authors pointed out, “could arise from H5N1 (‘bird flu’)… or come from elsewhere. When it comes, there may be only a few weeks’ warning before there are significant numbers of cases in the UK.” What the report showed was that although a pandemic was at the top of the government’s civil risk register, the Lansley Act had dramatically increased this risk. Institutional memory and expert resources had been discarded, with no less than 10,000 key NHS staff made redundant. Responsibility for co-ordinating the response to an epidemic had been divided among a variety of agencies with no clear line of central authority, and private providers of NHS care were not subject to central direction. "
The UK now has nearly one thousand deaths a day, as a result of the above action and inaction, and yet people claim the crisis isn’t political. That is the plainest attempt to evade scrutiny, responsibility, and challenge.
The UK government and its media cronies are politicising the issue every day in the spin and propaganda and the invocation of fake community and unity. There is an unavoidable political dimension to all of this. Those who insist that this isn’t a time for politics are themselves engaging in a politics of the status quo, intervening to protect culpable political leaders from challenge and criticism. To deny others a political voice is to delegitimate alternate political platforms, leaving the government unchallenged. Those most in denial of politics are invariably the ones practising the most invidious form of politics – the politics that seeks to reign unchallenged.
Given the evidence of government complicity in the spread of infection and death, there is no way that the Coronavirus could not be political. This isn’t ‘party political’ in the sense of one party seeking to bring down their political opponents, but involves citizens seeking to hold their government to account for the mistakes it has made. Those mistakes can be identified and need to be identified. Those ‘playing politics’ here are those who want those mistakes hidden and, in time, forgotten. These are the people who elected this government, the people who warned of disaster if Corbyn’s Labour were elected, and now wish to pretend it didn't happen. Basically, they want to be reassured that the UK has a great, competent government and that no matter how disastrous events may turn, they are doing the best job possible. It is highly political when people try to silence critical voices identifying causes and culpability in the attempt to hold government to account. It is worth noting how many of the people who caution against politicizing the crisis whenever someone is concerned to question the Government's handling of the Coronavirus catastrophe are those who are most concerned to associate support for NHS workers with the #clapforboris nonsense. There is an obligation and duty on the part of citizens to hold power to account. Apologists make for great servants and sycophants, but poor citizens.
The issue is political to the core. The government had ample time and opportunity to get ahead and stay ahead of this virus, and wasted it. The government even conducted research in 2016 into how prepared the NHS would be in face of a pandemic; it ignored the findings and buried them. The NHS was not prepared, and preparation would be costly. The warning was shelved for political reasons.
Bullying people into political silence is a political act. The problem is not that the crisis is being politicized but that it is being depoliticised. This crisis concerns the very stuff of politics. All decisions that are taken or not taken are political decisions. This is basic politics.
‘It’s not a time for politics’ is code for ‘I voted Tory, and would prefer not to be reminded of my complicity in crisis, death, and disaster.’ If it is impossible to lay blame elsewhere – and how these people try! – then just suppress politics and silence critical voices. This crisis was political from the very start, beginning with this Government's inaction and incompetence.
This is the kind of thing that those who voted Conservative are saying in an attempt to assuage their guilt in voting Conservative. If there is the merest hint that things are going bad, the comment that it would have been so much worse under Corbyn is added.
The audacity of those seeking to depoliticise the recorded, known, failings of the inept, ideologically blind, complacent, incompetent UK government is breathtaking. The government had months to prepare. And yet we still have NHS front line staff relaying on friends, family, charities and local businesses to supply (just about) adequate levels of PPE. Precisely because government didn’t. They were warned and had ample time to prepare. They didn’t heed the warning and didn’t prepare. Every preventable death that occurs is nothing short of manslaughter. This is criminal negligence. Clap for Boris? The man should be clapped in irons and made to break rocks, along with all those who are complicit.
Holding the government to account and challenging power is the right thing to do. The only ‘politicizing’ going on is on the part of those who not only refuse to ask political questions, but seek to prevent others from doing so. Let me make a wild guess here that those saying it is not a time to be playing politics voted Conservative and are Johnson supporters. Refusing ventilators from the EU … That sounds very much like the Brexiteers handiwork. If anything proves that the UK can't 'go it alone', then it is this pandemic. But some committed to the politics of stupidity would prefer not to be given lessons in hard reality. This is one for the rest of us – toughen up and hit back hard, because the politics of the stupid will take us to year zero if unchecked. Feel free not to do politics, feel free to go away, maintain your silence, get out of the public realm, and bury your head. Goodbye and good riddance. Your absence will significantly raise the quality of public life.
I would say that these people don’t understand that political decisions and choices impact on people’s lives, except that I think they do understand that. I think they see it clearly in the daily death counts, and don’t want to be reminded of their complicity. This crisis is political to the core. The political decisions that were made and actions taken have issued in unnecessary deaths. That is manslaughter, and it is very, very political.
We could be charitable and say that those arguing about politicising the issue are merely naïve. There is no doubt that many are infantile, political innocents who lack the nerve and nous to engage in politics. But this anti-political animus is much more knowing and cynical. Whenever government and power is exposed and vulnerable, there is an attempt to depoliticize an issue and delegitimize critical voices. As a result, a protective screen is placed around an issue. Political decisions that bring about the deaths of people is an unavoidably political issue. Attempts to depoliticize that issue are themselves inherently political. This is not about party politics but about holding government to account. The first duty of government is to protect the people. We the citizens holding government to account are the people. Our duty is to raise our voices. We charge government with the responsibility to govern well in our interests. It is not the government’s job to tell us that all is well when it isn’t, and it is not the citizens duty to parrot the government line that all is well.
"Find out just what any people will quietly submit to and you have the exact measure of the injustice and wrong which will be imposed on them."
Frederick Douglass
As for ‘politicizing the pandemic,’ that is precisely what the government and its media supporters have been doing. Every action is being stage managed for political show and effect, managing and manipulating the public into complicity.
To those trying to silence political voices I say you voted for this shower, have the guts to own the consequences.
More than ever we need to form a critical counter-public giving voice to political concerns. The media aren't doing their job and the Opposition can't be heard.
The infantilism here is one hundred percent on the part of those who, whenever any controversial event takes place, determinedly demand that it not be ‘made political,’ as if politics were merely an expendable extra in life, of no great concern and import. People are dying as a result of flawed government thinking and strategy and government failure to prepare. Of course it is political, as is the demand to take politics out of it. Are we expected to believe that had this been Corbyn in charge, these same voices would have been demanding that politics be kept out of it?