A litany of unforced errors

By Pete North - May 16, 2020

Instead of ring fencing the elderly we shunted Covid infections from hospitals and into care homes. Instead of using the Nightingale hospitals as primary treatment facilities to keep Covid out of hospitals, they stood empty thus deterring people from using hospitals to get the treatment they need. The system was never overwhelmed but fewer A&E admissions, cancelled surgeries and missed cancers have created tragedies.

Then, instead of employing local authorities to conduct contract tracing, this government centralised efforts through private call centres in conjunction with a phone app that doesn’t work and never stood any chance of working. It has echoes of the Grayling ferry fiasco.

Further to this we find the government was working to an obsolete plan to combat an entirely different type of virus thus every subsequent decision was faulty. Leaving aside the hotly contested political choices, by any objective standard this government is wholly incompetent and is lying through its teeth to cover its tracks.

Depending on your political bent you can add further crimes to this administration’s rap sheet. The left have picked up on the shambolic PPE situation while the right is primarily concerned with the massive economic damage inflicted by a lockdown with questionable merit. This has not been handled at all well.

Perhaps the only institution failing harder is our media which has repeatedly failed to hold the government to account for its failures while doing little to bring us any closer to understanding our predicament. Nearly everything is reduced to a single metric which hacks then use as a crude benchmark of government performance while utterly failing to identify and pursue the central issues. Instead of expert probing everything is reduced to a tedious soap opera with journalists seeking to put themselves at the centre of the story.

Without an effective mechanism for holding the government to account there is no reason to expect the handling of Covid will improve. The lockdown can be eased in conjunction with effective track and trace, but that’s not going to happen so we have to get used to the idea that we have lost control and we are just going to have to take our chances. Economically, this is not sustainable.

Meanwhile, casting an eye to Brexit, we see a similar disarray with both sides reporting no significant progress. As ever the Tories are quite convinced they should have all the market preferences but with none of the obligations, making false equivalence with other high profile FTAs, failing to note that geography matters and our circumstances (as a departing member having evolved much of its trade inside the single market) are wholly unique. They then have the brass neck to accuse the EU of being “ideological”.

It would seem, then, that we are to depart without a deal unless there is a u-turn on extending the transition. That presently seems unlikely. By way of its own obstinacy, this government is frog-marching the UK over the cliff edge (while denying there even is one) at a time when we can least afford it.

That much, though, was already written. As the EU repeatedly states in the latest Notices to Stakeholders, “a free trade agreement does not provide for internal market concepts (in the area of goods and services) such as mutual recognition, the ‘country of origin principle’, and harmonisation. Nor does a free trade agreement remove customs formalities and controls, including those concerning the origin of goods and their input, as well as prohibitions and restrictions for imports and exports”.

The Tories have spent the last four years convincing themselves that left was right and up was down on trade matters, with Shankar Singham in Conservative Home telling us that mutual recognition was a possibility and that if needs be we can get by on “Australian terms”. Having secured the ascendency of Boris Johnson, the Tories have gone feral – drunk on their own self-assuredness.

The fundamental point is that as far as exporters are concerned, being out of the EU regulatory system, facing all manner of regulatory barriers and customs formalities, there is not much of a difference between an FTA and no deal, only now we have a dog’s dinner of a withdrawal agreement which can’t be renegotiated to contend with. Once the option to renegotiate and replace the NI protocol was removed by Johnson, the scene was set for a messy and expensive departure.

The media will no doubt find itself momentarily attracted to the high drama of negotiations as they get bored with Covid, but the decision to wreck our exports was made way back by way of ditching the EEA option. A deep and comprehensive FTA is only comprehensive by contrast with having no formal relationship at all, but by contrast with the single market, it barely scratches the surface.

It is hardly fortunate that any government should have to face possibly the two most politically and economically significant events in half a century simultaneously but it seems bizarre that any government should willingly inflict further harm on itself, but then there is nothing especially to stop it from doing so. The legacy media is the unwitting servant of a canny media manipulation machine while parliamentary opposition is all but absent. The Johnson regime has a free pass to further consolidate and centralise power. One might even say it is self-isolating.

But then perhaps it is fortunate that Johnson can mask his Brexit failure unders the smokescreen of Covid – a disaster not entirely of our own making. After all, Airbus shedding jobs because of Brexit is something of a moot point when nobody is buying any new aeroplanes and for the time being nobody is even flying them. But one supply chain not in danger, is the continued supply of incompetent government. For all that Johnson may get away with fudging Brexit, the legacy of Covid will haunt this administration to its end.

Ultimately there is only so much Johnson and his defenders can sweep under the rug. Initially Johnson denied there would be checks down the Irish sea but this week Johnson finally came clean. He sold out Northern Ireland for political expediency. He’s no defender of the Union. Naturally his supporters will change their tune and say they always supported a united Ireland, shifting the goalposts once more as ever they do, but it further adds to the case that no lie is too big for Johnson, and any lie will do.

One by one, the lies will fall as we draw closer to the consequences of Johnson’s avoidable errors. We are used to dysfunction as a fixture of British governance, and inadequate, inept response is only to be expected but previous governments mired in circumstances beyond their abilities were largely reacting to events beyond their control. In this instance, though, Johnson will be trying to explain the many holes he has dug for himself. With livelihoods shattered and many lives lost, exports plummeting, and the “global Britain” shtick falling flat on its face, even our media might notice we are governed by a fool.