I GUESS we’re done with shame now. It’s consigned to the past. Not needed anymore. It gets in the way too much.
You’d think so to look at contemporary politics. This week a cross-party group of MPs issued a report into the pandemic which called the UK’s initial response one of the country’s worst public health failures. Note that word. Failure.
The dither and delay of Westminster in the early days of the pandemic and the groupthink shared by ministers and their scientific advisors on the response led to “many thousands of deaths which could have been avoided,” the report claimed
It also criticised the sense of “British exceptionalism” around pandemic planning and argued that the lack of early testing capacity was “an almost unimaginable setback.”
To be fair, the MPs also noted the successes, most notably the vaccination programme. Prime Minister Boris Johnson gambled and won on that one. But he and his government have been using that success as a shield to cover them for everything else ever since.
It doesn’t excuse all his other costly gambles. People died because he dithered. That is surely clear by now.
Read More: Was Angela Rayner right about the Tories
And yet, in the week the report is released the Prime Minister is, perhaps conveniently, on holiday. Meanwhile, Stephen Barclay, Chancellor of the Duchy of Lancaster, was rolled out to talk to the media. He refused 15 times to apologise for the Government’s failings at the start of the Covid pandemic. Apologising is another thing that we’ve given up in public life, it seems.
But that shouldn’t surprise us. At the start of the Tory party conference earlier this month Johnson himself had the gall to answer a journalist’s question about levelling up by saying “I’ve given you the most important metric – never mind life expectancy, never mind cancer outcomes – look at wage growth.”
The offhand callousness of that still takes the breath away. Johnson sails on blithely, though. Nothing to see here. Just a Prime Minister saying your loved ones don’t matter unless they’re earning.
The Government’s stock answer this week is we are all wise in hindsight. And there’s some truth in that. But some were wise in foresight too. Demands for a response to the threat of the pandemic were loud long before the Prime Minister moved himself to act. The example of what could go wrong was evident in Italy and the Government didn’t act.
The fear now is that the same complacency and disregard for other methods seems to still be in place. Britain has by far the highest number of cases of Covid and reported deaths in western Europe at the moment, despite our early success with vaccinations. The daily covid death rate in the UK is more than twice that of France and Germany.
Meanwhile, our vaccination rates have fallen behind several of our European neighbours. France, Italy and Spain have all moved ahead of the UK in terms of the share of people fully vaccinated in recent months.
Westminster’s hurry to leave behind social distancing and mask wearing and the message that sends out (all those pictures of cabinet meetings devoid of any face coverings) can’t help. A proper front-foot rebuttal to the unscientific nonsense of the anti-vaxxers wouldn’t hurt either. But don't hold your breath.
There will be questions for all the devolved governments in regard to their response to this huge crisis. The SNP may find any similar inquiry uncomfortable. And let’s be honest, the pandemic has been an unprecedented challenge. But it is surely clear now that some people failed that challenge.
It would be something if they at least acknowledged that. Whether they feel any shame, though ...
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