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Thinking about whether 2020 has been a fantastic year for Britain.(Photo by Jack Hill - WPA Pool / Getty Images)
In 1940, immediately following the fall of France and the humiliating retreat of the British Army at Dunkirk, three then-anonymous journalists rushed out the short polemic Guilty Men. It catalogued the complacency, incompetence and total absence of strategic vision at the summit of British politics, which threatened to lose the war less than a year after it had begun. The Government had refused to take the looming threat seriously until it was far too late; even when war was inevitable, the writers alleged, it had failed to mobilise the full resources of the state, terrified of harming the economy; the nation’s system of procurement and supply for the goods vital to prosecute the war was vastly unequal to the task ahead, and the Government saw no urgency in rectifying the situation until total defeat seemed almost certain.
“To grasp these facts we must patiently and clearly trace the origin and monstrous growth of this régime of little men,” Guilty Men’s authors wrote, whose “half-baked, uncoordinated scheme of economic mobilisation” was driving the country towards defeat. The hard truth was that “the dead bureaucratic hand of the Civil Service, coupled with the complacent willingness of some of our Ministers to relax their exertions so long as they could keep the public quiet by pouring the soft and soothing oil of optimism over their heads, was putting us in peril”.
The analogy with today is painfully clear. Our Government has indeed mounted a wartime response to Covid, in that tens of thousands of fellow countrymen are now dead due to a series of catastrophic errors. The lack of foresight, the inability to plan effectively or marshal the full resources of the state, the incompetent governance and series of defeats snatched from the jaws of victory, all call to mind the series of disasters which characterised Britain’s first three years of the war. So who are the Guilty Men of the Covid crisis?
As the Atlantic journalist Tom McTague observed back in August, the entire British state has been found wanting, as this country “has found a way to be simultaneously overcentralized and weak at its centre”. The problem is not just the Conservative Government, though that has failed entirely: it is the entire superstructure around it, the Civil Service, Public Health England, the media. The British state and its parasitic para-state are both entirely unfit for purpose.
It is the very malaise identified by the pantomime villain of our expert class, Dominic Cummings, when he said, back in 2014: “We do not have a problem with ‘too much cynicism’ — we have a problem with too much trust in people and institutions that are not fit to control so much. When faced with the ‘fog of war’ in nonlinear systems such as the financial system, disease outbreaks, or terrorism, the current system is absolutely bound to respond with sloth/panic, chaos, and blunders.” Working within the heart of the British state, Cummings identified its fatal flaws long ago — so it is no wonder that the para-state’s immune system, the Westminster lobby, spat him out as a threat to its continued survival.
It is unfortunate that his suggestions for its reform suffer from what the writer Paul Kingsnorth identified in his essay on the scythe as an ingrained tendency to hope for technological quick fixes instead of simple, timeworn solutions. Surrounded by hapless administrators, Cummings identified the over-powerful yet ineffective state bureaucracy as the problem, and markets and Big Tech as the solution. Yet the global response to Covid reveals the opposite: surely the state is the solution. The market is as parasitic on the state for its survival as steppe nomads are on settled farmers: not the freebooting corsairs of neoliberal mythology, but entirely reliant on the state to pump taxpayer’s money into correcting their errors.
Back in the spring, distracted by the global crisis of liberalism, the pandemic was presented as a test between liberalism and authoritarianism. The success of East Asian democracies such as Taiwan and South Korea, however, shows that the crucial distinction is in fact simply that between functioning state bureaucracies and inept ones.
It is noteworthy, perhaps, that Taiwan and South Korea, as well as the also-successful Israel, are neighboured by enemies, and have experience in military mass mobilisation as a result; tucked away on our island at the most pacific corner of the European continent, we have lost a necessary appreciation of threat, like the flightless birds on previously undiscovered islands which waddled heedlessly into hungry sailors’ outstretched arms.
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SubscribeThe state is incompetent, corrupt, and self-serving. Yet I fail to see how your solution of yet more state, is going to help matters.
Very few of our politicians, and civil servants have ever had a real job, where you have to perform or be sacked. All PPE graduates should be barred from public service.
In fairness, I don’t think that Aris is necessarily suggesting ‘more state’; rather a ‘better state’. Of course, identifying the problem is easy – solving it is a different matter.
Roll on the Revolution.
As a PPE graduate I can but agree with you BUT after 20 years in the private sector and proving you can hack it then may be you should be allowed in!!
Mark Francois is an idiot but I don’t think he is corrupt or self-serving (all of us are self-serving to a degree).
Who/what is stopping UK state from hiring Jimmy (PhD in Aerospace) that worked for Airbus for 20 years – in Toulouse & Hamburg – and speaks fluent French & German?
A former colleague of mine works for the Treasury – part time. She has an MBA from Ivy League University and worked for years in Investment Banking in NYC & London. She (being a mom and all that) works pretty hard and is highly competent. According to her the problems are political not technocratic. People (Aris and most of the commentators here) pretend lunch is free – be in political or financial terms. It is not.
Some idiots, like Thatcher, are useful and necessary, and Francois is one of those.
Maggie was everything but an idiot.
‘anything’ I think
She single handedly destroyed British research and higher education. British scientists post-Thatcher have not won as many Nobel prices as they used to pre-Thatcher!
Absurd.
Germany won 20 Nobels between 1950 and 1969 and 11 between 2000 and 2019. Was that huge decrease Thatcher’s doing too?
When there was no competition from Britain, German scientists probably just took it easy!
joking aside get real.
The civil service is full of Phd types. We’ve had enough of experts.
Ah yes experts, what do they know? I met a bloke in Wetherspoons who told me you can cure this virus with a cocktail of meths and drain cleaner. He seemed to know what he was talking about.
The guy in the pub was right. He could fix the virus with meths and drain cleaner. Sadly the patient died from side effects.
Come to think of it now, a car mechanic would flush out the sludge from your car engine and refill it with clean oil. So why cannot a doctor flush out his patient’s blocked arteries with a suitable degreaser? Without killing his patient of course.
They can, the ‘degreaser’ is called a statin, and I for one am well beyond the ‘finishing post’ because of it.
There are drugs the can do that. Unfortunately when the fat / calcium deposits are released, they travel through the blood to the heart and cause a heart attack.
You probably can. Death cures everything.
I saw a Professor on TV who said you can cure this virus by shutting down the economy, asking people to stay in their homes, closing all the schools and then paying people not to work. I was a bit skeptical, but he seemed to know what he was talking about.
That was in March…..
Lockdown did reduce transmission rates resulting in a reduction in the number of hospitalisations ensuring that the NHS did not collapse. The Government’s subsequent failure to create a test and trace system that could decisively pin down new outbreaks of the virus is not the fault of lockdowns. Social distancing remains the best way to break the transmission of infectious diseases. Look at the data comparing US cities that enforced social distancing during Spanish Flu with those that did not. The results are stark.
Lockdowns have never been without risks. They cause death in other ways and sabotage the economy. However, our social contract must be that we are all willing to suffer economically so that more people do not have to prematurely bury their family and friends. Other nations managed this crisis more effectively because they were better prepared and made the right decisions at the right time. Our Government has failed us but instead you question whether social distancing reduces the spread of infectious diseases.
I agree lockdowns work insofar as they reduce transmission, hospitalisations and deaths. The problem is when they end, everything reverses. They are always temporary.
The UK has built the largest test and trace system in the world per capita, of any major country. However unless the testing and isolation is mandated, through legislation, it can never be effective. The system is entirely pointless if people once tested positive or contract traced do not isolate. That has been the case for every country in the world.
Personally I would mandate testing and attach electronic tags or force apps on people to monitoring they are isolating. I would arrest them if they breach isolation. But we are a liberal democracy and I can understand why the government will not do that.
Almost every major western country in the world has been impacted in a similar manner. Germany was lucky in the first wave, now they have mass infections and 1000 deaths a day. Deaths per capita are similar for France and Italy, Spain. Unlike those countries we test and trace more people and have vaccinated more people. We are fortunate to be in the UK. We are unfortunate to have the new variant in the UK, although it was our world leading genomic testing that identified it and enable us to act.
“The Government’s subsequent failure to create a test and trace system…”
This is partly true – Dido Harding has a record of incompetence – but overlooks the fact that the “test” part of the system is inadequate. PHE’s own figures show that the RT-PCR test is neither sensitive enough in general, nor specific enough at low prevalence (which, despite the hype, is what we actually have) to provide useful results when used in the community. False negatives and false postives abound, so we’re in a fog of confusion. (They could improve things a little by reporting the Ct values – below 25, most people are not infectious.) The lateral flow tests are reported to have better specificity, but their sensitivity is woeful. You might as well toss a coin. Politicians don’t understand statistics, nor does the MSM.
JJ’s totalitarian prescription (see below) would mean locking up large numbers of false positives at the same time as you let the false negatives roam free. A recipe for disaster.
A PhD in International Relations is just about as useful as a rolling pin is to a bullfighter!
It’s probably useful if you are dealing in international relations.
Rolling pin to bullfighter? Applied forcefully onto the animal weak spot, it might work.
Yep, let’s fire the medics…Are you sane?
I’m not suggesting we fire the medics. I am suggesting we don’t let them have the power to destroy the economy.
Let’s simply agree that there is a realm for experts and a realm for the use of public and personal opinion. They are not the same.
YES.
PPE is literally just a employment ticket for political office/civil service. Pre-packaged opinions wrapped together in a nice bow ready for joining the mandarin class. I remember being shocked in my teens reading that there was degree for Politics (a massive subject in itself), Philosophy (even bigger) AND Economics (as large as Politics, and with more application). All in three years. I thought: There is no way you can seriously study all these subjects in one degree.
Later on I realised that actually PPE students were literally only studying a small sampling of these subjects, and – surpise surprise – they all conformed to the Conventional Wisdom and Received Opinion of the current political class. Graduates of this subject(s) all think and sound alike. You mention one slightly unusual economist or philsopher, and they look as you as though as you are quoting an alien text.
The Four year Greats/Classics course should a mandatory requirement.
Learn how Ancient Greece and Rome did it, and we may still have a slim chance against the Mongoloid hordes massing on ‘The Limes/Frontiers’.
David Cameron is living proof of what a c**p degree is PPE. Strangely, it turns out that Ancient Greece, Rome, Latin and Greek (Bojo) provides a much better, and stiffer intellectual framework. Econ 101 – lines going everywhere – is total s..t. I know, because I used to teach it at b-school. Will it change ? No, because the vested interest of university economics departments in neo-classical econ rubbish, with their inconsequential hypotheses and multiple regression analyses suitably rejigged to look meaningful, is much too great. We’ve seen it before: in the Middle Ages, when clerics argued with each other about how many angels could be located on a pinhead. Look where that ended up.
The classics make a fine foundation, because our culture is literally built on them.
The industrial revolution wasn’t ushered in by classics Oxbridge scholars! The modern culture is the outcome of the last industrial revolution.
Quite correct, none of the Titans that started the Industrial Revolution were the product of Oxbridge.
In fact Oxbridge essentially a ‘ Priest Factory’ for the Anglican Church, was diametrically opposed to all those who toiled in/with ‘dark satanic mills’.
Quite correct, none of the Titans that started the Industrial Revolution were the product of Oxbridge.
In fact Oxbridge essentially a ‘ Priest Factory’ for the Anglican Church, was diametrically opposed to all those who toiled in/with ‘dark satanic mills’.
Quite correct, none of the Titans that started the Industrial Revolution were the product of Oxbridge.
In fact Oxbridge essentially a ‘ Priest Factory’ for the Anglican Church, was diametrically opposed to all those who toiled in/with ‘dark satanic mills’.
Quite correct, none of the Titans that started the Industrial Revolution were the product of Oxbridge.
In fact Oxbridge essentially a ‘ Priest Factory’ for the Anglican Church, was diametrically opposed to all those who toiled in/with ‘dark satanic mills’.
But those who aren’t clever enough to understand algebra can confuse the masses with their abstruse vocabulary.
You can build a crappy house on fine foundations.
Correct – but you can’t build a fine house on crappy foundations.
Classics is/was useful if you have to run an Empire.
Sadly those days are long gone, and the world is poorer place as a tsunami of greed and corruption now overwhelms it.
Sic Gloria Transit Mundi.
Classics is/was useful if you have to run an Empire.
Sadly those days are long gone, and the world is poorer place as a tsunami of greed and corruption now overwhelms it.
Sic Gloria Transit Mundi.
Classics is/was useful if you have to run an Empire.
Sadly those days are long gone, and the world is poorer place as a tsunami of greed and corruption now overwhelms it.
Sic Gloria Transit Mundi.
Our culture is built first on sheep (as emphasised by the wool-sack in Parliament), and later by international trade (as witnessed by our once-enormous merchant marine). So perhaps the ideal training for MPs would be sheep-farming combined with freight sailing?
Agreed, though with the current crop that would quickly become sheep-shagging, followed by some ‘frigging in the rigging’…
It doesn’t seem to have rubbed off on Johnson. And I speak as one.
Where did that pin end up?
Quite, but it is not simply PPE that is cheating students and then the country – there are so many more light weight degrees.and their ‘professors’ doing the same.
Only real engineers should be allowed to run anything as complex as a government, NHS, treasury, etc. These guys are the only ones who can grasp the concept of balance in complex systems.
Go and hire them.
Pay them.
They have tried to but private sector will always pay more. And there is little evidence that Jimmy (there is a shortage of grads BTW) with an aerospace degree wants to work for GOV instead of Airbus.
These days Jimmy will struggle with engineering employment . Jemima , not so much.
I agree. I am available at very reasonable rates.
Yours sincerely, a Real Engineer.
Actually, I would be happy were doctors to run hospitals, and accountants to run the treasury – the NHS should be replaced by copies of those systems with which we it is adversely compared, e.g. Germany.
Engineers have been running governments worldwide for the past 25 years..Social Engineers….Manipulators of ”Data” & ”Models” skewered to their particular ‘argument’ or field
It’s CP Snow’s Two Cultures problem still with us:
A good many times I have been present at gatherings of people who, by the standards of the traditional culture, are thought highly educated and who have with considerable gusto been expressing their incredulity at the illiteracy of scientists. Once or twice I have been provoked and have asked the company how many of them could describe the Second Law of Thermodynamics. The response was cold: it was also negative. Yet I was asking something which is the scientific equivalent of: Have you read a work of Shakespeare’s? I now believe that if I had asked an even simpler question ““ such as, What do you mean by mass, or acceleration, which is the scientific equivalent of saying, Can you read? ““ not more than one in ten of the highly educated would have felt that I was speaking the same language. So the great edifice of modern physics goes up, and the majority of the cleverest people in the western world have about as much insight into it as their neolithic ancestors would have had.
And that was 1959.
I am reminded of the experiment where MPs were asked what the odds were, when tossing a fair coin twice, of two heads in a row. About 50% of Tories got it wrong, about 80% of Labour too.
The party split is not so much the issue as the innumeracy – it comes out in idiotic policies like the “gender pay gap” nonsense, and in energy policy where most of them seem to know nothing about how energy is generated, stored, or how it is distributed.
Except that when CP Snow himself expressed an opinion about a policy – he was normally wrong. Still his general point, the need for more scientific understanding among policy makers, may have been correct – even if not in his own individual case.
I agree Aaron. 3 years PPE will only result in somebody fit to be part of the political system if they spend a lot of tme studying out of the beaten track. The main issue with PPE, in my opinion, but I will be happy to be proven wrong, is that most PPE students are public school persons (mostly masculine ones at that, seems to me) who felt entitled in the first place. It is so contradictory in a way: if you feel you are entitled, then you should not be afraid to venture away from the beaten tracks…you should not fear losing your entitlement. Yet, they do just the opposite. So maybe they are scared of losing their places in society??? So they can be toppled.
I read PPE. It was really boring, I got a 2.2 and never did anything remotely
connected with it ever again. Maybe I am an exception, no idea. My fellow PPE students in my college were pretty normal people, no high-flying entitled types. One became a civil servant. To be honest, I don’t see it as being
any worse than a lot of other Oxford degrees. Don’t forget Johnson
read Classics.
“Never had a real job”? Do you actually know this, or is it just standard shoot-from-the-hip-at-something-or-other rightwing rhetoric? When I was in the Civil Service (a long time ago) there were many section leaders who had done plenty of outside jobs before. Since then, I hardly think they are likely to have reduced, because there has been pressure to increase them. After leaving, and self-employed in the private sector (where I worked successfully if I wanted to eat), I found there were plenty in the public sector (with whom I often worked), and in other sectors such as social work and law (with whom I also worked). I appreciate that one person’s experience (mine or yours) isn’t a representative survey. I would ask where your figures come from, but you didn’t present any.
As for “yet more state”, the past year should have taught us all that state intervention is sometimes essential. Left to market forces, the health system was prepared for nothing, run down to the bare minimum. Overseas fully privatised systems have fared no better – the US is a disaster area. Then, the US health system has always been a disaster. That is why their (no doubt very efficient) methods result in a shorter life expectancy and poorer outcomes in many fields, such as infant mortality. We need to understand that public services spend money, and it’s how they do it that matters.
Agreed, too much state can be a bad thing as well, but we are nowhere near that yet. We need more decentralisation, not London functioning like a colonial government and ignoring the local knowledge and capabilities of everyone outside the M25.
Taking back control? Brexit was only the half of it.
There are two points here which do reveal a staggering level of let’s just say innocence. “When I was in the Civil Service (a long time ago)” so how relevant is that experience today ?
“Left to market forces, the health system was prepared for nothing”. There are no market forces in our health service, it is state run (the clue is in the name.) It is a command economy: Infinite demand, limited supply and no clearing price mechanism.
Quite wrong, it is infested with corporate interest through bodies like Public Health England, NICE etc. The great idea about the NHS was to provide service free at the point of delivery, but our institutions need to be accountable to us, not global interests.
Hi Martyn. I think you will find that the government has included market forces into the NHS, mostly concealed, even the way they buy medicines or PPE is/was actually partly due to market pressure. Do your research.
Second about Robert Forde’s experience: we do not know how long ago, but we know a lot of people stay in the civil service for decades, so there is no saying that part of what RF says is not relevant today. You are not proving your point.
Goodness, you clearly have a lot of time on your hands given your volume of posts. And thanks for the patronising comment. Given you are such an expert, you can tell us what percent of the NHS budget is spent on medicines/PPE ? 50, 60, 70% ?
Off the top of my head, no. However, the enormous burden of admin costs which were brought in beginning with Thatcher’s/Major’s “reforms”must form a sizeable part of the budget.
“Do your research.”. Anne’s comment. “Must form a sizeable part” Kathy’s comment. Maybe you should do the same.
Perhaps learning a little about the privatisation by stealth of the NHS (since the mid 80s) might improv your argument.
And what pray, are the areas that have been privatised. Please tell me what to read to enlighten myself.
We know of one part of the health system which is private; vaccine development.
Look at acute mental health beds and complex learning disabilities as a place to start. I am not commenting on good or bad but it would be good for more to understand the hugely valuable supply chains that operate – linked to private equity global companies. This is is where alot of our NHS budget goes. The workforce was left to the market about 10 years ago – nurses and all the other professions had to pay for their own training – we now have unhelpful shortages across all clinical specialisms.
“…privatisation by stealth of the NHS (since the mid 80s) “
What privatisation? This is a Guardianesque fiction. There has been no privatisation.
Agreed with everything you said…except I do not think Brexit will prove a wise move.
The author is presumably too young to remember the last time when government officials ruled the commanding heights of our economy, when swathes of manufacturing, steel, coal and utilities were under state control, as were telecommunications (wait weeks for a line and then only one phone model on offer).
It was a disaster. With the depredations of the unions also contributing (made super-powerful by ruling over nationalised industries where they had governments over a barrel), Britain was called the ‘sick man of Europe’.
There’s a reason why the Thatcher government rolled back the state. The one area that was untouchable was … the highly centralised NHS. We’re paying for that now.
We could re-nationalise the railways though.
Call me sentimental, but have you tried booking a ticket across different operators, without getting overcharged and/or threatened with a fine all on the same journey?
But why nationalise as a knee-jerk policy?
Take Chiltern, which I have been using since 1994.
A fine service, well-priced, and continual improvement to both trains and infrastructure throughout that time.
Okay, as a concession I will leave Chiltern out of my plans.
Then put the people running Chiltern in charge of the nationalised network. They have proved themselves. That is meritocracy, what was wrong with nationalisation was not the nationalisation per se, but how they were run. A lot of countries with nationalised railway and other infrastructure do a very good job (Germany/Switzerland). Bad administrators then, bad administrators now. Don’t confuse the system and those running it.
Depends which Chiltern line you are on…
Indeed. And nationalise the supermarkets. Have you tried getting Sainsbury to supply Waitrose ham, Tesco cornflakes, Morrisons beef, and Mark’s and Spencer mountain bars? It’s a national disgrace
I only said the railways
Not my beloved ladies on the delicatessen counter at Waitrose.
You clearly never had to use the filthy outdated and unreliable nationalised British Railways .
I pray it never happens again
I did I commuted regularly on them. They use to be crowded because most people preferred using them to driving and they could afford to. I don’t remember the reliability and frequency of trains getting any better post privatization. The trains and stations got a nice new paint job whilst prices went up and a simple fare system became unintelligible. The points still failed, leaves on the line and the wrong type of snow still brought services to a halt. Each time I got on a train I had no idea what time it would get to its destination during rush hour. Before privatization each yearly fare rise was roundly condemned by the press and whichever side was in opposition even though they were below inflation. Ever since fare rises have consistently been higher than inflation justified by “investment”. Furthermore it was once very cheap to park the car at the local station. One of the first things post privatization was parking charges went up massively. It used to be cheaper to commute long distances by train than car. By the time I stopped commuting I would drive as far into London as I could without incurring parking charges despite the extra journey time. Property prices in the London went through the roof whist many commuter areas they were static because commuting became so expensive, you now need a pretty well paid job to justify paying train fares. If the old British Rail was allowed to increase prices to the level they have done since I suspect it would have been a pretty good service like many nationally owned railways you see across the world.
I am not a fan of big government for the most part but privatization of our major infrastructure service industries seems to have produced little improvement beyond cosmetic presentation and huge price rises, telecomms possibly being the one exception, even then a lot of modern technology was developed under public ownership, the GPO were just rubbish at marketing and a competitive market offered real alternative services and products not just an alternative bill collector.
Speaking of filth, nothing could be worse than the toilet in the 1st class Virgin train I travelled in a few years ago.
I was working for BR when it was split up and privatised. It was a colossal step backwards, as cutting-edge technology was abandoned in favour of outdated less efficient methods, which earned a higher % profit. It was depressing. It was good for lawyers, though, and what had previously been run by a single board of directors now needed 50 boards of directors (at inflated pay rates).
Yes. Quite often. All went very smoothly.
Railtrack is nationalised….Royal mail constant Stamp price rises shows too much Privatisation is as bad as too much state control..
Perhaps the worst favour that Thatcher did us was making higher education dependent on corporate patronage – quite the wrong type of market solution.
In many ways the public ownership of the late 1940s didn’t go far enough. Not in extent, but in depth- falling short of making real changes in management. The state took over the bankrupt major industries, which had been starved of proper investment since 1914 by warfare, profiteering, incompetent leadership, depression, and then more warfare. Instead of re-structuring them for improved efficiency, much of the existing management and organisational structures were left in place. The Unions were as bad: offered a German-style representation in management, they refused, feeling safer in their comfort zone of “us & them” antagonism. Failure was more-or-less inevitable.
Rail lines which had been loss-makers since their construction in the late 1800s were left open, and drained the system. The ‘modernisation’ of the 1960s with electrification was 20 years too late. Tiny and archaic steelworks and coal mines were left open, and new up-scaled plants again not developed this time for 30 years. The Labour administration was truly too deferential towards the British managers who had been failing for 40 years or more, during our long slide from industrial leadership into irrelevance.
PPE is considered fairly right of centre, yet most of our politicians and politicians are left wing. Discuss.
They read The Guardian. And watch BBC.
They really don’t.
What makes you say most politicians are left wing? Prove it.
“All PPE graduates should be barred from public service.”
I cannot agree with that, and not for reasons to do with my own education (which is all STEM).
Rather, require that nobody can become an MP until they are at least 35 years old, and have minimum employment criteria. Being a “research assistant” to the likes of Ed Milliband (who likewise never did a real day’s work in his life”) does not count as a real job.
The Civil service might be capable of being reformed – though it might require Cummings to be brought back and given the job of doing so…
David Lawler spot on. No incentive to succeed, little or no downside for failure.
We need to get rid of the political parties. We vote for a representative, but they do not represent and serve us, they serve the political party they belong to. We should keep the first past the post system, but a candidate will only be elected if they get more than 50% of the total registered voters. Reduce the Commons by half and get rid of the House of Lords.
Do you intend to ‘ban’ political parties? How would you form a government? How would you appoint a PM? You can’t let Parliament decide these things as there would be chaos.
If you need 50% of the vote, it’s not really FPTP. You would have qualified majority voting.
Political parties, in the context of FPTP, help force collaboration between similar minded people (big tent politics). Without them you would have allsorts of loonies standing and you would never get anywhere near 50%.
We need political parties more than ever, as consensus politics is under massive stress with the advent of the internet (everyone is now an expert and usually has multiple different views that never remain static).
Can you state a democratic country which doesn’t have political parties?
The work of a politician is a real job. It requires particular set of skills and parliamentarians can be good or bad at their job. What is a real job exactly? A toilet cleaner, astrophysicist, AI programmer or shelf stacker. An MP is good at their job if they are a strong voice in Parliament for those that they represent. Running a government department is a different proposition altogether, granted. However, this ‘real job’ narrative is tabloid rubbish and if anything seems to code for anyone who is middle-class and well-educated. University of life, bro.
Perhaps there is no solution. https://www.telegraph.co.uk…
I quite agree David. Everything was nationalised after the war and look what happened to our economy? It collapsed amongst recrimination, poor productivity, poisonous industrial relations, lack of investment and lousy performance. We were a basket case by the 1970’s, seemingly incapable of governing ourselves which is one reason we joined the EEC to ask them to help us out.
I do understand the idea of a de-centralised state and the need for local, determined leadership and investment by those who know what they’re doing: experienced investors, business people, administrators, entrepreneurs etc. These are the people who make things happen not bureaucrats and Whitehall officials who have never visited most of the rest of the country.
“Root and branch reform of the civil service” sounds great. You’re not the first person to suggest it. It has never been achieved, so how do you propose it can be? “Clear out the dross” of course but again this is a vacuous statement.
As for ideas like “a
vast new programme of public infrastructure projects, and an immediate program of nationalisation of key industries and utilities”, absolutely not and definitely not until the mythical competent state has been achieved. Ditto the government by random lottery. Bonkers.
By the way, do you really think the French state is “well-practised at actually doing things” (competently)? 500 vaccines administered to date, and a huge shortfall in doses ordered doesn’t seem that competent. And the gilet jaunes say ‘hi.’
I don’t want to sound too provocative. I’m with on the whole lack of competence in government and the civil service thing. I actually think that the Tories are at least making some waves about reform of the most seriously dysfunctional institutions. I’m not sure Johnson is fully committed to the program, and the myopic reliance on SAGE is a worry, but I don’t think anyone else would be doing better – and certainly not Starmer.
Relative political newcomer Macron through his nascent, upstart party En Marche! apparently famously achieved his lofty position seeing off all the big main long established political rivals and defeated Marine Le Pen in the presidential run off with barely any party machinery or funding to speak of at the time and through his grassroots supporters going door to door asking hundreds of thousands of people, many of them younger voters, what they thought was wrong with France.
And in the space of only a few years…..
Vive la plus ça change!!
Yes, once you’ve got your hands on the chauffeur-driven Citroen and got accustomed to having your coffee served by an obsequiously smiling pretty girl in a uniform, then why change anything ?
Surely gerontophile Monsieur Macaroni would prefer the pretty girl’s granny to serve his coffee.
People talk about reforms but are not willing to pay the price. Schroeder did the right thing for Germany (Agenda 2010 and Iraq War) – he lost his re-election. There is the lesson for you.
..the globalist propaganda machine moved against him and voila…..he’s out. Just like Trump, just like..XXXX…..(insert any ‘right-wing’ or ‘far right’ labelled politician or public figure.
….and he’s just another identikit globalist like almost every Western politician. I may be wrong but I seem to remember that although Macron was unknown politically, he was backed by serious multinational financial cartels and their money.
Not such an outsider after all?
Isn’t the lack of anyone in mainstream politics that you would truly wish to vote into power a major, a large part of this problem? Why the system has been in play too long and needs to be replaced. I am not politically minded enough to suggest how!
Yes, Macron suggesting use of a lottery is madness and I live in France.
Sophie, please explain why it is (lottery 35) madness, other than the fact that you are not politically minded. You might be right, but you might not, just explain your point please.
We already have government by lottery. Random individuals put themselves up for selection as candidates. Random candidates are then selected by a random set of members of a party and put up for office. Random voters vote in these random candidates and they randomly become part of the largest party. This party then picks random members to form the government. Any picking of Hancock, Grayling, Williamson, Corbyn, Abbot and a good few others must surely be random, please tell me it wasn’t by design!
With all due respect, that is just not sound. Random individuals apply for medical school – it doesn’t mean doctors are just selected by lottery. There is selection, on the basis of some assessment of presumed competence and aptitude. So it is with elections: anyone can stand, but voters choose – and it is wrong to say they do so without thoughtful discretion.
They were wise enough to reject Corbyn, for example…
I have offered My services in the Last 5 General Elections & been rejected 5 times,So the country has to Suffer…Will prince Charles make it to King,before i’m MP ..discuss?…;)
I live in France, the farce is beyond parody. Under pressure…?…the EU procured 300 million vaccines with Sanofi, yes you guessed it a French Pharma Major…declining an early invitation from Pfizer in favour of a European solution. They have now secured 100 million doses from “Pfizer” enough to vaccinate 10% of the -EU- population.
The more I see the more I believe, we the UK really have confidently arrived in the sunlit uplands.
Because many thought that Sanofi was ahead of the curve. US too placed a large order for its vaccines.
Did you miss the BioNTech part of Pfizer vaccine?
You mean in favour of a solution that benefited a French company? What a price such national self-interest / chauvinism has come at. And this from the little upstart (far better funded and much more the insider than is thought) who saw fit to lecture Britain for leaving the EU regularly and very recently. Proof that as if it were needed, that France (and Germany) put themselves first, not the EU.
The more I see the more I believe, we the UK really have confidently arrived in the sunlit uplands.
Leaving France and moving back to gambol on the sunlit uplands, then, are you?
I agree about the French State not showing great efficiency, but the UK did not do great in the first few days of vaccinating, so give them 10 days to show what they are made of. I am always happy when people mention the Gilets Jaunes as a proof of whatever they want, as long as it is negative, in French governance. Do you not think it is remarkable that there is a country which is in fact able to function WHILE large numbers are protesting, without resorting to Chinese style crushing? Moreover, the Gilets Jaunes have achieved some victories. Apart from Markus Rashford (Markus Rashford for Prime Minister is my motto) who in the UK has protested and got results???? The Dizzy Blonde in Westminster being what he is and saying what he does say, the Scots will try to get out (and I know a fair few in Manchester who wonder if a case can be made for us to become Scots). I am not sure said Dizzy Blonde won’t try to crush them militarily, because he’ll think people want that, or, corection, his back benchers want that.
“Our Government has indeed mounted a wartime response to Covid, in that tens of thousands of fellow countrymen are now dead due to a series of catastrophic errors.”
Oh what piffle!
People have died with covid all over the world – where the sun has already set over the British empire. I can’t decide whether this statement comes out of the author’s arrogance (Britannia still rules the waves) or parochial ignorance of there being an outside world.
First everybody thought it was just another virus from China. Yawn. Then, when they realized it might be a virus escaped from the lab in Wuhan with gain-of-function features, they were terrified, because it would have enhanced functions that would just beat down human immune systems.
That’s why such unprecedented action was taken: shutting down, locking down, trampling over civil liberties, human rights and economies – in a life-and-death situation we can worry about that later.
Then it turned out that this virus cannot, after all, overcome regular human immune systems and it only kills people who are already weak and vulnerable and old and immune compromised and sickly.
But then they were locked in by journalists too lazy to do any research and make their names by yelling at officials with gotcha questions! “Why did you not lock down sooner and harder!” This attack made it impossible for governments to calmly reassess and admit: “We’ve overreacted, sorry about the inconvenience, it’s not as bad as we thought. Everybody go back to normal.”
Today’s media just makes it impossible for governments to do their work. Unless they are in a position to avert their faces from the journalistic halitosis and carry on with the job – like Putin.
There is now enough evidence all over the world of different countries having responded in different ways to enable us to compare and establish that it made not a damn difference.
Counter-intuitively, statistics even show that fewer people died of covid (per million of the population) in the poorer countries. One of the more obvious reasons is that poor countries have younger populations. (There are other reasons too complex to explain here.) It has nothing to do with how clever their governments were.
“There is now enough evidence all over the world of different countries having responded in different ways to enable us to compare and establish that it made not a damn difference.” Are you sure? Compare the UK with Japan, island nations of roughly a similar size. Some difference there, don’t you think?
Couldn’t agree more
Yes, the Media and Big Tech have a lot to answer for. Rather than investigating what works and trumpeting such, they find the bad and frame it to its scariest maximum and bast it lavishly with woke gravy. Now I’m hungry… er, angry…the MSM is the real problem, the Universities are our second.
Look at the the 21-item checklist of form-filling for doctors who want to volunteer to give jabs to 80-year-olds: diversity, human rights, equality, conflict resolution, preventing radicalisation, fire safety (the list goes on and on). They are a stark reminder of a trend in UK politics since the Blair era: whenever the chattering classes get a bee in their bonnet about some topic, politicians introduce it into legislation. From then on, that legislation has got to take precedent over common sense as far as the civil service is concerned.
This is a good point. As a fairly senior local government worker I can recognise it clearly. As well as political trends there are also ever evolving and inter linked compliance regulations and standards that mean huge parts of governmental at levels is in a state of constant administrative flux. Plus constant metrics and reporting to internal and external boards and bodies. Many of these administrative hurdles also leads to a huge chunk of what appears to be incompetence or mismanagement as they all influence specifications for services that you’re procuring. You end up procuring people who are excellent at mirroring back the language of the state rather than doing the services you require. And you end up procuring people who are good at doing the secondary political trends over the ones who are good at doing the service you require.
If there were no people living in our local government area and no service to provide we could still do 30-50% of our work. And that’s not right.
I worked in the private sector before, and it’s a very different beast so it isn’t as simple as replication. I’ve thought about how to create more efficient public bodies quite a lot. The only thing I can think about is setting up dummy organisations afresh. But if you’re basing the operational requirements off the legislation and policy we have now you’ll end up with slightly
more efficient versions of the same monsters.
Diversity – Die white people die!!
Human rights – human wrongs, absurdities cooked up in courts to violate all sense of justice and proportionality.
Equality – “Screw men, white people, christians and people who fancy the opposite sex and but don’t want to dress up as them.”
Conflict Resolution – pussycats using psychobabble.
Preventing Radicalisation – identifying thoughtcrime and reporting to the police for punishment if required.
Fire Safety – “If there’s a fire, be sure to leave the building!”
This deserves a double uptick, but the technology doesn’t allow it!
I believe there are some good therapists for this sort of anger problem, though.
Therapists should come right after Fire Safety in his list.
Great post.
If only that were the Fire Safety advice – see Grenfell Tower.
If one of these doctors turns out to be the next Harold Shipman, you will be the first to scream outrage that there was no vetting process.
You can’t win.
And how would those forms spot the next Shipman? He was a doctor. Maybe he would have explained on the radicalisation form that he wanted to kill people. “Drat, I’d have got away with it but you had to ask me about that! Fair cop guv. “
What has Diversity training got to do with the ability to inject a vaccine?
Okay, we can skip that bit 🙂
Yes but…the vetting processes mentioned will NOT weed out Harold Shipmans. Also, as I have done the courses, I can tell you with absolute confidence: they are time consuming box ticking exercises. They are unable to address the issues, except maybe conflict resolution and pro-social modelling (latter not on the list).
That’s hilarious.
How exactly do you think that filling in forms on “diversity, human rights, equality, conflict resolution, preventing radicalisation, fire safety” would have caught Harold Shipman, or stop another one?
The point of this bureaucracy is that it is at best entirely pointless, at worse, actively harmful.
A person should be required to have a medical degree to practise medicine.
Having attended a course in “diversity” or “preventing radicalisation” is of no benefit at all.
These things exist only to provide work for members of the brain-dead government class and they hurt everyone else.
Spot on. In the context of a response to a public health emergency, I just want the volunteer medics to put a jabs in arms as quickly as is safe. I do not want the volunteer medics to spend time pondering whether the 80 year olds who they are about to jab look like they might have been radicalised by checking out the tell-tale signs enumerated by the plonker with the flip chart giving the spot-the-radical training course.
This is slightly off-topic, but I noticed this morning that Talk Radio was no longer available on YouTube. I suspected the heavy hand of censorship, and it turns out that Talk Radio has indeed been banned from YouTube for talking to eminent doctors and scientists etc who do not agree with the line that almost all governments have taken on Covid.
This is very, very serious and proves once again that we are fast approaching a state of tyranny. I would encourage everyone to support Talk Radio by listening to them online while you still can. They are not perfect, but they are a million times better than the BBC.
Just search for it. The TalkRadio sites is better than YouTube.
Nonetheless, this is the last straw – What else is Google censoring without my knowledge?
I shall do what I had planned for some time and de-google myself.
PS: I gave Youtube some feedback to the effect that I don’t like a gang of rat-faced yanks censoring what I can listen to.
I realise that it does no good, but It might give the snowflake that reads it an attack of the vapours.
You guys really are the perfect marks for the free speech grifters out there.
…and your name is?
What is a free speech grifter?
There is a need in any crisis to prevent disinformation.
“Masks work”, Masks are ineffective”, “Social distancing is not necessary”, “Social distancing is mandatory to save lives”-these are only some of the many different positions taken by our masters in government and tech. The crisis is incipient totalitarianism, and controlling and banning non-approved statements is the need that animates these increasingly dangerous entities.
The changing positions are less alarming that the speed within which people forget the old advice while demanding adherence to the new. We have more access to information than ever before – to include what today’s “expert” said yesterday or two weeks ago – but unfortunately, we have the attention span of toddlers.
All we are being fed from the government is disinformation.
What a revolutionary idea – listening to someone on the other side of the debate! If we have to have SAGE (a misnomer if ever there was one, along with NICE – who aren’t) why are economists, psychologists etc etc not included? Health is not just about curing/ treating illness. The problem with this country is we don’t take a holistic view. The other problem is having politicians with no imagination or ideas to begin with.
And where did all these ‘professors’ come from?
Is there an assembly line somewhere?
And not a mention of it on the BBC site/news.
And yet, listening to TalkRADIO last night after the green light to abandon Dry January early was announced, one had the option of enduring James Whale and his moronic sidekick trash any and all callers with a different or sceptical view.
According to the Whale, if the callers weren’t scientists then they had no right to a point of view because they weren’t as qualified or experienced as government scientists. We all know how consistent and transparent the latter have been. But the callers are equally not as qualified as the eminent and experienced scientists from all over the world who have a different approach or point of view. That however is not to be tolerated. It’s increasingly hard to see a way out of this as long as idiots like Whale can shut down debate. He represents all that is reprehensible about the majority of the last, feckless and complicit / compliant MSM.
Make that lazy, not last.
Youtube Google Twitter ALL Stop anyone,Views Who oppose Lockdowns, Global ‘Warming’ &climate channge ,or UN ..whether its Davos 2020 .Globalism is a failed ‘religion” Talkradio at least Presents both sides of An Argument,NOT cancel culture favoured by University Campuses
You mention the way Labour nationalise swathes of the country after the War.
Are you aware that they kept rationing?
It was only fully removed (by a conservative government) in 1954 – 9 years after the war!
That is how good the Labour party was and how successful nationalisation was.
You write that the state is not very good at managing things and then go on to suggest we need more state interference; have you ever considered how illogical that is?
Surely the lesson to learn, is that if the state is not good at managing, then there should be less state managing.
We have a perfect example of incompetence with the vaccine rollout. Some bureaucrat, or bureaucratic committee has decided that a practicing dentist cannot administer a jab without filling in loads of forms.
I live in hope that some, any journalist will expose this monstrous bureaucratic nightmare. But no, you all seem to think this is fine; why?
Don’t forget that after it cost Labour the 1950 election, the Conservatives kept rationing going for another four years before they finally had to accept that it would do the same to them.
1951 General election….& Clothes were rationed until 1956..
‘in that tens of thousands of fellow countrymen are now dead due to a series of catastrophic errors.’
No they are dead due to a virus that is probably not containable. Yes mistakes were made but statements such as this are purely emotive.
Current death rates are not out of the ordinary they may rise but I think they should have done that already.
We have ten times the ‘cases’ of France and Germany but the same death rate. We test more than they do … could it be the testing that is at fault?
10s of 1000s are dead because 100s of 1000s are flouting health advice¬ giving a toss..
The UK Gov did make catastrophic errors that led to a death rate which could have been mitigated. Chief among these are:
1) Not taking the virus seriously before March (where us advocating for strict border controls were branded racist cranks)
2) The disastrous policy on sending CV19 ill old people back to their nursing homes to free up NHS capacity for a wave of ill young people that never happened. They were literally allowing the virus to spread amongst the most vulnerable population possible. Exact opposite to what should have happened.
Everything that has happened since March is another matter, but there *was* something to be done before then and the UK Gov was found wanting.
My company was following government advice in February about home working, distancing, hand washing etc. The lockdown was a full stage further but it doesn’t mean nothing had happened earlier. I think a full lockdown of a whole country in peacetime is not something you should do lightly. Chris Whitty gave an excellent interview on LBC explaining the expert rationale, and it was basically the Swedish approach. I honestly think the government just looked at the figures, heard everyone calling them evil Tories murdering grannies and saw what others were doing and succumbed to peer pressure.
If you can provide figures to demonstrate that lockdowns are effective and do not kill people then you may have a point.
No figures are given estimating the impact of lockdowns which I think is generally accepted to kill other people. Without that we cannot have a balanced debate.
It is also interesting that other types of flu have virtually disappeared is this not another indicator of a problem with using testing which was not designed for this type of use.
Our institutions are not dysfunctional. They are doing exactly what they have been designed to do – serve the needs of those working in them, and allow them to implement their worldview without too many obstacles. The public is of secondary importance, as are elected politicians.
This is what happens when left wing progressives occupy positions of influence inside institutions. They fail. Always. It’s inevitable when the process is more important than the outcome.
Except that right wing reactionaries would succumb to exactly the same systemic pressures – institutions inevitably evolve to protect their own interests, first and foremost, if not exclusively, and to recruit into their ranks more of the same. This applies as much to corporations as to governments and state bureaucracies. As several have pointed out, a good war would do wonders. I’m not sure Covid is really up to the job.
I think the key point of the article is to make the state / country more effective by decentralising and empowering local people and communities while gutting if not utterly discarding our current introverted, self serving and over-centralised institutions of all stripes, public and private. Any attempt to do the former without the latter is doomed to fail.
Great comment.
Good organisations especially private ones only recruit more of the same if that is reflective of community diversity to do otherwise is bad management.
The media’s role during the pandemic has been entirely destructive, sowing distrust and cynicism, providing a platform for every government critic, and with editorials and columns castigating the government written by journalists who between them wouldn’t qualify for a Girl Guide first aider badge. At the end of their book on the Falklands War, Max Hastings and Simon Jenkins provide assessments of the performance of all the ‘players’, governments, armed forces, etc. The UK media war correspondents are castigated as clueless, incompetent, and unfit in every respect for the role. Nothing has changed in journalism, whether in defence, health, science, and the rest.
“The problem is the state. The solution is more state”…?
That way lies madness.
There is much to like about this article, not least the clear statement that the blame is NOT just to be found with Johnson et al.
It is the same ghastly uselessness that left PHE smugly congratulating themselves for the quality of their pandemic preparedness, while quickly moving on to investigations of ‘systemic racism’… Examples abound:
>The police celebrating their own open mindedness as they ignore Rotherham and as they ignore vandalism and disruptive, destructive X-R demos.
>The failure of the NHS to prepare for extra demand every winter.
>The fact that the NHS HR director is still in post despite the debacle of volunteer vaccinator hiring.
>The whole NHS “National Program” IT fiasco.
It is however utterly unreasonable to expect any PM to clear away all that dross in the mere three or four months before the pandemic struck (the pandemic he would have been advised we were well prepared for) three months during which he had to clean up after the shameful incompetence of Theresa May and the collective actions of the BBC and other “parastate” actors (parastate – great word… and so coincidentally close to parasite) in their efforts to overthrown the will of the British people.
It is a massive, slow, painful and painstaking job to reengineer the British state so as to make it somewhat more fit for purpose. Step 1 must surely be to introduce real accountability to the public sector – more people must be removed, not promoted or shoved sideways, when they make such a massive mess of things.
Bring back Cummings, and give him the resources to really get the job done.
Another truly excellent piece from Aris that brings together so many of my own observations, beliefs and ideas/solutions. And the WWII comparison is surely appropriate. As Andre Walker said last night in his podcast: “Whitty and Vallance are the biggest threat to the UK since Hitler”.
Aris says: “The British state and its parasitic para-state are both entirely unfit for purpose.”. This has been obvious to many of us or many, many years. And I would agree with when he says that, to all intents and purposes, the British state no longer exists. Essentially, it was destroyed by New Labour, who ruined literally everything they touched, here and in Iraq and Afghanistan etc. I believe that far more subsidiarity is the only solution.
I didn’t know that Macron had proposed the selection of 35 random people to help with the vaccine roll-out (A somewhat moot proposal given that Sanofi will not even have a vaccine until the end of the year). Just yesterday I had been thinking – once again – that 650 people picked at random really would undoubtedly have far more expertise/competence, knowledge (of history, science etc), common sense and integrity than the 650 MPs in place. And you can say the same for the HoL.
Like the US, and like a number of other western countries such as Italy, Greece and Spain, the UK is a failing state, and possibly a failed state. In a sense I don’t particularly blame the govt/state for the deaths. Even reasonably well run countries such as Germany and the Netherlands have seen a large number of deaths. But I do blame them for destroying society and millions of livelihoods at the same time, and for not protecting the borders etc.
I do not believe that Labour under anybody, of the Tories under Cameron, would have handled it better. The political class and the surrounding superstructure is so rotten, so denuded of all sense of competence, that all one can do is watch in fascinated horror. The response to Covid is merely the crowing glory of a failure that goes back 25 years to run or respond to anything with any competence or integrity.
However, the solution to this is not, as Aris suggests, more state, and certainly not more of the British state, which will always lead to disaster Aris complains that the neo-liberals have eroded the state, but the state has only grown and grown alongside neo-liberalism over the last 40 years. The solution, instead, is a much higher degree of subsidiarity. This need not mean more layers of politicians and bureaucrats if we can find ways of administering local affairs with volunteer councillors and referendums on local issues.
Political class is elected by the people.
Aris and you pretend that there is a free lunch – politically or financially. There is not.
Although the PM does believe in “cakeism”.
The political class is elected, the civil service and all of the employees in the public institutions are not. And as we have seen, the political class have no control over the public institutions which are mainly full of left wing types.
A civil service full of Mark Francois will be amazing!
As I understand it, in USA much of the Civil Service is appointed/brought in by the in-coming Administration. I’m not sure it produces any better Government, but at least it better embodies the philosophy and objectives of the Party that the voters elected.
A % of it. The core civil service is apolitical.
Apolitical? Surely you jest.
I have worked in the Civil Service and if you believe that then I have a bridge to sell you. There has been an institutional transformation of the Civil Service since the late-90s so that it is decidedly political (broadly aligning with Neoliberalism). Those who do not align with that view keep quiet lest they lose their plum jobs.
More dopey Statements..Blair,Thatcher Politicized the Civil service,BBC, later Police & Elected Mayors &Judiciary (Supreme Court) Time for Non-political appointments..GLA &, P&CC unecessary
It doesn’t matter which 650 MPs you have if they use Covid as an excuse not to go to work.
Cambodia, with a barely functional, deeply corrupt government, has succeeded in avoiding all deaths from Covid-19. Using your line of reasoning, you would argue that the UK should adopt the Hun Sen approach to governance.
The UK has deep problems with managing the role of the state, but you clearly aren’t in a place to be offering advice if you can write the sentence above. (Get a clue — the success of South Korea and Taiwan have very little to do with government competence.)
Would love to know how that differs from the UK.
Have you considered that the virus may have been designed to go easier on East Asians?
Umm, you think?
Consider also that there may be some existing immunity in East Asian populations
The civil service getting rid of the civil service, ok, they are really going to do that!
To many nice lunches to be had by people who have never had a job outside of politics, to many university educated half wits and no people with real life jobs and experience.
Jobs for the right, sorry, correct class will never stop when the right, sorry correct class run everything
So what the author is saying is “drain the swamp”. Unfortunately the swamp is so large and infested with so many undesirable, parasitic, species any government would have to be in power for 30 years to make any kind of progress on a project of that scale. The swamp is not going to drain itself anytime soon so I suppose all we can do is keep promoting the latest culture fashions by considering ourselves all victims and pointing the finger of blame at anyone other than ourselves.
And a great deal of that swamp consists of private sector lobbyists. Whatever motivates them, it isn’t getting government policy right, only getting it closer to what they want.
I’ve been curious about what that suppressed Home Office report had to say. It had to be something explosive. Was it suppressed because it revealed cowardice, depravity and corruption at every level of the British state?
This started out well, but descended into nonsense quite quickly, which is a pity because the central premise is both important and requires debate. I don’t know the political leanings of the author, but in spite of that I have to say that this reads very much like a left-winger who knows that the State has dropped the ball badly, but who has no intention of admitting it without a healthy dose of whataboutery directed at the free market.
Well that won’t wash I’m afraid: look at how the free market adapted to the threat posed by Covid19. Did we run out of food, or require rationing of it? Did supermarket workers threaten to go on strike over working conditions? Even the queues we were forced to put up with were the direct consequence of the State intervening, not the the decisions of the shops themselves. And look at how the other shops that were forced to close adapted: restaurants became take out venues, safely providing restaurant quality meals at home to everyone, while cafes adapted by selling local fresh produce etc.
On the matter of the initial response last year, the suggestion that a Trump-style early block on international travellers would have worked is complete nonsense: the virus was propagating freely in the UK for weeks prior to the government action taken in March, so the notion that erecting a fortress on international travel would have made any difference is simply not true.
The last conclusion that attempts to conflate the need for top level reform in the Civil Service with Boris Johnson’s resignation is risible and outrageous. I do accept that there has been an unacceptable degree of cronyism in the past year, but here’s the thing: you can’t observe this on the one hand and then provide Dominic Cummings with what looks to me like a free pass on his record: he is just as guilty on this score. Frankly, the way Cummings is praised here looks more like an attempt to look balanced, but only by praising someone who’s already got the boot and can’t therefore form part of a solution provided by the existing government.
The truth is that the unusual popularity of Boris Johnson is an absolute prerequisite for any program of reform demanding such disruption. No other PM could have got as far as he has done with the draconian lockdown effects seen thus far, let alone then expect to mount a successful attack on the deep-state vested interests that make top-level reform almost impossible.
On a final note, I do accept the basic premise of the article: the State is unfit for purpose. It has too much power which it seems always to misuse, possessing the character of a bully: intransigent and vexatious towards the individual, and supine and powerless in the face of anything resembling its own size and strength. But the proposals for reform listed here are mostly worthless, other than a welcome recognition that localisation is a necessary component of whatever action is eventually taken.
Very well said.
Yes, very well said.
I agree with the need to rebuild the functionality of the British State which along with many other European states has seen its agency eroded by the EU Treaties.
However, the premise for this essay is plainly false.
60% of the people that die from Covid-19, after contracting Sars-Cov-2, did so due to co-morbidities. The rest died because of age related weaknesses.
In South Korea, nearly 300,000 die a year from preventable forms of cancer. That is nearly 900 a day. In the UK it is 450 a day. Most people dying from Covid-19 were dying anyway, yet your entire essay is premised on saving the unsavable.
If the UK or South Korea genuinely wants to reduce yearly mortality rates as a sign of State competence then tobacco will need to be banned. Alcohol will need to be banned. Air pollution will need to be banned. Food additives will need to be banned. Because people aren’t dying from Covid-19, they are dying from the weakness of their immune system due underlying health issues caused by environmental toxicity.
South Korea might appear competent because of its low incidences of Covid-19 deaths but the underlying health issues which actually result in Covid-19 deaths prevail despite strict surveillance and border controls.
Today, like yesterday and like tomorrow, in South Korea, 900 people will die from preventable forms of cancer. If Sars-Cov-2 was freely circulating in South Korea, the same 900 people will be dead but with Covid-19 on their death certificates.
Time to get real. Nearly all Covid-19 deaths are due to a weak immune system caused by other preventable diseases.
“….they are dying from the weakness of their immune system due underlying health issues caused by environmental toxicity.”
You seem to overlook the considerable numbers whose health issues relate more directly from obesity than environmental toxicity. Obesity, unless the result of unavoidable enforced inactivity (i.e. paraplegics) is mostly the result of life choices – eating too much of the wrong foods and not exercising enough. The resulting obesity then entrains other harmful conditions, such as heart disease – a vicious circle. The weak immune system you refer to is a direct result of these choices much more than environmental toxicity.
Doesn`t seem to me that our government has cocked up handling the pandemic any more than any other. Yes our civil service is venal and sclerotic but the Gov`t are trying to make the best of the worst hand ever- they need support not carping, because if they go down the alternative does not bear thinking about.
There are two or three separate issues. Once upon a time the civil service would attract the brightest young people, but that hasn’t been the case for a long time. This has to somehow be changed.
Also somehow stop the revolving doors wherby the very same people are engaged in creating strategies for improving the nations’ lot, as are engaged at a different point in time, in creating workarounds to those precise same strategies, through accountancy, law, economics, regulations, and the 900-lb gorilla: technology.
The west typically but especially the UK, picks Humanities Generalists (Economics, Law, History, Languages modern and ancient, Businesses Admin, Lit, etc) into top administrative positions, recent exceptions being of course, Thatcher and Merkel, both for good or bad, transformative for their countries. In contrast, Carter, a decent man, was overwhelmed by events.
The problem is, Humanities people, bright as they often are, do not understand the 21st century at a detailed enough level, because they don’t understand the nature of technology scaling effects and are reduced to making guesses at consequences. Humanities generalists also have an inbuilt tendency to look to the past. But for myself, I’m highly dubious the past can help us here. Because what we are facing next in terms of technology driven change, has never been faced before. Not even close. One example of this: in the past societies always had time to adjust to technological change, but this is no longer the case. We crossed the rubicon, some unmarked day in the recent past, where human societies are now slower at reacting to technological change than the speed of that change. China in contrast often picks scientists, engineers and technogists into governing positions. How many UK MPs and Lords and civil servants come from such backgrounds?
What has always struck me is that there are a: far too many politicians in Westminster and b: far too many of them have never worked in the rough and tumble of the private sector. My recommendation would be that all would-be MPs have to have spent 5 years minimum in a regular non state paid job. Secondly that all who take Ministerial posts have to have been trained in that speciality, eg: medic for health ministry, teacher for education minister and so on. We also need fewer lawyers and more engineers.
The situation we are in is a result of aggressive power hungry Leftist politics. That we have allowed the Globalist Left to take any power at all has been a fatal error. These end justifies the means Marxists, Socialists, and Communists are ruthless ideologues who will stop at nothing to force their agenda. The lunatic Klaus Schwab is the poster child for the movement. He has the accent down, all he needs are highly polished Jack Boots and keys to various re-education and extermination camps to complete his costume. We have our own examples of far Left authoritarian crazies in the USA. Cuomo, Witmer, Murphy, and nepotism Newsom in California. Might as well mention Canada’s virtuoso dancing clueless clown Justin Trudeau, Victoria Australia’s imbecile is Daniel Andrews. Honorable mention for New Zealand’s witless Jacinda Ardern. I had thought that the UK’s Boris was the real deal. He seems to be very educated but Boris has turned out to be a Manchurian candidate for the Great reset. The Commie COVID bio-warfare attack seems to be the catalyst that triggered all these A$$ holes to simultaneously start their Jack Booted marches to the Great reset.
BJ is probably more in thrall to post modernist stupidity than even the sickening Arden or Trudeau. Its a great way of passing off guilt for decisions made in relationships, fatherhood or at work etc. BJ can simply pass the guilt over to the patriachy or people with light skin color. Very similar to Blair becoming catholic after figuring that their god may offer forgiveness for illegal wars, whereas a true protestant god offers fire and brimstone and protestant light like CofE offer at the very least a stern talking to.
The article identifies a supremely important problem, but in very general terms. Unsurprisingly, the proposed solutions do not make a lot of sense. For example, it seems customary for articles on this site to blame neo-liberalism for most of life’s problems. In this case, I know neo-liberals argue for a smaller state, but I’m not aware of any that argue for an incompetent one, or one apparently tied up in a lot of PC nonsense. And, another example: does anyone seriously think the state would have handled the pandemic better if the utilities and major industries were in the public sector? I’d have more confidence in the vaccination programme rollout if it was being managed by Amazon than by the NHS!
In a 2018 Spectator article “The Rise of the Bluffocracy ““ Britain has become hooked on a culture of inexpertise”, James Ball and Andrew Greenway skewered the bluffers with PPE or law degrees who have never had “proper” jobs yet fill the senior ranks of government, civil service, quangos, think-tanks and media in a symbiotic bubble. They are insiders who know how the system works, how to use it and how to play the game. And end up with sinecures at the banks, consultancies, think tanks and public companies that have benefitted from their largesse with our money. James and Andrew thought only a “decent-sized war” will present an opportunity to effect change but, as our army admitted to the Defence Committee (09.10.20) that it can’t even field a single division, any war won’t last long enough to drain this foetid swamp.
Stanley Baldwin started precautions against German air raids in 1935. Rearmament and recruitment of citizen auxiliaries gathered pace (Territorial Army, Navy and RAF volunteer reserves). If the bluffocracy clergy is to be reformed it must be leavened by a laity of men and women, unaffiliated to any political party, think tank, trade organisation or quango. Active or retired members of the public who have had “proper jobs”, experienced professionals with practical knowledge from public and private sectors. Part-time auxiliaries in local groups throughout the country (the pandemic has highlighted the willingness to volunteer and efficacy of participation in web-based communications) who would not make the decisions but, unencumbered by party and political intrigue, perform sanity checks and
peer review of local and national government policies, plans and strategies, interrogate data and evaluate the results. They would replace the select committees or comprise at least 50% of their membership, perhaps populate a reformed House of Lords. These cadres would be think tanks without agendas – reserves of practical competence and experience to be mobilised when required. A sorely needed resource, given the educational and professional profiles of most civil servants and politicians of all stripes. The country’s innate latent wealth of skill, experience and knowledge was and is spurned. As anathema to the Civil Service, the cadres would hold its feet to the fire and force it to up its game.
If I had to name one responsible guilty man (system even) it must be Marxism and Xi President of the People’s Republic of China. Only a week or two ago the journalist who alerted the world of this problem was coming our way was imprisoned by Marxism and the doctor who saw this coming after having a hard time this hero of mankind died.
I don’t think that there is any doubt about these facts and how Marxism let mankind down yet again and is causing an untold amount of dead yet again.
The UK response was not at the same level as that of Taiwan or Japan which after being the best should be what we should be aiming for. The reason for this is that they have much better scientific leaders with experience in those parts and most likely the admission to civil servants is via a meritocracy and not parasitocracy as was here in this case. Advisors who don’t know what they are talking about Vance and Whitty were anything but. In a meritocracy they would have resigned already, they failed right from the start.
Our politicians out of necessity will do U turns when confronted with this problem because nobody knows what will come next except “Captain Hindsight” and we all know who the Brownie-Point scorer out there is with the crystal balls.
All in all some of the responses by the UK were very poor and others very good at a world level, there is a lot of room for improvement, like the big promised shake up of the civil service, media, judiciary, police all of which need to be decolonized of Marxists and made much more agile and less parasitic, for example such conditioning Marxists are concerned with retired doctors going through some “inclusive rubbish course” before they can join in with administering lifesaving vaccines!. How can Marxists like that be allowed even near such professionals and the civil service with so scarce or even missing intellect built to condition results with a total lack of MERIT.
This has been indeed a wakeup call, there could have been a much more challenging virus, and we need to be ready for it if and when it comes and then survival may well depend of having proper scientists, with real knowledge and whose reply to a sick animal is not just to shoot it.
Id recommend that the author of this piece do some research into the disastrously state of the UK in the later 1960’s and 1970’s.
Google searches for The 3 day week in the UK in the 1970’s or The UKs Winter of Discontent might be a good place to start.
Britain in the late 60’s and 1970’s was an awful , dysfunctional place to live and the idea that more state intervention will fix the current situation is nonsense.
Good government is about corralling the forces of the free market it to help make the country a better place for as many as possible. The current group of “people in charge” dont seem to have the background or intelligence required to run a modern technology driven state.
That said .. they are good at managing the main stream news media.
It may have slipped the authors notice but Communist China only prospered once it stopped trying to own and run everything directly.
In a long career I have worked in the professions, the private sector, the charitable sector, local and central government and nothing was as bad as central government, not even local government.
In fairness there are problems within the public sector not experienced within other sectors. For a start everything has to be judged within the framework of politics which warps the decision making process, and this in turn is not at all helped by having politicians in charge of huge departments, many of these politicians having run nary so much as an office lottery syndicate in their working lives. Then there is the sheer scale of the undertaking. The key to success is a combination of strategic vision and mastery of the detail. It is very hard to master details quickly enough in an unprecedented situation like the pandemic.
Having said that, the Civil Service falls into the almost inevitable trap common amongst large, sclerotic institutions: it recruits people “like us.” So what you get are policy wonks, people with good academic qualifications but often a limited experience of the real World, and, not least, people with no understanding of the business world and no creativity or understanding of the dynamics of enterprise. This recipe can work reasonably well when everything is normal, but it fails completely when things like national crises happen.
The author was right to pan the institutions of state but his remedy: renationalising key components of it like utilities and the railways, shows a complete lack of understanding about how things work in practice, and of history – he obviously didn’t live in pre-Thatcherite Britain.
What would I do? Reform of the Civil Service as Dominic Cummings wanted is key, but not in the way that he envisaged.
The real great reset will come about as a result of our country and a great many others becoming bankrupt, after the way our governments have handled this disease.
The lack of trust in the state and in govts. of every political shade will be almost total. The lack of treasury funds to keep the state afloat will be almost total as the businesses that supply them will be non existent. The polarisation between the idiots who think the govt. have money of their own and should be investing it to keep the state afloat and those who know the govt. killed the goose that lays the golden egg will be almost total.
But the truth will emerge from that polarisation, people who are resourceful and creative will survive, but not flourish sufficiently that the state will be able to act as a parasite upon them. Either it will become Stalinesque and deal with them, as he did the enterprising peasant farmers scraping by, and will thereby kill the goose a second time destroying the golden egg laying breed forever. Or the surviving population will understand that it is the state that has ruined them and will never allow socialism to flourish again. There will be no mood for compromise only the will to power.
The real solution is devolution of budgeting and responsibility to smaller communities, the state’s beaurocrats no matger how efficient are far too removed from the real life situations they manage
Do the English people truly want more local power? I am not so sure. It is far easier to whine about Westm.
I like to think that we do want more local power. Now that we are rid of one level of malign interference i.e. the EU, perhaps we will have the confidence to slough off as much interference and incompetence from Westminster as we possibly can.
How did EU membership stop W handing more power to (say) Leeds?
NuLab tried to do that (regional assemblies) – how did that work out? I remember Leavers claiming that it was a plot by EU to break up England.
It is not a conspiracy, despite English pretensions the modern English state (starting with Tudors) has always been centralized. If the English wanted Swiss style gov (cantons) it would have gotten it.
The reason that English local gov is weak it is because that is how the English want it. The problem was/is the gap between English perceptions of themselves and the reality.
10,000 Andy Burnhams? No thanks.
So hang on you want us to put our faith in Starmer and France and China. Er no. Cronyism, crappism and just evil is no better than Boris and the awful civil service (I mean seriously as if Starmer who is a complete woke swamp creature will achieve any reform at all is just a joke). How about instead we trust the people and have direct democracy and yes we can then get intelligent deciosions free of corruption such as closing the border if needed.
“…direct democracy…”
LOL
It’s that LOL again isn’t it?
Only used by children, Jeremy.
You can not teach an old dog new tricks.
P!ss off.
Is that kind of language really necessary?
When dealing with Jeremy, yes.
I answer him in his own coin.
I don’t agree with the vast majority of what he says either, but he’s not (overly) rude. Keep it civil.
He has been pretty rude.
In my defence I am polite to everyone else.
When you are under starter’s orders to depart London Jeremy, you should consider Switzerland as an alternative to Luxembourg.
I have grandchildren living there and am a frequent invader. Its form of direct democracy works well and everyone appears much happier than the disgruntled Demos of the UK.
They are proud of their history, thrashing the Habsburg thugocracy of the 13th century, and the Burgundian bullies of the 15th for example.
They have managed to integrate their three majors linguistic and cultural divisions superbly, in total contrast to the fiasco that is the devolved UK, seething as it is with petty spite and envy, at every turn.
There is off course a slightly authoritarian streak, that you may not be used to in Quislington.
Recently one of my Springer Spaniels, to use a biblical term (Isaiah 36:12) ‘released a t**d from bondage’ by the village fountain, unnoticed by myself. On returning home the door bell soon rang, but on opening it there was no one in sight, just the lonely t**d, steaming in the snow on the doorstep! A lesson learned!
Good luck.
in that tens of thousands of fellow countrymen are now dead due to a series of catastrophic errors.
Presumably referring to the collateral damage due to lockdown?
The primary function, and duty, of the state is to keep the people safe; all authority flows from this compact with the nation.
I think you need to elucidate here -safe from what exactly-and within what parameters?Everything?Cancer/heart attacks/suicide?
and as for rebuild the capacity of the British state do you really think that Kneel Starmer and his mates are even vaguely qualified to design,implement and oversee such a project-?
Other than that-some fair points!!!!
Wonderful, especially the sub-title, but I’m mega-surprised that an erstwhile ‘war reporter’ doesn’t seem to be aware of the military circumstances of the British retreat at the start of WW2. After all, it happened largely under the command of General Alan Brooke who was arguably the allies’ most competent soldier and, later, as Chief of the Imperial General Staff was constantly at Churchill’s side and formulated the grand strategy to win the war which was accepted even by the Americans.
Sure, the UK forces were ill-equipped compared to the Germans but they gave Rommel quite a fright when they met him head on. However, it was the sudden total collapse of the French which left the UK forces with an open flank which necessitated the retreat to Dunkirk.
Yes, in the run-up to the war the British establishment and civil service were the usual incompetent menace and it’s a miracle that a few good men just had enough power to save the country and slowly turn things around.
“Sure, the UK forces were ill-equipped compared to the Germans but they gave Rommel quite a fright when they met him head on”
What version of history is that?
If you don’t want to wade through Bullock’s “Hitler: a study in tyranny” or Hildebrands “Third Reich” i suggest “Rommel?, Gunner Who?” by Spike Milligan can give you the basics.
Much better to get a copy of ‘Achtung-Panzer!’ by Heinz Guderian.
i think “sudden collapse” is letting brere Frenchie off a bit lightly. Rampant opportunistic collaboration opposed only by a few die hard communists and anarchists is more accurate.
Excellent piece.
I would suggest that the real source of many of the problems justly identified here is the debilitating desire not to offend. The pusillanimous government, the supine civil service, the woke judiciary combine to undermine the state’s ability to act decisively and purposefully.
God help us if there were another world war.
And the MSM?!
I understand that one of the Prime Minister’s first duties after appointment is to write 4 letters. one to be kept in the captain’s safe in each of the nuclear missile submarines. If the sub looses contact with HQ at the time of war , the letter tells the captain whether to launch or not. I wonder what Boris told the captains?
They cannot “launch” as you call it without the approval of the USN/President. It is not a truly independent nuclear deterrent whatever various PMs might say,thank goodness.
Having recently retired from the civil service, I agree that it has become sadly dysfunctional in the past 15 years. One of the key problems is recruitment and promotion, which used to be centralized and is now the responsibility of individual line managers who are not HR professionals, don’t have the experience in recruitment nor the time to learn and who have to attempt to diversify their workforce. The only training one appeared to need is unconscious bias! Never mind whether you’re capable. This means promotion to management grades is not consistent, especially since they dropped assessment centres for promotion to principal. People are promoted with little experience and far beyond their capability, but once in post, it needs a very strong manager who has the time and ability to get a poor performer up to a decent level. So it doesn’t happen. And it’s so difficult to sack people (despite the Maud reforms) so that poor performers are just moved around. Centralized HR with common standards for recruitment and promotion would at least ensure we have better quality people.
Sounds like a University.
Having recently retired from Network Rail this broadly mirrors my experience. I worked in British Rail then the private sector and then Network Rail. The difference in cultures is huge. The HR industry moved from from being doers to advisors because it enhanced their remuneration at the expense of the line manager that everything got dumped on. Overworked specialist line managers are prevented from using their experience and knowledge to drive productivity and improvement as they are measured against woke metrics.
“remove the dross”
Unfortunately this is where all great plans plans to expand the state fail. The dross is never removed – it just grows and expands with the state. The state is run by dross and attracts dross. Non-dross chooses not to join or, if it does, is either forced out by the dross or leaves because it can’t stand the dross. Dross hires dross to protect itself. Why would non-dross join the state anyway? The pay? The recognition? Freedom of action? Quality of colleagues? Sense of purpose?
As many commentators have said – many have said they will remove the dross, far fewer have actually tried, but the dross has never been removed. Given this repeated lesson from history expansion of the state is not a solution. Remove the dross first and then I’ll listen!
Too true. I once worked for a company, which was told by its new owners to reduce headcount. One might have thought the less effective would go, and the most effective would stay, but unfortunately it was the less effective who did the choosing.
Nice reference of Bomber Trenchard.
This is from an excerpt I posted in an Ideas Forum on Quillette
What disappoints most is the singular lack of leadership from the entire political class, coupled with the basic failure to inform the public with any consistency or view to clear and concise guidelines. One worrying thing to emerge through all of this, was that people were getting sick, taking a test and then continuing to go about their daily business until they received the results! In their rush to arm politicians with information tailored to scare the public into compliance, public health officials forgot the most basic principles of informing the public- but to be fair it’s not just them, but also the inherent tilt within legacy media to ignore more boring, but far more vital information in favour of attention grabbing graphs and admonishments.
I am now beginning to wonder whether there is such a thing as a multithread cultural single point of failure. In the past it may well have been the case that catastrophic failures happened, were noticed and reported. In some instances politicians even resigned, enquiries were held after the fact, often years later. But add social media and the 24 hour news cycle to the mix and we have politicians and institutions which are perpetually wrong-footed, unable to acknowledge their mistakes and move on. In these instances the errors tend to be be cumulative and compound- making it impossible to summon even the bare minimum of institutional resilience and resolve.
In other words, social media turns even the smartest and internally strong amongst us into little more than headless chickens, reacting to one overblown fire after another.
I definitely agree with you about Britain’s expensive, but congenitally low state capacity.
“Britain’s governance is simply too important to be left to its current political class.”
You can say that again. We’re being led by a load of PR consultants and disaster capitalist management berks. One thing that really needs to happen after all this is over is a very detailed review of all the contracts handed out during this pandemic. The government seems to be more focused on lining its mates pockets than actually protecting the public.
The writer misses the point that the overwhelming deaths have been those in the process of dying – the average age was 82 last time i checked.
Deaths across many age groups will continue as people cannot access hospital treatment
The greatest mistake of the infantile Johnson was ignoring everything bar covid, and advancing the scare them sh7less campaign that worked well on the witless
You now have the worst of everything, more non covid deaths, economic armageddon and a one eyed focus on a vaccine for a disease that basically kills none not already ill.
What a blinder he has played
One remark the contributor made does indeed echo 1940. Not until the country recognised the severity of the situation were tough sacrificial decisions administered.
Over the next six weeks the people of England need to think very carefully for themselves and ask why this is happening. Why has a health crisis, for that is what it is, been turned into a disaster psychologically, emotionally and economically because we and the government have not been prepared to consider the really hard choices facing us.
23,857 thats the number this all turns on.
2.5% of the population of the UK are over 85.
170 per 100,000 are in that 23,857 hospital admissions.
4 per 100.000 are 0-60 the number is so low it could be less.
54% of all deaths in hospitals to the virus are 85+. (ONS)
25% of people catch it in hospital.
92% of all deaths in hospitals are co morbid. (ONS)
96% of all deaths in hospitals are over 60. (ONS)
It is entirely obvious the very elderly many of whom are ill are dictating what is happening what is effecting the growth of the young, to relationships, to mental health, to business to everything and with no discernible advantage to them. If they survive like most co morbid elderly they won’t suddenly bounce back the deterioration will continue some may be long haulers and psychologically many even with a vaccine will be to frightened to do anything more than stay barricaded in their homes. The one thing about elderly co morbid is their health is everything. There life is reduced to mere survival to the next hospital visit the next set of medication. If by them attending a hospital they survive that will not improve matters they will return to their epilogue age lifestyle until the next seasons flu gets them or the one after. That is the reality of their lives.
Those elderly people who are fit and active who have the capacity to shield have been locked up lonely with no nourishment for nine months. That is the sacrifice they are making and will go on making. Many of them have given authority not to be resuscitated (so why put them on ventilation but that a separate point). These people may never see their family again but they are making that sacrifice and they had a life pre covid.
It’s very simple the 85+ who get a positive test and are co morbid should be given palliative care and die at home. The numbers attending hospitals which should be segmented into fever and non fever would half. If you add co morbid age 60 plus it would become a trickle. 26,000 excess deaths at home to non covid causes could be capped.
As for the fit and well 0-60 377 had died by the 16th December and many will be health care workers. That is a tragedy the other deaths are not,
In italy in March in certain districts they stopped taking these people into hospital and the overall death rate dropped compared to those that continued to take them in.
The answers are there this protein is a damn nuisance but it has its limitations it kills in the main two groups use that knowledge.
It is beyond belief how so many journalists put the lack of susceptibility to the virus in South East Asia down to efficient management and obedient citizens. It doesn’t take too much imagination to understand that unless you live in a remote country with a limited population, (Australia and New Zealand), this simply isn’t possible. Unherd itself published an article on the subject not so long ago, suggesting the possibility of some kind of immunity having been built up through exposure to previous viruses. Much more credible.
This ridiculous article makes the mistake of believing the critical factor in determining infection and death rates is government action. Its not. They key factors are the proportion of over 60s, population density, cross immunity from prior infections, mobility patterns, pollution levels and Vitamin D levels (sun exposure and consumption of fish).
Africa is not impacted by most of these factors, Europe and particularly the UK is heavily impacted.
The UK has higher rates of dementia than most African countries. Is that because African states have better governments and policies in relation to dementia than the UK (and France, Spain, Belgium, Netherlands and Italy)?
I’m afraid we are again indulging in national masochism. Not only are we all racist, sexist, greedy, evil capitalist pigs. But it turns out we are also ravingly incompetent and indecisive.
The weekly death rate in December never matched the highest weekly death rate in 2020 PRE Covid !
Most of these claims have been debunked. Excess deaths in 2020 are higher than any previous year on record (against a prior five year average). Unfortunately there is no doubt Jan 2021 will also be one of the highest excess deaths on record.
However it’s true that there were years in the past when total deaths were higher, if you adjust for population and age (mortality rate). I think we are on about 2008 mortality rate. However that is a tenuous argument. If 70,000 people were killed be terrorists in 2020, we wouldn’t argue ‘so what, more people died in 2008’
No mention of public sector unions as a drag on innovation, change and improved performance? In any crisis they seem to be the one’s pulling the politician’s chain.
Ah, the wisdom of hindsight by someone who has never had to make decisions of real.import in the absence of reliable data
It’s all so easy for these people, yet they never seem to have a coherent strategy
Ahh, “Lock down hard, lockdown early”. That worked so well for Peru.
Asian countries likely have far higher rates of pre-existing immunity, from trading bats. This theory makes a lot more sense than the lockdowns that have not made a difference in other continents.
https://twitter.com/gummibe…
Aris Roussinos clearly having a bad day.
Nothing more than an overtly simplistic monologue of what is undeniably the most difficult of circumstances in an unprecedented period of National crisis.
If the plebs did what they were told, we might not be having this conversation.
Commending Kier really takes the biscuit. Imo.
If the plebs did what they were told, we might not be having this conversation.
when do you plan on purging the kulaks?
You can roll over for tickle-tum but you will find many others won’t – with good reason.
Some other suggestions:
1. reform public services by separating payment for services (by the government) from provision of services (by a competitive market of public, private and third sector actors). One example of this in practice is Australia where every citizen has a Medicare card that they can use to purchase most healthcare from any accredited provider they choose at a set rate per procedure. The government picks up the bill through a process called bulk billing. No queuing or rationing and the patient is king. This principle could be applied to healthcare and education as well as many other services.
2. Stop treating the bureaucracy as a lifelong priesthood. Make it permeable with all positions accessible to all qualified people not just public servants. Reward public servants who get private sector experience.
3. Make the structure of government flexible with frequent start ups and close downs as projects come to the end of their natural lives.
Rationing happens in every health system. That’s economics 101.
Rationing of payment could occur (but it shouldn’t) but there is no need for rationing of provision if the private sector was involved in supplying wants. I have just purchased an iPhone and need a case for it – it is amazing how many options are offered by the market. The private sector busts a gut to get revenues up a percent or two (by increasing quality) and to reduce costs (by improving productivity).
I’m all in favour of final salary schemes, but these have all but vanished from the private sector, so it’s time to put all public sector workers on money-purchase schemes. This would help the transfer of employees between public and private sectors, and help politicians and civil servants understand what it’s like to live in an uncertain world. It would also avoid the imposition of today’s employment on future taxpayers.
No political system can be better than the quality of the people who voluntarily compose it. This was as true of Russia under communism as it is of the UK now and in the past. None of our politicians is trained for the job of government. At any one time, 650 of them are MPs who got to Westminster because they were good at politics, not because they were especially qualified to govern. From this pool of amateurs are chosen ministers who run departments they may nothing about till they get there. As ministers, they are in thrall to civil servants who know a lot about administration (aka office politics) but perhaps not so much about the real world. The blind leading the blind as it were.
When competence occurs in our system of government, it is as likely to be by accident as design. As we have known for a long time, muddle is how we do things and if there were a better way, we would doubtless have already adopted it. It should be noted that the French don’t do any better with their Enarchy. Having witnessed it in action, I very much doubt that a return to nationalisation – which had a good (or do I mean bad?) run from 1945 till 1979 – is the answer. Prospective MPs could be made to sit the parliamentary equivalent of the civil service exam but since the latter doesn’t ensure efficiency, I wouldn’t have high hopes for the former. I fear that muddle is the best we can hope for.
The only department of government in any country which constantly performs at a high level of efficiency is the revenue. Perhaps we should let HMRC run the UK.
Nonsense, HMRC couldn`t organise a piss up in a brewery
it’s good to have articles like this because polemics always push you back to the centre, eventually. We don’t have a failed state we have a state in flux and there is an opportunity for us to improve it. Crises always have that affect. The Crimean war caused the current model of the civil service to be created and maybe it’s past its sell by date. The over centralised Public Health system is not fit for purpose in times of plague but may be useful in other respects now we have a vaccine. Nothing is beyond change and change will happen and it wont be communism.
What an extraordinary article. A plea for economic Socialism dressed up as an attack on the competence of the State, which would have to administer the Socialism!!
No one disputes the British State does not work; nor that the planning and organisational side of the NHS/PHE has failed utterly. Our death statistics suggest that the clinical side of the NHS is not so hot either.
I have worked in the NHS and served on a local council and in my view the key problems with public administration are firstly that its priorities are set on process rather than results and secondly are always subordinate to a political zeitgeist. The former is a cultural mistake caused by a desire for easy measurement and the latter is a function of the over involvement of the State in service delivery and the needs of a governing bureaucracy to justify itself separately from the service deliverers.
Short term memory loss? He accuses labour of not offering an alternative then lists the ideas in Corbyn’s manifesto as if it’s something new and ground breaking…
Let’s be blunt. We have a dearth of good, qualified graduates. Any that are any good will go and get a very well-paid job in the private sector – Big Pharma and Big Tech pay Big Money. How much?
Current advert for STEM graduates in the Civil Services – £28k, no car, no stock, no private health-care, no modern working styles…
AWS/Google graduate recruitment – £50k plus travel allowance (car allowance for more senior), stock, bonus, health-care, flexible working, usual tech bonuses. And there are more vacancies than there are grads…
In Big Tech, we’re advertising summer internships where we pay $24k (in the US, not UK at the moment). Need to be a MS/PhD student but that is a 6 month placement.
You’re 21, just graduated, want to change the world and make money. Where would YOU go?
The answer lies in more competence with less people – look at any big tech company and see how thin the management to the top is and how much is invested in “do-ers” at the edge. Administration such as HR, IT, purchasing is consolidated (usually globally) – imagine if we had one IT, HR, purchasing system across ALL public bodies (GPs, hospitals, schools, gove agencies, councils). Think of the power in the data – Amazon and Google do…
I want the best public services on the planet in this country – I lived in the US and their health system nearly killed me. But I want the money spent on a very small number of very motivated and capable people in the centre supporting a large number of people-that-can at the edge. You have to pay top dollar/pound for good people when demand outstrips supply.
Who’s to blame? All of us for valuing that Amazon can deliver a parcel of consumer crap next day including public holidays over decent schools and medical services that struggles to operate 5 days/week.
The higher levels of the public sector have been very well paid for 20 years now, along with those at the top of the Quangos etc. These people are also unsociable and have pensions and working conditions that people in the private sector cannot even imagine. But the quality of delivery has only got worse during that period. The problems are deep, ingrained and systemic. Hiring a few of the supposedly smarter graduates is not going to fix it. Anyway, they will be so ‘woke’ that they will only make things worse.
Correct diagnosis; wrong prescription. The Colbertian French State is failing even more miserably than laissez faire neo liberal Britain to tackle these second/third (or maybe just a continuation of the first?) waves. Renationalisation can never be the answer. Revitalization through, for example, a federal structure of governance could be.
That was a really excellent analysis of the current state of our governing class. You are so right about the debiltating effect of the so-called culture war. It is of no importance whatsoever to the vast majority of the population and it is kept going by self-serving commentators in the press and on social media, and in particular on Unherd. Frankly they should all know better and start addressing serious issues for a change.
“..debiltating effect of the so-called culture war.”
Did you have a culture war when the country went through multiple £ devaluation, Suez, IMF, ERM, house bubbles?
Was there a culture war when the British state decided (assuming the author is correct) to spend money on butter instead of guns pre 1939?
At least there is debate on Unherd, not so the Grauniad, Times, BBC etc etc
Surely an island nation with few entry points could easily have sealed the borders back in the spring,
Depends on the nation. Japan has had relative success with Covid, but had more suicides in October than total Covid deaths, so it’s not like there is a utopian answer. The US, though not an island, imposed bans on flights to China and the result was accusations of “xenophobia.”
Short of complete and total shutdown, enforced by armed patrols, what would one have the state do? You cannot declare restaurants off limits but leave big box stores open. People start to notice the inconsistency. Perhaps the lesson should be that the precautionary principle is doomed to failure because it ignores any fallout or consequences of the safety measures taken. And it does not help that increasing numbers of people are willing to outsource all risk management to an unaccountable third party.
Well mandatory 2-week quarantine and testing of all new arrivals in Late-January would have gone some way to mitigating the spread of CV19 until Late-Spring arrived. We could then build up capacity in the Summer for the inevitable peak in the Winter.
In the event the UK Gov was still allowing flights from China during the peak of March/April. Absolute insanity.
This is a fascinating and insightful piece, and warrants longer thought. I would simply note here that I made some of these points, just as calmly, in a comment posted on the Guardian website yesterday. It was summarily deleted…
Once upon a time, the Guardian was a serious newspaper…
Gullty Men was written anonymously by Labour luminaries who wanted to hide their party’s opposition to rearmament. As A piece of political propaganda and myth-making it worked well. As history not so much
The French State is also centralized and weak. In France, the State’s handling of the pandemic was such a disaster that commentators talked about the hoboisation of the French State. For the record, so far, less than 200 people have been vaccinated in France which says something about the capacities of a State apparatus that is apparently “well-practised at actually doing things”.
I stopped reading when I got to “in that tens of thousands of fellow countrymen are now dead“. No that is wrong. Regardless of government incompetence and contrary to the dramatic prohecies of experts, Covid has not killed tens of thousands of people in the UK. Thankfuly the excess deaths compare fairly reasonably to that of previous bad flu years. So sick of being fed inaccurate information by the legacy media, I expected better of Unherd
Surely that is only because social distancing has been effective in preventing the spread of other diseases, such as the seasonal flu. The lockdowns have been to prevent the NHS being overwhelmed. The fact they worked appears to be your criticism?
My criticism is of the lack of factual accuracy in this article. Tens of thousands of people have not died because of Covid. I have not commented on lockdowns.
What’s your source, David?
Interesting article. Boris thinks he is Churchill but he reminds me more of the General staff in WW1 trying the same strategy over and over seemingly heedless of the cost and knowing ti is unlikely to work. Or Of Chamberlain, desperate to preserve the status quo heedless that in doing so he had already lost it.
But the fault is not this govts alone it goes back decades. Put simply if Govts had understood that keeping people alive longer means that the health service has to be expanded in order to keep those people healthy we would not need lockdown.
The Government has borrowed £394 billion to support the lockdowns which have so far produced no solid data to support their function.
The brand spanking state of of the art Queen Elizabeth hospital here in Brum (opened in 2010) cost a little over half a billion to build from scratch. £560 million pounds in total.
We’ve spent nearly FOUR HUNDRED BILLION on lockdowns and it’s not even been a year.
That could build over SEVEN HUNDRED STATE OF THE ART HOSPITALS
There are only around 1,000 NHS hospitals in the UK in total and that includes all the smaller tiny ones dotted around the country. The big flagship hospitals are a much smaller number.
Govts could have effectively DOUBLED the entire countries hospitals for £390billion with each one being a brand new state of the art major flagship hospital
Good point but how would they staff them?
The Government has borrowed £394 billion to support the lockdowns which have so far produced no solid data to support their function.
Then almost every country in the world is making the same mistake. Brisbane has gone into lockdown because of one, just one, case of the UK variant.
One of the problems is that people working in the civil service are unlikely to want to dismantle it, risking their own jobs. This is a flaw in the system and anyone disruptive gets trolled and fired like cummings. They seem to have no overall accountability and I am wary when the incentives are not necessarily aligned to serve the people but to protect their jobs; this is where the price mechanism helps in business. In business people would generally be fired for not contributing to the larger mission because the collective is greater than the individual.
It seems to me that you can’t assume that people are just intrinsically insentivised to give their all for the state; they are more concerned with keeping their jobs. The public sector has grown too big and is incentivised to grow bigger. I agree they need to be audited by an independent body because it is difficult to see that you are the problem. They need to remember what their purpose is; they need to be providing cost effective benefit to the public. The NHS has all these problems as well.
The government are incentivised to create jobs in the public sector to keep unemployment figures down and increase spending on the things they can be blamed for. It seems to me that this will occur whenever the price mechanism is removed and people aren’t directly incentivised to work for the common good, including removing whole failing departments.
The incompetent spoken of here, are a brotherhood of self-preservation, who’s removal would take something akin to a coup to remove.
If you know of any coup that has produced a functioning, humane apparatus for that society’s inhabitants, go poach the talent from there.
In the meantime, excuse me if I’m somewhat reluctant to hold my breath.
You are correct in many ways.
Canute Johnson needs to go and now, not next week. In many respects he has no purpose now Brexit has been delivered but worse he has demonstrated none of those skills that Churchill demonstrated.
The first, which you do not refer to, was Churchill’s ability to get rid of the useless. I cannot remember the author of the book but there is an excellent book called “Churchill’s Generals”. Churchill disposed of vast quantities of poor generals who had risen to the top during peacetime and proved incapable of managing in a war. Who has Johnson sacked so far? People have fed him lies, damned lies and false statistics and forecasts not worth the paper they are printed on with impunity. I suspect the same has happened recently. Sadly, he is a classicist and a hack, has never done a proper job in the real world, and is not a scientist and clearly has no numerical knowledge or abiity whatsoever.
Second, Churchill had a message “action this day”. Instead we have a government of drift and paralysis by analysis. Why is the MHRA being allowed to do to drift along and wait for batched to be approved? Its delay in authorising the AZ vaccine was deplorable enough. The time has come to bypass them. Again that demands management action to dismiss or sideline the blockers.
All he does is get rid of the one person, Cummings, who might have had a chance of reforming the civil service.
You ignored Churchill’s campaigns in the Med – wasting blood and money.
Most historians strongly criticize WCH performance post 1942.
Who or what was WCH?
Churchill also got in a socialist, Attlee, to run the country while he fought the war.
Don’t you really mean Ernest Bevin?
I think you’ve identified a real and important problem Mr Roussinos, I have less faith in your solutions, however.Having been to them all I admire none of the countries you evidently do and identify with.
To me, its instructive that the government had to appoint an outsider (David Frost) to achieve the Brexit agreement; presumably because there was no competent Minister, MP or Civil Servant available to do so.
Maybe we should change how our Cabinet Ministers are appointed
Yet another armchair commenter.
I challenge you to do better.
I thought not.
Two immediate thoughts on this. So far as the civil service and the wider public sector is concerned, the whole philosophically incoherent emphasis on diversity should be scrapped. It is a huge waste of resources and diversion of effort; it is dysfunctional in that it does not necessarily produce the best people for the job. I’m sure that it has much to do with the recent poor performance in the public sector.
Secondly, so far from nationalisation, we need a large expansion of the private health sector. That would provide more investment, more flexibility when we have crises such as the present one, and it could relieve Government of some of the risk it faces in allocating scarce resources to address urgent situations that arise infrequently.
Having read through many of the comments below, I am delighted to see that a wide ranging and combative discussion is still flourishing, even though the Pubs are shut. Very British!
Long may it continue!
Sure it will. It’s been going on all my life, and I’m 77.
First another historical comment: as steppes nomads predate farmers, they are not parasites preying on farmers. When they are, it is due to other issues. Moreover: in most cases, nomads have desirable goods to trade with farmers. Not every steppe nomad culture functions like Attila the Huns and his hordes.
If we arrested all those at SAGE, the scientific advisors, and simply shut Westminster down, the nations problems would halve overnight.
Think Belgium – 384 days without a government – what happened ?
About 1/4 way in i was formulating a post about this piece but as ppl have already said below its a bit of a dysphoric rant, looks more like a serotonin crash than journalism ( Not that this is always a bad thing, as the last 5 pages of Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas attest). I still want to say that all debate about guilty parties, systems or steppe nomads is meaningless when at issue is a simple failure of epistemics. BJ, Starmer and the massed ranks of civil servants including NHS etc, are simply unable to understand anything which requires critical and analytical thought which can then be tested in theory and then practice. Their Lacanian obsession that belief is knowledge has let us all down, and is a betrayal of mainstream UK thinking over the last 200 years. You will get a lot more sense on the Clapham omnibus or in any domino club than you can from these failed public servants. If they weren’t filling their boots from the public purse they could at least claim ignorance as a defence. The monstering of Sikora, Heneghan, Malhotra et al is evidence of BJ and co’s adherance to 15th century thinking. The only positive i can see is at least its not Corbyn in charge, otherwise anyone with real education would be in the cattle trucks by now. So in the short term the future is dark to the point of black, but give it a generation or two i am sure we can bounce back.
The good news is that post Brexit, this discussion makes sense again.
But the kicker is, unless this government destroys woke, and soon, we’re all b******d.
Epic.
I’m surprised this has not yet been mentioned, but why the headline asserting that all the guilty parties are men? Roughly a third of our MPs are women. Did you intend to use ‘men’ as an all-inclusive term? Why didn’t you include the words ‘white’ and ‘old’ too? Don’t blame me for this pedantry; I have been forced to think this way due to the prevailing wisdom mostly peddled by your profession. As for the problem? Well it doesn’t help to just point fingers and blame others for making mistakes when they’re trying to tackle the biggest issues since WW II. This piece makes not a jot of difference to the ongoing crisis and only serves to re-enforce division, dissent and disagreement to the detriment of all. Just stop.
Worse than that, the author is claiming that things have been getting steadily worse , and failing to acknowledge that this CORRELATES with a focus on diversity and inclusivity inevitably to the detrihumant (sic) of COMPETENCE
Its time to look deeper into ”covid”. I suggest you all google Dr Reiner Fuellmich-he is actioning several lawsuits against the perpetrators of the PCR tests. He is working with Robert Kennedy Jr.: https://www.youtube.com/wat… .
This is not a joke!!!!!!
And who would be the trigger for such reform of the ruling class?
Not the mainstream media. They are stuck in a declining market, desperate to preserve market share and unwilling to rock the boat.
Not politicians. Most of them are mediocrities with little life experience outside politics who are desperate to preserve their privileges. Any body with any genuine leadership talent or vision is busy making their fortune in the private sector.
Not the functionaries of the multitudinous quangos, public agencies and various branches of the civil service. Turkeys don’t vote for Christmas.
Not the general public. Most are too locked-in to the emotive stories spun by the media and lack the understanding of, or willingness to be driven by solid data and blunt facts.
It’s a nice idea that things need to change, but I haven’t the faintest of notions as to how that might happen.
The British Public voted for radical change, in the teeth of a vicious establishment campaign of terror, Brexit. Never seen that anywhere else. We’re capable of voting in a b***h like Thatcher if we have to. Don’t underestimate Us.
The core problem stems from the civil service training staff to not question and just do the job at hand. As we know from the Hague trials this is not considered a safe defence or a proper way to act for a civilised person. With this trained in utter subservience to authority all the moral and competency checks and balances are lost. I think in a startling similarity to the underlying causes of the banking crisis, gouging ‘the customers’, lack of personnel responsibility, graft and cronyism have become rife leaving the civil service absolutely no way to fix itself.
Giving such a broken organisation further meat to grind, like feeding a cancer more nutrients or giving a virus any easy way into a vulnerable society can only lead to disaster.
I think the key sentiment that needs to be implemented at all seniority levels in to not just the civil service, but the other remaining public sectors, is ‘your jobs are not safe’. This, i believe, along with enforcing of direct responsibilty for outcomes will remove the acceptance of stupid results that seems common place in many public sector deliveries. Bearing in mind the policy makers are already reviewed every 4 or 5 years anyway, why should bad implementers get a free pass, especially when bad implementation has the direct consequence of ruining both good and bad policies alike.
It is a travesty to suggest that more state is the solution to a failed state utopically administered by more competent human beings that would be put in place by those other humans that created the failure in the first place. If this was at all possible, surely a previous period of state reduction would be worth considering. Furthermore, I’d submit that AI would be a much better administrator that any human, and in light of the overwhelming evidence, it is worth trying since can’t imagine what can possibly be worse than present state inefficiencies, in the UK and all other states with more than 10M peoples. The key is efficiency, this should be the central topic, and more state will not be the solution. If human moral involution is the problem, maybe we should stop betting in humans!
Dear Aris, this is the last time I will read a contribution from you. Too sad for words.
We are doomed where national emergency measures are decided upon by a government that is preoccupied with ensuring that they will win the next General Election.
This is the problem with democracy – when mostly stupid citizens are allowed to choose mostly stupid politicians.
The minority of intelligent political candidates who were smart enough to keep their intelligence sufficiently under wraps to have won a seat in parliament will be smart enough to rise up the power pyramid and remain there by ensuring that what they say and do will continue to win the approval of stupid voters. This will usually take precedence over The Right Thing To Do.
Democracy is said to be for the people by the people. But when the majority of people are daft, this perpetuates a downhill trend.
Israel is different because being smart and expedient is seen as a good thing, indeed, the essence of survival. South Korea is different in that its citizens respect authority and any candidate campaigning on a libertarian ticket would be scornfully dismissed as a flake and liability.
Britain has long been suffering from its very own progression of three viruses that are dragging it consistently downwards. It’s a virus chain that goes from The Peter Principle to Parkinson’s Law to Murphy’s Law.
Peter Principle: rising in a hierarchy until reaching a maximum level of incompetence
Parkinson’s Law: work expands to fill the time available, leading to bureaucracy, data pollution, analysing to distraction and decision paralysis
Murphy’s Law: an inevitable botch-up
I agree about Dominic Cummings, and Johnson is going to miss that DC vision at the heart of his government. But there is no prospect at all of the current administration giving up until 2024, by which time we all may have forgotten the COVID panic, and equally no prospect of the current, corrupt organisation of government being significantly changed or overhauled. By achieving DC’s defenestration, the Civil Service has demonstrated its mastery of self-preservation and so we will have to go on tolerating huge salaries for public sector management jobs and the “Yes, Minister” approach to government.
DC’s vision (based on his blogs) was on technocracy running the state and ignoring the MPs as much as possible. Read his endless rants about MPs.
How is that supposed to work out with the segment of the British people (voted Leave and Tory) that complain about lack of political control?
Do you think Mark Francois will be able to “control” some IT scientist with a IQ of 165?
P.S. You need to watch Yes Minister again! Your understanding of the show is wrong.
Cummings is probably right: maybe the people deserve a technocracy and be damned. The truth is that if people feel happier and their prospects have improved they won’t care what Mark Francois says.
As we are now it’s a worst of both worlds where Francois remains completely ignored but by people cynically running the show on emotive Liberal norms.
The first thing to do is accurately identify the problem and I wouldn’t trust anyone in parliament or the civil service to do that. It seems like the government has been stress tested by the pandemic and has come up short. Why? Does it need a radical change; is there an inherent flaw in the system?
The same could be said of the NHS, although it is unpopular to say, it has failed in its purpose, in that the country had to be shut down to protect it.
There are likely always going to be flaws in systems, like there are flaws in people, but recognising and accounting for this is the first step in dealing with it.
What a load of crap!
European societies are not East Asian societies. SK was able to invade individual privacy to control C19.
Calm down, kid!
Just calm down.
What a joyous piece to wake up to Mr Roussinos, particularly as HMG attempts yet another campaign of National emasculation. Thank you.
The ‘Guilty Men’ was a scurrilous polemic, that seems to have acquired divine status, at least among the cohorts of Quislington shriekers. Of the triumvirate that wrote it, two studiously avoided military service, of particular note being the repulsive Foot creature.
As to your contention that the British State is “unfit for purpose” that been obvious for years, the recent ‘panic’ has only exacerbated the decline.
Finally your contention that “The failures of Dunkirk, of Norway, of Malaya and Singapore led, once the battle was finally won, to the total reorganisation of the British state”, omits one crucial fact. That reorganisation was paid for by the munificence of the USA.
This time there will not be such a generous gesture, unless off course the ‘wonderful’ Chinese
step in.
On mask effectiveness: https://www.ox.ac.uk/news/2020-07-08-oxford-covid-19-study-face-masks-and-coverings-work-act-now
Just ask, what else is in the news that they are trying to misdirect from? What corporations did these people previously work for, or where their relatives currently work? How close is the next election? These are the basic questions, at least.
But basically, politics is full of not so competent people feathering their nests. Western governments are getting as Banana Republic as others, due to the fact that most politicians are in reducible thick and quick to seek their own advantage. There are some good folks, but they are not venal enough to become the party stars.
We are stupid to fight over what their misdirections over the media. We need a new media with real watchdog. Yet media want to be invited to the right parties…basically do not lend them your ears, it flip und the backbencher who can keep them in check a bit.
The Guilty Men, name names. I’ll start it off with Hancock, Whitty and Valance. With Boris running them a close second.
I suggest people who can’t do the basics of washing their hands, avoiding close contact and crowded places. That’s most of us.
Isnt it grand to live in a country that allows you to slag off your own govt with impunity..?
Your essay and this section to capture my attention: “Surely the solution is this: to rebuild the capacity of the British state as quickly as possible, through a vast new programme of public infrastructure projects, and an immediate program of nationalisation of key industries and utilities, just as in the Second World War, while carrying out a root and branch reform of the Civil Service to remove the dross”.Â
But the answer to the question, is who can we trust to initiate the ideal solution of the above suggestion, and the crux?
Poor argument and solution. Especially the solution.
“The state’s not up to it. So let’s nationalise everything and create a bigger state. Then fix the state!”.
If you know how to fix it then let’s just fix it. But you don’t suggest anything beyond asking ultra authoritarian countries how they manage things. At least you didn’t suggest throwing Putin into the mix.
It is difficult to disagree with the premiss that the British state is dysfunctional and enfeebled by bureaucratic political correctness, corruption, chumocracy and incompetence. However, the author does not really make a good case for how this can be rectified. We do need a PM of towering authority, and integrity, and all we have got is Johnson. Leadership is important, and if you have a weak, indecisive and fundamentally dishonest leader at the top then the fish will rot from the head down. That is what is happening right now. The most important thing we need to do right now is to reclaim our right to peaceful protest. We are living in a highly censored State with a cowed Media and nothing will improve without mass protest and demand for change. I think the next generation will shake things up and rightly so,
I hope you are right about the next generation!
The most important thing right now is to obey medical advice and NOT protest in public where the virus spreads.
Disobedience will be the end of us.
when has blind obedience to an authority figure ever worked out well?
It would be interesting to see what you think of the Greek State.
Perhaps we could offer Greece colonial status.
It would give some of our bureaucrats something useful to do.
I do have one practical suggestion for what the government did wrong – a point I’ve made before, but…
The mindset at the start of crisis was fundamentally flawed. It should have been a lot more cognisant about the major limitations of our knowledge at that time and clearer about what we needed to find out as quickly as possible. I would have had a government website that gave information to people about (a) what we know about the virus; (b) what we think we know about the virus and (c) what we need to find out more about. This would have covered all relevant areas, but especially how to treat cases and exactly how the virus is transmitted. Taking this approach would have meant that the ‘following the science’ narrative would have been far easier for people to understand. It would have meant that changes in policy (e.g. on facemasks) would have been easier to explain. It would have encouraged the spread of good practice, notably in treatments. And it would have pressured the government to fill in the gaps in its own knowledge. As it is, the new lockdown looks an awful lot like the one last March. Despite the new variant of the virus being more transmissible – and credit at least for identifying this variant pretty quickly – this similarity seems an abject failure. Do we not know that the virus is a great deal less likely to spread outdoors? And my pet peeve, is playing singles tennis – which I was planning to do this morning – really any significant risk at all?
I think that would have been and still could be a great idea. Particularly since the mainstream media have been so hopeless at providing information. One thing I have found extremely vexing throughout the crisis is the lack of information about excess deaths over previous years.
https://www.euromomo.eu/gra…
… the over feminisation of key State attitudes and institutions and their sub-marxism leads to an inability to use even the natural defensive moat of the English Channel for the historic priority of the Defence of the Realm … no such hollowing out problems in Japan, or S Korea, or Israel, or Taiwan, or Hungary … define the reasons, lads, and act on them .
It would be good if you actually named names.
Kind of thought he did – from the PM down to the EO in charge of recycling in the Outer Hebrides
It is the inability or lack of desire to see the full picture namely that Boris is taking orders ‘from above’ having been hijacked by bribes or threats or blackmail. He is controlled by the NWO, the World Economic Forum which has laid out a complete change in structure for the functioning of the world in its new form. As a prelude to this they need to instigate The Great Reset which involves the destruction of our culture. This in case you had not noticed is proceeding apace. Covid has been long designed as the excuse to bring in this form of fascism equivalent to Germany in the 1930’s. They would not do that would they? Er yes and they are. My reference web site for researchers may help.
covid – unmasked . net
Totalitarianism is not Fascism. I am fed up of people making this mistake. If the WEF was intent on an international Fascist dictatorship they’d not be siding with Cultural Marxist luvvies and international Corporations.
As I understood Mussolini’s definition, Fascism is:’Everything within the state,nothing outside the state, nothing against the state.’
Government seems to be working towards this with its Police service that has forgotten Peel’s principles.
Do you think that is incorrect?
You need to read Arendt
Another rant by a rabid journalist whose biggest decision today was whether to have jam or honey on his toast in the morning, rather than having to balance the life and health of people and economy. Give it a rest !
Very good article, thank you.
The best part is the solution.
“But first of all, we need a clear-out of government, which has failed this country at a moment of crisis. Johnson has fulfilled the role granted to him by history, of delivering Brexit. The time has surely come for him to leave the stage, along with those around him, and the incompetent civil servants beneath him. “
More government bashing from the cadre of people that don’t do nothing themselves, other than stand watching and complaining.
Those of us who feed the vast state machine and do not depend on it, have every reason to watch and complain.
Government in the UK and across the West has been utterly useless for 30 years, ever since the collapse of the USSR. Until that point, western governments and corporations had to be a least somewhat competent and possessed of some integrity in order to present a better alternative to communism. When that requirement disappeared, the political class very quickly became devoid of all competence or integrity. There are other factors at play such as the rapid growth in fiat money and the long march of the left through the institutions.
Anyway, western politicians now face a much more organised and intelligent threat than the USSR. Namely, China. And, as their reaction to Covid has demonstrated, they stand no chance.
people who don’t do nothing except pay the freight for whatever govt does in their name. A customer has the right to complain. Is too much expected of govt? Probably so, but govt officials never hesitate about jumping into things, issuing mandates and directives, and otherwise inserting themselves into our lives.
I put the article down when I read “expanded government” and “nationalizing”.
“Certain organs of British conservatism have been so captured by libertarian thought that their commentators disgrace themselves with Covid conspiracy theories in support of age-old British freedoms.” So who exactly are you talking about and what conspiracy theories?
Seal the borders and starve the people. Oh, I forgot, we’re already halfway there with Brexit.
Seems rather a common narrative to blame Government or somebody for the mess we find ourselves in.
Looking for guilty men is in error now as it was in 1939.Its an utterly false premise.
UK’s sole aim early in war was to not lose it, merely stay in it long enough to eventually get the USA and all its industrial might involved. Churchill even admitted to having his first peaceful night following Japan’s attack on Pearl Harbour. Our capability to hang on against the odds were nothing to do with the failings of some but rather the merits of others including RJ Mitchell, Sydney Camm and Churchill with the organisation and development of both the RAF and the Navy. Without any of these elements the UK would have fallen in 1939. Looking for scapegoats then as now is both wrong and futile. The UK was in verge of bankruptcy in the 30s.
Our current disaster is the virus and systematic failure on a world wide scale to prevent its spread. All this soul searching, blame and hounding of “guilty men” simply provides a breeding ground for masses to ignore simple messages. Our country has insisted on using its freedom to take the restrictions to their limit, we should have used our hard fought freedom to go beyond them. Footballers holding parties, mothers going into schools despite positive tests, every day we see yet another example of sheer stupidity spreading the virus attached to some soundbite blaming the Government and its mixed messages. Folk shouldn’t need telling don’t go abroad, don’t go to Cheltenham, don’t go to raves etc etc.
The government has been fighting the virus, social media, anti vaxers, covid deniers and stupid articles like this one.
We, ve given a voice to those undeserving of one. Then we wonder why so many are confused, anti government and ignoring rules to benefit all. I blame such as this specifically and mass media in general. They have given, for anyone of a mind, excuses to ignore Chris Witty’s advice.Ironically those same people, and media ,then blame the government for our predicament. It’s not the Government it’s people like the author of this nonsense who are actually to blame. I wonder how much better all these experts would have done had they got worthwhile jobs actually making decisions rather than making pseudo intellectual but worthless critiques.
Same at football matches, strange how chap swearing and jumping up and down on his seat 20 yards behind goal knows way more than chap in dug out.
A few facts and figures would help. Overall I still believe the thing is a vastly over-rated threat, that’s one.
And the best way to meet it is naturally as we’re always going to have to live with endemic viruses as we always have; that’s two.
Most recent figures I saw for the USA with it’s ‘shocking’, ‘terrible’ etc, death figures were that deaths were actually no greater than ever – but apparently what’s happened is even heart failure has been subsumed in covid figures. That’s three.
And the current covid thing seems to be the result of a variant and variants have the possibility at any time of circumventing any effectiveness of any vaccine which puts you right back into ‘deal with it naturally’ land. That’s four.
So how about publishing those figures: overall deaths compared with historical and latest science on the infection itself?
And even a quick look at the bright side? There’s no bad side with this without a commensurate bright side, you know? For every infection survived is a growth in herd immunity and ‘herd eperience’, a phrase I just made up because I don’t know the correct one. I refer to the fact that the human race has lived for hundreds of millenia in a constant dialogue with viruses – they’re even incorporated in our genome – and if we isolate ourselves, step to one side, step out of that dialogue – then we weaken ourselves en masse for the future.
So the bright side could be summed as: ‘we’re getting used to it… we’re adapting… immunity is growing…’ that sort of thing.
I think without those aspects the article is simply another opportunistic rabble rouse.
A collection of observations regarding this covid thing if you’re interested: http://bullockornis.com/
Dr. Xa0S Cogitated…. there is escape not only hope…. http://www.1888CE.net
Total deaths are average compared to previous years but we are supposed to be in a deadly pandemic so why are total deaths average why are we so frightened when total deaths are average – Here is what is really happening with the virus – http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=p_v...
Oh sure state ownership of the means of production. Frankly we would all be better off if the government did not run the NHS and Education and that were left to Doctors and teachers and professional managers. For example I could recommend Albert Bourla the CEO of Pfizer who seems to get a lot of stuff done but he costs £15m a year and I do not think Aris could live with that.
Daft and risible claptrap from a pontificating ill educated rewriter of history. Go directly to China and pitch your tent mate. And take a few history books with you that are not based on left wing fantasies.
We can all have our opinions about PPE, entitlement and the State but there is one single and fundamental problem with our government and parliamentary democracy – a lack of experience. This is particularly demonstrated by the failure of Minister to anticipate the consequences of their actions.
The problem with this article is that Guilty Men named their culprits; Mr Roussinos does not
Such polemic bombast left me feeling exhausted with the tedium of it all. I’m tired of reading “failed state” articles because you could apply the same logic to 90% of the world’s governments. There is nothing unique about the UK when compared to Germany, Italy, France, US, etc etc. So therefore there is no point ranting on about the UK either as it is a broader issue. Johnson has actually done quite well to get Brexit done in his first year in power. I would appreciate a little research. The author talks about closing the border or screening at the start of the crisis. In fact, there is a detailed explanation of why screening was not done in the NERVTAG minutes of January 2019. The DHSC (civil service) goes cap in hand to NERVTAG (the virus advisory committee set up to monitor for exactly a covid-type situation) begging it for advice. The professors on NERVTAG – professors, not civil servants – refuse border screening on the basis that it would ‘stigmatise’ those being screened. Yes, fear of being called racist, and also fear of their Chinese PhD students not paying fees, caused the professors to suggest a novel approach, that although they had absolutely no idea whether or not China was doing exit health screening, they would rely on it anyway because in that way they are not doing the stigmatising, the Chinese would be doing it to themselves! A brilliant plan, with one minor flaw, the Chinese weren’t doing any exit screening. Hence public safety was put second (despite the protests of the civil servants, who to be fair could probably have overrided NERVTAG and were probably just looking to protect their own backsides by having someone else to blame) and avoiding stigma to arrivals from China was put first. If anyone has a sincere interest in knowing what happened you only have to read the – publicly available – NERVTAG minutes.
Excellent article. Let’s hope we can open up and promote positive constructive dialogue about radical new forms of organisation on the back of this pandemic. Genuine localism and power sharing between citizens and professionals, less management and more opportunities for the younger generation to find solutions. Co housing, allowing young people to move from home without having to be millionaires, learn cooperation and living together. New forms of education and work which reflect the digital age.
Has anyone mentioned an English version of the École nationale d’administration as a possible way to improving the calibre of the bureaucrats.
I agree with very much of what Aris Roussinos writes; the ineptness of the state suggests an urgent need for reform as does its relationship with the rest of us. I part company with him on several counts; it will probably be a long time before we can measure what policies would have produced the best Covid 19 outcome. The writer’s solutions appear to me to lack consistency; it is unclear to me who he proposes will deliver the medicine? As for his suggestion that the answers lie in widespread nationalisation, he is plainly too young to remember the squalor and shaming inefficiencies of the nationalised industries of old and the social and economic harm they inflicted.
At the heart of the problem is the absence of a collective hinterland among the political class. It would be a huge step forward if no-one joined parliament until they were forty years old and had a decent job under the belt.
The UK Influenza Pandemic Strategy prepared in 2011 and updated every year was very clear. “We will not be able to stop a new virus from coming through and we should expect up to 315,000 deaths across all age ranges.” There is no mention of lockdowns just the expectation of up to 50% of the workforce being off sick during the peak. This startegy was prepared by the NHS, SAGE and all 4 UK governments. This was effectively the plan that was presented to the nation on March 12th by Chris Witty, Patrick Vallance and Mr Johnson. They have been tacking away from and then back towards this strategy ever since. It was the herd immunity strategy. It expected a loss to the economy of £28 billion. Given Covid deaths are far more skewed to the elderly (avg age = 84) I personally think we should have stayed the course with this plan, removed healthcare intervention for the very elderly and not beggared the economy to the tune of £500 billion. the young cannot keep paying for the old. We are vandalising and sacrificing the economy and the future of the young on the alter of ever extending life expectancy. We simply must get used to the idea that death is a natural and welcome part of life. Without it the planet would be in even more trouble.
“All 4 uk governments” (sic)
It’s almost as if:
a) England had a “government” of its own
b) all the money spent maintaining the politicians in these “governments” was money well spent
More rot from an ill uninformed journalist . Imagine if the other side had the power at this crisis time . Boris can hold your type to task anyday besides covid he can be seen to be restoring values to the country and its people who have been betrayed by self seeking politicians for to long.
Self seeking politician or politicians . Not much guesswork required.
I’m off to read the Sunday Telegraph.
Great article on the benefits of Brexit when we come out the other side. Recommended
Pppffhhh, what is this article? Is he really comparing the virus to WOII? By the way: schools were open back then 🙂 And is he really thinking the virus can be stopped permanently by implementing measures? It’s sad.
It was not “lack of resources” that led to defeat in 1940 it was bad military tactics – so the authors of “The Guilty Men” were just flat wrong. By the way they were leftists – and the Labour Party campaigned for getting rid of the RAF in the 1930s, it wanted a smaller and weaker British armed forces.
As for your attack on “libertarian” Britain – your attack is totally perverse because it is the exact opposite of the truth. Britain has never had higher government spending (this spending will cripple us – and economic collapse may well lead to mass death), the extreme nature of the edicts of the state since last March go further than the rule of the Major Generals under Cromwell, or the restrictions in either World War.
The policies of lockdowns and other restrictions have been a total failure. And even quite left wing regimes, such as Nicaragua and Belarus (how are they “right wing” or libertarian) have shown that the entire policy is barking mad. They did not lockdown – and their death rate is vastly LOWER than our death rate.
The one good point you make is that the British government might have kept the virus out by closing the borders as Taiwan did – I will not argue with that, because I suspect you are correct on this point. The obsession with keeping the borders open at all costs, whilst “locking down” internally, has been very odd.
Lockdown, wear masks, keep out the dirty foreign germs… all medieval superstition. How does anyone think closing the borders to a nation the size of the UK is ever going to work, especially once the virus is already in the community?
I know (outside a book or something) space is always a limiter but I don’t think a critique that identifies other aspects of the problem can so conslusively then just refocus back onto some Atlee Govt style nationalising activity.
Leaving the other stuff behind. It’s important in all this to look at the best responses, and the worst, but it’s also important to analyse through exactly what the reality is here that allows us, or stops us, from simply replicating those successfull responses.
So the East Aisian exposure to other healtgh pandemics that never really reached Europe is a massive factor. I feel sure if we get a similar situation to last Feb/early March happening in say 2026, even with a virus having different characteristics the country will respond at many levels, with far greater speed than last year.
Anyway my own careeer has been spent in the media and I feel the problem of what has becpome an unreflectively over-adversarial media , interconnecting in multiple and complext feedback loops with social media, was lightly dismissed in te aryicle– I feel it is a massive problem.
And this interacts especially viulently (no pun intended) in socities that are already divided, with unresolved issues.
So *Free* (ie very partisan and ‘over’-adeversarial) media PLUS already quite divided are
USA (Trump and the issues around him)
UK (Brexit, at the time of the first outbreak)
France(The metro elite/provincial rural interest which is powering everything from immigration problems that are acute, to police brutality, islamist problems etc
Italy (The North v South but also metro/rural crosscuts and still EU/anti EU)
Spain (Similar *populist issues around perceived urban elites vs more conservative ‘provincial’ interest PLUS sepraratism in Catalonia nd, despite the end of ETA, the Basque area
Even, to give a smaller sized population example, Scotland (Inde as ever is the main division, Brexit was always just a subsidiary to this)
These problems contrast with say a Sweden where society isn’t as divided (despite their emerging immigration concerns) and so the Media is more supportive in general, for longer anyway, than the countries above.
Germany…although here one wonders if having had *a Good Covid* until October the consensus there will continue if the recent figures keep spiralling (is it worse to be useless and lose control or be *effecetive and efficient* and then lose control?) and the fact that the first vaccine was invented there but their vaccine rates may suffer compared to say a UK…
Anyway I hope that gives an idea of other aspects of the *what went wrong debate* that argue against simply saying it’s *the govt/civil service wot’s to blame*…and especially if the argument based on that is we need more of it.
Sweden, with the experts in charge of health policy, and politicians forbidden by law to override their advice, has done just as badly. But the problem with the UK is that there is a political ‘class’, and a media ‘class’, a civil service ‘class’, and a variety of other classes and castes, such as education and academia, and not least the union leaders, whose interests are solely their own. There are plenty of big issues needing strategic direction, and with the capacity to provide a sense of purpose and social achievement, but they fall outside the electoral and news cycles, and the remedies are often ideologically inconvenient.
Actually Sweden continues to to pretty well. For instance, its death rate per million is now lower than Denmark’s. Had they not screwed up with the care homes, Sweden’s death rate would be very low indeed. And their death rate from all causes was lower in 2020 than the two previous years.
The ONS has now put the deaths from covid at exceeding 70,000 and although there is an offset for flu etc. these are the state’s official numbers. The response by the state has been woefully inadequate, the DHSC, PHE, NHS Providers etc. SAGE have shown themselves as incompetent. Drastic change is needed and removal of all these deadwood bodies would be a worthy start.
Brilliant article.
Good article. The PM, Hancock, PHE, SAGE, DHSC and the civil service in general are a total failure. The incompetence shown for covid response is beyond belief. Maybe civil servants might think otherwise. A mass sacking is needed and they should all go along with all the quangos and direct support to ngo’s.
I think this is possibly the worst article I have ever read on Unherd.
Why?