Two weeks ago this post suggested that the UK
coronavirus response is trending towards cock-up. Two weeks on we know enough to see an emerging trend towards totalitarian futility.
The coronavirus debacle is complex and there is little point
in pointing towards this or that bit of evidence, authority, conjecture or anecdote. We do
our own analysis and we try to see the big picture. To my mind the big picture
is becoming increasingly obvious. There are caveats but there will be caveats
for ages yet. The big picture still begins to seem excessively
draconian. Lockdown harm and its potential for lasting damage have become the
issues.
Simple observation tells us that here in the UK we have
adapted to the lockdown as far as we ever shall adapt to it, we have learned the
lessons as far as we ever shall learn them –
Unless we ease the lockdown.
Because we have quite obviously reached a situation where
any further learning and adaptation by the UK population should be via an eased
situation. We need to move on and we should do it now and learn whatever there is
to be learned. The vast majority of vulnerable people know they are
vulnerable and can be relied on to do whatever they are currently doing. It is
in their interests to do so and they know it.
Supermarkets could still maintain a controlled shopping routine
for vulnerable people – say an hour a day on certain days of the week. Apart
from that, all we need is to maintain the flow of information keep the obvious cautionary messages in mind, wash our hands, observe social distancing as far as conveniently possible - but get on with
normal life. Normal life will then generate new ideas and new behaviours as we adapt further to the pandemic. It's called progress.
I’m not holding my breath though. The trend towards totalitarian futility continues.
11 comments:
This would truly be a futile type of totalitarianism. The police and other agencies will be raring to tell us what to do, but we'll have no money to pay them because we'll have buggered the tax take.
I would like to call you out as a pessimist but. My experience is that the hardest thing about shopping is staying at 2 metres from one of the supermarket staff or even a cluster of four staff. Also, the mask and gloves bullshit. The people who wear them don't know why they are wearing them, what they hope to protect from, and they behave in a totally moronic way, bumping into people for example. The gloves and masks do not confer immunity but they behave as if they do. My conclusion is that people are so stupid that either lockdown continues forever or we just give up
Armstrong economics reckon the economy will be totally screwed unless we come out of lockdown by 1st May.
The officer class making the decisions all have secure public sector incomes / pensions, no skin in the game of the real economy
Agree it is wage earners who have most to lose.BBC etc featherbeded.We must get people back to work.I think schools are more compolicated.
Much is being done for home-delivery, and while Ocado were pretty naughty with their treatment of established customers, it seems they've pulled their socks up and are starting to do more.
My local garden centre, which is a small independent firm, has been magnificent in its work to keep going, and they'll be the first to get a proper visit when they reopen!
Then we'll start on the pubs...
Sam - the tax take ought to drive an easing of lockdown if anything does.
Graeme - our experience at our local Co-op has been fine apart from a woman who had a coughing fit but she left the store very quickly. We mostly rely on online deliveries though.
Nessimmersion - even 1st May sounds too slow to me but no doubt we'd recover. Any longer than that seems crazy. In my pretty extensive experience, people with those secure public sector incomes / pensions do not understand a world where income has to be earned. They think they do but they don't.
George - our grandkids seem to be doing pretty well working at home. Many kids won't of course.
Scrobs - we use home delivery and it works well, but there is much competition for delivery slots so sooner or later we may hit a problem with that.
If you look at the history of local government development, a very large part of it was driven by the need to protect public health - such as the provision of clean water, adequate drains etc and control of epidemics. By their nature, epidemics consist of multiple local hotspots and there were over 300 authorities with their own Medical Officers of Health and teams of officers with epidemiological training and considerable statutory powers to trace and track infected people and their contacts. In earlier days there were also isolation hospitals to keep those infected out of general hospitals. That has all gone ( the Nightingale hospitals are a belated attempt to make this good after the event) so the government made no early effort to pursue such a policy vigorously when the infection might have been contained. The functions had all been taken into the nine regions of the Quango Public Health England which, at best, had only a few hundred staff capable of such work. The countries which appear to have been more successful followed this standard epidemiological priority, developed over a century ago.
This thought struck me as I took a little permitted exercise past our local pub ( The Hawk & Buckle, Main Street, Etwall), looking very sad in its closure but still displaying its excellent food hygiene score in the window. The Environmental Health Officers, no longer employed on that duty could be diverted to Coronavirus tracking . I understand there are some 10,000 such officers in the country.
There was one recent bright spot of initiative from a local business, David Nieper, which has reopened to manufacture PPE for local hospitals, bypassing the NHS official supply chain. The owner said he had offered his services through the official channels and not received a reply, so he approached the hospitals direct.
My guess is that some relaxation of the lock down will start around 11 May because that is what President Macron has announced and our centralised, national control is driven as much by PR as by anything.
Edward - that's an interesting point. If we still had those 300 authorities with their own Medical Officers of Health and teams with epidemiological training, I'm sure we would have a range of approaches to the pandemic. Cities, towns and villages would probably have approaches more suited to their population densities and local facilities. It isn't easy to see how that could fail to be an improvement over where we are now.
One of the strengths of the German health service in comparison to the UK one is that they have multiple providers, whereas we have a national service with a stalinist management structure.
There system has proven to be much more flexible and adaptable in dealing with panicdemics, similar in fashion to Mr Spaltons memories of local authority competence.
Nessimersion,
On 25 March I wrote to my noble friend, Lord Stoddart of Swindon, with an article by Pete North
http://peterjnorth.blogspot.com/2020/03/corona-britain-forgot-what-government.html
concerning the origins of our system of local government. For twenty three years Lord Stoddart held the position I now occupy as chairman of the cross-party Campaign for an Independent Britain. Today Lord Stoddart sits as Independent Labour. I hope the link to the article works.
Lord Stoddart replied
"Pete North's article was interesting and he is correct that local government has been stripped of many powers which have been handed over to unaccountable expensive quangos. I was a member of Reading County Borough Council for eighteen years and its leader for seven of them. Our powers were extensive since the county boroughs exercised all the powers of counties, boroughs, rural district and parish councils. Leaders of the county boroughs were often known as the local prime minister!
It was the 1888 Local Government Act that really gave real powers to local authorities but that act was ruthlessly unravelled by the Heath government by the 1972 Local Government Act which destroyed the county boroughs and and removed important powers from local government which they had carried out reasonably well over the years. Heath and, later, Thatcher, did not understand that the way to make local authorities more efficient was to give them additional powers not fewer. Unfortunately, I could not give too much time to opposing the bill as I was a member of the standing committee dealing with the Housing Finance Bill which sat all day and often through the night".
When did we last hear of Parliament sitting through the night? But those were different days.
Nessimmersion - yes, the bigger they are, the more inclined they are to paper over the cracks with PR. It becomes the standard response.
Post a Comment