Tuesday, 8 February 2022
Too big to fail
At the time, a particularly startling aspect of the recent pandemic was how rapidly the UK government response became too big to fail. Almost as if this aspect of it was deliberate and not dictated by circumstances. It is easy enough to picture how this could have occurred via an imaginary but plausible scenario –
A group of senior government officials, senior ministers and other transnational groups favour a particularly drastic pandemic policy. It is to be a major programme of severe personal restrictions, widespread business closures and a relentless programme of daily announcements to ensure almost complete public engagement.
It occurs to this imaginary group that such a drastic policy must be too big to fail if it is to create an overpowering sense of inevitability in the public mind. This is to be achieved by colossal and well-publicised levels of government spending. No cutting your losses in this game.
It’s how climate change, Net Zero, HS2 and many major government policies appear to be insured against failure. Make them too big to fail and create that powerful sense of inevitability. It seems to have become the technique of choice.
Is it deliberate? Yes – obviously. It works, mainly screws the little people and is a good fit with a powerfully repressive political ethos.
Of course too big to fail also means too big to tolerate discussion, especially discussion about the possibility of failure, let alone actual failure. Hence the censorship, the abuse of critics and carefully selected data. This too is a good fit with a powerfully repressive political ethos.
We could say that too big to fail is a key characteristic of totalitarian governments. In which case we’ll see more of it.
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4 comments:
Perhaps not so much 'too big to fail' (like banks in the big financial crisis) as 'too big to let go'?
You could argue that our Government (and many others) were stampeded into the first COVID responses. Ventilator manufacturing, Nightingale wards, lockdowns and piling into vaccine production. They had a tiger by the tail and when the tiger turned out to be a house cat they fond that all the fingers of the Establishment didn't know how to let go without loss of their jobs and their profits.
Imagine what might have happened if COVID had been presented as a bad outbreak of influenza!
Blair's wars, too. Just had to happen. No option, really.
"Ventilator manufacturing, Nightingale wards": I don't blame the pols for those. The first was a response to NHS doctors drama-queening, the second was a wise precaution that only hindsight showed to be unnecessary.
It's the lockdown that is the great error, leading in turn to the vaxxes, which were not so much anti-viral as anti-lockdown. The other whopping error - presumably more the fault of the doctors and the NHS than the politicians - was the failure to give early treatment of the ill.
There's ample reason to hang the most damaging of the culprits but the evil-doers are not limited to, though they include, the politicians.
DJ - yes we could say the government was stampeded into the first COVID responses, but if we do we should go after those who caused the stampede first. Good and hard.
Sam - all those home-made WMDs pointing at us, when all we have are thermonuclear weapons.
dearieme - it's not as if nobody was advocating early treatment. I recall a video of a US doctor fulminating against the failure to make use of and investigate early treatments. He was livid, barely managed to restrain himself.
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