The Centre Cannot Hold

Comparison of G7 countries during pandemic

The failures of the UK Government to respond to the COVID-19 pandemic have been the subject of many articles and TV programmes ever since we were one of the last European countries to introduce a lockdown on 23 March. The Sunday Times, Lancet, BMJ, Public Health, and the previous Chief Scientific Adviser have not held back in their critique of the delays, the flawed procurement, abandoned track and tracing, abysmal testing record, failure to protect care homes and carers, and the deliberate absence of transparency by the government.

The government has always tried to shield itself behind the mantra of "following scientific advice". Many news agencies worldwide have highlighted how the UK, a country that was expected to be amongst the best prepared to suppress the pandemic, has failed on so many counts. The number of deaths is the highest in Europe and the G7 countries and the death rate remains the second-highest in the world.

But we know all of this, it has been the playlist of the last few weeks and now, even the BBC which has allowed the government to peddle its slanted narrative is beginning to acknowledge the appalling mistakes made before and during the pandemic. The real issue is that the UK government, the civil service, and the other grand panjandrums of the state are overly centralised. They lack operational experience, detailed knowledge of services, and the emotional intelligence of practitioners who work at the local or regional level.

Unlike the majority of the press and media who display the political allegiances of their owners when reporting, the BBC, ITN, and newspapers such as The Guardian and FT have a considerable international online presence, and aspire to provide an independent and objective reporting of events. But they are all part of the hubble-bubble of influencers, the metropolitan elite, and self-opinionated insiders in reporting and blaming for the crisis. They are too socially distanced from the real world where the pandemic has taken hold and where it will be checked.

Local government, including public health, embedded local businesses, and active communities, have the insider advantage over the centralised government. They understand the nuances of geography and operational networks. They have informed and immediate intelligence, and, most of all, a genuine commitment to resolving problems. They also have the energy, personnel, institutional knowledge, and determination to implement actions that will make a difference. It's just that they are not trusted by the central government and not understood by the fandango of government agencies and fellow travellers. It is a measure of the government's lack of self-awareness that has resulted in the UK being the world leader in failing to control the pandemic.

As the country opens up after lockdown, we are still left without an effective track and trace system and the UK government insists that they will call the shots to impose local lockdowns. Surely the more effective outcomes in Northern Ireland, Scotland, and Wales devolved nations should tell them that the centre cannot hold. The government must accept that local knowledge and networks are far more relevant to suppressing the pandemic than continuing with their impotent posturing. The perpetual failure of the PM, his discredited cabinet and special advisers is another example of how they have broken Britain.

A Bankrupt Government in mind and money.

Covid Cavaliers

"Your whole mind is occupied by a seething anxiety that things are going to go badly because il principle, or whatever little worshipfulness is in charge today, is not very good at the base business of thinking." Hilary Mantel, Wolf Hall

I pulled Wolf Hall out of the bookshelves. I needed something to while away the hours and the book has been lavished with universal praise as the best book of the 21st century. The intrigue and callousness in the court of the Tudors reminded me of our present government's attempts to obtain a divorce from the EU and its serial failures to handle the COVID-19 pandemic. It's just that Hilary Mantel would have written a far better script and the actors would have been so much better. Boris Johnson lacks the zealousness of Henry VIII and Dominic Cummings is far less cunning than Thomas Cromwell.

We are in week 12 of lockdown and as the story of how the government and its advisers have responded to the COVID-19 pandemic begins to emerge it confirms all our fears of gross incompetence and a total absence of operational management experience. The cabinet is totally lacking any minister with serious knowledge or ethical principles that are essential in dealing with events of this kind. It does not stop them acting with impunity and throwing money at initiatives that could have been scripted for Only Fools and Horses.

 

The Health Minister, Matt Hancock, seems to be in his element as he surfs the airwaves behaving like the great redeemer. His insatiable ability to twist the truth and bring in friends and donors to help with the procurement of PPE has been flabbergasting.  The stockpiles of PPE should have been maintained by his predecessor Jeremy Hunt several years ago. Hancock and Sunak's involvement in creating and then allowing ministers to use a fast track for willy-nilly contracts for equipment will not end well. And how could Hancock appoint someone with a CV like Dido Harding to be let loose with a Test and Trace budget of £22bn. Her track record in management is woeful with her greatest hits including the scandal at Talk Talk when it lost the personal details of 3m customers and letting the Cheltenham Races proceed and escalate the spread of Covid. Don't hold your breath for Test and Trace to be a success. 

Rishi Sunak is doling out the money from the Money Tree that Theresa May never found, Whilst the speed of his response has been impressive, I am far less certain that he has thought it through. There will be many thousands of Del Boys in the city and MPs' friends and associates who take the money and run, I doubt the taxpayers will ever see it again. I also fear that the inquiry into Johnson's Covid omnishambles will not see the light of day anytime before the next General Election.

Fact-checking whatever happened will require the involvement of the BBC and other institutions that are more transparent than the government and the phalanx of organisations and regulators that it controls but The mendacity of this abysmal government seems to have no limits.

When Matt met Dido

The UK Government's response to Covid 19

Our Top Table for Responding to the Covid 19 pandemic

The critique of the UK government's response to the Covid pandemic has gathered a fact-shaming momentum as we discover daily about the delays, the lack of transparency, the abuse of statistics and the failure to act in a timely and appropriate way. The government is still trying to convince a now sceptical public that we have world-beating systems, scientists, and solutions. True, we are world-beating in terms of the number of deaths, and the lack of PPE, testing and tracing. Comparisons with New Zealand, Vietnam and Taiwan, not to mention most developing countries have made us a laughing stock of our former EU partners. The government meanwhile responds by suggesting that there will be a comprehensive inquiry once this is over. It is ever thus, and we know from the still gestating Grenfell Inquiry, all the reports over the past dozen or so years on Community Care and Racial Discrimination that after a lengthy period of government prevarication that the outcomes of these inquiries are seldom worth a hill of beans.

Five weeks ago during a Zoom catch-up with four former colleagues, we were lamenting the litany of mistakes made by the government in responding to the Covid pandemic. We had all had extensive experience of coping with emergencies and we decided to put together a paper for publication. The way these things work it took a couple of weeks before we had a final paper and already some of the arguments we were making had been picked up by various journalists and practitioners and published in the press or been expounded on TV programmes. The journal that normally publishes our papers has a long lead time, and in a fast-moving crisis like Covid, the article was passing its read-by date and attempts to have it published elsewhere have so far not materialised. I have copied it below for posterity.

‘Things fall apart; the centre cannot hold’, Governance in the post-COVID World

In what has seemed like the blink of an eye, our public services and the people who work in them, public administration and governments have had to radically re-orientate themselves and their businesses to face up to the threat to life and society presented by COVID-19. In recent weeks, the Westminster Government and the devolved administrations have had to take entirely unprecedented steps to fundamentally reshape social and personal behaviour for the good of all, to shore up the economy,and protect economic well being of individuals.

And in the midst of all of this, the preparedness, the speed of response, and the capability of central government has been severely tested, and has been found wanting by many professionals, academics and citizens.

So what does this tell us about the way we run and govern our public services and administration? If one of the most significant responsibilities of government is to protect its citizens and keep them safe, what has gone wrong? And in the particular case of this emergency, after so many years of planning, training, and investment in assessing and mitigating risks of exactly this nature, how could our response have been so stuttering and flat-footed?

We believe much has to do with the relationship that has developed between central government and the rest of the public polity, and the level of regard and mutuality which exists in that relationship. We believe that ironically, in the years since devolution and the creation of governments and administrations in Scotland, Wales and Northern Ireland, the UK and its constituent nations have become more centralised in decision-making and engagement, not less so. We believe that the huge potential of devolution, of dispersing power and widening engagement across geographies and into communities, has not been recognised or realised, and our system of governance is much weaker for that reason.

Strong central control in government can indeed work, but history shows that it very rarely flourishes. Ultimately, the truth is, in the words of WB Yeats in his poem ‘The Second Coming’, the centre cannot hold, and things will fall apart. In our current emergency, we have seen that the initial UK consensus on fighting COVID is already fracturing. On the easing of lockdown restrictions, Scotland, Wales and Northern Ireland are now on different paths to the policy being followed in England. New points of difference are emerging on the re-opening of schools, and they will occur again on the issue of social gatherings, and the opening up of workplaces and entertainment venues.

But this should not be seen as a threat. Public policy decisions should reflect local priorities, characteristics and circumstances, and the devolved administrations are well-placed to make these decisions.

Questions may be asked about the adequacy, or indeed, the existence, of a coherent, clear UK post-COVID response strategy. But the question is not whether the devolved administrations are right to chart their own paths: the question should be how can that principle of devolution be further extended - the so-called ‘subsidiarity’ principle - to local government. Not only would this allow the tailoring of policy and delivery to meet local circumstances, but a unified, strategic alliance of UK, devolved and local governments would offer up expertise, a labour resource, and a knowledge exchange far over that which the UK Government can offer by going it alone.

Above all, the time is right for this to happen. We are about to enter the recovery phase of the pandemic. Local authorities are well used to being called upon to take the lead in recovery after emergency events. In the management of most serious emergencies, there comes a time when responsibility is handed over from the Police services to local authorities, so the they can coordinate and deal with the tasks of repair, rebuilding and healing.

Local authorities take the lead in working with local health authorities, local housing associations, local businesses, local communities and voluntary organisations. They are better placed to solve the multitude of problems that occur uniquely in different areas – providing local solutions to local problems, and mobilising local communities. We have learned time and time again that during the recovery phase, local planning and local delivery solve local problems, providing as it does scope for local innovations which centrally determined alternatives and directives cannot.

Preparations should be being made now for the assumption of local control of the recovery phase, led by local authorities and their local partner organisations. This means making sure that these public sector and voluntary bodies are properly resourced to do the job. It means local authorities being charged to engage with communities, and help them to build their resilience and readiness to deal with what comes next in restoring post-COVID world that may be very different to our previous experiences.

In Westminster, Edinburgh, Cardiff and Belfast, our politicians need to recognise and acknowledge the power of local diversity and local initiative. They need to focus on setting out a clear national strategy. They need to relinquish some control and allow local initiative and real operational experience to build a safe, post-COVID world based on good knowledge and local evidence. But much needs to change to allow this to happen. We are advocating that action needs to be taken in the following areas:


· There needs to be a strong, clear UK strategy to provide a context and framework for regional and local action plans;

· New relationships are required between public bodies and local communities, where communities are enabled to take responsibility for services at the most local level;

· New functional relationships are needed with local businesses, which recognise the financial investment and human resources that businesses have in local and regional economies, and which change decision-making processes accordingly;

· Within public bodies, new, flexible relationships are needed so that staff can move freely from agency to agency. But also from agencies into the community, lending technical skills and expertise to help create stronger and more able community structures. More radically from communities into agencies and back again, allowing community activists to acquire knowledge and experience which can be applied in their communities,

· Revamped democratic structures and processes are required, based on a more participative principle of democracy, including e-democracy, and an openness to engagement through activism and partnership;

· The expectations of central government and its institutions need to change: the proliferation of local solutions, locally designed and commissioned, and inevitably diverse, needs to be encouraged and facilitated, not resisted.

In the final analysis, as we look towards what a post-COVID society might look like, and how it will have to behave, we need to put our trust in cooperation and collaboration. Our collective experience of in public service tells us that, with the right support, we can depend on the irrepressible good sense, good intentions and good humour of local communities throughout the land. If we forget this, we are lost. The secret will be to respect and trust them, and to give them the tools, resources and confidence they need to do the job.

A Bamboozler and a Cockwomble

Bamboozler (noun) – A person who deceives or gets the better of people by trickery, flattery, hoodwinking, pulling the wool over someone's eyes, or the like.

Cockwomble (noun) – A person, usually male, prone to making outrageously stupid statements and/or inappropriate behaviour while generally having a very high opinion of his own wisdom and importance.

World-beating porkies

Sins of pride, greed, wrath, envy, lust, gluttony, and sloth are fake news folk 

PM Johnson announced in May that we would have a 'world-beating test and trace system' by the start of June. We discovered on Wednesday that it will not now be ready until September. On the same day, 3 June, his alma mater, Oxford University showed that there were 359 deaths in the UK  compared with 332 in the remaining 27 countries in Europe. He bamboozled MPs and the media by insisting that "he remains proud of the government's response to coronavirus".

In the United States, the backlash following the murder of George Floyd and the USA reaching 100,000 deaths through COVID received no immediate response from the king of the tweets. He subsequently ordered the police and national guard to clear demonstrators using tear gas and rubber bullets so that he could walk to the St John's Church and fondle a Bible as a prop for a photoshoot. As my Australian cousin said, "What a Cockwomble". As well as millions of American citizens, two former Generals, his Defense Secretary, a Republican Senator, and the Bishop of Washington have all denounced President Trump for being prepared to order the police to suppress demonstrations by mainly peaceful protesters to allow him to wallow in an act of fake Christianity against the backdrop of the President's church.

It would appear that the chickens are coming home to roost for the Bamboozler and Cockwomble.  They have both lived charmed lives bolstered by their inheritance, enormous egos, craven contempt for facts and an ability to wing it in an era when knowledge and collaboration with others have been semaphored as a weakness to those most damaged by austerity and inequality. How much longer will they be able to hang on to their egos? I know there's an answer.