Different circumstances require different responses

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Whether the decision to prioritise England for PPE was a deliberate act of sabotage or just another example of the UK Government’s incompetence is still unclear. I always tend to support the cock-up theory of history in preference to the conspiracy theory.  In this case, it is entirely possible that whoever told the companies concerned that Wales and Scotland had their own processes for acquiring equipment either genuinely believed that to be true or simply didn’t bother to check. And although the antipathy of the present UK Government towards devolution becomes daily more obvious, even a hardened old cynic like me finds it hard to believe that they would deliberately sacrifice people in Wales and Scotland in order to save more lives in England. It may be some time before we know the whole truth, however.

What we do know is that the London government is increasingly intolerant of any decisions taken in Cardiff or Edinburgh which in any way differ from the ‘central’ position, even down to the rather petty question of the naming of field hospitals, where the English NHS decided to call them all Nightingale Hospitals and the UK Government simply assumed that Wales and Scotland would fall into line. English ministers were also unhappy at Scotland ‘jumping the gun’ and closing schools before England did so.  And there is clear annoyance at any suggestion that Wales and Scotland might take different decisions on the length of the lockdown and the way in which it is lifted. But in this last case, the desire for a centrally taken decision which the ‘subordinate’ administrations accept without question is potentially extremely dangerous.

I’ve seen some graphs and statistics pointing out that the death rate in Wales, for instance, is currently lower than that in England.  Factually, that is indisputable, but care is needed in interpreting such a statistic.  Some have drawn an inference that Wales might have got something right where England got it wrong, but that looks to me to be unwarranted at this stage, however much some of us would like to believe that Wales is doing better than England.  We know that the virus spreads rapidly, but it does not spread equally quickly in all areas.  We’ve seen, for example, how it seemed to travel from north to south in Italy and from east to west in France. An alternative explanation for the situation in Wales might be simply that Wales is behind the UK curve, just as the UK is behind the Italian curve.  It could imply that, purely by accident, a ‘late’ lockdown decision for England just happened to be much timelier in those parts of the UK, like Wales, which were at an earlier stage in the pandemic. 

That would also have other implications, though: treating ‘the UK’ as a single entity when it comes to judging the success of the lockdown could also be a mistake. We’ve suffered for years with economic policy being decided on the basis of what’s right for London and the South-East; deciding to relax the lockdown on the same basis could directly lead to more infections and deaths in those parts of the UK which are a week or two behind London.

In this situation, retaining the option of doing things differently, or on a different timescale in Wales (or even treating parts of Wales differently) is not just a matter of respecting devolution – it’s potentially a matter of life and death.  Doing things differently will undoubtedly further annoy Johnson and his Cabinet in London given their obsession with central control and uniformity, but Mark Drakeford and Nicola Sturgeon will be doing absolutely the right thing if they reserve the right to make their own judgements based on the needs of their respective nations. That doesn’t guarantee that they’ll get it right, of course; but the validity of their decisions should be judged on the eventual outcomes in Wales and Scotland, not on whether they meekly follow London.