Living down to the words of Bevan

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In the past few days, in the wake of problems with energy supplies and food, ministers have been almost falling over themselves to assure us that the lights will not be going out this winter, Christmas will not be cancelled, and that talk of a three day week is ‘alarmist and misguided’. Given their track record to date of predicting the consequences of their actions and delivering on promises made, the safest assumption is probably that all three are near certainties, and that the main question is whether they’ll happen in series or in parallel. One might almost think that they’re going out of their way to live down to the accusation made against them by Nye Bevan all those years ago. Lest anyone jump to the wrong conclusion, I’m not talking about them being lower than vermin (although judging by some of their actions, they could well be going for justifying that one as well). No, the one that I’m referring to here is the accusation that they are organising geniuses, an accusation which, in context, was far from being the compliment which the words suggest it to be.

Is Boris an organizing genius?

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If there’s one thing for which the English Prime Minister cannot be blamed it is the fact that there has been an outbreak of coronavirus in the UK. It is becoming increasingly clear that the virus was already circulating well outside China much earlier than people thought, and the UK isn’t the only country where community transmission was already happening before the need to take any measures was identified. However, turning a drama into a crisis (as an insurance company once said) only happened as a direct result of government action (or rather inaction). With the advantage of having seen what was happening in places like Italy, and the luxury of having a week or two to avoid a repetition, it took a special kind of skill to ensure that not only could the UK repeat the experience of Italy, it could go one better and show that the UK doesn’t have to be bound to any mortality limits set by a member of the EU. And having the highest mortality rate (on a population basis) of any country in the world just goes to show how brilliant the UK can be under the right leadership, and once freed of the shackles of the Brussels bureaucracy.

Avoiding the economic impact of a minor outbreak would have been hard to avoid as well. Obviously, allowing the outbreak to get out of control before taking any action made that impact worse, but it took further government action to make it as bad as it has become, and only a world-leading government could have responded to the economic impact in such a way as to make it even worse than it needed to be.

Having presided over a health crisis, and then compounding that with an economic crisis, it took real effort to add a constitutional crisis into the mix by conflating England and the UK and ignoring the devolved administrations in Cardiff, Edinburgh and Belfast. There was nothing inevitable about things like accidentally outlawing driving from England to Wales, and whilst the health crisis might have mandated an economic crisis of sorts, there was nothing about either the health crisis or the economic crisis which mandated a constitutional crisis as well. That is entirely down to the actions of government.

Now some might feel that all this just highlights the incompetence and cluelessness of Johnson and his team, but I am reminded of the words of Aneurin Bevan. He once said that “This island is made mainly of coal and surrounded by fish. Only an organizing genius could produce a shortage of coal and fish at the same time.” Could the apparent bumbling and stumbling of Johnson all be a cunning way of disguising the man’s secret genius for organization?