Ignorance as a qualification?

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Last week, the Welsh Secretary, Simon Hart, told us that he wished Wales hadn’t been able to set its own rules for handling Covid. In itself, the idea that an Anglo-British nationalist wants Wales and Scotland to do as they’re told rather than follow their own paths is about as newsworthy as the revelation that the Pope is a Catholic. In support of his position, he argued that “if you look at all of the measurements of success or failure, … actually there was precious little difference between England and Wales”. It’s one of those statements which has the veneer of truth, but where the situation is actually rather more complicated.

Leaving aside the fact that no-one could have known in advance whether different approaches would lead to different outcomes (which makes his statement a rationalisation after the event, rather than a reason for not allowing differences in the first place), one of the reasons for the differences in outcomes being small was that the English government constrained the ability of Wales to be more different, by, for example, only making furlough available when England needed it. There is also a danger in his use of headline figures, because – as the Welsh health minister has pointed out – a country with an older and often sicker population and higher levels of poverty would expect to lose a higher proportion of its vulnerable people to a pandemic where the death rate amongst those groups is higher. The very fact that the outcome was similar could itself be taken as at least a partial vindication of the Welsh approach. Statistics need to be interpreted with caution, rather than just looking at the headline figure, although, in fairness, Hart is probably just following the cavalier attitude of his boss. But leaving the numbers to one side, one thing which has stood out throughout the pandemic – and I suspect that this is what really irks Hart and his colleagues – is that the approach of Mark Drakeford and the Welsh government has been overwhelmingly supported by people in Wales, who are well able to tell the difference between a government trying its best (even if it didn’t always succeed) to keep people safe, and one more concerned for the profits of its friends and donors.

More shocking to me was the claim by Hart that, despite having been an MP for a Welsh constituency for 9 years before being appointed to the Cabinet, he had never heard of the Barnett formula. That really is an astounding admission to make, although it was probably part of what qualified him – in Johnson’s mind at least – to take on the job. Looking around the cabinet table, it is easy to conclude that ignorance is a qualification under the current regime rather than an impediment. On the other hand it could just be that whatever some of those providing him with cash were after, it wasn’t a detailed knowledge of Wales or its finances.

Moments of pride

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Apparently, Boris Johnson will tell the world today that lifting all Covid restrictions in England this week is a “moment of pride”, although scientists and health experts, to say nothing of opposition politicians, are using rather different descriptions, such as “reckless”, “dangerous”, and “premature”. It’s what happens when the political need to buy off his own backbenchers takes precedence over the need to protect the lives of citizens.

Part of the argument is that Covid is now no worse a disease than seasonal flu, in terms of the numbers of people becoming seriously ill or dying as a result of catching it – and we don’t take drastic measures to protect ourselves from seasonal flu, do we? Whilst true, as far as it goes, it is confusing the ordinary seasonal flu which comes around every year with the sort of pandemic seen much more rarely. A more accurate comparison would be with the actions which we would take if a pandemic such as that of 1918 were to hit, when it is highly likely that we would indeed take precautions to try and control the spread. In short, it’s not the death rate per million cases which determines whether action is required, but the sheer number of infections. On that measure, the pandemic is far from over, and Johnson’s proposals for ‘living with Covid’ amount to a proposal that between 1000 and 2000 people per week will die with Covid, and that the most vulnerable will bear the brunt. The idea that mask-wearing is a matter of personal choice and responsibility is all very well if the primary purpose of wearing a mask is to protect the wearer, but it isn’t; it’s about protecting those around the wearer. Allowing people that personal choice is tantamount to treating the infection of other people as some sort of human right.

Here in Wales, there is increasing pressure on the government to follow the UK’s lead, particularly from the Tories. They are actually right to argue that having a common set of rules makes life less complex (although having a common set of rules over a wider area, such as Europe, is apparently a very bad idea), but the result is that, for them, a ‘common set of rules’ amounts to ‘following England’, no matter how reckless decisions taken in London may be, and no matter how little London consults before announcing changes. Prioritising ‘all doing the same thing’ over thinking about what the ‘best’ approach might be is prioritising unionist ideology over public health. A more imaginative approach would be to treat the way in which the four administrations have varied their actions (even to the very limited extent to which that has been possible) as a means of examining which policies have the best outcomes. Devolved decision-making in the face of a novel threat could teach us all lessons for the future, when other pandemics appear, and be a positive advantage rather than a disadvantage. A 'moment of pride', even. The problem, though, lies in the word ‘imaginative’; it’s simply not a word which can be applied to the ‘Welsh’ Tories.

Hints of desperation

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The attempt by some Tories this week to suggest that ‘Keith’ is as guilty of breaking lockdown rules as Johnson, and establish some sort of equivalence between him and Johnson because of a photograph showing him drinking a lunchtime beer during a day spent campaigning, smacked of desperation and barrel-scraping. It was also a rather pathetic attempt at misdirection, with its implicit suggestion that the ‘sins’ being committed in Downing Street were all to do with the consumption of alcohol. Whilst the consumption of apparently industrial quantities of alcohol certainly adds colour to the stories, painting, as it does, a picture of celebration and insouciance whilst others were sick and dying, the line actually crossed in Downing Street wasn’t that one at all. There was nothing in the Covid rules which barred the consumption of alcohol, even if it occurred in the workplace; what was forbidden was people gathering together for non-work purposes.

Had the infamous ‘drinks party’ in May last year resulted in 100 people gathering in the garden after work to drink lemonade and mineral water, it would have been an equally egregious breach of the rules as that which actually occurred. If the media had got hold of a picture of Starmer clutching a diet coke at 7 in the evening in the company of a gang of colleagues who had finished campaigning for the day, they would have got him ‘bang to rights’, to use the sort of lawyerly phrase with which he is presumably familiar. But taking a break to eat a takeaway at lunch time with the same people as he’d been working with all morning before carrying on in the afternoon? Under the rules, what he was drinking was irrelevant, even if unwise. The problem for Johnson and those around him is not their love of wine, but their inability to distinguish between a work meeting and a social gathering. Even ‘Keith’ can do that much.

Making sense of the denials

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When the PM stood up in the House of Commons last week and uttered his unapologetic apology, he must have been well aware that there were other events which hadn’t yet been made public, especially the “Wine Time Friday” sessions which were apparently scheduled into the electronic calendars of around 50 Downing Street staff, and which the PM is reported to have called into on multiple occasions. And he must surely have been aware that there was a high probability, given the succession of stories over recent weeks about other events at Downing Street, that they would also become public sooner or later. Perhaps he was simply hoping that the story wouldn’t get out – a pretty forlorn hope given that there are clearly multiple sources behind the string of stories.

Alternatively, this latest revelation of a weekly event might just make some sort of sense of his repeated denials that there has been any wrongdoing. It is clear that the Friday sessions predated both the pandemic and the Johnson premiership – they were simply seen as a ‘normal’ part of the working week. Whilst many were trying to work from home, Downing Street staff were under instructions to attend the office and work normally – and ‘working normally’ apparently includes staying in the office until late on a regular basis and consuming alcohol whilst doing so. There have been stories in the past about a culture of boozy lunches when Johnson was editor of the Spectator; perhaps for him, drinking in groups around desks and/or moving out into the garden really is just a normal working day.

Earlier on in the unfolding story, some ministers got a bit hung up trying to define what was or was not a party. Duncan Raab tried to claim that it can’t have been a party because people were "all in suits, or predominantly in formal attire", and Business Minister Paul Scully tried to argue that the absence of balloons and party poppers proved that it was a work event. It’s a semantic blind alley: for most of us, staying at the office after the end of the working day and cracking open a few bottles whilst chatting informally draws a clear line between work and socialising. And it was the people doing that who made the rules outlawing socialising at the time. It’s a difference which most of us understand; Johnson’s inability to understand or empathise with the way others think goes to the heart of the problem.

Whatever, the man’s days in Number 10 are now clearly numbered. I somehow doubt that the infamous Sue Gray report will deliver a verdict which is enough, in itself, to finish him off. Establishing criminality isn’t really part of her brief, and she’s not exactly independent either as a senior civil servant reporting to the PM. Johnson’s continued smirk when he refers to her and her report suggests that he is confident that she’ll give him enough wiggle-room to carry on, but the real question is whether Tory MPs, fearful for their seats and beset by a wall of outrage from their constituents, will be content to allow him to do so. The odds look to be against him at the moment, especially if more revelations keep appearing.

Whilst many will take a certain amount of pleasure at seeing the Great Liar defenestrated, we should be careful what we wish for. Perhaps there is a dark horse lurking somewhere in the depths of the Conservative Party, untainted by association with the boss, who will restore a degree of decency, common sense and honesty to the affairs of government. But if there is, he or she has yet to make himself or herself known – and the alternatives who are currently making their play don’t exactly look like people who are going to make things much better.

Making the rules proportionate

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Yesterday, Jacob Rees-Mogg, in seeking to defend the actions of Boris Johnson and his government, came close to saying that what happened may have been against the rules, but the problem was that the rules were not proportionate to the situation. At least, that is how some seem to have interpreted his comments. It’s not out of character; this is, after all, the man who claimed that the reason so many died in Grenfell Tower is that they were too stupid to ignore the advice of the fire brigade. In his world, ‘sensible’ people like him and his boss should take take a view on which rules to obey and which to ignore, and should be allowed to do so with impunity.

It’s a pity that his innate sense of superiority and apparent attempt to justify rule-breaking retrospectively blur the fact that he may actually have a point. Not one which can be used to in any way excuse the past, but one which might be a lesson to learn for the future. Were the rules really proportionate or sufficiently targeted to the problem in hand? To take the specific example of the innumerable parties at Downing Street, it is surely legitimate, in terms of infection control, to ask just how much extra risk is created if people who are working closely together all day long indoors in poorly ventilated buildings then go out into the garden at the end of the day and enjoy a few drinks together in the sunshine. That added risk must be very small indeed, and I can well understand how it might have seemed that way to those involved. It doesn’t alter the fact that rules were broken, though, and that those rules gave them no right to make their own assessment of the risk of breaking them.

If that’s the point which Jake was attempting to make, then it’s a reasonable one, even if he failed to make it in quite such terms. If they’d wanted to, the government could have made all manner of exceptions to the rules which would have covered that sort of situation, but they chose not to for, I suspect, two very simple reasons. Firstly, at the time they were making the rules, they had already dithered for too long and were trying to claw back some of the time that they’d wasted – stopping to work out the fine print would have compounded the disaster they were overseeing. And secondly, keeping the rules as clear, and as black and white, as possible was by far the best way of ensuring widespread adherence. The objective was to stop people mixing beyond what was strictly necessary, and allowing people to use their judgement to decide how much extra risk was involved in activity A or activity B would have led overall to much wider mixing and faster spread – and also have made the job of enforcement many times more difficult.

It’s easy to look back and say that such-and-such an activity caused no problems, and should therefore be ignored, the argument which Rees-Mogg comes close to making. It’s like arguing that driving above the speed limit or crashing a red light on a particular occasion caused no accidents and can therefore be ignored. In this case, the simple fact is that the government made the rules and then ignored them, despite encouraging the police to enforce them for other people. No amount of retrospective analysis of the harm done (or not done) can change the fact that other people were prosecuted and fined for lesser breaches of the rules.

The point which Jake makes about how strict the rules should be is one which governments may well wish to consider carefully in responding to future circumstances, although they will always still be faced with the argument about ‘keeping it simple’ which many might think trumps any attempt at finessing the rules. But trying to use that point to justify, in any way, what has already been done is foolish to say the least. It looks like what it is – just another attempt to justify following a different set of rules.

Luck, not skill

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On Monday, Michael Gove was busily repenting his ‘sin’ of arguing for a more cautious approach to Covid in England than that decided upon by the PM (with its inevitable knock-on effects in Wales). In effect, he was arguing that because the Omicron wave has turned out – so far at least – to be less severe in its impact than some of the worst-case scenarios put forward by the experts, Johnson took the right decision in not implementing further restrictions. That is something of an oversimplification, based on hindsight. The outcome actually owes more to luck than judgement. And whether the decisions were right or not depends on some difficult value judgements as well.

Imagine two cars at the top of a steep hill crowded with pedestrians. One driver disables his brakes completely before both cars set off down the hill. It is an almost inevitable result of the physics of gravity that the brake-free car will arrive before the other, even if a few pedestrians are killed or injured in the process. Whether disabling the brakes was the ‘right’ thing to do depends on how highly we value two things: getting to the bottom first, and the lives and families of the unfortunate pedestrians. It is increasingly clear that Johnson and his government place a very high value on being first to the bottom and a very low value on the lives of the pedestrians. They believe that getting through the Omicron wave before other European countries will enable the UK economy to recover faster than others. Some ministers have been talking openly about there being a ‘first-mover’ advantage. It follows that they view any additional deaths or injuries incurred in the process as a ‘price worth paying’, and scorn those other countries (and we’re not just talking about other parts of the UK here) who are slowing their progress in order to protect citizens. Whether events have proved them ‘right’ or not doesn’t simply depend on whether they get to the bottom first. It also involves an implicit value judgement on the cost of getting there.

It’s true that nobody knew in advance how many extra hospitalisations and premature deaths would result from allowing rapid transmission of the virus, but everybody knew that the answer would be both greater than zero, and also greater than in other countries which adopted a more cautious approach. How much greater is down to luck, not judgement. The English government has been very much, as Mark Drakeford put it, an outlier. Making such a value judgement is actually not a unique position for a government to be in – all administrations sometimes have to make difficult decisions based on costs and benefits. (A much more down-to-earth example is when local councillors have to decide whether to install a new pedestrian crossing or not, and take the number of accidents and deaths into account in the process.) The pandemic has, however, elevated this type of decision to a much greater scale; they’ve been gambling using the lives of tens of thousands of citizens as the stake. Having the highest body count in Europe is nothing to be proud of, however Johnson might try to spin the ‘benefits’; and it’s a direct result of government policy.

What the statements made by Gove and others this week reveal is just how little the lives, health and well-being of the citizens of the UK matter to them in comparison to securing the profits of companies (and Tory donors). Their real ‘success’ is in getting so many people to share their view that the rest of us are essentially of low value and expendable.

Defining futility

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Some Tory backbenchers, including ex-PM Theresa May, were being very hard on the PM yesterday, demanding that he set out his plans for dealing with any future variants of Covid. What possessed them to believe that any plan put forward by Johnson would be worth the paper it was written on is one of life’s little mysteries – they know him well enough to know that nothing he says can or should ever be taken at face value anyway. Besides, we can already work out what his plan will be based on his actions to date, and there are three parts to it.

Part 1 will be to deny that there can ever be another variant at all. Deaths will continue at roughly the present rate, and Tory MP’s will politely applaud the PM’s announcement that no new measures are needed.

Part 2 will be to declare that the variant is harmless. It’s not based on data or science (why would we expect that it would be?), but additional deaths will only be in the hundreds or low thousands, and Tory MP’s will shout and wave their order papers at the PM’s announcement that no new measures are needed.

Part 3 will come into effect when mere facts show that the variant might indeed be more infectious than any we’ve seen to date, but the PM will declare that the NHS can and will simply ride the wave. Thousands, or even tens of thousands will die, hundreds of thousands will be hospitalised, parts of the NHS will collapse under the strain – and Tory MPs will cheer the PM to the rafters when he announces that no new measures are needed.

The strategy, if one might dignify it with such nomenclature, has only two elements in reality. The first is that, regardless of what happens, no new measures will be required, and the second is that the announcement of no new measures will please the majority of Tory MPs, with their degree of pleasure increasing in direct proportion to the seriousness of the situation. Given that the second part of that, with its concomitant that the crazies who have taken over the Conservative Party might allow the world king to stay in office a little longer, is now the only driver of pandemic policy, asking for a detailed plan is an entirely futile exercise. A bit like being an ex-PM sitting on the backbenches, I suppose.

Learning to live with it

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The media reported two fatal stabbings in London last week, an occurrence which seems to be becoming all too frequent. Each and every one is a tragedy for those involved, of course, but to put it in perspective, very, very few people die each year as a result of knife crime. According to the House of Commons Library, there were 244 homicides as a result of the use of a sharp instrument in the year to March 2021. Yet no-one seriously suggests that we should ‘just learn to live with’ knife crime, and invest resources in dealing with the consequences rather than in attempting to reduce the incidence. It would be a very silly argument to make. And yet…

Contrast that with preventable deaths due to Covid. There have been 174,000 premature deaths so far which mentioned Covid on the death certificate, according to the ONS, and currently around another 1,000 are being added to that total every week. There are things which the UK government could do to reduce the incidence of infection, or even to make resources available to allow the more civilised governments in Wales and Scotland to take more steps to protect the population, but they have instead decided to allow the virus to rip through the population in England, with inevitable knock-on effects elsewhere in the UK. Instead of acting to prevent deaths and hospitalisations, they are investing scarce resources in building extra temporary wards in hospital car parks (with no clue as to how they will be staffed, given that Covid-related staff absences are increasing daily). It’s good business for what the Telegraph referred to as “purveyors of soft-shell body storage solutions”. Yes, that’s right – their normal business is supplying temporary morgues, but they are handily diversifying to house the living in glorified tents. Although we may yet be calling on them for their core business skills as well. This is what ‘learning to live with Covid’ looks like for at least the next few months in the UK, and there is no certainty that it won’t be so for a great deal longer.

One of the fundamental arguments for restricting people’s freedom has always been to protect others from the consequences of that freedom. That is why we do, quite properly, restrict the ‘freedom’ of people to walk around the streets carrying knives, and we act against transgressors. In the case of Covid, the argument has been turned upside down. The ‘freedom’ of people not to have ‘restrictions’ placed on their daily lives in order to control the spread amounts to the freedom to infect others as they wish. Not intentionally, of course – that’s where the comparison with carrying knives breaks down – but those resisting restrictions have enough knowledge to know that the ‘freedom’ they demand has inevitable consequences for others, including the premature death of thousands of them.

The UK finds itself at a time of crisis with a government in thrall to people who present an effective cull (perhaps unintentional, although in the case of some of them, I cannot be certain) of the oldest, frailest and most vulnerable of the population (for it is those categories most likely to die early) as some sort of libertarianism, a protection of the ‘freedom’ of the many. And, rather than having a reasoned debate on what collectively enforced measures might be sensible to reduce the impact of the disease, the public is encouraged by the UK government, from the PM down, to see any measures as individually restrictive rather than collectively preventative, and a compliant media goes along with this. It’s difficult to overstate how dangerous the crazies who have infiltrated and taken control of the Tory party are, but the one thing Brexit has taught us about them is that ‘winning’ one argument is never enough for them. Their pursuit of ideological purity can and will never be satisfied, and the costs of making the attempt will be high. Wales and Scotland need out.

Winning doesn't prove a gambler to be right

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The compulsive gambler who stakes all the money he has on the spin of a roulette wheel producing a red number will see a win as a vindication of his strategy, whilst a loss is merely a spur to find more money to try again. He ‘knows’ that his strategy is right: it’s just a matter of time. Most of us can see and understand that whether the wheel comes up red or black is purely down to chance, a matter of luck rather than judgement; but winners always need to believe that there’s more to it than that; that they possess a special skill and ability to judge.

It is our great misfortune at a time of pandemic to have the UK led by a gambler, prepared to take risks with the lives of others in the belief that he knows better than the rest of us. If Omicron turns out not to have the hospitalisation and death rates which some feared, he and his supporters will describe it as a vindication of his approach; if things go the other way, it will simply be a case of bad luck. In truth, of course, the biggest factor is simply luck either way; there wasn’t enough information available to be able to claim that it’s about the application of any skill or ability. If ignoring all those voices who warned him that strong urgent action was needed turns out not to be a disaster, that actually tells us nothing about his judgement – but will probably encourage him to do the same again in the future.

If it really turns out that the cost of his recklessness is only in the hundreds or low thousands of additional premature deaths (which is the best case scenario), that doesn’t prove that he was right not to do more to prevent them, any more than it proves that Mark Drakeford and Nicola Sturgeon were wrong to take stronger action. Equally, the converse is true – if it all goes horribly wrong and there are tens of thousands of additional premature deaths, that doesn’t prove Johnson wrong and Drakeford and Sturgeon right. The truth is that they’re using different criteria to judge ‘success’, and those criteria are based on completely different sets of values and priorities.

The leader elected by the voters of England, albeit under their badly-flawed electoral system, prioritises money and wealth over lives and health. As his remark about ‘letting the bodies pile high’ indicates, he regards the number of deaths – however high it might go – as a price worth paying for protecting the economic interests of the few. Measured against that criteria, his decision not to act was always the ‘right’ one, regardless of the consequences. He’s not so much hemmed in by the crazies on his party’s fringes, as some have presented it, but freed by them to follow his instincts rather than having to accept the advice of experts who don’t share his values. The leaders elected by the people of Wales and Scotland, on the other hand, prioritise the protection of citizens over mere monetary considerations, and their natural instinct would be to act even more strongly were they not hamstrung by London’s control of the necessary resources. From their perspective, acting strongly was always the ‘right’ thing to do, even if the number of premature deaths avoided was much lower than it has been.

People often claim that the UK is a single country with a single set of values, but the pandemic has clearly shown that to be a gross oversimplification. Our problem has been not that Wales and Scotland have dared to express that difference by diverging from England in responding to the pandemic (as the Tories and their media supporters keep claiming) but that the union prevents us from diverging as much as electoral politics in Wales and Scotland suggests that we might have liked to do. The union has become an obstacle to expressing our values, and we could well do without it.

Don't let them take us down with them

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The old headline which some say is apocryphal but which others attribute to the Times in 1957, which read “Heavy Fog in the Channel. Continent cut off.”, serves as a classic indicator of that special English sense of being exceptional and at the centre of everything. We had a contemporary indication of that same attitude this week, when Sir Somebody Tufton-Bufton MP declared that if England does something different to what he referred to as ‘the principalities’ then it is not England which is out of step, but everybody else. Given his obvious ignorance of the nature of the UK and its component parts, it will surely come as a surprise to no-one to discover that he is, like his party’s leader, yet another Old Etonian, another product of that network of so-called ‘educational’ institutions which seem to exist primarily to remove any feelings of empathy and humanity from their charges and replace them with an innate sense of superiority and exceptionalism. Accurate and useful knowledge seems to play only a minor role in the curriculum.

Anyway, the basic difference between the more civilised parts of the UK on the one hand and England on the other in this case is about whether it is sensible to take formal precautions to try and slow the spread of Omicron before it gets completely out of control, or whether we should rely on the common sense of people to take their own decisions about the level of risk involved and wait until the health service is overwhelmed before acting. And the problem for the civilised parts is that it’s only when England acts that money will be available in the quantities required to support the affected individuals and businesses. Notwithstanding certain obvious exceptions, and without playing down the damage that those exceptions can do in spreading the virus, it is true that many people, even in England where their leader is still exhorting them to party on and leading by example, are showing a great deal of common sense and voting with heir feet. Some of the businesses affected are effectively being closed by customer withdrawal rather than by government dictat – something which the Chancellor apparently considers a good thing since he doesn’t need to subsidise them, but which will not feel quite so good from the perspective of either the businesses themselves or those working in them.

The argument of the so-called ‘freedom lovers’ of the swivel-eyed crazy tendency which has infiltrated and taken over the Tory party is that setting rules infringes our rights to take our own decisions. I suppose we should be glad that they haven’t – not yet anyway – tried to apply this to certain other offences, like murder or theft. There is a sense in which they have a point: what events have shown us is that, whether we are given rules or merely guidance, most people do the sensible thing. For most of us the outcome (in terms of our behaviour) is much the same. In the same way, most of us don’t need a law banning us from killing other people to prevent us from doing it. The difference between rules and guidance, though, is about the lack of enforcement. With rules, we can and do take action against those who transgress and endanger the rest of us (unless, of course, they are cabinet ministers, advisers, Tory MPs or donors), whereas with guidance, they are free to continue to act as they wish (and may even gain unfair advantage from their actions). Specifically, in this instance, to spread a virus variant the potency of which is still not fully known or understood. Underlying their argument is an ideological aversion to any action being taken collectively rather than individually.

Some might object to the distinction drawn above between England and the more civilised countries of the UK, but doesn’t this go to the heart of an important aspect of what civilisation is about? Acting collectively, in the interests of the many rather than the few, setting rules which allow us to live side by side in a commonly-agreed framework rather than allowing individuals to do as they please regardless of the consequences for others  – aren’t these all aspects of a developed civilisation? Under the leadership of an ignorant and exceptionalist elite, England is rapidly turning its back on civilised values. And that applies not only in the specific dealt with here, but in the treatment of the least fortunate in society and of refugees, to pick just two examples. Remaining attached to what England is becoming is not a future which offers much hope to anyone.

Criminalising the bullied

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One of the problems faced by the first capitalists with their mills and their machinery was the pre-existing work culture amongst a largely agricultural population. The idea of working the same hours every day all year round was a strange one to a population used to the idea of working when things needed to be done, spending longer in the fields in the summer and staying indoors more during the dark winter months. In time, the idea that ‘work’ required regular hours on regular days in a regular location became so deeply ingrained that most workers – to say nothing of most employers – now find it difficult to conceive of an alternative model.

One of the few ‘benefits’ of the pandemic has been to challenge that concept of ‘work’. Whilst many tasks still require a physical presence at a set location (although increasing use of robots and AI will reduce that number over time), what the pandemic has shown us is that with modern technology at our disposal an awful lot of work does not require that workers are in a set location or even working set hours. Some employers are even seeing this as an opportunity to reduce office costs (and improve staff morale and motivation) by no longer requiring physical attendance on a regular basis. Others are in a state of near panic, so tightly bound by the old paradigm that they don’t understand how they can ever manage people without physically policing their activities.

As we know from ‘Britannia Unchained’, the idea that workers are essentially idle is not only the strong belief of many employers, it is also rife at cabinet level. From their perspective, they work hard and deserve the rewards that go with that; the rest of us are born idlers who need to be kept in line with clear rules and firm discipline. It’s part of the explanation which Raab and others have repeated for those Downing Street ‘gatherings’ – these were people working under extreme pressure and needed the relaxation, whereas the rest of us (including front line health service workers) needed to be kept in line and observe the rules. They seem to genuinely believe that preparing for, and debriefing after, press conferences is more exhausting than simply looking after the sick.

Anyone who has ever considered the question of productivity in relation to much office-based work knows how difficult a concept it is. At its simplest, productivity is simply output divided by input, but in many – perhaps most – office jobs, ‘output’ is difficult to define and measure. Lazy employers therefore fall back on measuring the easy part – input. Or, as it’s otherwise known, hours worked. They even build up a bureaucracy around time keeping, with a host of rules and exceptions, in order to train their staff to work by the clock. No surprise that many end up presiding over a workforce of clock-watchers as a result. They’re measuring completely the wrong thing, of course – output is far more important than input. Most of us who’ve ever worked in an office will be able to think of at least one person who’s worked long hours without producing very much (or even who has done more harm than good during the hours worked!), as well as someone else who’s managed to appear totally on top of his or her job without ever staying after the end of the day. For employers measuring only input, ‘working from home’ has left them feeling threatened and vulnerable. Instead of asking how they can assess what their staff are producing, or even think about how to encourage a culture of wanting to be productive, they’ve resorted to using fancy monitoring software and demanding that staff return to the office prematurely.

The decision of the Welsh Government yesterday to introduce fines for those who go to work when they could be working from home is very badly targeted. Whilst the objective (reducing contact) is the right one in the face of the pandemic, fining workers who are bullied and feel threatened by incompetent employers who are unable to manage a workforce other than through monitoring their presence in the workplace is merely adding to the pressures on the individuals. It’s taking the easy option – just like those employers who only measure input – rather than the difficult one, which is about encouraging and helping employers to find new working methods (or, as a last resort, fining those who don’t). At a time when the people of Wales have shown, in general, an amazing willingness to act collectively and follow the leadership of Drakeford and his government, criminalising people who are in fear of losing their jobs because of the actions of bad employers is intensely counter-productive. It’s a surprising lapse in judgement from a man who has generally been seen to be doing a good job.

Update:  The First Minister has subsequently clarified that there has been some misreporting over this issue, and the intention is not to punish those attending their place of work, but to support them by providing a solid reason for them to refuse a request from their employers. It's a welcome clarification, although it says something about some employers that their staff need to be threatened with prosecution in order to persuade them to behave reasonably and lawfully. There is also a danger, of course, that announcing that there is, in effect, no intention ever to actually fine anyone might serve to weaken that protection. Still, not enforcing laws seems to be the in thing when it comes to Covid, as we've seen with certain parties... 

With one bound, PM leaps out of frying pan

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“We will not hesitate to act!”, declared the PM yesterday as he announced that his government has, in fact, decided to hesitate rather than act. Despite all the warnings from scientists and those working in the NHS that after Christmas is too late for any action to have a meaningful impact on the spread of Omicron, the government has decided to wait until there is hard evidence that the number of hospital admissions is too large for the NHS to cope with before taking any action to reduce that number. The Cabinet clearly understand neither what exponential growth is, nor that the lag between infections and hospital admissions means that waiting until they’re already too high means not only that even more drastic action is required, but also that hospitalisations will continue going up for a week or two even after action is taken. It amounts to a policy of waiting until there are too many, and then loading on even more. And even if, as we all hope, most infections are milder than with previous variants, there will still be many, many additional premature deaths as a direct result of government hesitation, purely because of the sheer number of people likely to be catching the disease.

We know that the headline figure of around 90,000 per day new infections is an understatement. Many of those infected will either be asymptomatic or else driven to avoid taking a test by the government’s total unwillingness to provide adequate support for those who are unable to work. At a doubling rate of every two days (current estimates are between 1.5 and 3 days), the number infected will double twice between now and Christmas Day, and another three times by the end of the year. Unchecked, that could mean 2.8 million recorded cases a day by the end of the month. The ‘good’ news (for the government’s spin doctors at least) is that the headline figures will never reach that level. The UK only has capacity to do around 800,000 tests per day, and there is no way of increasing that capacity in line with the rate of infection. By the end of the year, the headline figures are likely to have reached the peak allowed by that capacity constraint – and also to have been rendered utterly meaningless as any reflection of what is actually happening as a result. On the particular measure of infection rate, the UK government’s policy of  ‘waiting until we have more data’ is equivalent to ‘waiting until events render the data meaningless’.

There is one other piece of ‘good’ news for the PM in all this as well. Watching the numbers soar out of control is likely to divert attention – for the time being at least – away from parties and rule-breaking. Whether encouraging people to worry instead about catching Covid, and about which of their friends and family will be hospitalised or die, is an entirely positive change is another question entirely.

Sticking to pretend principles

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Of the 361 Tory MP’s in the House of Commons, 135 are considered to be part of the ‘payroll vote’, that is, MPs who must either resign before voting against the government, or be sacked after doing so. Of the remaining 226, over 100 – nearly half – chose to vote against the government last night. We can be reasonably sure that a number of the 135 on the payroll vote agreed with them, but decided (surely not?) that their careers were more important than what passes for their principles.

The main arguments that the rebels used against the idea of people having to display their Covid vaccination status were firstly that they are opposed to the idea of people having to display their ‘papers’ before entering certain venues, and secondly the lack of evidence that such a move would be effective against transmission. It’s worth comparing their stance on this issue with their stance on other issues.

Whilst I haven’t checked the lists in detail, it is clear that most – perhaps even all – of the rebels also voted recently in favour of demanding that voters should be required to show ID before voting. They clearly believe that requiring all electors to show their ‘papers’ in an attempt to reduce the almost non-existent incidence of electoral fraud is a good thing, but requiring only those who wish to enter venues where large numbers of people gather to show their ‘papers’ in an attempt to reduce hospitalisations and premature deaths is a bad thing.

What could possibly be the huge difference between the two propositions? Two things immediately spring to mind. The first is that the requirement for ID to vote will disproportionately benefit the Conservative Party, and the second is that the requirement for ID to enter venues will disadvantage Conservative donors and supporters certain businesses. Still, the rebels pretend to have their principles – and as Marx (Groucho, not Karl) didn’t quite say, if people don’t like them, then they will pretend to have others. But only ever ones from which they and their ilk will benefit.

Maybe it will be the little things that get him

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The response by the Metropolitan Police to the reports of parties at Downing Street during last year’s lockdown was clumsy at best. Saying that they do not routinely probe "retrospective breaches" of Covid rules was a pretty silly thing to say – as many others have pointed out, the nature of any crime investigation is that it is retrospective, because crime can only ever be investigated after it has occurred. It might be true that most prosecutions for breaches of Covid regulations have resulted from police action taken at the time of the breach rather than from a “retrospective” investigation, but it isn’t universally true, and there was nothing in the regulations themselves which suggested that people would only be prosecuted if they were caught red-handed. But whilst the words used were badly chosen, the basic point is one which many victims of car crime, burglary etc will be only too familiar: under-resourced police forces do indeed pick and choose which crimes they investigate and which they ignore.

The question which deserves more scrutiny than it gets is about how the police come to a decision about which crimes they should investigate and which do not deserve their time and attention. Whatever the answer to that should be, it most definitely should not resolve entirely around how long ago the offence was committed. Telling would-be offenders that they’ll get away with the offence if they can only keep it secret for long enough is a poor approach to law enforcement, and an even worse one to crime prevention. And in the specific case of Covid breaches, telling those who were fined for holding parties which were raided and broken up by the police that the difference between them and the offenders at Number 10 was that nobody reported the Downing Street parties at the time they were happening is not much of a justification for differential treatment before the law.

In the grand scheme of things, and all other things being equal, it doesn’t seem entirely unreasonable for an overstretched police force to say that it really doesn’t feel investigating the details of a party held twelve months ago is a sensible investment of officer time, despite the fact that during last year’s lockdowns, the Home Secretary, no less, was urging people to report their neighbours for holding parties. (Perhaps she should be reporting Rishi Sunak for failing to report his neighbour.) However, all other things aren’t equal. Any decision on whether or not to investigate is inevitably an intensely political one – whichever way the decision goes. Of course the opposition parties want to expose and punish the repeated and continuous lies and evasions at the heart of the current government, and a decision to investigate will inevitably be seen as supporting that. On the other hand, a decision to let the matter drop will, equally inevitably, be seen as allowing ‘them’ to get away with what ‘we’ would be punished for.

The government really does seem incapable of helping itself. A government with any sense of honour or shame would simply announce that after an internal investigation any of the organisers still employed at Downing Street had been disciplined and that nothing similar would ever happen again. Instead of which, a government which is incapable of ever admitting doing anything wrong ties itself up in knots by arguing that only a ‘formal’ party would have been against the rules. (I don’t even know what that means: does it mean white tie events, or events to which embossed invitations were issued? If that’s what the rules really meant, the police were surely wrongly applying them to events held by others.) The PM’s spokesperson has consistently both failed to deny that parties were held and argued that no rules were broken – two things which in no conceivable universe could both be true.

There is a sense in which whether a party was or was not held is small beer in the scale of things. To date the media have generally gone fairly easy on Johnson; he has learned that if he just ignores a bad story or doubles down on the lie, the media eventually get fed up of the story and move on. There would be a certain poetic justice if it turned out that it was something fairly small which eventually did for him. We should never forget that it was, eventually, tax evasion which placed Al Capone in prison.

Being used as the stakes in a high-risk gamble

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Whilst in theory the Welsh Government has the power to determine what steps should be taken to minimise Covid risks, in practice the scope for divergence from England is limited by the tight control of the purse strings being retained in London, the long and porous nature of the border, and the shared media which inevitably highlights what is happening in England and can lead to a degree of confusion when the rules differ. Despite that, the Welsh Government has tried to maintain a safer environment in Wales than that pertaining in England, and has succeeded, by and large, in keeping most of the population on board with its decisions.

It has been clear since the emergence of the latest variant that the desire of Wales (and Scotland) to take stronger action that England is still strong, with the First Ministers of both countries openly demanding tougher action, a demand which Johnson has rejected outright. It isn’t just non-Tory politicians who are expressing their concern – just yesterday, Johnson slapped down the head of the UK Health Security Agency for her entirely sensible advice that people should try and avoid unnecessary socialising. The PM, apparently, is all in favour of unnecessary socialising whatever the risk. Today, senior doctors and NHS leaders have warned that the government needs to take stronger action on a precautionary basis, describing it as “bizarre” to wait until a spike happens before acting.

Whilst the government is entirely correct to emphasise that advisors advise and ministers decide, a decision not to act in the face of such strong advice from so many experts indicates that the government has decided to take a gamble. How much of a gamble remains to be seen. It may be that they end up being lucky: the new variant could turn out to be less of a problem than some think likely. If that happens, they will retrospectively claim that they took the right decisions, ignoring the degree to which luck plays a part; if things are as bad as others fear, the gamble will cost thousands of premature deaths. None of us – not even the most knowledgeable experts – have enough information at present even to make a reliable guess as to the outcome; only time will tell. Johnson might get away with it this time – that would be a good outcome in the short term, but might also simply encourage even more recklessness in the future.

What is clear is that the UK government is being less than honest with the population. Their rejection of the suggestion that all arrivals into the UK should self-isolate until after a second negative test on day 8 (as put forward by Mark Drakeford and Nicola Sturgeon) was on the basis that it would have a detrimental impact on the travel industry, which demonstrates that impacting one particular industry sector is a more important consideration for Johnson than hospitalisations and deaths, let alone increased pressure on the NHS. Presenting sound and sensible public health actions as being ‘restrictions’ on ‘liberty’ not only presses the right buttons with the Tory party’s increasingly influential extremists, but also encourages the public to overlook the fact that our lives are the stake in Johnson’s massive gamble, a gamble which puts profit ahead of people. And, to return to where this post started, as long as Wales is tied to England, no matter how much the Welsh Government might huff and puff, Welsh lives are part of that stake as well.

Another huge boost for world's most successful union

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The UK’s world-leading science sector is very fortunate indeed to be blessed with scientists of the quality of Jacob Rees-Mogg. Indeed, it’s hard to believe that so many scientific advances were made in the past without his input. His revelation this week that Tory MPs don’t need to wear face masks because they all know each other will unquestionably have a huge impact on the UK’s reputation in the hitherto unknown field of viral intelligence. The implications are very far-reaching indeed. He has demonstrated, to his own satisfaction at least (although the detailed analysis has yet to be peer-reviewed or published as far as I have been able to establish), that the virus is sentient (well, more so than Jake, anyway) and that it can only pass from one human host to another if those two humans are strangers to each other. Uniquely in the UK, the virus has also been encouraged to mutate to the point where it has developed a remarkable ability to tap into human brain cells in order to ascertain whether its next potential host is known to its current host or not before deciding whether to attempt a new infection. How it will behave in the case of human hosts with an obvious deficiency in the brain cell department (Jake, we might just be talking about you again) is the subject of an ongoing experiment amongst MPs, in which the Tories have decided to be the guinea pigs whilst the opposition benches constitute the control group.

These astounding discoveries have undoubtedly come as a profound shock to virologists the world over, all of whom have been working to date on the rather naïve assumption that a virus consisting of a mere few strands of RNA could not possibly be sentient enough to determine the pattern of its own spread. At this very moment, top teams of experts in epidemiology around the globe are preparing to descend on the UK to examine this strange new variant, and study the processes which the UK followed in order to channel viral mutations in the direction of sentience. Brexit, of course, has been absolutely key to the success of the government’s management of the viral mutation programme. Freed of the demands of unelected Eurocrats that scientific conclusions should be based on evidence or data, the UK is the only state which was in a position to make this particular discovery, and freed of a requirement that scientists should possess any particular qualifications or experience, Rees-Mogg was uniquely placed to lead the work.

Anyone who chooses not to believe the word of the great Jake is clearly being unpatriotic, and foreigners caught sniggering are just trying to hide their jealousy and embarrassment at being left so far behind. So, crack open the bubbly, raise the bunting, and celebrate another huge success for the most successful union the world has even known. But only with people you know, obviously.

Competitive recklessness

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One of the more boring but predictable aspects of pandemic politics has been the regularity with which the 'Welsh' branch of the English Conservative and Unionist Party has demanded that the Welsh Government should follow the English lead in all respects, in order to maintains ‘consistency’. Leaving aside for a moment that ‘consistency’, like honesty and integrity, is one those attributes mostly conspicuous by their absence in their English leader, there’s a certain irony that people who have spent years arguing for Brexit precisely so that the UK could follow different rules to that alien place across the water called Europe should now find themselves arguing that having different rules between neighbouring administrations is confusing, but that is not something that particularly concerns them.

When it comes to relaxing restrictions, they do seem to be making the assumption that that is what most people want, despite the fact that opinion polls regularly suggest that the majority – in England as in Wales – would prefer caution. Most people have probably been able to work out that ‘learning to live with the virus’ is actually a euphemism for ‘encouraging a higher than necessary number of premature deaths’, but then, they’re not interested in most people, only in that magic 35-40% which is enough to give them absolute power the UK on the basis of the electorate in the only part that really matters to them, namely England.

Whether Mark Drakeford’s more cautious approach has always been right is a moot point, and something that will only really be understood properly after the event. The scale and lethality of the virus has created an unprecedented situation in much of the world, and different governments have responded in different ways, all of which have positives and negatives attached to them. What has been clear throughout, however, is the differing motivations of the different players here in the UK. Drakeford has consistently erred on the side of trying to reduce the numbers of premature deaths and serious illness, whereas Johnson is conducting an unethical mass experiment on the population at large by deliberately pursuing a policy which he knows will lead to more death and sickness in the hope that the numbers will ultimately be considered ‘acceptable’ and that any new variants arising out of the experiment will not be vaccine-resistant. If it works out, he will claim to have been prescient, but, like the gambler who ‘knew’ which horse was going to win, it will owe more to luck. But then, for Johnson the stakes are low. He’s not taking the massive risk which some have claimed – the only thing he’s risking is his reputation, and in his case that’s no risk at all. The real risk is being taken by the involuntary subjects of his experiment.

In truth, the differences between the actions taken by Drakeford and Johnson aren’t as different as the politicians make out – and given the nature of the border between the two jurisdictions and the limited nature of devolution, that is hardly a surprise. Many of the differences when it comes to ending lockdowns are to do with sequencing of actions rather than the substance, which leads to Wales being later than England in some respects and earlier in others. Which of them has got the sequencing right is another unanswerable question; it’s a question of balancing the advantages and risks and forming an opinion as to what suits the differing circumstances best. Demanding that all should move at the pace of the fastest in all respects might be good politics but it’s bad epidemiology. It’s ‘disappointing’ (others might prefer a stronger word there) to see the English Labour leader joining in the same game in the hope of political advantage by demanding that Johnson should follow the Welsh lead in areas where Wales has acted earlier. Arguing that Wales has got the order right and England has got it wrong is one thing – but this was an argument for taking an increased level of risk. Starmer is in danger of finding himself as out of touch with the public desire for caution as Johnson.