A brave policy

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It would be hard to argue that the Welsh government’s performance during the coronavirus pandemic has been brilliant. Errors have been made and they’ve been slow to act at times. Part of this may be the result of an over-willingness to seek consensus with an English government which has shown itself to have not the slightest interest in working with anyone else. Part of it may be down to a lack of power to vary some aspects of the response to the pandemic. And part of it may be down to the porous nature of the long eastern border of Wales, which makes divergence more difficult. None of that is enough to excuse the Welsh government for all its failures – a government which truly put Wales first and foremost would have diverged sooner and faster from the increasingly shambolic approach being taken by England rather then held back because of the largely political fear of being seen as ‘too nationalist’. Scotland’s response has not been perfect either, although the less equivocal political leadership and greater willingness to diverge there has helped.

Despite the imperfect response in Wales, the polls suggest that the Welsh government, like its Scottish counterpart, is significantly more trusted than the English government. The more cautious approach is in tune with public opinion, and the willingness to at least attempt to answer questions rather than bluster and lie has been notable. That some people are frustrated with the slower pace of release is unarguable; we still have less freedom than is being enjoyed across the border, and that seems set to continue for a while at least. However, public support for that position seems to be holding up. Whether that continues probably depends on what happens in England. If the release of lockdown leads to an upsurge in cases in England, the First Minister can probably count on becoming even more trusted, but if it doesn’t, then the frustration will grow. The evidence to date is that the former is rather more likely than the latter and like most I broadly support the Welsh approach even if I’d quibble with some of the details. Only time will tell.

The utter incompetence of the English PM and his disastrous handling of the pandemic has left the Conservative Party in Wales in a particularly difficult position – they had to decide whether to hang on to Johnson’s coat-tails or to strike a more independent position. They have chosen to ‘resolve’ that conflict by making repeated demands that Wales should follow England more closely. Being as kind as I can, I assume that they sincerely believe that Johnson has got it right and Drakeford has got it wrong, despite all the current evidence suggesting precisely the opposite. Because if I didn’t make that assumption, I’d be obliged to assume that their demands for copying England amount to a demand that we should increase the Welsh infection and death rates to match the English ones. They’re taking a huge gamble on Johnson’s competence in the face of all the evidence to the contrary. If they’re wrong, then effectively demanding that Wales should ‘level up’ the death rate rather than act differently would be a highly original election strategy. Sir Humphrey, in his customarily understated way, would probably call it ‘brave’.

Taking liberties

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On Friday, the Prime Minister of England warned people not to “take too many liberties” with the coronavirus guidance which his government has issued. He presumably thought that the official guidance wasn’t sufficiently vague or meaningless, and there is little so vague in life which Johnson cannot, with a few ill-chosen words, make vaguer or more meaningless.

Taken literally, his words mean that people should consider themselves free to take ‘some’ liberties with the advice – which I take to mean free to ignore it – as long as they don’t take ‘too many’, but the definition of how many is too many is a matter which he will leave to that good old British common sense which led thousands of people to congregate on beaches last week. And although the outcome didn’t look exactly like the mass application of common sense, the individual decisions of those people heading to the coast were entirely rational within the context of the PM’s words. Anyone who believed that everyone else was going to follow the government guidance could legitimately set out for the beach (aka taking a few liberties) safe in the ‘knowledge’ that the beach would be otherwise empty. And that leads us to a rather different interpretation of the PM’s words.

He doesn’t really mean that ‘all’ people are free to take ‘some’ liberties at all – what he really means is that a small minority can take as many liberties as they want as long as the vast majority follow the rules. It’s another variation on the ‘one rule for us, another for everyone else’ philosophy which underpins his whole approach. There is nothing particularly risky about any individual taking a trip to the beach (or, for that matter, and choosing a destination not entirely at random, driving to County Durham); the risk arises when thousands individually apply the same ‘common sense’ assumptions to their own decisions. The actions of any one individual may be considered excusable, but the problem with excusing the actions of one is that it becomes difficult to condemn the actions of others for doing the same thing. Or at least, it would be difficult for anyone who applied rationality or a sense of justice and fair play to the question: for those who start out with a perception that some people are privileged and have more rights than others, it’s very easy to do.

What the PM was really telling us on Friday is that the many need to know their place and stay there so that the world is relatively safe for the few.

The matter is closed

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This week, the media have been reporting that the PM is “under pressure” to sack Robert Jenrick following revelations about the minister’s role in granting a planning application in order to save a Tory donor millions of pounds. A few weeks ago, the same media claimed that he was “under pressure” to sack his chief aid following the infamous mobile eye test and breach of lockdown rules. But expecting Johnson to feel in any way pressured over the dishonesty of those around him is wholly unrealistic. This is a man who harbours a deep sense of resentment over the fact that he was himself sacked from two jobs for dishonesty, and that’s not indicative of a man who thinks that dishonesty should be in any way punished.

Someone who has lived his whole life believing that normal rules are for other people and that he is entitled to do whatever he wants is hardly likely to sack someone else for a similar offence. Applying the ‘normal’ expectations of what a PM should do in such circumstances is to misunderstand the man. When the world king declares a matter closed, it is closed. For those wondering just how badly a minister in Johnson’s administration has to behave to get sacked, the answer is obvious: act honestly, stand by your principles and say what you think. There are no signs of any minister being likely to qualify in the near future, not least because anyone meeting that description would never have been appointed in the first place.

Coining new words

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Apparently, millimate isn’t a word, largely because no-one's considered it to be particularly useful to date. However, the word’s non-existence doesn’t mean it’s not an accurate description of the outcome of the pandemic in the UK to date – with around 65,000 excess deaths out of 66,000,000 people, the UK’s population has been roughly millimated. According to the PM, this is some sort of great achievement of which we should all be proud, presumably in the sense that it’s better than being centimated (also not a word), let alone decimated. And thus far, no other government has succeeded in millimating its population, so the UK is achieving the world leadership status which the PM craves.

That there will be an increase in the rate of infection after yesterday’s series of announcements is surely beyond dispute; the only area for debate is by how much. The problem with changing so many things at once is that it will be difficult to know which changes are the ones which are leading to the increase, as the scientists have been quick to point out, and that will make it difficult to re-impose the right controls, even supposing that the PM has any intention of so doing. His haste to get back to ‘normal’ and end the daily on-the-record lie fests (despite the death rate being higher now than it was when they started) suggest that his real intention is to return to the herd immunity strategy which he seems to have favoured all along. Perhaps he even believes, in best Trumpian fashion, that not having a government minister announcing the numbers of deaths and infections every day means that they haven’t actually happened. The utter inadequacy of the test-and-trace strategy which has been put in place inevitably means that many infections will go undetected until the numbers are significant.

I can understand the political motivation for his government seeking to agree air corridors to a range of countries and allow people to holiday abroad. Allowing people to return to the UK without facing 14 days’ quarantine makes it likelier that they will want to travel. And given the better performance of those target countries in getting the virus under control, I can see why we might all think that we’d be safer abroad than we are here (although I don’t expect the government to use that particular sales pitch in support of its approach). I can’t, for the life of me though, see why those other countries would be in such a rush to allow people in from a country like the UK which clearly doesn’t have the pandemic under control and which has such an inadequate system for checking people.

Whilst the Welsh government’s approach has been better on the whole (and in relation to yesterday’s announcements shows signs of having been more prepared to listen to the experts), it’s been far from perfect. I can’t honestly say that the Welsh system for testing and tracing looks much better than the English one at present. That makes it right to be more cautious about lifting restrictions until the system is properly up and running, but it’s no excuse at all for a proper system not being in place already – they’ve had three months to sort it. The bigger problem we have in Wales is that, for a variety of reasons including porous borders, a media which doesn’t adequately explain the distinctions, and economic control over furlough and other schemes remaining in Westminster, observance of the Welsh rules is likely to decay rapidly as well. The weaknesses of devolution compared to independence will become increasingly obvious.

Perhaps most worrying of all yesterday was the PM’s reliance on people applying what he called common sense. Common sense isn’t as common or consensual as he seems to think. After all, he is a man who thought that Dominic Cummings was applying common sense by driving on a 60-mile round trip to test his eyesight. If that sort of common sense is what we’re now all depending on, then the word centimate is likely to fall into common usage sooner than we might wish.

Simple strategies to deceive

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There are two unifying strategies underlying the PM’s approach to everything. The underlying goal is always to protect the interests of the most well-off, and the aim is to do that in a way which a sufficient number of electors in the key seats will support.

Strategy 1 is a very simple one – when in doubt, lie. Even better, when not in doubt, lie. Even when the truth would be more helpful, and even when the lies are so blatantly obvious that he can’t possibly expect anyone to believe him, the approach is still the same: lie. He knows he’s lying, we know he’s lying, and he knows that we know he’s lying, but he still does it anyway. When the lies are exposed, repeat them. It doesn’t matter – the media will broadcast even demonstrably untrue government statements as though they were true, and few will pay much attention to the timid, half-hearted, and occasional fact checks.

Strategy 2 is also amazingly simple: find a scapegoat. Nothing is better at diverting attention from your own failures than having someone else to blame. Foreigners are always a useful starting point, especially European ones who simply don’t understand how special and exceptional the UK is. And if it’s not foreigners, it’s the poor. Getting younger people to feel resentment about paying a decent pension to the old is just another example. The only people not to blame are those who own and control the wealth, and they maintain their position by ensuring that the population at large remains divided, blaming each other for their lack of wealth rather than blaming those who have hoarded it all.

Whilst it’s true that there is an anomaly in the calculation of the triple lock for pension increases as a result of the drop in wages because of the furlough schemes, the attack on the triple lock isn’t a new one. They’ve been looking for an excuse to weasel their way out of it for a while now, and I somehow doubt that they will settle for a ‘temporary’ adjustment. For those who respond that Boris Johnson has ruled out scrapping the lock, I’d refer them to strategy 1 above.

The interesting thing is that, in fact, the main beneficiaries from the triple lock aren’t current pensioners at all. Those of us receiving pensions do of course gain a little from a 2.5% increase even if there’s no inflation, but due to the power of compound interest (which Einstein apparently did not describe as the most powerful force in the universe), the main beneficiaries over the long term are the young people who will see their future pension entitlement growing as a proportion of their income over the next 30-40 years, as Chris Dillow has pointed out here. But then, convincing people to act against their own self-interest is precisely the aim of the lie and scapegoat strategy. It’s why so many blame those on benefits for their own difficulties and support the loss of their own freedoms so that those freedoms can be removed from foreigners. It was at the very heart of Brexit. It’s a strategy which works – and it will continue to work as long as a sufficient number of people are taken in by it.

They can't even recognise a petard when they see one

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In principle, there’s nothing at all wrong with the idea that the government should launch an advertising campaign to encourage people to prepare for Brexit. The plan does suffer more than a little from the absence of any certainty about what we should all be doing to prepare for an event when they can’t tell us what’s going to happen, but that level of incompetence is only to be expected. What struck me, however, was that they see a particular problem in getting Brexit supporters to prepare.

On first thoughts, one might reasonably expect that Brexiteers would be the most clued-up and enthusiastic about the changes – it is, after all, something that they’ve long been yearning for. But the problem, in a nutshell, is that those who thought they were going to have the penny and the bun simply don’t see any need to prepare. As the tender document puts it, Brexit voters are “less likely to prepare as they don’t believe in any potential negative consequences of leaving”. They’re deluded, of course; but what this means in practice is that the people who did the deluding now want to spend large sums of money on persuading those who they successfully deluded into believing that Brexit would be painless to start preparing for the changes that they told them wouldn’t happen.

Those who lied, lied and lied again by telling people that the UK was so special that the EU27 would give us all our current benefits with no downside are now using public money to tell people to prepare for an unspecified set of changes whilst continuing to assert that the EU will back down and let us have whatever we want, and continuing to deny that they ever misled anyone in the first place. If they had any sense of shame or integrity, they’d be squirming. In the absence of that, they’ll just keep lying.

Donkeys led by donkeys

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There are surely times when even Tory MPs must find themselves wondering how they ended up where they are. Well, those with half a brain cell, at least. Earlier this week, they were all issued with ‘lines to take’ explaining why extending free school meals vouchers throughout the school summer holidays was a really bad idea, and many of them loyally took to the airwaves to defend their government. They were enthusiastically at it on Tuesday morning, only to discover by mid-afternoon that they’d somehow misunderstood that when their leader said ‘very bad’ what he actually meant was ‘very good’. Brilliant even; so brilliant that they all now believed passionately the exact opposite of what they said they believed passionately just a few hours earlier.

It’s not exactly the first time it’s happened either – there are a group of Tory MPs who are serial suckers. Perhaps it’s a form of masochism (which is, after all, a practice not entirely unknown on the Tory benches). Whatever the reason, the PM is probably enjoying testing the limits of how silly he can make his own people look. It may continue for some time though, given that there doesn't appear to be any obvious limit on their gullibility. It was only a couple of weeks ago that MPs and ministers were all over the media one morning explaining why it was absolutely impossible and completely unaffordable to scrap the NHS surcharge for immigrant workers in the NHS, only to find out in the afternoon that it was not only not impossible, it was both a sensible and obvious thing to do, and something that they’d all fully intended to do all along. Money? No problem. And then there was the fiasco over voting in the House of Commons when some of them managed to vote for a proposal which they themselves described as utter farce, only to discover that the government largely agreed with them by the end of the week.

Not all Tory MPs took the same position, of course. One of the reasons for the U-turns, in each case, was the growing number of Tory MPs who could see that there might just be a slight problemette with the government’s position and who made it clear, either publicly or privately, that they could not support the government. A cynic might suggest that this, rather than campaigns (especially the one of which he was apparently completely unaware until the day after his spokesperson told us that he would respond to it the following day) by people outside parliament, might have weighed rather more heavily on the PM’s mind. But there were plenty who were more than willing to say one thing at 9am and the opposite a few hours later.

I could almost feel sorry for them in the way that their misplaced loyalty forced them into such contortions. Only almost, mind – if they weren’t so utterly unprincipled in the first place, they wouldn’t have dug their own holes with such enthusiasm. And I’d lay odds that, even as I write, most of them are busily polishing their spades ready for the next time the PM tells them something can’t be done.

Who's doing the painting?

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The revelation that it is going to cost £900,000 to have an RAF aeroplane repainted in red, white and blue to boost the image of the PM when he travels abroad has raised more than a few eyebrows. There is a minor (?) question about how the PM is going to fly anywhere without having to go into quarantine for a fortnight when he returns (he surely wouldn’t want to be caught out breaking his own rules), although the story seems to suggest that the repainting job is going to take a while, so perhaps it won’t be finished until after the quarantine rules have been scrapped. It’s an expensive ego trip.

It made me wonder, though, about this story from late April about the emergency flight collecting PPE from China (picture from BBC story at the time). It was all arranged in a huge rush, allegedly, yet somehow the company managed to fit in the time and money to have the plane repainted in NHS livery before sending it out to China. Did that little PR exercise really cost them £900.000? Somehow, I doubt it. And I also doubt that it took very long to get the job done.

So, what’s the difference? I find myself wondering if this isn’t one of those very profitable outsourcing contracts which the MoD has negotiated under which the painting of aircraft is undertaken by a private company which charges an extortionate amount, completely legitimately under the terms of a poorly negotiated contract, all in the name of converting public cost into private profit. A bit like the £5,500 sink or the £884 chair, maybe. At £900,000, someone, somewhere must be making a lot of money.

It shouldn't be about nationalism

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The study by a team of scientists at Oxford University which led to the discovery that a cheap and commonly available drug can significantly reduce the risk of death in patients suffering a serious case of Covid-19 is good news. Not as good as discovering a cure or a vaccine, but nevertheless a major step forward in reducing the mortality rate from the virus. Whether it’s entirely accurate for the PM to describe it as a “great British scientific achievement” is a slightly different question; the team which organised the trials might be based in the UK, but like all such teams, the members of the team at the Nuffield Department of Population Health come from a range of nationalities, and had the current government’s approach to immigration been in force for some years it’s more than a possibility that some of the team wouldn’t even be here. And whilst I don’t want to take anything away from the success of the team, which will have done a great deal of desk-based research before deciding which existing drugs were worth trialling, there is inevitably at least an element of luck involved in finding that one of those worked as early as this in the trial process.

Continuing the nationalistic drum-beating theme, the English Health Secretary claimed, on the basis of little more than assertion, that “… the UK is leading the way in the global fight against coronavirus – with the best clinical trials, the best vaccine development and the best immunology research in the world”. The demand that we all accept that anything the UK does is ‘world-leading’ or ‘the best’ tells us more about the mindset of the politicians making such statements than about the true state of British science, which is facing a loss of talent, funding and collaborative opportunities as a direct result of decisions taken by those same politicians. And to make it worse, whilst one of the leading investigators is proudly and correctly noting that “…it is fantastic that the first treatment demonstrated to reduce mortality is one that is instantly available and affordable worldwide”, the UK Government, as of yesterday, quietly added the drug to the list of those which are banned for export from the UK. Given that the drug is, apparently, already widely available, that decision looks not just petty but unnecessary – but imagine the outrage which government ministers (to say nothing of the tabloids) would express if any other country banned the export of a drug which could save lives here.

There’s nothing wrong with taking pride in the success of talented people in tackling global problems but finding solutions to the pandemic isn’t some sort of international competition with winners and losers, especially if the ‘losers’ are then potentially denied access to the drugs or treatments discovered. Scientific advance depends more on co-operation and collaboration, both of which seem to be alien concepts to the Anglo-British nationalists now running the UK.

Forced divergence

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It looks increasingly as though the English government is going to reduce the physical distancing rule from 2 metres to 1, and the various reviews and discussions taking place are more about trying to either keep the current scientific advisors on board or else find some different advisors who will agree with the proposal. ‘Following the science’ has increasingly become more about fitting the science to the policy than adjusting the policy in the light of the science. The science in this case isn’t entirely clear to begin with. Two metres isn’t risk free anyway; setting a distance is about calculating the level of risk. About the only thing we know for certain is that the risk of transmission is higher at 1 metre than it is at 2 metres – the precise extent of that increase in risk is subject to debate. In principle, it is entirely reasonable to be weighing up that difference in risk against the economic costs – there are many businesses which could be viable at 1 metre but not at 2. The problem about reducing it to mathematics and economics, however, is that it isn’t just money that we’re playing with – it’s people’s lives. And, of course, it’s always worth remembering that the people deciding that the risk is worth taking aren’t the ones who will be taking that risk.

The probability at this stage is that Wales and Scotland will, for the time being at least, stick to the current rule. Whether that reflects a difference in the weighting given to the two main factors, public health and economics, as some would like to believe, or whether it’s just taking a more holistic and long-term view about the economics (an extended lockdown might be better than a stop-start approach) isn’t entirely clear as yet. That applying different rules across such porous borders will cause difficulties is not in doubt, as we’ve already seen with the reckless rush to end the lockdown in England. Some of the implications could be interesting to watch – if a train can carry twice as many people with a 1 metre rule as it can with a 2 metre rule, will half the passengers on a London-Swansea train have to get out at Bristol Parkway before the train enters the Severn Tunnel, for instance? Having such differences isn’t unmanageable – they manage perfectly well on the European mainland – but it runs counter to the ‘British’ (and especially Tory) mindset, which still lives in the pre-devolution era of a single state with a single government and a single set of rules.

Increasing divergence between England on the one hand and the other governments in the UK on the other in relation to the pandemic wasn’t inevitable. Scotland maybe was always most likely to diverge, but the instinctive position of ‘Welsh’ Labour has throughout been to seek a ‘four nations’ approach, working through consensus. It is the English government which has made that difficult, by a lack of discussion or consultation and a conviction that it is uniquely ‘right’ about everything. Whether Johnson simply expected the devolved governments to fall into line or whether he simply didn’t (and still doesn’t) understand the reality of devolution is another open question. Neither paying attention to constitutional detail nor listening to other opinions are obvious character traits of the current PM. And taking decisions in direct contradiction of the expert advice provides further evidence of his determination to follow a particular path regardless of the consequences. The result is that he has pushed the First Minister of Wales, an apparently mild-mannered man who clearly would eminently prefer that EnglandandWales followed a common set of rules, into a position where he sees little choice but to ally himself with the SNP leader in Scotland and follow an increasingly divergent line. The alternative is tearing up a strategy which was prepared on the basis of the best expert advice available to him and following instead the capricious whims of Johnson. He seems to have rather more integrity than that.

When the United Kingdom ends –Scotland’s departure is now surely inevitable, and Welsh independence is rising up the agenda too – it will owe as much to the incompetence of the unionists in their approach to maintaining it as it will to the persuasiveness of the independentistas.