Why has the British government been so incompetent at dealing with COVID-19? Less than a month ago I explored whether its glaring failings would eventually prove unsustainable. In the space of just four weeks the situation in the UK has deteriorated faster than most anticipated, the virus is far more deeply embedded in the wider population than realised and the numbers diagnosed positive have nearly quadrupled to 4,000 a day.
At the current rate they will exceed the previous record of over 6,000 a day back in late April and although death rates remain far lower there are already ominous signs of rapid increases in hospital admissions. The Chief Medical Officer is reported to be recommending an immediate two-week national lockdown, and the national mood has swung so fast that faint whispers of Johnson’s political demise that were around during the summer break are now discussed openly in media bastions of government support.
Last month I listed many factors in an attempt to explain what had gone wrong. They included incompetence across the board, a cabinet selected for unquestioning loyalty to Boris Johnson and the Brexit cause, ideological commitment to neoliberalism and the determination to use the crisis to further this agenda. That readily embraced large-scale privatisation of much of the pandemic response, especially but not only in the NHS, with this coming after serial cuts in local authority public-health budgets.
