THE NEW NORMAL ?

If you have half a morning to spare put "NHS at breaking point" into your web browser. It will take you from elevenses through to a late lunchtime just to finish scrolling through the list of articles, never mind reading any of them. This is not just the current reflection of a service stretched "to the limit" by the Covid pandemic, but is a hardy perennial of front line reporting about it. That the nation's health service is always in such a state of crisis would, in a normal world, reflect poorly on those charged with the stewardship of it. Yet far from attracting criticism, it is a condition that is always adroitly used to the NHS's advantage. Indeed, the institution is invested with a sacred status such that it is rarely called to account even when egregious failings and even criminality are found on its watch. 

The obeisance given to the NHS takes many forms: Danny Boyle's baffling homage to it during the opening ceremony of the 2012 London Olympic Games or the more recent national "clap for carers" during the first outbreak of Covid spring most easily to mind. Elsewhere, the reverence is more insidious. The BBC (as another "public service" monopoly provider) has become a mouth piece for its fellow institution, whether in its news, drama or current affairs divisions. From the fictionalised "Holby City", the risible "Doctors" and "Casualty" to the documentaries "Hospital", "Surgeons: Life at the Edge" and "Ambulance", the weekly schedules are incomplete without one medical documentary or soap for prime-time viewing. There is also C4's "One born every minute" and ITV's "24 Hours in A&E". The health service is, as Nigel Lawson once observed, the closest thing the British now have to a religion.

The veneration has prevented some long-overdue scrutiny of an organisation, which in its institutional culture is little changed from that which was set up in radically different circumstances in 1946. But when politicians come to discuss it or to deal with it, their moral courage and critical faculties desert them. Every election, the Labour Party comes up with some new variant of its famously mis-leading "24 Hours to save the NHS" strap-line of 1997, and the public has been conditioned to assume that any attempt at rationalisation, efficiency or even improvement is a prelude to privatisation. 

The Covid crisis has exposed the shortcomings of the NHS like never before and it would be fair to say that the entire government strategy has been predicated on a determination that it not be "overwhelmed" by the pandemic. After nearly nine months of increasingly futile restrictions and counter-measures, a ludicrously expensive and poorly designed "Test and Trace" system, hundreds of billions spent on economic support for national inactivity, the opening of numerous and unused Nightingale facilities, the explosion of non-Covid hospital waiting lists and the scarcely believable sum of £15bn spent on PPE, it feels like the UK is back to square one. After various iterations throughout the spring and summer, the strategy is once again "Stay Home, Protect the NHS, Save lives". 

Sir Simon Stevens, CEO of NHS England and his compadres in the devolved regions have been almost invisible as the crisis has evolved. Indeed the FT reported one NHS official describing Sir Simon's part in the pandemic thus: "I think it was evident from the outset that this was going to be a shambolic response and I think he's done quite well to emerge unscathed and focus on the NHS's priorities (sic). NHS England is a commissioning organisation - it wasn't his job to deliver some of this stuff in the way that it was for Public Health England or the health department, and I think he's quite rightly stayed out of it". Yes indeed.

Although the NHS has operational independence (at least in its English variant) and has nearly 1.4m personnel on the pay-roll, it has managed (with the aid of the BBC) to shift the whole blame for the mismanagement of the crisis onto the government, whose only fig leaf has been the perception that other countries in western Europe have similarly struggled, although none have yet to surpass the UK's mortality rate. Yet the shambolic procurement and distribution of PPE, the lethal decision to discharge Covid infected patients into care homes, the risible Test and Trace procedures that leave many health staff needlessly self-isolating, and the ballooning lists of untreated ailments other than Covid are all outcomes in which the NHS leadership has had a hand. It would be fair to say that the UK has erased a decade of growth and taken on its biggest level of public debt since WWII in order to prevent 170,568 bed spaces being filled too quickly, an outcome premised on inaccurate modelling, incompetent planning and institutional panic.

Naturally, the working assumption of those like the Health Secretary, Sir Simon and their cohort of advisers and on-message statisticians is that the proles are neither able nor can be arsed to work out where things are going wrong. The latest attempt to bamboozle citizens is the fatuous determination to "Save Christmas", as if the jingle of sleigh bells and a 72 hour "window" in which we may hug members of our extended families wipes the slate clean. Are we really so stupid?

Despite the increasing tone of exasperation in the printed media and the steady loss of public confidence in the strategy to deal with Covid, it seems pretty clear that the pandemic will subside and will either be ameliorated by a vaccine or reduced to a recurrent ailment (such as influenza) which could be dealt with calmly and without destroying the economy and other people's livelihoods in the process. The bigger issue is whether or not the UK is able to afford a return of the NHS to "business as usual" or if that was desirable even if it could.

Being married to a former state-registered nurse, medicine-on-TV is a staple of our cultural life. So here are a few observations about what the last 12 month's worth of documentaries have (sympathetically) portrayed about "our" NHS:

• A viewer could be forgiven for thinking that the Health Service is entirely about hospitals, an impression massively reinforced by the top priority given to them by Covid. GPs, health care workers in the community, care and respite homes, mental health specialists, health charities? Forget it : too dull.
• Hospitals are a conglomeration of cottage industries gathered under one roof. The advances made in medicine and the growing range of treatable ailments have spawned a hive of specialisations with their own ever increasing demands for resources. Yet while some units (like the Alder Hey children's hospital in Liverpool) are centres of excellence, others manifestly are not. Or to put it in bureaucratic-speak, "Outcomes vary across the UK".
• Medical outcomes are as much about what the NHS wants as what the patient needs. Specialisation brings its own status and consultants and the hospitals which they serve are not averse to being regarded as stars if they are both literally and metaphorically at the cutting edge. So Alder Hey will do expensive ground breaking "cranial reversal" surgery on one poor mal-formed mite, but has binned the performance of a simple procedure to reverse a "pigeon chest", a more prevalent and uncomfortable syndrome suffered by many adolescents as well as older adults. 
• If you are ill and require hospitalisation, to have a better than even chance in the lottery of likely outcomes, you generally have to live in the right area. More importantly, you need access to a bed.  
• There is not a single documentary (either pre or cum Covid) that does not contain extended "drama" about the hunt for bed space. At heart is the daily but not insoluble problem of allocating resources between elective procedures (planned) and emergencies (unplanned, but not difficult to anticipate). There is always a sequence with consultants pleading/ admin staff pencil sucking/ ward managers negotiating/ practitioners warning / trust boards whingeing and bean counters complaining. And at the end of it all, there is the inevitable sight of a highly paid specialist medical team being idled and of a patient, often in great discomfort, being sent home or being telephoned to say that, yet again, their op is being postponed or cancelled. Or being brought into hospital, there to wait (quite literally in one episode about London's Royal Free), for weeks on end. When it comes to the planning of bed usage, hospitals are like zoos where every animal is let out at feeding time at exactly the same moment. 
• Naturally, if a child was in charge of the NHS it would see with great clarity what was needed - more beds. But you don't get to run your bit of the (pre-Covid) £145bn annual budget without being able to complicate things such as you can justify your huge salary and your army of expensive management consultants, non medical "executives" and administrators. Every documentary has a sequence with a Chief Executive Officer (Trust, Hospital, Department - take your pick), a Director of Operations, a Clinical Operations Manager, a Service Manager and/or some other health authority panjandrum furrowing their brows. And they all have their own expensive staffs and agendas that seem to bear little relevance to clinical outcomes except in the sense of arbitrarily set targets. In today's NHS, non medical admin staff make up 37% of the workforce. In 1946, the proportion was 7%.
• A child would also perceive that although there is a profusion of important sounding titles in a hospital, no-one really seems to be in charge. In today's culture, being seen to take a grip of things is perceived as a sign of bullying or of showing a "micro-aggression" or some other form of "disrespect". So in hospital, things get done by a laborious process of back-scratching, favour calling, muddling along and low level politicking - all of which takes time and money and where the patient seems almost incidental to the process. But this being 2020 Britain, inefficiency is taken as a mark of compassion.
• The term "nursing" should perhaps be -re-defined. Nearly every sequence involving a nurse sees him or her either administering a procedure or sitting frowningly at a "workstation" in front of a computer. There is only very rarely a scene where they are doing something mundane yet vital, like making a patient comfortable in bed, helping them to feed or wash, stroking a hand or offering some cheering words beyond those which other ears may find patronising.  Nursing is now a degree-strength discipline, with all the demand for additional reward, advancement and status that that implies. The care of patients seems increasingly to be part of a route map to further credentials, rather than a vocation in its own right.
• What is "free at the point of use" is open to abuse. Folk turning up at A&E because their child is a bit "under the weather" or people asking for condoms because they've run out. The time wasters and those who self-diagnose. The callers of ambulances because they've split up with a partner and feel "suicidal". Persistent trouble makers at hospital who turn up demanding attention and threatening staff. Happily, they are outnumbered by those folk patiently waiting for attention and who seem amazingly stoical (mostly the elderly) when they get bad news and almost pathetically grateful when it is good.
• Covid is taking a heavy toll on hospital services, but not necessarily in ways you might expect. Even though the Nightingale Hospitals were erected at great expense, there seems to be an extraordinary reluctance to use them, not least to isolate the treatment of the most seriously infected Covid victims. Instead, hospitals are still trying to run themselves as before, except for a massive reduction in service as they follow laborious  safety protocols to accommodate the actual or likely incidence of Covid. Unbelievably, testing of NHS staff is still not routine and until very recently, hospitals were allocated a preposterously low number of "rapid" tests which can only be used "in an emergency". As a result, many practitioners are having to needlessly self-isolate and the pandemic has spawned a whole new layer of administrative intervention as managers try to work out who has been in contact with whom among medical staff. There is a growing incidence of patients going into hospital, only to get Covid whilst there.

When a nation's debt goes above what it is able to produce, it is usually in trouble. Unless interest rates are negative, the principal is never eroded unless the country can produce faster than the compounding rate of interest on that debt. And if the interest rate is negative, where is the incentive to lend so that the UK can continue to enjoy its public services? In such circumstances, it normally requires an understanding central bank to tide it by. The UK has now gone well beyond that point, with the Bank of England now "owning" over two fifths of outstanding IOU's issued by the government. That is completely unsustainable and the "nation's health" (as superintended by the NHS) is well on the way to bankrupting the state as a whole. The "new" normal is just whistling in the dark.

LUBECK & HAMBURG

Hamburg station is surrounded by granite tiles covered in drying piss and spilled drink. Little islands of squashed gum sit in the evaporating pond. Propped up against the walls are dozens of beggars and beatniks, a number dishevelled and stoned, and several covered in primitive tattoos, various metal piercings and neo-barbarian haircuts and braids. There are some rather bored but otherwise dignified looking dogs; the animals seem to be in better shape than their owners and carry colourful scarves around their necks. We are here almost on a whim, one of those spontaneous adventures that have neither plan nor ambition behind them. 

Inside it is bedlam. The next train to Lubeck departs in 8 minutes but the ticket machines are complicated and make no concession to anyone without the firmest grasp of the native language. Nearby stands a railway-man straight out of central casting - blue coveralls and baggy cap, thick boots and the various implements of his trade hanging from a leather belt. He is looking at some sort of well-thumbed maintenance schedule in his hand. I try my basic German and without looking up, he jabs a thumb at the next booth and utters something that could mean anything. But it's a sign of sorts and I press a few buttons as the crowd of impatient commuters swarms around me.

We make the train by the skin of our teeth. As the minute hand on the platform clock hits departure time, there is the merest of shudders and our comfortable carriage glides forward completely noiselessly. We see that we are on the Copenhagen express. The journey takes about an hour and within twenty minutes the green and placid countryside of Schleswig Holstein starts to roll by. It is drowsily peaceful in that way that air and road travel can never be, but the narcotic depth of our relaxation is suddenly and sharply disturbed by an inspection. We have the wrong ticket. Huh? Harry arranges his face into a look of mild concern and Occy does an elaborate little pantomime of alarm that suggests we might have hurt the official's feelings. Two identical middle aged ladies across the aisle console us with sympathetic smirks and make discreet clucking noises. The inspector seems mollified. "So, life is too long, no?" and he departs.

It is a short trudge from Lubeck station to our hotel where our welcome is brisk but courteous. The twins share a comfortable room decorated with eye searing stripes of red, orange and blue, and I am shown to one where the idea seems to be factory chic. The heavy zinc covered occasional table has stout wooden wheels and looks as if it had been used for moving concrete. Everything is black or grey but there is a vast walk-in shower with water pressure that could hose mud off a tank. We have arrived. 

This is to be a wander. We have no itinerary other than a few nights here and then a couple in Hamburg. The twins have already started at university and this is a sort of bonus leg to their own summer adventures. I just love travelling with them - they take it all in and never comment with a pre-conception. My receptiveness is clouded by prior knowledge and a partiality to experiences of which I already have a happy memory. It is is a kind of comfort journey, where the new is not so easily registered. But they do see it and yet respect my narrower vista.

The Holstentor fills our view. I remember it from the old 50 Deutschmark note. Its plump and bulging towers, filled with imaginary gold and topped by conical slate roofs are emblematic of the prosperous burgher ethos of this ancient Hanseatic port. Lubeck is described as the Venice of Germany although it sits on two islands in the River Trave rather than in a lagoon. During the Cold War, the eastern edge of its suburb was pressed right up against the Inner German Border. Now the sight from within the spire of Saint Mary's church is a calmer one towards the boundary with Denmark rather than the razor wire, watch-towers and "death strip" of the demarcation line with Communist Europe.

I am a foody. We head to the Rathaus and descend to a vaulted chamber where the walls are covered with armorial shields and roe antlers that hang above solid brown furniture and stiff linen napkins. We are shown to our own "booth" which is a tiny room with an oak door and narrow leather benches set against wooden partition walls. There are pictures of pheasants, facsimiles of merchant ledgers and photographs of one of Lubeck's most famous sons, Thomas Mann. Occy just loves the mystery of our apparent seclusion, but I can see that Harry is steeling himself for a "briefing" from his father and makes some light hearted comments about the heavy ambience. I give up after a few "facts" and soon we are enjoying a happy evening and delicious meal - veal dumplings, rosti, creamed herrings and spiced cabbage. 

Lubeck boasts two Nobel Laureates for literature, their awards separated by seventy years. But wandering around, I later sense that the town's attitude towards both Thomas Mann and Gunter Grass is more nuanced and ambiguous than the photos in our booth at the Ratskeller would seem to suggest. The civic monuments to each seem to be rather low key and unobtrusive. Mann was an unpolitical reactionary descended from that comfortable burgher class that was the focus of his most famous work, Buddenbrooks. Yet he fled from Germany to the USA where he was lionised amongst all the other emigres from Hitler's regime. His constant themes seemed to be fate, decay and death. Whether in his own unhappy family circumstances (his supressed homosexuality and the suicide of his son), the Alpine sanatorium of The Magic Mountain or the tortured decline of Aschenbach in the more explicitly titled Tod in Venedig, the darker motifs of the German Romantic movement were ever present. He seemed to be both a German and of the merchant class against his will, and the rejection implied by his self-imposed exile was a rebuke to his countrymen. 

Gunter Grass too subverted the bourgeois ethos of his adopted town. In The Tin Drum, the posturing  Matzerath was one character by which Grass accused the burgher class of too easily falling in with the Nazis, their moral failure emphasised by the way it is seen through the eyes of "the other", in this case the stunted child Oskar. The author was an almost exact contemporary of Gabriel Garcia Marquez, to whose own style of "magic realism", Grass's work was frequently compared. But the German's indictment of the complicity of his fellow citizens was later denounced as hypocrisy when he revealed, at a sixty year remove, that he too had served in the Waffen-SS as a teenager. He died in 2015, a year after Marquez, and achieved a redemption - his house in Lubeck bordered that belonging to Willi Brandt, revered statesman and former Social Democratic Chancellor of the Federal Republic. Walking around Brandt's property, it's clear that it is his aura that shines on that of his erstwhile neighbour next door, rather than the other way around.

The twins don't seem to be too fussed by any of this, although Occy shows interest in a section of the Berlin Wall that stands in the politician's garden. But her perspective is that of someone looking at a piece of "modern art" or at the chunk of some ancient ziggurat. The history and thus the context of how this unlovely blob ended up in Willi Brandt's yard (he was also the mayor of West Berlin) seems to be of only tangential interest. Harry is absorbed by his own thoughts and merely glances around. But it's a lovely sunny day and really what is the point of getting vexed by their own interpretation of something I think is settled. My mistake here is not to probe their reaction and thus to learn something that is fresh and new.

We take a walk down to the banks of the Trave. En route, I mention with all the confidence of an aficionado who has just read the guidebook that Lubeck is "famed" for its marzipan. There is a shop right there. We go in. The sales "assistant" immediately sizes us up as irksome tourists - this is plainly an emporium for people who take marzipan seriously and we are firmly dissuaded from touching any of the heavily wrapped offerings. Occy is fully aware of this rebuff but is too polite to make a comment about it and leaves the premises with an air of carefree dignity. Having enthused but now feeling rather foolish, I buy a token handful of silver wrapped lumps. They are bland, sugary and revolting - nothing like the thick yellow almond paste that went around my grandmother's Easter and Christmas cakes. 

Our meander along An de Obertrave is wonderful. Here and there people are swimming in the shadows cast by the waterfront houses with their "Dutch" style gables. Roses grow out of the pavements to climb their half timbered walls and the cobbled alleyways are tranquil and overlooked by window boxes. Well used bicycles are propped unchained beneath ancient gas lamps. It is a serene experience and further on there are boats, yachts and barges tied up and quietly bumping against the banks. Later we enter one of the many beautiful churches and look inside the mediaeval infirmary and "dormitory" for the elderly. There are exquisite carvings, reliefs and statues for which we would have had to queue for hours to see in Florence: here we have them entirely to ourselves. 

We travel on the "local" back to Hamburg. The seats are uncomfortable but, needless to say, we are absolutely on time. The city had to be almost completely rebuilt after the fire-bombings and infernos unleashed by the RAF during the War. There was no time for a careful re-construction of ancient thoroughfares - Hamburg is a massive working port near the mouth of the Elbe and the citizenry had to rebuild their own lives quickly. There is no sensitivity about "heritage" here, as seems more obvious in UNESCO protected Lubeck. We head down to a bar standing on a wharf of the elaborate canal system that joins the Elbe at various intervals as it passes through the city. As the British planes above set fire to the city below, people flung themselves into the boiling water or were asphyxiated as the towering flames sucked in all the available air. Afterwards, humans could only be identified by the charred remains of their teeth. Now, the granite mass of the river seems to bulge between its banks and moves below us like a remorseless tongue of volcanic lava. 

Across the water stand some massive naval dockyards: a huge supply vessel is being gently nudged towards its moorings by two squat tug-boats. Beyond is a refinery and there is the occasional jet of flame as gas is ignited into the atmosphere. Everything else is black and blue and grey and jagged. Cranes crank away lifting cargoes and other indeterminate lumps along the jetties. It is a scene of industrial Valhalla but there are dots of human activity. More immediately in view is the new Elbe Philharmonic, standing only partly complete on yet another spar of the wharf. It is a stunning vision - a mixture of silvered golf ball and egg box, perched above the niebelungen scrambling of the naval yard across the river.

Our hotel is just a comfortable as the one in Lubeck and the staff are well-groomed, courteous and efficient. There are no interns, newbies or "guest workers" here - everyone looks and moves as if they could be running the whole business. We head out for a late evening meal and find a restaurant by the side of a busy dual carriageway. A more charmless spot you could not hope to find, but the place is buzzing and the food sensational. An affable waiter takes us under his wing and guides us through some amazing wines - Moselle and a delicious red from Baden. We all happily scoff and chat away and plan our ramble for the following day. 

We cover a lot of ground, completing a wide circuit around the lakes in the middle of the city and head back to the site of the old town square. It is a hot day but we agree to visit the main art gallery. It is deserted. Occy is relentless and wants to see everything. I attempt some exposition of the vast painting of Frederick the Great before his troops on the eve of Rossbach, but she has not come here just to listen politely to her old man droning on about his slight knowledge of the Seven Years War. On and on we go and I have to admire her love of the quirky and unusual. The heat is absolutely stifling and Harry and I eventually slump together on a bench in one of the airless lobbies. We are shaken awake and goaded up to the top floor where she has discovered some sort of workshop. Inside are fantastical papier-mache creations that look to be a design for a carnival float. Everything is painted back and white. Enough. We flee down the stairs and emerge gasping onto the street.

That evening is spent down on the Reeperbahn. The title "Red Light District" hardly does it justice and the imagined ambience of seediness, incognito writhing and predatory pimps is entirely absent. This is to sex what Waitrose is to food retailing. In the middle of the thoroughfare is the famous picture postcard police station. One seriously gorgeous citizen sidles past us with a brazen stare and a perfect smile. I try to kid myself that she has batted her eyelids at me rather than my son. But there are in fact very few sex workers around. Instead, the boulevard has been given over to a mass of pop-up bars with wide television screens. It is the first night of the World Cup in Brazil and the hosts are playing unfancied Croatia. We cram ourselves into a tiny space and Harry squeezes himself towards the bar. It is all pretty disappointing and after a lacklustre start Brazil put a goal into the back of their own net. We retreat. 

Our last day is spent in Altona. Although a suburb, it has some grand civic architecture and rose filled public parks. There is gigantic fountain spouting between the figures of two bearded centaurs writhing with a surprised looking fish. But the area is eerily quiet and the famous town hall appears to be closed. Once again, we appear to have a chunk of one of Germany's largest cities to ourselves. Altona used to have a large and prosperous Jewish community, but there are no signs of re-population. Perhaps I am just imagining the silence. Meanwhile Occy is taking a picture of her brother made to look as if one of the fountains is jetting out the front of his trousers. We laugh.

That night we go past the Saint Michael church, standing in a vast concrete plateau with its statue of a rather energised looking Martin Luther, and head towards a narrow strand of all that remains of Hamburg's original old town. It is a cramped alley full of lopsided gingerbread houses where most of the outer wall woodwork is painted a uniform green. But it all feels pretty lifeless. We find a small restaurant and are taken to an upstairs gallery with an uneven wooden floor and low rafters where you can bang your head with ease. We seem to be the only ones there but we are tired and there is no mood to press on somewhere else. Our desultory conversation is broken by the appearance of an enormous and bearded old man dressed as a sailor and carrying an ancient accordion. We politely compose ourselves to listen to the "entertainment", but he gives us a cross and suspicious stare and presses on to a private room whose occupants we have only just detected. One or two of them poke their heads around the door to look at us. Soon, the accordion wheezes into action and the company warms up. After a short while, they are really belting it out - sea shanties and goodness knows what. Later he emerges, sweating heavily but wearing the same irascible scowl. As he passes our table where we are now paying our bill, I notice that he has a small iron cross pinned to his lapel.

We head back to our hotel. There is a blast of a ship's horn on the Elbe. The flames from the far off refinery continue to probe the sky.

HORROR SHOW

Of all the deficiencies in the official response to the Covid 19 pandemic, the sourcing and provision of Personal Protective Equipment (PPE) to "front line" medical workers has perhaps been the most significant. It has been costly too: £15bn since the meter started ticking in March up until the Chancellor disclosed this figure (by way of an update) to Parliament in early July. In the early days of the pandemic, PPE (or rather the alleged lack of it) was invariably the lead issue on the BBC news. The President of the BMA, Chaand Nagpaul was given unfettered access to bash the government over this issue and his assertions were never challenged. Not even Dr Nagpaul CBE would deny that his interventions were just a tiny bit political; indeed he has form in publicly opining on issues which do not strictly come within the remit of his responsibilities. But the BMA is a powerful union of the dominant producer interests within the UK's healthcare system, and so Nagpaul is allowed to shield within the sacred halo that has settled on "our NHS". It would also be fair to say that his interventions, which the BBC treated as Holy writ, induced a sense of near panic in the Department of Health.

Alas, PPE has become a proper scandal as even the BBC has now sheepishly admitted. As is usually the case when the government and officials are in full "Something MUST be done" mode, money was sprayed around rather too indiscriminately. You might have thought that HMG would have learnt its lesson from the fiasco of awarding a shipping contract to a firm not known for its production of ferries, or indeed of any device which floated, as part of its No Deal Brexit preparations. But no; all sorts of  companies with no known manufacturing connections were awarded contracts to supply PPE, while others which did have the know-how and capacity were ignored. More embarrassing still, some of the lucky recipients of the government's largesse appear to have invested more heavily in acquiring off-shore status and other exotic tax arrangements  through which to funnel their cheques, than they have in the production of the kit.

Naturally Dr Nagpaul is entirely unrepentant. In his most recent outing before Parliament, he effectively accused the hapless Secretary of State of lying about the actual quantities of PPE that the government has procured, although he seemed strangely unable to give the "correct" figure. Indeed he has moved on to far weightier issues: now his beef is that the government has ignored the religious sensibilities of medical practitioners who have to wear beards as a signifier of their faith, but who cannot get their face fluff within the standard mask.  Meanwhile, he argues for tougher protective measures since, in his opinion, the public doesn't "understand" social distancing because citizens cannot accurately distinguish one from two metres.

It is not entirely clear how this eminent lobbyist thinks he is improving public confidence in the UK's healthcare arrangements. Certainly, he has been quite amazingly successful in adding to the narrative that all deficiencies are entirely the fault of the government rather than that they augment the shortcomings of those fellow professionals whom he so assiduously represents. Indeed one of his colleagues (Niall Dickson, head of the NHS Confederation) admitted to the baffling inability of the 1.4m strong NHS to distribute that PPE which was procured - apparently, we would have been better off "with a sort of Amazon style service". 

Sadly, whenever HMG does get a belated opportunity to get onto the front foot, it drops something heavy upon it. Some of its initiatives seem both risible and contradictory. What, for example are citizens to make of the £10 voucher schemes that encourages us to stuff our faces away from home during August and the £50 subsidy to get us to repair our bikes and get cycling in the new "war against obesity"? Much more seriously, the attempt to get back to normality as the pandemic demonstrably subsides has been up-ended by the new policy of mandatory face masking and by the capricious re- imposition of  quarantine restrictions so soon after they were rescinded. It is simply neither fair nor credible for Nichola Sturgeon to admit that while a fortnight ago people were not discouraged from going abroad, she herself would never have made such an arrangement. Now she says it would be far better for us all to stay at home and drive nose-to-tail up the A9 to the Highlands while observing "appropriate" social distancing.

Apparently, all this risk aversion is to do with the likelihood of the so-called "second wave" of Covid 19, which has been eagerly anticipated since the UK began to emerge from lockdown in early July. It would be fair to say that a lot of scientific reputations are on the line if such a phenomenon does not recur. Even as the observable and verifiable evidence accumulates, public policy is still dominated by the model dependent "realism" propounded by the likes of Professor Ferguson and which has been so thoroughly discredited as the pandemic has subsided, both here in the UK and in lockdown "refuseniks" like Sweden. Yet the two "Gentlemen of Corona", Dr Whitty and Sir Patrick Vallance have continued to emphasise "worst case" scenarios upon which the government is acting as if they were its own base case. 

In this context the private sector, upon whose contributions all this public sector complexity, ineptitude and scaremongering depends, is in absolutely dire straits. It is clear  that the good intentions of the original government schemes to support both employment and corporate solvency have been vitiated by red-tape and patent instances of unfairness simply because previously earning citizens did not show up on officials' spread-sheets. In the latest SNAFU, the emergency grants scheme operated by local councils is to be terminated, even before the intended recipients of this support have received a penny. The reason for this delay? The government's valuation agency is still trying to determine the "status" of those many small businesses that pay their business rates by way of an intermediary such as a landlord, and which have only recently been recognised by the Business Department.

Larger companies have fared little better: as with their smaller brethren, double digit falls in revenues have been multiplied by operational gearing into hugely diminished profits and frequent losses, notwithstanding recent results have shown corporate ingenuity and ruthlessness in riding out the storm. Investment and inventories have been cut back and cash squeezed from whatever level of activity that has been achieved. It is noticeable too that many companies have decided to repay those loans provided by the government, perhaps fearful of ministerial interference where they are deemed to have received "public support". Yet now jobs are being shed in earnest, despite furlough measures.

But the biggest flashing light of all is surely the banking sector. Recent results have shown the shocking levels of carnage in their loan books, which their other activities such as investment banking and securities trading have barely mitigated. Yet the regulator behaves as if the banks should just sit there and take it, as a further form of existential punishment for their previous misdeeds in the Great Financial Crisis of 2008/09. Now even the current Chairman of the recently re-named NatWest Bank says that the sector is un-investible. The implications of this are startling. Certainly smarter investors who can see that the banks will neither be able nor be allowed to make an economic return in the current dispensation are arguing that they should be wound up and their distributable assets returned to shareholders. With many banks trading at multi-year discounts to their intrinsic book value, even the costs of an orderly run-off can easily be accommodated within current valuations of equity.

Meanwhile, the government continues to make a virtue of its caution, buoyed by opinion polls that show the public is still far from being educated about the difference between risk and uncertainty. Dare one say it, but the PM's and Ms Sturgeon's understanding of business and economics extends no further than a dim hope that the central banks around the world will continue to keep the monetary taps open and that companies will somehow manage, despite their best endeavours. Why all the rest of us should continue to bankroll this calamity by way of our jobs now or by way of higher taxes in future is far less clear.

A BILLION HERE, A BILLION THERE

Even before the UK was placed in lockdown the citizenry had been saddled with a whopping bill, which was in hindsight a mere amuse-bouche for the far weightier invoices that followed. Back in January, the Office of Budget Responsibility (OBR) gave its judgement that the sum of cash with which the UK would have to part to "settle its divorce" from the EU would be £33bn. This is the amount that will eventually have to be handed over whatever happens in the current negotiations over future trading relationships.

It's a heck of a lot of money and formed a major part in the objections of the euro-sceptic wing of the Conservative Party to the dog's dinner of a settlement that was negotiated with the EU by their erstwhile leader Theresa May while she was Prime Minister. Indeed it was this rather than the more arcane details of the "level playing field", the future jurisdiction of the ECJ and the so called "backstop" which animated so much of the ill-tempered debate over the terms of Brexit, notwithstanding that some sort of financial settlement of the UK's residual obligations to the EU was always unavoidable. Despite the objections, it remained as a very expensive cornerstone of Boris Johnson's eventual deal to "get Brexit done". But after all the intense haggling, politicians in neither the UK nor the EU claimed that the result was an optimal one. You do not have to be a cynic to infer that the EU's silence was to spare the UK's blushes.

In the first three weeks of July however, two other unusual invoices dropped which have barely received a passing comment in the media. Which is odd, because the sum of these bills is almost identical to the EU divorce settlement.  The first was mentioned in the Chancellor's summer statement: a £15bn tab for personal protective equipment or PPE. That's right, fifteen thousand million pounds for rubber gloves, facemasks, plastic visors, bootees and disposable surgical gowns. Express that as 10% of the NHS budget for 2019/20, and perhaps it does not seem so significant when set against the backdrop of the "biggest health crisis to hit the UK since the Spanish Flu epidemic of 1918". It's also the same as getting a cheque for £224 from every man, woman and child in Great Britain. Or put it another way, it represents a £50,847 bill for every person in the UK that has been infected thus far by Covid, whether hospitalised or not. Yet this is not the direct cost of saving a life: it is the sort of thing your garage will describe (rather vaguely) as "consumables" when it invoices for the service of your car. 

The second exceptional bill landed a mere 10 days later. This was another large sum to make good a ministerial and civil service oversight pertaining to the reform of public sector pension arrangements in the wake of the review by Lord Hutton  in 2010. The generosity of these arrangements had become egregious even as those that could be obtained in the private sector had shrivelled, and the government took a number of steps to mitigate the patently unfair imbalance. Alas, the officials tasked with crafting the measures took insufficient notice of the relevant "Equalities Legislation", despite specific advice from Hutton that they should do so. Indeed, these officials went one step further: as is always the case when pay-and-rations in the public sector are at stake, special interest groups with something to lose lobbied the ministry and were successful with their entreaties. Sadly, their lordships of the Bench spotted the artifice and decided that the officials had indeed erred by breaching the age -discrimination parts of the legislation. The result? A bill for £17bn to put right an error about which the officials had already been warned before they made it. Does this count as "levelling up"?

A fair minded person would struggle to deny that, in aggregate, the UK tax-payer has been very much inconvenienced by these "bargains", struck on our behalves by ministers and their officials. All three are instances of officials succumbing to external pressures and all demonstrate varying degrees of incompetence and even chicanery. 

Yet £65bn is the mere tip of the tsunami of financial and economic woe that has now reached landfall. At the moment of the Chancellor's summer statement, the direct costs of the Covid epidemic had already reached £188bn with a further £122bn "hit" from loans, grants and deferred taxes. To many commentators, this largesse merely refills the hole in economic activity left by the decision to go into lockdown but it is already apparent that the much anticipated "V -shaped" recovery as the UK exits its economic strait-jacket is illusory. On the present cheery assumptions, the national debt is forecast to rise above 100% of GDP by the end of the 1920/21 financial year. Yet the latest OBR study has considered a reasonable "downside" scenario in which the pre-Covid level of economic output is not restored until 2024 at the earliest, and even this does not discount the effects of the appearance of a "second wave" of the epidemic. Meanwhile the meter is still running: £350m to help industry stage a "green recovery" towards the target of a carbon neutral economy by 2050 and an inflation-busting remuneration increase for public sector workers in recognition of the "sacrifices" that have had to be made during the lockdown, even while the vast majority have been idled on full pay.

The sums are absolutely prodigious and to the extent that they distort economic protections in favour of the public sector are indefensible in all except those cases of genuine risk to "front-line" workers such as medical practitioners.

It can only be a matter of time before the market starts to impose a price for all this indiscriminate spending, particularly where there is scant evidence of the productivity needed to pay the coupon, never mind the principal. Optimists think that the negative interest rates than can be perceived for some way along the current "yield curve" of government Gilt Edged securities is a sign of the equanimity on the part of creditors. But to the extent that yield curves around the world are distorted by heavy central bank intervention, this forbearance is as illusory as is the current evidence of the first green shoots of recovery. After all, who would not trouser a turn from the selling of a Gilt to the Bank of England in the afternoon after it had been purchased more cheaply at a government auction in the morning?

A clearer signal of the future can be seen in the currency market, where sterling has resumed its inexorable long term downtrend against the dollar and even the euro, and in the equity market where securities linked to consumer spending, manufacturing, banking and services remain in the doldrums to which they sank during the initial phase of the pandemic. Gold too is within touching distance of an all- time- high, and is seen as a good each- way bet on presently negative real interest rates and the threat of inflation or stagflation to come.

The bulk issuance of IOUs continues and HMG remains in its dream state of unreality.

 

IS OUR CHILDREN LEARNING?

As to the facility with which mortals escape knowledge, try an average acquaintance in the intellectual blaze of London, and consider what that eligible person for a dinner-party would have been if he had learned scant skill in "summing"... and had read a chapter in the Bible with immense difficulty, because such names as Isaiah or Apollos remained unmanageable after twice spelling. Poor Dagley read a few verses sometimes on a Sunday evening, and the world was at least not darker to him than it had been

before. Some things he knew … but that there was no earthly beyond open to him.                                                          

(George Eliot "Middlemarch")

It is reasonable to argue that the problem of education in the UK has been hiding in plain sight. That is the insufficient attainment of the lowest cohort in the school year group, whether that range of pupils is defined by family circumstances, intelligence, linguistic facility, post code or by the receipt of free school meals. However, this problem has been re-framed in a way that obscures it. The closure of the "attainment gap" between this lowest cohort and more "advantaged" pupils (however "advantaged" is defined) has been one of the key educational objectives of governments both nationally and at the devolved level - indeed it would be fair to say that the SNP administration in Scotland has staked its reputation on the resolution of this very issue. But until the fundamental insufficiency of attainment is addressed, then ambitions to close the "attainment gap" will stay just that.

Why has this proven to be so difficult? Distinguished thinkers across the political spectrum, from RH Tawney on the left to Michael Oakeshott on the right have all talked about the endowment effects of a good education and the almost sacred duty of each generation to pass this heritage to its successors. Yet every year seems to bring a new horror story to be reported in the media. In Scotland, a nadir of sorts appeared to be reached in 2009 when the Literacy Commission (which included the popular author Ian Rankin) revealed that a fifth of Scottish adults did not have the literacy skills that they needed for their daily lives. Three years later, the insufficiency detected north-of-the-border seemed to have turned into a UK wide tsunami that was by now lapping the shores of academia. In 2012, the Oxford and Cambridge Examination board (OCR) reported a much increased incidence of unhappy dons across the university system who were having to provide remedial training in grammar, spelling and essay construction to new undergraduates.

The OCR report was taken as further confirmatory evidence of the failure of the perceived strategy of closing the "attainment gap" by levelling downwards. Indeed the perception that "standards" were under threat was a big impetus behind Michael Gove's reforms of 2010, the aims of which were to introduce greater rigour into the school curriculum in England and an end to the pernicious practice of successive retakes of the same exam until the pupil passed. Amongst other matters, he encouraged examining authorities to pay closer attention to the demands of an expanded tertiary education sector rather than focusing on the demands of schools, all eager to boost their standing in the "league tables". The introduction of the EBACC was also designed to provide stiffer competition to those subject choices deemed, by ministers, to be of little academic worth - it was only later that this was seen to have been to the detriment of subjects such as drama, music, art and DT.

Scotland took a different route by setting its face against a style of curriculum that seemed to have been "imposed" centrally by Tories. Certainly the uproar against Gove's agenda was such that Cameron thought best to relieve him of his duties as Education Secretary rather than fight the 2015 election against a background of unrest within the teaching unions and educational establishment (derisively referred to by Gove as "the Blob"). Instead, the SNP administration in Edinburgh decided to adopt the "Curriculum for Excellence", which had the laudable aim of turning out purposeful and socially well-adjusted school-leavers and young adults but was altogether vaguer on what the child should be taught and what they should find out for themselves. In another departure, the SNP also decided to allocate a far greater proportion of its educational budget to the provision of no-fee university places to Scottish students.

Ten years on, and the Gove reforms are seen by some to have arrested the "grade inflation" that was assumed to signify the dilution of academic rigour beforehand. The growth of new schools in England as "Free Schools" under the Coalition and Conservative governments has also expanded the degree of choice available in primary and secondary education while further diluting residual local authority control that was an aim of the Blair Academy programme. Naturally, Free Schools have attracted a great deal of opposition from those who doubt that they can drive up standards and who claim that they divert badly needed resources from the rest of the educational estate. However, there seems to be no such ambiguities in Scotland where declining levels of overall achievement by pupils has seen a steady diminution of the country's ranking in surveys such as the international PISA study. The "quality" premium that a Scottish education used to enjoy over an English one in these statistical exercises has also steadily been eroded over the past twenty years, while in some subjects such as English, Maths and Science, it has reversed. Further, the educational expert Lindsay Paterson of Edinburgh University has claimed to detect a fall in the standard of Scottish undergraduate entrants, the sum of declining achievement at Higher Level and the expansion of university places north of the Tweed. 

But a far bigger deficiency can still be observed in both England and Scotland, and that is the attainment of the lowest pupil cohort in the school system. At Wester Hailes Education Centre (WHEC) in Edinburgh, where Nicola Sturgeon made education her "defining mission" in a speech delivered in 2015, the proportion of children achieving one or more National 5 awards or one or more Higher awards has remorselessly declined since that pledge was made. The catchment area for WHEC is one of the poorest in Scotland, with over a third of pupils receiving free school meals and 7 out of 10 receiving additional support. Yet such bald statistical indicators are no grounds for smugness in England where OFSTED surveys have identified a persistent level of under- attainment by children in receipt of free school meals, otherwise used as a proxy for poverty.

Why do disadvantaged children from poor communities still suffer from low levels of attainment in an environment resounding with official claims of "excellence" and rising (or in Scotland's case, "stable")  standards? It is not as if it's the children's fault. Many come from areas of poor housing, inadequate employment opportunity for their parents, drug abuse, domestic violence, low incomes, racial tension and civic neglect. Parents who were poorly educated themselves cannot reasonably be expected to stir their children's ambitions, even if very few will lack a sense of wanting something far better for them than they had themselves. Yet these children seem to be regarded as a residual of the education system, whose only salvation will come (if they are lucky) from the various "access" programmes employed principally by the tertiary education sector in an effort to be seen to be achieving "fairness". There is surely a bitter  novel to be written about a poor family trying to game its post code on the off-chance that a daughter or son might get into Oxford. Such a unit will already be fully occupied just keeping body and soul together, never mind having any time to ponder if the child has an aptitude for Greats or PPE.

It's not as if the issue has suffered from a lack of attention - indeed the number of surveys and reports, the plethora of programs (such as "Sure Start"), the academic symposia and the numerous and anguished articles in the media all point to a problem that is being, or is always on the cusp of being, energetically addressed. Nor does the UK, one of the largest and most diverse economies of the world, lack the resources to deal with the issue if it truly put its mind to it. So why doesn't it? Or if it does, why does the problem persist?

One of the main obstacle to achieving better outcomes is the misguided obsession with education as a signifier of class and cultural status. Despite the claims of traditionalists, there never was a "golden age" of British education for children. Since educational records in Britain began, its purposes have been largely utilitarian: fitting youngsters for the Christian priesthood in the Dark Ages to providing enthusiastic coders for the post-industrial digital economy of today. The idea of a disinterested educational process, pursued purely for its own sake was (and is) seen as quaintly romantic, even slightly decadent. Which makes the lack of success in the education of the modern-day poor and dis-advantaged child even more extraordinary. 

The advent of an organised national education in the 19th Century to meet the needs of Britain's industrial economy and to address the challenge of civic peace in a rapidly growing population brought the state to the centre of a process that previously had been the preserve of the wealthy, the philanthropic and the religiously devout. The secular demands of the state as both user and provider rapidly turned education into a cultural battle-ground on which to cajole or subdue the denominational requirements of the faithful, especially if non-conformist. Despite the decline of organised Christian religion, these tensions persist today as the UK state grapples with the cultural and religious requirements of a rapidly expanding Moslem population.

After the Second World War and the Butler Education Act of 1944, the cultural fog in which educational decisions had been made beforehand began to thicken. The creeping ascendancy of the social sciences in both academia and the educational establishment meant that the economic purposes of education gave ground to its social purposes: now, the way that wealth was created was far less important than how it was distributed. But the fervent egalitarianism swelling in the heart of the educational establishment ran into the aspirations of legions of parents, across the classes, who saw education as  promoting and consolidating social gain. In the universities, many an anguished hour was spent debating the inherent conflict between these "good ends" - how was the child and ultimately the adult citizen to optimise his or her liberty and potential in a society where they were supposed to be equal? 

The succeeding decades were ripe with paradox - as battle was joined over the issue of comprehensive education, some of the biggest defenders of the local grammar school were Labour dominated councils that saw them as a key route to material and social improvement for the working classes. A Tory minister, Margaret Thatcher, converted more grammar schools to comprehensives than any of her predecessors or successors, while the Labour government of Harold Wilson oversaw the biggest expansion of private education in the UK when his ministers ripped the rug from under the feet of the residual Direct Grant Schools, thus forcing many of them to go fully fee-paying to maintain their ethos and academic purpose. 

As the answer to the question "What type of school?" was settled, a new battle (still ongoing) was joined over the question "What is to be taught?". Amid much scoffing about "media studies" and "sports science", a more serious anxiety was revealed about grade inflation and league tables and the statistical significance that could be attached to the composition of either. Yet by the time of the Baker  Education Act of 1988, the progressives had moved on. Now the education of children was to be about the inculcation of "skills", but not necessarily those that might be recognised by a workshop or business enterprise. "Child- centred learning" was all the rage: children were individuals, not an undifferentiated mass that had to be trained, and it was critical that whatever went on in the classroom should not bruise their self-esteem.  

Despite planting the flag for academic rigour, neither the Baker nor the later Gove reforms dealt with the anxiety that the focus of each risked the creation of a cohort of educationally disadvantaged children who had abilities and interests that were not best moulded by a national curriculum of the "traditional" academic kind. But nor has the Scottish approach, with its focus on "skills" such as Health & Well-being, addressed the fear that an education that is not based on knowledge, and the learning of the best that has been accumulated by previous generations, is not really an education at all.

While all this intellectual masturbation has been going on amongst the adults, the most able children and those with the material and social support of a settled family environment have gamely soldiered on. It is the cohort at the bottom, re-filled by the offspring of succeeding generations, that has been dumped in the mire left in the wake of these speculations and agendas. The children of the poor do not demand that their fragile self-esteem is massaged so much as their capacity for self-respect. They don't need to be locked up by "appropriate safeguarding measures", patronised by "out-reach" programs or bamboozled with "accessible modules of learning skills".  As Christ said, the poor are always with us - but he didn't say that they should be ignorant.

So here are some suggestions:

• Teaching children of mixed ability in a comprehensive system is tough enough. A cadre of teachers who are intensively involved with the lowest cohort of pupils needs to be recruited with entry level salaries that compete with those for graduate entry at a top law firm or investment bank. Overall pay scales should rise to recreate a parity of esteem for the teaching profession. More competition will provide better candidates. For every new teaching post recruited, a managerial post in the local or national educational hierarchy should be allowed to lie fallow.
• School building should mainly be focused on smaller or re-purposed units in deprived areas. 
• A cadre of tutors (who might be professionals retired from other disciplines) should also be recruited to provide additional individual mentoring and support during school holidays.
• All new schools should have some ability to provide overnight accommodation staffed by trained wardens.
  
• Additional tax breaks should be given for donations to charities that have an educational purpose where fees do not change hands. The voluntary sector at the local level should be further incentivised and mobilised to provide non-educational support with clubs and other activities. 
• The cadet schemes of the armed forces should  be expanded to encourage greater participation from children in deprived areas.
• The primary school day should be lengthened so that every child gets breakfast upon arrival. 
• Free books should be provided to poor families.
• Sceptics should be presented with plan that shows that such measures will ultimately pay for themselves, with interest. 
  

                      

YOU'VE BIN TELL'T

Unionists in Scotland are getting nervous. Nichola Sturgeon has been judged (thus far) to have had a "good" Covid crisis in personal terms, notwithstanding the dreadful missteps of her Health and Education Secretaries and the embarrassment surrounding the resignation of Scotland's Chief Medical Officer in a classic case of "Do as I Say, not Do as I Do". The First Minister's turns at the lectern have been authoritative, if a shade authoritarian considering she is (as she tells us) a member of a team. But they have been favourably compared to the rather less slick performances of Boris's colleagues in London. Presentation, as they say, is everything. Unionists and some of those who have habitually been viscerally opposed to her every utterance, admit they have been quite impressed and even disarmed. The bizarre message that Covid- infected Scotland is in the same boat as Covid infected England but is somehow in a better place, has gone down well. Over half the voting population would now approve Scottish independence, according to polls.

There is a strong strain of unionist belief in Scotland that, when push-comes-to-shove, the juices of William Wallace will ultimately always be diluted by an overwhelming sense of individual self-interest. In other words, the passion for independence will defer to material well-being in the privacy of the voting booth. Certainly, the economic case for independence has been ruthlessly unpicked by reality and by changes in the SNP's own agenda. For instance, the ballast that was supposed to be provided by Scotland's oil and gas reserves has been dumped over the side, the price of Nichola's conversion to going "Green". 

Further, the SNP vote has been more volatile than the political dominance of Salmond or Sturgeon would seem to suggest. Even in the "Let's give two fingers to the Tories and their Union" atmosphere of the 2015 General Election, the SNP was unable to improve its vote share beyond 50%, the highest ever. Two years later it fell to 37% and only managed a recovery to 45% in 2019, bolstered by the majority Scottish vote to remain as a member of the EU, the collapse of the Labour base and the advent of the anti-Knox, Boris Johnson. These more recent numbers still easily convert into Westminster seats, but they do not meet the threshold for success in a referendum. 

If the 2019 General Election was, in Scotland, a further referendum on a UK government that was proposing to take Scotland out of the EU against its will, its overall result challenged the Union in a more subtle way. Although Boris is a metropolitan libertarian who adroitly surfed the wave of forces grouped under the Brexit banner, the parliamentary party that he now leads more closely resembles that of Stanley Baldwin. The Conservatives won 43 more seats north of the banks of the Severn and the Trent in England & Wales to add to the 6 they picked off in 2017. They took a further five seats in the West Midlands. Many of these constituencies had never before elected a Tory member. Some such as Mansfield, are now as "safe" for the Conservatives as were the Home Counties seats of old. But many are not and Boris was smart enough to admit that former Labour votes had been lent to him "to get the Brexit done" and to see off Corbyn. Most of these new MP's can be added to the already large number of English Conservative members who are incurious about the "Union". And they certainly don't have an incentive to care much about Scotland.

Ancient reflexes are now giving way to more immediate concerns. Newly won constituencies in England such as Blyth Valley in the north-east have been disproportionately affected by Covid infection, while some in the valley of the Trent have suffered the double-whammy of both the pandemic and earlier flooding. Other Tory gains (such as Burnley, Hyndburn, and Penistone & Stockbridge) are amongst  the most deprived areas in the UK. In a world of scarce resources post-Covid, Boris knows  that the maintenance of his majority in 2024 will be determined in places like Bolsover and Bassetlaw, not Aberdeen South.

The cultural case for Scottish independence has coincided with a much diminished sense of "Britishness". The institutions that gave a common identity, purpose and cultural affiliation north and south of the Tweed have evaporated. The major industries (such as steel, mining, engineering and textiles) that shared a Scottish, Welsh, Northern Irish and English heritage have either gone or are massively diminished. The Protestant Church is not the unifying force it once was. The individual Scottish regiments are no longer a backstay of the British Army. The trades unions have split more visibly into their Scottish and English variants. But this affects English sensibility just as much as it does in Scotland.

The Covid crisis has made practical devolution a highly visible but not terribly impressive reality, shown daily on our television screens and in other media. Ulster, Wales and Scotland have loudly pursued footling variations of the approaches taken by London but the notion that there is some sort of devolved version of the virus is absurd and cuts no ice with English MPs who feel their constituents are paying through the nose for the existing constitutional set- up, the irresolution of the "West Lothian Question" and devolved dawdling now. The first bow shots have been fired - caps will be applied to the availability of loans to English students who want to take up Scottish University places and the £1bn fund to help pupils transition to the new school year by way of summer "camps" and tutorial help only applies to England.

Boris Johnson has trenchantly asserted his resistance to another Scottish referendum, at least while he remains premier. But can it be inferred that he must therefore be a unionist? The loss of seats in Scotland has been much tougher for the Labour Party than it has been for the Conservatives and Johnson can continue to toy with the SNP, which is beginning to show signs of driving itself mad with the differing approaches to securing independence and the defenestration of its charismatic but flawed former leader. With Ireland, Johnson was able to ensure a degree of assent from Dublin to his vision of a deal with the EU with a veiled threat to make Ulster an Irish problem (rather than an English one) by the simple expedient of Westminster acting upon its long stated disinterest in unification. Johnson wants neither Scotland nor Ulster as a constitutional ball-and-chain. The best that can be said is that, unlike the more sincere unionists Cameron and May, he is a fair weather unionist only.

It remains to be seen if Boris's gangly coalition of Brexiteers, Red Tories, Blue Rinses and free marketers will last the distance. But one thing it will not be thinking about is how all this plays in Scotland. Unionism has got a fight on its hands, and not just with the Nats.

LOST IN SPACE

A few years before his death in 2012, I had the huge honour to meet Neil Armstrong, the commander of the Apollo 11 mission and the first human to stand on the moon in July 1969. What do you ask the 20th Century's Magellan that cannot possibly have been asked before? But Armstrong was gracious, self-deprecating and amusing in the face of my trite enquiries and was completely without any aura of self-importance. We talked about boredom amongst the crew as their elaborate tin can ground its way towards the sphere of dust in the distance and Armstrong confirmed that Buzz Aldrin did in fact utter a variant of the "Are we nearly there yet?" question at one point. Armstrong also talked about fear and revealed that all three crewmen had been asked to consider odds of 15% that they wouldn't be coming back. It's easy to envisage three healthy astronauts being stuck in space, their life support systems dwindling towards their extinction, and absolutely no chance of rescue. Yet all three took those odds for, as Armstrong put it, they had an 85% chance of nailing it: which indeed they did.

As the spluttering rocket of the UK struggles to escape the gravitational pull of Planet Lockdown with traces of Covid still on board, the calculation of odds is also at the forefront of minds back at Mission Control in Downing Street and Whitehall. As the futility of "lockdown" became increasingly clear, the equation of the known risks of contagion was neatly solved for the citizenry in the cheap seats by the 2 metre social distancing guidance, a snappy little rubric that further upended vast swathes of the economy, normal family life, employment, leisure activity and the education of children and adults. Although the UK is one of only a tiny handful of countries to have promoted this guidance (in the teeth of WHO advice), it was repeated so often that it morphed into a "rule". 

So what did the "rule" (which has no statutory backing) say about the chances of infection? Presumably the government and its advisors on SAGE didn't think the proles would be able to deal with simple probabilities, so the threat was rationalised as a binary metric to bolster the rationale for "lockdown" and to underpin continuing restrictions. And you could only justify such draconian measures if there was a statistical match of infection to death. So it was promulgated that at two metres the incidence of infection was half that at one metre - stan's to reason, dunnit? The further link with mortality was left hanging in the air. Yet the immutable truth of 2 metres was  unquestioningly drummed in by the media: in particular, the BBC News's "Science" Correspondent David Shukman and "Medical" and "Health" Correspondents Fergus Walsh and Huw Pym were on hand almost nightly to explain matters in that  style of BBC exposition that elsewhere is reserved for the educationally sub-normal.

But the "rule" was a bit like saying to the crew of Apollo 11 that "There is a chance that you won't come back and a chance that you will". It said nothing about the actual probability of infection from Covid-19 as it would have said nothing about survival on a space mission. The chances of infection from an uncovered person who has Covid, and who coughs at you, is 13% at one metre. It is 3% at two metres. In other words, you have an 87% chance of avoiding Covid if an infected person clears his or her throat in your general direction at a distance of a little over three feet. You have a 97% chance of avoidance at two metres. There have been just over 300,000 cases of confirmed Covid-19 infection in a UK population of 67 million. Just under 43,000 have died. As they say, "Do the Math".

The public health impact of Covid -19 has been fearsome. Yet arguably the official response to it has been absolutely catastrophic and in no way mitigated by the knowledge that other countries have also struggled with their various approaches. The idea that there are "so many unknowns" about the virus is just a poor excuse for not getting to grips with what was known about the pathology of Covid 19 at an early stage and acting accordingly. Amid all the obfuscation about Chinese "secrecy", Johns Hopkins University of the USA established quite early on in the pandemic that the elderly were the most at risk and that infection was mostly determined by sustained proximity in confined spaces. Death from Covid was far more likely to result in patients with pre-existing medical conditions such as heart disease, respiratory illness and dementia. This was all borne out by  subsequent experience and confirmed by outliers such as the miniscule proportion of fatalities amongst young children and infants. Yet infected elderly patients were discharged into care homes early in the pandemic while the task of getting children back into the class room has caused a collective official seizure throughout the UK.

Debatably, as much fear has been generated by the official response to the pandemic as by the virus itself and the inflation of these fears by the media and especially the BBC. The civil service moves extraordinarily slowly and it is simply not enough to assert that everyone has been working their socks off within processes and procedures that are incapable of swift adaptation. After all, no senior civil servant, departmental leader or director of one the vast battalions of quangocrats was ever selected for their spontaneity, non-consensual thinking or single mindedness. We live in an era of "equalities audits", "access agendas", "stakeholder consultation", "vulnerabilities"  and "safety protocols" which have led to a steady bureaucratisation of our culture beyond the boundaries of those departments and local authorities that promulgate them. Ministers might bang on about "moving at pace" (the latest bit of jargon to contaminate public briefings), but all this faux activity is nearly always qualified by the word "appropriately", which has itself moved beyond cliché into the realm where language truly dies.

As the UK government and devolved administrations are discovering, it is a lot harder to coax people out of lockdown when they have only so recently been terrorised into it. But this is the inevitable result of a cultural conditioning that has encouraged citizens to confuse risk with uncertainty and a belief that adversities in life must always be the fault of someone else or the consequence of impersonal forces which ought to be negated. Now, political and administrative action has been stymied by the desire to get a scientific imprimatur for every decision that is made, a level of approval that the scientists are understandably reluctant to give. Yet some of the recent measures, such as the quarantining of travellers into the UK, seem bizarre not least because they have come so late in the day and seem to have been driven by the "focus group" style of reaching political conclusions. But there is a world of difference between running for office and actually governing. Too often decisions seem to be driven by the consideration "Does this look good?" rather than "Is this right?". Some of the initiatives look thoroughly embarrassing too: the Health Secretary's bombastic ambition to create a "world beating test and trace system" foundered almost immediately, the victim of official UK's obsession with centralising everything within its purview. Naturally, the providers of the kit were reluctant to have their actual world beating technologies re-organised for them by the men and women from the ministry.

Certainly it is a season for superlatives: the highest level of national debt since WWII;  the biggest downturn in the economy since the early 18th Century; the greatest loss of liberty for the private citizen since the 17th Century etc. etc. The bills are absolutely staggering and keep mounting. You can be sure that the NHS will be back cap-in-hand to deal with the stupendous backlog of cancer therapies, heart procedures and hip replacements that have been denied attention even as vast swathes of the NHS have lain idle in expectation of the "second wave" of Covid infections. Government IOUs are being sprayed around with abandon and there is a creeping consensus that the debt can simply be monetised. But Modern Monetary Theory (or the Magic Money Tree) is just a sophisticated way of saying "inflation" and the Bank of England has warned that there are limits to its abilities to backstop the spree, even if it wanted to. 

Natural or even man made disasters should prompt a thorough re-appraisal. The Covid pandemic has somehow managed to combine the two. Criticism is not just the application of hindsight and the  crisis has thrown up plenty of examples where the failure to take the right turning could easily have been  anticipated had the map been studied more closely and logically. What is clear is that government, both at the level of the politicians and their officials simply lacks the intellectual or practical bandwidth to do all the things that it is attempting to do. There is undeniable truth that the costs of the crisis will have to be met but a rather lazier consensus that we will have to go on paying for more-of-the-same. Some are calling for taxes on wealth, justified by the dubious logic that the costs of dealing with the pandemic were mainly aimed at the elderly, as if we would tax parents had the pandemic mostly affected children. There is a broad consensus that consumers will need incentives to get spending again. After a brief reprieve from stimulus measures such as lower VAT and employers' National Insurance, it will be fingers crossed that growth will somehow see us right. Otherwise...

But all this assumes that we were well governed before the UK went into the crisis. We were not. Surely it is time to radically rethink the state, its purpose, size and cost? We can't go on like this, or we really will burn up on re-entry.

 

THE STATE THAT FAILED ?

Here's Sir Max Hastings in the Sunday Times on 19th April 2020: "It seems mistaken to heap too much blame on the government for the failures in Britain's response to Covid 19". Aside from the point that this judgement seemed a tad premature, it also begged the question as to who else Sir Max thought should be to blame for the epic mess that has been created by the response to the virus? Nonetheless the main thing, he sententiously averred, was that "our rulers should be judged by how fast they learn from grim experience".

But whatever doubts Sir Max had about the government's performance seemed to have been resolved by the start of the very next paragraph, as "Amid many uncertainties, one thing is assured: the state will play a role in all our affairs for the next few years greater than we have known for 60 or 70 years". In one respect, he's dead right of course - on the latest forecasts provided by the OBR, the UK government's deficit could rise ten fold in the year 2020/21 and in the worst case scenario could consume fully one quarter of GDP. Someone has to fork out, and the media is already sharpening its pencils to work out the (inevitable) tax increases that will be required to pay for the stupendous bills.

Sir Max enjoys a reputation for his non-consensual views about history, especially military history, and his books are widely praised. Yet in his apparent belief in the state, he is now firmly in the mainstream, if indeed he had ever left it. Further, the question as to whether or not the state should be acting so comprehensively or so intrusively never seems to cross his mind. Indeed "the fumbled response thus far represents consequences of generations (sic) in which its (the state's) institutions and instruments have been eroded and run down, as the dynamic of society shifted to the private sector". What's more, he  continues, this lamentable state of affairs has been caused by "an invasion of management consultants" and because "the nation's brightest and best have devoted their lives to making money or spending it in the private sector".

It is perhaps somewhat unfair to single out Sir Max as all sorts of people normally associated with "small state", libertarian or "free market" views have had their hitherto rock solid beliefs shaken and their capacity for logical thought undermined by the crisis. Gillian Tett enjoys a big following for her op ed in the FT, but there she was showing doubt about the monetary and fiscal bailouts since "by propping up not just companies but capital, the bailouts risk exacerbating...income inequality" (FT Magazine 16th May). Three days later Melanie Phillips, who can normally be counted upon to defend civil liberty from a socially conservative perspective, gave former Supreme Court judge Jonathan Sumption both barrels for daring to question the lockdown and accused him of being the leader of some quasi- mediaeval heretical sect that wanted people to die. It would appear that the virus doesn't just effect people's lungs.

But is Sir Max right? Certainly, he would be appalled to see himself labelled as a corporatist or (horrors) a socialist, but then again some people may aptly be described as berks, even though they would never describe themselves thus. Over the time frame to which Sir Max refers, state spending has never dropped below a third of GDP and there have been some notable splurges, not least under the stewardship of Tony Blair and Gordon Brown when it peaked at 45%. Spending on health  has risen seven fold in real terms and has doubled as a proportion of GDP - even in the so-called "austerity" years since 2010, it has always kept pace with GDP. So if a lack of monetary resource is an imperfect culprit for the decline, what else may be responsible for the running down that Hastings claims to detect?

Since 1950, the number of public and private spaces from which the UK state has withdrawn can be counted on one hand. Even in the sphere of sexual behaviour, the libertarian reforms of the 1960's are being reversed as the state seeks to intrude upon personal preferences in the name of the "Equalities" agenda. The transfer of economic assets under the privatisation program of the 1980's was accompanied by a regulatory framework that continues to grow and now encompasses vast swathes of private commercial activity. The UK's membership of the EU has only reinforced this trend as the tradition of UK Common Law (which permits anything unless it is expressly forbidden) has been usurped by the Napoleonic continental model (which permits only that which is legally allowed). Even religious freedom has been curtailed where it is deemed to give offence. Indeed, apart from our choice of TV channel and car colour, pretty well everything (including things which might be described properly as matters for the autonomous private citizen), has been outsourced to the state.

Under whatever party, state intrusion has been relentless and compounded by the enabling effects of technology. The beguiling trade off for this steady erosion of liberty and responsibility is that not only does the state protect you, but it also now makes you "safe" to yourself and others. As the Covid 19 crisis has demonstrated however, both propositions are palpably false. Indeed the bargain has been entirely inverted as the citizenry has been ordered to accept economic privation and the loss of liberty in order to "protect" an organ of state, the NHS.

The only difference between the mainstream Tory and Labour parties (apart from a very brief interlude in the early 1980's) is not about how big the state should be or where it should or should not poke its nose, but about how it should be run. At the risk of caricature, the left thinks that the only limit on state spending and activity is the limit of our compassion and that the state can tax its way to the prosperity needed to pay for all this aspiration. The right (as defined by the Tory party) has broadly come to accept this agenda in an attempt to "de-toxify" its image - what else were Cameron's "Big Society" or Johnson's "One Nation Conservatism" if not pale imitations of Blair's "Third Way"? But the Tories have always believed that they can run the state more efficiently, although the list of private sector leaders and "management consultants" who have tried to apply business principles upon entering government and who have come a cropper is a lengthy one.

Remember the "bonfire of the quangos" that the Cameron government made such a song-and-dance about ? There were 367 of these  opaque, largely unaccountable and publicly funded entities when the then cabinet office minister, Francis Maude, took an axe to them in late 2010. In the teeth of civil service resistance 87 were abolished and some, such as the OFT and Competition Commission, were merged. Others, such as the Tote, were sold to the private sector. Scroll forward six years to  Postmaster General Ben Gummer's production of his blockbuster report "Public Bodies 2016". These were now snappily described as "Arms Length Bodies"(ALB) : but weren't these just the old quangos under a different guise? The National Audit Office and the Public Accounts Committee of Parliament weren't so sure and warily "concluded that the ALB landscape remains complex and is difficult to understand". Whatever, the report identified 463 of these entities with a payroll that would fill Wembley Stadium nearly three times over, and with responsibility for overseeing £195bn of public spending. Is there any democratic oversight of these bodies beyond the weary eyes of frequently rotated ministers? Of course not.

The list of government/state cock ups is growing bigger and ever more expensive. Here, we are not just talking about cost overruns  (although they are often massive relative to original estimates on projects such as HS2), but on things that are far more strategic and fundamental. Wars in faraway places? Immigration controls? The implementation of Universal Credit? Preparations for a no-deal Brexit? The rail franchise system and network upgrade? The decades long disgrace of a public education system that leaves unbelievable numbers of pupils functionally illiterate and innumerate? Pandemic planning, anyone? All these are areas where the political choice has already been made, but which the massively resourced apparat has contrived to foul up.

Meanwhile, we have been absolutely infantilised by a state that claims competence in virtually every single area of our lives. Even Boris Johnson's much paraded trust in the "common sense of the British people" as they emerge from lockdown has been hedged by footling, intrusive and arguably unenforceable directions, rules and regulations. Basically, the state does not trust us and never has. Should we now continue to trust it?

Back to you, Sir Max.

WE WILL REMEMBER THEM

According to the Health Secretary, NHS staff and care workers who have succumbed to Covid-19  are "our fallen heroes". The way the BBC tells it, these and other "tragic victims" are martyrs to the government's ineptitude. We have had national weekly rounds of applause, Captain Tom's prodigious NHS charity fund-raiser on the eve of his centenary (complete with guard of honour), a one minute silence, and nightly news of our "front-line" workers sent over the top without ammunition (PPE). Footage of soldiers clad in camouflage and running Covid testing stations, and delivering kit to apparently hard pressed hospital medics completes the war-time iconography. We are running out of military metaphors.

So it was good to hear Nicky Credland, Chairwoman of the British Association of Critical Care Nurses providing a more thoughtful perspective to the increasing levels of mawkishness. Interviewed on Newsnight, she confessed that she and many other healthcare professionals were becoming increasingly uneasy at the characterisation of NHS staff as "heroes". Yes, she said, the death of medical personnel was sad. But the truth was that they and their colleagues were all highly trained practitioners who just wanted to get on with their jobs with the right kit. Futhermore, all the heightend emotion of the broadcast media's coverage was giving rise to completely unrealistic expectations and she dismissed Emily Maitlis's assertion that nurses were "angels". Nurses weren't "ethereal beings" she said, flitting in and out to dispense miracles. Emily looked a tiny bit crest-fallen.

The mood identified by Credland feels as phoney as it is misplaced. The current crisis is a medical crisis and a civil one. More specifically, it is one which has cast doubt upon the ability of the country's healthcare systems to cope with the challenges thrown up by a thoroughly nasty virus. The government's entire strategy has been driven by the desire to prevent the NHS being overwhelmed, but it seems pretty clear that this approach is already costing lives. The order to "Protect the NHS" has, dare one say it, been too successful. At the geographical heart of the UK's pandemic, London's Nightingale Hospital, built and equipped in nine days by a mixture of army personnel and civilian contractors lies mostly empty. Meanwhile, the number of untreated cancer sufferers continues to mount. Now, very late in the day and in spite of all the evidence that the virus disproportionately affects the aged (90% of Covid related deaths are over 60) and those with pre-existing conditions, the focus of attention has fallen on care homes for the elderly, where the death toll has risen sharply. If the measure of a country's commitment to the highest standards of citizenship and civilisation can be gauged by the ways in which its prisoners and its old folk are treated, then the UK has a lot of work to do.

At least in a hospital, Covid sufferers have a chance of survival and an ease of their suffering. But nursing and care homes, so long the Cinderella's of the UK's huge and sprawling healthcare and social care infrastructure have been overwhelmed. If anyone deserves the title of hero, they are likely to be found among the underpaid and often un-equipped staff of this sector, many from abroad with few rights of citizenship. Meanwhile, their charges are forced to endure a horrible death in which many quite literally drown in their own mucus. But although this was all entirely predictable, it has taken until the sixth week of the "lockdown" to start to mobilise testing and adequate PPE for this shamefully neglected sector.

The Covid 19 crisis has exposed profound weaknesses and failure at both the institutional and political level. The government has boxed itself into a corner with a narrative that places the needs of the NHS above almost all other. This bloated and inefficient totem has been allowed to achieve a cult status that will make it almost impossible to reform even as its every demand is granted. More immediately, the government has said that the conditions for ending the "lockdown" must include the adequacy of PPE, stopping the NHS being overwhelmed and eliminating the risk of a "second wave". National wellbeing is being sacrificed to an institutional imperative and to the questionable notion that (in the absence of an effective vaccine) Covid 19 can, in the words of the PM, be "wrestled to the ground".

Meanwhile, while the BBC plods around trying (improperly) to doorstep the relatives of "victims", companies are voting with their feet. The announcement by British Airways that it is likely to dismiss a full quarter of its workforce, notwithstanding the government's employment support measures, is a truly terrifying reminder of the long term damage being inflicted. The Prime Minister, no doubt sobered by his own near-death experience, is said to face some "indescribably difficult decisions".  Yet surely it's a pretty simple and single one: do you want to work through this, or do you want the UK and its citizens to go bust?

BRAVE NEW WORLD

The penny is beginning to drop that the official strategy to deal with the Covid -19 pandemic is likely to cause an economic catastrophe, probably far worse in its impact on health and well-being than is being caused by the virus itself. Even the BBC has now twigged that all is not well in the boiler room that generates the nation's economic energy and pays for its public services. There are faint stirrings too of impatience within the media at the clouds of obfuscation that have become a feature of the daily "coronavirus briefings" from Downing Street and with official Britain's bizarre assertion that  it is still "too early" to even contemplate the steps to ending the "lockdown", never mind disclosing them to the citizenry.

But one can also sense that in some quarters the desperate images of the suffering, and the efforts of medical staff to treat them, have begun to pall. Already the thoughts of the commentariat are turning towards the shape of things to come, when and if the rest of us are allowed to emerge blinking into the post-corona world. In her trenchant but not always dispassionate style, Emily Maitlis of BBC Newsnight abandoned all restraint in keeping her personal views under wraps and roundly denounced the current fiction that we are all, somehow, "in this together". The "front-line" workers, she averred, were amongst the lowest paid in our society and there would have to be a new "social settlement" when all this is over.

There is nothing like a good crisis to get high-minded consciences stirred into a frenzy of virtue signalling, particularly if there is a regular pulpit in which to do it. As with Emily, the amount of the ersatz passion displayed tends to grow in inverse proportion to the number and quality of the remedies proposed. But there are a few staple solutions for all our ills that are ever present: more "resources"; more "fairness" (whatever that means); more taxes (especially on the wealthy); more government.

On all these themes, Kevin Pringle, adviser to and cheerleader for the SNP ministry in Scotland, gets a weekly column in the Sunday Times for his own brand of finger wagging. Here he is on April 5th, (as the full extent of "official" Britain's incompetence was beginning to manifest itself), in an article entitled "Be civil to quiet army of public servants". Kevin had got hold of an internal e-mail from a senior official in the Home Office which deplored the accusation that civil servants didn't live in the "real world". Kevin was right there behind his source of course, but in cold print the pompous whinge that he endorsed took on a somewhat sinister complexion: "We are not only in the real world" it  crossly asserted, "We are in its darkest places, and in its future potential (sic). When we make mistakes, it's your life that's affected, so we work every day to get better, be better. This isn't just a real job, it's our job and we've got you". The creepy arrogance of these remarks appeared to be lost on the columnist as he primly concluded that "none of it (the response to the pandemic) would or could be organised without the framework of guidance, regulation and law overseen by officials".

The food retail industry in the UK also contains more than its fair share of "front-line" workers, although in terms of overall manpower, it is pretty puny relative to the resources available to the state. Most of the industry operates a highly sophisticated distribution system which relies on swift delivery and deft re-stocking. It is in the eye of the current storm, not least in the sourcing of fresh produce from markets like Spain and Italy whose own distribution systems and economies have been completely disrupted. Yet the UK industry has arguably performed prodigies: food availability and even choice has been excellent and social distancing measures in the shops and supermarkets have been enacted efficiently and cheerfully. Almost overnight, the retailers had to cope with the withdrawal of the UK's entire hospitality industry and a subsequent surge of demand that would have overwhelmed less well organised providers. But the loo-rolls, chocolate bunnies and fresh vegetables are all there.

A month on and Team NHS (all 1.2m+ of them) is still messing about with "PPE", a term that is likely to become shorthand for the  leaden footedness that has come to characterise the official response to Covid- 19. According to Mr Hancock, enough PPE has been assembled as could equip every man woman and child in the UK with a new visor, face mask, coveralls, boots and gloves every day for the next fourteen weeks. Yet the task of getting this kit to around 58,000 "facilities", a feat that the Posties in Slough achieve on an average morning round or that Amazon Prime does nationally within 24 hours, has apparently eluded the capacity of the third biggest organisation in the world. In similar vein, the NHS is treating testing (the swift efficacy of which everyone, outside official Britain, seems to have agreed) in the same muddled and leisurely way. Its officials are still struggling to overcome their distrust of anything on offer from private laboratories and their lassitude even has its own snappy little motto - "No test is better than a bad test". The politicians have arguably had to shoulder more than their fair share of the blame for all this chaos, as it is too easily forgotten that the NHS, at least in its English variant, is operationally independent and has been for some time. Sir Simon Stevens, head of the NHS and noticeably absent from the daily "briefings" from Number 10, surely has some questions to answer.

Likewise, the government's economic support measures, so simple and lucid in the mouth of the Chancellor, have been mired in the bureaucratic jungle ever since they were first promulgated nearly a month ago. The Swiss authorities presented their small businesses with one side of questions on A4 paper to fill in, and the option of a loan of up to SFR 500,000 the day following receipt, free of interest and repayable within 5 years. Bingo - disaster averted. This being Switzerland, where the citizens are at least treated like grown ups, it hardly needed stating that fraud would be treated with the stiffest of penalties.

But there is nothing, absolutely nothing, that HM Treasury or HMRC cannot complicate. As of Good Friday, a mere 5,000 out of 300,000 applications and enquiries for the UK's Coronavirus Business Interruption Loan Scheme had been processed. The conduit for this gigantic and over-engineered exercise is a small and obscure quango called the British Business Bank (BBB) which acts as a government agent for the validating and checking of applications and lenders to see that the "public purse" is not unduly exposed to risk. The smarts in Whitehall didn't sully their hands with the actual implementation of course, although at first they insisted that businesses should be seen to have applied for a commercial loan, as if there was anything "commercial" about a government ordered slump. Naturally, the greedy banks through which the loans are accessed, have taken most of the flak for the obvious deficiencies even though they (or their shareholders) are on the hook for at least 20% of the loans' value. So, quite rightly, the banks are having to do their own due diligence while firefighting a current book of business that is already smouldering and may soon go up in flames.

Happily, quangos like the BBB provide another useful function which is to shield those more culpable in the larger departments of state that stand over them. Such is the culture of sacredness surrounding the NHS, it has proven tricky for the media to subject it to some overdue scrutiny and to hold it properly to account. Step forward then Public Health England. Formed in 2013, its remit is to "protect and improve the nation's health and to address inequalities", and to respond to major incidents. Famed for fatuous interventions like trying to ban coco-pops and endorsing electronic fags as "95% safe", PHE has provided a handy shield behind which Sir Simon has been able to hide his vastly larger cohorts for their almost total lack of preparation for the pandemic.

Meanwhile enforcing compliance with the "lockdown" has fallen upon an habitually misdirected and unreformed police service that has continuously moaned about a "lack of resources". Hitherto hidden away with a mandate to pursue "hate crimes" that contravene the 2010 Equalities Act, the police are suddenly ubiquitous in their pursuit of those deemed to contravene their interpretation of the new dispensation of 24 hour curfew. Liberated from their "paperwork", the rozzers seem to have been galvanised by their exposure to fresh air. The Chief Constable of Northamptonshire declared the determination of his force to rootle through the bags of shoppers in search of "non-essential" items while his counterpart in Derbyshire publicly defended the idiotic strategy of shaming those trying to exercise alone in remote rural places. Citizens have been handed penalty notices for sitting in their front garden.

The apparent passivity of the UK public in the face of the severest restrictions to their liberty, and the threat to the livelihood of anyone who earns their crust outside the public sector, has been absolutely extraordinary. The press is  full of "polls" (of whom?) that show almost "unanimous support" for the lockdown; so much so in fact that the politicians are now reported to be nervous that people will stay indoors even when the "all -clear" is eventually sounded.  Certainly the effort to scare the citizenry out of its wits has been unabated and even data that clearly demonstrates the idiocy of current official priorities is spun to suggest the opposite. The BBC has hyperventilated over graphs that show the mortality rate has "surged" past the 12,000 deaths per week that recent surveys show to be the average at this time of year. The excess of mortality? 4,000 people. It is quite a trade off for the colossal damage being done to the prospects of the young, fit and well of the next generation, never mind existing and hitherto thriving businesses.

But maybe the compliance is a sign of resigned toleration rather than enthusiastic endorsement. There is a counter narrative here that shows that the overweening state and its large band of "progressive" supporters have been well-and-truly found out by a tiny micro-organism. The "lockdown" and its colossal economic and financial price tag is an indictment of the officials' lack of preparedness, sense of priorities and floundering reaction. The very notion of the state, which derives its legitimacy from its ability to protect the citizenry, has been called into question. Saying that this is all somehow the "fault of the system" is just a lazy cop-out and denies the role of individual agency and group autonomy in the way public affairs are ordered. Further, it is an argument that treats people as if they were mere instruments of policy, whether in their private spaces or as part of the body of citizens.

Beyond a shadow of doubt, the vast and expensive "public enquiry" that will inevitably follow this fiasco will conclude that (1) Lessons will be learnt and (2) No-one was to blame for any deficiencies. Happily, we will "all be in it together" in the atmosphere of official denial and the rhythms of the state's life will resume, although it will be on the back of a vastly poorer and more nervous citizenry. So here are a few things that arguably should happen, but almost certainly will not:

• Some simply eye-watering bills are going to be coming in. But it needs to be far better understood that a society cannot simply tax its way back to prosperity. There should be a significant shrinkage of the state and expensive trophy programs like HS2 and the replacement of the nuclear missile fleet re-considered. 
• Above a certain level that protects, motivates and rewards the least well paid amongst it ranks, civil service pay should be cut by 10%. All public servants should also be moved onto a contributory pension scheme, part funded by the state. This would more fairly reflect the greater job security in the public sector.
• The NHS should be broken up into more manageable units and its aggregate size shrunk. The nonsensical fiction that something that is "free at the point of use" can be run along private enterprise lines should be abandoned. The NHS's considerable "debts" have already been written off and funding levels are anyway a political not a business decision. The NHS needs  better to reflect clinical rather than managerial priorities. A whole army of bean counters can be released for more productive activity.
• The amount of duplication in the public sector through the use of quangos and management consultants should be aggressively eliminated. Departments and civil service cadres that habitually use consultants and quangos for their decision making processes and functions should be privatised. Whole departments should be merged and economies realised - are there any good reasons why the Foreign Office, Overseas Aid and Trade Departments should not be combined, for example?
• The police need to be rationalised into larger regional bodies and its senior cadres purged. Police training should be overhauled, and an ethos of detection, deterrence and enforcement should replace the prevailing culture of the police as a social service.
• The tax system will need to be substantially simplified and reformed, and a separate levy for healthcare, underpinned by insurance, considered. Tax relief for debt accumulation should be more specifically targeted in ways that encourage real investment rather than financial speculation. The top rates of Income Tax will need to be lowered and thresholds for the lowest paid increased. Citizens are going to need incentives to spend and invest.