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.