Our probable next
Prime Minister has
said that if another pandemic hit the UK, she would
not authorise any lockdowns similar to those employed around the
world against Covid before most people were vaccinated. She has also
said that she argued for doing less around the cabinet table when
lockdowns were discussed. If I could choose just one statement that
exemplifies how far the current Conservative party and its leadership
are living
in a fantasy world, where things like science, truth and facts
have been replaced by wish-fulfilment, I would choose this.
Both simple theory
and state of the art analysis shows lockdowns imposed in the first
year of the pandemic saved hundreds of thousands of lives in the UK.
Covid spreads through social interaction, so the more you can reduce
social interactions the smaller the number of people who will get the
disease. Lockdowns, which involve telling everyone except essential
workers to stay at home and supporting them to do so, obviously
reduce social interactions. We also know that vaccines reduce both
the chances of getting Covid and the chance of hospitalisation and
death if you get it. It therefore follows that reducing the number of
people getting Covid before vaccines are available by imposing
lockdowns will save countless lives.
In the UK it was
projections
by Imperial College of half a million Covid deaths without lockdown
measures, together with a breakdown in the NHS, that persuaded
Johnson to abandon the policy of herd immunity. What is true in
the UK is also true across the world, with researchers finding
that millions more would
have died if lockdowns had not been put in place.
Epidemiological models also tell us that governments should lockdown
quickly once TTI (test, trace and isolate) has failed to control a
pandemic, and if they did that lockdowns could be shorter. Countries
that were able to do that and impose tight border controls saw far
less deaths and (because lockdowns lasted less time)
economies were less affected by the pandemic.
This last point
completely undercuts the typical excuse the government used to delay
imposing lockdowns, which is that they didn’t want to hurt the
economy. The idea that absent lockdowns an economy can carry on
regardless during a pandemic was nonsense. As my own collaborative
study on the economic costs of a pandemic showed more
than 10 years before Covid, when infections and deaths are widespread
people who are able to will lock themselves down, and consumption of
most services drops like a stone. Much better for the state to
intervene early to keep cases low.
Anti-lockdown,
anti-mask Conservatives are not just ignoring the science on Covid
[1], but they are ignoring the lessons on hundreds of years of human
history about how you deal with pandemics. As Hilary Cooper and Simon
Szreter show in a new
book, the state has for the last five hundred years
often intervened in drastic ways to try and stop the spread of
pandemics. The authors point out that the Italian cities used
quarantine measures, including detention of travellers, to help
control against the plague: indeed the word quarantine comes from the
Italian for forty days. Elizabethan England followed their example,
raising local taxes for their equivalent of a furlough scheme.
As more began to be
understood about how disease was transmitted, state authorities began
to improve sanitation and hygiene. Costly large scale sanitation
measures in English cities helped contain outbreaks of cholera.
Hamburg, by contrast, decided this was all too costly, and as a
result the city was the last significant casualty of cholera in 1892.
When the misnamed Spanish Flu hit the US, different cities reacted in
different ways. In Seattle there were meticulous restrictions on
business activity, closing schools and churches and mask
requirements, while little was done in Philadelphia. As a result,
Seattle had one of the lowest death rates on the West Coast, while
Philadelphia suffered one of the highest death rates in the US.
So why does Truss,
along with many on the right in a number of countries, ignore all
this? The amount of myth
making about the pandemic, largely coming from the
political right, has been incredible. Cooper and Szreter lay the
blame at the door of the neoliberal project, although they do note
that a similar retreat from collectivism occurred when Elizabethan
Poor Laws were replaced by workhouses in the 19th century.
Furthermore they persuasively argue that since 2010 there has been a
concerted attempt to undermine the structure and principles of the
NHS and social care by right wing politicians. The response of some
of these politicians to the pandemic, with their ridiculous stress on
‘individual responsibility’, is symptomatic of their general
attitude to collective health and care provision.
As regular readers
will know, my
own view is that we left the neoliberalism of Thatcher
and Reagan behind with Brexit, and instead (under Conservative
leadership) the UK now behaves as an authoritarian plutocracy with
periodic elections. Brexit was not in the interests of most UK
businesses, as the dire UK macroeconomic position and outlook
testifies. It is why under Johnson we had endemic corruption from the
top that became clear after the pandemic hit. But for the arguments
of this book my distinction matters little, because our authoritarian
plutocracy still subscribes to the anti-collectivism inherent in
neoliberalism. What has changed is that anti-collectivism is no
longer justified by saying corporations always know best, and instead
it has become wealthy people who support the party (financially or
through the media) know best.
Cooper and Szreter
extend the argument that swift government action to control pandemics
helps the economy to make a more general point. To quote: “British
society – and its economy – has flourished most when it has embraced
both universal social security and welfare as a legal entitlement of
all citizens …” They argue that the UK has been most successful
when it has embraced “collective individualism”: collectively
funded support for all individuals so they can flourish as
independent agents. But the book’s ambition goes well beyond
documenting this and the problems that neoliberalism and recent
Conservative led governments have caused. The second half of the book
is a blueprint for a better future, covering ethical capitalism,
progressive taxation, participatory politics, a sustainable future
and more.
As UK society faces
a perfect storm of crisis, mainly created by its political leaders
who seem oblivious or indifferent to them, it’s great to read a
thoughtful, well researched and clearly argued blueprint for a better
future. I strongly recommend this book.
[1] A Daily
Telegraph headline
recently blamed current excess deaths on lockdowns! The right wing
press and Conservative party exist in a mutually reinforcing fantasy
world, where measures that saves lives are regarded as mistakes and
as a result what is actually killing people goes unaddressed.
