The last few weeks have seem damning testimony to the official Covid inquiry. Johnson and his team are revealed as incompetent, uncaring, misogynist and totally unaware of how far out of their depth they are. A bunch of over promoted, under-talented posh boys who thought that running the country required the same skills as a winning a debate at the Oxford Union.
Cummings in particular, remains convinced by his own genius, unable to comprehend his own role in the biggest operational failure by a British Government in memory. Still searching for his precious.
It turns out that while the media were fixated on the legality of Keir Starmer eating a naan Boris Johnson was cheerily condemning your Nan to death.
There is, however, one thing that I can’t allow to go uncorrected. Time after time people in front of the committee have claimed that Britain didn’t have a plan to deal with a pandemic, and didn’t realise that it needed one until the pandemic was out of control.
This isn’t true.
After the SARS outbreak the NHS led a nationwide programme to develop a comprehensive response plan for a highly contagious respiratory illness. Just like Covid. There were local plans, too, all of which were tested in a series of table top exercises. I know because I attended some of them. Additional surge capacity was identified, equipment and supplies were stockpiled.
And then 2010 arrived. The Tories came back into Government and embarked on a massive re-organisation of the NHS. Cameron had made a promise to “cut the deficit, not the NHS”. In fact this was a lie; there were cuts to the NHS. Public Health was transferred out of the NHS and into Local Government, along the way it’s budgets were slashed. This deceit allowed Cameron to claim he had met his promise when he had done the opposite.
Decades of planning and got lost in the re-oganisation. Public Health expertise was lost, and stockpiles were sold off to meet savings targets. Expertise was downgraded and organisational memory deliberably wiped.
All of which cost £4bn of taxpayers money to implement.
We were prepared for a pandemic. We had a plan. And supplies. The roots of that failure didn’t start with Boris Johnson’s horrific lack of empathy and judgement. Successive Conservative Prime Ministers took decisions that damaged the ability of the state to deal with predictable crisis. And they did so recklessly, sure that their ideology would triumph over reality. That shrinking the state might have consequences, but those consequences would be felt by other people – the poor, the vulnerable., people who they didn’t care about and who weren’t going to vote for them anyway.