Unintentional Conspiracies

The picture emerging of the UK’s initial response to the coronavirus outbreak is increasingly clear, grim, and, for anyone trying to be honest, horribly familiar. From the time in the middle of January that news reports began to discuss what was happening in China, the UK government and its scientists were also talking about it, and concluding, first, that C-19 wasn’t a problem, and then that it was but that the best approach would be to manage its spread rather than repress it. Not until the middle of March was the government reluctantly dragged towards doing the things other states had done and which public opinion was demanding. Behind that was a group of scientists apparently giving the politicians advice that fitted their preconceptions and hopes, and politicians without the knowledge or inclination to challenge it. When you’re being told what you want to hear by people who are subconsciously tailoring their words to what they think you’ll accept, it requires colossal strength of mind to question the process. Why would you? It becomes a conspiracy of optimism. After that, once it’s clear you’ve made a possibly catastrophic error, you don’t want to face it: your natural instinct is to deny it to yourself as much as anyone else. Your failure, your responsibility, takes ages to digest, especially if you’re still having to make decisions.

It hasn’t just happened here, of course. People in France, Italy and Spain have exactly the same sorts of questions about their governments’ actions and inactions as we do here, and when the story is eventually told the UK’s experience will have to be put into a wider context: other countries have found themselves in the same place as us, not, perhaps, for exactly the same reasons, but with the same overarching combination of complacency and denial. Sandra Zampa, assistant minister of health in Italy, said that as the Italian government watched what was playing out in China during the first half of February, ‘it was like looking at a science-fiction movie’ – something that wasn’t their problem, until it was.

I struggle to remember what I thought at the time, and the fact that I struggle probably indicates that I didn’t think very much. If challenged about it during those early weeks in January and February, I expect I would have expected vaguely that the disease wouldn’t escape from the Far East, and that if it did efforts would be made to combat it, and that it wouldn’t be much more of a problem than seasonal flu: when I started work in Swanvale Halt, we were all exercised about swine flu, and of course not much came of that in the event. I certainly wasn’t writing to our MP Jeremy Hunt about it. Then, at the start of March, as the Government started to talk about allowing the disease to infect most of the population as the best way of managing it, I sat with a calculator and took about ten seconds to work out that, with the expected rates of infection and mortality, that policy would kill anything between half a million and a million-and-a-half people. Really? I thought. Is that actually unavoidable? The experts seemed to be saying that the Chinese policy of lockdown would be ineffective; now, I trust Mr Johnson no further than I can throw him, but the scientists were independent, weren’t they? Surely they can do the same simple calculation as I’ve done; have they not done it? or, having done it, don’t they believe it; or, believing it, do they think it’s inevitable? Why do so many other countries seem to think differently? I didn’t actually do anything, though. I’m slow on the uptake.

I point to this only because I see the same thing playing out in the much lower-stakes processes in which I take part. The people sitting in a circle at a PCC meeting, for instance, know and usually (unless the church community is really dysfunctional) like each other. They don’t want to be nasty and don’t want to push one another too hard. They’re all going to have to carry on sharing the same space and time, and conflict is awkward and embarrassing. It takes a lot of effort to hold on to the purposes of the organisation and the cautions that should operate in it, and take the risk of disagreement. Everyone is usually willing to accept diplomatic untruths and half-explanations that allow them to go home feeling all right, including ones that tell them there’s nothing they can do, and therefore they can park the issue. Most of the time, it doesn’t matter that much, and in fact diplomacy is just what you need. I speak as someone who finds themselves going down that route a lot.

At the moment I’m reading through the Gospel of Luke in the mornings. We are used to thinking of Luke as the most polished and literary of the Evangelists, but I hadn’t realised how often he builds ambiguities into familiar narratives. His version of the Parable of the Talents concludes with the landowner ordering his enemies to be slaughtered in front of him, a disturbing detail missing from Matthew’s account; and several of Jesus’s particularly double-edged statements in Luke 13-16 have no parallels in the other Gospels, including the strange story of the Prodigal Son (as someone once pointed out to me, the Prodigal is welcomed home, but not restored to his earlier condition: his elder brother remains his father’s heir, and his own inheritance is gone). I note that Jesus’s enemies in Luke are not just openly hostile to him, but deceitful; thus the authorities send ‘spies who pretended to be honest, to trap him’. The narrative recognises human failure and the deceits and lies that cover up failure and self-interest.

We all want to think the best will happen, and to imagine the best of others. Most of the time we are right. Ascribing the mistakes the UK seems to have made in its treatment of the epidemic to the ‘evil’ of the Tory Party, as some people I know do, ignores similar problems in other countries, and doesn’t identify exactly what the evil might be. Perhaps neglect is a sort of evil: it can certainly have catastrophic  results. In a vivid phrase, Jason Hickel of the LSE wrote of the UK government that their “minds are so strafed by neoliberalism” that they find it impossible to envisage positive action rather than cajoling, nudging, hoping it will all turn out all right; this is different from malice. I’m a bit like that too: I find it almost unbearable to tell people directly what to do. But then I’m not responsible for managing a public health emergency. Perhaps being aware of my own basic shortcomings might help in identifying where things have gone wrong elsewhere.

We know that not everywhere has followed the same course. South Korea, Singapore and Taiwan instantly concluded, based on their past experience, that what began in China would come to them pretty quickly. Alone among Western democracies, Canada had a significant number of deaths during the SARS epidemic of 2005, so they were primed for the same thing to happen again. The outliers, and therefore the most interesting cases, are places like Germany, Iceland and New Zealand, who’d had no recent experience of pandemic disease but acted as though they had. It may be that eventually the question we find ourselves asking is not why things went wrong in the UK and elsewhere, but why they went right where they did. Failure is the normal human reaction to crisis; it’s success which is the anomaly.