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.
