England’s Covid Woes Expose Significant Governmental Flaws
After a month of bask-in-the-backyard sunshine – seeming to herald a long and lovely summer – the English weather is, as is usual, muggy and grey. It seems an apt metaphor for the current moment in British politics: having promised a final release from covid-19 restrictions on 21st June, Boris Johnson extended them into the following month. The glimpse of sunlight makes the gloom bleaker.
The restrictions would be more tolerable if they made sense. In the summer, I went to a rural beer garden to watch England’s Euros grudge-match with Scotland. Sitting in a soggy marquee, limited to tables of six, we risked expulsion if we jumped up for a goal (a purely hypothetical situation: the match finished nil-nil) or if we boozily stood up to belt out a chant. The risk of anyone perishing from covid-19 due to an over-zealous rendition of ‘Ten German Bombers’ was, I’m quite confident, zero.
I stayed at home for England’s once-in-a-generation victory over Germany, but those who did head out will have endured similar rigours. They are only required to do so because, during the month-or-so when the ‘delta variant’ ravaged India, the Conservative government allowed 20,000 Indians to enter Britain without any quarantine buffers. ‘Government insiders’ have told sympathetic newspapers that Boris Johnson did not wish to offend Narendra Modi’s, India’s prime minister.
There have been mutterings that this desire of Johnson’s stems from the tantalising prospect of a post-Brexit trade deal with India. This seems unlikely, given that India has never been an important export market for British industry. Nor is there any reason to attribute his decision (or, rather, indecision) to a special British neurosis about India: the likes of Barack Obama and Goldman Sachs proved similarly craven in their pre-pandemic dealings with Modi’s brutal government. Such attempts to make sense of Johnson’s fumbling only underscores its senselessness.
As the British saying – hardly less senseless – goes, we are where we are. Polls suggest that old people – the Conservative Party’s principal electoral base, by now almost entirely vaccinated – favour the extension of restrictions, while the young resent it. Cases are going up, but deaths remain minimal – which is, of course, the point of vaccination. Nearly everyone who had a real chance of dying from the virus is now immunised against it.
You won’t of course, hear any of this from the opposition Labour Party. For the entirety of the pandemic, its leader, Sir Keir Starmer QC, has limited himself to protesting that the government should have done whatever the government is doing sooner than the government did it. ‘Anti-lockdown’ agitation retains an odour of crankery – the genteel English cousin, according to respectable opinion, of continental anti-vaxxery. A walk to the shops anywhere in Britain will attest the hypocrisy of a populace which ‘backs’ a straightjacket around its liberties, yet shows little sign of wearing it. And so England, as so often in recent memory, has become a cartoon of itself: a place where nothing ever lives or dies, and from where there is no escape.