News from Nowhere: Panniversary

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It’s now been three years since the United Kingdom first went into Covid-19 lockdown. Yes, this week Britain marks the pandemic’s third anniversary, or “panniversary” if you like.

Much has been said of the British government's failure to take this public health emergency seriously in its early stages. Prime Minister Boris Johnson, with characteristically foolhardy optimism, had ignored medical advice and travelled around the country unmasked and shaking hands. He’d kept the borders open and had resisted the imposition of lockdown restrictions until the virus had spread widely across the population.

He’d generally done his best to underplay the risks and shirk his own responsibilities. This was after all his administration’s house style. It was Brexit all over again.

He went on to mess around with multiple lockdowns in a misguided bid to save Christmas rather than to save lives. Under such circumstances, the eventual emergence of a deadlier new strain of Covid in the southeast of England might have seemed almost inevitable.

It later of course transpired that Mr. Johnson had wasted billions of pounds of public money awarding contracts for useless procurements to his government’s friends: from protective equipment that didn’t protect to software systems that no one used. Fraud was rife.

Taxpayers’ cash was thrown around in an unprecedented spending free-for-all. Even the former landlord of the Health Secretary’s local pub got a piece of the action.

It of course also eventually emerged that while the rest of the nation had been adhering strictly to the rules introduced to preserve the health of the population, the Prime Minister and his cronies had been partying away in Downing Street like it was the end of the world.

Even his own severe brush with Covid failed to dampen his ebullience or bring him to his senses. Indeed, it appears that by surviving his time in intensive care, he came to think of himself as somehow immortal, both physically and politically.

The fact that Johnson’s near-death experience proved neither redemptive nor revelatory reflects in microcosm the failure of the hopes of those who’d believed something better might have emerged from the ruins of a society traumatized by a domestic catastrophe of a magnitude unknown in living memory.

Now, in 2023, we may feel some nostalgia for the naïve utopian faith of those who’d dreamed that the pandemic would prove a panacea for the inequities and inequalities of the nation and indeed of the world.

But was it really so crazy to imagine that the shared experience of this global disaster might have been enough to reaffirm our common humanity and inspire us to put aside our differences and conflicts, and strive to come together in a spirit of transnational community?

Instead, of course, it turned out that the increased economic pressures which followed the height of the crisis served only to reinforce the short-term self-interest of struggling states.

Rather than, say, uniting us in the face of the next great disaster, the climate emergency, it has entrenched individual governments in their narrow agendas, and made it look even less likely that we’re going to get out of that one alive.

Earlier this month, the unauthorised publication of many thousands of his WhatsApp messages revealed that Boris Johnson’s Health Secretary had failed to follow scientific advice recommending a general programme of Covid-19 testing for all people about to be admitted into care homes.

Nearly forty thousand Covid deaths were registered in English care homes in the first year of the pandemic alone. It is now believed that many of those deaths might have been avoided.

That Health Secretary had himself been obliged to resign in 2021 after it was reported that he had pursued a romantic relationship with a colleague in breach of both his marriage vows and his own pandemic safety rules.

Further leaked texts have charted acrimonious arguments and personality clashes at the heart of government, chaotic decision-making processes and crippling indecision, political concerns trumping medical evidence, the premier’s failure to understand basic mathematics, and even a case of one senior minister receiving special access for his family to virus testing kits at a time when they were in very limited supply.

A public inquiry into the UK government’s handling of the crisis is due to open in June. But, as the BBC’s political editor has pointed out, the hearings have already opened in the court of public opinion.

The Metro newspaper has declared that Covid victims’ families have been “sickened” by these messages. The Daily Mirror has said they’ve exposed a “tragic betrayal”. The Leader of His Majesty’s Opposition has described them as revealing the “ghoulish spectacle” of government failings.

Three years ago, overnight, everything suddenly changed. Yet today, in the UK, in the pettifogging politics of a ruling party still dominated by morally myopic Little Englanders, nothing much seems to have changed at all.