“How on earth did it come to this?” Keir Starmer’s question could skewer Boris Johnson at every PMQs from now on. It encompasses all the damage the government did in the last decade, as well as all it has failed to do to protect the country from Covid-19. The list of derelictions in the early stage of the crisis is long, the testing and the protective equipment still shamefully inadequate. Have lessons been learned? The auguries are not good.
The era of government by ideology against evidence, of political messages before good policy, is unchanged as showman Johnson opts for “a big speech” on Sunday, instead of a sober prime ministerial Commons announcement subject to questions. If decisions have been made, why leak them teasingly to his press? Their headlines today read: “Hurrah! Lockdown freedom beckons!” (Mail), “Happy Monday!” (Sun) “First steps to freedom from Monday” (Express). Yet even his press is conflicted, well aware of their older readers: “UK is the sickest man in Europe” warns the Mail.
His own champions, the Telegraph and Spectator, have been rumbling into a crescendo of hostility over the lockdown, while old Brexiter ultras such as Steve Baker turn their libertarian rebellion against Covid-19 restrictions.
Johnson is tugged both ways: all his native instincts are against state inference, which is why he was still hand-shaking and making light of danger on the very day scientific advice told people not to, yet he can’t afford to see the infection graph shoot up again, when freedom depends on it falling. Expect more mixed messages to come, starting with last night’s TV public health announcement saying “Keep going. Stay at home”, a minute before the 10 o’clock news conveyed the No 10 nudge that Johnson would relax the rules a bit.
Last week, Trumpishly, he boasted of others envying “our apparent success”, now he faces the humiliation of the rest of the world aghast at how we ignored infection on its way from Italy and Spain. “Where did Britain go wrong?”, Sydney Morning Herald; “Incomprehensible”, El Pais; “A curious mixture of superiority and fatalism”, New Yorker. After Brexit it’s surprising they are still surprised by Britain’s vainglorious, self-harming exceptionalism. It seems to be what we do, for now.
Impatience from his own side leaks into their language. This week a senior government source complained of workers’ “addiction” to state subsidy, and of how they supposedly needed “weaning” off it. That is miserably contemptuous of the victims of this crisis, the nearly 2 million already tipped onto the unkindness of universal credit, millions more on just 80% of often puny wages, many destined for the dole.
Their future is not good: Tory governments have no record for treating the unemployed well. Don’t forget the deepseated view of the Britannia Unchained gang (Priti Patel, Dominic Raab, Liz Truss et al) that the “British are the worst idlers in the world,” in a country of “bloated state, high taxes and excessive regulation”.
What’s needed is a gentle easing back to work, better benefits, and for unemployed a return to a proven employment programme such as the Future Jobs Fund. But the mood music already starts to sound punitive.
If on Sunday easing lockdown begins, what’s “freedom” for some may be enforced hazard for others. Frances O’Grady of the TUC rightly sounded the alarm over safety conditions. Andy McDonald, Labour’s shadow secretary for employment rights, formerly a personal injuries lawyer, called for the government to require “specific Covid-19 risk assessments for most businesses [and] that assessments are made public and registered with the Health and Safety Executive”.
The HSE has already had 4,500 Covid-19-related concerns raised, which it is slowly working through. After a decade of austerity and “‘elf and safety gone mad” rightwing assaults, the HSE’s budget has been cut by a third. In order to carry out any inspections they’ll need resources, and fast.
Whistleblowers will hardly be encouraged by MP Nadia Whittome’s complaint yesterday that she has been told she will get no more shifts in a care home where she worked part-time, after talking to the media about lack of protective equipment.
Today would have been election day, had the fixed-term parliament of 2015 run its course. What if David Cameron had not gambled everything on a catastrophic referendum? But he was educated into the same excess of self-esteem as Boris Johnson, endowed with that breezy presumption that they would always be winners. And yes indeed, Johnson glories in poll ratings of 50%, Labour at 30% – with a four-year political eternity until electoral judgment day. But on that day, how he navigated the fallout from both the virus and Brexit will define him.
The question now is whether he can ease the country gradually and safely out of this any better than he got us into it. His speech on Sunday will show if he listens to the precautionary principles of epidemiologists or the call of the wild from his own anti-state libertarians. Having his Covid-19 cake and eating it will prove more difficult every day.
•Polly Toynbee is a Guardian columnist
