This week marks the second anniversary of Boris Johnson’s premiership. It has been a painful two years for the country. Much of that has been down to a pandemic that has claimed the lives of more than 4 million people worldwide. But Johnson’s incompetence, his lack of integrity and the leadership vacuum at the heart of his government have all resulted in the UK suffering more than necessary.
Johnson’s rank unfitness for office is evident in his lack of a domestic policy agenda: his “levelling up” speech last week was devoid of substance on how his government might seek to reverse the impact of a decade of spending cuts on the least affluent parts of the country, together with the unequal impact Brexit is forecast to have in the coming years. It is evident in the way Brexit has played out so far: the ideological drive for a hard Brexit with no consideration of the consequences for the stability of Northern Ireland or the damage done by threatening close allies with breaking international law. It is evident in the way the government tries to stoke divisive culture wars over whether footballers should take a stand against racism in order to distract from its own incompetence. But most of all, it is evident in the higher-than-necessary death toll that has resulted from Johnson time and again acting too slowly to control the pandemic and taking unjustified risks in relaxing social restrictions too quickly. Tens of thousands of people are grieving the loss of relatives and friends as a result.
Tomorrow’s relaxation of almost all remaining social restrictions aimed at controlling the outbreak – from the opening of nightclubs to compulsory requirements to wear masks in indoor public spaces – is one of the most important moments yet in this pandemic. But it is happening as infection rates are rising, many international scientists are warning that the UK government is effectively embarking on a dangerous experiment and amid some of the most confusing and chaotic public health messaging of the entire pandemic.
The argument in favour of removing the remaining social restrictions is that the population has sufficient levels of immunity through vaccination and that to wait until more people are fully vaccinated could risk a third wave hitting the NHS during the winter when it is even more stretched. But the government’s previous efforts last March to let the virus spread while there was less pressure on the NHS went horribly wrong. It is true that more than half the population have the protection of a vaccine, but modelling by the government’s scientific advisers still predicts between 80,000 and 160,000 hospital admissions due to Covid by the end of the year and between 9,000 and 18,000 more deaths, assuming the protection from vaccines does not wane. The chief medical officer, Chris Whitty, has warned that with the number of hospital admissions doubling every three weeks, the UK could find itself reimposing social restrictions in a matter of weeks. Countries that have relaxed restrictions, such as the Netherlands and Israel, have ended up reimposing them.
Moreover, the chaotic messaging around 19 July makes it difficult for the public to know what they should be doing to keep themselves and others safe. At first, the lifting of the requirement to wear a mask was touted by ministers as a symbol of “freedom day”; now, we are being fed the conflicting message that we should wear them even though they are not compulsory. The emphasis on personal responsibility when so much of pandemic control is about collective action to protect each other makes little sense. There is no consistency in the government’s approach, which appears to be driven by politics and symbolism rather than the scientific evidence: why drop the requirement to wear masks, a very low-cost intervention, while still requiring those who are double-vaccinated and who have had a negative PCR test to self-isolate for 10 days if they have been in contact with a positive case? Why allow nightclubs to reopen while insisting those who are fully vaccinated returning from a country with lower infection rates than the UK quarantine for 10 days? If there is logic or evidence behind these decisions, the government has not shared it, which risks undermining public appetite to comply. The strategy is being overseen by a new and inexperienced health secretary, Sajid Javid, who has himself just tested positive for Covid.
The government’s decision to open up even further was clearly driven by a belief this would be better for the economy. Yet accelerating infection rates – one in 95 were infected with Covid last week, the highest infection rate since mid-January – mean that while we may all be able to do more in theory, the reality is that essential services such as the NHS, the police, food supply chains and schools are being hampered by the vast numbers of people being asked to self-isolate by track and trace. Hospitality businesses are also having to close at short notice because of staff shortages. Would it not be better to live with more restrictions, but a greater level of collective certainty about what we can and cannot do? The risk is that the cost of any future social restrictions that will need to be introduced as a result of letting the virus spread unchecked now will dwarf the cost of the extra government support that would have been needed to support hospitality businesses through continuing restrictions over the summer.
There remains no risk-free strategy for coping with Covid. Yet the government’s decision to proceed with its self-styled freedom day despite the surging infection rates driven by a more infectious and vaccine-resistant variant is looking more ill-judged every day. One of the most important lessons of this pandemic has been that the precautionary principle is essential in controlling a virus that spreads exponentially: the costs of inaction can be far, far greater than the costs of action. It is a lesson that Boris Johnson has repeatedly ignored and too many people have paid the price with their lives.
