Mr Ripple
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From the Guardian
Boris Johnson wants Britain to go to the pub – and forget about the 65,700 dead
Editor’s note: The opinions in this article are the author’s, as published by our content partner, and do not represent the views of MSN or Microsoft.
The Luftwaffe did not chalk up such a gruesome death toll. During the blitz, 43,000 civilians died, an average of 175 each day, a national trauma that is seared in Britain’s collective memory. In the past 100 days, the number of reported excess deaths linked to Covid-19 – which England’s chief medical officer, Chris Whitty, declares “the key metric” – has reached 65,700, a daily mortality rate far deadlier than the Nazi onslaught on British towns and cities between September 1940 and May 1941.
Inevitable is a word that can be used to describe the tragic fact that families were always going to “lose loved ones before their time”, as the prime minister put it 11 days before he belatedly ordered a national lockdown. It is not a word that can be used to describe one in every 1,000 members of the British public being killed by the virus in a three-month period, or what was at one point the second-worst death rate on earth. Scandalous? Yes. Criminal? Certainly. But inevitable? No.
If Boris Johnson has a trump card, a USP in politics, it is can-do, sunny optimism, an ability to dismiss and marginalise his critics as “doomsters” and “gloomsters”. It is our “patriotic duty” to visit the nation’s reopened pubs in a week and a half, he chirrups; “our long national hibernation” is coming to an end. His media outriders, too, hope that a cacophony of clinking beer glasses and flapping union jacks will drown out the dissenters. “SUMMER’S BACK ON!” bellows the Daily Mail as Britain’s national shutters come up. The Daily Express lauds the Dear Leader: “CHEERS BORIS! HERE’S TO A BRIGHTER BRITAIN.” “Our plan is working,” triumphantly declares the health secretary, Matt Hancock, as another 171 deaths are announced. With grinning declarations of victory, our rulers hope, we will all cheerfully shuffle into socially distanced pubs, sink our first freshly poured pints in over a hundred days, and let tens of thousands of fellow citizens who died needless deaths rest in peace.
If Johnson and his allies gets away with this national calamity, then the questions hovering over our democracy are troubling and grave. What does a government have to do to suffer adverse political consequences, if not violating its “first duty”, as Johnson once put it, “to protect the public in the most basic way” on an unprecedented scale in modern times? The reasons for this are tragically simple. Britain was an international outlier in its approach to the pandemic, and now stands in the top three (after Brazil and the US) for its death toll. If lockdown had been introduced even a week earlier, declared Prof Neil Ferguson, our pre-eminent epidemiologist, our death toll could have been halved. The delay was undoubtedly an “economy first” approach: how utterly self-destructive on its own terms, then, as allowing a graver pandemic inevitably led to a more protracted lockdown, leaving Britain possibly facing the worst economic hit of any developed nation.
Patients were released from hospitals into care homes without being tested for coronavirus, allowing the most vulnerable population in Britain to be seeded with a deadly pandemic. The consequences? Around 13% of care home residents have died from this illness in around three and a half months: that statistic alone should haunt every government minister. The severity of our three combined national emergencies – public health, economic and social – was entirely self-inflicted by our own government.
The British public are neither stupid nor oblivious to the catastrophe: their rating of the government’s handling of the crisis is among the worst on earth. World-beating, indeed. But the scale of the criticisms does not match the scale of the disaster. While some journalists have fearlessly challenged the government’s failures – including at Newsnight and, two words I never imagined I would type, ITV’s Piers Morgan – the Pravda-like qualities of much of the rightwing press has undoubtedly helped insulate Johnson’s administration.
There is another failing too. Several broadcast journalists express their fear that their industry has failed the public badly in the pandemic. “The media has badly messed up holding the government to account,” one broadcast journalist tells me, “because the priority has been to amplify ‘stay home and protect the NHS’ rather than scrutinising official failings.” It should have been science journalists challenging the government at the now abandoned daily press conferences – which became shams long ago – rather than political reporters. Politics is too often treated as a soap opera, a Westminster drama of who is up and who is down, and this crisis has been no exception.
The focus on the “pre-existing health conditions” of many who have died is another factor, too: many have interpreted this as meaning at “death’s door”, as the sad passing of those on the brink of dying anyway, unaware that millions of their fellow citizens qualify for this description. In the US, for example, it’s estimated that up to half the non-elderly population have pre-existing health conditions. According to a study in April, those dying from coronavirus are losing an average of 13 years of their lives. Coronavirus did not gently push the already flailing into their graves; it ruthlessly killed those who still had long to live.
Perhaps the government believes a summer of sunshine and beer will make us all forget: that a nation released from house arrest will embrace relief at a new present over a reckoning with the past. Johnson’s trademark combination of bluster and cheer will certainly aim to nurture this collective amnesia. But we should know this: if a government can get away with the avoidable deaths of tens of thousands of its own citizens, it can get away with anything and everything.
• Owen Jones is a Guardian columnist
Boris Johnson wants Britain to go to the pub – and forget about the 65,700 dead
Editor’s note: The opinions in this article are the author’s, as published by our content partner, and do not represent the views of MSN or Microsoft.
The Luftwaffe did not chalk up such a gruesome death toll. During the blitz, 43,000 civilians died, an average of 175 each day, a national trauma that is seared in Britain’s collective memory. In the past 100 days, the number of reported excess deaths linked to Covid-19 – which England’s chief medical officer, Chris Whitty, declares “the key metric” – has reached 65,700, a daily mortality rate far deadlier than the Nazi onslaught on British towns and cities between September 1940 and May 1941.
Inevitable is a word that can be used to describe the tragic fact that families were always going to “lose loved ones before their time”, as the prime minister put it 11 days before he belatedly ordered a national lockdown. It is not a word that can be used to describe one in every 1,000 members of the British public being killed by the virus in a three-month period, or what was at one point the second-worst death rate on earth. Scandalous? Yes. Criminal? Certainly. But inevitable? No.
If Boris Johnson has a trump card, a USP in politics, it is can-do, sunny optimism, an ability to dismiss and marginalise his critics as “doomsters” and “gloomsters”. It is our “patriotic duty” to visit the nation’s reopened pubs in a week and a half, he chirrups; “our long national hibernation” is coming to an end. His media outriders, too, hope that a cacophony of clinking beer glasses and flapping union jacks will drown out the dissenters. “SUMMER’S BACK ON!” bellows the Daily Mail as Britain’s national shutters come up. The Daily Express lauds the Dear Leader: “CHEERS BORIS! HERE’S TO A BRIGHTER BRITAIN.” “Our plan is working,” triumphantly declares the health secretary, Matt Hancock, as another 171 deaths are announced. With grinning declarations of victory, our rulers hope, we will all cheerfully shuffle into socially distanced pubs, sink our first freshly poured pints in over a hundred days, and let tens of thousands of fellow citizens who died needless deaths rest in peace.
If Johnson and his allies gets away with this national calamity, then the questions hovering over our democracy are troubling and grave. What does a government have to do to suffer adverse political consequences, if not violating its “first duty”, as Johnson once put it, “to protect the public in the most basic way” on an unprecedented scale in modern times? The reasons for this are tragically simple. Britain was an international outlier in its approach to the pandemic, and now stands in the top three (after Brazil and the US) for its death toll. If lockdown had been introduced even a week earlier, declared Prof Neil Ferguson, our pre-eminent epidemiologist, our death toll could have been halved. The delay was undoubtedly an “economy first” approach: how utterly self-destructive on its own terms, then, as allowing a graver pandemic inevitably led to a more protracted lockdown, leaving Britain possibly facing the worst economic hit of any developed nation.
Patients were released from hospitals into care homes without being tested for coronavirus, allowing the most vulnerable population in Britain to be seeded with a deadly pandemic. The consequences? Around 13% of care home residents have died from this illness in around three and a half months: that statistic alone should haunt every government minister. The severity of our three combined national emergencies – public health, economic and social – was entirely self-inflicted by our own government.
The British public are neither stupid nor oblivious to the catastrophe: their rating of the government’s handling of the crisis is among the worst on earth. World-beating, indeed. But the scale of the criticisms does not match the scale of the disaster. While some journalists have fearlessly challenged the government’s failures – including at Newsnight and, two words I never imagined I would type, ITV’s Piers Morgan – the Pravda-like qualities of much of the rightwing press has undoubtedly helped insulate Johnson’s administration.
There is another failing too. Several broadcast journalists express their fear that their industry has failed the public badly in the pandemic. “The media has badly messed up holding the government to account,” one broadcast journalist tells me, “because the priority has been to amplify ‘stay home and protect the NHS’ rather than scrutinising official failings.” It should have been science journalists challenging the government at the now abandoned daily press conferences – which became shams long ago – rather than political reporters. Politics is too often treated as a soap opera, a Westminster drama of who is up and who is down, and this crisis has been no exception.
The focus on the “pre-existing health conditions” of many who have died is another factor, too: many have interpreted this as meaning at “death’s door”, as the sad passing of those on the brink of dying anyway, unaware that millions of their fellow citizens qualify for this description. In the US, for example, it’s estimated that up to half the non-elderly population have pre-existing health conditions. According to a study in April, those dying from coronavirus are losing an average of 13 years of their lives. Coronavirus did not gently push the already flailing into their graves; it ruthlessly killed those who still had long to live.
Perhaps the government believes a summer of sunshine and beer will make us all forget: that a nation released from house arrest will embrace relief at a new present over a reckoning with the past. Johnson’s trademark combination of bluster and cheer will certainly aim to nurture this collective amnesia. But we should know this: if a government can get away with the avoidable deaths of tens of thousands of its own citizens, it can get away with anything and everything.
• Owen Jones is a Guardian columnist
