by On Tuesday, the BBC reported about £1.5 billion worth of unused personal protective equipment (PPE). It was, we were told in scandalous tones, rotting away in warehouses.
Opposition parties were invited to give their views. Labor initially called the surplus “massive waste”. The Lib Dems agreed, promising that “steps would be taken to ensure that such a massive misuse of public funds does not happen again”.
But hang on. Didn’t the BBC, along with the opposition parties, spend the day crying about the need for more PPE? Didn’t he tell us that NHS staff were being treated as “gun fodder”? Didn’t he end every report with a quote from some public sector union saying ministers weren’t doing enough? Wasn’t it running headlines like “Covid PPE: How ‘disposable’ healthcare workers felt”?
Have we forgotten the demented atmosphere of those days? Pretending that every failure of our supply wallahs, be it PPE, ventilators or testing, was Boris Johnson’s fault? The scramble for a device, which reporters saw sent to follow one consignment from Turkey?
I think we have. And I think our amnesia, not only about PPE, but about the green in general, helps to explain what is going to happen on Thursday.
We don’t want to think about those phantasmagoric months. We do not want to remember the great issues, the illnesses and the excesses that we suffered. And we certainly don’t want to admit that a policy we called for could be at the heart of Britain’s problems.
It takes effort, four years later, to think about what we went through. The taped playgrounds. The police minus. The bankruptcies. The school children who never got the chance to play their solo, be the captain of their team or say goodbye. The pensioners who suffer in solitary confinement. The increased national debt. The mental health problems brooding in silence. The spinning. The furlough scams. Print the money. The weddings are cancelled. The missed cancer screenings. The police drones in search of hikers.
God, it was terrible. But the worst thing was the popularity of these restrictions. Ninety-three percent of people supported the first green, 85 percent the second, and a large majority opposed the lifting of restrictions in 2021.
Already those numbers feel ridiculous, don’t they? Many people have edited their memories, and now complain about restrictions that, at the time, wanted to be stricter. Psychologists call it “hindsight bias”.
Having opposed the lockdown from day one, I cannot forget the abuse of the small number of skeptics. It is easier to forget those who did the hurling, naturally.
So Labor can now complain that they bought too much of it.
The Lib Dems, who tore into the Tories for their “failure to ensure adequate supplies of protective equipment reach frontline workers”, now oppose them for over-ordering.
They get away with it because the country as a whole has done the same thing. It is as if we woke up with a terrible hangover, not knowing that we had done something stupid the night before, but unwilling to think about it.
When Rishi Sunak was challenged about NHS waiting lists during the first leaders’ debate, he replied that Britain was through a pandemic, but that Conservative-run England had shorter waiting times than Wales. was run by Labour. The audience groaned. If you don’t want to be reminded of the lock, any mention of it by a politician is a joke.
But the lock cannot be asked away. He squats like a poisonous toad in the middle of every policy discussion. We edge carefully around it. We affect without seeing it. But it is covered with wart and malignant, regarding us with cold, protuberant eyes.
Take any question you want. Education? The number of children who are “persistently absent” from school has increased since before the lockdown.
The economy? Growth is still slow because people have not returned to work. It makes life tougher in many small ways. Airport carousel travel cases are slow because there are fewer baggage handlers. Trains run fewer stops because there are fewer railroad men. A secondary market has developed in dates for driving tests.
Figures from the ONS suggest that while the private sector has more or less regained its pre-lockdown productivity levels, the public sector is years behind. It turns out that government staff who insist on working from home have been so effective. Who would have thunk it?
Education and public services go with everything else.
Tax? We dropped the better part of half a trillion pounds on the lockdown.
The NHS? The lockout was the reason for the waiting lists.
Human rights? No worse violation was committed than keeping the population under house arrest; but our activist human rights lawyers recommended it.
The cost of living? To pay for the lockdown, we printed money like Robert Mugabe at speed. A surge in sickness benefit claims? When people got used to… oh, you get the picture.
We speak as if our troubles were brought upon us by a single malicious minister. But one of the reasons why taxes have gone up with no commensurate improvement in public services is that we paid people to stay at home for the best part of two years, we borrowed money to do it, and we don’t want to return to work yet.
Tolstoy wrote that “everyone thinks of changing mankind, and no one thinks of changing himself”. He was right. Ask people if they want change, and every hand in the room will go up. Ask them which they want to change and the hands jump back down. That’s what’s so clever about the slogan “Britain needs reform”.
Those months of being paid to stay at home changed the relationship between the state and the citizen. We have become more demanding, less willing to admit trade-offs, easier to blame any disturbance on the government’s supposed mindset.
One politician who recognizes the cost of the lockdown is Nigel Farage, who told a crowd in Sunderland on Thursday that the second and third lockdowns were the worst peacetime mistakes the British government had made.
It is a credit to him to say that. But what about the first lockdown, which was tougher and more damaging from an economic point of view? Why is Farage not included? Does he generously allow that decisions made during those heated weeks might look different in retrospect?
Or is it that he wanted the first lock himself? Our recollection of the entire episode means that we rarely recall Farage calling the original strategy of controlled spread “immoral” and demanding that Tony Blair lead a vaccine task force. We forget the sight of him, in a plum jumper and mustard cords, banging his pan for the NHS.
I don’t blame him. Most of the country followed the same trajectory, first calling for a crackdown and then complaining about its effects. Farage came around much quicker than most and was indeed a critic of the greens later on. But governments, unlike commentators, are not allowed such inconsistencies.
The paradox of the current election is that both Johnson and Sunak were more skeptical of the shutdown than most of those who now blame them. Recall that Keir Starmer was against the loosening of the restrictions, and even wanted to re-impose them at the end of 2021.
Except no one remembers it. Our anger, whether directly at the shutdown or, more commonly, indirectly at its costs, is directed at the politicians who resisted pressure to go even further. Funny old world.
