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- Herausgeber: Biteback Publishing
- Kategorie: Geisteswissenschaft
- Sprache: Englisch
Swamped beneath the tide of fake news, wars on woke and social media storms lies democracy. Jo Phillips and David Seymour guide the reader through the workings of government and Parliament and make a passionate case for the power of democracy. Their argument is that young people should take back control of the future, hold politicians to account and get involved. In the last decade we've had a Brexit referendum, the Covid pandemic, war in Ukraine and Gaza, increasing fears over the climate emergency, a new monarch and since 2010, six Prime Ministers. Britain's influence in the world has been diminished, freedom to protest peacefully has been curtailed, the cost of further education is a concern, the health service is in crisis and the likelihood of owning your own home or even finding somewhere to rent is becoming less and less. If younger people turned out to vote in the same numbers that older people do, this country would be a very different place. Apathy is the enemy, not the answer.
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Contents
Foreword
Since we wrote Why Vote? ahead of the 2010 election, we’ve had a referendum that led to Brexit, the Covid-19 pandemic, war in Ukraine and the Middle East, increasing fear over climate emergency as the planet got dangerously hotter, a new monarch and six Prime Ministers. Yes, six. It’s as if the world has gone mad – and particularly this country.
But can you do anything about it? This book sets out to show you can. It is for people who are ambivalent about voting, who feel like they don’t know enough to make a decision, who simply can’t be bothered or are maybe voting for the first time, for people who think all politicians are the same and that voting makes no difference. We hope to persuade you otherwise.
Everyone under the age of thirty-two will know nothing but Conservative governments, except when they were a child. The Conservatives have been in power since 2010, although they formed a coalition government with the Liberal Democrats for the first five years. But, whatever your age, you viiiwill have had your life, studies, relationships and maybe even your health upended by Covid. Since Brexit, when the UK left the European Union, you no longer have the same freedom to work, study and travel in other European countries. Freedom to protest peacefully has been curtailed, the cost of further education has deterred some people from going to university and burdened those who do go with a huge debt, while the chances of owning your own home or even finding somewhere to rent are getting slimmer.
Yet if young people turned out to vote in the same numbers that older ones do, Britain might not be suffering as it is and the future, if not completely rosy, might not look so gloomy.
In fairness, not everything that has happened was caused by government or politicians. The war in Ukraine was started by President Putin’s invasion, so it is his responsibility alone. The Covid-19 pandemic, which killed almost seven million people worldwide and nearly a quarter of a million in the UK, wasn’t caused by politicians – although as you will see in the chapter on Covid, the government could have prevented many of those deaths if it had acted faster and made different decisions. But, some of what has happened is entirely down to politicians who should forever be shamed in a rogues’ gallery for destroying the United Kingdom’s international reputation. The gap between rich and poor has increased, there are record numbers of people waiting for medical treatment, tens of thousands of families are living in poor housing, raw sewage is being pumped into our seas and rivers and almost ixeveryone except the super wealthy is worried about the cost of living and the future.
The United Kingdom, home of the Mother of Parliaments and admired throughout most of the world for its political stability, seemed to take leave of its senses by calling a national referendum on whether we should remain in the European Union. The result, Brexit, led to a chaotic situation in which the country found itself with six Prime Ministers in seven years. The last two, Liz Truss and Rishi Sunak, were not elected in a general election, but by less than 0.12 per cent of the electorate – by members of the Conservative Party in Truss’s case and Tory MPs in Sunak’s, which means that more than 99.88 per cent of us are governed by people we never had the chance to vote on. Not terribly democratic, is it?
And if you think that democratic choice means the people’s will decides the outcome, think again. Older people are far more likely to vote than the under-thirties, which means that older generations are determining the future of this country: your future is being abandoned into their hands. Turnout at the 2019 general election was around 63 per cent, so more than one in three failed to vote, and of those who did, the biggest age group voting is consistently the over sixty-fives.
If younger people don’t vote, then apathy, or despair, have won hands down. Yet people aren’t apathetic. They care deeply about climate change, the state of the health service, lack of affordable housing, the cost of living, immigration, education and transport. It is understandable that people feel powerless, particularly after the last few bruising years, and xthe future is scary. That’s why we all need to shape a tomorrow that is better, healthier, fairer and safer. We cannot afford to turn our backs on democracy because the decisions made by governments have far-reaching implications for all of us and for future generations.
Governments make decisions that affect our lives, from where children go to school and how much we pay in taxes, to what hours we work and how much we get paid. They control where and how fast we drive, what and when we can drink in a bar and where new homes can be built. They also decide where and when our armed forces will be sent to war, how the elderly are cared for and whether we can vote at all, as well as countless other issues that shape our present and our future.
People who don’t use their vote help to elect governments that don’t have the overwhelming support of voters, which is a bit like a football team winning the Premier League with a clutch of offside goals and a few extra players that nobody complained about because they simply couldn’t be bothered. Our current system also allows the Prime Minister to call an election when he or she decides, which, to continue the football theme, is like letting one team blow the final whistle when they are winning. No self-respecting football fan would let that happen, so why let it happen to our country?
So there is a lot at stake and you might want to have a say by using your vote: in fact, you really, really ought to use your vote, even though the government has introduced rules to ximake it harder for you: like having to produce specific photo ID before you can do so. Surely that should make you even more determined to exercise the democratic right which past generations fought so hard to win.xii
Chapter 1
A Nation Divided
There is an old saying that you should never discuss religion, politics or sex in polite company, but in the open society that blossomed in the 1960s, nothing was taboo. Healthy debate was considered to be just that: healthy. You might have a heated row but the combatants usually parted on good terms.
Tragically, that changed with Brexit. Britain suddenly became a country divided. Friends, neighbours, even family, found they couldn’t discuss certain topics unless they didn’t mind becoming involved in a furious row.
It wasn’t just on social media that people discovered that what they thought was a simple statement of fact or an opinion would be met with fury, vilification and contempt. Just going to the pub or inviting people round for dinner could become a no-go area, where every step had to be taken gingerly for fear of poking an angry, snarling bear.
And it wasn’t only Brexit. The growth of conspiracy theories about climate change and even Covid-19 – yes, there are 2people who insist it doesn’t exist (apparently, those 7 million dead died of natural causes) – can divide long-time friends and ruin family gatherings. This great divide is most obvious in the United States, where some of Donald Trump’s more rabid followers are filled with hatred for those who don’t hold him in the same regard that they do.
This never used to be the British way of doing things. Discussions, debates and even arguments were conducted in a civilised manner. There might have been no chance of persuading your adversary that you were right, but that didn’t mean your disagreement would turn nasty. You parted as friends, often with respect for the other person’s opinions, even if you didn’t agree with them, but now the mere mention of any of the taboo topics will launch a furious response.
The obvious way to deal with this problem is to know the facts. After all, facts are facts are facts. At least they used to be. Nowadays, though, facts aren’t facts for some people. There only needs to be one scientist who doesn’t believe in climate change when thousands do, or one economist who thinks Brexit was a good idea which is working when there are thousands who disagree, and that is all the ‘proof’ they need to confirm their opinions. You will be told: ‘Scientists [plural] say there is no such thing as climate change.’ So name them, you ask, and the same name will always come up: the same solitary name and no others. The same phenomenon happens with Brexit and the one economist who provides all the ‘evidence’ that is needed to confirm how brilliantly it is doing.
3The consequence is that either you decide it isn’t worth trying to persuade the person you are talking to that they are spouting nonsense and so you give up, leaving your adversary with a smug look on their face because they have ‘won’ and are convinced that their views are correct, or you carry on in an argument that gets more and more heated and more and more unpleasant. This is how the bad guys win.
It is mainly a problem with people who have right-wing views, yet they don’t have the monopoly on being massively wrong. Some on the left are convinced that Covid-19 doesn’t exist and so believe they don’t need to be vaccinated against it, just like the Trumpian fanatics in the States.
In the past, people said they knew something because ‘I saw it in the papers’. Now there is an even greater problem because so many newspapers have flipped into eccentricity and extreme views, compounded many times over by being magnified on the internet and certain TV channels – Fox News in the USA and GB News in Britain.
Too often a social gathering becomes a cesspit of angry, spit-flecked rants with finger-jabbing and table-thumping. The chance of them listening to what you say, let alone changing their mind, is remote, but if you don’t stand up for what you believe in, you are letting your opponents win by default. Stay calm, put your points across forcefully and give them the real facts. Maybe they won’t believe them, but do it anyway. At least you won’t have let the dangerous people who threaten our country, and our democracy, go unchallenged.4
Chapter 2
And the Result Is… We’re Out
The first results of the Brexit referendum were announced in the early hours of 24 June 2016 and it soon became clear that the nation had voted to leave the European Union. At least, 52 per cent had. The result was not just a shock to Prime Minister David Cameron, Remain campaigners and business, but also to Boris Johnson and Nigel Farage, who had led the Leave campaign without expecting to win. They were stunned when they learned the result. In fact, Farage had gone on television after the polls closed to concede defeat, while Johnson, who was watching the results on TV at his home in north London wearing a Brazil football shirt and shorts, is reported to have said: ‘ What the hell is happening? … Holy crap, what will we do?’
Cameron immediately resigned as Prime Minister, creating an even bigger problem, as now there was not just no plan, but nobody in charge to work one out. The resulting chaos led to even more chaos, which in turn led to still more chaos. There were a number of knock-on effects which no 6one had foreseen. These included a succession of Tory leaders and Prime Ministers being picked not by voters, but by a tiny number of party members, mainly white and old and living in the south of England. The Conservative Party, which took pride in presenting a united front to voters while Labour regularly tore itself apart, launched into a vicious civil war.
A growing number of Tory MPs gathered under the banner of an organisation called the European Research Group. In reality, they didn’t research anything but were a band of dedicated enemies of anything European. There were enough of them to be able to defeat any proposal the government – their government – put forward to reach a deal with the EU. It appeared that the only thing that would satisfy them was a complete break with Europe. Even though most of our trade was with EU countries (because Europe was just 20 miles away across the Channel, unlike, say, America, which is 3,000 miles distant, or Australia, which is more than 9,000 miles away). One MP even announced that he had just discovered, to his surprise, that Britain was particularly reliant on the Dover–Calais crossing for trade. His name was Dominic Raab and he was then the Brexit Secretary before becoming Foreign Secretary.
We will go into more detail about what happened to domestic politics later, but let’s concentrate for a moment on what was going on with our relationship with the EU. One of the Brexit campaign’s key arguments during the referendum was that, if we left, nothing would change for the worse. We would be free of what they called the shackles of Europe 7while enjoying our new-found freedom. That was like someone getting a divorce saying that while it was great being able to go out and have fun like they did before having a partner and children, they would keep their spouse’s income, go on living in the family home and driving the family car and see their children whenever they wanted without the problems of taking them to school, looking after them when they were sick and all the other joys of parenthood. Life just ain’t like that.
It soon became clear that many of the advantages we had taken for granted when we were in the European Union weren’t there anymore. These meant that UK citizens now had to join long, slow queues for passport checks when they arrived in other European countries, whereas before they could just walk in while waving jauntily at customs officers, and businesses now had to fill in huge, lengthy forms when they exported goods to EU countries. The ‘bonfire of red tape’ that had been promised if Britain left the EU became, in reality, the strangulation of many British businesses by endless kilometres of new red tape.
The Brexiteers knew who was to blame. It was the EU of course! As if they had insisted that we should vote to leave and impose the hardest possible deal on ourselves. Most of the fishing industry had voted to leave because they thought that other countries were catching ‘our’ fish. They now discovered that we could catch the fish but that the fish in ‘our’ waters needed to be sold in the EU because Brits didn’t want it, so that became a huge problem.
8The farming industry had also supported the Leave campaign because they thought they’d had to do too much paperwork as members of the EU, even though farmers had received generous payments from the European Union’s common agricultural policy, so you might think that filling in a few forms once a year wasn’t asking too much. As soon as we’d left the EU, farmers discovered that our government had no intention of paying them as much and that there were even more forms to fill in, as well as environmental hoops to jump through.
The ending of freedom of movement, which had allowed people from every EU country to travel to and work in other EU countries, had been a key reason why many voted Leave. They thought these incomers were taking their jobs and only coming to Britain to get welfare benefits, not seeming to realise that both could not be true. In fact, neither of those assumptions were – the UK had agreed with the EU that benefits would not be paid to those without a job until people had been here for a couple of years. Above all, it soon became clear that Britain needed workers from other countries for particular jobs. Thousands used to come here to pick crops every year, but now much of the country’s harvests rotted in the fields. Thousands of doctors and nurses from European countries had worked in the NHS, which now saw a growing shortage of key medical personnel as the unwanted waved these shores goodbye.
Restaurants, cafes, hotels and even pubs also struggled to find staff to fill the vacancies that had been taken by young 9Europeans who often came to Britain for a few years to work and improve their English. Scientists and academics went home too, even those who had been here for years.
But enough of the depressing downside of leaving the European Union. What about the great advantages that the UK got out of Brexit? It soon became common for government ministers, MPs and other Brexiteers to be asked to name one thing that leaving the EU had given us. This was always followed by a long and embarrassing silence. What they eventually came up with was the successful vaccine programme which saw Britons being the first people to be inoculated against Covid-19 and which Brexiteers claimed could not have been done if we had still been in the European Union. This is a good point: except it isn’t true. Any EU member state was free to pursue their own vaccine development, as well as participating in the EU-wide programme. In fact, although the UK was the first to start vaccinating, other countries began their vaccination programme only a few days later.
So, were there any other benefits to Brexit? Well, there were the seventy-two trade deals signed with non-European countries. Except that all of these deals had simply rolled over from deals the EU had, so we had enjoyed them before Brexit. Then there were the trade agreements we concluded with Australia and New Zealand in 2022, although over the next fifteen years these will only be worth a tiny amount compared with the value of trade with the EU we have lost and, in any case, they could do serious damage to our farming industry. Even former pro-Brexit Environment Secretary 10and Farming Minister George Eustice described it as ‘not actually a very good deal’ and that giving Australia and New Zealand full access to the UK market to sell beef and sheep was one of the worst concessions, and potentially disastrous for UK farming.
Chapter 3
Ask a Silly Question…
One question regularly posed in opinion polls is: what are the most important issues facing voters, their families and the country? Top of the list, or near the top, are usually what you would expect: the cost-of-living, the NHS and housing. The order changes from time to time and sometimes a different issue pops up, yet there was a consistency about what issue was regularly bottom, or very close to the bottom, of the list of concerns: Europe. It bumped along at between 3 and 5 per cent of voters, except when there was a controversy over a particular issue such as the Maastricht treaty or a European election.
But, for that 3 per cent of the population, Europe was THE big issue: an obsession. For some, it was because they passionately believed in European countries working together after the wartime horrors of the first half of the twentieth century. For the others who fell into that tiny minority, Europe was despised and the UK’s involvement in the EU was seen as the ultimate betrayal of the British people. We had won 12the war, after all, and we were better than every other country, as one Tory minister, Gavin Williamson, claimed during a radio interview. Patriotism and belief in your country are good, but not to the extent of blinding you to what is really happening in the twenty-first century.
In the forty years after the referendum of 1975, which confirmed that Britain should be part of what was then the European Economic Community, two significant things have happened. One was that the newspapers, which had near unanimously been in favour of us being members of the EU, almost all turned against it, printing endless distortions and untruths. The other was the founding of the United Kingdom Independence Party (UKIP), while the Conservative Party, as well as including a growing number of MPs who were anti-Europe, had become overrun by members who were blindly opposed to anything to do with Europe. The average age of a member of the Conservative Party is fifty-seven.
This had consequences. For instance, in the Conservative leadership election of 2001, the highly experienced and qualified Ken Clarke, a pro-European, was beaten by Iain Duncan Smith, who spouted a lot of anti-EU nonsense and whose leadership didn’t last two years before he was replaced by the then pro-European Michael Howard, who subsequently supported the Leave Means Leave group during the 2016 referendum.
Most politicians understood that the UK received significant benefits from its membership of the EU, the world’s largest trading bloc with 550 million citizens, but they hesitated 13to show too much enthusiasm: and that wasn’t only Tory politicians. When Tony Blair was Labour Prime Minister, it was said that he made strong speeches in favour of Europe – but only when he was over there. His speeches on home soil were always rather critical so as not to upset The Sun and the Daily Mail.
It was more problematic for the Tories, who feared that a growing number of their voters were drifting off to UKIP, which is why their leader, David Cameron, hit on the wizard wheeze of promising to hold a referendum on the UK’s continued membership of the EU if he won the next election. Not that he thought he was risking much, as he didn’t expect to get an outright majority.
But he did, and instead of doing the politician’s usual thing of weaseling his way out of calling a referendum, he kept his promise, convinced that he was invincible and would win again. He even put himself at the head of the Remain campaign. Those decisions had consequences for this country which may be felt for a very long time.14
Chapter 4
Johnson and Chums
Leadership is essential for any successful campaign. Think of Winston Churchill uniting the country against the Nazis, or Genghis Khan founding the Mongol Empire, or Napoleon, until he got his army trapped in the Russian winter, or Lord Nelson, until he was shot on the deck of his ship HMS Victory. So we must look dispassionately at the leaders of the Leave and Remain armies.
Cameron led the Remain side in the belief that he could triumph under the slogan ‘Dave could fix it’. He was overconfident about his own invincibility as so many Old Etonians seem to be and dismissive of UKIP’s members, describing them as ‘a bunch of … fruitcakes’, ‘loonies’ and ‘closet racists’.
Like the Tories, Labour was officially on the Remain side – certainly most of their MPs and members were. Unfortunately Jeremy Corbyn was their leader at this critical time. Corbyn had spent his political career arguing against the UK’s involvement with Europe, believing like others on the far left that it was a bosses’ plot to keep workers down (unlike 16the far right, who believed that the EU was a socialist plot). He went through the motions of supporting the Remain camp, but everyone could see his heart wasn’t in it and he was invisible for most of the campaign.
The rather smug, disjointed nature of the Remain campaign was in stark contrast to that of the Leave group. Various MPs and members of UKIP had spent years waiting for this moment and they weren’t going to fail to take advantage of it. What gave them the greatest boost, however, was the emergence of Boris Johnson at its head.
Johnson had never been particularly interested in the European issue, although he had worked for the Daily Telegraph as its Brussels correspondent – writing nonsense stories such as a proposal to ban bendy bananas – despite his father having worked for the European Commission and being a strong supporter of Britain’s place in Europe. Johnson junior, however, was mainly a strong supporter of his own career prospects. Before the referendum, Boris Johnson actually wrote two columns for the Daily Telegraph, one putting the case for continued membership and the other the case for leaving. At the last moment he chose to publish the Leave one. He was old friends with David Cameron, who assumed he would join the Remain camp, and his sister Rachel begged him to back them. But at the last minute, Johnson announced he was joining the Leave faction and became the figurehead of their campaign.
The Leave campaign’s secret weapon was Dominic Cummings. This single-minded fanatic had a sneering contempt 17for everyone – MPs, civil servants, teachers (he revolutionised the education system when he worked with Michael Gove while Gove was Education Secretary) and anyone who knew anything. Although it was Gove who uttered the immortally stupid sentence ‘people in this country have had enough of experts’ during the referendum campaign, it more than likely came from Cummings’s fevered brain.
Dominic Cummings’s rise and fall will be described later, but for now it is enough to know that he was selected by some wealthy Brexit backers to run Vote Leave, which was the official campaign. There was another campaign, called Leave. EU, which was led by the UKIP leader Nigel Farage, who had made his name by denigrating all things European except his German wife.
And so battle commenced, with one side blithely announcing the dangers of leaving the EU and the other employing a mixture of lies, distortions and xenophobia while painting a picture of a Britain freed from the shackles of the European Union which would be all positives and no negatives.18
Chapter 5
The Cold Light of Day
It would be unfair to criticise voters for not understanding how the EU works. The truth is that hardly anyone did. Not politicians, not journalists, not even most academics, but following the result of the referendum, the cold light of reality began to creep in. What Leavers had dismissed as ‘Project Fear’ turned out to be worse than anyone had forecast, while the great new Britain that had been promised by Brexiteers was seen to be no more than an imaginary land of unicorns.
People in the twenty-first century know far more than previous generations, thanks not only to better and longer education but also to the huge amount of information on television, radio and the internet. Yet life today is also extremely complicated and very few us of know much about the way society, industry and other systems actually work.
Let’s look at just one example. Hands up who had heard of the ‘supply chain’ until we left the EU? Hardly anyone – except the people who relied on it for their businesses. This is how it works. The motor industry, for instance, was quite 20basic before the EU’s single market. Almost everything needed to manufacture a car, van or lorry was produced at the factory, from the body to the engine. Some components came from outside – electrical parts were probably made by a different company, but that was located down the road so the parts could be easily obtained. Tyres would have come from another plant, but that wasn’t far away either.
That all changed dramatically, however, when the single market was launched in 1993. Now a car body could be made in England, parts of the engine in Germany or Spain or elsewhere in the EU, and other parts in other EU countries, and they could all be seamlessly brought together because there were no borders, no customs checks, no paperwork and no forms to fill in. But that ended when the UK decided to pull out of the single market (which it didn’t need to, incidentally, and the Brexit leaders had all insisted during the campaign that it would never happen).
Suddenly there were mountains of forms that had to be filled in, miles of red tape to deal with and long lines of lorries queuing up at the Channel to get into and out of Britain. Leaving the EU made British goods harder to produce, which meant they were more expensive. The motor industry in particular had warned of the dangers of leaving, but they weren’t believed. Anyway, hardly anyone understood what they were talking about; politicians and the media certainly didn’t.
One of the defining moments of the referendum campaign came when Michael Gove, a passionate advocate of Brexit and at that time Lord Chancellor and Justice Secretary, was 21challenged about the warnings being given by industry leaders, which were in stark contrast to what was being claimed by the Leave campaign. He brushed aside their concerns with the aforementioned comment about experts. Presumably the next time he goes to hospital he will be happy to have any medical procedures performed by the catering staff rather than a surgeon.
There had also been warnings that many EU citizens who were working in Britain while we were members would pack up and go home. It wasn’t going to happen, said the Brexiteers – and if it did, it would be no problem. Well, it did happen, and it caused appalling problems in hospitality, care homes and on farms.
There was a particular shortage of lorry drivers, because Continental drivers thought that it wasn’t worth coming to Britain and going through the agonisingly slow procedure to get in and out of the country, so shortages of imported food and goods grew. The government said that this situation was happening everywhere, but that was exposed as a lie when pictures appeared online of supermarket shelves in France, Spain, Italy and other EU countries positively groaning with delicious fruit and vegetables, while in this country we faced empty shelves.22
Chapter 6
Covid
New Year 2020 began with reports of a mystery virus in China. Within weeks a killer was sweeping the world. The virus has since claimed millions of victims and disrupted the lives of almost everyone across the globe. Education, health, business, leisure and travel, and the economy and governments of every nation were all affected by the Covid-19 pandemic.
An unknown respiratory infection with no known cure, the virus swiftly spread outside China. News footage of its impact on Italy, where it became rampant, was particularly shocking as it continued to surge across Europe. Hospitals and health services were buckling and medics battled a tsunami of death that was sweeping across the world at an alarming rate. Elderly people and the sick were particularly vulnerable, but coronavirus was killing the young, fit and healthy too, and Britain wasn’t immune. By the end of January 2020, two cases had been confirmed here.
While some countries reacted quickly by imposing 24lockdowns, travel bans and other restrictions, in the UK, life carried on as normal. Although frontline healthcare workers raised concerns regarding the country’s ability to cope with a large-scale outbreak, Boris Johnson didn’t appear bothered. In a televised press conference on 3 March, the Prime Minister reassured the country that the government would ‘contain, delay, research [and] mitigate’ the impact of the virus. His recipe for dealing with this deadly disease was to urge people to wash their hands regularly for ‘the length of time it takes to sing Happy Birthday twice’. This did not provide a lot of protection from an airborne virus. Johnson also boasted that he had visited a hospital that day and had shaken hands with everyone he met.
There were no bans on big sporting events like the Cheltenham Festival and no travel restrictions, which meant that thousands of Spanish football fans were able to travel to England and watch Atlético Madrid play Liverpool in a Champions League match.
On 11 March the World Health Organization declared the coronavirus outbreak a global pandemic. In the UK, experts warned of a total collapse of critical care and urged social distancing restrictions. Johnson continued to pooh-pooh their fears although beds in intensive care units were already full. It wasn’t until almost a fortnight later, on 23 March, that the Prime Minister finally acted and announced a national lockdown.
This was an unprecedented curtailment of freedom, more restrictive than anything during the Second World War, and 25was the biggest shutdown of society in our history. Only essential travel, for food shopping, exercise (of humans and animals), medical attention and travelling for necessary work, which included those working in healthcare, farming, journalism, policing and food distribution, was allowed.
Schools, offices, non-essential shops, pubs, restaurants, libraries, cinemas, sports centres, playgrounds and theatres were closed and places of worship were also shut. People weren’t allowed to travel, go to school or work, visit family or friends or be beside elderly relatives in care homes, women in labour or the dying. Gatherings of more than two people in public were banned, which included social events like weddings and baptisms. Dentists and hairdressers were closed and social distancing was imposed, which meant long queues outside shops as only one or two customers were allowed in at a time.
Those walking or out for exercise weren’t allowed to stop and chat or sit near each other on a bench. Those who could worked from home, while many also had to juggle that with home schooling. For many who were already lonely and vulnerable, lockdown meant total isolation. For those who lived in overcrowded conditions with no access to outside space, it was almost unbearable.
By 5 May, approximately 32,000 people had died from Covid in the UK – more than in Italy. Thousands more were hospitalised and critically ill, and those figures continued to rise. There were daily television briefings from the Prime Minister, other government ministers and public health 26experts like Professors Chris Whitty and Jonathan Van-Tam, who became household names.
Although local councils and communities, organisations like the BBC, charities, unions, businesses and individuals were quick and imaginative in responding to the crisis, with online learning, social events, food deliveries and other support mechanisms, all of our lives were completely upended by the decisions made by the government. They had been elected to run the country, but no one imagined it would be run like this. The impact of their decisions is still being felt across the whole of society and every aspect of our lives, from healthcare to housing, education and the economy to how and where we work, travel and engage with each other.
If anything demonstrates the importance of having good government, the Covid pandemic must be top of the list.
There were many questions that needed to be answered about this unrivalled crisis and there were demands for an official inquiry to investigate and hopefully deliver some of the answers. Yet the Johnson government prevaricated and delayed and it wasn’t until June 2023 that public hearings of the Covid-19 Inquiry began. It will look into the government’s response, the decisions taken during the pandemic, the impact they had, how well we were prepared for such a crisis and how we might do better in future. However, there are some things we do already know:
There were no gowns, visors, swabs or body bags in the government’s pandemic stockpile when Covid-19 reached 27the UK, despite the fact that, as far back as June 2019, the government was advised by its expert committee on pandemics to purchase gowns.There wasn’t enough personal protective equipment (PPE) to keep health and care staff safe, so that ambulance crews and anyone working in a hospital or care home was risking their life every day they went to work. Many isolated themselves from their families to try to keep them safe.The chaotic testing before the vaccine was available meant that people, particularly the elderly, were discharged from hospital into care homes with Covid so that the virus spread like wildfire among extremely frail and vulnerable people: tens of thousands of them died.The ‘furlough’ scheme, which effectively meant that employers were given grants by the government so they could keep paying staff up to 80% of their wages during lockdown, cost around £70 billion. That is £70,000 million – about half the cost of running the NHS for a year.Scientists and pharmaceutical companies worked together to create a vaccine for Covid-19. On 2 December 2020, the Pfizer-BioNTech Covid-19 vaccine was approved for use in the UK, becoming the first to be authorised anywhere in the world.Billions of pounds of public money was spent on inadequate PPE. The Department of Health and Social Care lost three quarters of the £12 billion it spent on PPE in the first year of the pandemic due to inflated prices and kit that was not fit for purpose, including £4 billion worth of PPE 28that could not be used in the NHS and had to be disposed of at great expense.
