Covid-19 as a Piece of Political History
It would be very remiss if the history of Covid-19 were depoliticised. While it may be obvious to learn from the mistakes in pandemic response, it needs to be understood that these mistakes were the direct result of political decisions.
Chances are, the pandemic will be written as if it were a natural disaster, a tsunami that swept in and there was nothing anyone could do about it. While there is not enough information available for any speculation about the virus’ origins, there is still plenty to dispute here. Covid-19 did not come out of nowhere. A major pandemic had been predicted for years. After SARS and MERS in the 2000s, it was even predicted that the next major pandemic would be of a coronavirus strain. This means that countries that did not have proper pandemic procedures and had not invested in pandemic response planning had done so despite plenty of warnings from the scientific community.
Several states have had governments that have used a deep distrust scientist and ‘experts’ in general as a political tool. It is a deliberate populist technique that narratively elevates the people’s voice (or at the very least those that support them). The idea that the government can go against experts’ advice because ‘we’ (they and their supporters) know better. There is also a more nefarious reason. Populist leaders like to discredit experts’ voice as they want their voice to be the most trusted. By discrediting official spaces that may criticise their decisions, their view becomes the only view that matters. It will come as no surprise that these countries were with a failed pandemic response. Bolsonaro in Brazil, Trump in America and even Boris in the UK.
Boris does not quite fit the same stereotypical populist profile as Bolsonaro and Trump, but he shares some characteristics. Boris does not have so much of a cult of personality around him. However, he did use narratives around leadership and Brexit to curry favour in those that feel left behind by globalisation, giving a cause to those who are struggling. This is a very similar base to the other two leaders. All three leaders framed the pandemic in reductionist terms. While Boris did not fall into the same conspiracy theories denying the virus altogether, he did follow the others in the narrative that the UK would not be badly affected. From Boris, there was this perception that British Exceptionalism meant that we could not possibly be at risk from a mere virus.
There was a perception among the British that we couldn’t possibly have an outbreak and the countries amid an outbreak only had one because of their failures. Boris’ calls to just wash our hands properly and be fine were part of a narrative discourse that presented Italy and Iran as backward. The country’s own xenophobia and perceptions that British Exceptionalism was ultimately its downfall.
Because of the position, these leaders are in, and how they got there, they felt that their handling of Covid-19 was simply a PR exercise. All three focused on the economic circumstances because to them, that was how you measured a leader’s success. For Trump, he pushed the economy narrative as he was going into an election year and spout economic success. He felt would be enough to distract from his other failures.
In the UK, Tory governments always have measured success in the size of the deficit and the economy’s strength. For them, to do anything that might hinder economic progress, would seem absurd. The main and now obvious in hindsight flaw to this logic is that a failed pandemic response was always going to have much more of a devastating effect on the economy than leaving businesses open. The cruel irony is that for countries that had early and strict lockdowns, the pandemic has not had such a devastating effect on their economies.
In early 2020, the government decided that a certain number of deaths was an acceptable outcome. This was where they went wrong. The countries that succeeded in pandemic response decided that they would do everything to prevent even a few deaths. So many decisions would have a much better outcome if a tiny bit of compassion was used.
As soon as cases arose in areas that were not being tracked, the government needed to lock the country down and require testing and mandatory isolation from those coming in on flights. It would not have been the most popular decision, but history would have thanked them for it. Hindsight has condemned their reluctance to do the unpopular thing as it stands. Treating a pandemic as a PR exercise has obviously backfired horribly in the UK at the very least, however, it is deeply sad that the cost of this callousness is paid by the most vulnerable.
The main reason I devote all my time and energy into politics is my belief that it can provide powerful tools for good. Governments inherently have the most tools at their disposal to do the most good in the most efficient way possible. And for me, I feel that the reason the Covid-19 response failed was that people were not prioritised. They have not been the priority for 10 years now. Austerity has had a devastating impact in the UK with very little success, but no effort to reverse the damage has been made. Welfare cuts have had a catastrophic impact on the most vulnerable and that national safety net was filled with holes that over the last ten years have just gotten larger and larger. Austerity has been profoundly detrimental to care services, especially the NHS. The frontline to defeat Covid-19 had been systematically weakened over the last ten years. Make no mistake, the devastating impact of Covid-19 in the UK was not just because of the current government’s errors, but because of systematic failures over the last ten years.
When it comes to Covid-19 as a piece of political history, I think about how GCSE history will talk about it in twenty years. Would Dominic Cumming’s trip to Barnard Castle make a bullet point list of reasons why the public did not trust the government? Or will it be forgotten, historians seeing it as too absurd to be examined. What about the ‘chumocracy’ where the government gave their neighbours contracts resulting in huge failures of PPE provisions and track and trace. What I hope is spoken about in GCSE history is that for every country that failed in its pandemic response, a country succeeded. The death rates of countries like the UK were not inevitable, it was the direct result of appalling leadership. I hope the government knows that history will not view them kindly: it is the least they deserve for their complete incompetence.
Written by Zoe Williams
Zoe Williams is 23 years old and is currently living in either Bath or Manchester, depending on where she is sat when a lockdown announcement occurs. She is currently doing a Masters on Human Rights and working part time as a politics research assistant which means she can rant about Trump and Boris for hours, which she does.