The dark charisma of Boris Johnson: how to "gaslight" an electorate

Britain has had more than 100,000 deaths from the Coronavirus, one of the highest rates in the world. Japan, another highly-developed country that is also an island, has had a little over 5,000 deaths due to Covid-19.

Under normal circumstances, you would expect the electorate to punish their government for such an appalling number of avoidable deaths. But in the UK, these are not normal circumstances, because Boris Johnson is charge and nothing is ever his fault.

How is it possible for the head of the government to not be held to account for 100,000 deaths? Does Boris Johnson possess some kind of magical superpower that allows him to avoid blame? Is it some kind of psychological "trick"?

On closer inspection, it seems that, indeed, it is some kind of psychological sleight of hand. Not only is Johnson able to avoid blame, but he is able to transfer that blame on to the victims of his own actions. 

The government have been blaming the public for the number of deaths from Covid for a while now, but now that has gone into overdrive with the government's newest extremely graphic scare tactic. 

Power without consequences

Let's remind ourselves how we got to this point. 

The government, headed by Boris Johnson, has, from the very beginning of the pandemic, consistently refused to use effective border controls to limit the spread of the infection into the country. This approach is almost unique in the world.

Boris Johnson then was late in implementing a national lockdown, by which point the virus had spread widely across the country. This tendency to delay the decision-making process has been a consistent and entirely avoidable pattern in Johnson's behaviour during the pandemic.

He then allowed Covid patients to be sent from hospitals to care homes, adding to the deaths the elderly and vulnerable. The NHS was left to struggle without any clear or consistent direction from government.

He told people to go to work in unsafe conditions (this is still true now, as the government does not enforce health and safety regulations in workplaces, while the NHS, and retail and hospitality sectors in particular, have had to work in poorly ventilated workplaces while dealing with large numbers of the public). 

It should also be made clear that many of the poorest in society are still going to work in unsafe conditions because they simply have no financial alternative; they are ineligible for any government support, so they have to simply choose between having enough money to feed themselves or the risk of becoming infected with the virus while at work. Many others are simply unable to get government financial help and no longer have any work at all, so are suffering in other ways.

When lockdown was eased in May, over the following months through till the winter, the government introduced a bewildering array of ever-changing rules that the public were somehow expected to follow.

At the same time the government encouraged people to socialise with others in the "Eat Out To Help Out" campaign, aimed at financially subsidizing the hospitality industry. This was later shown to have a significant effect on spreading the virus around the community.

Boris Johnson then encouraged people to meet others at Christmas time, being a significant factor in causing the dramatic second "spike" in deaths we are seeing now.

Boris Johnson claims to accept "responsibility" for the calamity that his decision-making (or lack of it) has created, while at the same time leading the public to believe it is their fault for the virus spreading.

With the undoubted success story that is the vaccine programme now taking precedence, it looks for all the world that Johnson will, as he has many times in the past, "get away with it". But the 100,000 deaths are a result of his decisions in government, and his government's decisions. Thus is the nature of power - that actions in government have consequences; in this case, 100,000 real consequences.

He will most likely escape blame, as he has before. This is the strange power he has on others - his magical ability to transfer blame to others, using his "lovable rogue" character to make people always want to give him the benefit of the doubt. He will lie again and again, and yet people still choose to believe him.

The blame game

Is there something uniquely-hypnotic about the effect Johnson's personality has on the electorate? His "superpower", if we can call it that, is to gaslight the nation; to lie, manipulate and disarm others with his persona - the "charismatic oaf" that the people will always forgive and excuse, allowing themselves to believe that it was really their own fault that 100,000 people died, for it couldn't possibly be the fault of Boris Johnson. 

After all, he is just the head of government, and the government isn't responsible for anything, is it? 

A last word about the media, who have been Boris Johnson's enablers for the past twenty years. Somehow, Johnson fits into their stereotype of being "one of us": as a former journalist (along with Michael Gove), Johnson has been charming his way in the right circles for years, his various mess-ups and controversies only adding to his fascination. 

In the media, The Daily Telegraph is effectively his own personal propaganda machine, with the Express and Daily Mail almost just as fawning. The same can be said for The Sun and The Times, who can always be relied upon to provide a sympathetic telling of Johnson's agenda. This covers the vast majority of the media that the electorate consume; the left-wing media here are sadly barely worth mentioning in terms of their actual influence on the psychology of the electorate; the populist press have the advantage of patronage and government connections in the influence on the electorate.

So Johnson, for all his failings, is likely to be secure in his position as "national saviour" for quite a while longer. This blogger did at one point think his days at the political pinnacle were numbered, but he seems to have ridden in perennial luck and come out of it with barely a scratch to his reputation.

On current trends, he may well even win the next election, if the Brexit calamity can be blamed on the EU and an unprepared business sector as well as 100,000 deaths have been blamed on his own electorate.

Boris Johnson: a Hitler satire "Brexit bunker" tribute act and funny fable to authoritarian comedy acts

 If Alexander Borisovich DePfeffel Johnsonov could be compared to Hitler, it would only be in the sense that he was a man destined for the greatness of his own ego. The "World King" became the ruler of Brexit Britain. As the Ayran dictator of the English master race, England was, under his guidance, fated for greatness. His boundless energy and optimism would whizz-bang the nation into orgiastic delight under his personality, as he flew the flag of Brexit, the cult that he knew he was destined to lead as soon as he decided to choose to write the article in favour of Brexit that would lead him to victory in the referendum (or not).

But he didn't want Britain to really leave the EU. He just wanted to back the losing side in the referendum, and lap up the honour in defeat at Leave losing the 2016 EU referendum, so that he could take Cameron's place when he stood down shortly before the 2020 UK election. That would leave Boris ideally place to rule and dominate politics in the UK for that coming decade, his place in history secure. Sure, he had no idea what he was going to do with that power when he had it, much like Cameron. But being Prime Minister was much more important than having a plan for the country.

But he went on and won the bloody referendum, didn't he? Him and Michael, Goebbels to his Hitler, had to look like they had a plan when they won. It was lucky in a way that the two of them managed to cock up the leadership battle after Cameron fell on his sword so that it was nasty Mrs May who took the fall for the mess of the negotiations. She was never suited to power either. May was far too serious, with her own neuroses that haunted her like demons in the dark shadows of power, lurking in the back of her mind. The Brexit demons got to her in the end, sending her slightly mad probably.

But not Alexander the great, the Ayran superhero! He was biding his time, allowing May to take the blame for everything that was going wrong. Everyone knew about his energy and hypnotic power. When May finally gave in, her soul broken by the Brexit monster, it was Boris' turn to demonstrate his vision for Britain, giving Brexit a personality cult that it truly deserved. For Boris would be Brexit's dear leader, with the drive and dynamism of a blonde Hitler but with a better sense of humour and minus the anti-Semitism! Sure, Boris was a womanizer, a liar, a casual racist and almost completely amoral, but at least he was a lovable rogue! And having Michael "Goebbels" Gove at his side was a stroke of genius: Michael playing the straight man and the dissembling propagandist to Boris' affable fool-cum-secret genius. 

Then there was Dom. He was the man who never smiled, and when he did. you had the right idea to run very far away. Dom was the Martin Bormann of the gang. The real power behind the throne. He was the real ideologue, even more than Michael or Boris was. Boris was just doing Brexit for the bantz. No-one could really do anything without Dom's consent, and Dom controlled access even to Boris. Dom allowed Michael to take over control of the logistics and media side of Brexit - for Michael was more of details man than the fantasizing Aryan leader - while Dom controlled the wider strategic vision. 

This was how they came to win the public's adulation so quickly, with the motivational rhetoric and simple solutions - "Take Back Control" became "Get Brexit Done". TBC, GBD. Easy. Now at the height of Dom's powers at this point, he was able to get Boris to replace his new finance minister with an even newer one one more amenable to their agenda.  It was all about GBD, and the economy was to become a tool to the might of Brexit.

But the great leader suffered a cruel twist of fate: at the pinnacle of his success, a great pestilence stuck him down like Thor's hammer. The Gods were cruel to the unbelievers, and Boris had not prayed hard enough to the Brexit sigil for the nation's Aryan master to be protected. Struck down and debilitated for a time, the nation lurched without his divine inspiration and leadership. Brexit Britain's foreign minister struggled to fill the place of Alexander Borisovich, and in this time even Dom "Bormann" Cummings lapsed in his focus, his sight failing him on the way to Barnard Castle. It was a dark time for the nation and the government.

When the leader came back from his respite there were many praising the return of the triumphant lion, waiting for the personification of the Brexit cult to inspire us all again. Alas, it was not to be. For the leader's health was not what it was; he seemed to lack focus, drive and certainty of purpose. He came to rely more and more on Dom while also limiting his own public appearances to a minimum. His sense of judgement, once sharp, had dulled and become fogged by indecision, paranoia and corrupt motivations. Those in the higher echelons of the party looked at the sclerotic and chaotic running of the government and saw a power play of personalities incapable of rational thoughts; for the elite had become poisoned by an amoral thirst for autocracy at all costs. And behind this most of all was Dom.

Murmurings in the ranks talked darkly of the time after the leader, for all could see that "the once-and-future king" was a ghost of his former self. Like May before him, something had sucked the life out of his soul. For her it was the essence of Brexit itself; for him it was divine intervention that had snatched away the essence of the leader's energy. Brexit it seemed, was a cursed cause. 

Who could take over the mantle of the Brexit sigil after the assumed saviour, Alexander Borisovich? Who was worthy? Some talked of Michael "Goebbels" Gove being the natural successor, given the longevity of his connection with the Ayran superman. But outside enemies were circling. Brexit Britain had few friends in the world thanks to the self-defeating fanaticism of its most ardent disciples. No-one wanted it to succeed; it was a doomed religion.

Now that Brexit was destined to ruin the country after all, once the dear leader himself eventually retired into obscurity, the leadership of the cause seemed a hopeless endeavour. Whoever took over would only act as an "Admiral Doenitz", there to formalize the death warrant of the Brexit death-cult. And few were willing to do that. There was no fame in surrendering the cause. Once it was all to "take back control", by now people were pleading to "Get Brexit Undone", to end the madness.

But the true believers needed a scapegoat, as they had used May before the dear leader. Michael "Goebbels" Gove was too cunning to allow himself that dishonour; better to coax another into the role. That way at least, the blame could be transferred from the fanatical ideologues that had ruined the country to another malleable cypher. That way at least, the flame of Brexit could still live on to be passed to another generation, and the brief glorious period of Brexit could be misremembered in myth... 

 

The British government's Coronavirus response: "gaslighting" the UK population and Brexit "psy-ops"?

 The UK government's response to the Coronavirus pandemic has become more and more chaotic and confused in recent weeks. 

The government's strategy for dealing with the pandemic has from the start has been like that of how UK governments of the past have dealt with many national crises - the "command and control" instinct, with the Conservative Party having a particular instinct for centralized decision-making on one hand, while simultaneously outsourcing operations to unaccountable and inefficient private service providers (which coincidentally often have some kind of nepotistic link to someone in government).  

Heading into the autumn and a predictable rise in infections, this has left Britain's ability to deal with the virus highly compromised. The UK government appears to have had no clear strategy: a "track and trace" system that has effectively broken down; a testing system that is incapable of dealing with an increase in demand for tests; and worst of all, a "lockdown" that whose rules and regional nuances have become so confused and contradictory that they make no logical sense and are impossible for any reasonable person to keep a track of from one week to the next. More on this in a moment.

The sheer levels of appalling incompetence on Brexit meanwhile were sharply raised by Ed Milliband in parliament recently. On both Brexit and the Coronavirus, the Boris Johnson's government seem to have to have no coherent strategy; on both key issues for Britain, if him and his government have a strategy at all, it is about blaming others for the government's own failings. 

On Brexit, any failure to get a deal with the EU is always put down to the EU's "unreasonable" behaviour; on the Coronavirus meanwhile, ministers have been blaming the British public itself for the the government's own strategic failure.

What is interesting in the case of the virus is that surveys have shown that a surprisingly large segment of the population agree with the government's pointing the fingers at its own electorate. In other words, they believe that it is not the government's responsibility to look after the public health of the country, but the people's themselves!

"Gaslighting" a perpetually-anxious population?

This kind of psychological blame-transference is akin to "gaslighting": the abusive husband that makes the abused wife believe that it is her fault she is being abused, because she isn't doing enough to earn her husband's respect. But equally, the government's success in getting people to turn on each other rather than the government is a sign of the success of the kind of discreet "psychological warfare" that the government has been conducting through austerity for the last ten years. While "austerity" itself is supposed to be over (until the government finds some other justification for its return) the "nudge theory" approach by the government has shifted people' perceptions of how they view the government: they are now much more likely to blame individuals or each other for failings in the country than the government compared to ten years ago. This is also very useful for the government considering its plans for Brexit.

While there is far more evidence to support a "cascade failure" of incompetence behind the government's Coronavirus response than some kind of dark conspiracy, what is clear is that the government's chaotic and ever-changing strategy (and laws) on the virus have left the public disoriented and anxious. Rules are changed at short notice on some occasions while at other times their communication is staggered many days in advance of their actual implementation, so they are not implemented until after the population have had a weekend to congregate together (and potentially spread the virus further). If there a rational strategy in place behind these endlessly contradictory approaches, it is impossible to discern. But as already mentioned, the government have already laid in the "strategy" of blaming the population themselves for the spread of the virus.  

Under these circumstances, an anxious and disoriented population would be more willing to accede to greater government control over aspects of their privacy and their daily lives. Such controls have already been happening, both in legislation and greater use of technology for the sake of "public order".

Under the cover of a public health emergency, laws have been passed by the government without any real parliamentary consultation; "temporary" laws that the government would equally be able to conveniently keep on after Brexit. And while a covert power grab is underway, the government produces guidance and law changes on the Coronavirus that change from week to week. The public cannot keep up with these perpetually-changing restrictions, and you wonder if that is down to government incompetence or something else.

A perpetually anxious and confused population is also one that is easy for governments to control. This is something that authoritarian governments know very well; and Britain's government structure is still among the most centralized and authoritarian in nature in the democratic world. 

It is also well-observed that Britons are perhaps among the most anxious and neurotic of the national populations in the democratic world. Some of this is due to history and culture, with Britain still having a hierarchical culture of  a "landowning aristocracy" and "landless tenants", a long history of social inequality and lack of social mobility. These issues have only got worse over the last forty years, and especially in the last ten years after the detrimental effects of the financial crisis and austerity on the stability and quality of the job market and social cohesion.

So the levels of anxiety in Britain's population were already high; with the Coronavirus and the government's chaotic "blame the people" strategy in dealing with it, the government seem to want the British population to turn on themselves. Thus distracted, this kind of psychological environment would be an ideal one for an authoritarian government to make whatever changes it thought it could get away with. This is the kind of thing that Naomi Klein talked about in "The Shock Doctrine". An increased role for outsourced government contracts to unaccountable corporations and a greater corrupt symbiosis between them a favoured government figures. In such an amoral environment, these Brexiteers all fail upwards, with the law only applying to "ordinary people". 

While Brexit is at its heart a Libertarian project, the authoritarian and corrupt instincts of Britain's Brexiteers are never far away. These people are only "Libertarian" in the sense that they hate the idea of having to help the "ordinary person". This is why there a view that Brexit will leave the wider state to shrink to a bare minimum of support for the general population, while leaving the Brexit "elite" to further integrate their corrupt connections between government and big business. Like in any corrupt authoritarian state, Brexit will be about subsidizing the Brexiteer elite. Meanwhile, the people will be too disoriented by the perpetually-changing situation to know where to target their blame; they have already been "trained" to blame each other.   

Brexit, CANZUK and Tony Abbott: a vision of "Empire 2.0"?

 The appointment of Tony Abbott as a UK trade advisor is one of the clearest signs that Britain's government sees CANZUK as a primary plank of its Brexit trade strategy.

Brexit has been an ideological project from its birth, with the Libertarian wing of the Conservative Party and like-minded supporters. Their vision was of Britain not as a part of the EU, who it sees in ideological opposition to their agenda, but seeing Britain instead as a "thalassocratic" power, a power of the seas as the British Empire had been.

This is not to equate Libertarians as the same as old-fashioned imperialists; the rationale is different, even if the effect is not that far different in reality. However, Libertarians in Britain see their agenda in the same fantastical light, almost entirely separated from rational and coherent thought. More on that in a moment.

The purpose of having someone like Tony Abbott as a trade advisor is transparently-clear - to facilitate the closer ties that Britain's government would want with Australia. Other ideological allies in Canada and New Zealand have also expressed a like-minded desire to have closer bonds with Britain. 

"Rule, Britannia!"

The thinking behind CANZUK from Britain's point of view is equally transparent. 

The fact that, within CANZUK, Britain would be the largest power, in terms of financial clout and population, can hardly be a coincidence. It's easy to see its British advocates as seeing Britain within CANZUK as the power with the financial might to support the resource-rich economies of Australia and Canada, for example. In this sense, Britain within CANZUK would see itself as the primary power within a trade association, and (presumably) able to dictate much of the agenda of the group. Russia within the EEU (an economic grouping of former Soviet states that Russia dominates) performs the same function, and the similarities cannot be mere coincidence.

In this sense, CANZUK would be to the UK what the EEU is to Russia: a tool of vainglorious power projection, and a kind of "legacy empire", in recreating something of its former imperial reach. 

It would only be a matter of time before the UK is bossing about its more junior "partners" in the trading bloc. No wonder that some in Australia are already calling Tony Abbott a "foreign agent" for working with Britain. At the same time time, Britain's role within CANZUK would only further encourage British arrogance on the global stage. While the Royal Navy is only a shadow of its imperial former self, the two enormous aircraft carriers built to roam the seas are further vainglorious symbols of Britain's power projection. It's not hard to imagine Britain encouraging other compliant states to join its "trade bloc" (Singapore has already been mentioned), and the more far-flung its reach, the more Britain's imperial vanity as a global power is stroked.

While the CANZUK group are all multicultural democracies, it is also a grouping of the former "White Dominions"; the same former colonies that had been the initial target of Britain's postwar labour outreach when Britain was in a manpower shortage. The fact that it was the Caribbean and South Asian parts of the empire that answered the call was not what the British government had actually intended. The "Windrush generation" wasn't actually part of the plan - the UK was really hoping for Aussies, Canadians and Kiwis instead. In a subconscious way then, isn't CANZUK also a way to turn back the clock? While CANZUK these days is a Libertarian project, it still has great emotional appeal to old-fashioned sentiments and nostalgia, with many of the older generation having memories of relatives moving "Down Under", for example. The feeling in Britain that "they" are "like us" is a strongly emotional one, with historical memory playing a far greater role than rational or practical thought. The feeling that Europeans are someone not "like us" is part of the emotional justification for CANZUK. It is an idea based on emotional pull; a dangerous game to play when all rational sense says it's an idea that makes no economic sense. 

Empire of irrationality

CANZUK has little economic or logistical reasoning behind the concept. The actual benefits to the nations, in terms of freedom of movement for trade and labour, are questionable as relatively little trade is done between them to begin with, at least compared to each country's close neighbours and larger trading partners. In Britain and Canada's case, especially so. Then there is the question of logistics and how to think that trading with countries thousands of miles away will make more sense than Britain trading mainly with countries just across the channel. CANZUK is an idea that appeals mainly to Anglophone romantics like Daniel Hannan (who by no small coincidence is, like Tony Abbott, also a British trade advisor). 

If the idea from Britain's point of view is that CANZUK is meant to be a replacement for EU trade, then only the merest glance at the comparison will make the idea seem not only absurd but idiotic. The population of the EU is nearly 300 million, while the population of Canada, Australia and New Zealand combined is barely equal to the UK's. How do CANZUK's proponent's in Britain expect to get enough trade from such a smaller trading bloc? But again, fantastical ideas overrule any kind of rational thought when it comes to most things on Brexit.

The British government's "Command and Control" Coronavirus omni-shambles

The news that the 400,000 items of PPE the UK government ordered from Turkey had to be sent back is somehow befitting of an institution that has been shown to be clueless in their actions.

The government's systematic incompetence is made worse by its own dissemination, equaled by the way in which criticism of its actions is framed as being unhelpful or biased, as though a time of crisis should somehow absolve the government of accountability. In Hungary for example, that is indeed exactly the government's position.

Within the overall sense of chaos at the centre, the government has failed in almost every area of public health. The chaos over PPE provision is followed by the ventilator supply chaos, where the the ventilators asked for haven't met the government's standards, partly due to misunderstanding. The fact that these haven't been needed may well be a reprieve in one sense, though the fact that there have been thousands of elderly dying in care homes rather than being taken to hospital dampens any remote sense of "success" in the ventilators asked for not being used.

This comes on top of the closure of the London Nightingale hospital, which is marked as a sign of "success", while at the same time highlighting the unused beds there that could have been used for those dying in care homes, or the many "excess deaths" that are happening in the community as a result of people not going to any hospital at all. The hospitals opened for Covid-19 patients are not being used for their presumed purpose, while general hospitals are seeing far fewer non Covid-19 patients. The overall "excess deaths" tell us the story on that.

Then there is the testing fiasco. The "100,000 tests a day by the end of April" was only reached by fiddling the figures, and testing has since fell back to its previous modest levels. Within that, there are stories of tests being lost, poor communication, and so on.
The government is beginning to implement the system that South Korea had for "test, track and trace", albeit two months late, when it becomes a great deal more difficult to implement effectively. The small-scale trial testing system on the Isle of Wight has software issues, as well as being of questionable use when it requires close contact with people (i.e. breaking social distancing rules) in order to pass on information around the community.

The overall picture, then, is one of a government out of its depth. The rest of the world has been looking on at this level of incompetence in disbelief, while the government-friendly side of the media has been keen to deflect blame (NHS staff apparently being more likely to support Labour, so they are therefore "biased" against the government) or to gloss over the ongoing disaster entirely, with stories about Boris Johnson's bravery when in hospital, for example.


A hierarchy set up to fail

One of the key linking elements in this institutional incompetence is the organisation of government itself, and the ingrained thinking within government figures that any kind of crisis such as this must be "led from the centre". To be fair, this is a view that has been held within government for decades, but is especially true of the conservative wing.
It's best to understand England in particular as a historically hierarchical society, with its "public school" education system being the most important method of maintaining power within a limited core of society. By this thinking, power remains within the overall hands of  "the establishment": a loose social grouping of like-minded and similarly-educated people. Through their shared social connections, those in "the establishment" use the media, politics, and the arts to maintain their insidious grip on society. Those in society outside their esteemed group often have no idea why the lives of so many in Britain are set up to fail from birth, but merely take it fatalistically as their lot in life. This is the idea.

In George Orwell's "Nineteen Eighty-four", the party operative O'Brien said "the purpose of power is power". With Britain, the Conservative government's rationale is similar. They believe they are the "natural party of government", and so their own incompetence is dismissed as something that couldn't be helped. Their natural assumption is that, as their own education has come from being part of the elite, anyone else in charge could only do an even worse job.
Their incompetence, though, stems from the corrupt nature of the hierarchy, with people being promoted far beyond their capabilities. Personal loyalty and ideological purity are the key to career advancement; competence and intelligence are merely coincidental. The so-called "elite" is no more intelligent than any other person in society, and in many cases, much less intelligent. You only have to look at how badly departments are ran by their ministers.

In many ways, England's historical hierarchy continues into politics today, with much of the media's portrayal of Westminster as a latter-day "medieval court", with daily reporting of metaphorical "palace intrigue" the norm. Many of these journalists being from the same "elite" background as the politicians, those selfsame journalists often seek public office themselves (such as the Prime Minister and his deputy, to name just two). This is just one illustration of the corrupting nature of the hierarchy, and explains a lot behind the motivation of the popular press.

So understanding the effect all this has on the government's response to the Covid-19 pandemic, we can see that the government's own prejudice is to centralize control: for power to effective, the government's own hierarchical prejudice means that it is loathe to relinquish decision-making to those it doesn't trust. By this rationale, the only time it might feasibly relinquish control down the chain of command would be to undermine confidence in those lower down (i.e. only give others power to make sure they screw it up).
For example, one of the problems NHS England has had in obtaining PPE during the Covid-19 pandemic is due to the byzantine fracturing of the decision-making process. This fracturing happened when the government "reformed" the NHS in the early years of the Coalition. What was meant to be a decentralizing "reform" of a top-heavy institution turned it into one with thousands more middle managers. Now with dozens of smaller NHS authorities chasing after the same PPE, the result has been chaos and in-fighting within the NHS, all as a result of the "reforms" the Conservative government carried out during Cameron's tenure. One assumes this effect wasn't intentional, but by making decentralization a by-word for chaos, it boosts the government's own hierarchical prejudice for its own ends.

By contrast, Germany's federal structure has been to its advantage in this public health crisis. Its form of decentralizing power is designed for flexibility; unlike the British institution, where the government seems to make sure that decentralizing can only result in chaos and incompetence. The British government's own prejudice is for "Command and Control", to assume that only central government can have all the information or the key expertise, and against allowing others lower down in the pecking order the agency to make decisions on the spot. This all comes from the country's historical hierarchy.

In this public health crisis, this effect is deadly.


 

Lions Led By Donkeys, again: the NHS and the British government's Coronavirus response

It's a hundred years, or thereabouts, since the Spanish Flu pandemic, which followed on from the chaos and carnage of the First World War.

That war led, in many cases, to a collapse of the old social order in societies across Europe. In spite of avoiding the threat of revolution that rose elsewhere, Britain's own ruling class was not immune to the human consequences of war, and many aristocratic families lost people as well as everyone else. There was a hope that because of this the ruling class would learn the error of its ways and build "Home For Heroes" after the war. Alas, they did not. There was enormous suspicion of "Socialism" from the ruling elite, and it took another global war for effective social change to occur, with the Labour government of 1945 leading to the NHS and the wider "welfare state".

The phrase "lions led by donkeys" was coined during the Great War to describe how Britain's incompetent, callous and out-of-depth generals caused the deaths of thousands of their soldiers, who loyally died for "King and Country".
Over a hundred year later, most agree that the battle against the global Coronavirus pandemic is a "war" ("World War C", if you like). In this battle, those on the front line are health professionals rather than soldiers, putting their lives on the line for everyone else's sake. But from Britain's experience, what we see from the government's response (and "strategy") are an echo what happened during the First World War: those in charge being clueless or callous in their response.

In government, the initial strategy seems to have been to follow the idea of "herd immunity", which not only goes against all recognised scientific practice on the response to pandemics, but also shows a complete misunderstanding of the original concept (which can only work after there is already a vaccine in circulation). This author has already stated how this approach bears distinct similarities to the "laissez faire" ideology of Libertarian thought, which many government ministers follow (including, the Prime Minister, his deputy, the Foreign Secretary and the Home Secretary just for starters).

This deeper ideological bias prevalent within government is deeply disturbing when it is applied to public health during a deadly pandemic. This kind of ideological prejudice in these circumstances is effectively casting a death sentence to a proportion of the population, either directly (by saying that people should get a potentially deadly disease), or indirectly (through the knock-on effect of causing the deaths of those who would have been saved had the hospitals not been overrun by a pandemic).

This kind of callousness is chilling to anyone with an iota of humanity. It demonstrates that those in government should be nowhere near the corridors of power. It demonstrates that their actions are detrimental to the public good and the public heath of the country.


Callous and incompetent

The main areas where the British government's strategy and organisation has been either dangerously callous or incompetent include those of testing, the effectiveness of the national "lockdown", and the issue of supply (of PPE to front-line staff, as well as protecting the vulnerable).

The responses to the first two of these issues (testing and the approach to a "lockdown") are ones that mostly obviously have the fingerprints of Libertarian thinking over them. To return to the military analogy from before, mass testing during a pandemic is the way to discover how large is the "army" you are going to war with. Fighting a virus without knowing how many people in the population are infected by it is like fighting a war against an army whose numbers and capability you are completely blind to. It is leading a battle based on belief alone, with rationalism and planning abandoned to the wind. It is insane. This was also government policy, until very recently.

Then there is the issue of the so-called "lockdown". Again, the government's prejudice towards Libertarian "laissez-faire" thinking is apparent. The "lockdown" that the government introduced still remains "advisory", with the police having limited enforcement powers. While lots of shops, cafes, restaurants, pubs and the like have closed, there are still plenty of businesses that are operating almost as normal. Many haven't closed because the "lockdown" is advisory and not a legal obligation, meaning they cannot make any claim from their insurers.
Meanwhile, the government's wish to rely on the public's own "self enforcement" is simply about naively relying on people's "better nature" rather than understanding the essential irrationality of human behaviour, especially in the face of uncertainty. The overall communication approach from the government has been appallingly-confused, with different ministers giving different advice, and it being unclear who (if anyone) is actually in charge.

Other countries look at the way Britain's government has handled the "lockdown" with despair. To the outside world, Britain's government looks like it has a completely chaotic strategy, with no coherent plan and no coherent enforcement.

Finally, we come to the issue of supply.
On the issue of testing, the government's lack of co-ordination with the chemicals industry is another reason (on top of the government's previous "herd immunity" strategy) why the process is appallingly sclerotic.
The same lack of co-ordination is true with supplying PPE, which now means many health professionals are exposing themselves to the virus without suitable protection. In this way, the wider health sector, thanks to government incompetence, is rapidly turning into a breeding ground for the virus. Even the PPE that health professionals do get is of a lower quality of standard compared to that worn by health professionals in Italy. This is without even mentioning the social care sector, whose provision of PPE is pitiful, and the provision of food by the government to those deemed most vulnerable (as they cannot leave their homes) is so poor it would embarrass a Food Aid worker in the Third World.

The "Nightingale" hospitals being built in a matter of days are a great demonstration of the army's strengths in a crisis, and it feels poetic that in Britain's part in "World War C", it is the army coming to the aid of this pandemic's battered front line. But beds are one thing, and there is the question of staffing for the hospitals, as well as supply of ventilators, oxygen, and so on. Good will and clapping our health workers is the least they deserve, but applause doesn't save lives. Again, on these issues the government are found wanting, with centralisation of the decision-making process being a recurring problem.
It is in this kind of crisis that Britain being one of the most centralised states in the Western world is having a knock-on effect, to the detriment of public health.

We haven't even covered the mismanagement of the government's financial response to the pandemic, which has involved lots of good words, but with poor communication, little (if any) co-ordination between agencies, and little in the way on concrete action to prevent mass unemployment, a steep rise in poverty and all the social knock-on effects that would bring.

All these issues were true in a different context during the First World War, and recurred in other ways more recently during the Falklands War (when the military went to war without adequate air cover, and its victory was down to blind luck). Later in the eighties, there was the Hillsborough disaster, where police incompetence and/or callousness led to the death of nearly a hundred football supporters. These are all situations where the incompetent, negligent or callous actions of people in positions of power led to people's deaths.

In in the Coronavirus pandemic, the actions of those in the decision-making process in Britain must not be forgotten.

Coronavirus in the UK: a Brexit "stress test"?

A country’s culture tells us a lot about how it reacts to a crisis. When the Coronavirus hit Italy, the government put the entire country in quarantine (this literally being the place where the term “quarantine” was invented). When the Coronavirus came to Britain, the government’s approach has been one of “Keep Calm and Carry On” (as though stiff upper lip is a coherent strategy against a pandemic).

The advice the government is following comes from its Chief Scientist, who is in fact a behavioural scientist. This makes one wonder if Britain's official reaction to the Coronavirus isn't then turning into a kind of mass behavioural science experiment imposed on its population. 

Britain’s strategy rests not only on a lot of counter-intuitive thinking; it is also the dead opposite to what the rest of the world seems to be doing. Why?

Libertarian “behavioural science”

There is an attitude of “let things run their natural course” at work here, which is a mentality shared by proponents of laissez-faire Libertarianism. The “behavioural science” aspect of the government’s strategy is about “nudging” human behavior rather than through implementing drastic measures that could cause panic. In other words, the government wants the British population to be acquiescent and placid; fatalistic, almost, about the coming epidemic.

The government naturally has its own reasons for not wanting to create a panicked population, but the strategy here also seems to rest on some aspects of British culture as well. Fatalism and stoicism are two aspects of the British psyche that have been honed through different “crisis points” over the centuries, most recently the Second World War. Boris Johnson’s grave demeanour during these Coronavirus press conferences, feels deliberately designed to engender morbid acceptance of what is to come. In another (probably deliberate) way it feels like a quietly-knowing echo of the kind of “blood, toil, tears and sweat” of Churchill fame (which at the time definitely did not reassure everyone at all, by the way). Thus we have the national leader implicitly evoking the nostalgic spirit of “national struggle” and ultimate sacrifice, with the latter being seen as an inevitable consequence of the former. Those at the most risk, the elderly and the infirm, are already being made to be seen by the wider population as, to an extent, helpless victims of viral “natural selection”.

The scientific strategy seems to rest on allowing most of the population to be exposed to the virus naturally, with people’s own immune systems given time to fight it off. In this sense, the government seems to have already accepted that the health care system is unable to cope, and is encouraging people to “look after themselves”.

The fact that this strategy goes against all the official WHO advice and the responses of most other governments in the world is telling. It tells us the British government approach is a combination of Libertarian thinking backed up by the fatalism inherent in the British psyche. One wonders if some in the government haven’t already seen the “learning potential” from taking this “ideological strategy” to a pandemic outbreak to see how the same strategy could be used across the country more widely to deal with the political effects of Brexit next year.

Coronavirus: an opportune Brexit “stress test”?

If people can acquiesce to losing, for example, potentially half a million people on the back of ideological “science”, what else could they accept?

The dark echoes that this fatalism to mass death leads to need no explanation. Already Britain is a country where homeless people are left to die on the streets or in seclusion in the countryside and some of the disabled live in starved penury; people acquiesce as people are made homeless and the disabled starve thanks to government indifference. Such things are accepted, so it isn’t hard to see how that same population could accept potentially half a million dead as “one of those things”.

This is a society that has been “nudged” for the last ten years to accept what was once unacceptable in a civilized society. The British government’s approach to the Coronavirus has all the hallmarks of being ideological in its nature, against the approach recommended by the world’s health authorities. The ideological project that is “Brexit” intends to radically transform the structure of British society. Already weakened by a decade of austerity and welfare “reform”, those social structures are only supported by a government that seems willing to let a viral outbreak dissolve much of what’s left of British society’s communal bonds. 

With so many already homeless, so many disabled left to their fate, why would care about the old and infirm dying in a viral outbreak? This would be Darwinian "natural selection" on a national scale.

By making people acquiesce to the idea of half a million dead as somehow “feasible”, it psychologically prepares them for the ideological mayhem that a Libertarian “Brexit” would inflict on them afterwards. Worn down by a decade of austerity and a year of viral deaths, whatever ideological plans the government has for “Brexit Britain” would be accepted as almost trivial by comparison. There would be no effective opposition left.

In this sense, there could be a very discreet (and deliberate) psychological strategy behind the government’s “laissez-faire” attitude to the Coronavirus outbreak (as their strategy is so plainly at odds with every other country’s): using the outbreak as a way to “stress test” specific structural aspects of society, while weakening public resistance to the radical (and at one time, unthinkable) social change to come afterwards.

The “national struggle” that the Coronavirus is now being portrayed as by the British government evokes the jingoistic spirit of Britain’s mythologized past on one hand and the stoic fatalism in the British psyche on the other. The acceptance of the radical ideology of Brexit after the national trauma that an ideological approach to the Coronavirus could inflict could well be something the government is banking on.

The “ideological laboratory” that Britain has been for the last ten years seems to be stepping up in its approach, with Brexit as its endgame; in the case of the Coronavirus, using Britain’s population as expendable “guinea pigs” seems like just the logical conclusion of that when applied to medical science.

Finally, there is the idea of the virus as a "test of national character". By being able to deal with the Coronavirus with its own ideological approach, it implies that Britain can deal with any kind of adversity. The mythology of Britain's supposed exceptionalism fits the Coronavirus outbreak into the narrative of Brexit.