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.
