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.
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