This year, there were no exams because the United Kingdom locked itself down against COVID-19. Instead, teachers supplied predicted grades. Teachers make these predictions every year, and it is with these in mind that universities make the offer of a place. Offers are made either unconditionally or with the proviso that the predictions are realized or bettered. In recent years, more and more offers have been made unconditionally, and these now comprise around a of the total.

Boris Johnson Takes Britain Back to Square One

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Universities do this because they are dependent upon the fees each student pays: no students, no fees, no university. The pressure rises as universities expand, and each finds itself having to attract a greater share of a of school leavers. Restrictions imposed by a hostile immigration service on international students’ movements, and now in response to COVID-19, have made matters worse.

The Algorithm

This year was also different because, when the results were issued on August 13, it was obvious that Ofqual had intervened. The grades awarded to many students bore little resemblance to the schools’ predictions. Worried that teachers were being too generous and that this would undermine the credibility of the exams, Ofqual devised and applied a to moderate the results. The algorithm took account of the students’ mock results and the performance of each school in previous years, amongst other variables. The calculations determined that 40% of grades should be reduced. This threw offers and plans into doubt, causing umbrage among students, parents, teachers and universities.

Gavin Williamson, the education secretary, stuck resolutely to his guns. By August 17, he had abandoned them, and the original predicted results were reinstated. Williamson had been blindsided by Ofqual, he , and only became aware of the full implications of the recalculations over the weekend. Ofqual struck back, saying that Williamson had known difficulties were brewing ever since March, when he ordered the regulator to adjust grades if they appeared inflated.

It was then made known that the head of Ofqual, Roger Taylor, established and ran a firm implicated in the . His firm, Dr Foster,  had come up with an algorithm enabling the hospital to present its mortality rates as low when, in fact, they were dangerously high and its patients were being dreadfully mistreated.

Just what had Gavin Williamson been levelling at? The entire mess was completely avoidable and unnecessary. No exams had been taken, so there were no exams to be brought into disrepute. And there had been no exams because of exceptional circumstances. So why treat the teacher’s predictions as an assault on standards, especially when predictions are made every year and unconditional offers are issued to a fair proportion of students as a matter of course?

Whatever the answer, the response was immediate. Gasps of disbelief at the secretary’s sheer incompetence (“He’s fucking useless,” one vice chancellor) were combined with emotional outbursts from students worried that their lives had been ruined, from parents trying to deal with the fallout at home, and from university staff whose summer breaks were interrupted.

All parties most likely suspected that things would eventually sort themselves out if only because chancellors are desperate to fill seats. Having said that, the government and Ofqual displayed a complete absence of trust in teachers and schools. Most disgraceful was the treatment of students with potential and drive who had worked hard against the odds in schools assessed as poor over the last few years. At a macro-level, it meant that the proportion of the (the bottom third) who achieved a Grade C or better fell by nearly 11%, while the independent schools saw their proportion of A and A* grades increase by nearly 5%.

An education secretary, whose only claim to the job is that he was not educated at an independent school and did not go to Oxford or Cambridge, willfully took away the ladder from the very kids it is meant for. A more callous and spiteful decision in the name of equality is difficult to imagine. However, the farrago matters for another, even more important, reason. It illustrates just how superficial education has become.

Grades Are Everything

The A-levels are not just a passport to university. A school whose students’ average grades fall too far will come under greater scrutiny from the government, which can end in sanctions of one sort or another. These include changing staff pay and conditions; removing staff and governing bodies; turning the school’s budget over to an interim board; closing the school; or handing it (minus its former staff) to an academy. Academies, though state-funded, have more control over management, curriculum, pay, the selection of students and staff, and the freedom to attract money from private sponsors.

Of the 3,400 or so state-funded secondary schools (3.25 million pupils), nearly three-quarters (about 2.3 million children) are now . If an academy fails, then it, too, is either absorbed by a more successful one or closed. Independent schools judged to be failing can also find themselves in trouble. For instance, they may be prohibited from taking on new pupils, fined or closed. Proprietors who do not respond adequately to enforcement notices can end up in prison.

Grades, then, have come to mean everything. And because they mean everything, what they are supposed to signify has come to mean very little at all. The education system — and “system” is a good description — barely manages to educate. Where a good education is found in English schools, it is provided by teachers and parents despite the vast amount of nonsensical instructions (misleadingly entitled “guidelines”) issued by the government. In these oases of levelheadedness, staff teach outside the system’s narrow confines, helping children to explore more rounded and deeper understandings of the world, introducing them to new ways of thinking.

The problem is not just that teachers are weighed down and worn out by red tape. To avoid falling foul of the government and its quality enforcers, teachers must consume millions of words of legislation, statutory instruments, notices and guidance that lay out in extraordinary detail everyday practice within the school. It is that education — or rather the fulfillment of standards dictated by the government — has become a bureaucratic procedure, a glorified exercise in form-filling, in which content, imagination, experimentation and sustained and unconventional thought no longer matter.

Children and teachers must do what they are told to do in the way they are told to do it. “Best practice” holds sway over fresh thought. The student must see the world as directed. Thus, for instance, a play is a composite of meaning shaped by literary and dramatic devices. History is an unstable melange of constructions arrived at by historians through their interpersonal relationships. The economy must be studied through the application of the correct economic models. Only by breaking the mind into a kaleidoscope of skills through which patchworks of information are collected and assembled, declare geography teachers, can social and natural worlds be understood. Facts, interpretations and evidence are set out in neat bullet points so they can be memorized and marshalled in the correct way and in the correct place.

All of this and more — such as precisely defined “command words” like “analyze” and “suggest,” and the marks to be awarded for each correctly placed fact or argument — is found in thick, glossy volumes of “specifications,” “amendments,” “sample assessments,” published “resources,” “mark schemes,” “specimen papers,” “exemplar material,” “schemes of work,” “skills for learning and work” and “topic materials” produced by exam boards for each subject.

Officialism smothers all schools. But when parents are well educated and bring up their children to read, learn, write, talk and think coherently, teachers have an easier time of it. Children are confident, and this shows in class and in their work. Teachers know that as far as the exams are concerned, their students can, to all intents and purposes, teach themselves. A teacher’s immediate job is to make sure a child is practiced in the bureaucracy and is given the required information. This will deliver the grades.

The second, and more important job, is to lead their children out and well beyond those limitations. It is this — a passion for their subject and a willingness to go further — that really prepares the child for university and beyond. Most, though not all, of these schools are independent and selective.

State-funded schools are far more constrained by the system, and it is all they can do to meet its demands. The bureaucracy does not allow them the time, freedom, money or incentive to instill in children and parents the outlooks, values, beliefs, practices and confidence that will enable them to see beyond the government’s petty world view.

I should say that the distinction I make between independent and state is too stark. There are some excellent state schools, and there are some terrible independent schools — unhappy little communities tucked away in some old building in the countryside. My point is simply that education, rather than its bureaucratized version, is found unevenly and rarely, and is more likely where teachers and parents have the wherewithal and determination to play the system and so keep it from dragging them and their children down into a mire of niggling and pointless tasks, boredom and despondency.

Not Much Help

British universities have not been much help. Rather than find common cause with schools and encourage them in fostering a university-style education, universities have gone along with government reforms all too easily and are becoming more like brash, over-confident schools. The university has become a brand, an experience, a rite, designed to extract as much cash as possible from students. Walk away with a good degree, the student is told, and our brand will confer upon you a charisma, a light, a duende that will set you up for life or at least give you a foot in a door so that you show an employer what you can do. Meanwhile, behind all the pizzazz, the content of the degree is scratched away at and the process through which the certificate is awarded becomes more bureaucratic.

The trend is especially obvious in universities without a well-established pedigree. Why should a student pay tens of thousands of pounds for a certificate from a university no one has heard of? The answer is “relevance,” and relevance means “skills.” As the degree is hollowed out, the space is filled with an omnium-gatherum of skills: cognitive skills, intellectual skills, key skills, transferable skills, employment-related skills, practical skills, applied skills, inter-personal skills, writing skills, reading skills, thinking skills, networking skills, team-working skills, observational skills, speaking skills, speech-making skills, analytical skills, editing skills, note-taking skills, research skills, computing skills, entrepreneurial skills, lab skills, creative skills, leadership skills, work ethic skills and ethical skills.

Choose a verb or adjective, put the word “skill” after it, and it becomes teachable, assessable and marketable. To write an essay or a thesis or to take an exam is to engage in a piece of bureaucracy, an updated form of medieval scholasticism, in which all these skills are stitched together, tracked and traced.

By lifting a corner of the veil, the A-level fiasco exposes a little of the humbug swirling around the government’s education system and something of the cynicism with which the government treats the people it claims to represent. Just how deep this cynicism goes, however, is revealed by a matter from which the farce distracted public attention over the last week — a week that I suspect will prove deadly. I say deadly because it will be difficult in the time left to deter the government from repeating the same mistakes it made at the start of the pandemic that cost over 40,000 lives.

At present, the UK government and its scientific advisers are busy saturating the press with its claim that the “life chances” of children will be damaged irreparably if schools stay closed. A generation of children will “fall behind,” many of those who rely on schools to feed them will go hungry, and many others, forced to stay at home, will be at greater risk of physical, sexual and emotional abuse.

The government’s chutzpah is breathtaking. To indict the produce of its own policies and then use that indictment as cheap blackmail in support of those same policies is surely the height of contempt. A of the population is poor because of government actions and inactions over many years. It is these “ordinary” people, as ministers like to call them, who are most under pressure to go work because of cuts to welfare, changes in benefit rules and threats from government.

It is also they who, last time around, from a virus allowed to run loose. And it is their children who are most likely to bring it back home after struggling on public transport and spending hours in crowded classrooms working on pointless and soul-destroying bureaucratic techniques. The only strand of reasoning that makes some kind of sense in this tangled web of lunacy is a ruthless one: the primary function of the education system is to keep Britain’s labor force — and especially its cheaper end — at work.

The views expressed in this article are the author’s own and do not necessarily reflect 51łÔąĎ’s editorial policy.

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History Will Judge Britain’s COVID-19 Response

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On March 23, Johnson led the UK into a lockdown. It was far too late. In May, he led the country out of lockdown in what was supposed to be an incremental fashion. It was far too early. It was also confusing, chaotic and only encouraged people to abandon all pretense long before the final restrictions were lifted in July and August.

Johnson is now back where he started, declaring, as he did before March 23, that normality and the economy must be preserved at all costs. As before, are on the rise, especially in London and parts of the north. As before, these facts are being ignored. Under no circumstances will a second lockdown be contemplated, nor will schools close after September 1. Responses to any future outbreaks will be localized and short term.

If Possible

The being handed to England’s hapless schools is remarkably similar to that issued back in January, February and March: wash your hands, clean surfaces and, if possible, keep your distance from each other. (The government adds “” to its documents because it knows full well that such distancing is impossible in most schools and in most classrooms.) As before, teachers or children who are clinically vulnerable — or who are shielding a husband or wife, a mother or father, a daughter or son who is clinically vulnerable — can attend school and should do so when the new term starts in early September.

If you are a parent who is determined to keep your child at home, you will be fined, as before, by the secretary of state for education. And, as before, there will be no testing unless someone displays symptoms. There is, however, one innovation being introduced this time around: children, parents and staff who do show any symptoms are asked to get themselves tested, to trace contacts and to report their findings to the school.

Johnson’s motivation for all this nonsense is the economy. He is seemingly and willfully unaware that it by a whopping 20% of GDP in the first quarter, to just under 12% across the EU. This is not because Johnson locked down too early and for too long, but because he didn’t lock down early enough or for long enough and didn’t take that breathing space to organize an effective track-and-trace regime or institute a mask-wearing culture. He also failed to engage with local governments and instead treated them with contempt and withheld from them the information they needed to protect the vulnerable. He has, in other words, assiduously ignored the best strategies that are on public display in China, Taiwan, Hong Kong, Macao and South Korea. These include the restriction of movement and physical distancing, rapid identification of positive and suspected cases through mass testing, and the immediate isolation of positive and suspected cases with appropriate treatment rendered.

The pillars of Seoul’s response, for example, are promptness and transparency, and a willingness to learn from the 2015 MERS outbreak. Government, local and national, did not hesitate: It tested aggressively, launched epidemiological investigations and imposed quarantines, shared information and began disinfection efforts.

South Korea saw its first confirmed case of COVID-19 on January 23. Within a week, hand sanitizers and disposable masks were being distributed for free on public transport, and seats and handles were being disinfected. Within 16 days of the first case, museums, galleries and other cultural venues, along with taxis, subways and buses, were being sterilized with ever more frequency, and people who had been exposed were quarantined and given specialist medical care. Within four weeks, screening stations were up and running around the clock. Risky venues such as bars and cafes were closed, and treatment was being extended to citizens with suspected COVID-19 symptoms. Within five weeks, public facilities were shut.

Unsurprising Results

In the UK, within five weeks of the first confirmed case on January 29, Johnson, on the best scientific advice the country could muster, had done almost nothing. The government’s modeling group had advised that isolation and tracking wouldn’t do much other than delay the peak of the epidemic. Life might as well go on as normal. Masks were not needed. More proactive measures were not advised until six weeks after the first case. On March 3, Johnson’s government, having listened to the great and the good of Britain’s scientific community, declared that it would be better if people did not shake hands. That same day, Johnson that he had been shaking hands with everyone, including coronavirus patients.

The results are as stark as they are unsurprising. While the UK has had more than deaths and has taken the to its GDP year on year in the second quarter in 64 years, just over 300 people have died from the virus in , its economy grew through the first quarter and is expected to manage around -0.8% over the year. Even in the Philippines, where the government has been equally as irresponsible as Johnson’s, there are those who see the choice between keeping the economy going and as an entirely fictitious one.

Yet perhaps the most exasperating thing about this whole sorry debacle — surely the worst exhibition of foolhardiness and incompetence since the 1853 Crimea campaign, the First World War, Neville Chamberlain’s policy of appeasement or Britain’s chaotic and bloody withdrawal from India (take your pick) — is the fact that Boris Johnson is still in Number 10. Not so long ago, a few weeks before the outbreak, I heard a young lecturer, a social psychologist from China, say that the English, so used to being smothered by their government and their aristocracy, are most at ease as placid and compliant followers. I’m beginning to see what she meant.

*[This article previously stated that the UK has had more than 60,000 deaths from the coronavirus. Updated: August 19, 2020]

The views expressed in this article are the author’s own and do not necessarily reflect 51łÔąĎ’s editorial policy.

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Attempts to test and track the virus were abandoned weeks ago. Testing of medical staff and people with symptoms at an early stage has been inconsistent or absent, and remains a shamble. The list goes on.

But it is extremely unlikely that successful prosecutions will ever be brought. Nor is there any certainty that Prime Minister Boris Johnson and his ministers will suffer at the ballot box or be punished by unrest on the streets. Why? Governments, to some extent, reflect society. A good many people in Britain, even if they don’t vote Conservative, share the attitudes and mores of their government.

Moral Cowardice

Professor Christopher Whitty, the country’s chief medical officer, speaking at a Downing Street press conference last week, that when we can “look back over this pandemic, I’m sure we will see a high mortality rate in care homes sadly because this is a very vulnerable group, and people are coming in and out of care homes and that cannot, to some extent, be prevented.” He knows full well that care homes have been compelled to take in patients who may well be infected. He also knows that everyone in Britain knows that care homes have issued warning after warning about the risks they are being forced to take. Yet the lie is told and left unchallenged.

This is just one instance of the moral cowardice that pervades Britain’s response. Advisers and ministers hide behind intellectual snobbery, the authority of their office and secrecy. They are not prepared to make admissions of any consequence. They pretend that what is happening is not happening.

On March 14, Health Secretary Matt Hancock that herd immunity without vaccination was the government’s strategy. His advisers had said otherwise on television and radio over the previous two days. The fiction then turned increasingly Byzantine. Now that the disclosure had made a lockdown politically necessary, a different by Professor Neil Ferguson, an epidemiologist at Imperial College London who sits on the government’s Scientific Advisory Group for Emergencies (SAGE), was quickly seized on to justify the sudden change in policy.

Yet nine days later on March 25, because herd immunity remains the government’s long-term goal and provides the scientific gloss to release the UK from its lockdown, Ferguson then his study’s assumptions to generate rather different results to fit the new political realities. Instead of what initially was 510,000 deaths, he was now predicting around 20,000.  

Meanwhile, in the days immediately after the revelation and denial that herd immunity was government policy, ministers had to cobble together a which until then was just not on the agenda, let alone planned for, according to another member of SAGE, Professor John Edmonds. Unsurprisingly, ministers were in no position to test, trace, ensure supplies of PPE, protect care homes, gather reliable and timely statistics or stop people from moving about.

Led by Science?

Moral cowardice also hangs over SAGE. When ministers boast that their decisions are “led by science,” they are referring to the deliberations of the advisory group. Repeated day after day over the last three months, the phrase has become little different to a religious chant. The sect’s membership was kept secret until April 25 when names were to The Guardian. Among those was Dominic Cummings, the prime minister’s chief political adviser. By no stretch of the imagination can he be considered as a scientist, let alone impartial.

It is not just this deceit and the group’s secrecy that suggests cowardice. It marshals ideas, hunches, observations and possibilities through personal networks and coteries, and presents these as certainties, as evidence, as science. This, too, smacks of cozenage.

The group includes academics who have made their names by devising models, applying them in analysis and trumpeting their policy implications. Mathematical models are used in all kinds of disciplines and generate all kinds of interesting and curious results when one or two assumptions here or there are changed. It is these results, especially if counterintuitive, which are, to the academic, the “clever bit.”

Graham Medley (one of SAGE members) has developed that permit him to argue that it can be in the best interests of an organism’s immune system — and by extension communities of organisms — to tolerate a level of infection rather than eradicate it altogether. The infection is not eliminated because to do so exacts a biological cost (in terms of say, energy) which may not be in the interest of that organism. The same logic applies at a different level to human societies.

One of his colleagues at SAGE, Angela McClean, who also advises the Ministry of Defense, has often that vaccines that are too effective and whose coverage of the population is extensive can, in her models, encourage the emergence of new, vaccine-resistant diseases. It is often best, therefore, to ensure that vaccines are only just about effective, or that highly effective vaccines are given to a small enough segment of the population.

The Only Way Out

It is not difficult to see how the group arrived at herd immunity and why, despite protestations to the contrary, it is determined to stick with it. To that end, all kinds of shenanigans have been tried. A few small instances serve to illustrate this.

On March 26, McClean’s Department of Zoology at Oxford posted an which, on the basis of another model and its assumptions, claims that significant levels of herd immunity without vaccination have already been achieved in the UK — a useful argument and piece of “evidence” for those hoping to release from the lockdown as soon as possible.

On April 25, Cummings’ wife, Mary Wakefield, was given a slot on BBC’s Today — a radio program that claims to be strictly impartial and holding the government to account. She was given the “Thought for the Day,” a five-minute slot of uninterrupted commentary on a question usually of moral or religious in nature. Wakefield used it to say that her husband is really a very nice man. As it happens, she is also commissioning editor for The Spectator, a magazine that has run by journalists and doctors in favor of putting an immediate end to the lockdown and .

Herd immunity, science has decided, is the only way out. It was always so. Exposure to the coronavirus — and the illness and death that often follows — is in the interests of society. Most people intuitively know this to be wrong. But for SAGE to recognize this, and to put ambition to one side, requires a courage that its members do not possess.

Leading From a Long Way Behind

Just as distasteful is the physical cowardice of Britain’s political leaders and advisers. You won’t find Boris Johnson leading his people from the front. As the virus made its way toward Britain, and as deaths mounted in Europe, he spent a good deal of time in the countryside with his girlfriend, Carrie Symonds, playing down the threat. When the virus arrived on his doorstep in London, he was out shaking hands and did not think to attend . When his own callousness finally caught up with him, he hid on a private ward behind a mask soaking up oxygen and sympathy.

He recuperated at a grace-and-favor manor house in Buckinghamshire as his government continued to evade while the people its leads were dying in their thousands. He eventually emerged on April 27, two days before he was showered with congratulatory messages from the British establishment on the birth of his child with Symonds.  

His scientific advisers — and they are very much his advisers— won’t raise their heads above the parapet either, though they expect the rest of the population to do so. Don’t be fooled into thinking they are mild-mannered scholars interested only in research and education who had no idea their abstractions would be taken up and used in ways they never wanted or expected. They are on the committee because they have long made a point of becoming an influence on political and administrative policy. That ambition is written into their research articles and research grants. They are content to glide through the corridors and committee rooms of Whitehall and academia, or to sit at dinner and engage in clever conversation with the great and the good, sure in the knowledge that they are too valuable, too special to be lost to an unthinking virus.

Britain’s Shame

Hopefully, Britain will think carefully about what kind of society it has become and what kind of leaders it has thrown up. But I know it well enough to know that won’t happen. Britain will conceal its portrait in the attic, too frightened to see just how rotten it has become.

Instead, a public inquiry will be held to ensure that such a disaster “can never happen again.” The mistakes made, it will have already been decided, were structural, to be remedied by superficial organizational changes. Recommendations on the role of political advisers and the composition of scientific committees will no doubt figure. Perhaps, it will be suggested gently, universities might also want to think about encouraging more robust debate amongst scientists? Perhaps they should also look more critically at how academics are rewarded and assessed?

British exceptionalism might be mentioned, but that, it will be said — with far greater tact — is an outdated cultural predilection that probably won’t survive a few aging embarrassments on the backbenches and in the shires. By the time this anodyne report is published, years after the pandemic subsides and the political point-scoring has lost steam, any impact it might have had will be reduced to a headline or two if the news on that day is slow.

The dead will have to wait for historians, who today are probably only children, to assign responsibility and guilt, retribution and damnation, because the living are too afraid to take a long hard look at themselves.

The views expressed in this article are the author’s own and do not necessarily reflect 51łÔąĎ’s editorial policy.

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People were at first encouraged to work from home and to avoid pubs, clubs and crowds. On March 20, places to eat and drink and entertain were told to close. Anyone who felt ill was advised to isolate themselves for seven days; later, it was suggested they do so for two weeks. On March 18, Prime Minister Boris Johnson said tests for COVID-19 will increase from 5,000 per day to 25,000. Doctors and other National Health Service (NHS) staff, who until then were not being tested even if symptomatic, will now be prioritized. Schools have also closed to most pupils. The possibility of further, more stringent measures has been left open.

The British Government Is About to Fail on Coronavirus

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These modifications do not amount to a complete volte-face. Neither social distancing nor isolation are compulsory. It will take about a month to reach the target of 25,000 tests a day so that, for the moment, the sick will not know if they have the virus unless they end up in hospital. This delay to treatment may reduce their chances of survival and puts families at risk. Schools remain open to the children of key workers, a category which in practice includes just about the entire public sector and anyone involved in food distribution and transport, as well as journalists, the clergy and morticians. Trains and buses are still running, though in smaller numbers, leaving many of them .

On March 19, at a held at the Academy of Medical Science, the government’s chief scientist, Sir Patrick Vallance, and its chief medical officer, Professor Christopher Whitty, did not seem chastened in the least. Tactics evolve as new data comes in. Different opinions are welcome, Whitty said, provided they are expressed with courtesy. He went on to identify three categories of “critiques.” The first — that the government scientists have the right strategy but wrong timing — he described as legitimate. The other two comprise criticisms of a technical nature and demands that they should act to locate the virus, break transmission and end the outbreak. These last two critiques, he said, were not supported by science and did not fit the right theoretical framework.

This is a courteous way of saying that we won’t listen to you unless you think like us. Rather than stop the virus in its tracks, it is best to manage its spread throughout society. Otherwise the NHS will be overburdened, and herd immunity cannot be established. How else will life get back to normal, the economy rescued and the effects of subsequent viral waves mitigated?

Reluctance to Criticize

It is difficult to know for the moment if the measures introduced over the last few days are a fudge or a sop. It is possible that Whitty’s apparent sensitivity to criticism suggests he feels sidelined. Alternatively, it might be that the new measures are window dressing for Whitty’s “theoretical framework,” and that this remains firmly in place. The country is being guided by “the latest Government modelling,” The Daily Mail its readers on March 22.

Either way, an explanation for the extraordinary crisis Britain now faces is needed if there is to be any hope of remedial action. Part of the explanation is a belief in the superiority of Britain’s “mature” democracy and Johnson’s own personal laissez-faire approach to all facets of life. Another part is the government’s feeling that, after his recent electoral victory, a sizeable chunk of the population is still with the prime minister.

There is also a concern that the government cannot be seen to have lost credibility, let alone control. Before March 18, people were so doubtful about the advice issued, they had already begun to take matters into their own hands. Teachers were calling in sick. Parents were keeping their children at home. One private school after another decided to close down. And the education minister, Gavin Williamson, had resorted to threatening court action against the heads of some state schools if they took upon themselves to shut up shop.

A further part of the explanation is that while the government is considered fair game, there is a general reluctance to criticize Vallance and Whitty forcefully, directly and immediately. The men in question are thought to know their stuff, and few commentators want to be associated with the new right’s instinctive and pointless loathing of experts and science. A few critics, like Anthony Costello and John Ashton, have spoken out loudly and clearly — irrelevant and discourteous rants to Whitty’s ears. On the whole, though, the debate on the scientists’ easy-does-it approach sounds more like an academic seminar in which each participant is dependent upon every other for their reputation and station.

It has all been very restrained and gentle: “I’m not sure this is the best we can do”; “I worry that”; “another strategy might be”; “Do we have enough evidence”;  â€śIt is a measured approach”; and “We urge the government to reconsider.” , writing for The Guardian, demurred: “I can’t judge who’s right,” noting that trust in Whitty is very high. Even , editor-in-chief of The Lancet, pulled his punches. He acknowledges that the “best” scientists knew the bug was lethal (all the others did not?). “Something has gone wrong,” he told The Guardian, but “I don’t know why.”

There has been “a collective failure among politicians and perhaps even government experts to recognise the signals that Chinese and Italian scientists were sending,” Horton went on. But he knows Whitty and Vallance, he says, and “has the utmost respect” for them and the talented researchers whose support they draw on.

Led By Scientists

The government’s efforts to build up their scientists — the “best” of whom, it would seem, were already brimming with confidence — also makes it difficult to take a crack at them. When Johnson gives his briefings, he is flanked by Whitty and Vallance, stony-faced and gimlet-eyed. They stand there like high priests through whom the king communes with the gods. That the government response is “entirely science-led” is the uttered by every minister at every opportunity.

Effusive about Whitty are seeded in the press. When it was pointed out that the government’s response was out of step with much of the rest of the world, the reply was that Britain is led by science, not by the kind of populist and ineffective measures peddled elsewhere. When more than 200 mathematicians, geneticists and other specialists wrote an open letter expressing their doubts, the  that none of the signatories is a leading expert in the science of the spread of diseases.

The health secretary, Matt Hancock, in reply to such doubters, was more dismissive: “What we will do is listen to all the credible scientists and we will look at all the evidence.” When “ordinary” people wondered when schools will finally close, they were patronized: You might find it counterintuitive, they were told, but it really isn’t necessary and, in fact, would be counterproductive.

Treated with a deference that is almost feudal, the two chief scientists’ word and judgment has become irreproachable. They are free to indulge. Why shouldn’t they explore their own theoretical insights? Why shouldn’t they go for herd immunity, not through vaccination, but through exposure to a disease known to be deadly? Why not try out their own model? Why not blend epidemiology with behavioral science? Why not even pioneer a completely new way of managing pandemics, one that requires minimum intervention and is highly cost-effective?

No wonder they appear so authoritative even as they nonchalantly discard the most basic principles of disease control: stop people moving around, find out where the virus is, break the chains of transmission and find a cure or a vaccine.

Whitty and Vallance are right, and the rest of the world is wrong. They ignored China’s experience, the reports coming out of the country and the warnings issued by the World Health Organization. Instead, they preferred to model — to re-present the real world as mathematical symbols which are then manipulated to elucidate variables before being transposed back into their real-world counterparts. It is a pleasant enough pastime, but no substitute for effective government, sound judgment and nuanced decision-making, especially when time is short and lives are at stake.

Clopening

While they model, London and the rest of the country burn. Up until 5 p.m. on March 20, schools were left open to fan the disease. The transmission of a virus among children in classrooms and common areas is, of course, a complex matter. It depends on thousands of variables: anything and everything from air flow and surfaces, to respiratory rates and friendship groups. But children do spread it about.

There are half a million teachers and 400,000 other staff working in more than 30,000 schools attended by around 10 million children of all ages scattered around the country. It is a ready-made system for transmitting the virus from hospital staff through their children back into the general population who then turn up at hospitals to start the cycle all over again. Whitty and Vallance made it easier for the virus by leaving hospital staff unprotected and untested, and by leaving every train carriage and bus crammed with tired commuters, and every pub, club, café, restaurant and office full to the brim until the very last minute.

Even after March 20, schools will still be used by a large number of children and adults, skeleton transport services are running, and people are free to move about. Local authorities in London even have a name for this: “clopening.”

Another crucial matter about which Vallance and Whitty are supremely confident is the death rate. No more than 0.001% they have said time and again, and certainly less than 1%. Yet the evidence on the ground in China and elsewhere is that the cases turning up in hospitals are not the tip of a vast iceberg. The death rate is closer to 3.4% and much higher for older people.

Pride or Unity?

The government’s scientists have been slow to react because they are sure they are right, and no one is prepared to disabuse them of this. As infections, deaths and questions mount, the government finds itself in something of a quandary. It is easy for Johnson, intent on political survival, to drop most of his ideological predilections. It is more difficult to drop his scientists. He has had to look for another model to justify a partial back-to-basics approach to disease control. He found one that a quarter of a million deaths if the government held its course.  

It is commonplace that science, like all knowledge, thrives when criticism is open, when hierarchies are dispensed with and when court favorites are dismissed. Britain has forgotten this.

From the very beginning of this farrago, politicians talked about a war against COVID-19. This is ridiculous. There is no war. A virus is loose amongst us. We are faced with what is at once a massive operational challenge and — in locating the virus, treating those infected with it and vaccinating against it — a scientific one. British scientists have been far too clever by half. They have strayed far beyond their competencies and sought to reshape the logistics of the campaign and, to this end, dispense with basic practical measures needed to save lives.

Government first empowered them and then stood back, abandoning the populace to the virus. The recent change in tack, whether superficial or not, is probably too late. Many “ordinary” people, as they are constantly referred to with unashamed condescension by their government, will now take the fall.

Can anything be done about it? The reasons why Britain is in this mess suggest that any remedial action will have to be drastic and immediate. Boris Johnson must be removed if not from office then from any influence over decisions. His scientists, who often seem to be more concerned with theory and fragile egos than with the carnage that is to follow, must also go and be replaced by those who are more practical, sensible and humane. A government of national unity will enable this. It will not end the death and misery which Johnson, Whitty and Vallance have already set in motion, but at least it might reduce the final tally.

The views expressed in this article are the author’s own and do not necessarily reflect 51łÔąĎ’s editorial policy.

The post Why It’s Taking Britain So Long to Tackle COVID-19 appeared first on 51łÔąĎ.

Coronavirus Outbreak Puts the World’s Governments on Notice

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The motive is ideological, though they claim their strategy is fixed in science and fact. The remarkable successes witnessed in China and the vital lessons to be learned from its experience are simply being ignored. Speaking on the BBC’s Today Programme on February 28, Jeremy Hunt, the former health secretary, put it in more palatable terms: Being a “mature” democracy means that Britain’s government does not need to act like China’s.

Business as Usual

A point which he and many others in Britain seem to have forgotten is that in China most families have elderly relatives living with them. If the coronavirus strikes, younger people will see their parents and grandparents suffer and, in all too many cases, die. Empathy, sympathy and common humanity more than any other consideration explain China’s willingness to sacrifice economic growth rather than the old and the vulnerable.

In Britain, elderly relatives are mostly put out of sight and left out of mind. It’s hard to tell how many avoidable deaths will be needed before younger people realize that it is their own elderly relatives who are being sacrificed. But only then, I fear, will the government and its medical advisers abandon the perverse and callous pride they take in putting economy and normality first, and in avoiding the decisions and expenditure which in China have saved hundreds of thousands of lives.

For now, people in the UK are being told to wash their hands frequently and for at least 20 seconds on each occasion. They are told to blow their noses into tissue and bin it. They are told not to touch their faces. They are told to stay at home if they are unwell. This will slow up the inevitable spread of the virus and buy time, though for what is unclear. Neither schools, universities nor places of work — including Parliament — will close. Trains and buses will stick to their routines. Under no circumstances will cities be closed off and their populations quarantined in their homes.

Even as the of cases grows, “the vast majority of people in this country” can and should go about their business as usual. Food supplies to the supermarkets will be maintained. The police will continue to police and the fire service will fight fires, although their priorities may change. The National Health Service will delay non-urgent care. If teachers are sick, larger classes will be permitted. If schools do have to close, it will be as a last resort and only in the event of a major epidemic, in which case grandparents — whose age puts them most at risk — will be asked to look after children who have all the while been kept in class passing the virus amongst themselves. If doctors and nurses fall by the wayside, retired colleagues and unqualified students will be recruited. People over 70 — except, presumably retired doctors, nurses and teachers — will be banned from attending large gatherings.

Younger people who volunteer to work in whatever capacity is needed to fill the gaps left in public services will have their jobs kept for them for a month. Small businesses will receive financial help. Research into the virus will be stepped up.

So confident is it, Downing Street has even overruled the Department of Health and decided not to remain part of the through which members of the European Union coordinate cross-border action to prevent, control or mitigate pandemics. At the same time, surveyed said the country was unprepared for the outbreak; just 8 of 1,618 shared the government’s optimism.

Normality at Whatever Cost

Normality is to be preserved, no matter what. People are told that the chances of any one person catching the virus are small. This may well be true for me or you, but someone will catch it. And for as long as each of us feels that the chances of infection remain small, the number of cases and deaths will mount. People are told that there will be “excess” deaths as if each death is merely a death foretold — a death moved from one accounting period to a marginally earlier one. People are told the will be less than 1%, a figure based on the expectation that there are many more people with the virus than reported.

Meanwhile, the figure given by the World Health Organization (WHO) is 3.4%, a number that is not just in China but in other major outbreaks around the world. The truth is no one will know what the death rate is until long after the outbreak has subsided. Yet the British government has already decided what “fact” it wants to put its faith in.

It is often said that only fools learn from their own experience. In Boris Johnson, we have the worst of fools. But he and his entourage — for that is what the government has become — will not even have that excuse, for they have been warned again and again about their lack of preparedness and the vacuity of their plans. “Act now, pull out all the stops, and learn from China,” cries out the .

“Negligent” and “ridiculous” is how many GPs (general practitioners, in the UK the first port of call for people who feel unwell) the government’s response. There are insufficient beds and health workers even at the best of times, and beds for the critically ill and ventilators are in even . The clown and his court are fully culpable for what is about to happen.

The views expressed in this article are the author’s own and do not necessarily reflect 51łÔąĎ’s editorial policy.

The post The British Government Is About to Fail on Coronavirus appeared first on 51łÔąĎ.

The Last British Governor of Hong Kong

The present troubles are rooted in the snake oil peddled before 1997 by what is now, very largely, an English Conservative Party that was then in office. Like all British governments, they scattered appointments about like golden corn to clucking hens.

Chris Patten, the last governor of Hong Kong before the end of the British administration, was a parochial politician for one of the most parochial constituencies in England: Bath. He was no statesman. But he was good at presenting arguments clearly — and himself as thoughtful, intelligent, intellectual, self-deprecating and wise — irrespective of the truth. Patten ran in a successful general election for the Conservatives in 1992, though he lost his own seat in the UK Parliament. For this, he was rewarded and compensated with Hong Kong.

Once there, his thinking didn’t change. He took the view that the Beijing leadership — responsible for the well-being of 1.16 billion people at the time and for lifting hundreds of millions from poverty — ought to make exceptions for an Englishman who still had his mind on home and what it would think of him after the handover of Hong Kong to Chinese authorities. Patten created the impression that he and the British cared about Hong Kong, and that Hongkongers (just like the good people of Bath) would control their own destiny through local democratic mechanisms that he would introduce. He advertised himself and his reforms shamelessly. It was an exhibition in self-delusion and sentimentality only now matched by Prime Minister Boris Johnson’s desire for Brexit, no ifs, no buts.

True, Patten was dealt a poor hand. Although the colonial administration could be effective when its military-style simplicity and self-imposed limitations were at their best, Hong Kong never had good government, let alone democracy. The majority of people had always lived in cramped accommodation as they do today, struggling to make ends meet through work, work, work and still more work. There was corruption in the administration, in the universities, in the judiciary and in business. The police worked hand in glove with gangsters. Everyone from the poorest immigrant to the highest colonial officer had to pay their way somehow.

Those insulated by money or a passport to another world might have found life in Hong Kong to be an “experience,” exciting and even romantic. For the rest, it was a grubby, dog-eat-dog existence. But Patten made a bad situation worse by foisting on it the democratic pretentions of an English market town.

Consequently, Hong Kong was left with no tradition of good government and no pool of committed and effective public servants. There was just a collection of tycoons and merchants, intellectuals and professionals, only some of whom might conceivably oversee Hong Kong’s gradual integration with China. The field was narrowed further after many of them — hooing and cooing at the world in what D.H. Lawrence called an “Oxford voice” or, worse still, a “would-be Oxford voice” — wrapped themselves in Patten’s democratic cloak. They were the ones upholding democracy and defending the people’s “unique” way of life.

So, don’t blame them if they were incompetent; if they were unable to agree on anything or do anything; if they failed the people through maladministration and petty bickering; if they had no imagination or foresight or just did not care; or if they spent their time grandstanding while others scratched out a living in tiny rooms amongst the skyscrapers.

Blame the outsiders instead. Blame the day-trippers who pack the shops, stuff their wheelies full of Gucci and Yves Saint Laurent, pour through the streets, clog up the trains and buses, fill the parking lots, push up prices and are generally “there” in too great a number. Blame the outsiders who are picking up jobs, buying up apartments, fouling up the bureaucracy and public services and who, in just about every other sense, are behaving rather badly. Just blame the outsiders.

For the last two decades, these writhing factions have preferred to engage in whatever shabby tactic is needed to get one up on their opponents. Having grown up in this morass, it is unsurprising that today’s politicians and “influencers,” professional dissenters and career activists (many of whom are still only in their 20s and 30s) are just as uncompromisingly bitter, ambitious and moralistic as their mentors. If things should go badly wrong in Hong Kong, well that will only give these careerists the profile they need and another entry for their résumé. They might even be able to scoop up a stipend as a “scholar” at a prestigious university overseas and write books about the crisis they saw coming.

The Mainland

The most critical problem confronting Hong Kong, and the source of the despondency eating away at its soul, is second-rate political leadership by Hongkongers, for Hongkongers. The solution lies just across the border. If absorbed by Shenzhen, Hongkongers would quickly see an improvement in their living standards. The high-quality government that the city so desperately needs would be forthcoming immediately, the political and physical constraints on the territory would be relieved, living spaces opened up, corruption expunged, businesses controlled and inequalities finally tackled as subventions are pushed toward those who need it most.

Beijing is certain to act positively because its long-term survival, just like that of any other leadership the world over, depends upon how well it looks after those it governs. Moreover, Beijing will want China to look good. And there is the simple fact that the Shenzhen government really does know what it’s doing.

The solution might seem radical, even unthinkable in the present circumstances. Yet full integration by 2047 will take place come what may. I suspect it will be necessary sooner rather than later. At the moment, Hong Kong’s government probably has neither the will to make such a proposal, nor the ability to win enough support for it after 22 years of misrule.

The most likely scenario is that Beijing will increase pressure on Hong Kong’s tycoons to govern properly and look after its own people rather than just administer them. Equally likely, however, is that Hong Kong’s youth, seduced by that Oxford voice breathing gently and languishingly on the back of their necks, will cling to the hope that they can unmix Hong Kong from mainland China. Beijing will then have no choice but to conclude that the slow path to integration is taking Hong Kong over a cliff. Unity will come sooner rather than later but in a different and extremely unhelpful atmosphere — one, it will be said, that all along could have been avoided.

The views expressed in this article are the author’s own and do not necessarily reflect 51łÔąĎ’s editorial policy.

The post It’s Time for Hong Kong to Get Real appeared first on 51łÔąĎ.