This sounds so very reasonable. How could anyone object to politicians objectively listening to rigorous scientists and putting the best possible policies into practice? Surely anyone who dares to question the wisdom of that approach must be as daft and as dangerous as the people who are telling us this variant of Coronavirus was created as a result of installing the 5G network?
Yet hold on a minute. It might just be worth asking what science is and where it reaches its limits and the social science of good policy making takes over.
Science is about objective evidence and repeatable testable experiments. That means that if you want to know whether a particular test for Covid 19 gives valid results then you absolutely must checkout the science and take care to ensure there is real evidence behind claims. It is also a rather good idea to listen to science when it comes to deciding what treatment a patient with symptoms of the disease should receive at any particular stage of their illness. Those are very fact-based assessments.
When it comes to making policies about how to best control the spread of the disease the science is a lot less clear because you are actually dealing with a social and political problem. Once you start asking questions about how to influence human behaviour you enter the world of social science where there is a messy mixture of evidence that has to be assessed with great care and little certainty about how to interpret that evidence and translate it into action.
It is really important not to confuse the two. No government should ever try and dodge constructive criticism of its actions using the excuse that it is powerless to do anything else but follow the extreme wisdom of its current course of action.
Particularly when that course of action has led us to death tolls of over 900 people in hospital in one single day and more in care homes. It is only necessary to compare the death toll in Germany with that of the UK to see that something has gone very wrong with British political decision making during this crisis. With a higher population, and long land borders, Germany has had many fewer deaths. With all the advantages of an island setting, and considerable advance warning, the UK is now exceeding the worst death tolls of Italy.
The reasons for this are pretty clear. Firstly, the UK was slow to act. Boris Johnson let the Cheltenham races go ahead and allowed one in every thousand of the population to mix when the disease was already beginning to spread within the country. We will never know how many of those people took the disease home with them. We can pretty reliably say that the decision cost lives. Incredibly the government was also prepared to allow the Premier League to go ahead as late as 14th March, at the risk of half a million spectators mingling. The games were only cancelled by the responsible decision of the League not by the government.
Then it was quickly discovered that the UK didn’t have enough testing facilities to even succeed in checking whether doctors and nurses in the frontline had the disease. Curiously Germany did have enough kit. That was not down to bad luck in the UK. It was down to bad planning. The UK has actually got quite a strong medical science infrastructure when Universities, the medical industry and the NHS are collectively considered. Germany managed to marshal its facilities and make sure tests were available in time. The UK didn’t and has been playing a very dangerous game of catch up. That wasn’t the result of following scientific advice. It was the result of slow and sloppy decision making.
The worrying lack of kit also applies to personal protective equipment and to ventilators. After a very slow start, the government has actually done rather well at rapidly trying to increase the supply of these things in difficult circumstances. It did extraordinarily badly in refusing to join in an EU wide procurement exercise. That decision wasn’t taken because of scientific guidance. It was taken because it was embarrassing politically to do anything in co-operation with the EU and the decision was then covered up by ludicrously claiming to have lost an email that invited them to participate. Officials had in fact sat in three separate meetings before letting the opportunity go.
Yet one of the other key mistakes the government is making goes completely against the strong border control policies Brexiteers usually love. They have consistently refused to put any meaningful controls on people arriving at airports. So, every day flights arrive from hotspots like Madrid, Rome or New York and the passengers just walk off, get into the transit bus, mingle in the baggage hall, queue up for a quick passport check and are then waived through with an advice leaflet. The UK has so few proper tests available that the government can’t spare them for tests on airport arrivals but there isn’t even a quick temperature check. As a consequence, the empty hotels surrounding Heathrow are not full of quarantine cases. People just get on the tube, then on the train and head off around the country.
All the scientific evidence suggests that the virus originally arrived in the UK by plane. All the scientific evidence suggests that it is wise to avoid travel and so millions of people have been very rightly advised to stay close to their homes and not risk transmitting the disease over significant distances. Yet when challenged on why airport arrivals weren’t being checked the government told us in its daily briefing on 10th April that it wasn’t wise to do so and they were “following the science”.
All the scientific evidence is that there are different strains of the virus around the world. It is not a great idea to keep importing new ones. Sooner or later the UK is going to get on top of the virus domestically. At that point it is going to need to make sure it doesn’t keep coming back into the country. Surely the government needs to start doing something to get the necessary controls in place as soon as possible. Or are we going to once again delay taking action for no good reason?
As I write there are incredibly brave NHS staff working flat out in intensive care wards worrying about the personal protective equipment that is available to them. The dedicated low paid staff in care homes have even less. We all want the government to succeed in their efforts to get more supplies to them, win the battle to control this virus and emerge with the minimum death toll and the minimum damage to the economy. That doesn’t mean we should all shut up and listen without the smallest hint of criticism if the government chooses to follow bad policies.
The vast majority of the whole country is showing great discipline and wonderful community spirit in working together to get through this. It doesn’t remotely help anyone to do that if the government refuses to listen to helpful advice, or to learn from countries that are getting on top of this crisis much more rapidly and much more effectively than we are.
Governments need challenge if they are going to improve policies. Good government rarely comes from us all bowing down before the wisdom of the “dear leader”. Particularly when that leader ignores his own advice, shakes hands with hospital patients and puts his own life at risk at a time of great national crisis. The death toll in the UK has risen faster and harder than almost anywhere else apart from the US, where Trump proved even slower and clumsier in taking action. Asking the citiens of the UK to follow government policy blindly and uncritically after their previous policies have contributed to an appalling death rate isn’t following science fact. It is following science fiction at its worst.