The Sick Man of Europe

It's hard to recall now, but there was a time the UK looked on top of Coronavirus. In the very early days as the outbreak was raging in Wuhan, Iran, and northern Italy, we were treated to a reassuring show of covid-19 victims getting tracked down and carted off to hospital. The people they had been in contact with were traced, tested, and told to stay put. For once, the Tories were on the edge of ... doing the right thing. As the rest of Italy succumbed and Spain fell under its pall, there was a smidgen of possibility the UK might weather the storm with fewer infections and fewer deaths than the countries across the Channel. Two months is a long time in epidemiology these days, and here we are at the end of May leading Europe with the highest incidence of disease and the greatest number of dead. And we take this grisly trophy for one reason. Despite their best efforts at trying to blame the public for not obeying lockdown rules, the Tories' tardiness at implementing the measures necessary to save tens of thousands of lives is responsible. This disaster is on them. There is no one else to carry the can.

Yet, as with all political things, fortune contrived to smile kindly on the Tories. With the initial shock of people being forced to stay home, combined with record job losses, significant cuts to the income of millions of others, and the fear covid-19 has struck into our collective hearts, this sheer incompetence wasn't much noticed. Labour's new leadership also fought shy of trying to highlight it fearful of Keir Starmer being seen playing politics with a life-or-death crisis. Therefore, many were prepared to forgive the government their innumerable sins because we needed them to get it right and, well, no one had been in this situation before. See, the Tories are lucky. The wrong choices could be put down to exceptionalism.

Nothing lasts forever, not even polling honeymoons facilitated by a deadly disease. In this last fortnight, the Tories have appeared determined to do everything to take their immense advantage and throw it around like non-functioning testing kits. We saw the imbecility of forcing open the schools while picking fights with teachers and their unions, retreats on ending furlough early and on NHS charges for foreign-born NHS workers, and a collapse in support thanks to the eternal Dominic Cummings crisis. And the government's response to this state of affairs couldn't be worse. Mindful of the u-turn-if-you-want-to nostalgia of the Tory imaginary, and the barrelling approach to Brexit, they've decided to hunker down and go through with school openings and further lockdown relaxations, with arbitrary dates set for the resumption of sports and opening of non-essential shops. This despite infections and death rates standing many times higher than the next worst afflicted European country. That's what they think of the science they're supposedly led by.

Over the coming decades the awful decisions of this government are sure to be pored over. They're going to be a factor at the general election in four years time and be scrutinised with a fine tooth comb at the upcoming round of trials. Well, you can't blame a guy for dreaming. But what is the root of this bloody-minded idiocy? We know Johnson is lazy and would know a brief if one came to get him out of jail, but it's more than having a personality indifferent to the suffering of others. Remember, this is someone entirely driven by self and the desire for popularity - you couldn't find a politician more appropriate to the age of the attention economy. The government's psychopathy isn't thanks to the personality traits of its Prime Minister and chief adviser, it's the collective property of the dominant wing of the Tories. Before the fall out of Dominic Cummings forced the right wing press to reflect the anger of its readers they were strongly agitating for lockdown restrictions to be eased. Whence does this will-to-psychosis come?

There are two intertwining aspects to understanding the Tories here. The first barely needs much rehearsing because it will be familiar with anyone reading anything to the left of the liberal press: class politics. The history of the Tory party is of its being the preferred, but not sole, arena for the political articulation of ruling class interests, for organising those interests, and representing these sectional interests as if they're identical with those of the country/people. The Tories' hesitation over implementing quarantine measures, their being forced by the measures already taken by the public was, transparently, about keeping the UK's stagnating economy from seizing up. How they've supported people through the crisis by tying subsistence to employers, keeping Universal Credit low, propping up landlords and issuing loans to businesses demonstrated their first concern was maintaining the disciplinary complex underpinning waged labour and market competition. No matter how many old people are shipped back into coronavirus-riddled care homes to die, no capitalist relations of production will be harmed by the pandemic. Even if some changes to the workplace are accelerating. Therefore the lifting of the lockdown is about putting profits before people, reasserting employer authority over employee, and starting the bounce back from the viral depression.

The second is about authoritarianism, which has been the ingrained common sense of British state craft since Thatcher. This is different to what we see in Russia, Hungary, the US, and elsewhere but is driven by the same sorts of processes. As Andrew Gamble observed in his 1988 book, The Free Economy and the Strong State, Thatcher's roll back of the post-war social order was not possible without the state tooling up. Famously it did so to see off the labour movement in the key disputes of the 1980s, but the authoritarianism ran deeper than handing the police more powers and carte blanche to do as they pleased. The Thatcher project was about positioning the government as the absolute authority within the state system. Her attacks on the civil service, the restructuring of education and health, the gutting of local government, and her overall disdain for expert knowledge (except when it was in accordance with her prejudices) reinforced Downing Street as the seat of command to which all other institutions cleaved. Tony Blair settled very well into this practice of government - the rows with the BBC, enforcing more marketisation on public services, and so on. Ditto for Dave's lash up with the LibDems and their programme of austerity in defiance of economic sense, and doubly so with Johnson first on Brexit and now with coronavirus. The parading of SAGE is just there for show - Johnson has no intention of abiding by their advice not because he thinks they're wrong and he's right, but because it goes against the entirety of his political socialisation. There cannot be room for alternative bases of authority in government if, crucially, the Thatcherite settlement within the state apparatus is to be maintained. I therefore fully expect the government to declare victory over the virus some point this summer while infections head toward a second peak and deaths accumulate at a greater rate than present.

I doubt Johnson consciously see things this way. His modus operandi is opportunism, not ideology or an appreciation of the interests of his class. As such, he's also well suited to the government machine bequeathed him by his predecessors. He doesn't have to be held to account, no one in the civil service is going to say no, experts and critics are rubbished as activists with political axes to grind, and they have zero authority in the state system anyway. Whether an active authoritarian like Thatcher or a couch potato authoritarian like Johnson, they want to maintain government privilege - hence also the outright refusal to sack Cummings, even at the risk of diving poll ratings.

In the 1970s, right wing columnists and rent-a-quote Tory MPs used to regularly describe Britain as the sick man of Europe because of rising inflation, sclerotic growth, strikes, inflation, and a generalised malaise. With an unenviable record and a rate of transmission higher now than when we entered quarantine, more people are going to be getting ill, getting incapacitated, and dying as other European countries start easing things and begin the slow journey back to something approximating the normal. Our continued morbidity contrasts unfavourably with their recovery. But our sickness is deeper - the illness of the social body is exacerbated by a disease of the mind, of a governing party and a Prime Minister prepared to sacrifice the many to conserve the profits and power of the few, and a practice of government that encourages him to do so.

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