TORY ministers who have gazed in wonderment at the opinion polling figures — which showed unprecedented majorities of people with positive opinions about the government and the personage of the Prime Minister — must have had a nasty turn when they saw yesterday’s headlines on the front pages of their normally reliable tribunes in the monopoly media.
The government’s serial errors of judgement and indolence in the face of emergency are beginning to play back from the crowded homes and busy social media streams of a population that is now thinking more deeply about what this crisis really means.
Already commentators are speculating that when the inevitable inquiry comes to grips with the facts of the case there will be precious few hiding places and no excuses for the people who hold the reins of power.
No amount of fine words about our heroic health workers will suffice when front-line doctors, nurses and unnumbered NHS staff speak of the anxieties they experience when faced with mounting demands on our hospitals, when the tales of inadequate personal protection kit abound and when vital medics cannot work because they remain untested while they and their personal contacts report symptoms that might signify a Covid-19 infection.
Testing is becoming the test of the government’s competence.
After weeks in which one reason or another was advanced for Britain’s failure to meet the gold standard in epidemic response — which experience in other countries suggests entails extensive and repeated testing and the comprehensive tracking of infection contacts — ministers are making unsupported claims about the roll-out of a testing programme.
This is now the focus, not only of intense media interest but of every conversation over the breakfast table, every social media posting and a zillion Skype and Zoom encounters.
Perhaps the only consolation available to ministers is that Donald Trump looks to be in even more trouble than they do.
Wall Street — the index by which US capital judges itself — has dropped on confirmation that unemployment is shooting up.
The dole in the United States is a double whammy. No money coming in and for most US citizens their health insurance is employer-provided.
The contrast between the response of economies in which decisions about research and development, and contingency planning, are made in a climate of reducing public expenditure and when public procurement is dependent on a market skewed by fragmented private ownership and profit-seeking, and countries in which the anarchy of the market is mitigated by public ownership and a planned economy is daily becoming more apparent.
Of course, not all capitalist economies are in quite the state of ruinous neglect and upside-down priorities as ours.
Other countries have kept a more reasonable balance between productive industry and finance.
Other countries spend a low proportion of their GDP on ruinously expensive war preparation and floating follies like Britain’s so-called nuclear deterrent.
Other countries have better funded health systems and other countries may pay more attention to expert opinion. In Britain ministers make it up as they go along.
But what kind of testing regime emerges from this cock-up will shape the future public health response to such crises.
The very first priority must be to test and retest health workers so that those who are infected can be isolated and treated and when clear of infection return to work.
But a recovery from the hit that the economy is taking — which is felt most sharply by the working class — must lie in isolating sources of infection in society as a whole, driving down the rate of infection and testing widely to that where it is safe and sensible for people to return to work.
