Iain Dale presents the evening show on LBC Radio and the For the Many podcast with Jacqui Smith.
The number of people who tell me they would ignore the rules of any new national lockdown is troubling indeed. Despite YouGov reporting that 68 per cent of the nation support such an initiative, were to be in any way successful it would need the full co-operation of the British people, and I now wonder whether that would be forthcoming.
Dominic Cummings’ trip to Barnard Castle back in the spring did an enormous amount of damage. It allowed people to say: “well, if it’s one rule for them and another for us, that’s it. I’ve done my bit’.
However ludicrous the logic might appear, it’s a view many people take. The story of Matt Hancock drinking in a bar after 10pm didn’t help either, no matter what the truth of it was.
It was a clever move by Keir Starmer to break with the Government and side with the scientists who want a circuit breaker lockdown. Clever politically – though perhaps not from any other standpoint.
For as Boris Johnson pointed out at PMQs, SAGE recognised, in the minutes of the meeting in September, that although it recommended a so-called ‘circuit-breaker’ lockdown, it also that recognised the Prime Minister has to weigh this up with other considerations, not least economic and behavioural.
On the face of it, it seems more logical to adopt a regional and local approach to lockdowns. That’s the one that the Opposition leader wants to adopt on test and trace – yet otherwise he’s set on a national lockdown, even for areas with comparatively few cases.
No Labour spokesperson I have interviewed has been able to tell me how to explain to a business in North Norfolk why it should close, when in the whole of the area there are only 19 cases as I write.
Sometimes, we are led to believe that we’re the only country going through this. We hear very little in the media about what’s happening elsewhere in the world, apart from the United States.
Virtually every other country in Europe is introducing new restrictions and experiencing high rates of new infections – yes, even the sainted Germany.
As I write, France has hit 26,000 new infections. Emmanuel Macron has announced a curfew from 9pm to 6am in nine cities, including Paris. He has admitted that many of the country’s biggest hospitals are on the verge of being overwhelmed. Its test and trace system has been even more shambolic than ours, and has been largely abandoned. Where in the British media do you hear about that (apart from on my LBC show, natch)?
It’s as if every failing in the UK system is leapt upon as a further sign of both Johnson’s incompetence and deliberate spite towards a population that he clearly wants to die. It’s preposterous, of course. No one denies that there have been massive failings in all parts of the response to Coronavirus, but why is it that the failings in Scotland, Wales and Northern Ireland aren’t highlighted in the same way?
The figures in Scotland in many areas are worse than in England yet, because she does a press conference every day, Nicola Sturgeon is given a largely free pass by a supine Scottish media.
Holding a press conference in which you repeat yourself each day, but talk a good game, is no substitute for effective policy. And in most areas, Scottish government policy towards Coronavirus has been just as ineffective as that applied in other parts of the UK.
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On my Cross Question programme on Wednesday night, Richard Burgon’s answer to every question on Covid was to trot out a mantra of blaming Boris Johnson for every single failing.
Well, it’s a point of view, but to then rely on New Zealand as proof of the Prime Minister’s incompetence strikes one as incongruous to say the very least. He kept saying that New Zealand has done everything right, and if only we had followed its lead we’d have been OK.
Sometimes, you have to shake your head at the ignorance of some people. How is it possible to compare a country with a population density of 16 per square kilometre with another country which a density of 255 per square kilometre? How is it possible to compare a country whose biggest city’s population is 1.6 million, with one whose capital city has a population of nine million?
I could go on. The challenges of fighting a virus in a country like the UK is very different to that of New Zealand. Having said that, no one can deny the New Zealand government has done a brilliant job, and I am sure there are things we could learn from their experience.
Similarly, we can learn from other European countries, and you’d hope that there’s a lot of learning going on in the Department of Health. Sometimes, one has to wonder, though.
Take test and trace. Three months ago, I interviewed the Mayor of Blackburn. Because the National test and trace scheme was failing to trace people in Blackburn and the R rate was increasingly at a worrying pace, the Mayor and his local council decided to use its own public health people to set up a local test and trace system.
Contrary to some media outlets reported at the time, this was not set up in opposition to the Dido Harding system, it was designed to complement it. If the national system failed to trace someone in 48 hours, details were handed over to the local public health department. It worked like a dream.
‘This is the way forward,’ I thought to myself after the interview. And I assumed that arrangement this would be replicated across the country.
Not a bit of it. Only now is it beginning to happen – with the Department of Health, PHE and National Test and Trace finally working out that more local input is needed. Why has it taken so long for the penny to drop? Ask me another.
What we are seeing in so many areas is a failure of the machinery of government. This will be one of main areas for a public inquiry to delve into.
How can it be right for example, for Boston Consulting to be paid £7,340 per day for each of its consultants who have been hired to advise on test and trace? I do hope there’s a performance element to the contract…if so, they ought to be handing the money back
Obviously, a private company has to make a profit, but £7,340 per day equates to an annual rate of £1.8 million per consultant. There’s taking the piss, and taking the piss. And this qualifies on both counts. Whichever civil servant or minister signed this off has some very serious questions to answer.
And don’t get me started on the EU and the trade talks. I’d better leave that until next week, I think. If only for my own sanity and your blood pressure.