‘Covid-19 has been perhaps the biggest test of governments worldwide since the 1940s,’ declares the government’s command paper on the virus. The fact that the following paragraph proposes ‘a rapid re-engineering of government’s structures and institutions’ is telling. It is an implicit admission that the British government machine is, in several important areas, failing this test.
The argument about whether the UK has the worst death toll in Europe risks descending into statistical absurdity. Until excess mortality figures are known, it won’t be possible to come to a verdict. But it’s hard to argue that the UK has done much better than France, Spain and Italy. We have clearly done worse than Germany and are miles behind South Korea, Taiwan and Japan.
To put it another way, there’ll be no international teams coming to this country to learn how to prepare for a pandemic. This is all the more shocking given that for some time a pandemic had been at the top of the national risk register.
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