There are two aspects of the COVID-19 pandemic. A health aspect and an economic aspect. The health aspect should have been entirely left to the medical and allied professions to deal with and to advise the government to introduce the appropriate public health measures. The government on the other hand should have taken a back seat but led on ameliorating the economic consequences. The net result of the current situation is that the pandemic has been politicised beyond belief and some opinionated people claim to know more than scientists and doctors and HCPs. The government has even appointed a non scientist, a failed business person, to head a new biosafety organisation after dismantling Public Health England in the middle of the pandemic. The person’s main qualifications for this being that she is a great horse riding friend to the health minister and a previous PM. If this reminds you of post soviet states corruption and nepotism it will not come as a shock when you also know that the great Russian oligarchs who have settled here are also great tennis playing chums with our great absolute leader. Millions have been lavished on masks that are useless and test and trace that traces nobody and sub performs numerically chronically for testing. These awards to their cronies who have no experience in these sort of provisions go unremarked upon by our great socialist revolutionary opposition leader who congratulated himself as the architect of the failure of his party’s performance in the last elections, and revealed proudly his part in it and publicly gloats about it.
No this is not a central Asian dictatorship , it is 21st century Britain.
I digress. The government should have had the imagination to deal with a novel pandemic in a novel way, but failed, reverting to the tried and tested graft that is otherwise known as neoliberal capitalism where disasters are opportunities for the rich to make more money. The new normal is nothing of the sort it is not “we are all in it together “ it is survival of the richest who get even richer. A novel way of looking after the population would have created some sort of mass employment for everyone instead of squandering money on failed projects and sleaze and bankers.
But then that looks dangerously like socialism.