Opinion – Covid-19, and how it has exposed the rotten core of UK government

Although Brixton Buzz mainly deals with local issues, we’re all being affected by the ongoing pandemic, with matters made considerably worse by the government’s incompetent and bumbling handling of the crisis.

Since March last year, the coronavirus forums on urban75 have proved a valuable resource, registering  tens of thousands of posts offering insights, commentary and debate.

We found ourselves in strong agreement with this recent post by Stephen Castle, so we’ve reproduced it in full below:

Opinion – Covid-19, and how it has exposed the rotten core of UK government

While we are busily (and righteously) ripping Boris Johnson’s clown cabinet a new one for their in-the-moment cockups throughout the pandemic, the really bad shit is happening because of decisions taken long ago, and kept in place even now.

 

Here’s how I think the damage has been done.

Accommodation

How many people here (just for example) are living in situations where they’re stuck with housemates, landlords, or lodgers because housing policy over the last 30+ years has been all about restricting the supply of housing, particularly to those at the lower end of the income scale?

 

How much easier would it have been to control in-home infections, if the shortage of housing had not created a situation where people are living, essentially purely for cost reasons, in what are effectively mixed households?

 

Employment – a culture of presenteeism has suited the Government (and particularly those huge businesses who are so generous with their funding to the Tories) very nicely up until now.

 

OK, we’ve had a few rumblings during the nastier ‘flu seasons about people coming in and infecting colleagues, but much of it has been against a kind of acceptance that struggling in to work with obvious symptoms was the Right Thing To Do.

 

Plenty of employers might say “oh, if you have ‘flu, don’t come in” but it’s often within workplaces where sick pay has been pared to the bone, or subject to the iniquitous Bradford Scale, complete with intrusive and punitive return-to-work interviews and an a priori assumption that anyone taking time off sick must be swinging the lead.

 

On top of that, we have the progressive loosening of employment protections that has led to the gig economy and zero-hours contracts, leading to a situation where a vast swathe of the more important tasks being done are being done by people with absolutely no employment security (or sick pay) at all.

 

People like those in the care sector, and – yes – delivery drivers, etc.

 

Which leads on to…

Benefits

Our current benefits system is predicated on the assumption that anyone claiming benefits is doing so because they’re a workshy scrounger just out to exploit the State, so they can sit at home watching their flat screen TV while necking tins of Scrumpy Jack.

 

Which wasn’t ever true in the vast majority of cases, but is even less true as people that the Government would presumably have lauded as good hard-working citizens find themselves in a position where they, too, are needing to claim benefits.

 

All of a sudden, those injunctions to “make work pay”, generally by making the process of claiming benefits so miserable that people will – and do – take any job, no matter how exploitative, rather than do so, ring somewhat hollow when there cannot even be the pretence that jobs exist for people to do any more.

 

OK, there was a grudging uplift in the rate of UC being paid, and by all accounts the application process suddenly became a lot less aggressively nasty.

 

I’d like to think the latter is down to the Government having a realisation that, if they ended up treating some of these new claimants – people with arguably more social capital, less beaten down by the system, and more likely to articulate their outrage at the way it works – the same, they’d have some serious pushback on their hands …although I suspect it was probably more by accident than design, when the system became so overwhelmed that they didn’t have time to put the claimants through the usual shit mill.

Education

I have watched, from varying distances, as our education system has clunked further and further towards a purely box-ticking exercise whereby the most important thing is exam results.

 

Less academic subjects have been progressively (about the only time I’ll use that word in connection with this Government) stripped away, along with the staff to teach them.

 

There has been a race to the bottom which has resulted in capable, experienced teachers being put at a disadvantage as they compete for jobs with cheaper NQTs when they apply for jobs at cash-strapped schools, and (cheap to employ) LSAs taking on more and more of the teacher’s role.

 

The educational house of cards has had every possible “non-essential” card pulled out, to the point that it totters in the slightest breeze.

 

This situation has prevailed for a while, and it has largely been the willingness of teachers to take up the slack which has enabled the education system to function.

 

But now, as lessons appear to alternate on a whim between online and offline, and as the lesson delivery process presents huge challenges, requiring agility and skill, a burned-out and unresourced teacher contingent is by no means in the best place to do that, although they are clearly doing their best.

Health

Any sensible government would, when faced with successive “winter challenges” to the NHS, rather than insist that we’re doing a brilliant job, have addressed the issue, not paper over the cracks.

 

But they couldn’t, because their whole philosophy is predicated on cutting everything to the bone.

 

It has apparently been preferable to see the NHS, and the people within it, brought to the brink of collapse in the hope that we’ll get through on a wing and a prayer, than resource it adequately and build in the resilience it needs to operate flexibly even in normal circumstances.

 

A health system that was operating comfortably within its abilities before the pandemic might well have been far better able to scale up to meet the challenges of the Covid-19 pandemic.

 

But it wasn’t, and it hasn’t…and yet again, the gap between expectation and resource is being met by medical staff overstretching themselves even further.

 

Coupled with that has been the, frankly, abusive nature of the relationship between the government and NHS staff.

 

Nurses have long had their vocations taken advantage of – everybody knows that a nurse isn’t going to walk off a ward if there isn’t any cover, handing NHS managers and the Government a perfect plausible deniability that enables them to on the one hand forbid employees from working beyond their shift times (H&S, after all), while at the same time tacitly allowing it to continue.

 

Then they decided they’d pull a similar stunt on junior doctors, worsening their conditions and strong-arming them into signing new contracts, something that has had a significantly deleterious effect on the number choosing to remain in the profession.

 

And remember, all of this is against a background whereby fewer people have been applying for (expensive) medical training, and we’ve been scouring the world to steal nurses and other grades – many of whom, thanks to Brexit, have now buggered off home – with the result that we’re facing a continual and worsening staffing shortfall with, apparently, no motivation or intention on the part of Government to do a damn thing about improving that situation.

 

So now we’re left with a health service that, faced with a pandemic, and the inevitable consequences on staff, is in a perfect storm, where demand is stratospheric at exactly the same time as its staff are collapsing from burnout, PTSD, and Covid-19 infections, themselves unnecessarily exacerbated by the appalling management of PPE from the beginning of the pandemic.

 

Talking of which…

Corruption

Time and again since March 2020, we have watched as the government has blatantly and shamelessly handed out lucrative contracts to companies who lack any kind of proven track record on being able to deliver…or, in some cases, any track record at all.

 

But this is not new. There is a litany of these dubious cases of patronage, which stretch back in a consistent line through the history of at least this present government and its predecessor.

 

Up until now, perhaps it has been less obvious, because the question of awarding of contracts is not usually a headline issue – though many have become so as a result of catastrophic failure to deliver.

 

Serco, a favoured government contractor, have been repeatedly caught in fraudulent activity, whether it is around prisoner management, or misrepresentation of their costs.

 

Capita, likewise, has a long track record of abject failure to deliver on many contracts.

 

Government-contracted firms, to which work was outsourced in order to shift risk into the private sector, have gone out of business leaving the country with all that risk back in their laps, and no likely possibility of any come-back.

 

It is so normalised, now, that nobody is really particularly outraged when yet another example of a government minister handing a PPE contract to a mate, or outsourcing test and trace to another corporation run by a “friend of the Party” with an appalling track record on data security, and who promptly botched their first ill-advised implementation with the result that any meaningful track and trace system was delayed by months.

 

The list goes on.

 

All this didn’t happen yesterday, or even during the current Tory government…it’s been going on for years, and what I think we are seeing now is a real-world example of what happens when you cheesepare all of your social provisions to the bone (bit of a mixed metaphor there!).

 

If one good thing can come of Covid, it’s the realisation that we just can’t carry on like this.

 

Systems need spare capacity, and resilience, as do the people within them.

 

Operating them on skeleton staffing and resources, where both are stretched thin just to operate in normal circumstances, must surely be obviously futile and dangerous to anyone prepared to look.

 

But will anything change? Absent some kind of dramatic action, I bet it doesn’t.

[Article by Stephen Castle]

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