“The most terrifying words in the English language are: I’m from the government and I’m here to help” – Ronald Reagan.

The above quote from former US President Ronald Reagan have proven to be mightily prescient, especially when it comes to the British government and how they’ve handled the coronavirus situation. This is because it is the UK government’s actions and their attempts to help, that Britons and the economy that supports them and the nation has been so greatly and unnecessarily damaged.

For the record, I’ve never been one of those who believed that covid was a hoax, I believe it is a very real disease that does have a significant degree of lethality among certain groups. My argument has always been with how the government has handled the situation and how they’ve dealt with the public.

The whole saga of HMG and covid is one of bad or late decisions, indecision, reliance on limited sources of information to base decisions on, casting blame on the public rather than on themselves and trying to hide from the public the shortcomings of the NHS, shortcomings that many of us have known about for years. The covid situation has exposed for all of us to see the complete incompetence of how Britain is governed both by the elected politicians and by the Civil Service.

Let’s go back to the beginning shall we and see just what a series of monstrous cock ups have occurred to bring us to this point.

The first failure was for there not to be any sort of effective, well researched and tested pandemic plan. It seems the government was very much caught unawares by covid and the blame for this must rest in large part with the Civil Service whose job it is to formulate plans for ministers to approve and put into action when the nation is faced by a problem whether that be war, a natural disaster or a pandemic. With more people travelling to and from areas of the world where fast transmissible diseases or novel diseases are likely to originate from, there was an obvious need for there to be both a pandemic plan and also a plan that was communicated, before any problems occurred,to the public. This doesn’t seem to have happened. What studies the Government and its agencies did do were related to pandemic influenza and not what would happen if a novel virus suddenly appeared. I strongly believe that had Britain had a properly thought out pandemic civil defence plan which was communicated with the public prior to all this occurring then things may have worked out better than they have.

There was also great indecision and complacency at the beginning of this crisis and a failure of disease intelligence in government circles. As soon as news started come out of Wuhan in China the government should have taken drastic action and restricted travel into the United Kingdom. Yes it would have pissed off the French and the Germans at a delicate time politically and would have riled up the political left who would naturally have screamed ‘xenophobia’, but it would have been a sensible move. Instead the government kept the airports open for visitors from all over the world, even whilst the rest of us were held on house arrest in March. It is no wonder that the angry and mocking phrase ‘pubs closed but borders open’ started to be directed at the Government.

I was somewhat supportive of the idea of a lockdown in March because I believed what the government were saying which was it was only for a short time and only to relive pressure on the NHS, an organisation that I know is consistently creaky and failing. I came to my position on the grounds that here we have a novel disease and we need to be cautious about it so I reluctantly accepted the idea of a temporary lockdown. However, as time has gone on I have had to revise my position. Lockdowns have failed dismally. They have not halted or curtailed the spread of covid and instead have become the cure that is worse than the disease causing massive economic problems along with physical and mental health problems that all too many Britons may not survive.

Rather than the government looking at the evidence that lockdowns have failed, the government fell back into a sunk cost fallacy, similar to that which the American government fell into with regards to the Vietnam War. With the Vietnam War, the American government realised that tens of thousands of American lives had been lost and billions of dollars expended on a war that eventually became unwinnable. Because of that they could not bring themselves to admit that they were wrong and all those lives and money had been effectively wasted. In Britain’s case we have a government that must feel that they’ve spunked so much money at their one and only covid policy, that of lockdowns, that they cannot retreat from it or try to follow another path without a devastating loss of face.

After the failure of the first lockdown and the revelation that the danger of covid is primarily to certain demographics, I came around to the point of view that targeted shielding would have been a better path to take once it became apparent that for the vast majority of healthy people, covid is not that much of a problem. It doesn’t have the sort of death toll among the young and the healthy as did for example the Spanish Flu of 1918 and was instead something more akin to the Hong Kong flu pandemic of the late 1960’s. Covid primarily affects those with significant medical conditions and also those who are elderly. The identity of these groups is well known and identifiable via medical records and demographic records which should have meant that members of these groups could have been shielded from covid and effectively supported by both the state and by volunteers. Such a policy would I believe have had a less devastating effect on the general economic and personal health of Britain and Britons.

The government has also suffered from an increasing eroded trust situation. As time has gone on more people have expressed distrust in the government and how it is handling this matter. Failure to honestly communicate with the public is a big part of this loss of trust as has been the perceived inflating of covid numbers, the taking of actions that cannot be justified such as prohibiting post mortems, something that was not done even at the height of the AIDS Crisis. Unrealistic ‘doomsday’ numbers being put out by the government have also contributed greatly to a loss of trust by the public in the government. We can see with our own eyes that there are not bodies piling up in the streets because of covid but a ‘bodies piling up in the streets’ image is what the Government portrayed by way of its public statements about covid. A growing number of Britons are coming to the conclusion that the Government is lying to them and much of the blame for that sentiment can be laid at the door of the Government itself.

Trust in the government has also been eroded by certain aspects of the conduct of those in government. Contracts for PPE going to those who are perceived to be the friends and cronies of Ministers has been a major trust buster for many of us. Even if there is no outright corruption involved in such cases, they give the impression of corruption and that can be just as damaging to the public perception of governmental activity as actual corruption. At a time when the government needed to be seen to be squeaky clean, they were not and instead looked like the contents of an overflowing cesspit.

I’ve also been shocked by the amateurism of this government with regards the sources that they use to base decisions on. Nobody in any position of authority should base any decision on the strength of a singular source. All sources and all advice needs to be compared with other information to ensure that the primary source is not biased or following its own agenda. This is something that even the most junior journalist on the smallest local newspaper understands and why the claims of a singular source need to be verified. If I as a lowly blogger can work with a variety of sources, not just those whom I politically agree with to ensure some semblance of balance and to avoid siloising, then why can’t the Government do the same? The advice from SAGE and Imperial College should have been checked against other sources and that advice tested to see if it was both reasonable, factual and not tainted by the agendas of those giving the Government advice. The Government, rather than relying on advice from only one source, should have had a diversity of sources. Because they did not do this now the Government is trapped in a situation where they have only one policy that of lockdowns, which they follow, despite this policy being one that has failed to contain covid and a policy that has done immense damage to the United Kingdom and its people.

One of the things that have most disgusted me about how the UK government has handled the covid issue is how it consistently blames the public for not following the Government’s incoherent, changeable and failing rules. If we had had a proper civil defence pandemic plan that had been communicated to the public in advance, of the sort that have in the past been issued to those living near nuclear installations for example, rather than rules that are seen as arbitrary, capricious and which seem to be made up on the fly, then maybe the public would be more willing to take note of such rules? As it is, the unnecessary scaremongering engaged in by the Government and its mouthpieces in the MSM coupled with a severe lack of bodies piling up on the streets along with police forces that also seem not to know their arse from their elbows, has caused a lot of Britons to not trust the Government’s advice and only resent it and say ‘sod it, I’ll do as I damn well choose’.

I’m in no way an anti-vaccination nutcase. I’m old enough and aware enough to see the devastation caused by diseases such as Polio and have been fortunate enough to speak to those who suffered from now long vanquished diseases such as Diphtheria, to know that vaccination has been one of the greatest boons for mankind. I’m positively in favour of vaccination and believe that vaccination will ultimately be what controls covid and in time will also be what defeats other more worse diseases such as Ebola and other haemorrhagic fevers and may even, in a few decades, finally consign Malaria to the history books along with Smallpox.

However, the growing lack of trust in the UK Government is I believe at heart the main cause for vaccine suspicion when it comes to covid. As the Government has lost the trust of the public, the public has decided to look elsewhere for information and the members of the anti-vax cult have stepped into the breach to promote their narrative. Because of the woeful lack of trust in the Government this anti vax cult have picked up a lot of support as they give the appearance of being trustworthy even though they are not. A lack of trust in the government and its ability to deliver a safe effective vaccine for covid has I believe contributed greatly to vaccine hesitancy and the high levels of this phenomenon. I’m seeing figures of one in five Britons claiming they will refuse to be vaccinated with the Pfizer vaccine on the grounds that this is newer untested technology. This lack of trust in the Government is even causing vaccine enthusiasts such as myself wanting to wait until a vaccine based on more tried and trusted technology comes to market. Maybe, just maybe, if the UK Government had been more honest with the general public and had been seen and perceived to be competent then we would not be seeing such high levels of vaccine hesitancy?

This whole covid debacle has also seen the Government go out of their way to protect from criticism an entity that is a monstrous example of state bureaucracy gone mad, the National Health Service. Rather than ensure that this massive and unwieldy organisation did what it was supposed to do both in its day to day work and in the face of a national emergency by putting pressure on managers to do what was necessary, the Government instead turned the NHS into a sort of quasi-religion, encourage Britons to make an idol of it rather than ask the most important question, ‘Is the NHS working for the British people or just prioritising its staff’?

All in Government, both the elected ones and in the Civil Service have been found wanting in all this. There was no plan, just confusion, chaos, dishonesty and buck passing on a grand scale. The covid debacle has shown that the UK Government and the adminisphere to be woefully incompetent and has done immense damage to the country, damage that may take a decade or more to put right.

One can expect some degree of incompetence from government as a tendency to incompetence seems to be baked into governmental activity, not just in the UK but in other nations across the world. But the incompetence shown by Boris Johnson’s government and by the Civil Service with regards to covid is of an order of magnitude greater than we’ve ever seen before. Soon we will be into governmental arse covering territory, in fact it could be said that we are already here with proposals to again delay the local elections and the Scottish and Welsh national elections. The excuse being given by the Government or rather those close to it is the risk of covid infection, but it is more likely to be that the Governing party, the Conservatives, know they are going to take a serious hammering at these elections, which may even see challenger parties take their first steps towards Westminster representation. The Government seems to be hoping that by October or November the public will have forgotten this monstrous covid cock up and will continue to vote for either Labour or the Conservatives. Somehow I think the Government is wrong on this. Many of us will not forget what they’ve done and the damage that the massive and unforgivable cock ups that have characterised the Government’s approach the covid problem.