Michael Gove is wrong – we need a change of approach
Michael Gove’s intervention in The Times on Saturday, a 2,000 word long “Weekend Essay” on the rationale for lockdowns (“Lockdown was the only way to stop the NHS being broken”), is the most well written and well argued attempt to justify the government’s decision-making that has emerged since the beginning of the pandemic. Nevertheless, it is a model of sophistry and wishful thinking.
On the Great Barrington Declaration (that recommended an alternative approach to the blanket lockdowns and restrictions), Michael Gove had this to say: “How, practically, could we ensure that every older citizen, every diabetic, everyone with an underlying condition or impaired immune system was perfectly insulated from all contact with others for months to come?… No visits by carers or medical staff, no mixing of generations, the eviction of older citizens from the homes they share with younger?”
We have absolutely been in the business of quarantining whole swathes of the population for months – not perfectly, but as near as makes no odds. We have protected almost the whole professional class – or at least that class of people for whom virtual working approximates to white collar, office work. The comfortably well-off need not venture out much if at all, because working class people working as delivery drivers supply their every need.
Indeed, our economic life has been reshaped quite rapidly to suit the well-off. But a WFH economy is not an economy in which risk is evenly spread – it is an economy in which risk is overwhelmingly shouldered by the already vulnerable and by the poor.
The luxuries afforded by rapid supply chains, well-stocked supermarkets, and “Covid-secure” hospitality are paid for in the lives of the working classes, who are – as Martin Kulldorff, Professor of Medicine at Harvard Medical School, told me – also those who have been made responsible for “building up the herd immunity that will eventually protect all of us”.
The virus is not like a rising tide, or “like a tap filling a bath” as Gove has it; rather, it is a cluster-driven disease which spreads in certain environments extremely rapidly.
A failure to account for the specific needs of the most vulnerable is not remedied by the vague aspiration that to protect the whole population, however imperfectly, is a more noble and more effective goal. The practical outcome of failing to think properly about the character of the virus and its aggressive effect on certain demographics has brought us the worst of all worlds – a world in which the vulnerable have been imperfectly protected along with the rest. And yet the risk posed by imperfect protections to those groups most in danger of severe disease and death is of a qualitatively different order of magnitude. They have in fact been asked to risk everything – even dying alone – in the name of protecting everyone to an imperfect degree and preventing contagion at any cost.
It is unfair to accuse the government’s critics of advocating outcomes that would be “indefensible” in a civilised society, when several of those outcomes have already come about on this administration’s watch.
A failure to preserve NHS capacity, Gove says, “would mean Covid-19 patients who could be saved would die; cancer patients who could be cured would be lost … the economy would grind to a halt, as a population we could not protect sought to save their loved ones; and the world would hang an indelible quarantine sign over our nation’s name.” All that might conceivably be true in a worst case scenario. And yet the historical record points in the other direction: that the harms inflicted by a public health strategy that accounts only for one disease over a long term period, but also bets the house on its general and absolute defeat, are “indefensible” by any reasonable standard.
We can plot the graphs that tell us “what might have been” – but these are acts of augury, not an analysis of what is really happening. Hedging the argument for lockdowns against a cavernous “What if?” is an artful loading of the dice in favour of the most robust action, the strongest, the most brutal measures.
For all manner of terrible things are justified and permitted in the reflected aura of that great “What if?”. Gove reminds us that “those costs are not ones we choose; they are ones we must endure.” But who gets to choose? And in whose interest?
Parliament has been effectively sidelined and denuded of its historic role – national policy has been made and remade on the hoof and announced via personal addresses to the nation by the PM. No amount of polling that shows any single course of action to be popular with the public can replace the processes that have long provided the context in which government makes its policies and justifies them. In 1940, the Norway debate in Parliament brought about a change in the course of the war – in 2020, the way the coronavirus legislation was structured effectively meant that such a turning of the tide could not happen.
The argument that tells itself “things could not have been otherwise”, that the “costs are not ones we choose” is a comfortable delusion. In Sweden, children were allowed to go to school; in Germany, they were allowed to sit their exams. In the UK, university students were sent back to campuses across the country, massively boosting case numbers in several cities that have experienced tough autumn epidemics. Things could have been otherwise.
We might like to fool ourselves that we are the most humane generation there has ever been, and we are taking these extraordinary decisions in light of a perfected sensibility that prides life and its preservation above all else. For what is more important than life? The reality is that what the government has done with its blunderbuss approach is merely to re-articulate, in the pathos of its grand solutions, an old rule of history: “The strong do what they can and the weak suffer what they must.”