HEALTH SECRETARY Matt Hancock is in no position to accuse those joining a rushed exodus from London of “totally irresponsible behaviour.”
Saturday night’s chaotic scenes at railway stations — with all the risk they posed to passengers and transport workers — were an entirely predictable consequence of an avoidable last-minute U-turn.
Just three days before ordering millions of people to rip up their Christmas plans, the Prime Minister was mocking everyone, from respected scientific publications the British Medical Journal and Health Service Journal, the experts at Independent Sage to the Labour Party, who suggested that relaxing Covid restrictions over the festive season was a mistake.
Attempts to blame a new strain of the virus won’t wash. By the government’s own account it knew about this development when it was threatening local authorities with legal action for trying to protect their children by closing schools early.
Rail unions are right to warn that public transport must now only be used for essential travel. People should follow the official guidance for their and others’ safety.
But public goodwill — essential for the success of any policy that depends on mass alteration of ordinary behaviour — has been disastrously squandered.
Opinion polls suggested a majority believed Christmas relaxation was a mistake weeks ago. Ministers had a receptive audience for the arguments that, despite the very genuine distress caused by enforced absence from loved ones during a family-centred festival, the rapid spread of a highly infectious and deadly virus made it necessary.
Delaying the announcement until close to closing time for most shops on the last Saturday before Christmas will raise suspicions that commercial rather than health considerations stayed their hand.
The same suspicion must fall on many of the decisions made on the second lockdown, that lasted from early November to early December and has so signally failed to prevent a renewed coronavirus spike.
The lockdown was not nearly as strict as the first, with far more shops and takeaway food outlets open.
And social distancing and “stay at home” orders were much less observed than in March – while the failure to include schools in the lockdown fatally undermined any attempt to stop household mixing, setting the scene for the massive spike in cases predicted by health professionals and education unions. Their warnings were ignored by ministers and the Labour front bench alike, while the Establishment media renewed the summer’s shameful attacks on teachers in a bid to rubbish their concerns.
Limited compliance with the second lockdown was not due to a vague “Covid fatigue” but because public confidence in the government had been shattered in the intervening months — by the “one rule for the rich” response to Dominic Cummings’s infamous road trip, by the total failure to use the first lockdown to build a working test-and-trace system, by what the British Medical Journal rightly called “state corruption on a grand scale” when it came to allocation of health contracts.
Hancock blames the public for seeking to leave the capital on the grounds that the advice was clear. In fact, mixed messages have abounded.
But worse, the government has given the public no reason to trust it and an abundance of reasons not to. If people now treat its advice with a shrug, the blame sits squarely with Hancock and his colleagues.
The cost of any breakdown in community discipline will not be borne by ministers, though, but by those most vulnerable to the virus, the elderly, the millions living in poverty, the key workers whose jobs put them on the front line.
That is why trade unions and the left need urgently to build support for a complete change of strategy to a Zero-Covid policy, one aimed at total suppression of the virus and backed by a mass publicity campaign.
Public support can still be won for a rational health policy — our problem so far has been the absence of one.
