The Royals, Books - Failures of State

Buckingham Palace Viewed from St James's Park
British School
Photo Credit: Leeds Museums and Galleries [CC BY-NC-ND]

 ...Why doesn't the Queen let her people enjoy Buckingham Palace gardens? Previous royal dynasties gave the nation Hyde Park, Regent's Park, Epping Forest, Kensington Gardens. We can roam freely around Richmond Park, created by King Charles 1. Alas the Windsors seem incapable of such gestures.

Land across the UK was grabbed and enclosed by the ruling classes; exclusion ruthlessly enforced... Members of the Country Land and Business Association own 50 per cent of all rural land in England and Wales. Public footpath mileage is half as long as it was 100 years ago... Royals and aristocrats own 1.5 million acres - the highest category after charitable organisations and environmental preservation zones.

The Windsors are exempt from proper scrutiny. Businessmen, autocrats and oligarchs, the Church of England, too, fiercely protect their interests and keep out curious fact-diggers as well as the riff-raff...

They, the Windsors, will never share their estates, not even in this time of great need. And their subjects will suck it up and carry on genuflecting. Like the generations of unfortunate peasants before them.

(Yasmin Alibhai-Brown, The i, 2021)

Failures of State: The Inside Story of Britain's Battle With Coronavirus - Jonathan Calvert and George Arbuthnott

Zusammenbruch
Ludwig Van Hofmann (1861-1945)
Photo Credit: Leicester Museums and Galleries [CC BY-NC-SA]

...In the first part of Failures of State, the Sunday Times reporters Jonathan Calvert and George Arbuthnott set out to answer the question of how a country whose level of preparedness had been among the best in the world should have been so unprepared when Covid-19 struck.

One entirely valid point made by Jeremy Hunt, among others, is that we had prepared for a flu pandemic rather than a coronavirus. But there are more similarities than differences between the two. Both are respiratory diseases emerging from a novel virus. Both require detailed plans for containment through isolation, quarantine and contact tracing. And, crucially, both require substantial stocks of personal protective equipment. In any case, given that it had been 16 years since Sars and 11 since swine flu, we should have been well prepared for both...

There had been another scaled-down rehearsal in 2016, codenamed Cygnus, after which the official verdict was that Britain's preparations were by now inadequate for the "extreme demands" of a pandemic. It was a danger signal that seems to have been ignored.

The result is chronicled here in meticulous detail: out-of-date stock that should have been replenished, respirators with an expiry date of 2012, no gowns, visors, swabs, body bags or eye protection. Nurses having to improvise PPE with bin liners.

As for containment, our borders remained open to the extent that large numbers of students returning to Britain from China early in 2020, at a time when we knew all about Wuhan, weren't even temperature tested, let alone quarantined. Such measures, crucial to the pandemic plan, were described as "symbolic gestures".

Not only did Boris Johnson lockdown three weeks too late, he spent three weeks lurching around hospitals shaking hands with staff too polite to spurn him...

On 25 February last year, Public Health England (PHE) told staff in the care home sector that there was no need for masks, as it was "very unlikely that anyone receiving care in a care home or the community will become infected". In fact, the virus was spreading like wildfire at that moment, with 1,600 new infections of which PHE had identified only 23.

A few weeks later, 15,000 mainly elderly patients were discharged into care homes and community placements, in order to free up hospital beds...

The result of this maladroitness? Over the course of 2020, a Briton had more than twice the likelihood of dying from the disease as a German. Britain had almost 20 times the number of cases per head of population and 40 times the number of deaths than China, where the pandemic began...

(Alan Johnson, The Observer, 2021)

Below, a doctor speaks out.

It's late January. The wards and ICUs are overwhelmed, awash with the virus. The patients seem younger, the new variant more virulent. We are drowning, drowning in Covid. The sight of a doctor or nurse breaking down has become unremarkable. Too close, for too long, to too many patients' pain, we have become - just like them - saturated. Behind hospital doors, tucked out of sight, we seem to suffer as one...

Patients Waiting to See the Doctor, with Figures Representing Their Fears
Rosemary Carson (b. 1962)
Wellcome Collection [Public Domain]

During the first wave, I knew the public had our backs. This time round, being an NHS doctor makes you a target. For the crime of asserting on social media that Covid is real and deadly, I earn daily abuse from a vitriolic minority. I've been called Hitler, Shipman, Satan and Mengele for insisting on Twitter that our hospitals aren't empty. Last night a charming "Covid sceptic" sent me this: "You are paid to lie and a disgrace to your profession. You have clearly sold your soul and are nothing more than a child abuser destroying futures. I do not consent to your satanic ways." A friend, herself an intensive care doctor, has just been told by another male "sceptic" that he intends to sexually abuse her until she requires one of her own ventilators. And this morning, another colleague, also female, was told: "You evil criminal lying piece of government shit. You need to be executed immediately for treason and genocide...

Worse even than the hatred they whip up against NHS staff, the deniers have started turning up in crowds to chant "Covid is a hoax" outside hospitals full of patients who are sick and dying. Imagine being forced to push your way through that, 13 hours after you began your ICU shift. Some individuals have broken into Covid wards and attempted physically to remove critically ill patients, despite doctors warning that doing so will kill them...

Please don't flinch. Please don't look away. The truth of conditions inside our hospital needs telling. To dispel a few prime ministerial press conference myths, the NHS is not "close to" or "on the brink of" being overwhelmed. We are here and now in the midst of calamity...

The prime minister insists that his government "truly did everything we could to minimise loss of life". Yet a quarter of those deaths have occurred in 2021 - during the last four weeks alone - making Boris Johnson's words a patent lie. He didn't lock down promptly, he didn't close our borders, he didn't protect care homes, he allowed tens of thousands of elderly and vulnerable residents to die. And then, instead of future-proofing Britain from a second surge last summer, he offered bribes for social mixing. But our eating out, far from helping out, sent Covid cases ticking hungrily upwards.

This second wave has been turbocharged by Downing Street's procrastination. Putting off lockdown until the eleventh hour has - yet again - wreaked havoc...

How - from where - can we find cause for hope when our political leaders, despite a track record like this, insist they've behaved infallibly? Well, by early spring, the country's most vulnerable citizens should be vaccinated, a prospect that makes me ecstatic...

(Dr Rachel Clarke, The Guardian, 2021)