COVID-19 MEASURES have been the most important political issue over the past year, so it’s striking that little has so far been said about what the election says about the voters’ views on Covid policies.
Online opinion polls over attitudes to restrictions have been criticised as inaccurate and misleading, with independent polling commissioned by Recovery finding very different results depending on audiences and how questions are asked. What then, does this first live test of mass opinion tell us?
With voters likely unclear as to the differences between the large parties on lockdowns and restrictions, there’s still plenty we can learn from these results. There’s certainly evidence of a desire for an end to restrictions. The Conservatives made gains in many parts of the UK against a backdrop of unlocking.
The Conservative Party has provided both the Government which is enforcing measures and, via the Covid Recovery Group, the principal opposition to them in parliament. Conventional wisdom says that a divided party loses. Yet, in general, it has performed well.
Labour made great play in the run-up to the vote of Dominic Cummings’ all-out attack on Boris Johnson’s supposed opposition to lockdowns in the expectation that it would hurt the Conservatives. While the Prime Minister has denied saying ‘let the bodies pile high’, polls show that voters believed Cummings’ claim. Yet the Conservatives gained seats across the country anyway. The prospect of restrictions easing with a successful vaccination programme was what counted. Perhaps the voters were more hostile to lockdowns than some polling suggested? Certainly we can see that with the vulnerable vaccinated, voters want an end to restrictions.
However, we can also see a big trend is for parties in power to do well regardless of the results their policies achieved, the mistakes made, or the speed of the approach to unlocking: one such example is Wales, the one area in which Labour performed relatively well. We can all sense the relief that unlocking is happening, but it seems likely that another factor is play.
The somewhat grim message is that the constant presence of leaders on screen and massive, inescapable Government campaigns produce the same effects in the UK that they do in totalitarian regimes: they encourage mass support for leaders.
This should not surprise – it’s why totalitarian regimes see it as so important to ensure that their messages and leaders are seen everywhere – but it exposes a widespread British delusion. If the people of the UK ever had an inbuilt love of liberty and a healthy resistance to authoritarian leaders, as many of us liked to think, these qualities are now shared only by a few.
As we know, Covid-19 is a dangerous illness, but it kills only a tiny minority of those it infects and they are typically people who have already lived longer than most ever will. The media and Government have produced panic in many people and largely obscured this truth, but the facts are easily established by anyone who worries about freedom.
What this shows us is how little most people now value our freedoms. Perhaps only a minority ever did, but Government and media have long led the nation in reinforcing their importance and the people of the UK repeatedly showed themselves ready to sacrifice countless lives in wars to defend them.
Today, with government and media lined up in support of restrictions, we can see that the consensus has changed. None of the major parties throughout Scotland, England and Wales even thought it profitable to discuss the removal even of such fundamental freedoms as the ability to hold the hand of a dying relative, to seek out a friend’s help in distress or need, or to kiss a lover.
The past year has shown us that the majority of people in the UK are as likely to fall prey to totalitarian policies as any nation in the world. Minority communities have been more likely than most to question the official response to Covid-19, with scepticism strongest amongst people whose friends and families have experienced hardship to escape repression. As I found years ago when I was Secretary-General of the International Society of Human Rights, liberty is most prized by those who have experienced the dangers of state control of lives and media: often they are shocked to find that so many Britons take it for granted.
Over the last twelve months the Government has handed record amounts of public money to experts in fields like behavioural psychology, neurolinguistic programming and mass communications to control the thoughts and actions of the UK population. At the first election at which the results can be judged, we see that support for those in power has risen (sometimes dramatically) in all parts of the UK.
There is clear evidence that voters were responding not to the success of policies, but to the profile and uncritical coverage it has gifted leaders. This is seen most clearly in Scotland, where the gap between the reality of SNP policy and the success in tackling Covid-19 could hardly be greater, yet the SNP has nonetheless retained a slightly tighter grip on power (gaining a seat and increasing vote share by 1.2% on a higher turnout).
The big improvement in Covid-19 numbers in Scotland this spring has been driven by the success of the vaccine roll-out, just as in the rest of the UK. Both Nicola Sturgeon’s flagship policy of secession and her direct call for the UK to join the EU vaccine programme would have made this success impossible.
As we all know, Nicola Sturgeon wants to crowbar Scotland out of the UK by offering it to the EU at pretty much any price demanded, thus delivering what is likely to prove a largely illusory independence as a fragment of EU territory with far less policy-making capability or influence than Scotland enjoys within the UK today. Had she achieved this, Scotland would have been snarled up in bureaucratic vaccine chaos just as other smaller EU countries were.
Recovery draws support from all sides of politics and both sides of the independence and EU debates, so I’m putting a personal view here. nevertheless, any impartial observer would surely see the vaccine roll-out as evidence of the benefits of membership of the UK union rather than the European Union. It demonstrates that Scotland has both influence in and benefits from the UK union, with considerable policy-making ability, whereas it would be without the ability to influence EU policy on vaccines.
The lesson could not be clearer – yet the SNP’s vote improved and Sturgeon was only one seat short of an overall majority in a proportional system designed to make that difficult. Were voters really endorsing her preferred strategy of impotence and vaccine chaos for Scotland during Covid-19?
You can argue that the message from these results is SNP voters see more deaths, isolation and economic damage from Covid-19 as a price worth paying for independence. But that would imply a sharp contrast between attitudes in Scotland and the rest of the UK, where panic over Covid-19 has seen all other political and economic aspirations jettisoned like sandbags from a plummeting hot-air balloon.
It’s far more likely that logic played little part in the results. Like voters in England and Wales, Scottish voters were simply responding to the uncritical media attention Nicola Sturgeon has enjoyed over the past year.
Labour has clearly had a difficult election. Outside Wales, where it holds power, its backing for harsh restrictions has not won support. However, the problem could turn round very fast. Recovery sees a big opportunity ahead for opposition parties and a potential issue looming for the Conservatives despite their apparent dominance.
The NHS has an off-the-scale problem with around five million people now waiting for treatment. The doctors and nurses in Recovery’s Medicine & Science group tell us that many hospitals are already under massive pressure because of the numbers needing urgent treatment for undiagnosed and untreated conditions – and the situation is getting worse.
Come the autumn, anything like the normal spike in respiratory illnesses will see hospitals overwhelmed. When the BBC cameras are (no doubt) filling our screens with pictures of overwhelmed hospital wards, patients queuing in corridors, and grieving relatives, what will the Government do?
Will it blame Covid-19 and lock down again, as we predict? What credit will it then have with voters for a successful vaccination programme?
The decision may perhaps already have been taken. The Government has just issued a media buying contract to place £320m of covid-related advertising between April 2021 and March 2022 – that’s double the record £164m spent during 2020. If restrictions are ending, why double ad-spend in the coming year to off-the-scale amounts? Bear in mind that these huge amounts exclude additional spending by national leaders in Scotland, Wales and Northern Ireland, public health authorities, local government and more. It is very likely that when the total amount spent on advertising alone over Covid-19 is totalled up, it will be in the region of £1bn – an absolutely extraordinary amount by any contemporary or historical standard.
Now that they can see the public support it delivers politicians are unlikely to give up this dangerous drug. For Labour to win, it must expose and attack the fortunes being spent.
That is not only politically astute, but also important for the health of democracy in the UK. And it clears the way for a second blow that opposition parties can land on those in power.
Labour must start warning of the looming NHS crisis and urging the Government’s responsibility to fix it now. This problem was avoidable. Tens of thousands of doctors and nurses offered to return to work last year to help with the crisis, but were not contacted; the Government bought up the UK’s private hospital capacity in its entirety, staff and all, but used only a tiny fraction of it. The Nightingale Hospitals were created with impressive speed, but left largely empty.
Opposition parties around the UK have an open goal: they need to ask how many of the desperately ill patients on waiting lists could have been treated? And warn that an autumn lockdown will be to cover up the incompetence of our leaders, not Covid-19.
If they do that effectively now, they will not only lay the foundations for future electoral success, they will also do the whole country an enormous service. Another lockdown will be devastating for our country. I see it as inevitable unless the coming NHS crisis is urgently addressed and the campaign of fear is definitively ended.
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