As time drifts past the fifth anniversary of the start of the first lockdown of the pandemic, it has been noted how quickly a period sometimes called the biggest national emergency since World War II is being forgotten.
Yes, the Covid-19 Inquiry continues. Yes, the National Covid Memorial Wall endures, with a campaign to make it permanent. Yet even though the virus was a cause of the deaths of nearly 227,00o people in the UK, there is a sense of it fading from national memory, just as pleas to “maintain a social distance” are fading from pavements.
That collective amnesia needs curing. Those whom Covid killed should remain in our thoughts, as should those bereaved and those still affected by symptoms of the disease. This, in turn, should keep minds focussed on other forms of loss and pain inflicted, and on lessons to be learned, not least about the ways national government too often works badly.
What happened to London government at the hands of Boris Johnson’s national administration during Covid says a great deal. The capital city, home to around nine million people and the white-hot core of the UK economy, was hit harder and faster by the “novel coronavirus” than any other part of the country.
The first case in London was confirmed on 12 February, 2020. In an international city teeming with commuters and visitors every day, the virus could hardly fail to proliferate at speed. Yet not until 16 March was London’s elected leader, Sadiq Khan, invited to a meeting of the government’s Civil Contingencies Committee (COBR), where high-level decisions are taken in the event of major emergencies.
Later that day, Johnson told a television audience that “it looks as though London is now a few weeks ahead” of everywhere else in terms of the disease hitting its peak. It certainly did. Over 400 cases had been confirmed in the city – almost half the total for all of England – and more than 20 deaths.
Khan believes more could and should have been done sooner. In November, 2023, he told the Covid inquiry he had felt “kept in the dark” by national government about some of the things it was concerned about during the preceding weeks, and that had he been made aware of them sooner, “preventative action” could have been taken, including in areas where he lacked the necessary powers. “On many occasions,” he wrote in a statement, “our advocacy went unheard or ignored”.
Even before Johnson’s first lockdown announcement, London’s streets were emptying, as was its public transport network. Transport for London, heavily reliant on fares revenue, came within minutes of running out of money. In May 2020, the government provided TfL with a £1.6 billion emergency bailout.
City Hall took note that Johnson had moved faster to assist private rail operators. And it was not best pleased by the conditions attached to the deal from on high, including forcing Khan to increase fares, reduce concessions and undertake a review of TfL’s finances. A “task force” to include “representatives of the government” was appointed to “oversee operational decisions”.
It was the start of a hostile takeover, one that would last for well over two years, leaving TfL’s top brass and City Hall colleagues exasperated by having to endlessly negotiating short-term funding deals when they should have been getting on with their jobs. The historical context was, of course, that PM Johnson had been Khan’s predecessor as Mayor. He and his henchmen were quite certain they knew better how to run things than the person Londoners had chosen for the task.
If the top-down treatment of Khan was motivated by that special form of cockiness found in Johnson circles before his Covid-related fall from grace, the comparable experience of London boroughs seems to have been more generally felt across the land: emails arriving the night before the latest set of pandemic containment regulations were to come into effect; a promise by the unappealing Robert Jenrick to give councils “whatever it needed” to get through the crisis that wasn’t quite as generous as it first sounded.
The desire and even, in some respects, the necessity for national governments to commandeer control during national crises is not hard to comprehend: fast decisions must be made and rapid action undertaken; time can feel too tight for consultation and collaboration.
But does it lead to better outcomes? Can it be justified when democratic entities closer to the ground can be easily recruited to the larger enterprise upon which all are interdependently engaged? And can the exploitation of desperate circumstances for the purpose of political score-settling be acceptable at any time, let along the worst of them? Just as those taken by the sickness should be written into UK history, so should the British state’s mishandling and misuse of its historically over-centralised power.
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