Labour must hold the government to account for gambling with lives and jobs

After months of closure, pubs and restaurants opened their doors on July 4th following the earlier reopening of non-essential shops. Although welcomed by most Tory backbenchers, these reopenings are still an enormous gamble for the government as Britain’s rate of Covid infection remains higher than nearly all other European countries. While data from the EU shows that most countries have only seen localised outbreaks of Covid after easing lockdowns, the story from America is completely different. The US is seeing record numbers of daily cases, which are now beginning to translate into higher hospitalisation numbers and ultimately deaths. Britain could go either way.

If the government’s bet does not pay off, the consequences could be dire. A nationwide rise in the level of infection will need to be met with a nationwide return of lockdown measures, or risk thousands of further preventable deaths. A return of stricter measures would obviously hit hospitality and retail businesses, which may have to close again as they have done in Leicester, but it would also blow a huge hole in public confidence that no number of half-price restaurant vouchers will repair. A second wave would be a tragedy for public health, but also for the economy and jobs.

The government’s calculation in taking such an enormous gamble must be that it believes it can avoid blame if it goes wrong. Its rebuke to those who questioned the wisdom of re-opening has been: ‘we are trusting the public’. But this pushes the accountability for preventing a second wave onto the public, and sets up ordinary people to take the fall if they do not to behave ‘responsibly’. A recent poll for JL Partners suggests that 59% of the public would put the blame on people not following lockdown rules as opposed to only 33% blaming the government. The primary duty of any government is to keep its citizens safe, but Boris Johnson’s administration has not provided the right infrastructure or messaging to enable Britons to adequately protect themselves.

At the beginning of the crisis, it was clear that people should stay at home. But since this instruction was abandoned in favour of the more ambiguous ‘stay alert’, government communication has become more confused. Professor Susan Michie, director for the centre for behaviour change at UCL and a member of the government’s SAGE committee, said: “We need clear, coherent and consistent messaging. Despite months of criticisms of poor government communication by professionals and public alike, this is still not being achieved e.g. Johnson and Michael Gove recently giving different messages on face masks to the media instead of giving clear advice directly to the public.”

The messaging around the government’s test and trace system is equally unclear. There is a widespread assumption that its main purpose is to find out where the virus is. In fact, the system is designed to prevent transmission of the disease. Although those who have symptoms of Covid-19 should already be in isolation, we know that people are at their most infectious a few days after they have caught the disease but before they become symptomatic. Test and trace is designed to find the close contacts of infected people and ask them to self-isolate so that if they do have Covid but are unaware of it, they will not be out in the community and potentially spreading the virus further. But many people remain unaware of the need to get tested if they develop symptoms, and self-isolation of contacts is voluntary. Astonishingly, the government does not even publish the number of people who are isolating, despite this being the main aim of the system.

Director of the clinical operational research unit at UCL professor Christina Pagel, who is part of Independent SAGE, told me: “The weekly government report on its test and trace results shows that the system is still far from world beating and, more concerningly, there is little evidence of any improvement since the start of test, trace and isolate (TTI) five weeks ago. There seems to be no plan to address this and the government, which once boasted of having a world class system in place by June 1st, barely mentions it anymore and had to abandon their app.”

She also warned against the rapid re-opening of the economy. “It seems to be taking about four weeks to see the impact of loosening restrictions on new cases,” she explained. “So phases of opening should be widely spaced apart to make sure new infections are under control before loosening restrictions further. The less effective your TTI system, the longer you should wait between opening phases because you can’t be sure that you are catching outbreaks quickly. The government is currently waiting two to three weeks between reopenings – gyms are the fourth major relaxation since schools partially reopened at the beginning of June. We don’t have a great TTI infrastructure and so I really think the government needs to slow down the reopening.”

As Professor Pagel noted, it takes time for the effects of looser restrictions to be seen in the data, so if there is little change in the numbers dying from Covid in the next few weeks, we should not necessarily be congratulating the government on getting it right. This is particularly true because evidence from America suggests that new infections are occurring disproportionately among younger people who are less likely to be seriously ill. However, young people do not live in hermetically sealed bubbles and eventually are likely to pass the virus onto those who are more vulnerable.

If infections do start rising, it is vitally important the government is held to account for taking an irresponsible gamble with people’s lives and jobs. The JL Partners’ poll showed that older people in particular are likely to say they will blame the public rather than politicians for a rise in infections. This hands the Tories an opportunity to fan the flames of an intergenerational conflict between ‘irresponsible’ young people and the elderly. Johnson’s recent attempts to hold care workers responsible for the devastating outbreaks of Covid in care homes show how quickly the government will resort to blaming others. Labour needs to be at the forefront of rejecting the misleading and divisive narratives that the government will almost certainly try to deploy.