Will the Covid inquiry deliver political accountability?

“Leading world authority” in oncology Professor Karol Sikora, writing recently about the Covid Inquiry (in the Daily Telegraph and on Twitter/X), has called it “pro-lockdown” and a gigantic waste of money. Sikora is a vocal opponent of blanket pandemic lockdowns, arguing these are more harmful than the effects of Covid itself.

Sikora’s outburst came during the latest module of the inquiry’s hearings which has examined issues of governance, and where questioning has heavily focused on the mitigation policies leading up to the first lockdown, as well as how policy decision-making structures operated. In the media’s summaries of the hearings, uncertainty over whether or not to lockdown and the functioning of government have appeared to be linked together.

Other medical and science professionals, less blunt than Sikora (who is also in favour of funding the NHS through mandatory health insurance), have made similar and related points about lockdown, and have argued that the inquiry, which began its hearings in June 2023, should have concentrated on how science informed policy-making and avoided how the Tories mishandled all sorts of things, as we already know a lot about that.

Whether the inquiry’s approach will help the overall evaluation of the policies remains to be seen. It seems to me that, while the WhatsApp messages (those that didn't go missing) and reports of the actions of of Johnson, Cummings, Hannock et al are often unedifying, if the inquiry had not dealt with the “real time” decision-making of the Tories, it would have deprived bereaved families, the biggest advocates of a public inquiry, of a measure of political accountability.

The aim of the Covid Inquiry is a good one: it seeks accountability from the key decision-makers for action throughout the pandemic; it aims to learn lessons for the next pandemic, so that the UK can be better prepared. It is no bad thing to collate all the evidence, about all the issues, in one place.

On the other hand there are two structural problems with the Covid Inquiry. Despite the way questioning has linked issues, its modular structure could artificially separate out issues which are inextricably linked. For example module one — pandemic preparedness — was separated from the current module of political governance. Yet the lack of preparedness was a crucial problem of governance! It will be a big effort to analytically link everything together in the final reporting.

In addition, the inquiry will take a long time. With modules still being added, it will continue until at least 2025, by which time this government will be out of power. It is not even certain that the first interim report, set to be released next summer, will appear before the general election. Will 2025 or 2026 be too late to correct or prevent a new problem of lack of preparedness for a pandemic? For example, recently NHS England has watered down infection prevention and control (IPC) advice.

The picture of the relationships between politicians, senior civil servants, special policy advisors (SpAds) and the scientists that emerged from the current module has been disturbing. The way that political policy decisions were made on the hoof, with a lack of a plan or strategy, cannot be accounted for by the pandemic's generation of extreme uncertainty: there was something chronically dysfunctional at the top.

Dominic Cummings, far from being an exceptional person who, according to his own account was virtually the only person taking the Covid threats seriously, typifies the problem with the people at the top: gigantic egos and enormous hubris. Ignore his propensity to use the c-word as punctuation, it's his WhatsApp messages where he refers approvingly to super brainy hedge fund types promoting the benefits of UV rays, and how Covid was a great “opportunity” for the UK to actually “take back control” of its borders, that paint the picture for us.

The inquiry has exposed the self-serving narratives of political insiders. Even Tory politicians need to show some contrition and that’s where narratives about the timing of the first lockdown has come into play. Matt Hancock’s told the Inquiry, “With the benefit of hindsight the UK should have locked down earlier”. Whatever the truth of it, by saying it he can avoid accounting for problems leading up to and surrounding 26 March 2020: the failure to contain early infections, poor public health communication, earlier mask wearing, slowness to get adequate testing capacity up and running and the failure to renew a stockpile of degraded PPE and perhaps most importantly, inadequate sick pay across the UK’s workforce. Lockdowns, in context, did help to curb surges of the virus but the picture is nowhere near as simple as Hannock tries to make it. He is bullshitting once again.

At the time politicians said they “were following the science” but the inquiry has shown a. this is not entirely true and b. the structures framing the decision-making relationship between scientists and the politicians was at best poorly defined. For example Kemi Badenoch, a minister with responsibility for equalities during the pandemic, refused additional support to groups who were more at risk of Covid, despite those risks becoming clear early on in the pandemic when doctors from Asian, African or Caribbean backgrounds were the first to die. She argued demagogically that getting the vaccine out was more important than “special” treatment. That’s not an argument based in science, but in a stupid political obsession with not appearing woke. Whatever the lessons to be learned about how science informs policy in future, it is clear that even those scientists who felt they needed to be discreet about their views at the time, were often very frustrated with the politicians.

Johnson’s manner at the inquiry may have been more measured than his performance at the “Partygate” investigation by the Parliamentary Privileges Committee, but he was still gas lighting us. His glib assertion that the UK is low down the European “league table” of mortality rates (deaths per million of population) was sleight of hand. Data sets which compare numbers of deaths to past averages show the cumulative number of deaths from all causes recorded in the UK between January 2020 and April 2022 was 9.2% higher than the projected total based on past averages. Those deaths will have been caused by a range of factors, some not directly comparable to other countries. Nonetheless although the UK’s percentage is lower than Italy, Spain, and Greece it is higher than many other countries in Europe including Belgium (8.3%), Austria (8.2%), the Netherlands (8.1%), Portugal (7.6%), Ireland (6.2%), France (6.1%), Sweden (4.9%), Germany (4.1%), Finland (3.9%) and Denmark (1.3%).

Johnson is the man who, according to the former Downing Street Director of Communications Lee Cain, was in the “wrong crisis” for his “skill set”. Unfortunately for us Johnson’s unique skill set is delaying decision-making; his talent, if you can call it that, is to wait to see which way the wind is blowing before committing, in order to claim glory for making the wind blow in the “correct” direction. The inquiry should deal with how to confront and manage how reasonable uncertainly stymies action, such as Chief Medical Officer Chris Whitty’s admission that he did not pursue his hunch that the Covid outbreak would get very bad because he feared it would not get traction. More open and transparent government would help, but what can socialists advocate here?

Lee Cain probably hit the nail on the head when he described the key policy dynamic throughout the period before the introduction of the vaccine as a trade-off between stopping the virus and what the Tories termed “keeping the country running”, that is, keeping the economy running. Some of that was more about the optics than real effects — such as Rishi Sunak’s expensive, and now discredited, “Eat Out to Help Out” scheme. If mitigation had been the government’s top priority, would 1,500 NHS and social care workers have died? According to a recent report many of those lives might have been saved by simple infection control measures.

The tensions implicated in the trade off contributed to inconsistent rule changes, ineffective communication around rules and an unproductive focus on generating fear and guilt to secure compliance with the rules. For instance Hancock said the government should “frighten the pants off everyone” about the Omicron variant which hit the UK in late 2021. A better alternative was to be clear about the risks to provide the kind of comprehensive financial and social support to people at work, school and college that Workers’ Liberty argued for throughout the pandemic and to make those measures permanent.