The COVID wave the government doesn’t want to talk about

 

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Right now it looks like the government have thrown away the advantages of getting vaccinated early by letting the Delta COVID variant get a hold in the UK. There is little doubt this was because the Prime Minister wanted a trade deal with India, and so put off putting them on the red list. Here is a graph of COVID cases in various countries, and the increase in the UK is because of the Delta variant.

If we hadn’t vaccinated so early this Delta wave would have been far far worse, and we would have either already locked the country down or been talking about doing so. That we are doing neither is because vaccination - particularly two doses of vaccine - is very effective (but not 100%) at stopping people getting the Delta virus, or stopping them going to hospital.

A better description is that we have a race between vaccination and the Delta variant, and the government by delaying putting India on the red list gave Delta a big head start. This head start could be crucial, for a reason I will explain later.

Anyone who thinks from the chart above that other countries are going to escape a Delta wave will be disappointed. Here is a week-old chart from the FT of how the Delta variant is gradually becoming the dominant variant in other countries.

Because Delta is replacing other variants, aggregates will continue to fall until close to the point at which Delta becomes dominant. One by one, we will see those countries that are currently seeing falling cases experience rising cases again. The Delta variant will produce a new COVID wave in the West, just as the Alpha (UK) variant did before.

What makes this wave different is that the age ranges that are vulnerable to dying from COVID have largely been vaccinated, so deaths from the virus should be lower. But even if deaths are very low, there are a number of problems with running a high level of cases of COVID even if it isn’t associated with deaths. The most obvious is the impact on hospitals.

As Delta mainly affects younger people you might have thought that the number of hospitalisations would be low relative to cases. Initial data suggested among the unvaccinated there was about double the number of hospitalisations per case for Delta than for Alpha. However once we take vaccination into account, the ratio of hospitalisations to cases is about half what it is in January. If that pattern persists, and cases keep rising, we may see serious pressure put on hospitals that are already struggling to get back to normal.

A second concern is Long COVID. At least 10% of those infected with COVID still have serious symptoms 12 weeks later. We do not know, for obvious reasons, whether these numbers will also apply to the Delta variant, but the presumption must be that they will. Allowing another large wave of COVID cases is therefore likely to significantly increase the already large number of people suffering from long COVID.

A third, but time limited, concern is disruption in education. As the Delta variant is mainly being spread among school aged children, it will disrupt the education of many. It is a time limited concern because school holidays are weeks away.

A fourth, and potentially most serious, concern with another wave of cases is that this provides ideal conditions for a new variant to emerge that could seriously diminish the effectiveness of a double dose of vaccine. We just do not know how likely such a development is, but the fact that Delta compromises the effectiveness of one dose suggests complacency is not warranted.

Some have pointed to a falling off of cases in some initial hotspots to suggest that this Delta wave may be short lived. This could be due to a number of factors that have nothing to do with the virus itself, such as school closures and to a smaller extent greater self-isolation among the population in those areas. However even if this pattern is repeated, it will be a long time before we see it at a national level.

The key question is how large a wave we are likely to see in the UK, and whether this will be replicated elsewhere. The bad news is the likelihood that every other region will experience something similar to our current hotspots in time. The potential good news is the summer holidays. The school holidays could reduce the speed of transmission among children, which gives us more time to get everyone vaccinated with two doses.

Which is why the PM’s decision to delay putting India on the red list was so stupid. If other countries are lucky, the school holidays will arrive just in time to prevent what has happened in the UK being repeated all over the West. It will slow down Delta before it really gets going, allowing vaccinations to continue and give those countries a good chance of muting the Delta wave. That chance would have been even greater for the UK if only India had been put on the red list at the same time as Pakistan and Bangladesh.

We can be pretty sure that ‘freedom day’ in the UK will happen while cases are still increasing, hospitalisations are still rising, and deaths will be well into double figures each day. That conjunction says so much about our government: Orwellian to the last. Freedom day as the Delta wave gathers pace.

At the initial stages of a wave, where key data is being revised repeatedly, it is hard to predict the extent of this wave and when its peak will be with any certainty. (We may even see a double-peak wave caused by the summer holidays.) But we can say with near certainty that the implications for hospitals and Long COVID will be very serious indeed.

And the UK government will try and ignore it all. They have made it clear that after much of the population has been vaccinated, they are going to live with COVID. Unfortunately that seems to mean absolving the government in any interest in mitigating the virus. On 17th May face masks were no longer recommended by the government in secondary schools, and that advice has not been reversed despite Delta being mainly transmitted in Schools. (Israel, also highly vaccinated, has been more sensible.) Schemes to help schools improve ventilation have been none. Nothing has been done to improve the government’s lamentable Test and Trace operation, or to incentivise people to self-isolate. The catalogue of failure is endless.

Will the government succeed in pretending there is nothing to worry about during the Delta Wave? Not for long, I suspect. The problem is that there is a small chance that even those who have been vaccinated twice can still get the Delta variant, particularly as this variant is so infectious. With hospitals moving into crisis, I suspect that will make many cautious about a full return to a pre-COVID lifestyle. The UK recovery is likely to be delayed.

While the Delta variant will cause problems for those countries that are well on their way to being fully vaccinated, the real hit will be in those countries that are only starting vaccination. There is a debate about how to get vaccine production to cover all countries as quickly as possible, but it is clear not nearly enough is being done by the West. They must do much more quickly, if only because otherwise the example of the Delta variant could be repeated in an even more serious form, and past experience suggests Western countries will not be able to keep that variant out.

What attitudes to lockdowns tell us about the right wing media

When I talk about how important the media is in forming political opinions and attitudes, some people tell me the causation is all the other way around. Their argument is that the press in particular reflects the views of their readers and not vice versa. It is certainly true that good newspapers are aware of what their typical readers think, and that going radically against that could harm the newspaper. Imagine what would happen, for example, if a newspaper declared football to be the work of the devil.

But media influence rarely works like that. Instead it influences views about things that most readers have little idea about, or it amplifies some views at the expense of others. For example, most people have a natural fear of the other. So when certain newspapers started talking about hordes of immigrants flooding the country, that had an influence on readers who were not accustomed to following the actual data. These readers generally knew that immigrants were not yet flooding their own town or neighbourhood, but they also thought they knew it was happening elsewhere because of what they had read, and feared it might be just a matter of time before it happened on their patch. There are plenty of other examples on a similar theme. For example people often wildly overestimate the amount of benefit fraud because of stories in the papers.

But, like declaring football was the work of the devil, there are limits to what the media can do to influence their readers. An interesting case study is the merits or otherwise of lockdowns during the COVID pandemic. Few will have escaped the fact that the right wing press has been full of articles about why lockdowns are unnecessary and harmful. So did that just reflect the views of their readers, and if not was this anti-lockdown campaign able to substantially shift public opinion?

On both counts the answer appears no. Consider the period of September 2020. We had already had one lockdown, so the public knew the arguments for them, and the right wing press had had plenty of time to present their anti-lockdown message. Here is a poll focused on the very limited measures the government had taken so far. What those answering the poll would not have known is that the government had recently rejected advice from its scientists for a much stronger lockdown.

Half of those answering thought the government had not done enough, and of course they proved to be right. But only 13% of people were following the line pushed by many in the right wing press that nothing needed to be done. Furthermore that anti-lockdown view was stronger in younger people, while newspaper readership is concentrated among older people.

So right wing papers were not reflecting their readership, and their ability to persuade has had at best limited success. The reasons for this are fairly obvious. The case for lockdowns is fairly obvious, and most people (particularly of an age that reads newspapers) are pretty cautious about the prospect of catching a life-threatening virus. Trying to persuade people to carry on mixing socially during a pandemic which is highly infectious is in the ‘football is the work of satan’ category.

So why are newspapers pushing this line, if they normally have a good idea of the limits to their persuasive powers. One reason is fairly obvious: lockdowns are very bad financially for newspapers. Sales collapse when people stay at home.

However a more interesting answer is that newspapers were not so much trying to persuade their readers so much as trying to persuade those in power. I noted recently how journalists at Fox sometimes talked directly to Trump (who famously relied on information from Fox rather than his civil servants), and how if you believe Cummings Johnson too was and is influenced by what he reads in the press, and particularly his old newspaper. It is more reasonable to see right wing newspapers championing an anti-lockdown approach as an argument among the governing right wing elite.

So what can we conclude from all this. First, the right wing press do not always follow their readership. That is why politicians are so keen to meet the editors of these papers on a regular basis, and don’t just look at their polling and focus groups instead. Second, newspapers cannot tell their readers what to do when it goes against readers interest and understanding. Newspaper propaganda works best on issues where their readers are not well informed.

Whenever I talk about press propaganda recently, I get told that countering propaganda with better information will not work, because voters will believe what they want to believe. There is a lot of truth in that. When Fox News didn’t follow Trump in declaring he had really won in 2020, they lost many viewers. But there are two crucial caveats when we come to the UK. First, most Conservative voters are not nearly as radicalised as many Trump supporters, yet. Second, and just as crucial, elections work on the margins, and the margins here are voters that have not become radicalised.

Indeed, if selective or inaccurate information didn’t influence readers or viewers, we would have no reason to be concerned about media bias. In reality we now have considerable evidence that media bias does matter. For that reason we should be very concerned that a large section of the press now acts as the publicity arm of the Conservative party nearly all of the time. Having a free press is a great ideal, and we have departed from that in a big way. Press propaganda is an integral part of how a populist plutocracy can stay in power.

I am very pessimistic that this can change that in the short term. While new media like the byline group are great, the typical reader of the Mail, Sun, Telegraph or Express, who has little interest in politics, is not going to read media which is mainly about politics and contains no sport, celebrity gossip etc. In my view the only way to reduce the power of the right wing press is to bring it under the control of Ofcom, and for Ofcom to enforce balance. That can only be done when opposition politicians win power, and are prepared to look beyond negative headlines and act to change one of the main reasons why they find it so hard to win power.

 

A government out of control

 

The commitment that the UK government gives 0.7% of its GDP as overseas aid is enshrined in law. Johnson’s government decided to cut this to 0.5%, but didn’t need to put this to parliament because the cut was supposed to be temporary. A large number of Conservative MPs were unhappy with this, and wanted to use parliament to reverse this cut. The parliament’s speaker ruled their attempt invalid, but requested the government to allow a vote on the issue. The government refused. The executive increasingly views parliament with contempt.

So much for the sovereignty of parliament. We knew this government thought little of parliamentary sovereignty when it closed it down, illegally, before the last election. The courts forced it to retract that measure, so now the government is intending to pass laws that would prevent the courts doing so again.

Of course it is open to MPs to pass a vote of no confidence in this government, just as it is possible for a majority of Tory MPs to bring down their leader. But that is never going to happen while Johnson looks like winning the next election. As a result, parliament has no effective control over what this government does.

The government, in the form of Michael Gove, has recently been found guilty of giving public money - our money - to friends in the form of a contract with no competition at all. That is breaking the law. This is corruption. He has no intention of resigning and Johnson will do nothing. In other words this government has been found to be corrupt, and no one can do anything about it.

Matt Hancock has recently been questioned by a select committee on his handling of the COVID pandemic that has killed around 130,000 people in the UK. One of the issues the committee raised was early shortages of PPE. He repeated that there has never been a national shortage of PPE. This statement could best be described as economical with the truth. He was asked about reports, from a whistleblower, that the department of health had pressured Public Health England to change its guidance on release of patients from hospitals to care homes to no longer include the need for a negative COVID test. He said he had no recollection of that - a clear non-denial denial. Mr. Hancock will remain in post.

The Education Secretary, Gavin Williamson, was quick to condemn 10 Oxford students who decided to take down a picture of the Queen from their common room. He knows what is important - it was going to be front page news in the Mail. What isn’t front page news in the Mail is that the new wave of the UK’s COVID pandemic, generated by the Delta (Indian) variant, is very strong among school children, and it is highly likely that these children are helping this variant to spread rapidly. Knowing all this, Gavin Williamson told schools they didn’t need to wear masks any more. Will Williamson resign or be sacked for helping this new wave spread rapidly? Silly question.

Then there was Priti Patel, Home Secretary, who was accused of bullying by, among others, her Permanent Secretary. Bullying is against the ministerial code, and an internal inquiry found her guilty. The Prime Minister refused to apply any sanction, and the only person to resign was the person in charge of upholding standards. The Permanent Secretary was sacked and received a large sum in settlement from the government after he took the case to an employment tribunal.

Then there was the Housing Secretary who unlawfully approved a housing scheme so that the developer could avoid paying £40 million odd to the council. Not even a rebuke from anyone in government. Corruption is particularly rife among building developers and this government. There is much more, but let me cut to the chase. Actions that would have led to pretty rapid resignation in past administrations have been ignored by this Prime Minister time and again.

It is not as if his predecessors in office have been shy of sacking ministers who transgressed in various ways, as this chart shows:

Why did Johnson keep Patel and the others? Why shouldn’t he? They are his people, and nothing bad is going to come from keeping the ministers he chose in the job. It is tempting to say that his own actions are too similar to these ministers (lying, breaking the ministerial code), but I don’t think that is the key here. The key is that this government is totally unaccountable, and does just what it likes.

It is unaccountable to parliament, because it has a large majority and Tory MPs are not prepared to bring the house down. It ignores the law when it can, and when the law does stop it doing something it then attempts to change the law so it won’t be stopped in the future. It gets away with this because it has effectively the one key check on its power - the media.

For a large part of the press, Johnson is their Prime Minister. They became propaganda outlets to persuade people to vote for Brexit, and they have remained propaganda outlets supporting the government ever since. It is tempting to say this has always been true, but the extent to which the right wing press has become the propaganda arm of the right in the Tory party has steadily increased over the last few decades. It is now fully signed up with the government’s culture war, which is why 10 students taking down a picture of the queen can become headline news. Talk of a free press in this context is laughable - these titles are now part of a Tory party run by one of their former journalists.

However the big change, begun by Thatcher and Cameron and completed by Johnson, is to tame the BBC. This is hardly surprising, when party donors are appointed to key positions and the government keeps attacking the BBC’s outputs, income and even its existence. The BBC does not push propaganda, but they do not take it on either, giving the press a largely open field for their propaganda to work. They avoid the truth if it embarrasses the government, and when its reporters do tell things straight, they are put down by the BBC’s leadership. (C4, Sky and sometimes ITV are better, but the BBC overwhelmingly dominates in terms of viewers.)

The only accountability that has any influence on this government is the electorate. But because of its natural advantage in the media, and unfortunately an opposition that seems pretty ineffective beyond PMQs, that influence on the government is partial and weak. Issues most voters will not notice, because their only sight of them is a news item towards the end of a bulletin (like the government breaking the law on contracts), can be safely ignored by the government.

Alas, because of the way the BBC fails in its reporting, even things that do have a large impact on voters, like tens of thousands of unnecessary deaths, will never be described in those terms. That lack of media accountability allows Johnson to ignore his scientists, and put personal ‘freedom’ above saving lives and the economy. This is what happens when the government becomes unaccountable. [1] It is allowed to make mistakes costing lives, and pays no price for these mistakes. 

None of this is a surprise. What I didn’t know then was that Johnson would choose ‘freedom’ over lives and the economy not once, not twice, not three times but now four times. Johnson prioritised getting a trade deal with India over protecting the UK from a new highly infectious variant. When Johnson went to stage 3 of removing the latest lockdown he knew SAGE was warning of hospital admissions on the scale of the previous wave, and he carried on regardless with little media comeback. He can only carry on ignoring scientific advice because the only institutions that could hold him to account in the eyes of most voters choose not to do so. This is why, for the first time in living memory, we have a government out of control.

[1] What has changed since Blair took us to war with Iraq? some on the left might ask. Blair went to war with parliament’s approval. Johnson takes key decisions with little or no reference to parliament. There was a huge demonstration against the war, which if this government gets its way a similar demonstration could be deemed illegal by this government.

How should we think about talk of an impending US inflationary spiral?

 

In 2013 I was presenting at a Bank of England conference. The UK recovery had stalled for three years. I cannot remember the details, but I was probably arguing that the economy desperately needed fiscal stimulus, not more austerity. A very well known academic and ex central banker started talking about inflation and the dangers of expectations becoming 'unhinged'. In my response I came quite close to losing my cool.

I wrote this post afterwards, which attempted to analyse why I had got so angry at that word ‘unhinged’. It is, after all, used a lot by central bankers and some economists. But its use makes no sense in today’s world. Here is a passage from that post:

“It is as if inflation expectations can be in one of two states: either low variance with mean reversion to the inflation target (or something close to it), or as highly volatile and could go anywhere. In this second imagined state, as expectations of inflation drive actual inflation, we could have ‘inflation bubbles’, which would become very costly for the central bank to prick. As we really do not want to go to that second state, we have to do everything we can to stay in the first state.

It is this view of the world that I find very difficult to believe - in fact I find it absurd.”

I still find it absurd. We cannot at the same time talk about how long term inflation expectations have become fairly anchored to the inflation targets as a result of central banks controlling interest rates to hit that target, and in the next breath talk about expectations becoming unhinged while the same central banker with the same or very similar inflation target is in place. That makes no sense, unless the aim is to permanently run the economy with a weak labour market as Kalecki suggested capitalism would.

All the evidence, direct or indirect, points to the story about fairly anchored long term inflation expectations due to inflation targets and independent central banks being correct. Most macroeconomists say they believe this story. That is why they prefer independent central banks (controlling inflation with inflation targets) setting interest rates instead of national governments controlling inflation by setting interest rates or fiscal policy. In that context, and when short term interest rates are at their lower bound, it seems bizarre in the extreme to start worrying about inflation expectations becoming unhinged.

The whole point about flexible inflation targets is that positive inflation shocks due to commodity prices increases, or temporary shortages (labour or goods), no longer kick off an inflationary spiral. If what was temporary becomes permanent, the central bank can raise rates to cure the problem. The clearest example of that was the oil price boom that started in 2004, which came nowhere near repeating the experience of the 1970s.

The whole point of the new state contingent policy regime that many macroeconomists now favour is that fiscal policy looks after recessions and interest rates stop inflationary spirals. If fiscal stimulus does not lead to inflationary pressure that requires interest rates to rise above their lower bound it is not a big enough stimulus.

The failure of the last decade in the US, UK and Eurozone has been the absence of that stimulus (and instead austerity), and unconventional monetary policy being insufficient to cope with severe recession. The failure is manifest in a largely unexplained shift down in the path of ‘trend’ output. As many of us explained before this happened, being conservative about policy risks a long term deterioration in output and prosperity. The upside risk was trivial in comparison because raising interest rates are very good at keeping inflation steady in the medium to long term.

This is the central argument about why it’s best to overshoot on fiscal stimulus rather than do exactly what you think you need to do to hit the level of output that stabilises inflation. It is the argument of asymmetric risks. If you are conservative or do exactly what you think you need to do, the risk that you get things wrong because the stimulus turns out to be insufficient (because your calculations were wrong or unexpected things happened) is much greater than the risk that you overshoot. If you overshoot you quickly get higher interest rates and a temporary blip in inflation. If you undershoot it will take you some time to realise what has happened, and you will have lost real resources for everyone in the economy forever.

As I noted here, the Eurozone and the UK seem to be intent on making the same mistake again, approaching a conservative view of the natural rate gradually from below. Only in the US do policymakers understand the mistakes they made before. After a failed coup against democracy and the opposition party in thrall to the coup maker that is hardly surprising.

Does the change in US monetary policy to a form of average inflation targeting change the logic of going bigger than you think you need to? In fact the opposite is true. It means that some excess inflation will be tolerated for a time, to make up for previous persistent undershooting of the target. That shouldn’t mean that long term inflation expectations rise above target, as long as the central bank is clear what it’s doing. It remains the case that in time interest rate rises will bring inflation down if necessary. As long as US monetary policy makers, who have high levels of credibility, make it clear that excess inflation will only be tolerated until a clearly defined state is achieved, they prevent long term inflation expectations rising.

When you add this to the argument of asymmetric risk, any fiscal stimulus needs to be targeting not just the higher inflation the Fed will tolerate, but higher than that. The Fed should have to raise interest rates in response, and if they didn’t need to you have a fiscal policy failure. (That failure is an all too likely outcome in the Eurozone and the UK.)

So those who say that Biden’s plans would raise inflation should be met with ‘I would hope so’. The same reply is appropriate if we replace ‘inflation’ with ‘interest rates’. Of course it is still possible that Biden’s plans (even after they are watered down?) are likely to raise inflation by far too much, requiring far too great an increase in interest rates, even allowing for the asymmetric risk outcomes argument. That I think is the view of, most notably, Summers and Blanchard.

I’m not going to add to the many different assessments of exactly what the first Biden stimulus will do. Instead I will point to why I think the Biden critics are wrong, which again goes back to the theory that macroeconomists teach today. The people who really need the stimulus cheques will spend a lot or all of it, but no one is arguing against supporting these people. The argument is that the cheques are also going to people who don't need them, and have saved a lot because of COVID. But being savers, these are people who will save most or all of the stimulus cheques (see Florin Bilbiie, Gauti Eggertsson and Giorgio Primiceri here). As a result, Summers’ assumption on the demand impact of the stimulus cheques seems too high. I have consistently argued that the end of pandemic will see an increase in pent-up consumption, but that is a very temporary affair.

The US is streets ahead in macroeconomic policy terms than both the Eurozone and the UK. Both the latter have not changed their monetary policy goal and still obsess about deficits. If the forecasts prove correct the US will come out of the COVID recession with no long term scarring, while across the Atlantic we will not. No doubt lots of what Krugman calls Very Serious People in the UK and EZ will find reasons for why that was inevitable and had nothing to do with an inadequate stimulus. The reality will be that the US learnt from past mistakes, but the same leaders who presided over the austerity disaster after the Global Financial Crisis haven’t fully understood what they did wrong.

Worried about another COVID wave? Here are some pictures of Johnson getting married again

 

When cases in another country start growing rapidly, you quarantine in hotels people coming from that country. If they have existing variants of concern, you do the same. You do not wait because the PM has a state visit planned hoping things will get better. Once a variant of concern enters the country, you direct all resources to isolating that variant and preventing spread. You do not persist with a failed test and trace system because it is politically embarrassing to overhaul it. You make payments to those asked to isolate automatically.

Our government made all these mistakes, and so now we are at the beginning of a new COVID wave. Yet rather than stop further relaxation of the lockdown (not doing stage 3), this government carried on regardless. It poured petrol on a fire, and crossed its fingers that it would be OK. Actually even that is too generous. It reduced lock down restrictions because the PM and the rest of the cabinet were prepared to see another wave of cases, hospitalisations and a fair number of deaths in the UK. The new variant is spreading rapidly in schools in areas where it is concentrated, so what did the government do - it told people in secondary schools they didn’t need to continue wearing masks.

All this will come as a big surprise to most people. They will not have watched the occasional interview with an expert warning that this will happen. They will certainly not have read the SAGE minutes predicting this will happen. The media seem to only do crises when they happen, rather than before they happen. Perhaps they are scared of being accused of spreading panic, but the media really should sound the warning bells when PHE, after pressure from the government, starts delaying publication of data on the spread of the Indian variant in schools. Not only does this media silence put no pressure on the government to prevent the crisis, it also creates the impression that this was an act of god that had nothing to do with the government’s actions.

We know the Indian variant spreads a lot more rapidly than anything we already have, and it has become the dominant form of COVID in the UK in mid-May. It is now the dominant form in most regions. We also have evidence that one dose of vaccine offers less protection against this variant than against other forms of COVID, but two doses does offer a similar amount of protection. Around half of the UK adult population has had two doses of vaccine, meaning the other half have one or none at all. That, according to SAGE projections available before the government went to stage 3, could cause a wave of hospitalisation similar to what happened in the New Year. [1]

The number of deaths should be less than past waves, but we are still talking about many people dying who didn’t need to die. But hospitals are only just beginning to reduce the backlog from other diseases like cancer created by previous COVID waves, and another wave of hospitalisations will reverse that process, leading to yet more deaths from non-COVID causes. Staff at hospitals are also exhausted from a year of this pandemic under a Prime Minister reluctant to lock down until the very last minute, and secretly (until Cummings) wanting to be the mayor in the Jaws film who kept the beaches open. (A long running theme from the PM: see here.)

Of course it is possible that this virus will suddenly start slowing down, and hospitalisations will be less than in the last wave. With the weather finally becoming more summer-like, more social mixing will take place outdoors, and this might limit the spread of this variant. COVID predictions can be wrong, it both directions. But for exactly that reason the Prime Minister cannot know that things will not be so bad in this new wave. He is following dates rather than the data, and yet again not following scientific advice, because he is more interested in giving people the freedom to spread the virus to others. 

A new wave is also highly likely to stop the UK economic recovery in its tracks. If the government does not lockdown when cases are rising, many people will choose to avoid pubs and restaurants. Vaccines, even with two doses, do not give you 100% protection in the middle of a growing pandemic. Plenty of those with a single dose will also avoid taking risks. The underlying myth of the anti-lockdown brigade is that without government lockdowns the economy will continue as normal. It won’t, because most people isolate themselves in a pandemic. The key difference is that voluntary lockdowns are just less effective at lowering cases than those led by the government.

There is also a fallacy in letting people make their own choices, as this government seems to want to do. You can travel to Amber list countries (if they will let you in), but you shouldn’t travel except for exceptional circumstances according to the PM. Many go anyway, partly because they mistake being allowed to for it being safe, but also because they are prepared to take the risk for themselves. It is a fallacy because if they have COVID as they return they can pass it on to others, who had no part in the choice of whether they went abroad.

The Prime Minister seems to think that as long as hospitals can (just) cope it will be OK. However a wave in cases with most people vaccinated is about the most irresponsible thing you could possibly do. It invites new variants to be created that are far better at bypassing the vaccines we have. The more cases you allow when most of the population is vaccinated the greater the chance that a variant will emerge that vaccines are far less effective against. Much of the gains of the vaccination programme could be lost, and we will have to start all over again.

Cummings’ message was that this Prime Minister is exactly the wrong person to be leading us in this pandemic, and most of the media chose to ignore his warnings. On the day the opposition leader effectively accused Johnson of causing thousands of unnecessary deaths in the second half of last year, and warned of the dangers we face today, newspapers had the Prime Minister’s ‘secret’ wedding on their front pages. Will the broadcast media start holding this government and its Prime Minister responsible for past and possible future deaths? Will voters finally realise that they are being lied to by this government all the time, and their lives and livelihoods are at risk as long as Johnson continues as Prime Minister?

[1] This risk is not unique to the UK, which is why some other countries are quarantining new arrivals from the UK. But some are not doing this, so UK travelers are likely to start waves of the Indian variant in enough other countries that its global spread is assured. Perhaps these countries will have vaccinated enough people in time, but the dangers are that others will not and we again have the perfect conditions for an even more dangerous variant to emerge. 

Cummings, a puzzle about delayed lockdowns and more parallels between Johnson and Trump

 

Much (unfortunately for Hancock not all) of the material Cummings talked about in his morning testimony we already knew. Like the plans for Herd Immunity (all over by September) and how various people in and outside government realised those plans were time inconsistent (were bound to be changed as hospitals were overwhelmed). As I wrote at the end of April last year, our “Prime Minister and some in his cabinet, even in the face of predictions of hundreds of thousands of deaths, was too content to do nothing, take it on the chin, and too fearful of curtailing economic freedoms to interrogate the advice they were given.” Johnson didn’t invent Herd Immunity, but he was happy to go along with it until some of his advisors persuaded him otherwise, and even then he delayed for around 10 days before imposing a lockdown.

Given what Cummings said and what we already knew, can the government really persist with lying about the initial strategy? Can the BBC really two-side this if they do? At some point the BBC should start pointing viewers to the truth. Another thing reporters must stop doing is talking about a health/economy trade off. It was good to see Cummings setting out yesterday what I and others have been saying for over a year: there is no trade-off. If you delay lockdown because of the economy, you will have a longer lockdown later with greater economic damage, and people will start locking down themselves anyway.

What was new from Cummings, and by far the most concerning part of his testimony, is that by the summer Johnson had thought he had made a mistake. According to Cummings he felt that he had been bounced into imposing a lockdown. Johnson thought he should have been like the guy from Jaws who wanted to keep the beach open, much as he had in February. Which helps explain why policy shifted in the summer to restarting the economy, with little thought for the pandemic. It was why Johnson rejected the advice from his scientists to lockdown in September. (BBC again - please stop quoting without qualification the PM saying he always followed the science. It’s such an obvious lie.)

In my last post I talked about how you had to see this government as first and foremost populists (in the Jan-Werner Müller sense), in the same ilk as Trump, Orban and others. Yet as a result of Cummings testimony I realise I had in my discussion of the government’s failures in the second half of 2020 not done that enough myself. I just couldn’t understand why Johnson kept delaying lockdowns, at the cost of many tens of thousands of lives. It was a puzzle to me, which if I had fully examined Johnson as a populist I would have understood.

One of the persistent features of Trump’s period as president was his obsession with Fox News. He preferred to get his information from Fox News than internal government briefings. In time Fox News started to understand this, and some of its journalists started directly addressing him in their shows. Why did Trump do this? Because all populists are narcissists who want to be admired by their people. Most of the time, Fox News obliged.

Narcissists don’t want to be loved, they want to be admired. Trump watched Fox obsessively to check he was still being admired. That he was a winner and not a loser. What has this got to do with Johnson and the pandemic. For me it solves the puzzle as to why Johnson didn’t follow the science in the second half of 2020.

I have in the past dismissed the influence that the anti-lockdown right wing press had on the government, as well as the anti-lockdown Tory faction of MPs for that matter. I assumed that once the government had understood the reality of how pandemics worked and the lack of any health/economy trade-off, they wouldn’t be influenced by anti-lockdown nonsense. That was true for Cummings as much as it was for the government’s scientific advice.

I had also compared, like many others, Johnson and Trump and pointed out the many similarities. They were both populists after all, interested in power for its own sake rather than as a vehicle to achieve certain policies they believed in. Nick Clegg has described Johnson as like ‘Trump with a thesaurus’. But I didn’t carry this comparison through.

If we believe Cummings, Johnson too is obsessed by the media read by ‘his people’, and in particular his own paper The Telegraph. He looks to them to check he is being admired. So when this and other right wing papers started publishing anti-lockdown nonsense, it got to him. As the Prime Minister who had locked down the economy he was no longer admired by these newspapers. This overrode any ability to understand the reasons why lockdown was necessary (and quick and hard lockdowns particularly), so he became over the summer a lockdown skeptic.

Do I believe Cummings. On this I do, because it makes perfect sense and explains why he allowed so many unnecessary deaths by ‘going for growth’ in the summer, refusing to lockdown in September, and not locking down in December. This, rather than anything that happened in March, is why Johnson wants to put off an inquiry (and will not publish the internal inquiry that has already taken place). As Cummings said, lots of people died who didn’t need to die, and Johnson is the person who let that happen by ignoring his scientific advice.

I think too many people in their commentary on Cummings feel they have to blame the messenger. On issues like the role of Sunak I would take what he says with a large pinch of salt. I don’t think Cummings is looking for any favours from Sunak but Cummings admires people who are bright and get things done. The Treasury is full of such people and Sunak probably is too. So I would discount that. But Cummings’ discussion of the pandemic itself fits the facts. So when Cummings says that Johnson regretted locking down in March I can believe him, because it helps solve a puzzle about behaviour that I have seen no other satisfactory explanation for.

Johnson became a lockdown skeptic, and many tens of thousands of people died as a result, because he was obsessed with how he appeared in the anti-lockdown press and among his anti-lockdown MPs. Like Trump, he wanted to be admired by the media of his people, and like Trump that desire was sufficient to override all the good advice he received within government. When Cummings said Johnson cannot be trusted to run this country, he is merely confirming a view some of us have had for some time. What we couldn’t predict is that this wouldn’t just cost many livelihoods, it would also cost tens of thousands of lives.

Johnson leads a populist government which should not be normalised

 

Did Trump move Republican policy to the left? Before you think too hard about that, I want to suggest it misses the point. Trump was a populist. Populism is a much abused word, but I want to use it in the way set out by Jan-Werner Müller. For him populism is a form of anti-pluralism, a government that does not accept any constraints on its power beyond the electorate (at least as long as they win elections).

I want to look at two recent discussions of the Johnson government in this light. The first is by John Rentoul, who describes this as the most left wing Conservative government since Ted Heath and possibly forever. It describes a common idea (on the left and right) that this government cannot be right wing because it has ‘opened the fiscal floodgates’. The second is by Will Davies, who puts part of the success of this government down to ‘discretion rather than rules’, and in taming the Treasury. I want to suggest that both would follow naturally from the populist nature of this government, but so far the Treasury and Chancellor have not been tamed as much as these accounts suggest.

The populism, or anti-pluralism, of this government is as clear as it could be in its latest Queen’s Speech, which sets out what the government intends to do over the next session of parliament. It contains a bill that will restrict the ability of the courts to hold the government to account. No longer will the courts be able to stop the government closing down parliament. It contains a bill to make photo-ID compulsory in elections, which is a form of gerrymandering. The voting system in Mayoral and PCCs elections will be changed to FPTP, because it favours the Conservatives. It also contains a bill that will allow the police (and therefore the Home Secretary) to ban any demonstration they do not like.

This government just does not do accountability. No minister has resigned since the cabinet was formed just after the general election, despite many scandals that would have led to resignation in the past. The institutions of government that guard against ministerial wrongdoing, like the ministerial code, are now effectively meaningless as Johnson can and has overridden them. Parliament, that was once the ultimate source of power, is no longer, as the government increasingly ignores its existence. Johnson treats any opposition as an annoyance, constantly questioning why it is opposing rather than supporting his policies.

Like all populists of the Trump, Orban type, Johnson aims through media dominance and habitual lying to create an alternative reality where the government are heroes rather than villains. There was never ever any plan by the government to achieve herd immunity, we were told (and continue to be told) in all seriousness after the government ditched its plan for herd immunity. Of course all governments spin, but gross lying like this is rare in normal governments, but it becomes the habitual first resort of populists.

Most government’s arrive with an extensive policy agenda, and spend the first few years of their administration putting that agenda into law. This government had one policy, Brexit. Brexit as implemented by this government is a classic populist (in the Müller sense) policy. Not only was the policy promoted as the will of the people, where ‘the people’ excluded the 48% who voted against it, but it was enacted in a very populist (but unpopular) way, where any potential restraints on the government’s power from the EU (restraints we would normally call intergovernmental cooperation) were eliminated as being anti-Brexit.

There is only one constraint that this government does not intend to eliminate, and that is having to be elected whenever it chooses to hold an election or after 5 years. As a result, much of what it does is designed to make that more likely. Brexit was won by getting the votes of socially conservative voters, which is why the government is obsessed by being as nasty as it can be to asylum seekers and other immigrants, and why it talks so much about an anti-WOKE agenda. (Whether ‘the people’ are as obsessed by either is an interesting question.) Because it now has many more seats in the North it has a ‘leveling up’ agenda. If you look at many of the elements of that agenda we have seen so far, it amounts to channeling money to Tory parliamentary constituencies rather than areas of deprivation.

What the government will do, at any opportunity, is to help its friends and financial backers. It saw the COVID pandemic as a means of turning a crisis into opportunity, by farming out large elements of test and trace to the private sector and PPE procurement to its friends. It will override planning laws, and therefore the objections of its often traditional Tory voters, to allow its friends in the building industry to build more houses and make more profit.

If you're tempted to think that all this is not so very different from what all governments do, let me finally note another characteristic of populists: their governments are all about those at its head, who are generally narcissistic individuals who really don’t care about anyone except themselves. Johnson fits that bill, appointing a cabinet that was not the best of all talents but just those that would follow his lead. Crucially populists produce governments that don’t care about other people very much, except when they vote for them. Only a populist could dream of dealing with COVID with a policy of herd immunity, which means the government does nothing while hundreds of thousands die, just so that they could have a stronger economy than other countries subsequently. [1]

Does the furlough scheme, and the massive spend on test and trace, indicate that all fiscal restraint has gone? Of course not. The furlough scheme is just a natural counterpart to government imposed lockdown. That is why European governments adopted similar schemes. It has avoided substantial unemployment, and the last thing this government wants is large numbers of people who vote for it to experience Universal Credit (and see their savings disappear). As for test and trace, the government saw that as a good opportunity to sustain certain companies in the private sector.

As to fiscal rules and the power of the Treasury, the Treasury and Chancellor Rushi Sunak still have a kind of fiscal rule, which is that government debt should be falling in the medium term. This is why large areas of public spending face further tightening [2] and taxes are planned to rise. The fiscal stimulus during the recovery amounts to a single measure to bring investment forward, and looks feeble compared to what Biden is doing in the US. This is because Sunak still believes in fiscal restraint, and he has sold that to Johnson as being an essential part of the Conservative brand.

The term I would use for the government’s fiscal response to the pandemic and its subsequent recovery spending is not that it is left wing for a Conservative government, but that it is ironically rather European. The UK’s approach to recovery, like that adopted in the Eurozone, remains obsessed with stabilising the level of government debt. To argue in either case that their response to the pandemic shows that the fiscal floodgates are now permanently open would simply be wrong.

In looking at how left wing a government is, I think it is at least as important to look at what the government is or isn’t trying to do about inequality as it is to look at fiscal policy. Child poverty has risen over recent years under a Conservative government and is expected to rise further under this government. The pandemic has hit poorer households badly, whereas most other households have increased their savings, further increasing poverty and inequality. This government shows no signs of doing anything about any of this, and prefers to just lie about it when challenged. As poverty gets almost no attention in the media, this is likely to continue.

Of course populists prefer discretion rather than rules, as long as it is their discretion. [3] So why does Johnson, who has little time for fiscal rules, allow Sunak and the Treasury to plan as if one was still there? Here we need to talk about another possible constraint on populists, and that is their party. If Johnson goes too far in the eyes of enough Tory MPs he could be deposed. While a vocal number of Tory MPs (vocal in part because they had the support of the Tory press) were complaining about lockdowns last year, another large part were worried that Johnson was just not up to the job of managing a pandemic. His position in 2020 was insecure, which is partly why he was happy for Sunak to plan to raise taxes in areas that most voters would never experience directly. Whether Johnson remains happy now that his position is stronger will depend on whether he believes fiscal restraint is essential in winning elections. .

Once you see Johnson as a populist, it becomes obvious that he will hate any constraints on his power, whether they come from rules or directly from the Treasury. He will spend money on his friends (whether donors to the party or donors to himself), and will spend money in any way that secures his position with the voters, as long perhaps as he can claim to be fiscally responsible. The danger of describing such spending as left wing, or as reducing the power of the Treasury, is that it normalises a populist government: a populist government that will be defined by history for its authoritarianism, lack of accountability, habitual lying, inhumanity, corruption and anti-pluralism.

[1] The herd immunity policy only ended when it became clear it would lead to NHS chaos, which would look very bad and would threaten the government’s popularity. Ever since in Johnson’s mind overwhelming the NHS, rather than deaths or illness per se, has been the constraint on doing nothing. It is why he intends to ignore the Indian variant because he is hoping a large spike in cases will not lead to an overwhelmed NHS. It is nevertheless a foolish policy in its own terms, because a large rise in cases will severely limit the recovery.

[2] I can find only one area of public spending that will see an improvement in the funding they need over the next few years: education. NHS spending grows rapidly but that needs to happen to maintain the same level of service, and some of that increase may be eaten up by recovery from the pandemic. If any of the other areas of public spending are to improve over the next few years, either the cuts to other areas will be greater or the government’s spending plans will have to be revised.

[3] The Davies article is more interesting than this sentence might suggest. He is absolutely right that the most fiscally responsible government under Blair/Brown is believed otherwise only because of subsequent unchallenged (by Labour) Tory spin. However I think the ‘second government’ that operated under Brown, where the Treasury had more control over the details of departmental spending than it ever had before, was unique to the Granita accord. Neither Osborne or Hammond had the same degree of interest in what other departments did, although legacies of the brown era might have remained. (A major criticism of Osborne is that his cuts were largely arbitrary, with little interest in their economic consequences.) Fiscal rules, on the other hand, always make sense if they are good rules. Problems arise when they are not, and are used as cover to implement other objectives.