I reckon that up until now I have not done too badly in terms of remaining positive about life. Partly that has had to do with the fact that I have been occupied primarily with sustaining the morale and supporting the situation of others. Today that has begun to feel threatened. Continuing backache as a result of excessively enthusiastic gardening has contributed to my state of mind, and the exhaustion of my art projects leaving me at a loose end has made the situation worse. A third factor, however, has been the growing perception that things could have been handled better at the national level, and our response to crisis could have been more effective but for the legacy of government policy.
My initial response to the political dimension of things was to be fairly tolerant towards the government, recognising that the current situation is pretty well unprecedented and would present an immense challenge to any administration. As time has passed, however, that tolerance has come under strain.
Today I read an interesting piece in the London Review of Books, by a correspondent who lives in Italy (Thomas Jones, “Quaresima”, LRB, 2 Apr. 2020, pp. 13-15). In it he points out that in Italy ( cast in such a negative light by our press) at the outset of the current pandemic there were 12.5 intensive care beds per 100,000 of the population. In the UK the figure was 6.6 per 100,000–a half of the level of provision in Italy.
The true position is that we are now reaping the harvest of more than a decade of government “austerity”, sold to us under the label of fiscal prudence, but having the effect of steadily deteriorating the level of provision in our health service. The service is putting up a heroic struggle to cope with the situation, and government representatives are full of praise for those efforts. Their warm words of support, however, should not be allowed to detract from the fact that the seriousness of the challenge now being faced by the NHS is in large measure a creation of government policy.
A more embarrassing figure emerged over the past few days, in that a retired ex-serviceman in his nineties has raised by his own efforts in sponsorship more than £24 millions in support of the health service, exceeding the amount of £20 millions announced last week by the Minister of Health.
The government is indeed facing an unprecedented test as a result of the current pandemic, but one cannot help but ask to what extent is the severity of that challenge a result of its own historical neglect of the the health service, and its tardy recognition of what needs to be done in order to meet the situation. I cannot overlook either the fact that the first public announcements made by government ministers, as the scale and immediacy of the problem became apparent, were to do with support for businesses. There’ll be some changes made!