A plague upon your inquiry

A pantomime of handwringing, echoing our pantomime of handwashing. The COVID inquiry drives on to ill-thought destinations. They will find facts, which is a worthy thing. The fault comes at the end, in conclusions and recommendations, and worse still, in politicians as they have inappropriate reactions to those recommendations.

The terms of the Covid Inquiry are written so that they appear to be drawn widely, but in fact the terms are constrained narrowly: “The Inquiry will examine, consider and report on preparations and the response to the pandemic.” It is looking at what the Government and the devolved administrations did or did not do. The Inquiry may not examine what the lockdown and the commercial shutdown did to us all. The bankruptcies, the mental health problems, the malicious killing of enterprises and the sapping, morbid fear caused to the weaker members of the public – all this is incidental to an inquiry examining minutes and ministers.

Perhaps the coronavirus epidemic could have been slowed if we had all had our front doors barred shut, as in the Great Plague?  Perhaps, but we would have starved to death and gone mad, as in the Great Plague. No matter – that is not the Inquiry’s remit.

I do remember every bit of the Covid scare. First there were reports of a plague sweeping the Orient. Will it come here; will it not? Then bodies started filling morgues in northern Italy – in those ski resorts which hire illegal labour from Hubei Province. It looked for a moment as if this was the new Black Death (also a gift from China to the world). Now we tend to think of Covid-19 as just another ‘flu, but back then, with the virulent strains in ascendency, it was a deadly disease. A reaction was expected, and the short, sharp lockdown we were promised seemed just the medicine; but instead it became a long, killing lockdown; a harm in itself.

I recall the Israeli Health Minister appearing on television, or on YouTube at least, urging the fit and healthy to carry on as before and just to “take care of grandma”, to avoid infecting the vulnerable and let the population reach herd immunity. He was sacked soon after that. He was right though. We nearly ran the same strategy in Britain, but doom-mongers and dodgy statistical projections commanded the imprisonment of the population.

Be in no doubt: Covid-19 is still amongst us and while to most, who have contracted it before or been vaccinated it has turned into a snuffle, for others it is still deadly. We are not locking down now, thank goodness. Let the bureaucrats loose though, and who knows what they would demand.

It is disturbing to see the process of government opened up to daylight. Much of it should be. The mystique is lost, to see how so much is entrusted to fallible men with little understanding – but that is the reality. Actually the disturbing aspect is that honest, if flawed, politicians and officials may have been discussing matters in confidence, which encourages frankness. To see all the laundry aired in public might will them less daring, less innovative in the future. That disease has made more things its casualties than we could have dreamed.

The inquiry will grind on. It will find fact, which is good. I cannot fault the members of the inquiry for that.  However there it should stop.

They will be good at ascertaining fact. They are not qualified to make recommendations for action. This is a complicated life, and a contortionism of an economy, which is why it works so well. Many people in their various fields of life can look at the facts displayed naked before them and reach conclusions based on their own experience, which no one else will have. The members of the inquiry have their own expertise, and no understanding of other fields impacted. They should take the last evidence, publish what they must; and then close the book and fall silent.

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Author: AlexanderTheHog

A humble scribbler who out of my lean and low ability will lend something to Master Hobbes