Don’t mention the dour
“It’s the biggest challenge since World War Two, for the life and health of our people”. Dramatic, sweeping, rousing, and hark back to a conflict of 75 years ago. Those words on the coronavirus crisis sounded typically British, the sort of thing Boris Johnson would say to rally the nation.
In fact, they were uttered by German chancellor Angela Merkel as she addressed her parliament remotely today. This, in a country with 5,000 deaths, not nearly 20,000 like the UK’s. The two nations are once more united in suffering, but divided by a different history (the more recent history of having a network of laboratories ready to test its population early and often).
The war is never far away from Britain’s sense of its identity. As other European countries ease out of lockdown, it will be a bitter irony that as we mark VE Day with a special bank holiday on May 8, the first real sense of ‘victory’ over Covid-19 will be over the Channel, not over here.
Still, if chief scientific adviser Sir Patrick Vallance is right, we could see the end of the beginning. At the No.10 press conference today, Vallance said that the UK deaths from Covid-19 were starting to ‘plateau’ and within a couple of weeks (yes, around that VE Day) they would start to slowly drop.
Some government insiders hope Johnson will be back at the helm soon after that. Few expect any big call on when to start easing the lockdown until he’s fully recovered and in a position to make such a massive decision. In the meantime, other ministers will do their own bit to offer hope, yet all the while dodging the question of what the exit would look like.
Today, Scotland’s first minister Nicola Sturgeon once again outflanked London by publishing her own plan for a way out. There was no timetable, but there was at least a blueprint for the kinds of phases needed in a ‘managed transition’ to the ‘new normal’ (that phrase was actually in the document).
Crucially, her plan was centred on the four key values of “kindness, compassion, openness and transparency”. The last two are the ones several critics down here believe are lacking from No.10’s approach. When Sturgeon said she wanted to ‘treat people like grown-ups’, and be ‘frank with you every step of the way’, quite a few Tory as well as Labour MPs would probably have agreed.
Source: Yahoo News
