Just over a month ago my wife and I visited my daughter, her boyfriend, and my sister in Glasgow and had dinner in my sister’s house.  Two weeks later this would not have been possible, I would have been breaking the Covid regulations; in fact, my daughter and sister couldn’t have done it together even without us. They could, however, have met together in the pub, which of course doesn’t make much sense, as this Scottish blogger argued.

This week new restrictions were introduced in the North of Ireland, and even more stringent ones in Belfast and a number of other areas, making breaking of the regulations inevitable.  This has led to the targeting of students returning to University and partying in the Holyland area.  As some students have pointed out – we can’t party in numbers in our houses or on the street but we can all go to the Hatfield bar and ‘socially distance’.

When more restrictions were to be introduced by the Government in Dublin it was also stated that it would be looking at opening ‘wet’ pubs (that don’t serve food).  Later it suffered complete derision by asking publicans to keep receipts showing that punters had indeed ordered a panini costing at least €9 when they had bought their pint of Guinness.

This week it unveiled a new strategy that had five levels of restrictions, leaving Dublin to fall into level two and a half!  The Health Minister took sick on the day of the launch and had to isolate, causing the rest of Cabinet to briefly join him.  Since all these rules and regulations are based on assigning individual responsibility for avoiding the virus it wasn’t a good look.

In all these jurisdictions the number six has become a new guideline for people meeting up, the number to be made up – or not made up – of children and belonging to one, two or three households, sometimes differing between indoors and outdoors.  Overall however the differences seem less and less important.

The timing and severity of lockdown has proved no protection as infection rates increase in Dublin, Belfast and Glasgow while various parts of England are subject to greater restrictions every week.  In all places the threats of a second wave reveal the failure of the measures to deal with the first, and in all of them, despite its much-vaunted role, the test and trace systems are not operating as the should.  The readiness of the health services is unclear, but only in so far as the extent of new wave of infection is unclear, otherwise the inadequacies of each health service is perfectly clear.

Such inadequacies were the subject of a column in the Belfast paper ‘The Irish News’, in which was noted the absence of protest at the local NHS having almost closed down.  The lockdown has led to much reduced access and reduced capacity, on top of waiting lists much worse than those in Britain.  It has been justified in terms of keeping Covid out of hospitals and preparing for the second wave but deaths have now arisen in two hospitals – so it isn’t working.  In the South, the number of people screened for cancer was down 60 per cent in the first six months of 2020 compared to the previous year and the already unprecedented waiting lists have increased.

The so-called second wave was to be addressed by much improved test and tracing systems.  Unfortunately, the system in England is reported to be collapsing and the Irish one is nowhere near what was projected as necessary in April.  While still considering itself better than the British, the Irish are testing 1.8 per thousand people while the UK is doing 2.43, and has been achieving this only by using scarce heath care staff to do the testing, meaning they can’t do their day job.  In Scotland pressure on the system has meant results are taking up to ten days to come through with this reported to be threatening the regime for care workers in elderly persons’ homes.

In all countries extra funding for health services have been announced as if this will quickly address the neglect and austerity these services have suffered for years.  The additional funds are a reiteration, on a much greater scale, of repeated funding for new initiatives that are periodically announced but that rely on recruiting health professionals from other parts of the service, which create problems further back.  It’s as if you can deploy thousands of trained medical, nursing and other professional staff in a matter of weeks or months despite taking years to train them and years to put in place new facilities for them to work in.

The announcement of potential fines of £10,000 in England is many things, but an effective public health measure it is not.  It will discourage compliance with the rules and disaffection with the whole public health campaign.  The call for respect for the law, given the exclusion of Dominic Cummings from its requirements and the threat to break international law over the Brexit Withdrawal Agreement, is too obviously hypocritical to be acceptable.  The result will be intensification of blame on the general population for the Government’s failures.

Irish public health officials have warned of an increase in cases in the over-75s, the most vulnerable group and those who have suffered the greatest loss.  The argument advanced is that the whole population must suffer increasingly arbitrary and unenforceable rules to protect its most vulnerable section.  But all this achieves is failure to focus on targeted measures that might work in protecting the vulnerable, through steps to support their social distancing, ensure safe care home environments and safe hospital care when they need it.  It is impossible to square the idea of widespread social distancing to protect the vulnerable with the return of schools, colleges and the necessary return to some sort of normal working by many workers.

One noticeable aspect of the approach of all these administrations has been their failure to protect the old, through their being dumped out of hospital into homes without testing or even after testing positive. None of them has made a genuine attempt to investigate and report the lessons of their failure.  The traditional centralisation of power and secrecy in Britain has not been shattered by devolved administrations but reproduced.  The Scottish and Stormont regimes show exactly the same tendencies to secrecy, centralisation and lack of accountability.  They also show exactly the same instincts to authoritarian measures that substitute for an effective policy that goes beyond nationalist slogans.

Statistics are still paraded as proof of one jurisdiction being more successful than the other although this is fraught with difficulties and assumes that the statistics reflect the impact of respective Government measures: that it is the virus that is being controlled for either better or worse, rather than the virus determining mistaken responses to it, which is more obviously the case.

Lockdowns have been relaxed in each and the virus has flared up again, alongside dire warnings from Governments and their official advisors.  In circumstances where many are asymptomatic the possibility of testing and tracing systems identifying the source of every or most infections and then closing them down, even if efficiently carried out, is unlikely.  Not unless we face complete shutdown, which is not going to happen and which is now both too late and impossible to sustain in any case.

Comparisons drawn are always carefully chosen.  Sweden was the comparator not to be followed, except that at the beginning of September the Irish State recorded 30.6 cases per 100,000 while the Swedes reported only 23.4.

On 19 September the death rate for the four parts of the UK were reported below:

Area	Deaths	Rate per 100,000 population
England	37,076	65.9
Northern Ireland	575	30.4
Scotland	2,505	45.9
Wales	1,603	50.8

https://coronavirus.data.gov.uk/deaths

It is clear that England has performed worst and Northern Ireland best.  Scotland has done better than England, and my relatives confirmed reports that the SNP Government is getting credit for this.

Scottish nationalists claim that the dire performance of the Tory Government shows that Scottish independence is justified, and sometimes use comparisons to judge the Scottish performance poorly because of membership of the UK.  So, for example, this blog damns membership because Scotland did not match the performance of some Scandinavian countries. Of course, its comparison at that time excluded Sweden.

So not only do the nationalists get to pick their comparators but they get to pick whether being worse means that Scotland should separate from the UK and being better (especially than the English) also means they should separate.  If these statistics were the product of good Governance one must marvel at the so-far hidden wonders of the Stormont regime in Belfast that some believe works best when it doesn’t work at all, which it frequently doesn’t.

The Irish State in turn has been compared favourably to Northern Ireland, both of which recorded their first cases only two days apart.  Crude mortality rates calculated by two economists, one from the North and one from the South, showed a mortality rate at that point in time of 44.5 per 100,000 in the North but only 35.8 in the South.

They recognise however that the majority of deaths, in what they call the first phase of the pandemic, was of the over-65s, 93.5% between March and June in the South and 92.8% in the North.  They noted that a higher proportion of the population in the North is over 65 – 15.8% compared to 13.9% in the South. Adjusting for the age profile in each jurisdiction produces a mortality rate of 35.6 per 100,000 in the North (if it had the South’s population distribution – the rate in the South itself was 35.8), and the mortality rate in the South using the North’s population distribution would be 45 per 100,000 (the actual rate in the North was 44.5).  So in fact not much different at all.

The following graphs show first, the daily new cases, and the following two graphs the cumulative total cases and death rate per million for a number of different countries.

The first graph shows that there are increased numbers of cases in a number of countries giving rise to the concern about a resurgence.  The second graph however puts this into perspective, that growth in the cumulative number of cases is not at all as high as it was initially or in the first 50 to 100 days.

The third shows that the increase in the number of deaths has slowed even more than cases and the lines in the graph have flattened considerably.  The point is not comparison between countries but the common pattern of reduced growth of both cases and especially deaths over the whole period of the pandemic.  The first graph shows that this is the situation while cases have and may continue to increase in a range of countries.

The first of the following two graphs shows that across the world the number of new cases continues to grow but the second that the number of deaths is not following the same trajectory.  A strategy that assumes the opposite will be increasingly exposed and indefensible.

Despite claims that Covid-19 and state responses to it are not political issues, it is clear that in every country this is not the case.

Dominic Cummings and his Government are determining the strategy in England; the centralising SNP is doing so in Scotland, and the dysfunctional Executive is doing it in the North of Ireland.  The latest strategy out of Dublin makes explicit that the National Public Health Emergency Team has been downgraded and that decisions will be taken by politicians.  The punitive fines being introduced in England are eminently political and make for potentially violent confrontation.  That Keir Starmer supports them shows only that he will contribute to that coming confrontation.  Maybe he will be looking for his old job back.

There is widespread deflation, if not complete surprise, that the incompetent mess that we are passing through has not led to more precipitate decline in Tory support in opinion polls.  The ‘secret’ of course is the solid nationalist and reactionary support behind Brexit that clings to the Tories in order to deliver the promised new Jerusalem.  The more Johnson fails to deliver the more some will cling.

Considerable responsibility for this must be laid at the door of the Labour Party whose previous leader acted as if a good Brexit was possible, but whose new one has collapsed into more or less criticising that the Tory deal has not been implemented.  The idea that Brexit and its effects must be gotten out of the way, and Labour can then compete more effectively with the Tories afterwards, forgets that the effects of Brexit that have already been severe have only started.

At the moment the British press is full of articles that show that the real opposition to Boris Johnson comes not from the clever lawyer and stupid politician opposite but from those behind him.

This view that there is a good, or at least defensible Brexit, is held even by sections of the left who correctly opposed it in the referendum.  Against all the evidence of its toxic character socialists are asked to unite against the specifically Tory Brexit.  But far from the Tory Brexit being as far away as possible from the Brexit supported by the nationalist left’s Lexit, the Johnson version is exactly what they have demanded.  There is no reason for these people to unite against a Tory Brexit with those socialists who supported Remain and there is no reason for the latter to renounce total opposition to Brexit when its every step is a disaster.

The other opposition comes from the nationalists of the SNP, which have always employed English nationalism to strengthen their own and are now successfully hiding their own failures over Covid by pointing to the worse failures down south.  The difference is mainly presentational, with Sturgeon substituting seriousness for bombastic incoherence.  It is noticeable that the growth in support for separation appears not to be based on any confidence that things will be so much better but that it couldn’t be worse.

Scottish nationalism appeared in a ‘Yes’ campaign to offer some positive solution to Scottish workers’ problems even if the experience of the SNP Government provided no grounds for such a view.  The movement for it appeared more progressive than the objective itself, at least to those inside it.  Its renewed support is based on a hope and a prayer that somehow an ‘independent’ capitalist Scotland, by virtue of this alone, will solve problems.

The North of Ireland shows the complete bankruptcy of nationalism.  Just as England has an opposition that wants Government policy implemented (competently), and Scotland has a divided and discredited one, the regime in the North of Ireland can’t afford to have an opposition at all.  In Ireland the governing parties may have to accept that the current opposition is not really an opposition and will have at some point to be trusted.

Governing parties and States have gotten accustomed to exercising control and issuing dire warnings tempered only by the knowledge that a new lockdown is unaffordable and unenforceable without money.  Only the far-right has so far opposed the restrictions on civil liberties while pushing insane conspiracy theories and dangerous health edicts.

The justification for these restrictions reduces with every case that does not result in a death, while deaths of the vulnerable are their responsibility.  A danger is that the right leverages legitimate opposition to repression of civil rights into acceptance or tolerance of other reactionary parts of its programme.  Passivity and acceptance of the state’s increasingly unjustified repressive public health measures facilitates development of this possibility and does nothing to prepare workers for the disaster of a no-deal Brexit or, more likely, a Brexit sealed with a rotten deal.

The shared anti-Covid strategy of these Governments appears increasingly at odds with reality and is generating indifference and resentment.  Socialists need an alternative view of the pandemic rooted in observable fact, one that avoids any support for undemocratic measures or calls for more restrictive lockdown. We also need to renew opposition to Brexit and expose its effects while seeking to draw attention to the bursting of its illusions.  On their own, Covid-19 and Brexit would be a major threat, together the effect is multiplied.  But opposition requires some coherent view of what is happening.