英国选民害了自己。
2020-06-20 07:59阅读:
英国经济学家杂志文章,“英国处处错错错”。
选民选错了政府。投票时,为什么只听忽悠,只看重约翰逊的娱乐能力,而不分析他的执政能力?
细节管理的能力比忽悠更加重要。
when choosing a person or party to vote for, do not underestimate
the importance of ordinary, decent competence.
摘要:
(1)疫情来了,政府不当回事,
(2)政府科学家的建议错了,
(3)医疗采供系統 Public Health England 无能,政府又不问责。
(4)首相的顾问违反规定,偷偷开车出行,竟然保住了职位。
全文如下:
Britain has the wrong government for the covid crisis.
It has played a bad hand badly.
Jun 18th 2020 edition.
There was a lot going on in Britain in early March. London staged
an England-Wales rugby match on March 7th, which the prime minister
attended along with a crowd of 81,000; on March 11th Liverpool
played Atletico Madrid, in front of a crowd of 52,000 fans,
including 3,000 from Spain; 252,000 punters went to the Cheltenham
Festival, one of the country’s poshest steeplechase meetings, which
ended on March 13th.
As Britons were getting together to amuse themselves and infect
each other, Europe was shutting down. Borders wer
e closing, public gatherings being banned. Italy went into full
lockdown on March 9th, Denmark on March 11th, Spain on March 14th
and France on March 17th. Britain followed only on March
23rd.
Putting in place sweeping restrictions on everyday life was a
difficult decision, fraught with uncertainty. Yet the delay is just
one example of the government’s tardiness. Britain has been slow to
increase testing, identify a contact-tracing app, stop visits to
care homes, ban big public events, provide its health workers with
personal protective equipment (ppe), and require people to wear
face coverings on public transport. As this wave of the disease
ebbs, Britons are wondering how they came to have the highest
overall death rate of any country in the rich world, and why
leaving lockdown is proving so difficult.
The evidence so far suggests that the British government played a
bad hand badly. The country was always going to struggle. The virus
took off in London, an international hub. Britain has a high
proportion of ethnic-minority people, who are especially vulnerable
to the disease. And Britons are somewhat overweight, which
exacerbates the impact of the infection.
Britain has got some things right. Its researchers have been in the
forefront of the race to find drugs and create vaccines against the
disease. On June 16th a trial by Oxford University, the first to
identify a life-saving medicine, showed that a cheap steroid can
reduce mortality among the sickest patients by a third. A swift
reorganisation of the National Health Service put paid to fears
that it would be overwhelmed. But the government has wasted the
most precious commodity in a crisis: time. In a federal system,
like America’s, the central government’s failings can be mitigated
by state and local authorities. In a centralised system, they
cannot.
Hindsight is a fine thing, and offers a clarity that is absent in
the blizzard of events. Yet it is now plain that Britain’s
scientists initially argued for the wrong approach: accepting that
the disease would spread through the population, while protecting
the vulnerable and the health service. Neil Ferguson, an
epidemiologist at Imperial College London, estimates that had
Britain locked down a week earlier, at least half of the
50,000-or-so lives that have been lost would have been saved. This
is more Britons than have died in any event since the second world
war.
In retrospect, the government should have probed the scientists’
advice more deeply. Some of it was questionable. The received
wisdom that people would tire of social distancing, and that
shutting down early would mean loosening early too, was just a
hunch. Even after the evidence changed, and it became clear the
country was heading for catastrophe, the government was slow to
impose the sort of lockdown seen across Europe.
Yet you do not need hindsight to identify other mistakes. Delays in
fixing ppe supply chains, promoting face coverings and increasing
testing capacity were clearly errors at the time. Despite the
urging of the country’s scientists and the World Health
Organisation, by the middle of April Britain was still carrying out
just 12,000 tests a day, compared with 44,000 in Italy and 51,000
in Germany. Because most testing was reserved for hospitals, care
homes struggled to find out which of their residents and staff were
infected. Competition for ppe was fierce, so they also struggled to
get the kit they needed to protect their workers.
The government is not solely to blame. The pandemic made new
demands on the system. Some crucial bits of machinery did not work.
The publicly owned company which supplies the health service with
ppe failed. Public Health England, which was responsible for
testing and tracing, failed. But there was a failure of leadership,
too. When systems break it is the government’s job to mend them;
when the evidence argues for drastic measures ministers need to
take them.
Britain is still living with the consequences. The spread of the
virus and the devastation it has wrought have made leaving lockdown
difficult, as shown by the halting return of pupils to school. Only
five year-groups have gone back, many parents are choosing to keep
their children at home, and the government has abandoned an earlier
ambition to get more in. The “world-beating” contact-tracing system
still lacks its app, which is not due to arrive until winter. Slow
progress at suppressing the virus will have grave economic
consequences, too.
These shortcomings have claimed many victims. Among them is public
trust. Britain went into this crisis with a powerful sense of unity
and goodwill towards the government. Now Britons think worse of
their government’s performance during the crisis than do the
citizens of any of 22 countries polled by YouGov, aside from
Mexico. That reflects the government’s mistakes and its hypocrisy,
after the prime minister’s main adviser broke its own rules about
when to travel—and kept his job. While the world waits for a
vaccine this lack of trust will make managing the disease a lot
harder.
The painful conclusion is that Britain has the wrong sort of
government for a pandemic—and, in Boris Johnson, the wrong sort of
prime minister. Elected in December with the slogan of “Get Brexit
Done”, he did not pay covid-19 enough attention. Ministers were
chosen on ideological grounds; talented candidates with the wrong
views were left out in the cold. Mr Johnson got the top job because
he is a brilliant campaigner and a charismatic entertainer with
whom the Conservative Party fell in love. Beating the coronavirus
calls for attention to detail, consistency and implementation, but
they are not his forte.
The pandemic has many lessons for the government, which the
inevitable public inquiry will surely clarify. Here is one for
voters: when choosing a person or party to vote for, do not
underestimate the importance of ordinary, decent competence.
This article appeared in the Leaders section of the print edition
under the headline 'Not Britain’s finest hour'.