Who's having a good Covid19 War?

Covid19 certainly "separates the wheat from the chaff" - it didn't take long, for example, for us to identify the "good" leaders (both political and professional) whose judgements we felt we could trust - for example Ahern and Merkel and the Far-East leaders mentioned in Pankaj Mishra's article in the last post. The 1990s saw an interest in something called "good governance" - which tended to degenerate into a rather mechanistic list of desiderata unable, for example, to throw any light on the odd fact that  two of the countries with the highest Covid19 death rates (US and UK) are also the countries which
- have adversarial,”first past the post”, electoral systems;
- pride themselves on their ”exceptionalism”;
- gave us neoliberalism;
-  have a transactional approach to business which insists on paring costs down to a bare minimum – regardless, as Paul Collier argued recently, of the damage this does to social resilience.

Covid19 offers an opportunity to rethink what became a rather sterile academic debate about what was a pretty vague concept ("good governance") and to craft instead useful guides to the far more important topic of good government
There are, for example, thousands of books about leadership  but not so many about political leadership. It's certainly worth trying to identify what Merkel and Ahern have - which distinguishes them from Trump. Johnson and Bolsonaro - eg calmness under pressure; a search for a diversity of opinions; a refusal to be rushed into decisions; integrity; and effective story-telling are vastly underestimated features of the good leader

Fukuyama is one of many commentators who have identified the issue of Trust as a defining one for government systems in the future.

The crucial determinant in performance will not be the type of regime, but the state’s capacity and, above all, trust in government.
All political systems need to delegate discretionary authority to executive branches during times of crisis. No set of preexisting laws or rules can ever anticipate all of the novel and rapidly changing situations that countries will face. The capacity of people at the top, and their judgment, determine whether outcomes are good or bad.

And in making that delegation of authority to the executive, trust is the single most important commodity that will determine the fate of a society. In a democracy no less than in a dictatorship, citizens have to believe that the executive knows what it is doing.
It is a popular misconception that liberal democracies necessarily have weak governments because they have to respect popular choice and legal procedure. All modern governments have developed a powerful executive branch, because no society can survive without one. They need a strong, effective, modern state that can concentrate and deploy power when necessary to protect the community, keep public order, and provide essential public services. A democracy delegates emergency powers to its executive to deal with fast-moving threats.

But willingness to delegate power and its effective use depend on one thing above all, which is trust that the executive will use those powers wisely and effectively. And this is where the U.S. has a big problem right now.

Trust is built on two foundations.
- citizens must believe that their government has the expertise, technical knowledge, capacity, and impartiality to make the best available judgments. Capacity simply has to do with the government having an adequate number of people with the right training and skills to carry out the tasks they are assigned, from local firemen, policemen, and health workers to the government executives making higher-level decisions about issues such as quarantines and bailouts.
- The second foundation is trust in the top end of the hierarchy, which means, in the U.S. system, the president. Lincoln, Wilson, and Roosevelt enjoyed high levels of trust during their respective crises. As wartime presidents, this trio succeeded in symbolizing, in their own persons, the national struggle. George W. Bush did initially after September 11, but as his invasion of Iraq soured, citizens began questioning the delegations of authority they had made to him via legislation like the Patriot Act. The United States today faces a crisis of political trust. Trump’s base—the 35–40 percent of the population that will support him no matter what—has been fed a diet of conspiracy stories for the past four years concerning the “deep state,” and taught to distrust expertise that does not actively support the president.

And even the world of political science has woken up to the importance of Trust - with the UK's Economic and  Social Research Council funding a programme on the subject which has so far released such papers as
- "Trust, Mistrust and Distrust"
- "Lesson-Drawing from New Zealand"
- "Nudges against pandemics - on the Swedish experience" ( by Swedish political scientist J Pierre)
For a more critical view of the Swedish left's response see here

But it's all of us who should feel under a moral microscope in times of crisis - not just our leaders. How we behave in a crisis is a mark of our character - which often finds expression in our choice of career. I was intrigued by a recent post which suggested that certain character deficiencies of economists had been exposed during the Covid Crisis

Update;

I missed this always-interesting Matt Flinders' article on The Politics of Covid19 - trust, blame and understanding 
The interesting UK Alternative journal commissioned and published this interesting report on how Plymouth activists have responded to the pandemic

Quis Custodiet Custodes? Transparency, trust and accountability

Last April, I wrote about the accountability of public bodies on my blog -

"Some 15 years or so ago, transparency and accountabilitybecame a big issue  in my professional field (of governance). I have only recently begun to question the motives which have been at work. Reassuring at one level in the story it told of how various public organisations were held to account by citizens, it demonstrated one of many apparently superior elements of the capitalist model of governance over the communist one which had been the default system of the countries in which many of us were working post 1989. For example, in 2001 I myself wrote this briefing note on the issue for my beneficiaries in the Presidential Office of a Central Asian State.
But, at another level, the emphasis (in the UK at any rate) on the need for more and m"ore scrutiny of government business has perhaps had a hidden agenda – part of the wider agenda there has been for several decades to convince people that government activities were inherently inefficient and malevolent – and that the private sector would do it much better. But, while we were devoting more and more energy to scrutiny, for example, of local government activities, regulations and controls were being lifted from banks and financial agencies".

 This week a shocking report was issued on the apparent failure of a panoply of control and accountability bodies in the British health system. An article written the day before the report was published summarised the issues very well.

An estimated 400-1,200 patients died as a result of poor care over the 50 months between January 2005 and March 2009 at Stafford hospital, a small district general hospital in Staffordshire. The report published on 6 February 2013 of the public inquiry chaired by Robert Francis QC is the fifth official report into the scandal since 2009, and Francis's second into the hospital's failings.
His first report, published in February 2010, was an independent report under the NHS Act rather than a full-blown public inquiry. It examined the quality of care at Stafford hospital in 2005-09 and the many reasons why it was so bad, such as inadequate staffing, and produced devastating conclusions.

The new public inquiry began in July 2010. Its remit was "to investigate why and how a wide range of commissioning, supervisory and regulatory bodies and systems in the NHS failed to detect poor care at Stafford and to intervene". As such it probed the role of the bodies and individuals all the way from the hospital itself – including the trust's board and its patient liaison group – up to the most senior figures at the Department of Health in Whitehall, including ministers, senior civil servants and key figures in the NHS.
Its brief included its duty "to examine why problems at the trust were not identified sooner; and appropriate action taken. This includes, but is not limited to, examining the actions of the Department of Health, the local Strategic Health Authority, the local primary care trust(s), the Independent Regulator of NHS Foundation trusts (Monitor), the Care Quality Commission, the Health and Safety Executive, local scrutiny and public engagement bodies and the local coroner."
None of the links in what should have been the NHS's chain of monitoring and scrutinising hospital care, and intervening if necessary, did its job properly.
 Andrew Lansley, the then health secretary, commissioned the full public inquiry in June 2010, soon after the coalition took power. It was held under the Public Inquiries Act 2005. Labour in 2009 and 2010 had refused to accede to persistent requests from relatives of victims of the Mid Staffs scandal to hold such an inquiry. Instead ministers commissioned the first Francis report as well as two other, separate inquiries into specific aspects of how the hospital and local healthcare system operated. They were led by Professor George Alberti, the DH's national clinical director for emergency care, and Dr David Colin-Thome, his counterpart at the DH for primary care. They reported in April 2009.

Francis's report into care at Stafford hospital in February 2010, based on evidence from over 900 patients and families, was scathing. "I heard so many stories of shocking care," he said. "They were people who entered Stafford hospital and rightly expected to be well cared for and treated. Instead, many suffered horrific experiences that will haunt them and their loved ones for the rest of their lives."
Francis cited a litany of failings in the care of patients. "For many patients the most basic elements of care were neglected," he said. Some patients needing pain relief either got it late or not at all. Others were left unwashed for up to a month. "Food and drinks were left out of the reach of patients and many were forced to rely on family members for help with feeding." Too many patients were sent home before they were ready to go, and ended up back in hospital soon afterwards. "The standards of hygiene were at times awful, with families forced to remove used bandages and dressings from public areas and clean toilets themselves for fear of catching infections." Patients' calls for help to use the toilet were ignored, with the result that they were left in soiled sheeting or sitting on commodes for hours "often feeling ashamed and afraid". Misdiagnosis was common.

"A chronic shortage of staff, particularly nursing staff, was largely responsible for the substandard care," Francis found in his first report.
In addition, morale was low and "while many staff did their best in difficult circumstances, others showed a disturbing lack of compassion towards their patients", he added. "Staff who spoke out felt ignored and there is strong evidence that many were deterred from doing so through fear and bullying."
He laid much of the blame on the trust's ruling board. The action they took to investigate and resolve concerns "was inadequate and lacked an appropriate sense of urgency". Its members also "chose to rely on apparently favourable performance reports by outside bodies, such as the Healthcare Commission, rather than effective internal assessment and feedback from staff and patients". He was particularly critical of the trust's failure to take patients' complaints seriously enough.
Crucially, Francis also highlighted the key impact of the trust board's decision to try to save £10m in 2006-07, as part of its desire to gain foundation trust status. "The board decided this saving could only be achieved through cutting staffing levels, which were already insufficient." It also ignored staff's concerns, he added.

Needless to say, the scandal is being used by both left and right in their battle for votes. The disaster occurred on the New Labour “watch” and arguably was linked to the major structural changes the Labour Government had been pushing for 10 years to give both market mechanisms and private companies a stronger role in England’s (Scotland has not bought this “commodification” model) National Health Service. The Coalition Government in power since 2010 has gratefully built on that principle and is using the scandal of care in that hospital to bolster its argument for the need for the dramatic increase in marketization they have introduced in recent months.

Until this latest report, however, no one was really looking at the effectiveness of the control bodies. The incredible growth of regulatory and auditing bodies in Britain in the last 25 years was the subject more than a decade ago of a considerable literature. And English municipalities were required in 2000 to set up “Scrutiny” committees. This 2010 House of Commons research report gives a brief overview; and a blogpost of  mine in that same year gave a wider perspective.

But perhaps it is time we looked at the counter-productive aspects of all this – in the spirit of Ivan Krastev’s new book entitled In Mistrust We Trust: Can Democracy Survive When We Don't Trust Our Leaders? 

The print at the start of the blog illustrates the famous Panoptican of control dreamed up by the English philosopher, Jeremy Bentham