The official UK Inquiry about COVID

I have a passing interest in political institutions – having graduated in political “science”, with a subsequent Masters in Policy Analysis and spending the last 20 years of my life before retirement helping ex-communist countries develop the capacity of their state institutions. So I have followed with particular interest the different ways in which governments handled the COVID19 crisis - and what that seemed to reveal about their political systems.

As far as I am aware, the British government is the only one now carrying out an official inquiry. It started last July with an investigation of the preparedness for the pandemic (module 1) and is scheduled to last for several years. It started module 2 in September looking at issues of “decision-making and public governance”. This past week brought it a high profile with some of the key civil service, scientific and policy advisers under scrutiny. This is how one of the UK’s best political scientists covered the process

The COVID inquiry is possibly the most sophisticated and wide-ranging blame 

game that has ever played out in British politics. That said, the great benefit of 

public inquiries, as opposed to parliamentary scrutiny, is that their breadth allows 

for an exploration of issues in a way that promotes “cool thinking” (balanced, 

reflective, evidence-based) over “hot rhetoric” (aggressive, adversarial, emotive).
Although hotly awaited, Dominic Cummings’s appearance before the inquiry was a 

fairly cool affair. Gone was the “mad man in the wings” who had caused controversy 

and chaos in Whitehall as chief adviser to former prime minister Boris Johnson. 

The edgy and unrepentant dissident who sat in the garden of No.10 and sought to 

justify his lockdown-breaking drive to Barnard Castle replaced now by a far calmer 

character.
There were, of course, the juicy soundbites about poor planning (the Cabinet Office 

described as a “dumpster fire”) and even poorer leadership (Johnson apparently being 

“obsessed with older people accepting their fate and letting the young get on with 

life”). The scale of dysfunctionality was captured in the use of a new language of 

disarray and disorder. Johnson, for example, was known as “trolley” due to his tendency 

to change direction. Shifts in policy were the result of “poppins” (moments when 

officials would “pop in” to see Boris Johnson to drip-feed thoughts of doubt into his 

mind).

Deep story
None of this insight was new, of course. The fact that the pandemic became a “Kafkaesque 

nightmare”, as Cummings put it, was no revelation to those who had been following 

this sorry saga. But a deeper story did emerge in the course of Cummings’s evidence.
In sociological research the notion of a “deep story” – as sociologist Arlie Hochschild 

has demonstrated with such insight – focuses on how people make sense of the world.

 Deep stories don’t need to be completely accurate, but they have to feel true to those 

who tell them. They are the stories people tell themselves to capture and manage 

pressures and disappointments, fears and anxieties.
In the COVID context, what’s most significant is the way in which a trail of WhatsApps 

and other social media messages have laid bare the “deep story” of how officials and 

advisers felt about their political masters. Expletive-laden messages between senior 

officials, the government described as a “terrible, tragic joke” and even the admission 

by the country’s most senior civil servant that he was “not sure I can cope”.
What these inquiry sessions with central political figures have really revealed was 

the frailty of human nature when expected to govern under pressure – which in itself 

leads to a focus on expertise.

The deeper issue, if not the story, emerging out of Cummings’s evidence 

was the existence of a governing system that was almost completely devoid 

of expertise. Plans did not exist. Systems were not connected. Data was 

not collected. Admissions of “dysfunctionality” little more than a veil for 

an incredibly amateurish system staffed by generalists who were committed 

to “muddling through” when systemic responses were needed.

Where expertise was available in the form of its Scientific Advisory Group for 

Emergencies, the government lacked the capacity to understand or interrogate 

the advice it was given.
The bigger picture is provided in former government minister Rory Stewart’s book 

Politics on the Edge, which charts in great detail how those with expertise and 

specialist knowledge within Whitehall are sidelined in terms of promotion and policy 

input. Journalist Ian Dunt makes a similar argument in his critique of both ministers 

and the civil service – generalists jettisoned into a system based on non-stop churn.

Shallow man
And yet there is a dimension of this story that is not at all deep. Indeed, its shallowness 

is almost shocking. The core and undeniable concern that Cummings’s evidence reinforced 

relates to the issue of leadership.
The admission by Lee Cain, the former director of communications in No.10 under 

Johnson, that COVID “was the wrong crisis for this prime minister’s skillset” 

demands deconstruction.
How did Johnson become prime minister, and what were the skills or attributes that 

he brought to the role?
This is not a partisan question. It is a proposal for sober reflection on how we give 

people power.

Arguably the most galling element of the evidence that the public inquiry 

is amassing about Johnson’s lack of leadership skills is that anyone who 

had done even the smallest amount of credible research on his personal 

and professional life up to July 2019 could only have concluded that he 

was totally unfit for office.
This is not a partisan point either. It is underscored by a vast seam of 

research and scholarship. Anyone who doubts this point might simply take 

a dip into Tom Bower’s biography which titles Johnson as The Gambler. 

Andrew Gimson’s account of his “rise and fall” provides another weighty 

account of chaos and disaster. Sonia Purnell’s Just Boris: A Tale of Blond 

Ambition outlines a life of entitlement and absurdity.

The deepest question unearthed by Cummings’s evidence is really one about how we 

select and support our political leaders. In Johnson’s case it’s worth remembering 

that he was elected and effectively anointed prime minister by Conservative party 

members, who constitute less than 1% of the electorate in the United Kingdom (and 

a skewed and unrepresentative slice of the public at that).
Party activists tend to be more extreme in their views than the general public, and 

are likely to prize certain “qualities” (such as celebrity status, charisma and charm) 

over “basic skills” (organisational expertise or project management experience).
Celebrity, charisma and charm might be appropriate qualities for tea parties and 

fundraising dinners but they’re not much good for leading integrated pandemic 

response strategies. That’s the deep and simple story.

Further Reading/Viewing

• uk Covid19 inquiry live stream Cummings – starts from 02.00 hrs https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DLX37aNgUzk&ab_channel=UKCovid-19Inquiry

• 115 pages of Cummings’ formal evidence to the official inquiry

• Institute of Government Blog about the Inquiry

My World View?

The last post conveyed the World View (WV) I had developed by 2014 – but warned that I was becoming more radical in my old age. Almost a decade later,  this is a better (and more detailed) outline of my WV. The “mixed economy” which existed from 1950-1990 was a healthy and effective system for us in the West

• It worked because power was diffused. Each type of power – economic 

(companies/banks etc), political (citizens and workers) and legal/admin/military 

(the state) – balanced the other. None was dominant.

• Deindustrialisation and economic globalisation have undermined the power 

which working class people were able to exercise in that period through votes and union activity

• Privatisation has been a disaster – inflicting costs on the public and transferring 

wealth to the few

• Neo-liberalism has supplied a thought system which justifies corporate greed 

and the privileging (through tax breaks and favourable legislation) of the large 

international company

• All political parties and most media have been captured by that thought 

system which now rules the world

• People have, as a result, become cynical and apathetic

• Two elements of the “balanced system” (Political and legal power) are therefore 

now supine before the third (corporate and media power). The balance is broken 

and the dominant power ruthless in its exploitation of its new freedom

It is very difficult to see a “countervailing power” which would make 

these corporate elites pull back from the disasters they are inflicting on us

• Social protest is marginalised

• Not least by the combination of the media and an Orwellian “security state” 

ready to act against “dissidence”

• But the beliefs which lie at the dark heart of the neo-liberal project do 

need more detailed exposure

• as well as its continued efforts to undermine what little is left of state power

• We need to be willing to express more vehemently the arguments against 

privatisation - existing and proposed

• to feel less ashamed about arguing for “the commons” and for things like 

cooperatives and social enterprise (inasmuch as such endeavours are allowed)

In summer 2021 – with the Covid pandemic still raging – I made an attempt 

to update that statement by adding that we have  consistently underestimated the significance of global warming and what is now called the anthropogenic era – indeed there is now open talk of “facing extinction”

• Globalisation is in shreds

• Societies are polarised

• Thrust into narrow and selfish “bubbles”

• Artificial intelligence threatens what we used to refer to as “employment 

prospects”

How, in such conditions, might social forces come together with a programme 

which stands a good chance of reforming the political and state systems of power 

- so that the wings of corporate power can be properly clipped??
And make no mistake – power is the central issue here. At the heart of our 

collective malaise is the imbalance of power. We quantify everything these days 

– talking for example of the 8 men who control half the planet’s wealth. But 

somehow this fails to galvanise any sort of collective action – reference to 

gini-coefficients leaves glazed eyes. The  manifestos of political parties are 

characterised by total irrelevance. Totally missing are the commitments to 

change the power structure eg

• Break up monopolies

• Tax the rich – who currently hide in tax havens

• Reinstate media balance (including a requirement for interviewees to 

reveal their sources of income)

• Develop Citizen juries

• Stop money talking

• Ensure that civil service advice is neutral

And why are such commitments missing? Because those in charge of political 

parties know they would then be the subject of highly aggressive attacks by 

journalists and academics in the pay of corporate power. We can no longer rely 

on political parties to be agents of change - we seem to be on our own
I’ve been trying to gather together some key books to skim for my conclusion 

and felt that Jeremy Gilbert’s Common Ground – democracy and collectivity in 

an age of individualism (2013) was one of the important texts whose very title 

recognises the basic problem we face.

BOOKS WHICH FORM A WORLD VIEW

One of the most thoughful and well-read bloggers is Aurelien whose latest post is an annotated list of the books which have helped him develop his particular world view which, sadly, he makes no attempt to describe. But it’s clear that he’s a bit of a contrarian – rubbishing mainstream literature and clearly enjoying, as I do, the writings of people such as Richard Evans and EP Thompson whose 1978 “The Poverty of Theory and other Essays” I downloaded as a result of the mention. I would strongly recommend reading Aurelien’s post in full - its book references reflect a life of reading and are quite fascinating.

I recently posted about my response to a challenge thrown down by the Cultural Tutor to identify the book which everyone should read. That, of course, is not quite the same as listing the books which helped form your world view. But for what it’s worth, these are the books I mentioned for the challenge -

It’s not surprising that the books I remember are from the early 1960s – for example EH Carr was a favourite, not just his “Twenty Years’ Crisis” (1946) which introduced me to Realism but What is History? EH Carr (1961) which I vividly remember for its story of how you caught fish (facts) depended on the type of reel you used and the spot you chose to fish at.

Peter Berger was another writer who made an impact – first for his prescient postmodern analysis in The Socal construction of Reality P Berger and T Luckman (1966) and then Pyramids of Sacrifice – political ethics and social change (1975)

More recently, writers such as Francis Fukuyama, David Graeber, Michael Greer, Roman Krznaric, Kate Rawarth, Wolfgang Streeck and Yanis Varoufakis have also impressed . One book, however, stands out for the variety of explanations it offers for the difficulties we have in agreeing and acting on global warming – viz Why We Disagree about Climate Change by Mike Hulme (2009). But, at the end of the day, I tend to fall back on Bertrand Russell whose Sceptical essays still delight although published in 1925

Aurelien’s post has spurred me to do three things

• to try to describe my own world view

• to identify the books which helped form that

• to see whether I could list some books which challenged that world view 

My World View (WV)
My WV is not static – I have become more radical in my old age. In my youth, 

I was powerfully influenced by the likes of Karl Popper and Tony Crosland. 

My initial experience of municipal government made the tactics of Saul Alinsky 

attractive but then I became more of a liberal technocrat. The new millennium 

saw the scales drop from my eyes and this is how I described the situation in 

2014.

Political parties are a bust flush - All mainstream political parties in Europe have been affected by the neo-liberal virus and can no longer represent the concerns of ordinary people. And those “alternative parties” which survive the various hurdles placed in their way by the electoral process rarely survive.
The German Greens were an inspiration until they too eventually fell prey to the weaknesses of political parties identified a hundred years ago by Robert Michels.
More recently, “Pirate” parties in Scandinavia and Bepe Grillo’s Italian Five Star Movement have managed, briefly, to capture public attention, occupy parliamentary benches but then sink to oblivion or fringe if not freak interest.
What the media call “populist” parties of various sorts attract bursts of electoral support in most countries but are led by labile individuals preying on public fears and prejudices and incapable of the sort of cooperative effort which serious change requires.

NGOs are no match for corporate power - The annual World Social Forum has had more staying power than the various “Occupy movements” but its very diversity means that nothing coherent emerges to challenge the power elite whose “scriptures” are delivered from the pulpits of The World Bank and the OECD There doesn’t even seem a common word to describe our condition and a vision for a better future – “social change”? What’s that when it’s at home?

Academics are careerists – although the groves of academia are still sanctuary 

for a few brave voices who speak out against the careless transfer by governments 
of hundreds of billions of dollars to corporate interests …

• Noam Chomsky and David Harvey are prominent examples. 

• Henry Mintzberg, one of the great management gurus, has in the last decade broken 

ranks and now writes about the need for a profound “rebalancing” of the power structure 

- Rebalancing Society – radical renewal beyond left, right and centre. 

• Economists who challenge the conventional wisdom of that discipline are now able 

to use the Real-World Economics blog.

• Daniel Dorling is a geographer who focuses on inequalities eg his powerful 

Injustice – why social inequality persists.

Think Tanks play safe – and….think - although there are honourable exceptions such as -

• Susan George, a European activist and writer, who operates from the

 Trans National Institute(TNI)  and, amongst her many books, has produced two 

marvellous satires – Lugano I and Lugano II

• David Korton’s books and Yes Magazine keep up a steady critique.

• Joseph Stiglitz, once part of the World Bank elite, writes scathingly about 

economic conventional wisdom.

• The Pope has the resources of the Vatican behind him; and is proving a great 

example in the struggle for dignity and against privilege.

TOO MUCH CHANGE

Devastated to learn today that my favourite weekly journal – ScottishReview – is winding up. Its articles have been short and powerful – representing the best of Scottish writing. And its eloquence can be tasted in the twelve compendia it has issued since it started life in 1995 – a few years after I had left its shores.

Please dip in to see what you’ve missed!

Excerpts from JUST WORDS

I owe my readers an apology. For some time ”Just Words – a sceptic’s glossary” has been sitting in my list of Ebooks – but, when clicked, drew a blank. I’ve now sorted this out. And by way of compensation let me offer some excerpts.

But first, let me explain the title – of which I’m rather proud. The title has two meanings – the first could be construed as half-apologetic, meaning these are mere words – some trifles. The second relates the title to the idea of justice and the 60 pages do offer a real treasure trove about how the literary world has challenged the powers-that-be – whether Jonathan Swift, Gustave Flaubert, George Orwell, Ambrose Bierce, J Ralston Saul or Anthony Jay. Apart from my own definitions of words commonly used by bureacrats and politicians (some 100) to deceive us, I’ve also found many other examples.

So here goes -

Assumptions; the things other people make – which cause problems. Parsed – “I think; you assume; (s)he fucks up”. Project management techniques do require us to list assumptions and identify and manage risks – but in the field of technical Assistance these are just boxes to tick. In any project, the best approach is to list the worst things which could happen, assume they will occur and plan how to minimise their frequency and effects.

Audit; something both overdone and underdone – overdone in volume and underdone in probity. A process more feared at the bottom than at the top as frequent recent scandals (Enron; global banking scandals have demonstrated). See also “Law”

Benchmark; a technical-sounding term which gives one’s discourse a scientific aura.

Best practice; one of the most dangerous terms of the English language – implying, aș it does, that the answer to our problems has a solution which fits all contexts.

Bottleneck; what prevents an organisation from achieving its best performance – always located at the top!

Capacity; something which other people lack

Communications; the first thing which people blame when things go wrong – parsed “I communicate; you misunderstand; he/they don’t listen”.

Consultation; the skill of bouncing other people to agree with what you have already decided.

Contract out; as in “put out a contract on” – to wipe out.

Decentralisation; creating local people who can be made scapegoats for deterioration in service.

Empower; a classic word of the new century which suggests that power can be benignly given – when in reality it has to be taken.

Evidence-based policy-making; a phrase which represents the hubristic peak of the generation of UK social scientism which captured the UK civil service in the late 1990s at the time its political masters succumbed to corporate interests and therefore were practising less rather than more evidence-based policy-making!

Evaluation; job-creation for surplus academics. An important part of the policy-making process which has been debased by it being sub-contracted to a huge industry of consultants who produce large reports which are never read by policy-makers.

Focus group; a supposedly representative group of voters who will give us a clue about what we should be doing.

Hubris; something which politicians and policy experts suffer from – ie a belief that their latest wheeze will solve problems which eluded the skills and insights of their predecessors

Human Resource management (HRM); treating staff and workers like dirt

Law; “the spider's webs which, if anything small falls into them ensnare it, but large things break through and escape”. Solon

Lobbyists; people who make the laws

Reform; to divert attention from core questions by altering organisational boundaries and responsibilities

Training; “surgery of the mind”. A marvellous phrase an old political colleague of mine used to describe the mind-bending and propaganda which goes on in a lot of workshops.

Trust; something which economists and their models don’t have and which, therefore, is assumed by them not to exist within organisations. As economic thinking has invaded public organisations, everyone has been assumed to be a “rent-seeker” – and a huge (and self-fulfilling) edifice of audits, checks and controls have been erected

Whistle-blower; a Jesus Christ figure who blows a whistle – but is subsequently crucified.

JUST WORDS

“Words strain,
Crack and sometimes break, under the burden,
Under the tension, slip, slide, perish,
Decay with imprecision, will not stay in place,
Will not stay still.”
TS Eliot “East Coker”

Words are indeed slippery.

We hear what we want to hear

We look at the world in so many different ways

It’s a wonder that we are able to communicate at all

That seems to take me clearly into the postmodernity camp about whom I do, however, have ambivalent feelings – reflected in a series of posts I did last year viz Postmodernity Anyone?

History is assumed to consist of hard events like wars and revolts. But such events don’t just happen – they are caused by what goes on inside out minds – not just feelings of ambition; fear; greed; resentment; but the stories (theories) we use to make sense of events. And they are legitimised by the words we use. Words are very powerful - indeed have a life of their own – some more so than others. Once we stop thinking about the words we use, what exactly they mean and whether they fit our purpose, the words and metaphors (and the interests behind them) take over and reduce our powers of critical thinking.

One of the best essays on this topic is George Orwell’s “Politics and the English language” Written in 1947, it exposes the way certain clichés and rhetoric are calculated to kill thinking – for example how the use of the passive tense undermines the notion that it is people who take decisions and should be held accountable for them.

Fifty years before Orwell, Ambrose Bierce was another (American) journalist whose pithy and tough definitions of everyday words, in his newspaper column, attracted sufficient attention to justify a book “The Devil’s Dictionary” whose fame continues unto this day – with almost 2000 definitions. A dentist, for example, he defined as “a magician who puts metal into your mouth and pulls coins out of your pocket”. A robust scepticism about both business and politics infused his work.

Not so well known (at least in the anglo-saxon world) is The Dictionary of Accepted Ideas - a short satirical work collected and published in 1911–13 from notes compiled by Gustave Flaubert during the 1870s, lampooning the clichés endemic to French society under the 2^nd French Empire. It takes the form of a dictionary of platitudes - self-contradictory and insipid (at least 500 of them). It was translated and made available to an American audience by the famous Jacques Barzun only in the 1950s – with a definitive version appearing in 1967. The idea of a spoof encyclopedia had fascinated Flaubert all his life. As a child, he had amused himself by writing down the absurd utterances of a friend of his mother's, and over the course of his career he speculated as to the best format for a compilation of stupidities.

This glossary of mine - called Just Words - has a slightly more serious intent. It identifies more than 100 words and phrases used by officials, politicians, consultants and academics in the course of government reform and offers provocative definitions which will hopefully get us into a more sceptical frame of mind.

Only in the latter stages of its drafting did I come across John Saul’s A Doubter’s Companion – a dictionary of aggressive common sense¹ issued in 1994 which talks of the

“humanist tradition of using alphabetical order as a tool of social analysis and the dictionary as a quest for understanding, a weapon against idée recues and the pretensions of power”.

Its entries are not so pithy – many taking an entire page…..and more didactic….in the style of Deconstructing Development Discourse – buzzwords and fuzzwords (Oxfam 2010 and The Development Dictionary; Wolfgang Sachs (2015. Saul contrasts his approach with that

“of the rationalists to the dictionary for whom it is a repository of truths and a tool to control communications”.

The glossary is written in that same humanist tradition of struggle against power – and the words they use to sustain it. My glossary therefore forms part of a wider commentary on the effort various writers have made over the ages to challenge the pretensions of the powerful (and of the ”thought police” who have operated on their behalf). And , of course, the role of satire², caricature and cartoons³, poetry⁴ and painting⁵ should not be forgotten! Nor the role of films and TV series these days⁶.

1 Some examples can be found here – and an interview with him at http://www.scottlondon.com/interviews/saul.html

2 not just the literary sort - see section 9

3 from Daumier to Feiffer and Steadman

4 Brecht

5 Goya, Kollwitz and Grosz are the most powerful example

6 From the “Yes, Minister” series in the UK in the 1970s to “The Thick of it” of the 2000s

END TIMES?

In a previous post I listed some books on social change, indicating that I hoped to get around to reviewing them. They were

• Neither Vertical nor Horizontal – theories of political organisation by Rodriguez Nunes (2021) who is interviewed here

• Augmented Humanity – being and remaining agentic in a digitised world by Peter Bryant (2021). One of these annoying academic books which disfigures every second sentence with (bracketed) name references which require you to consult the end of each chapter. How AI is used is a fundamental issue which deserves better than this. John Naughton has just recommended this short paper on the risks of Artificial Intelligence which includes Geoff Hinton as one of the authors

• World Protests – study of key protest issues in the 21^st Century I Oriz et al (2022). A slim book which focuses on description. What I missed was any attempt to offer advice or theorise

• If we Burn – the mass protest decade and the missing revolution by Vincent Bevins (2023) interviewed by Chris Hedges here and by DIG here . I have to confess that these interviews really put me off the book – with Bevins coming across a rather arrogant young man

• End Times – elites, counterelites and the path of political disintegration by Peter Turchin 2023 with Turchin interviewed by Aaron Bastani. The most fascinating book not least because it uses Big Data to challenge our understanding of history. Tuchin graduated in zoology and biology but has grown out of these disciplines to venture in the last 2 decades into the field of history

I want to concentrate on “End Times” mainly because it is the more over-arching of the books, looking not at internal aspects of political organisation but rather on how various changes have come together to threaten the future of civlisation as we know it.

What, then, is this model? To put it somewhat wonkily, when a state, such as the United States, has

• stagnating or declining real wages (wages in inflation-adjusted dollars),

• a growing gap between rich and poor,

• overproduction of young graduates with advanced degrees,

• declining public trust, and

• exploding public debt,

these seemingly disparate social indicators are actually related to each other dynamically. Historically, such developments have served as leading indicators of looming political instability. In the United States, all of these factors started to take an ominous turn in the 1970s. The data pointed to the years around 2020 when the confluence of these trends was expected to trigger a spike in political instability. And here we are.

“I will look across human history for examples, but my primary goal is to speak to how we have slid into our current age of discord, with the United States as my empirical focus”.

Because the crisis has deep historical roots, we’ll need to travel back in time to the New Deal era, when an unwritten social contract became part of American political culture. This informal and implicit contract balanced the interests of workers, businesses, and the state in a way similar to the more formal, explicit tripartite agreements in Nordic countries. For two human generations, this implicit pact delivered unprecedented growth of broadly based well-being in America. At the same time, the “Great Compression” dramatically reduced economic inequality. Many people were left out of this implicit pact—Black Americans, in particular, a fact I will address in some detail. But overall, for roughly fifty years the interests of workers and the interests of owners were kept in balance in this country, such that overall income inequality remained remarkably low.

But the social pyramid has now grown top-heavy. We now have too many “elite aspirants” competing for a fixed number of positions in the upper echelons of politics and business. In our model, such conditions have a name: elite overproduction. Together with popular immiseration, elite overproduction, and the intraelite conflicts that it has engendered, has gradually undermined our civic cohesiveness, the sense of national cooperation without which states quickly rot from within. Growing social fragility has manifested itself in collapsing levels of trust in state institutions and unraveling social norms governing public discourse—and the functioning of democratic institutions.

This is, of course, a bare-bones summary. The meat of the book will unpack these ideas, relate them to the statistical trends for key economic and social indicators, and trace some archetypal human stories of people buffeted by these social forces. Although my focus here is primarily on America and Americans, the book will make forays into other parts of the world and into previous historical eras. Again, our crisis in America is not without precedent; we are in a position to learn from our past.

Interviews with Turchin

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vcrbz4EoTfw&ab_channel=INETOxford

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7R-AotyKPDU&ab_channel=UncertainThings

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GsbLZYDWLfQ&t=29s&ab_channel=TheRealignment