Phillips / Seymour Why Vote

How to make your voice heard in a world of broken politics
1. Auflage 2024
ISBN: 978-1-78590-885-9
Verlag: Biteback Publishing
Format: EPUB
Kopierschutz: 6 - ePub Watermark

E-Book, Englisch, 320 Seiten

Swamped beneath the tide of fake news, wars on woke and social media storms lies democracy. Jo Phillips and David Seymour guide the reader through the workings of government and Parliament and make a passionate case for the power of democracy. Their argument is that young people should take back control of the future, hold politicians to account and get involved. In the last decade we've had a Brexit referendum, the Covid pandemic, war in Ukraine and Gaza, increasing fears over the climate emergency, a new monarch and since 2010, six Prime Ministers. Britain's influence in the world has been diminished, freedom to protest peacefully has been curtailed, the cost of further education is a concern, the health service is in crisis and the likelihood of owning your own home or even finding somewhere to rent is becoming less and less. If younger people turned out to vote in the same numbers that older people do, this country would be a very different place. Apathy is the enemy, not the answer.

Jo Phillips is an award-winning journalist and former spin doctor. Her career has spanned politics, public affairs and media. She has worked for all the UK's major broadcasters, was editor of the Radio 5Live politics show Sunday Service, produced live TV coverage of party conferences and has played a key role in local, European and general elections. She was Director of Communications for Bob Geldof's media company, Ten Alps and was heavily involved in Live8. She was also Paddy Ashdown's Press Secretary and worked on the Home Office's Y Vote campaign.

Autoren/Hrsg.

Phillips, Jo

Seymour, David

Leseproben

Chapter 6

Covid

New Year 2020 began with reports of a mystery virus in China. Within weeks a killer was sweeping the world. The virus has since claimed millions of victims and disrupted the lives of almost everyone across the globe. Education, health, business, leisure and travel, and the economy and governments of every nation were all affected by the Covid-19 pandemic.

An unknown respiratory infection with no known cure, the virus swiftly spread outside China. News footage of its impact on Italy, where it became rampant, was particularly shocking as it continued to surge across Europe. Hospitals and health services were buckling and medics battled a tsunami of death that was sweeping across the world at an alarming rate. Elderly people and the sick were particularly vulnerable, but coronavirus was killing the young, fit and healthy too, and Britain wasn’t immune. By the end of January 2020, two cases had been confirmed here.

While some countries reacted quickly by imposing lockdowns, travel bans and other restrictions, in the UK, life carried on as normal. Although frontline healthcare workers raised concerns regarding the country’s ability to cope with a large-scale outbreak, Boris Johnson didn’t appear bothered. In a televised press conference on 3 March, the Prime Minister reassured the country that the government would ‘contain, delay, research [and] mitigate’ the impact of the virus. His recipe for dealing with this deadly disease was to urge people to wash their hands regularly for ‘the length of time it takes to sing Happy Birthday twice’. This did not provide a lot of protection from an airborne virus. Johnson also boasted that he had visited a hospital that day and had shaken hands with everyone he met.

There were no bans on big sporting events like the Cheltenham Festival and no travel restrictions, which meant that thousands of Spanish football fans were able to travel to England and watch Atlético Madrid play Liverpool in a Champions League match.

On 11 March the World Health Organization declared the coronavirus outbreak a global pandemic. In the UK, experts warned of a total collapse of critical care and urged social distancing restrictions. Johnson continued to pooh-pooh their fears although beds in intensive care units were already full. It wasn’t until almost a fortnight later, on 23 March, that the Prime Minister finally acted and announced a national lockdown.

This was an unprecedented curtailment of freedom, more restrictive than anything during the Second World War, and was the biggest shutdown of society in our history. Only essential travel, for food shopping, exercise (of humans and animals), medical attention and travelling for necessary work, which included those working in healthcare, farming, journalism, policing and food distribution, was allowed.

Schools, offices, non-essential shops, pubs, restaurants, libraries, cinemas, sports centres, playgrounds and theatres were closed and places of worship were also shut. People weren’t allowed to travel, go to school or work, visit family or friends or be beside elderly relatives in care homes, women in labour or the dying. Gatherings of more than two people in public were banned, which included social events like weddings and baptisms. Dentists and hairdressers were closed and social distancing was imposed, which meant long queues outside shops as only one or two customers were allowed in at a time.

Those walking or out for exercise weren’t allowed to stop and chat or sit near each other on a bench. Those who could worked from home, while many also had to juggle that with home schooling. For many who were already lonely and vulnerable, lockdown meant total isolation. For those who lived in overcrowded conditions with no access to outside space, it was almost unbearable.

By 5 May, approximately 32,000 people had died from Covid in the UK – more than in Italy. Thousands more were hospitalised and critically ill, and those figures continued to rise. There were daily television briefings from the Prime Minister, other government ministers and public health experts like Professors Chris Whitty and Jonathan Van-Tam, who became household names.

Although local councils and communities, organisations like the BBC, charities, unions, businesses and individuals were quick and imaginative in responding to the crisis, with online learning, social events, food deliveries and other support mechanisms, all of our lives were completely upended by the decisions made by the government. They had been elected to run the country, but no one imagined it would be run like this. The impact of their decisions is still being felt across the whole of society and every aspect of our lives, from healthcare to housing, education and the economy to how and where we work, travel and engage with each other.

If anything demonstrates the importance of having good government, the Covid pandemic must be top of the list.

There were many questions that needed to be answered about this unrivalled crisis and there were demands for an official inquiry to investigate and hopefully deliver some of the answers. Yet the Johnson government prevaricated and delayed and it wasn’t until June 2023 that public hearings of the Covid-19 Inquiry began. It will look into the government’s response, the decisions taken during the pandemic, the impact they had, how well we were prepared for such a crisis and how we might do better in future. However, there are some things we do already know:

• There were no gowns, visors, swabs or body bags in the government’s pandemic stockpile when Covid-19 reached the UK, despite the fact that, as far back as June 2019, the government was advised by its expert committee on pandemics to purchase gowns.
• There wasn’t enough personal protective equipment (PPE) to keep health and care staff safe, so that ambulance crews and anyone working in a hospital or care home was risking their life every day they went to work. Many isolated themselves from their families to try to keep them safe.
• The chaotic testing before the vaccine was available meant that people, particularly the elderly, were discharged from hospital into care homes with Covid so that the virus spread like wildfire among extremely frail and vulnerable people: tens of thousands of them died.
• The ‘furlough’ scheme, which effectively meant that employers were given grants by the government so they could keep paying staff up to 80% of their wages during lockdown, cost around £70 billion. That is £70,000 million – about half the cost of running the NHS for a year.
• Scientists and pharmaceutical companies worked together to create a vaccine for Covid-19. On 2 December 2020, the Pfizer-BioNTech Covid-19 vaccine was approved for use in the UK, becoming the first to be authorised anywhere in the world.
• Billions of pounds of public money was spent on inadequate PPE. The Department of Health and Social Care lost three quarters of the £12 billion it spent on PPE in the first year of the pandemic due to inflated prices and kit that was not fit for purpose, including £4 billion worth of PPE that could not be used in the NHS and had to be disposed of at great expense.
• Some people, such as Michelle Mone, made a huge amount of money out of contracts for PPE, many of whom had connections to government ministers and the Conservative Party, but had absolutely no experience in this field.
• Between February and November 2020, 98.9 per cent of Covid-19-related contracts, valued at £17.8 billion, were awarded without any form of competition and, in most cases, without the necessary justification.
• Fourteen new companies founded in 2020, after the pandemic began, received contracts worth more than £620 million. Out of these, thirteen contracts to the value of £255 million went to ten firms that were less than sixty days old.
• The government’s flagship test and trace scheme failed to achieve its objective of cutting infection levels, despite being handed £37 billion in taxpayers’ cash, 20 per cent of the NHS’s entire annual budget. The scheme had been assigned to the Conservative peer Dido Harding, a personal friend of Health Secretary Matt Hancock and former Prime Minister David Cameron, who, instead of asking the NHS and local councils to run the scheme, gave the work to two private firms.
• Poor ventilation in many public buildings meant they were unable to operate safely because they simply couldn’t open windows and let air circulate. The pandemic and lockdowns laid bare bad housing and health inequalities, which would have a lasting effect on poorer people and ethnic minorities.
• Everyone learned how to make banana bread and Joe Wicks became a household name due to his online fitness videos. Lots of people discovered the joys of gardening and swimming outdoors, or they got a dog.

When that first lockdown was eased, social ‘bubbles’ were introduced, along with quarantine travel measures, so that people arriving in the UK had to self-isolate for fourteen days and tell the government where they would quarantine. These measures were enforced through random spot checks and £1,000...