I remember during the darkest period of the pandemic that there was a feeling the British government had truly abandoned people to their fate. The daily briefings had become an insulting game of denial and lies, the death count was rising, PPE and track-and-trace debacles were unfolding, lockdown policy was clearly unstudied and the prime minister had refused even to meet the families of Covid victims. Around the time when those bereaved families began to organise and campaign for an inquiry, it became clear that the comfort, resources and momentum for reform that people needed was not going to be forthcoming from the government. Citizens were going to have to do it themselves.
That sense of a body politic and government entirely unsuited to crisis has come around again, and with it the same realisation that change is not going to come from our politicians, not unless they are dragged into it. England in particular currently feels like an eerie, unpoliced, ungoverned, unstable country after a coup. One government is gone but another hasn’t replaced it, and opposition cannot rise to the challenge. Bureaucracy continues to function on inertia, with queues and backlogs and bottlenecks. Private capital, already rapacious and unregulated, grinds on ever more aggressively, extracting profits for basic services such as water and gas, as if we were living in a war economy.
