When The Truth Offends

When The Truth Offends

“When the truth offends, we lie and lie until we can no longer remember it is even there. But it is still there”.

This is a line from the excellent HBO historical drama ‘Chernobyl’ and, as the UK comes to the end of an unprecedented Easter weekend, it can at times feel like we are all living through a drama that is being written right now and which, when we return to some form of post-Covid normality, will be put forward for acclaim alongside those other television series and shows on which we binge to while away the banal hours of lockdown.

But how will history judge the lead characters of our time? Who will be the capable and who will be the culpable?

It feels very much to me, that those portrayals are already being subtly crafted now before our very eyes. At the end of a weekend where we reached the point of over 10,000 people in this country having lost their lives to Coronavirus, it has felt all too easy to lose sight of the magnitude of those figures. For they have become just that.

Read it again: 10,000 people in this country have lost their lives.

In a matter of days, it is likely that this number will surpass 11,000 and then 12,000. I wonder at what point that stops becoming digits rolled out at a daily briefing with some nice bar charts and graphs comparing us to other countries who are, in many way, incomparable. And I wonder if that point will bring the type of questions we need answers to around why this figure has been so high, whether we could have done things differently or better to prevent such fatalities and what the exact plan is moving forward to prevent any more avoidable deaths, especially to those working in our Health Service.

Had you read any of the major newspapers this weekend, you’d have done well – on any of the front pages – to find the real news. That 10,000 people in this country have now lost their lives to this virus in the UK. You would have, instead, seen that Boris Johnson was better. That Boris Johnson was out of hospital. That Boris Johnson planned to take a couple of weeks recovering at Chequers. That Boris Johnson had praised the NHS who had saved his life with heart-warming reference to nurse Luis from Portugal.

When any Head of State becomes seriously ill, of course this is news. But the truth – that truth which may offend but is still there in the background – is that this Prime Minister being ill should not be a free pass on facing the tough questions that need asking about the UK’s handling of this pandemic up until now and from here onwards. Do not let anyone tell you that it is not right to question your government during a pandemic.

Accountability keeps standards high, but I’m not seeing much of it right now.

What I see happening right now – and what frustrates the life out of me – is a mass distraction campaign. When our government should be delivering, they are instead campaigning. The dumbing down of serious issues – in the exact same way that ‘get Brexit done’ Brexit was broken down into simple numbers and phrases that could be spoon-fed to the population (see ‘oven ready’ and ‘take back control’) – we hear about ‘Herculean efforts’ and ‘ramping up’ when they are asked why, two weeks into the thick of this crisis, our National Health Service staff are dying because they are not supplied with the appropriate equipment to do their job.

When they are asked if they are sorry that doctors and nurses have died due to a lack of basic protection, they cannot even muster an apology to the families of those victims. Priti Patel does wear empathy and humanity well at the best of times, but there is only one answer to that question: of course we are sorry and we are doing everything we can to try and minimise the chances of this happening further (here’s how and here’s when).

History already has not been kind to the way this crisis has been handled in the UK. When scientists were advising we were on the cusp of an unprecedented pandemic, our Prime Minister was telling the world he was shaking hands with Coronavirus patients and smirking as he effectively declared Britain would “see this thing off in 12 weeks”. When Italy was telling us of the horrors it had been facing, we were somehow different because we were Great Britain.

There is the old saying that if you pay peanuts, you get monkeys. Well if you elect on slogans and personas rather than policies then you get... slogans and ‘good ol’ Boris’ personas. Something deep in the Brexit memory recess jarred when, asked about the UK’s comparatively low quantity of testing to other countries when the World Health Organisation had advised “testing, testing, testing” as the key to handling this crisis best, Matt Hancock replied: “No test is better than a bad test”. You don’t have to think too hard to remember which deal was better than a bad deal.

And if you elect a government that consistently shows an inability to care for the most vulnerable in our society (see ‘herd’) then don’t be surprised when your government initially pursues a strategy of immunity for our ‘herd’ (see ‘society’). Similar to how, if you also elect a government that has consistently voted against funding and pay rises for the NHS, you also get a health service that is on its knees.

So what of the state the NHS was in coming into this pandemic? When do we ask those questions?

An intensive care capacity of 7 beds per 100,000 of population – Italy and Spain were at 12+ just for comparison – shows that, however great the work to mobilise and build the Nightingale hospitals has been, we were in-part solving a problem we had already created for ourselves. It has also been very easy to forget over the past couple of weeks that the NHS is not a charity. Whilst clapping on your doorstep, running a 5k or shaving your head are admirable and easy ways to support – so too is holding your government accountable to our state funding that service adequately to begin with.

A simple search on YouTube brings up videos of Barrack Obama and Bill Gates a few years ago predicting in the next 5-10 years that a deadly virus would sweep the globe: don’t let anyone tell you it was impossible for a government to expect that this might happen.

Senior scientists were urging the government to raise the risk level of the coronavirus as early as December and January: don’t let anyone tell you that we didn’t have enough time to prepare more. 

Britain missed 8 meetings with EU Heads of State or health ministers in between 13^th February and 30^th March on the pandemic: don’t let anyone tell you that we’ve done everything we could have done.

Finally, this is also not a war. If you find yourself comparing Boris Johnson to Churchill or eulogising over a speech that pits us against an ‘enemy’ or puts us ‘in the trenches’ then take a moment to consider how the fallen in this supposed war are currently being treated (largely nameless and faceless in our national media). We are not fighting over land, freedom of speech or religion here – we’re tackling a virus.

Why are our national media - many of whom are in cahoots with the Conservative elite - happy to portray this as such? And why has it been too easy to lose sight of the devastating reality of those numbers of dead and how they could have perhaps been lower?

I know that right now may not be the right time for all of the tough questions to be answered but I just hope that, as our national press fails to ask the right questions or write the real stories, we don’t lose sight of what those should be. My fear, in a weekend where LAD Bible are allowed a seat at the table to ask the government on their Covid-19 strategy – whilst on their Instagram feed I can’t see ‘stories’ about a girl cooking her own McDonalds Big Mac from home and quirky dog videos (which probably speaks volumes for who the government is happy to have scrutinise their strategy right now) – is that they will be obscured in a haze or PR campaigning and distraction.

My fear would be that the responsibility falls to us, the British people, to somehow cut through the noise and the rhetoric and make sure that these questions are asked. Consider whether you had, thus far, been willing to ask them.

There is also a line in ‘Chernobyl’ – about failing to show accountability for the actions taken before and during an unprecedented catastrophe that brings huge threat to human life –  “Where I once would fear the cost of truth, now I only ask: what is the cost of lies?”

What is the cost if we do not ask the tough questions that currently sit unasked by our press and unanswered by our government?