George Monbiot: Our politics isn’t designed to protect the public from Covid-19
They are called upon to govern, but they know only that government is the enemy
The worst possible people are in charge at the worst possible time. In the UK, the US and Australia, the politics of the governing parties have been built on the dismissal and denial of risk. Just as these politics have delayed the necessary responses to climate breakdown, ecological collapse, air and water pollution, obesity and consumer debt, so they appear to have delayed the effective containment of Covid-19.
The worst possible people are in charge at the worst possible time. In the UK, the US and Australia, the politics of the governing parties have been built on the dismissal and denial of risk. Just as these politics have delayed the necessary responses to climate breakdown, ecological collapse, air and water pollution, obesity and consumer debt, so they appear to have delayed the effective containment of Covid-19.
I believe it is no
coincidence that these three governments have responded later than comparable
nations have, and with measures that seemed woefully unmatched to the scale of
the crisis. The UK’s remarkable slowness to mobilise, followed by its
potentially catastrophic strategy – fiercely criticised by independent experts and now abandoned – to create herd
immunity, and its continued failure to test and track effectively or to provide
protective equipment for health workers, could help to cause large numbers of
unnecessary deaths. But to have responded promptly and sufficiently would have
meant jettisoning an entire structure of political thought developed in these
countries over the past half century.
Politics is best
understood as public relations for particular interests. The interests come
first; politics is the means by which they are justified and promoted. On the
left, the dominant interest groups can be very large – everyone who uses public
services, for instance. On the right they tend to be much smaller. In the US,
the UK and Australia, they are very small indeed: mostly multimillionaires and
a very particular group of companies: those whose profits depend on the
cavalier treatment of people and planet.
Over the past 20
years, I have researched the remarkably powerful but mostly hidden role of
tobacco and oil companies in shaping public policy in these three nations. I’ve
seen how the tobacco companies covertly funded an infrastructure of persuasion
to deny the impacts of smoking. This infrastructure was then used, often by the
same professional lobbyists, to pour doubt on climate science and attack researchers and environmental campaigners.
I showed how these
companies funded rightwing thinktanks and university professors to launch attacks on public health policy in general and create
a new narrative of risk, tested on focus groups and honed in the media. They
reframed responsible government as the “nanny state”, the “health police” and
“elf ’n’ safety zealots”. They dismissed scientific findings and predictions as
“unfounded fears”, “risk aversion” and “scaremongering”. Public
protections were recast as “red tape”, “interference” and “state
control”. Government itself was presented as a mortal threat to our freedom.
Their purpose was to
render governments less willing and able to respond to public health and environmental
crises. The groups these corporations helped to fund – thinktanks and policy
units, lobbyists and political action committees – were then used by other
interests: private health companies hoping to break up the NHS, pesticide
manufacturers seeking to strike down regulatory controls, junk food
manufacturers resisting advertising restrictions, billionaires seeking to avoid
tax. Between them, these groups refined the justifying ideology for fragmenting and privatising public
services, shrinking the state and crippling its ability to govern.
Now, in these three
nations, this infrastructure is the government. No 10 Downing Street has been
filled with people from groups strongly associated with attacks on regulation and
state intervention – such as Munira Mirza, who co-founded the Manifesto
Club; Chloe
Westley from the TaxPayers’ Alliance; and of course Dominic Cummings,
who was hired by Matthew Elliott, the founder of the TaxPayers’ Alliance, to run
Vote Leave.
When Boris Johnson
formed his first government, the Institute of Economic Affairs (IEA), which has
been funded by the tobacco industry, boasted that 14 of its
frontbenchers, including the home secretary, the foreign secretary and the
chancellor, were “alumni of IEA initiatives”. The foreign secretary, Dominic Raab, has published one book and launched another through
the IEA, which he has thanked for helping him “in waging the war of ideas”. The
health secretary, Matt Hancock, in a previous role, sought to turn an IEA document into government policy. He has accepted significant donations from the organisation’s
chairman, Neil Record. The home secretary, Priti Patel,
was formerly a tobacco lobbyist. One in five new Conservative MPs have worked in lobbying or public relations for corporate
interests.
Modern politics is
impossible to understand without grasping the pollution paradox. The greater the risk to public health and
wellbeing a company presents, the more money it must spend on politics – to
ensure it isn’t regulated out of existence. Political spending comes to be
dominated by the dirtiest companies, ensuring that they wield the greatest
influence, crowding out their cleaner rivals. While nobody has a commercial
interest in the spread of coronavirus, the nature and tenor of the governments
these interests have built impedes state attempts to respond quickly and
appropriately.
Brexit (remember
that?) could be interpreted as an effort to bridge the great split within the
Conservatives, caused by the rising power of dirty money. The party became
divided between an older, conservative base, with a strong aversion to novelty
and change, and its polar opposite: the risk-taking radical right. Leaving the
European Union permits a reconciliation of these very different interests,
simultaneously threatening food standards and environmental protections, as
well as price controls on medicines and other crucial regulations, while
raising barriers to immigration and integration with other nations. It invokes
ancient myths of empire, destiny and exceptionalism while potentially exposing
us to the harshest of international trade conditions. It is likely further to
weaken the state’s capacity to respond to the many crises we face.
The theory on which
this form of government is founded can seem plausible and logically consistent.
Then reality hits, and we find ourselves in the worst place from which to
respond to crisis, with governments that have an ingrained disregard for public
safety and a reflexive resort to denial. When disasters arrive, its exponents
find themselves wandering nonplussed through the wastelands, unable to
reconcile what they see with what they believe. Witness Scott Morrison’s response to the Australian fires and Boris
Johnson’s belated engagement with the British floods. It is what we see
today, as the Trump, Johnson and Morrison governments flounder in the face of
this pandemic. They are called upon to govern, but they know only that
government is the enemy.
