In an opinion piece on Sunday, the deputy prime minister, Chris Fearne, drew four lessons from the pandemic. I think we need to ponder at least eight to account for the failures and near misses, not just our success.
Fearne’s lessons relate to how the country upped its game and acted smarter than usual. Two have to do with outcomes: the importance of a greater appetite for political compromise and national social cohesion.
The other two lessons come from smarter decision-making: evidence-based, flexible, inter-ministerial and multilateral.
You don’t need an elephantine memory to remember, however, that some of the compromises were rotten. Sometimes the evidence was ignored. Cohesion sometimes turned to bigotry. And ministers were sometimes clueless.
Yes, mistakes were inevitable in an unprecedented crisis; this column urged tolerance of mistakes right from the start. But other mistakes were scandalously avoidable.
Here are the eight lessons I would underline.
First, communication systems lie at the heart of this crisis: its origins in China (with the first whistleblowers punished); its global spread (tourism, migrant workers and business travel); the crises in the long supply chains (supposedly globalised but suddenly nationalised); and decision-making (proper consultation).
So, although the war analogy is often made, the pandemic also resembles famines. The key to resilience lies in early-warning signalling systems, including free speech and structured democratic consultation.
Second, to say that compromise was fundamental means that politics, in the best sense, remained indispensable.
Science can’t give all the answers. Public health policy needs to consider economics, social organisation, cultural resilience, public trust and trade-offs in the interests of multiple risk management.
The pandemic showed that our government can be much smarter than it often is. A lot of the success was due to the suspension of business as usual – which doesn’t say much for how we usually conduct politics.
Fearne writes as though the pandemic was unprecedented in pitting two crises ‒ mortality and economic ruin ‒ against each other. Actually, this dual character is routine in political dilemmas. Deficits vs welfare, growth vs environment, and so on, are the stuff of politics.
What was different this time is that neither crisis could be ignored by the government. Both could be easily tracked. There was an immediate impact on families.
So the third lesson has to do with the components of smart government. Communication lies at its heart: pooling of multidisciplinary expertise; risk management by tracking; social intelligence to understand what policies are bearable; and a politics of empathy to engender public trust.
All these elements are needed if our environmental crisis is to be tackled smartly. We need official metrics for well-being and human development, among a range of others used to measure the world’s most habitable cities.
Fourth, many government failures can be traced to business as usual, allergic to evidence and patronage-based. This pandemic was unprecedented but the protocols of dealing with pandemics have been established for years: such as avoiding super-spreader events and the importance of social rules that are simple but consistently enforced.
Not all social solidarity is equal. Some cohesion is smarter than others- Ranier Fsadni
You didn’t need hindsight to see that youth parties in the summer of 2020 would be super-spreaders. It was foreseeable that giving amnesties would undermine rule-following down the road, no matter how much you spun that they weren’t really amnesties.
Fifth, other failures arose out of insidious social inequality in our society. Abused women were trapped in homes with their abusers. Some of the elderly suffered because of their social, not medical, vulnerability – our public policy of large homes for the elderly, instead of an emphasis on care in the community.
When combined with contracts (given ostensibly for the care of the elderly) based on cronyism, the results could be horrendous and, possibly, fatal.
Other fault lines showed up in the treatment of irregular immigrants and migrant workers. Some of the decisions taken were scandalous, although others were truly difficult and we’re already paying for getting some of them wrong.
Sixth, therefore, not all social solidarity is equal. Some cohesion is smarter than others. Investing in preventive and digital medicine, care in the community and a regard for the welfare of foreign workers might be dumb from the perspective of political patronage. But it’s smart from the angle of social and economic security.
Seventh, it follows that turbo-patronage and cronyism are dangerous for
our security. Fearne neglected to say whether he drew any lessons from the corrupt giveaway of three of our hospitals, which led the government, envisioning a worst-case scenario, to issue a call for a prefabricated hospital.
However, even if the Vitals Global Healthcare deal had not been corrupt (as the National Audit Office has determined), the privatisation could still have posed a significant problem.
Neoliberalism is dangerous when it comes to essential services. We should treat them as a security issue, exempt from the logic of globalisation.
Eighth, we should acknowledge the role of luck. The pandemic originated in China, with which we have long established relations of cooperation; China’s help in advice and supplies has been acknowledged by the government.
We were also lucky that the devastation in Italy was evident before the pandemic reached Malta. It helped our early response be more proportionate.
But suppose a future pandemic breaks out in Libya, poorly equipped to battle the pandemic? We would then have been a frontline, the early warning to other countries and a magnet for fleeing Libyans and others. What then?
Clearly, a final lesson is that we need a foreign policy that aligns itself with those (like the economist Robert Skidelsky) calling for a global health authority that stockpiles ‘weapons of mass salvation’ that would support all humans for three months.
We also need to urge a renewed Mediterranean policy that creates the conditions for a regional system of early warning and crisis response.
Of course, that means we need to recover the moral high ground.