As the incurable optimists that we are a bulletin from that pursuit of the silver lining to the current cloud. This is from Zoe Williams in The Guardian:
In order to follow strict rules, people need to believe they will make a difference: a drop in cases is not enough. If no progress is made during the lull, it feels like an outcome postponed rather than averted. In areas over which the government has the least purview there has been progress: treatment for the virus in a hospital setting has improved; death rates have gone down. Yet the government has nothing to show for the time we bought it. Indeed, every week since March has brought some new instalment of their inadequacy. When it’s not a calamity directly related to the virus – million-dollar consultants selling mixed messages, PPE procurement from amateur chums – it’s an A-level fiasco, or a university debacle. Deferred gratification is something most of us, at our most responsible, can comprehend, but it presupposes some future that is indeed gratifying. When tomorrow simply looks like a worse version of today – and the spectre of a no-deal Brexit doesn’t help, here – why kick the can down that road?
Leave aside the specific subject the complaint is about and consider the wider implication here. In order to agree to be subject to detailed rules we have to believe that those creating and imposing them are competent. As, obviously, is true of such rules being effective - there must be competence in their creation.
We’ve now that experience of detailed rules created by the British state and doesn’t that just kill any idea of a planned and scientific socialism?
Given what’s been happening we’re going to put these people in charge of the bread supply? Get them to run the coal mines and bus companies again? Decide who may build what, where?
This is not specific to the specific party in power either. Decades of our experience of Whitehall and Westminster tells us that competence is in equally short supply either side of the dispatch box. No, we’ve met a lot of these people and our insistence on less political direction of the real world is based upon such experience.
Perhaps this is something we should hope for rather than insist upon but the correct victim of current events is that ridiculous idea that the Man in Whitehall knows best.