![]() ![]() Back in 2009, Andrew was spending too much time on b3ta, and built a simple “Keep Calm and Carry on” image generator. The story of how we got there is an unusual one. Odds are, if you were a British teenager around that time, you knew it or were on it. Surely, we cannot let that happen. Strategy, planning and preparations are alternatives to crisis management but for this to happen we need to constantly look at future risks and future possibilities. The traditional response is to look at the past (pandemic) and prepare for it to happen again. But the next risk might not be a pandemic, it is more likely to be a crisis of climate change, vital infrastructure failure or supply of vital commodities. Whatever it is, we now know that the market will not deliver, instead we will need resilient, responsive and flexible public services. That is why we need to start the debate now, about what kind of NHS we want, about the supply chain, the workforce, the spare capacity. We will probably need strategic industries that operate with public subsidy rather than just market signals. It is also about how we distribute our national income and how we share the fiscal burden that we must surely bear when this is over.Ĭlapping makes these changes less likely and that is why I am not clapping.Years ago, we found ourselves running one of the most popular social networks in the UK, the Keep Calm-o-Matic. Government and media will join together in the project to celebrate the role that clapping played in our ‘success’, at the same time absorbing the memory of the clapping into our national collective myth, a Blitz for the millennial generation. The dead will be forgotten, the exhaustion of NHS staff will fade and we can look back and be proud that we did things the British way. And so nothing will need to change and we can be sure that, in the next crisis, we will be just an unprepared. The public enquiry will be massive, it will take more than a year to set up, more than 2 years to gather evidence and another year or two to deliberate. At the end of it we will be told that lessons have been learned that changes have already been made, likely a bit more stockpiling of stuff that will inevitably go out of date or be the wrong spec for the next crisis. ![]() Government is finally, belatedly beginning to admit some of the systemic failings and we are at least no longer being lied to about the prime minister, about PPE distribution or whatever. Small progress, and you can be sure that we will be asked to stick to the task and to wait for the public enquiry to look at the issues. The real danger is that the clapping creates a false sense that we are dealing with this. A sense that with ‘a bit of elbow grease’ and a ‘keep calm and carry on spirit’ we can do it in a way that is British and somehow better than other countries. So alongside our heartfelt gratitude there must surely be a feeling of anger, frustration, dismay even, how do we express this? A collective weekly groan, a daily sigh? We are therefore applauding the efforts of people who, as we know from the experience of other countries, are dealing with a crisis that did not need to be anywhere near this bad. If you are in any doubt just look at the data and you will see that we have the highest rate of expansion in active cases of any developed nation, overtaking even the USA in the steepness of our curve. We should have peaked last weekend but we did not. We have all been let down, my NHS colleagues have been let down very badly and are paying with their lives. They are dying because of failures of government that have been taking place over many years. We have no option but to conclude that a lack of PPE and other measures mean that some of the deaths of health and care workers must be classed as ‘preventable’. The question is whether I should clap myself.Īt this point I must break one of my rules and refer to a military example to shed light on the current crisis. On viewing the Charge of the Light Brigade a French general remarked ‘it is magnificent but it is not war’: similarly the handling of the Covid crisis ‘is magnificent but it is not government’. Should I be clapping? Is it important to show appreciation, however distant from the target I may be? To show that ‘we are all in it together’ at this moment of crisis? The arguments in favour are fine and I respect the decision of those that wish to clap and have no desire to argue with anyone. ![]()
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