It's no accident Britain and America are the
world's biggest coronavirus losers
Nesrine
Malik
Even before the pandemic hit, both nations had been
stripped of the people and systems required to respond effectively
Published
onSun 10 May 2020 15.55 BST
There’s
something profound about the irony. The world’s highest coronavirus death tolls
belong to two countries whose leaders came to power promising the restoration
of greatness and control – the United States and Great Britain. Neither can
claim to have been caught by surprise: both nations had the benefit of time,
ample scientific warnings, and the cautionary examples of China and Italy.
The
similarities are striking, the conclusions unavoidable. Here in the UK, we
comforted ourselves with the belief that while our own buffoonish rightwing
leader had his faults, at least he was no Donald Trump. But in the end, Boris
Johnson has managed to stumble over even this lowest of hurdles. The UK
government’s response to the crisis has turned out to be nearly as flippant and
ill-prepared as the US’s.
Two nations
that prided themselves on their extraordinary economic, historical and
political status have been brought to their knees. Their fall from grace is the
outcome of a damaged political culture and distinct form of Anglo-American
capitalism.
Over the
past four years, reckless political decisions were justified by subordinating
reality to rhetoric. The cost of leaving the EU would be “virtually nil”, with
a free trade agreement that would be one of the “easiest in human history”.
Imaginary enemies were erected and fake fights confected as both countries
pugnaciously went about severing their ties with other nations and
international institutions.
Political
discourse focused on grand abstract notions of rebirth and restoration, in a
way that required few concrete deliverables. All the Tory government needed to
do was Get Brexit Done, no matter how slapdash the job. In the US, all Trump
needed to do to maintain his supporters’ loyalty was bark about a wall with
Mexico every now and then, pass a racist travel ban, and savage various public
figures for sport.
This is
corrosive stuff – not only to the quality of public debate, but to the calibre
of politicians. When the business of government becomes limited to populist set
pieces, its ranks are purged of doers and populated instead with cheerleaders.
This is how we ended up with the current cast of dazed-in-headlights Tory
cabinet members. In the US, the very notion of an “administration” has been
worn away. As the New York University journalism professor Jay Rosen puts it,
“There is no White House. Not in the sense that journalists have always used
that term. It’s just Trump – and people who work in the building.”
By the time
Covid-19 hit their shores, the UK and US were lacking not just the politicians
but the bureaucracies required to respond effectively. Prior to the crisis,
Trump repeatedly attempted to defund the Centers for Disease Control and
Prevention (CDC). In the UK, the pandemic inconvenienced a Tory cabinet
embroiled in a feud with its own civil service. The intellectual and practical
infrastructure to deal with facts had been vandalised.
But there
is a longer, non-partisan history that rendered both nations incapable of an
adequate response to the pandemic. The special relationship is not just one of
linguistic and cultural proximity, but an ideological partnership forged in the
post-second world war era. Anglo-American capitalism, pursued by both right and
centre-left parties, rooted in small government and powered by exceptionalism,
had dismantled the state. No notice or warning could have refashioned the
machinery of government quickly enough to save lives. An economic and political
model that hinges on privatisation, liberalisation and the withdrawal of labour
rights created a system prone to regular crises, despite such shocks being
framed as one-offs.
The
economic and regulatory kinship was strengthened by the transformation of
Britain’s quaint and mercantile financial sector into a replica of the US’s
aggressive markets. The City caught up with Wall Street.
An
interventionist foreign policy – publicly moralistic but privately cynical –
gave the model an expansionist edge, which helped both nations project power
abroad and defend their own financial and political interests. But the wars led
to quagmires, and the rapidly expanding financial sectors to economic
near-death experiences. Neither triggered significant rethinking or reflection.
After the 2008 financial crisis, when this system came within “48 hours” of the
“apocalypse”, two centre-left leaders, Barack Obama and Gordon Brown, chose to
shore up the infrastructure that had brought their economies to the brink,
recapitalising the banks and revitalising the markets, opting for more
regulation rather than fundamental reform.
Just as the
financial crash was treated as the malfunctioning of a particular unsupervised
bug in the system rather than as a feature of it, so is the failure to grapple
with the pandemic being cast as an unforeseen, exogenous event, rather than a
result of an ideology that enables the state to scramble unprecedented
resources to save banks but not lives. A nurse will wear a bin liner as PPE in
the US for longer than a failing bank can go unfinanced.
Hollow
triumphalism about making America great again and Britain taking back control
becomes more and more likely in such a system. Trump and the Tories alighted on
this formula not entirely out of mendacity or ideology. Without radically
challenging Anglo-American capitalism, they have nothing else to offer their
voters. And so they must separate economic suffering from politics, and attempt
to blame it on immigrants and outsiders. They must blame other countries and
international institutions – the EU, WHO, Nato – for the feelings of
helplessness experienced by their own citizens. The swagger is a facade. Behind
it hides a rotting national landscape.
As the
bodies pile up, the failure of the US and the UK will be somehow spun into
victory. The triumphalism will intensify; that is certain. The only question
now is how many will continue to believe it.
• Nesrine
Malik is a Guardian columnist
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