The COVID-19 epidemic has revealed much about our country, its government and its people, little of it good.
While there have been stories about phenomenal fund raising and the dedication of health car workers, the real stories involve the utter shambles at the heart of the nation's administration and the appalling "couldn't care less" attitude of far too many of our people, especially some of the younger ones. While the government has issued guidance which has often been less than crystal clear, many younger people have carried on as if the epidemic simply did not exist, gathering in huge parties, on the beach and, more recently, in public houses and showing utter contempt for the rules and the rest of us.
Things were not helped by Prime Minister Boris Johnson himself catching the virus and spending time on the seriously ill list, but that is now history. What is now most worrying is that there appears to be little central control of the government's approach to managing the epidemic; diktats are issued at little or no notice and withdrawn in the same manner. The latest unbelievable mess over 'A-Level' results must surely mark a new low in this catastrophic saga, and yet ............. .
Over the last few months, our National Health Service, heralded by every government since 1948 as the "envy of the world", has been virtually closed for all but COVID victims and the most seriously ill; it has been shown to be very good at dealing with one problem at a time, but has failed spectacularly in its principal job of providing healthcare to all whenever needed. Its sister organisation, the named Public Health England, has proved itself to be utterly incompetent on almost every level, from sourcing protective equipment to producing statistics. Indeed, the numbers that have been spewed out by PHE and the Office for National Statistics, yet another pompously named and utterly incompetent body, have been withdrawn, revised, rebased and reissued with such obtuse associated guidance and little or no audit trail as to make them almost meaningless.
Now we have the farce of the 'A-Level' results. State school pupils in their hundreds of thousands have seen their predicted results downgraded, often quite dramatically, while public (=private) school pupils have seen the predictions of their grades virtually untouched. The government has, with crass stupidity, announced that the process for the determination of grades was robust and correct, followed by rapid backtracking from the Department of Education and the officiating body, yet another QUANGO which glories in the name of the 'Office of Qualifications and Examinations Regulation', or OFQUAL for short. This last named joke of an organisation has, for years, presided over steadily rising pass rates and awards of the highest grades, with no apparent regard for the ultimate unsustainability of its position, but has now come horribly unstuck when confronted by a genuine need for its services.
Pupils have had their grades determined not on the basis of their own performance but by reference to the past performance of their schools and groups of fellow pupils. Thus, pupils from a top-performing school may well have seen their predicted results stand while those from schools with a history of poor performance will most probably have seen their predicted results downgraded, regardless of the actual merits of individual cases. For OFQUAL to say that those who are unhappy can appeal is nothing but a 'cop-out' while their issuing of various guidance which has been withdrawn for further consideration within a matter of hours would be laughable if it wasn't so shocking.
This 'moderation' process has been a disaster and will undoubtedly lead to the sacking of the Secretary of State, Gavin Williamson, and quite possibly of its own heads, chairman Roger Taylor, and Chief Regulator Sally Collier, neither of whom will ever have been heard of before. If it was up to me, I'd abolish OFQUAL and the Department for Education altogether, issue some basic guidance on educational standards and leave it to the universities to sort things out by reference to international standards.
If COVID-19 has taught us anything beyond its immediate effects, its that our government and its hundreds of QUANGOS are inept and incompetent. The NHS is nowhere near being the "envy of the world", PHE is a joke, our education system is a mess and the ONS is a farce. Sadly, we also now know that Prime Minister Boris Johnson is no Churchill, in fact, I'm not even sure he's up to the job at all. What we need is a revolution in the way that our country is run. We have taken one tentative step away from centrally managed services by leaving the European Union, now we need to dismantle the elephantine and labyrinthine echelons of our own central government, letting some light and new thinking into the unbelievably musty corridors of Whitehall.
COVID-19 has given us the opportunity to do this and it's up to the current mob in government to grasp the nettle with both hands and give it one hell of a shaking.
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