Revealing the political foundations of the UK’s COVID-19 crisis

Posted on: 4 May 2023 by James Hickson in Blog

To celebrate the launch of COVID-19 and the Case Against Neoliberalism: The United Kingdom’s Political Pandemic, co-author James Hickson provides an overview of the book’s central arguments and its implications for post-pandemic policymaking.

Revealing the political foundations of the UK’s COVID-19 crisis

There is no such thing as an entirely natural disaster. To fully understand why the United Kingdom performed so poorly during the COVID-19 pandemic, we must therefore look beyond particular virological and epidemiological factors to evaluate how political decisions – and political ideas – have also played a key role in shaping the way this crisis has played out.

Written with Professor Mark Boyle (Department of Geography, Maynooth University) and Dr Katalin Ujhelyi Gomez (Institute of Population Health, University of Liverpool), our new book COVID-19 and the Case Against Neoliberalism: The United Kingdom’s Political Pandemic (Palgrave Macmillan) argues, in particular, that the country’s poor pandemic performance cannot be fully explained without considering the extent to which the UK policy response was constrained by the ‘logics and legacies’ of neoliberalism. 

The book builds on an interdisciplinary research project conducted at the Heseltine Institute to explore the UK’s encounter with the pandemic and how the UK could meaningfully build back better and improve future resilience. Combining political geography, applied political theory, and rigorous analysis of public health data the book aims to provide a detailed case study of the UK’s pandemic performance as well as a nuanced contribution to post-pandemic ‘lesson learning’.

Our recent book launch event, hosted at Maynooth University Social Sciences Institute (MUSSI) and chaired by Heseltine Institute co-director Sue Jarvis, gave us an opportunity to share the key findings from the book, explore the implications for post-pandemic policymaking (in the UK and beyond), and consider avenues for further research. As the video from the event shows, the author presentations and roundtable Q&A opened up rich discussions on a range of topics; from the impact of the pandemic on public trust, to the uneven geography of COVID-19 outcomes, and wider consequences for democracy.  

A ‘political pandemic’

In the book, we examine the dominance of neoliberal ideas, norms and assumptions across British policymaking over recent decades; as well as how this hegemonic way of thinking has served to erode resilience and capacity to respond effectively to crisis. To the extent that these neoliberal instincts continued to be indulged by the Johnson government during the pandemic, the UK’s vulnerability to the worst effects of COVID-19 was further exacerbated.

Whilst neoliberalism is often considered an ambiguous and contested concept we develop an account of neoliberalism, and its consequences for the UK’s encounter with the pandemic, that is orientated around a particular understanding of freedom and its implications for thinking about the state, the citizen, and inequality in contemporary society.

We show how a strict understanding of freedom as non-interference has informed a hesitant and reticent response to the pandemic, with interventions unnecessarily delayed and prematurely loosened in order to promote a particular idea of individual liberty over collective safety. We saw this reflected in Boris Johnson’s language throughout the pandemic, with the Prime Minister famously describing the end of pandemic restrictions in England on 19th July 2021 as ‘Freedom Day’.

We show how this idea of freedom has informed a minimalistic approach to thinking about the roles and responsibilities of the state, with an emphasis on market solutions to the pandemic, often leading to significant challenges, shortcomings, and inefficiencies that hampered the overall response. This was particularly visible in the reliance on private sector firms to deliver elements of the Test and Trace system, despite often shambolic performance. 

We show how neoliberal ideas have informed a particular approach to thinking about the roles and responsibilities of citizens in the UK, too, with an emphasis on personal, rather than collective, responsibility to combat COVID-19 discernible in government messaging, and insufficient opportunities for meaningful democratic scrutiny of decision-making.

Finally, we show how a neoliberal indifference to widening inequalities – particularly in the wake of post-2010 austerity measures – has served to undermine public health, creating favourable conditions for the virus to rip through the UK’s most disadvantaged communities (see Figure 1).

Figure 1: Age standardised COVID 19 death rates by deprivation decile 2020–2022. Decile 1 (most deprived) Red, Decile 10 (least deprived) Blue (Source UK ONS https://www.ons.gov.uk/)

Learning the lessons

With the UK’s public inquiry into the COVID-19 pandemic now underway, the book highlights the need to scrutinise the underlying political theories and philosophical commitments that inform governmental decision-making, as well as the probity of particular decisions and their consequences. The neoliberal framework for policymaking, we argue, is as much implicated in the UK’s poor pandemic outcomes as ministerial incompetence.

With this in mind, learning the lessons from the pandemic must then also include consideration of how we can now move beyond neoliberal orthodoxy and develop alternative bases for policymaking. In the book, we begin to sketch one possible antineoliberal alternative: a reimagined social democracy, oriented around a central political value of freedom as non-domination.

Drawing inspiration from the neorepublican political theory of Philip Pettit, this model, we argue, will require greater opportunities for citizens to participate in, and challenge, political and economic decision-making, enabling the state to play a more proactive role in social life without representing a form of arbitrary or dominating power. On this view, the state can become not just a guarantor of market functions, but a positive force for human development – rebuilding the public realm and promoting the shared wellbeing of citizens. We consider how interventions such as New Zealand-style wellbeing budgets, as well as Universal Basic Income and Green New Deal policies could play a role in this kind of social democratic model for the 21st century.

We suggest that, had the UK government followed these kinds of policymaking instincts during the pandemic, the country’s response could have moved much closer in line with international best practice and World Health Organisation guidance, promoting:

• A more proactive, pre-emptive and preventative approach to ‘lockdowns’.
• Greater public management of test, trace and isolate infrastructure.
• A more open, democratic approach to pandemic policy and its scrutiny.
• A more robust and urgent response to widening health inequalities and the uneven impacts of the pandemic on disadvantaged communities.

Moreover, we argue that, unlike our current model of neoliberalism, a renewed form of social democracy has the capacity to promote both individual liberty and collective resilience to the challenges of the 21st century (not least the accelerating climate crisis or, indeed, future pandemics). Further work is now required to develop this alternative model further and consider how it can be promoted practically by all levels of government in order to build back better from COVID-19.  

Dr James Hickson is a Research Associate at the Heseltine Institute for Public Policy, Practice and Place.

COVID-19 and the Case Against Neoliberalism: The United Kingdom’s Political Pandemic, published by Palgrave Macmillan, is available now in hardback and eBook.

ISBN: 978-3-031-18934-0