The government is stoking division and confusion over Christmas parties

This time of year was always going to be challenging, but we need clear unambiguous advice, writes Ian Hamilton

Is the lack of coordinated messaging more deliberate than accidental? (Getty Images/iStockphoto)

It seems our government has thought of the perfect Christmas gift to give Covid – confusion. Are Christmas parties permitted or not? This depends on which official you listen to, according to our Boris Johnson you should party like never before. But in the same room at the same time his recently rebranded head of Public Health, now called UK health security agency, Jenny Harris advises against this by telling us not to socialise “when we don’t particularly need to”.

Given that no one actually “needs” a work Christmas do or large family and friends knees up then the advice from the person the prime minister entrusts with the nation’s health is that Christmas parties are off.

This was always going to be a challenging time, although hardly unexpected as Christmas falls on the same day every year. It was also something of an inevitability that we’d be facing some new variant of Covid and so it is with the emergence of omicron, which we still don’t know much about. It will take a few weeks before we know exactly how transmissible it is and how effective, if at all, the current Covid vaccines are at reducing transmissibility, symptoms and fatalities.

In the meantime, there is an obvious need for clear unambiguous advice from those we have elected to manage this pandemic.

Not only are the disagreements about whether Christmas parties should go ahead or not very public and therefore likely to fuel confusion, but it also turns out that – yet again – those in power played by a different set of rules last Christmas compared to the rest of us. The Daily Mirror reported that while under the severest lockdown restrictions last year Number 10 was holding parties in confined spaces with a secret Santa that no doubt didn’t include hand gel or face masks as presents for under a fiver.

If this was our first experience of this virus then you’d forgive this government for its lack of preparedness and its amateur approach to messaging about what to do, but it’s not. We are nearly two years into this pandemic and have faced identical scenarios before this latest omicron iteration.

This suggests that the lack of coordinated messaging is more deliberate than accidental. What we are witnessing with the should Christmas parties go ahead or not shambles is ideology versus science. Although at the beginning of the pandemic the government appeared to have found a new love for evidence and scientists, that relationship has well and truly fractured.

The prime minister made a calculated attempt to very publicly dismiss the advice of his senior scientific advisor Jenny Harris in order to appear jolly and popular, ducking again the unpopular and unpalatable message that we should be cautious in how we interact and with how many others.

From the outset, the British public has surprised government ministers and some advisors with how willing they’ve been to comply with invasive restrictions on their lives to combat this virus. In other words, they underestimated our ability to understand what we needed to do to remain safe and alive.

The majority of people will sacrifice some freedom and pleasure to minimise the impact of Covid but what they won’t do is blindly follow a two-tier set of rules, one for those in power and another for everyone else. Throw into the mix some contradictory public messaging about how to minimise risk and you create confusion on top of resentment.

At a time when we need unity and a shared ambition to defeat this virus, we have a government hellbent on stoking division and confusion – in that, they are truly world leaders.