Conservatism has wrecked this country – just as it was designed to

We have reached the moment the safety nets are usually built for, and conservatism is completely unprepared for it

It isn’t often that life presents us with second chances. Whether it’s not breaking up with that girl who in hindsight you could have married, not flunking that crucial exam, or not crippling your country’s economy and health services with your mismanagement of a pandemic, there are lots of things we would do differently, given the chance.

Well, Stacy married Craig, and you didn’t get into Oxford, but for one man, Boris Johnson, that second chance may have just presented itself.

The omicron variant is here, but unlike its older cousin it hasn’t taken us by surprise. We haven’t been caught on the back foot this time; no, the omicron variant has announced its presence with all the fireworks and spectacle of an American gender reveal party.

The conditions for this new variant to wreak havoc on the UK are close to perfect: it’s winter, right before Christmas, most places are open, and the anti-mask crowd have really stepped up their game in the past few months. But the foresight that the past two years have afforded us means that we won’t be caught off guard this time. Not only do we know what’s coming, but we have a model for how to handle it based on months and months of global data. We know what works; we can prove it empirically. And we damn sure know what doesn’t; the UK spent 2020 acting as an instructional video for how not to handle a pandemic. So if there’s one thing we know at this point, it’s what to avoid. We can use that knowledge to meet this thing head on and begin to redeem ourselves for the failures of last year. Can’t we?

Watching the government respond to the omicron variant has been like watching a dog eat the chocolate bar it just vomited up. Except that a dog will eventually either recognise the needless harm it is causing itself, or simply die, neither of which this zombie government seems capable of. It lumbers on while infections rise and we are subjected to a million sequels nobody asked for.

Since this pandemic began the UK government has responded to it with a recklessness that has bordered on the pathological. Lockdowns have been implemented too late, lifted too early, and been riddled with loopholes big enough to drive a bus full of Covid-positive workers through. Mask mandates seem to have been decided by throwing darts at a list of professions and locations. The NHS is offered applause instead of tangible aid. And each of the government’s failures are met with anaemic justifications regarding the protection of the economy, as if allowing a virus to rip through a population unchecked is the secret ingredient to capitalism.

The problem is that recklessness is endemic to conservatism as an ideology. The government’s response to this new variant will not see much of an improvement over the last, because it will operate under that same compulsive, reckless conservative logic.

Conservatism is a perfect form of governance for a hypothetical closed system where nothing ever goes wrong, and nobody ever wants for anything. Under conservatism, everything is great, right up until it isn’t. Always plan for the best, and don’t think too hard about the worst. That same logic worms its way into all aspects of conservative policy-making, from healthcare and education to transport and the environment. National healthcare is a waste of money if you never plan on getting sick, or if you can afford private care. Social welfare for the poor is a waste of money if you don’t plan on ever being poor. Why nationalise public transport? I own a car. Who cares about global warming? I’ll be long dead before it’s a real problem.

Maybe that’s a little broad and reductive, but it’s undeniable that conservatism sees social safety nets as money left on the table. The unspoken argument of every conservative policy seems to be: yes, but what if everything turns out fine? What if we spent all this money preparing for the worst, and the worst never comes? What if this new Covid variant turns out not to be a big deal, and we spent all that money on furlough schemes and bail-outs for small businesses for nothing? Won’t we look silly then?

And that’s why our current moment has felt so much harder than it should have; this is the worst case scenario. We have reached the moment the safety nets are usually built for, and conservatism is completely unprepared for it. The old tricks have failed, but this old dog is incapable of learning any new ones.

In the middle of a public health crisis, Conservative politicians opposed legislation that would prevent companies from dumping raw sewage into our rivers. Vital Covid-related contracts were apparently doled out on the basis of nepotism instead of what would best benefit the country. No 10 didn’t even skip their annual Christmas party, at a time when many of us were avoiding travelling home for the holidays, believing we were serving the greater public good. These are not the actions of rational actors; they are the actions of a ruling class that believes – often correctly – that their actions will never be met with consequences.

This isn’t a new problem, either. There’s a temptation to say that conservatism has been transformed in the past five years, that Trump and Brexit twisted it into something that is counter to so-called “real” conservatism, but that just isn’t the case. That cutthroat Darwinism that conservatism calls “personal responsibility” and hails as the only way to live one’s life truly free and proud stems from the assumption that as long as I’m OK, the rest is just noise.

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This certainly isn’t a problem that is specific to the UK. If you want a look into the grim future of a country governed by irresponsible conservative impulse, America provides us with a window into tomorrow’s potential new reality. The US is a country where corporate regulatory practices are under constant attack, university costs more than a new house, and a trip to the hospital can bankrupt families for generations. America is the house that conservatism built, and for huge swathes of the population, it is a house whose foundations are crumbling beneath it.

The frustrating thing about the way we discuss politics, particularly in the UK, is that there seems to be an implicit assumption that the left is the side of the political spectrum that gives in to naïve idealism, with their pie in the sky ideas and magical money trees. Conservatives, on the other hand, are the adults in the room, with their tough love policies and cuts when cuts are needed.

How, I wonder, will that image fare in the years to come, after Covid’s naked exposure of the compulsive recklessness that underlies conservatism? In a world where people are able to see through shallow propaganda and grandiose boasting, I’d say there’s a real danger of conservatism being relegated to the ideological scrapheap. But for us? I don’t think the odds are really in our favour.