Abstract
In the first instance, the pandemic bolstered executive hegemony and consolidated the place of advisors within the core executive. This provided the Johnson government with a degree of autonomy and enabled it to abandon “herd immunity” and implement a dramatic policy U-turn and then, as the lockdown continued, resist pressure within the Conservative Party and from business lobbies to reopen swiftly. At the same time, however, the first phases of the crisis exposed the profound limits to central state capacity and the structural weaknesses of the British state apparatus. It could not prevent per capita mortality rates that were at that point far in excess of most other nations nor deliver on its many policy commitments. This in turn brought the devolved administrations and local government to the fore in ways that could not have been anticipated. Nonetheless, despite all of this, the early roll-out of a vaccine during early 2021 provided substantial political capital for the government that enabled it to mitigate much that had gone before, merged at times with Brexit discourses, and paved the way for UK politics to return to its pre-crisis developmental path.
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Notes
- 1.
While the EU served as the “Other” for Britain during large parts of the crisis, the World Health Organization (WHO) had much less public visibility in UK discourses. Despite Boris Johnson’s seeming affinities with President Trump the British government did not lambast the WHO. Instead, it made statements about for example the level of access given to a WHO fact-finding trip to China that echoed the tone taken by President Biden (Smout, 2021).
- 2.
Government thinking also sometimes leant towards an embrace of industrial policy. At the end of June 2020, in a speech delivered in Dudley, Johnson invoked the spirit of President Franklin Roosevelt and the New Deal as he called for infrastructural development aimed at the deprived areas in northern England: “It sounds like a New Deal … all I can say is that if so, then that is how it is meant to sound and to be because that is what the times demand … a government that is powerful and determined and that puts its arms around people at a time of crisis…” (Gov.uk, 2020b).
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Ashbee, E. (2023). The UK: Policy as a Game of Two Halves. In: Lynggaard, K., Jensen, M.D., Kluth, M. (eds) Governments' Responses to the Covid-19 Pandemic in Europe. Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-14145-4_29
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