The biggest event to happen during the last parliamentary term has been the COVID-19 crisis, which has had an immeasurable impact on our economy and society. And Labour’s record over that period, especially during 2021, has been appalling. In fact, it was bad enough that many people at the time said that Starmer’s mistakes ruled him out of any possible future as prime minister.
Why, then, have Labour’s failings over Covid-19 almost entirely escaped scrutiny in this campaign? Perhaps, before we install them in power with a large majority, we should remember what they are like.
At many stages of the pandemic, the Labour Party demanded further Boris Johnson’s government has imposed even greater restrictions than those imposed by the Johnson government. It opposed the gradual easing of restrictions during 2021 at almost every stage. While polls suggest that a majority of voters were in favour of further restrictions at almost every point, and there were plenty of doctors who argued for just that, once we reach the middle of 2021, the truly terrible, perhaps unforgivable, mistakes can be seen more clearly.
Johnson’s government finally removed almost all of the restrictions that had blighted our lives in mid-July 2021. However, Keir Starmer denounced that decision in an infamous Labour Party speech that was widely circulated on social media. In it, he declared that Johnson had been reckless and said that the wave of cases (which he wildly incorrectly predicted would reach 100,000 a day) would become known as the “Johnson variant,” inevitably creating a summer crisis for the NHS and forcing millions of people into self-isolation.
It is rare that an opposition leader’s preferred policy can be definitively tested and said, with absolute certainty, whether it was right or wrong. This was one of those rare occasions. Starmer was not just wrong. spectacularly He was wrong. He would have kept the country under quasi-house arrest for several more months, at least. We now know that would have been unnecessary.
In almost any other circumstances, a party leader who demanded that the country be subjected to demonstrably wholly unnecessary authoritarian restrictions for many months would rule that party out of any chance of becoming a government. Yet we seem to have simply forgotten that.
And Labour was not content to stop there. Throughout the autumn of 2021, Labour repeatedly demanded the reimposition of restrictions. For example, in October 2021, Shadow Chancellor of the Exchequer Rachel Reeves demanded that the government introduce a “Plan B” (including mandatory face masks and mandatory COVID passports) to counter what Labour repeatedly predicted (again, completely wrongly) was going to be another wave of the Delta variant.
Finally, in December 2021, a new variant (Omicron) emerged, creating a huge wave of cases that were much milder than Delta. And the government did introduce mandatory mask wearing. In my view, that was totally unjustifiable, and I think the data makes it clear that they were right. But at least the Conservatives, for all their mistakes, stood firm throughout the autumn of 2021 in the face of repeated pressure from the Labour Party to reintroduce restrictions. Labour would have banned their hobbies, made it mandatory to wear masks, and forced everyone to carry health passports, not to prevent hundreds of thousands of deaths, but rather simply to try to prevent the NHS from getting a bit busy – a prediction that didn’t even come to pass!
At the start of the pandemic, all parties made many policy mistakes in trying to deal with a situation that no one in Britain had ever experienced before. But by mid-2021 there were no more excuses. Starmer denounced the easing of restrictions. He was wrong. Labour demanded that restrictions be reimposed, month after month. They were wrong.
This was not about getting it wrong about the precise rules that must be followed when digging a road, keeping bees or selling knock-off football shirts. This was not about fine judgements about ideal macroeconomic management or questionable trade-offs between tax and public spending. This was about a major party demanding that our lives be ruined beyond recognition, for many more months, demonstrably without justification. This was about epic, repeated and sustained mistakes that, had Labour been in government, would have had enormous consequences for us all.
We are willing to punish the Conservatives for their numerous mistakes and the Reform Party for the shady history of their candidates. Are we so willing to forgive Labour for much more serious mistakes that would have damaged our lives so severely?
