An answer and a question for Owen Jones

Owen Jones wants us all to know that the British response to the coronavirus has been worse, vastly worse, than that anywhere else. We’d at least start to argue that the vaccine results belie that but then that’s when government has sensibly leveraged the private sector and of course Jones isn’t going to accept that.

It is possible though to give and answer to part of his lament:

Those who support the Conservatives – the party most likely to wrap itself in the flag and denounce the left for doing Britain down – are most likely to damn the public for the steep rise in Covid cases. Presumably they believe that Germans, South Koreans, Australians and New Zealanders have a superior national character to the reckless Brits, rather than governments that did not lock down too late, prematurely reopen the economy without a functioning test-and-trace system and allow the constant re-importing of the virus through a lack of border checks.

We are talking about health care here so the first stop would probably be to examine the health care systems in each country. None of the four mentioned have anything like the National Health Service even as all have universal health care systems. If the health care response has been institutionally terrible then perhaps it’s the health care institution that’s responsible for the response having been terrible?

This might even be true and certainly there’s enough logic there for us to examine the point, no?

It’s the question for Owen that we think is more interesting though. Assume that the analysis is correct, that the British state simply is incapable of dealing with matters more complex than MPs’ pensions. Why then does Owen want it to be responsible for ever more of our lives rather than our switching to a system of societal management that doesn’t rely upon this incompetence?