Publisher's Synopsis
Britain has achieved an undesirable hat trick of failures in its Covid-19 pandemic response. Jim McConalogue and Tim Knox argue in this report that: (1) Along with Spain, Britain has the highest excess death rate per capita in the world for the first half of 2020. (2) The government's reaction to the Covid-19 pandemic has also been one of the most financially expensive of any country in the OECD both in terms of the cost of the measures that the government has taken and the overall damage to the economy. (3) Only three countries in the world are less prepared to ease lockdown restrictions than the UK: Algeria, Nicaragua and Iran. McConalogue and Knox put the blame for this poor response on what they call 'The Blob' - the scientific clique entrenched within a managerialist Whitehall culture which the politicians chose not to confront or question.They show how the advisory groups to the government appear to have been granted 'a representa
