Covid in Westminster

A report on the banality of politics

This week, the House of Lords debated the Covid Inquiry’s first report.

As part of that debate, David Frost made an interesting contribution that went against the grain of the debate as a whole (which erred towards warm words and little analysis);

I am not particularly impressed by what I have seen of the workings of the Covid Inquiry so far and I cannot share the warm words that I have heard earlier today. The inquiry’s conduct so far seems to have lacked something, both in seriousness and in real intellectual curiosity about the pandemic. I hope I am proved wrong as subsequent reports emerge, but I fear that this one rather bears out my concerns…It is not even clear to me that we are going to get from the inquiry what we really need—a report on the costs and benefits of measures taken, factoring in the economic and social costs.

Although the Inquiry has now dropped off the news radar, I remember getting the same impression, and being so deeply unimpressed with what I saw of the proceedings that I began to ask myself… what was the COVID inquiry for? 

Was it a piece of political high theatre, in which the bureaucratic visage of ‘following the science’ must be abandoned, and those burdened with the responsibility of government, confront with the reality that governing is an answerable act?

Or is it national post-mortem, an axe with which to cleave the Gordian knot of political responsibility shirking, Byzantine bureaucratic inefficiency and disastrously underprepared healthcare systems? A process by which we can diagnose the condition, identify the symptoms and prepare a new treatment plan – if, alas, too late for the patient in quo. 

The truth is that the inquiry is neither. As entertainment it is strikingly banal, and as a learning process strikingly useless. But as an illustration of what is wrong with our politics, it is breathtaking.  

Show trials have also told us something about the regimes that hold them. Their aim, as George Hodos argues in his book on Stalinist Purges in Eastern Europe, is ‘to personalize an abstract political enemy, to place it in the dock in flesh and blood and, with the aid of a perverted system of justice, to transform abstract political-ideological differences into easily intelligible common crimes.’ But that is not the sole point of difference between a conventional and a show trial; as Hannah Ardent argued, if the person in the dock suffers, ‘he must suffer for what he has done, not for what he has caused others to suffer.’ 

The creation of the Nazi Special Courts (Sondergerichte) in 1933 and the “People’s Court” (Volksgerichtshof) in 1934 were important milestones in the gradual replacement of authoritarian over liberal criminal law, served as legitimizers of Nazi terror and were a key part of the Nazi plan to supplant the normal justice system with political courts – as they planned to supplant the state with the party more widely. The appointment of Roland Fresiler as President of the Volksgerichtshof in 1942 – the same year as the Wannsee Conference, at which Fresiler was also present – reflected the regime’s increasing genocidal mania. In three years under Fresiler, the court became a part of the apparatus of internal state repression; 90% of cases that came before him, often ‘sedious’ acts known as Wehrkraftzersetzung, resulted in death sentences.  

But it is Moscow that is the home of the show trial. In 1922 Lenin ordered the ‘Trial of the Socialist Revolutionaries’, a ‘noisy, educative’ trial as part of an ‘intensification of the repression of the political enemies of the Soviet regime and the agents of the bourgeoisie (in particular  the Mensheviks and the Socialist Revolutionaries); the use of such repression by Revolutionary Tribunals and People's Courts in the quickest and, for the revolution, most effective  manner.’  

Stalin, then merely People's Commissar for Nationalities of the Russian SFSR, perfected the genre during the Moscow Show Trials of the last 1930s. These trials performed the remarkable task of not just identifying political enemies of the regime, but promoting the idea that those on trial were the private enemies of every Soviet citizen. The first of Stalin’s major trials were used to separate the interests of the workers and ‘ bourgeois specialists’; as over 50 engineers in the Donbas were accused of ‘wrecking’, which the prosecution framed as an act of counter-revolutionary class struggle. 

Two years later the “Industrial Party Trial” prosecuted a group of scientists and economists for plotting a coup alongside foreign powers. The prosecution relied on characterising their actions, performed in the everyday function of their jobs, as evidence of ‘wrecking’, allowing them to serve as scapegoats for wider economic problems. A key part of the trial was the assertion that all had been raised in a ‘bourgeois’ environment as part of the engineering intelligentsia, and that they were therefore inherently opposed to the Soviet system. Not only did this mirror Soviet propaganda at the time, it allowed the the courtroom to become another front in the worker’s struggle against their enemies. 

Andrey Vyshinsky, the prosecutor for the Moscow trials, redefined criminal intent so that ‘having mildly oppositionist intent was equivalent to carrying out acts with violent, counterrevolutionary consequences.’ The legality of an act, too, was disregarded in regards as to criminal culpability; this served to underline that, in Stalin’s Russia, there was no middle ground between total support and total opposition. One was either a working-class hero or an enemy of the people. 

In Eichmann in Jerusalem, Hannah Arendt argued that the trial of the logistician was a show trial too, orchestrated by David Ben-Gurion, ‘the invisible stage manager of the proceedings’. She argued that Ben-Gurion wanted to use the trial not to hold Eichmann to account for his role in the Holocaust, but to highlight the suffering of Jews during the Holocaust after the Nuremberg Trials had largely ignored them. The ‘lessons’ Ardent suggests Ben-Gurion wanted the trial to teach were fundamental to the shaping of the Israeli state, amongst them ‘how only the establishment of a Jewish state had enabled Jews to hit back, as Israelis had done in the War of Independence, in the Suez adventure, and in the almost daily incidents on Israel’s unhappy borders.’  

But it is not the banality of evil on display during the Covid inquiry. It is the banality of Westminster. 

The Covid inquiry is self-described as having ‘been set up to examine the UK’s response to and impact of the Covid-19 pandemic, and learn lessons for the future.’ Yet when it has been presented with opportunities to do so, it has largely spurned them. When Rishi Sunak `highlighted the possibility that lockdown may have caused more harm than good, he was told by Hugo Keith KC that he ‘didn’t want to get into quality life assurance models.’ When Dom Cummings submitted a statement of evidence over 100 pages long, detailing such trivialities as ‘weaknesses in [the] system for dealing with critical problems’ and ‘no emergency procurement system’, it was barely discussed.  

The inquiry has been most celebrated when it has abandoned the pretence of seriousness and has given Westminster what it craves most: Low Namerist gossip. Westminster wants what Westminster understands; facile, valueless discussions about which politician called another politician a rude name, therefore, take centre stage. Our political system is wretchedly ill-equipped to deal with serious questions or issues of gravity. It is most comfortable wrapping itself in interminable political intrigue, in intellectually impoverished wranglings about who was up and who was down, on the petty squabbling of inter-personal politics and on glib, snarky snatches of lobby hackery. 

For those that died during Covid, we owe them an act of service to ensure that we have learnt lessons from their deaths. That is the point of the Covid inquiry. If the best we have to offer them is politically-induced idiocy, then they will certainly have died in vain. And perhaps they’re best out of it.