A message for all the people saying this current crisis isn’t political, and we shouldn’t politicise it.

If you are sitting at home saying *you* wouldn’t have done things this way, that’s your idea of what the policy should have been. It’s politics.

There is nothing *more* political than how the government of the day chooses (yes, chooses) to react to a public health emergency. It’s public policy in its purest sense- decisions taken by a few people, on our behalf, with potentially immense consequences.

This government was elected back in December, presumably by people who thought they would do a good job, no matter was thrown at them. At least, I *hope* that’s why people voted for them.

They voted for a colourfully-behaved man, known for bending the truth to his will. They voted for a man they knew was prone to whimsy. They could see the kind of person he chose to support him. They could see the sensible, thinking people he removed before the election.

Our representative system is adversarial, designed to have a party of a government opposed by a strong, questioning opposition to act as scrutiny, and ask the “What if?” and “have you considered?” questions.

If the questions being raised now annoy you, if you think we should all be “pulling together” and getting behind the government decisions without questions, you misunderstand the huge role that scrutiny plays in our democracy.

We are only a few weeks into this crisis, and had we gone with the initial impulses from number 10, would have been looking into the void of over half a million surplus deaths for this pandemic. But scrutiny and opposition pushed the government into altering its tack.

The government is indeed handling something unprecedented. They may well make mistakes -and I believe they made enormous and dangerous decisions early on in how they handled the crisis, especially given the very generous advance notice they had-there are questions to be asked.

They could have reacted much faster and much more effectively if they’d been clever and had the interests of the people at heart. They have been forced by scrutiny to change direction. Because they had set us on a very dangerous course, one that would have endangered us all.

Scrutiny and opposition played a huge part in altering them to a course that is still belated, but nevertheless risks fewer of us dying.

Public policy is being shaped in real time during this crisis. As my colleague @DrPhillipLee pointed out the other day, there are issues that came to light in a war game exercise 4 years ago that should have sounded alarm bells. It’s late now to catch up the lack of ventilators.

Maybe they will manage to bodge the policy enough that they can respond in a moderately responsible way now.

Tories are fond of saying “we are where we are”, as though pragmatism in the immediate situation trumps a lack of preparedness, despite the years of advance notice.

The truth is that their god mammon overcomes most other considerations in any given situations. This is a matter of policy. People have opted for a fleeter, less well-prepared and less people-focussed government than they could have, and now “we are where we are”.