What is Britain’s obsession with leading? We should be learning from other countries during this crisis

Earlier this month, when announcing the move from the initial “containment” response to the coronavirus pandemic to “delay”, Boris Johnson said: “Over the last few days, I have been comparing notes and talking to leaders around the world and I can tell you that the UK is now leading a growing global campaign amongst all our friends and allies, whether in the G7, the G20, the UN, the IMF – all those bodies in which we play a significant role. We’re leading a campaign to fight back against this disease.”

Now, I’m sorry, but this grated. The UK may have the fifth or sixth-largest economy in the world (depending on how you calculate); it may be one of only five permanent members of the UN Security Council, and it may belong to more international organisations than many other countries. It may, and we are going back quite a long way here, have been part of the victorious alliance that overcame fascism. But why the compulsion to “lead”?

What is it with the UK and “leadership”? Can we never be just part of a collaborative effort in a laudable common cause, rather than always having to “lead” it?

And the self-aggrandisement from Downing Street only got worse. The campaign we are leading was not only to “fight back against this disease”, Johnson said, but “to keep the economy growing, to make sure that humanity has access to the drugs and the treatments that we all need. The UK is also at the front of the effort to back business, to back our economy, to make sure that we get through it.”

He went on: “To make sure that humanity” – humanity, no less – “has access to the drugs and the treatments that we all need.” But, as has become ever clearer as the days have gone by, we don’t even have “the drugs and the treatments that we all need” on a national basis, let alone for all of humanity.

We have fewer intensive care beds per capita than any equivalent country in Europe. The government has had to ask entrepreneurs and car manufacturers to make ventilators, and there has been an embarrassing scramble to find test kits, still being concealed behind a forest of jargon that talks of “ramping up at pace” and “as soon as possible”. So far, in the space of 10 days or so, that “ramping up” has achieved 5,000 to 6,000 tests per day, way short of the 25,000 target.

It should have been clear for a long time – or at least since the 2008 financial crash – that the UK was not leading at anything much, except perhaps at the ratio of our financial sector to the rest of the economy and the number of bankers per capita. Oh yes, and perhaps – on a brighter note – the spirit of the people and our ability to hold a party.

The London 2012 Olympics was a glorious celebration of both, and those qualities may yet sustain us through the coronavirus emergency. When the health secretary calls for a quarter of a million volunteers to help the NHS and receives double that number within 24 hours, we may well come out on the other side. But not, dare I suggest, without having learnt a little humility on the way.

First, about the NHS and our social services generally. No, we do not have an exemplary, state of the art, health and social care service. We have one that is, yes, “free at the point of use” – and thank goodness for that (so long as you don’t need a dentist or, increasingly, a physio, or urgent mental health treatment or any other service that has become increasingly “add-on” and paid-for).

Compared with many European countries, including (though few may realise this, Italy), we have a health service that is dated, often poorly managed, bureaucratic without being “joined up”, and with capacity and standards subject to a postcode lottery. Those with chronic conditions are particularly poorly catered for. It is a service that, even in its current inadequate state, we have declined to train our own staff for, preferring to milk often poorer countries for the doctors and nurses they need at least as badly as we do.

If Brexit was not a loud enough alarm call on the need to train our own staff, maybe coronavirus will turn up the volume another notch. I won’t even start listing the iniquities of the social care system – at least in England, where it exists outside the “free” NHS. Suffice it to say that France, Germany, the Netherlands, Italy are all generally doing a better job, with a population of more advanced age than ours.

The other glaring area where the UK often flatters itself that it leads – but doesn’t – is the rest of the social safety net. This country has deliberately pursued a policy of high employment. I have no quibble with that. One of the often unremarked consequences, however, has been a growing disparity between a “secure” and an “insecure” workforce. The “secure” have jobs with conditions that, it is widely assumed, everyone enjoys. Except that they don’t.

The so-called “gig” economy is only the latest and most acute manifestation of a wider phenomenon. The truth about the UK economic model, rarely acknowledged, is that it has become in many respects a low-pay, low-productivity economy. As such, it has been on a different trajectory from the economies of many other advanced countries in Europe. Although “austerity” has become a code for Tory “nastiness”, this is a bargain that successive governments have struck.

When coronavirus struck, Italy – yes, Italy again – and France enacted measures that covered most workers, whichever sector and on whatever terms they were employed. The government here followed – note, followed – with support only for salaried employees. It took another week of frantic study and improvisation, before even partial coverage was extended to the rest. This is at least in part because the state protections for employment and self-employment and gig work are so different (despite recent challenges in the courts).

In both these very basic areas – health and the social safety net – the coronavirus emergency has cast into sharp relief some of the ways in which our system does not match up to those of our erstwhile EU partners. It has also shown that, despite our elevated self-image, our civility at times falls short of theirs. There has been almost no panic-buying across the Channel. Yet it is we, or at least our governments, who time and again claim the right to “lead”.

If nothing else, coronavirus should force not just this government, but the whole of the UK state system, to take a cold hard look at itself in the light of how other countries organise themselves and protect their citizens. One doctor, writing this week, said that the last three weeks had seen a culture shift in the NHS that was “mindblowing”. He meant it in a good way.

There are signs that the government and the NHS have been benefiting from the experience of Italy and Spain, as they prepare for the worst of the pandemic. That process, however, must not stop when the virus retreats. There is much that the UK can learn from others – if it drops its absurd and outdated claim to lead.