Five years on, British politics still can’t escape Covid-19

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LONDON — Most politicians would happily never talk about the pandemic again. But Britain is still living with its far-reaching consequences.

Five years ago this week, then-Prime Minister Boris Johnson solemnly ordered Brits into lockdown in a televised address to the nation — an unprecedented step that came as Covid-19 raged around the world and the U.K.’s National Health Service faced overwhelming pressures.

Hundreds of thousands of people died in the pandemic. An estimated 1.9 million more were left with long Covid, experiencing sometimes debilitating symptoms for years after contracting the virus.

A creaking British government machine was left badly exposed, accused of failing to prepare — and then moving too slowly when the crisis hit. The fallout cost Johnson his job.

Politics was upended. Parliament went virtual. Daily government press conferences on the response to the crisis — and the rising death toll — were beamed into Brits’ living rooms each evening, making familiar faces of obscure ministers.

And government borrowing ballooned as GDP plummeted and millions were placed on state-funded furlough in a bid to prevent a deeper catastrophe.

Yet, five years on, Westminster sometimes acts like the pandemic never happened.

The consequences of placing an entire nation into multiple lockdowns hardly featured during last year’s general election campaign.

But the challenges Labour now grapples with, from a creaking economy to tottering public services and low public trust, seem inextricably linked to that time many Brits would rather forget.

Economic toll

As ministers scramble for savings, the economic consequences of Covid-19 are still apparent.

First there was the short-term shock. Public sector borrowing shot up to £313 billion in 2020-2021 — about £179 billion more than expected before the pandemic. The furlough scheme, introduced by then-Chancellor Rishi Sunak, effectively paid workers to stay at home to avoid mass layoffs. That measure alone cost an eye-watering £96.9 billion.

And although borrowing has since fallen again, scars remain.

British government debt — which sat at around £1.9 trillion in 2019-2020, soared to over £2.7 trillion by 2023-2024. The pandemic was one of two shocks contributing to this, with state subsidies also doled out to help Brits cope with the post-Ukraine invasion spike in global energy prices. “We’ve got a lot more public sector debt,” said Paul Johnson, director of the non-partisan Institute for Fiscal Studies think tank — and the government is paying “an enormous amount of interest” on that debt.

This in turn restricts the current Labour government’s room for maneuver on a host of promises, and provides some of the backdrop to a tough fiscal statement looming later this month.

Johnson of the IFS explained that the British economy is now probably smaller than if Covid-19 hadn’t happened — and that means people are “worse off than they otherwise would have been.”

That feeling of being squeezed is hardly helped by increased court delays, ballooning hospital waiting lists, and a struggling educational system — all of which can be traced, at least in part, to the pandemic.

In Dec. 2019, the month the virus was first detected in China, the overall NHS waiting list for England was estimated at 4.57 million people.

By Jan. 2025, approximately 6.25 million people were on the list, including nearly 200,000 people who have been waiting more than a year for treatment. Waiting lists are now falling again — but it was a crisis the already-strained NHS could have surely done without.

The pandemic heaped fresh pressure, too, on the British justice system.

Courts were forced to operate remotely and spend more on video equipment as restrictions fell. A report by MPs on the Commons public accounts committee found that temporary, “Nightingale” courtrooms — set up to comply with social distancing guidelines — were typically three times as expensive to run as existing courtrooms.

The same committee found that the Crown Court backlog of open cases had rocketed from 33,290 cases in March 2019 to 73,105 at the end of Sept. 2024.

One of the most pressing impacts of the pandemic for many families was the closure of the vast majority of schools. The quality of remote learning provided in place of face-to-face lessons varied greatly.

While GCSE grades have largely returned to pre-pandemic levels, some children simply haven’t returned to the classroom. Persistent absenteeism, where 10 percent or more of lessons are missed, increased from 10.5 percent of pupils in the fall and spring of 2018-2019 to 19.2 percent in 2023-2024.

“There is clearly a break point where the productivity of those systems is much worse now than it was pre-Covid,” Johnson said — although he stressed that a direct correlation between Covid-19 and current public sector challenges is tricky to pin down.

On welfare, the U.K. is the only G7 country that has higher levels of economic inactivity now than it did before the pandemic — with 2.8 million people currently out of work due to long-term sickness compared to 2.1 million in July 2019.

Johnson cautioned that it is “hard to know” why the U.K. has been specifically affected on this point. But it is against this stark backdrop that the Labour government seeks to reform welfare — risking a bitter battle with its own MPs in the process.

Spending on working age health-related benefits increased from £36 billion pre-pandemic, in 2019-2020, to £48 billion by 2023-2024. The number of people claiming incapacity benefits has shot up by 28 percent, and 39 percent for disability benefits over the same period.

State of disrepair

The pandemic also exposed huge cracks in the way the British government machine works — with a blame-game between ministers and top officials playing out in the ongoing Covid-19 inquiry. There is no certainty about how long that probe will last, but it hopes to hold its final public hearings next year.

The inquiry’s first report into pandemic readiness, published last July, was damning. It found the government went into the crisis “ill prepared” and lacking resilience.

A parade of ministers and advisers in post at the time — including Boris Johnson and his abrasive top adviser-turned-nemesis Dominic Cummings — lamented how the Whitehall machine underestimated the pandemic’s scale, and some stressed that mass gatherings should have stopped much earlier.

Cummings lambasted what he saw as the the civil service’s fatalism about the pandemic spreading, and claimed that Cabinet Office — at the heart of government — was a “dumpster fire” with the wrong people in charge.

Starmer, the current prime minister, has begun to embark on what he’s billing as a fundamental shake-up of the British state, and late last week scrapped NHS England, the management body for the health service. Yet the public justification for that move has focused on duplicated comms teams in Whitehall — not the wider challenges exposed by the pandemic.

Britain was not alone in flailing when the pandemic hit. “When you looked globally, very few countries were ready for a pandemic on that scale,” Institute for Government Senior Researcher Rosa Hodgkin said.

But the outcomes for the U.K. were particularly stark — despite a highly effective vaccine rollout in 2021, it fared poorly on a number of measures compared with its G7 competitors, including excess deaths.

The pandemic highlighted the perils of serious political dysfunction in a crisis too. Boris Johnson’s Conservative Downing Street warred over how to respond to the pandemic. It showed itself to be “particularly incapable” in terms of decision-making capabilities, according to IFS boss Paul Johnson.

“I don’t think any of us were ready for anything of that scale,” admitted one former Conservative government adviser, granted anonymity to speak candidly. But they reflected: “Nobody and no institution and no organization can be ready for absolutely everything all at the same time.”

Unenviable challenge

Politicians were not exactly universally loved going into Covid-19.

But the response to the pandemic — and the Partygate scandal which saw lockdown-busting, boozy gatherings take place in the heart of Boris Johnson’s Downing Street despite strict pandemic rules being in place — further dented trust in the political class.

Ipsos polling in Nov. 2024 found just 11 percent of the public trusted politicians to tell the truth. Some 19 percent said they trusted politicians in 2018.

If Labour is still grappling with that lack of faith in politics — a recent YouGov poll found just 24 percent of Brits trust Keir Starmer — there’s also an apparent keenness in the governing party not to bang on about the Tories’ pandemic failures.

Once the acute phase of the pandemic was over, Covid-19 was no longer “front and center” of Labour’s attention, a former adviser to the party said. Instead, the then-opposition swiftly came to believe that highlighting the economic failures of Johnson’s chaotic successor Liz Truss was more fertile electoral ground.

“We appeared to have our act together for the first time in many years,” the adviser said. They argued that talking about the pandemic and Partygate alone were not enough to guarantee an election victory. “The test is on the opposition to be ready for that moment when it comes.”

But while Covid-19 quickly fell away as a “top-of-mind issue” for voters too, according to Ipsos pollster Gideon Skinner, Brits “still think [it] is having an ongoing impact on the state of the country.”

As the inquiry continues its long work, groups including the Covid-19 Bereaved Families for Justice continue to push for change.

In a punchy report last year, the campaigners pitched 22 asks of the government in the hopes of improving readiness for the next pandemic. That includes creating a secretary of state for resilience and civil emergencies, a U.K. Standing Scientific Committee on Pandemics to advise on risks and preparedness, and a new National Office for Resilience.

But, said Hodgkin from the IfG: “Governments here and in other countries have always struggled to do that learning lessons process after crises happen. There’s always a few years of really intense focus and a lot of discussion.”

But then “either you have another crisis … so that lesson just gets subsumed into dealing with the next thing. Or there’s a feeling of: ‘we just want to go back to normal now’ and start getting on with other stuff.”

“I don’t suppose politicians think very hard about why we’re in the state we’re in,” Johnson at the IFS concurred. “They’re dealing with the problems as they see them.”

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