23 April 2020
Exit
The penguin strategy.
By Robert Kilconner
Of course the opposition has to call for an exit strategy. After all, they need something to call for if they are to appear relevant and this is something which commits them to nothing. Suppose they called for an early release of restrictions and it turned out in hindsight that keeping a full lockdown in place was essential. Then they’d be royally buggered. “Thank goodness the government didn’t follow the opposition’s suggestions” could be the least of it. “The Government had no choice but to give way to pressure once the opposition had played political games by whipping up the press and now look what has happened” would be infinitely worse. Turn it about and imagine them calling to keep restrictions in place when others are releasing them and they could have the same problem in reverse. “Labour forces government to sacrifice jobs to neuroses” would not look a good headline either.
And how should government respond? Transparency is usually the best policy and it would be very helpful for everyone to know where we are heading. The trouble is, of course, that nobody knows and that any plan explained to the public would almost certainly have to be changed. That is the nature of this sort of thing.
The 19th century Prussian general, Helmuth von Moltke the elder, is best known for his comment that “No plan of operations extends with any certainty beyond the first contact with the main hostile force.” Quite so, you never know what the enemy will do. The position is the same with the pandemic. In our imperfect state of knowledge as to the levels of herd immunity and the effectiveness of different levels of precaution, we are still very much in the dark. The only answer is to wait, watch, and react.
That is hardly a strategy but there is one policy which is suggested by nature. When penguins want to know whether there is a shark beneath their iceberg, they press those at the front against the edge until one of their number falls into the water. The rest then watch carefully to see what happens and make their decision as to whether to go for a swim accordingly. It is not heroic but one can see how evolution got them there and the rule “don’t be first” is one which can be usefully borrowed. There are now a number of governments which are about to start raising restrictions. It is tempting to watch them carefully for a moment and see what happens before we decide what to do ourselves.
Of course that is what the government should do but it is hardly something that can be put on paper as a public exit strategy. A formal statement would need to be far more precise with sophisticated tiers of restrictions so that we can say we are going from step one to step two and clap ourselves on the back, until of course it does not go exactly as predicted. There are lots of people that would suit. The opponents of the Government would have something concrete to criticise. The media would be able to jump up and down talking about “targets missed” and giving air to all the know-it-all critics, no shortage there, who say that they would have done better. Television stations would be able to call in ministers for a “skewering” and then exhibit empty chairs when they became nervous of committing themselves on further progress and refused to appear.
No, we really don’t need that sort of circus and the distorted decision-making that would flow from it. To produce an exit strategy now would be folly and the right course for the government is to focus on the information coming in, both from our own scientists and also from other countries who face the same problems. Before long we will see how the different approaches work and, there being plenty of them, we should be able to make a Darwinian selection to find the best. Meanwhile “watch, wait and react” remains the golden rule and keep any comments on exit strategy as anodyne as possible. There are lots of reasons for moving as quickly as possible but they do not justify making the move in the wrong direction.
