Boris Johnson has at times looked overwhelmed and unprepared to deal with the pandemic
Credit: Frank Augstein /AP Pool
With the fifth highest death toll, the worst GDP contraction of any G7 nation and a series of communication mix-ups, it is hard to point to truly-world beating aspect of the British government’s response to the coronavirus pandemic.
In fact, the global view of British leadership has been almost universal — an indecisive prime minister who has confused the population with inconsistent policy choices and a failed testing regime.
This week, the New York Times wrote: "[Britain] ran up the largest death toll of any country in Europe, delayed in taking preventive steps, [and] failed to organise an effective testing and contact tracing programme," it said.
Where are the UK's coronavirus hotspots?
Aside from the vaccine under development at Oxford University, which is seen as a private endeavour, it is Boris Johnson’s struggles that have attracted the most attention abroad.
Since his stay in intensive care "Johnson has not been the same" wrote El Mundo’s London correspondent, Carlos Fresneda, claiming that the prime minister’s speech last week, in which he announced a 10pm curfew on pubs, was proof of his desire to suppress the outbreak, regardless of the cost to other areas of society.
In Italy, views of Britain as a nation have changed due to the Covid-19 outbreak. Where the UK was once a byword for common sense, discipline and rationality, the approach by Mr Johnson’s government to the pandemic has left Italians confused and bemused.
"Could it be that Covid-19 has confused people in Britain more than elsewhere because Johnson is no Churchill and constantly changes his mind, passing from ‘let’s all hug’ to threatening curfews?" Corriere della Sera asked in a front page editorial.
UK compared to Spain and France
Mr Johnson’s claims about the values of Britain have also drawn the ire of foreign leaders. In a speech to the House of Commons last week, the PM claimed that Britain had a higher infection rate than Germany and Italy because Britain is a "freedom-loving country."
La Repubblica, a national daily, accused Mr Johnson of "conceit" and said that he had suggested that health measures "work better for peoples of an inferior temperament – Italians, for example."
The prime minister had displayed "an Anglo-Saxon superiority complex," the Left-leaning paper said. Meanwhile Corriere della Sera issued a front-page comment which said Mr Johnson had made the claim because "we had Mussolini and they had Churchill."
Business Day, a major South African outlet, commented on how the government’s "confused messaging and policy U-turns” on issues like herd immunity had “eroded public trust in the rules." They described the situation in London as "chaotic".
The plight of British students — quarantined in university halls — has drawn worried glances from Germany, where the newspaper Bild claimed that students have been effectively "incarcerated".
"Is this a foretaste of what to expect in other European countries when the dreaded second wave of pandemics hits?" it asked.
The New York Times has also attacked Mr Johnson’s government for their "failure to prepare" for the return of children to schools. The paper said Britain had not recognised "dangers of sending children back to classrooms without a strong testing program in place."
Perhaps the most derided aspect of Britain’s response has been its failure of testing. At the outset of the pandemic, Mr Johnson boldly proclaimed he would develop a “world beating track and trace system”. When that failed to materialise, he spoke of completing 10 million tests per day by 2021 in ‘Operation Moonshot’ — an ambition that appears to have fallen quickly by the wayside.
Students at Manchester Metropolitan University have likened the lockdown in their halls to a prison
Credit: Peter Byrne /PA
"Boris Johnson’s empty promises" was the headline in Spiegel magazine. "Confused rules, haphazard tests, increasing numbers of infections: the British government is stumbling through the corona crisis," the magazine opined. "But everything will be fine, the Prime Minister promises yet again. And it disturbs an entire country."
Spiegel went on to describe the issues around testing as "embarrassing" and state that "the test regime has gotten completely out of hand in recent weeks."
Russia’s state-owned Rossiya 1 channel said: "Prime Minister Boris Johnson promised in early September that the country would perform a million tests a day. But this bright idea seems to have vanished in the rush of other state matters, and no one seems to be going back to it at the government level."
The NHS's new test-and-trace app has been downloaded over 12 million times in just four days
Credit: Simon Dawson /Bloomberg
But despite the doom and gloom, greater failures by other governments have spared Westminster some scrutiny.
There was some concern among those in India for the estimated 30,000 Indian students and 40,000 Indian doctors living in Britain but these views have changed rapidly, with the United Kingdom considered a much safer place than India from March onwards for Covid-19, due to India’s spiralling outbreak.
Britain’s new test-and-trace app, though delayed, has also been earning some plaudits among foreign outlets. It has been downloaded 12.4 million times in its first four days of operation, a number four times greater than in France.
Le Monde newspaper pointed out that the UK app, linked to Apple and Google, guaranteed decentralised management of user data. The French app, developed by a French research institute, uses a central server, leading to public concerns about how the authorities may use the data, despite promises that it will only be stored for a limited time and will serve only to combat the pandemic.
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