Vaccine hero Kate Bingham's warning on future pandemics must be heeded: Andy Brown

Britain used to be recognised around the world as a place where there was stable government and more focus on good common sense than on ideology. Not any longer. We managed three different Prime Ministers in one year whilst really important government departments like Education exceeded that and burned through five different people in charge. Some Ministers settled behind their new desk for only a few hours before resigning or being sacked.

To a disinterested observer it must have looked as if the ruling party was a lot better at vicious ideological faction fights than it was at running the country. Unfortunately, we are not disinterested observers but people who have been forced to live with the consequences.

This was supposed to be the year when the economy bounced back from Covid and the much-promised benefits of Brexit started coming through. Instead, it was the year of rising interest rates on mortgages, rising food prices, and staring nervously at the fuel bill.

We began the year still emerging from the worst of the Covid crisis and cheering on our brave frontline NHS workers. We ended it discussing how big a real terms pay cut they would have to settle for.

Yet the year may not be remembered for headline grabbing failures like Liz Truss and for all this economic pain. Sometimes it is the less noticed events that signal the most important long-term trends.

This was the summer when temperatures in Britain exceeded 40 degrees centigrade for the first year ever and we experienced wildfires sweeping across fields of bone dry wheat with such speed that they burned down neighbouring houses. This is expected to be only the start of increasingly chaotic weather as governments work on the assumption that it is OK to carry on making things worse and to be pumping out yet more CO2 and methane into the atmosphere for another 28 years.

It was also the year when the world signed up to a deal to try and ensure that 30 per cent of land is protected for nature by 2030 and when water companies had to face the fury of their own customers as they routinely dumped more raw sewage into our rivers.

If these are signs of an increasing recognition that our existence on this planet shouldn’t come at the price of the extinction of other species then this may prove to be one of the lasting gains of the year.

One of the key causes of those extinctions is the cutting down of rain forests which brings humans into increasing contact with species that live in remote areas. Those creatures carry viruses and bacteria that have previously been isolated from us but now have the chance to jump species and travel around the world on planes.

Which makes one of the other less noticed events of the year particularly important. In November Dame Kate Bingham informed us that the country was going backwards in its preparations for responding to a future pandemic. She was awarded her Dame status because of her brilliant work on leading the UK’s efforts to get vaccines produced, distributed and into the arms of the vast bulk of the public. She knows what she is talking about when it comes to pandemics and we need to listen to her if we are to be ready for the next outbreak.

One of the prime reasons why she was so successful is that she was quite happy to dump ideology and just focus on what would work. She was prepared to use private enterprise to do what it was good at such as innovative solutions and production of vaccines. She was every bit as comfortable using the public sector to do the things it does so well like getting the newly produced vaccines out into the community via the National Health Service. In a chaotically privatised service like the railways or the water companies that would have been a lot more difficult.

If the country learns how to use the best of private and public enterprise with an open mind instead of believing in daft theories that the markets always know best or that the state can do everything then we may have a brighter future. The country doesn’t need ideologically driven politicians. Just competent ones with an understanding of the serious challenges we face and the opportunities to overcome them. Like investing more in insulating homes to cut bills and help the environment.

What Dame Kate achieved was truly inspirational. The fact that she is telling us that politicians are already failing to prepare for the threat of further pandemics is chilling. At a time of bird flu and Strep A it is criminally short-sighted.

Perhaps if our politicians are a little more open-minded about where to find their solutions then we really will have a Happy New Year.

Andy Brown is a Craven District Councillor representing Aire Valley with Lothersdale and the North Yorkshire Councillor for Aire Valley