The Commons report on the early handling of the pandemic has been greeted as "robust" but it also suffers from a form of groupthink similar to that which it rightly criticises in the interface of politics & science.
This is evident in the use of the word "fatalism", which implies a error of judgement rather than a deliberate choice - i.e. we could have done more but we lacked confidence. I think this lets the British political class as a whole off the hook.
What was really at work here was an older policy tradition of "let nature take its course", which reflects a pessimism about both the morality & effectiveness of state intervention as well as a habitual disregard for the people (e.g. decanting infected patient into care homes).
This has echoes of the response by the British government to the Irish famine of the mid-19th century, which was equally informed by the enlightened view of scientific experts influenced by contemporary political economy (today, behavioural economics & "nudge theory").
Where once the population could be dismissed as "feckless", we were being told in 2020 that the interventions adopted by other countries would be counter-productive because of our susceptibility to "fatigue", a politer way of saying the same thing.
States that followed a people-first strategy have done better. Those with a high death rate have typically been ones that exhibited a disregard for the people. It appears that the UK has moved back into that latter category which suggests a "fatalism" about the welfare state.
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