The Daily Signal - How Coronavirus Has Impacted The U.K. and Beyond

Episode Date: April 16, 2020

Tim Evans is a professor of business and political economy at Middlesex University London. He joins the podcast today to talk about coronavirus in England, how nationalized health care has affected the response, and the great economic challenges and opportunities that are now reality due to the crisis. We also cover these stories: House Speaker Nancy Pelosi says President Trump will be “swiftly challenged,” in his decision to stop funding the World Health Organization due to its handling of the coronavirus pandemic.  House Democrats introduced legislation Tuesday to send payments of $2,000 to Americans affected by coronavirus, after qualifying Americans started receiving one-time stimulus checks from the coronavirus relief package passed by Congress and signed by Trump on March 27.  Governor Andrew Cuomo Announced Wednesday during a press conference that he is issuing an executive order that will require people to wear a face covering when in public.   Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

This is the Daily Signal podcast for Thursday, April 16th. I'm Virginia Allen. And I'm Rachel Del Judas. Tim Evans is a professor of business and political economy at Middlesex University London. He joins me on the podcast to talk about coronavirus in England, how nationalized health care has affected the response, and the great economic challenges and opportunities that are now reality due to the crisis. Don't forget, if you're enjoying this podcast, please be sure to leave a review or or a five-star rating on Apple Podcasts and encourage others to subscribe. Now, on to our top news. House Speaker Nancy Pelosi says President Trump will be swiftly challenged in his decision to stop funding the World Health Organization due to its handling of the coronavirus pandemic.

The president's halting of funding to the WHO as it leads the global fight against the coronavirus pandemic is senseless. This decision is dangerous, illegal, and will be swiftly challenged. Pelosi said in a statement. On Tuesday, Trump announced that he is ending funding for the WHO while the organization is reviewed for its role in severely mismanaging and covering up the spread of the coronavirus. Trump criticized the organization for its relationship with China. The WHO failed to investigate credible reports in Wuhan that conflicted directly with the Chinese government's official accounts, Trump said. there was no credible information to suspect human-to-human transmission in December 2019, which should have spurred the WHO to investigate immediately. Through the middle of January, it parroted and publicly endorsed the idea that there was not human-to-human contact despite reports and clear evidence to the contrary.

Kedros Gabrizes, Director of the World Health Organization, addressed Wednesday President Trump's decision to halt funding to the World Health Organization via the Evening Standard. The United States of America has been a longstanding and generous friend to WHO, and we hope it will continue to be so. We regret the decision of the President of the United States to order a hold in funding to the World Health Organization. We support from the people and government,

of the United States, WHO works to improve the health of many of the world's poorest and most vulnerable people. W.H.O. is not only fighting COVID-19. We're also working to address polio, measles, malaria, Ebola, HIV, tuberculosis, malnutrition, cancer, diabetes, mental health, and many other diseases and conditions. We also work with countries to strengthen health systems and improve access to life-saving health services. WHO is reviewing the impact of our work of any withdrawal of U.S. funding

and we'll work with our partners to fill any financial gaps we face and to ensure our work content. and interrupted. House Democrats introduced legislation Tuesday to send payments of $2,000 to Americans affected by coronavirus after qualifying Americans started receiving one-time stimulus checks from the coronavirus relief package passed by Congress and signed by Trump on March 27th. As millions of Americans file for unemployment week over week, we have to work quickly to patch the dam. And that means putting cash in the hands of hardworking families, Tim Ryan of Ohio, said in a statement. The payments would continue until employment reaches its previous levels before the pandemic hit,

per the hill. Face masks or coverings will soon be required in the state of New York. Governor Andrew Cuomo announced Wednesday during a press conference that he's issuing an executive order that will require people to wear a face covering when in public. Here's what he had to say, per the hill. If you are going to be in public, and you cannot maintain social distancing, then have a mask. And put the mask on when you are not in socially distanced places. You're walking down the street.

You're walking down the street alone? Great. You're now at an intersection, and there are people in the intersection, and you're going to be in proximity to other people, Put the mask on. Thousands of Michiganers descended on Lansing, the capital of Michigan on Wednesday, in a vehicle protest to show their disapproval of Governor Gretchen Whitmer's stay-at-home order.

The event, which was dubbed Operation Gridlock, and was promoted with the slogan, She's Driving Us Out of Business, we are driving to Lansing. Whitmer's Stay Home, Stay Safe, Executive Order, which was updated Thursday, bans public and private gatherings among persons outside a single household. It also mandates, according to a press release from Whitmer, that stores control crowd sizes, with big stores having to keep the amount of people in the store at any one time to know more than four people for every 1,000 square feet of space for customers, and that small stores must restrict capacity to 25% of the total occupancy limits.

The numbers are in, and retail sales for the month of March are down by a record-breaking 8.7%. CNBC reported that the Department of Commerce has not seen a decline that sharp since they began tracking the series in 1992. Tim Kualan, a senior economist at Wells Fargo Securities in Charlotte, North Carolina, said per CNBC that in general, consumer spending is going to look about as bad as it has ever been. Although there will be some categories of resilience, the panic buying at grocery stores cannot offset the retrenchment in spending that we will see in other categories.

Now, stay tuned for my conversation with Professor Tim Evans on coronavirus in England. At The Daily Signal, we want to make sure you and your family are receiving the most accurate information about the coronavirus. Here's an important message from First Lady Melania Trump. To all of our medical personnel and other frontline responders, on behalf of a grateful nation, Thank you. The President and I appreciate all that you're doing to keep the people of our country healthy and safe. In the most difficult of times,

the United States never fails to rise to the occasion with both unity and strength. It is because of you that the people of America are receiving the care and treatment they need. We stand united with you and we salute your courageous and compassionate efforts. Our prayers are with all who are fighting this invisible enemy, COVID-19.

I'm joined today on the Daily Signal podcast by Professor Tim Evans, Professor of Business and Political Economy at Middlesex University of London. Professor Evans, it's great to have you on the Daily Signal podcast. To start off, Professor Evans, can you tell us about yourself and your work at the university and if it's been impacted in any way by coronavirus? So I'm Professor of Business and Political Economy at Middle Sex University, which is a major campus in North London. We have campuses in other parts for the world as well, including Mauritius, Bolton, Dubai. We're the only University of the United Kingdom to have won the Queen's Award for International Enterprise twice this century.

Our campus in London is well shut down because of coronavirus. We're one of the world's top 15, most diverse universities. So we have huge numbers of people from the Far East, from the Middle East, from Africa, as well as Europe, the United Kingdom, and North and South America. We haven't had a huge number of cases on campus, far from it. We took the Prudence debt following the government's guidelines and closing down three or four weeks ago. we're lucky we live in an age of technology where people can carry on a huge amount of their work and students can carry on studying online.

I've tried to think what would have happened if we had this pandemic, let's say before the age of the internet, maybe in 1990, because so many of us wouldn't have been able to carry on working. But that's the situation. And also the UK is closed down. People are working from home.

Shops, pubs, restaurants are closed. and the virus is taking its toll, not just on human life, but also clearly on our economy. Well, you mentioned how restaurants are closed, people are working from home. What is it like right now on the streets in your community? I can imagine it's very quiet, but can you kind of set the scene for us in what you've seen in the past weeks? Yep. So I'm someone who was born and raised in central London. if I was to get in a motor vehicle and drive in about 12 to 15 minutes from now,

I'd be absolutely in the centre of town. I'd be in particularly circus and in what we call the West End, which would be the closest of Times Square on Broadway in New York. So I'm pretty central really. The streets, I would say, are much quieter. Generally, there's about 10 or 15% of the traffic that there would be normally. children are off from school. They would be this time of year anyway

because of Easter holidays. Many of them have not gone abroad or to other parts from well. Many are cooped up in their homes. A huge number of people are working from home. Again, thanks to the internet. Local restaurants, pubs, moat shops are closed.

There are supermarkets and food stores open. They tend to have huge. They have lines of people that are spaced out in what we call physical social distancing. So things are quiet, but things are working for the absolute necessities. You know, our pharmacy stores, our chemist shops are working, and our food stores are working. And there have been no great shortages. Of course, where there has been a complete mobilisation, where there's frenetic effort, is with clinical staff, doctors, with nurses right across our hospital sector,

nursing homes, a residential care home sector. There, this is, in fact, the largest mobilization that Britain has had. It affects its May 1940 and the early stages of the second report. So Britain has a government-run healthcare system, and you've previously written about that in a report for the Heritage Foundation. Could you explain quickly to our listeners how the United Kingdom's healthcare system works? Yeah, so as I pointed out in the Heritage paper last year, in 1948, the British government promised that the state healthcare system, which is called the national health system or the NHS, would provide all medical, dental and increasing treatment. care. And they put a leaflet, they sent to every home in the country, everyone,

Richard or Paul, will be able to use it. And of course, to create that service in 1948, government came into public ownership, around 3,118, previously independently or local government-owned hospitals, homes and clinics. So it was a huge nationalisation. And the reality is that the promise, 1948, if you look at the least, if you look at the least, that was sent every home back then. The promise that was written in black and white on it has never really been fulfilled. The NHS

never quite managed to do all industry. Private dentistry has always remained in the United Kingdom. In terms of nursing care, it's certainly true that a lot of nursing care is provided in NHS hospitals by the taxpayer, but

for longer term care, particularly for elderly people, people who need what we call social care, and an awful lot of nursing provision wasn't necessarily provided by the NHS. It was provided either by local government or people who chose to play for themselves. And really the big picture of British health care is that since the 1970s, right through the 80s, 90s and beyond, however much money has been pouring into the NHS and politicians of all stripes and parties have invested very heavily in it, lots more money has gone into it, it has never quite been able to keep up with public expectations or the increasing demands.

And so today, we have probably 700 NHS hospitals in Britain, and by March, they do a good job. But they're complemented and to an extent relieved by more than 200 hospitals. independent or private hospitals. Some of them are for profit, some of them are not for profit. And also in this crisis, a third an important sector, I have to say, is the military medical sector. And what's really happened is that since the beginning and middle of March, the government has been organizing the full integration of the whole of the UK's healthcare resource right across the NHS and the independent sector and the military sector to deal with coronavirus, whilst also at the same time dealing with trauma cases and, of course, people who might need ongoing care for things like

cancer. And also a lot of elective acute surgery, things like hip replacements or knee replacement, things like that, have simply been paused and put on hold. That mounting backlog will have to be dealt with later. But the reality is that probably today, nearly half of UK dentistry probably has a major private element to it, about one in four people who need long-term care. They invariably go private, not just in terms of provision, but also in terms of funding. Today we have about 16 or 17,000 private nursing and residential care homes in Britain. And in this coronavirus, the NHS is backed up by its additional 200 independent hospitals, which are providing thousands of beds and hundreds of intensive care and high dependency beds, ventilators, and all those things. And so that's an

extraordinary mobilisation, but it's a mobilisation in economic terms that goes beyond the NHS and is really mobilising the fully mixed economy in healthcare, which in 2020 is the base reality for the United Kingdom. We don't have that fully-fledged nationalization that we knew in the 1950s and 60s. We have a more mixed economy approach today. So right now, countries across the world are grappling with coronavirus. And I'm curious if you've noticed any significant differences in countries between nations with predominantly private health care and those with government-run health care. Well, the first thing is that that it's too early.

We don't have all the data in from around the world. For example, at the Blavaknik School of Oxford University in the United Kingdom, they have a huge project where they are looking at the interventions and the reactions of pretty much every government around the world to this coronavirus. and they're plotting each intervention, whether shops are closed or pubs and what different people are doing in different parts of the world. I'm in the advisory board of that, and about 10 days ago, we'd only gathered 140,000 data points from well over 100 countries.

So it's going to be really interesting. We get the final toll from coronavirus to understand what happened, if you will, to do ex post facto rationalizations. Again, it's far too early for us to know what the impact of the virus is going to be on overall death rates. There is, of course, very sadly, a group of people who are vulnerable, some of them are old and had a manner of medical problems. We're only going to know, though, the real impact, the actual correlation, the causal chain, if you will, between coronavirus and death rates where we can map those. And the other thing I would say is we're also going to have to calculate the knock-on

effects of the interventions to deal with coronavirus. Let me give you one example. In the downturn of 2008-9 with that dreadful financial crisis, what of the human cost of that downturn was, we now know that an additional 10,000 people in various countries seem to have committed suicide. That's a number that was just out of kill than what you normally got in normal years then. So there was a causal link there, we believe. It could be very interesting when we look at not only government's attention,

but that data at the end. And then in amongst that, we can be able to look hopefully at how different systems perform. I mean, I have to say, Britain is very lucky in that we have not just our state health care sector. We have a vast plethora of private hospitals, of nursing homes, of charities. We have a very broad and very deep civil society which is responding to complement that

which has been mobilised by the state. And I contrast that, for example, with Canada, where for a long time independent health care it's being illegal, you're not able to have a private hospital in Canada. It's why so many Canadians go for their private care and treatment down the US border, something you'll be familiar with. And the problem is that when you have a coronavirus, when you have a pandemic like this, it is that moment where a society, however your healthcare arrangement to configure,

it's that moment where healthcare, by definition, meets the full coercive power of the state. It's where the healthcare conjoins with the military. And if in that moment you have a very broad and deep, not only state healthcare sector and some military resource, but you have lots of institutions in civil society and you have, for example, 100 of independent hospitals that can join the effort, that gives you breadth, depth, flexibility. and I do want that to be very interesting when we do, maybe next year, get to look back the data how countries like Canada that don't have those additional independent or private resources have been able to react.

There are other countries in Europe like Germany that has much more localized, much more flexible and adaptive systems, and there are people in our newspapers that are suggesting that localisation of German healthcare, the flexibility, a much greater mixture of public and private provision, has added to them returning early on seemingly better data. But as I say, this is very early. And for example, we don't know whether what we're dealing with at the moment is the first wave or indeed if we're going to be facing a second wave coming along in the future. But the strategy in Britain has been to mobilize all that resource as quickly as possible,

aptly bolster intensive care and then try and flatten the peak and spread it over time to make sure that our health system, all that resource, can digest this pandemic. My hunch is that when we do come to ending lockdown, it will be incremental. We will probably have to wait for vaccine before we, return to complete normality and we stop shielding the medically vulnerable and particularly, you know, the elderly and frail, there will be an incremental return. But so far, I have to say, the conjuncture of the military, the NHS and the private all mixing together seems to have stood us in good state. Well, British Prime Minister Boris John

was one of the most prominent people to come down with the coronavirus. And although he was admitted to the ICU at one point, he is now doing better. I'm curious, what was the attitude in Britain during his health crisis? The attitude, I think, was a very human response. And it was a human response that transcended political allegiance and political stripe. most people for this is a prime minister in his mid-50s

he's quite a bouncing energetic character you know he has a younger partner they have a baby on the way and I think a lot of people's heart

went out to them and I sense a lot of people right across the political wanted him of course to return to health there was I think a scary

34 or 48 hours where he was in intensive care. And I think we could all see on the faces of cabinet ministers in broadcasts their nervousness. So there was no surprise when an hour two later. We were indeed told just how serious things became for the prime minister for a brief window. But I think people halt without him. I think generally the government is, in Britain has done fairly well. The Labour opposition has been particularly weak.

It hasn't been well led in recent years. And they have a new leader in Kirstearn who's just getting his feet under the table. And the consequence of this is that actually the conservatives are riding quite high in the opinion polls. But, you know, I have a hunch that generally, in a time of pandemic, where people become so reliant on government and the judgments of, senior governmental scientists and senior medical advisors, my impression is that governments around the world and leaderships can be doing quite well in terms of polling and electoral support. There is in a sense of unity behind whoever is on duty. I certainly think from a European point of view that the European

Union has not covered itself in glory during this episode. Lots of barriers have gone up within Europe between nation states, and there's been very much a return to the politics of the nation state. Of course, there are a lot of banking sectors, particularly in southern Europe that will have stressed. I'm particularly thinking of the Italian sector, how that plays out when this crisis. comes to an end or what the implications of that are for the European project for the EU, I don't know. I think the big loser, particularly in the United States, will be potentially China. I think lots of companies, lots of organisations will want to diversify their supply chains in future and not perhaps always be so reliant on China. So they'll look to other

competitive economies around the world to bolster and diversify their supply their supply. supply chains. But I think this will play into the hands politically of people who have long been wary, dare I say, of China, and who are worried about their governance and their seeming inability to tell the truth. I mean, there was a very interesting article recently in National Review Online, which detailed day by day the early goings of the on the Chinese government when clearly local doctors were warning the party and the leadership that there was a problem in Wuhan, and these people were vilified, they were called into police stations, they were ordered to sign pieces of paper that basically tried to sharpen

up, and the full, you know, horror of a authoritarian state lying has subsequently become clear for all to see around the world. So I think China has got a big reputational problem on its hand, and I suspect that will bleed out into trade relations and trade supply chains in the future. Well, Professor Evans, we've all seen news reports about the shortages of doctors and medical equipment from around the world due to COVID-19. What specifically are you seeing in the UK? So in the United Kingdom, we are seeing, I think, some rather clever, ingenious solutions that are not perfect, but we're not in a perfect world and we're not in a perfect moment when it comes to sloughing. And I'll give you one example. we have, of course, in this country,

to internationally recognized airlines, British Airways, and we have Virgin, Virgin Atlantic. Of course, if you are a member of Cabin crew in any record of an airline anywhere in the world, you are in fact trained, you're trained in resuscitation, you're trained in first aid, you have a basic level of skill. And you have to maintain

at that level of skill. So what's happened at a very practical level in the United Kingdom is that with a lot of support from the army and the military, huge additional medical centres has been put in place in East London. A huge conference centre has been turned into a makeshift hospital. It has the potential to have 4,000 beds. the cabin crew from airlines had been brought in and they have been upskilled so in effect they become care assistance junior nurses are rapidly being retrained and certain skills honed so they're

going up a notch very experienced and senior nurses consultant nurses senior sisters are in some ways overtaking the role of some aspects of junior doctors junior doctors junior politicians Doctors are stepping up a notch, you know, et cetera. Now, consultant doctors, people at the top of the food chain, the medicine, you know, you could be a kind of rectal surgeon, you could be someone who is doing plastic surgery. What happened in recent weeks is you, again, have done crash courses, you've been retrained,

and you have been brought up to speed again with resuscitation, ventilation, and ICU. So there has been a very, very swift, very clever rejigging of the talent and the human resources available. And so far, we seem to have managed. I can say this as Brit. We're sort of famed for coming up with solutions in rather dark moments. we're a country that naturally, if there is a crisis, we sort of pop into our gardens, do some gardening and then end up in the garden shed where we invent things. I think that's part of our own sort of self-identity.

And in this instance, we've buckled down, we've got on with the crisis, we've re-taught in rather inventive and ingenious ways, lots of the skills that various groups have. and so far we seem to be doing okay. But I mentioned much earlier in this interview that we do have a growing mountain, a backlog of lots and lots of, for example, acute elective surgery. And that's simply not being done at the moment. When we went into this crisis,

the National Health Service was not meeting all this targets. Often people were not getting cancer care as quickly as they should, people waiting too long. And this is with, you know, increasing amounts of money that the politicians have been investing into it, and the taxpayers have been spending on it. So I think that there have to be a lot of innovative work at the end of this of how we deal with the backlog of the medical work that is accruing. And the only way I can think of dealing with it is that, that again, the NHS is going to have to have for a much, much longer period, a part of the, an ongoing partnership with those independent hospitals and maybe even elements for the military

to deal with the backlog because otherwise this crisis in terms of medical need could go on for many, many years indeed as we get grips with that backlog. Well, Professor Evans, you had mentioned that before the lockdown ends, there might be a need for a vaccine or other measures. what will the lessons, though, you think, be once you all do, go back to work and as you look back on what's happened? So I think the first thing is, and there's going to have to be a big look back exercise. Government, this is all around the world. Governments all around the world are going to have to look back at their contingency planning strategies.

Where they worked well and where they failed. I think in some instances that look back exercise is going to have to inform elements of, dare I say it, industrial strategy. And by that I don't mean some sort of socialistic and onerous central planning doctrine, but I do mean that just as nations like the United Kingdom or the United States go to great lengths to make sure that they have the industrial capacity to so that if things, if you're in a difficult situation, if you enter a war, or that if you are facing a pandemic, you have the industrial capacity to make the things you might need. You know, for example, if Britain found itself in a war, do we have the capacity to produce the steel that our warships or things might need, all that kind of stuff?

So I think when the look back comes, we can have to look back in inform our contingency planning and we can have to revisit it. We really have the equipment. and did we really have the industry to produce the things that we need? Secondly, we're going to have to think more clearly, I think, in terms of national security. This is a wake-up call for lots of people who have been interested, not only in pandemics, but the potential in the modern world, for example, for biological warfare, to conjoined with economic warfare. What can we learn from this as we look forward?

I think there's going to have to be a broader and pragmatic acceptance that in, healthcare, the NHS cannot do everything. In fact, no one sector can do everything in a moment like this. You have to have a national effort that spans the various sectors. I think there will be an increased role for the independent sector, particularly independent hospitals, for many years to come, to deal with the backlog and to increasingly relieve the NHS of some of the pressures. And I think also geopolitically, this is going to be a wake up. up called not only to many democratic governments, but also to many businesses in terms of their supply chains. Finally, and I conclude on this point, I think that more authoritarian characters,

you know, people in Ankara, people in Moscow, people in Beijing, to keep a lid on this, and to, for example, for the folks in Beijing to basically try and cover up the states that were made early on in this crisis, they and other more authoritarian regimes are probably going to fall into the trap of becoming more authoritarian. I don't think that this pandemic is going to turn, for example, Vladimir Putin into being a more liberal libertarian character. I think that he will likely become more centralizing and more authoritarian. And ultimately, that might help to shore up some of these leaderships, short term, and their path to authoritarianism. But as we know from history, authoritarian regimes become fragile. They become brittle.

And the more authoritarian they become, they become less agile. And also less respected. They lose not only the moral intellectual high ground of debate, but they domestically become more fragile. And I suspect that's where countries like Russia, Turkey, Iran, China, and others will head. Well, going back quickly to the economic consequences of coronavirus, once this crisis is over or starts to wind down, how do you think it will change politics and public policy for your country over the months and years ahead? So I think the United Kingdom has a huge challenge. We were a country that before this crisis had been trying to encourage growth and be. managing it quite successfully in recent years, paying down our national debt as a proposal

of GDP. Our debt was quite high. There's around 80%, 85% of GDP. This crisis could easily add 10, 15, 20, maybe even 25, 30% of GDP to add debt. We won't know until we get through to June, July and August. quite what the numbers and the projections are on that. But I do think that the British government is going to have to focus on growth. It is going to have to either strike a pretty robust supply side and free market

for trading deal with Europe or indeed one of the United States. I think Britain going into this crisis was quite. lucky that it had stopped on an awful lot of equipment and supplies in the lead up to Brexit. Those stockpals, we're lucky in some instances we have them may have been used on this pandemic. I think that in the short term, the government's going to have to capture a lot of supply-side reforms, and most of a lot of regulations have been relaxed. I'll give you one pine example to wet the appetite. Until a few weeks ago, if I ran a restaurant in Britain, I couldn't necessarily also run a takeaway service from it, or maybe as Americans call it, a technical service.

Now, you can. Another example is that up until this crisis, I had to have what we were technically call on supplies or medical supplies or protective equipment, what was called a CE mark, which was a European Union kite mark. Well, there had been some shortages and supplies have been freed up and we don't necessarily now have to, of course, use those products of that guide mark. So there is a sort of energy, a sort of dynamism that come from these moments. Now, providing with British government is successful in spreading the economic pain of this in terms of debt over the term and can capture some of the supply-side reforms, go through elements of deregulation, manage taxes, sensibly, perhaps reduce corporation tax, but really make Britain stand out as a beacon of enterprise. And within that country, there is a challenge where we balance

the economic prosperity of the south-eastern England and the city of London by releasing activity and talent in the north of England, and that will require some up. front investment. If we can do these things well, then I think just as we've gone into this crisis and we've gone in quickly and deeply, so I hope that the outturn will be dramatic. And that certainly by the fourth quarter of this year, we will have, we will see them turn off only to growth, but hopefully some dramatic growth. But the saving grace of Britain in a way is that, this will be a moment where we can take stop. I've described how we're potentially going to see a rather different geopolitical landscape internationally.

If companies, for example, want to diversify supply chains, in some instances pivot away from China, well, how will that feed into opportunities for British manufacturing and talent? You know, there's an awful lot that's coming, I think, in the near future that isn't just a challenge, but we're going to be able to benefit from. Of course, Britain, as one of the world's most dynamic, one of the most successful economies, will I think advise to that challenge. And as ever, as we've done by hundreds of years economically and in terms of invention and medicine and everything like vaccines or whatever, I think we will punch one above our weight. So I'm quite optimistic, I have to say. And lastly, Professor Evans, what do you want the United States as well as the rest of the world to know about what the UK has been through? So, you know, the first thing is there is an extraordinary dialogue of the death when it comes to the Brits and the Americans on health care.

The average Americans think that everything in Britain, when it comes to medicine, is socialized. It's all nationalized. It's run by the state. That simply isn't true. I repeat, we have about 17,000 independent or private nursing residential care homes in this country. We have 200 independent private hospitals. We have huge numbers of charities that deal with all kinds of aspects of health and medicine, everything from Parkinson's Disease Society to Alzheimer's, and I could go on. Conversely, a lot of British people make the mistake that they think that everything in North America,

is private. The average British person has never heard Medicare, Medicaid, veterans, healthcare, you know, they don't understand the enormous sums of money, both at federal and state level that the United States spends on its mandated healthcare schemes and its public health facilities. So I would say the first thing is it's always good to overcome. dialogues of death and to understand slightly more objectively each other. I think that in the military sphere, the United Kingdom, the US has long been very close together, along the Five Eyes community, you know, Australia, New Zealand, Canada. I think that will continue.

And I think that community will probably become ever more relevant to bolstering the liberal democracies. of friends in Western Europe and in parts of Eastern Europe, I think that the biggest challenge facing Britain and the United States and the democracy, I have to say, is the vast quantities of debt that we are shouldering. I think the United States is already more into debt than 100% of GDP. You probably owe something, your debt is probably something order of $2 trillion.

Britain's debt is in excess of $2 trillion. And if I took the off-balance sheet liabilities, for example, of U.S. pensions, then your debt is even larger. And I think this is a civilizational challenge that the liberal democracy of the West face, and not just governments, but also levels of private debt amongst private companies. and indeed households. And so I would like to think that as we take stock and as we reflect, and as we work through this historic inflection point, and that's what often pandemics are, we think slightly more clearly in the future about what governments really can do, what they can't do,

and I think I would have a plea for a greater degree of transparency and honesty. I do wish politicians all stripes would simply start pandering to their basis, promising ever more and then being ever dodgy, if I can use that colloquialism, with their balance shapes. Because I really do think that we are playing with fire if we all simply get into ever more debt. That isn't me saying that we shouldn't spend money on this pandemic, rescue human life when we can. Perhaps categorically, I believe that we should and clearly we are. but there are other callings in the years and decades ahead that are also very, very important. Well, Professor Evans, thank you so much for sharing that perspective,

and thank you for joining us on the Daily Signal podcast. My absolute pleasure. And that'll do it for today's episode. Thank you for listening to the Daily Signal podcast. We do appreciate your patience as we record remotely during these weeks. Please be sure to subscribe on Apple Podcasts, Google Play, or Spotify. And please leave us a review or rating on Apple Podcasts and give us your feedback. Stay healthy and we will be back with you all tomorrow.

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