Oliver Letwin (2020) Apocalypse How? Technology and the Threat of Disaster, London: Atlantic Books, ISBN 978 1 78649 686 7, £14.99.

The UK, and world, is in crisis due to the COVID-19 pandemic. Governments have seemed slow to respond. Under these circumstances it is instructive to note that one former UK government minister, Oliver Letwin, has just published a book on disaster management positing a catastrophic technological breakdown. Here I review Letwin’s book, both on its own terms, and through the prism of the current crisis.

Letwin’s book is based on his experiences as Cabinet Office minister between 2010 and 2016. During this period he was Minister for Government Policy, from 2014 Chancellor of the Duchy of Lancaster, a member of the UK’s National Security Council, and crucially for this book, UK minister for national resilience, which included cyber resilience.

The disaster he foresees is one of a catastrophic electricity grid failure which takes out all internet-based networks and communication. Setting the scenario a little into the future, he posits a situation where effectively every means of communication, transport, commerce, is reliant on internet-based technology. Think of the internet of things (IOT) currently increasingly populating households, the proposed widespread uptake of electric cars and transport, and reliance on satellites for location and communications all going dead to begin to see the profound implications.  

Back-up forms of communication have been discontinued because of cost, the feeling that the networks are robust and well defended, and that there was therefore no significant probability of such a failure. Such a premise has also been deployed in fiction. One of Henning Mankell’s Wallander novels, Firewall, was also premised on such a failure. The potential problem has only grown with greater, and potentially more disastrous, effects since then.

The book intersperses fictional chapters, with more analytical discussions every second chapter. The fictional chapters are seen partly through the eyes of Dr. Bill Donoghue, Duty Officer at the Bank of England when the failure happens, and the personal and professional issues it raises for him. These chapters include convincing descriptions of how the inevitable COBR meetings unfold and the unenviable choices facing participants. In the end, the outage lasts five days and leaves many thousands of people, often vulnerable and elderly, dead.

Analytical chapters discuss how low probability ‘black swan’ events, such as the grid and network failure premised in the book, are often discounted by policy makers, and what might be done to avoid that. The answer is to build in resilience by scenario-planning which provide layers of fall-back options. In relation to grid and network failure, this means having available old-style fail-safe analogue communications, such as walkie talkies and analogue phone lines, and non-electronic details of critical infrastructure. Letwin goes so far as to imagine how the threat of such catastrophic technological failure might be mitigated at the international level. He posits a long diplomatic march which ultimately helps get momentum behind the idea of a UN-based Convention on Global Network Protection.

Letwin’s book is a welcome reminder about the potential fragility of the connected world that we live in. It is recommended reading for anyone interested in public policy around technology, disaster management and interconnectedness more generally. Given current events around COVID-19, it is however difficult not to read it through the lens of the current government response to the unfolding public health crisis. While clearly a different type of crisis, there are some lessons in Letwin’s book that help interpret current events.

The first, and perhaps most important, is that in dealing with such a crisis it is important that decision-makers have what he calls ‘emotional intelligence’. What he means is that while technical expertise and skill will likely be available to those in charge, such emotional intelligence will help them ask the correct questions of these experts to begin with, so that correct decisions can ultimately be made. In other words, the buck stops at the top with leaders who need to be both sympathetic to the problems being experienced by individual citizens, society, the economy and so on, and have sufficient analytical capacity to ask the right questions and balance the consequences to begin with.

The second is that there are what Letwin calls ‘hidden public services’. These include the food supply chain and pharmacies. Since they are in the private sector, these are not always recognised. Letwin also includes in this category having sufficient transport capacity – airlines etc – to repatriate people who may be stranded abroad during a crisis.

Thirdly, Letwin discusses the tendency to bring in ‘free-thinkers’ to ‘think the unthinkable’ and prevent groupthink among experts. As he puts it (p.82) ‘such efforts often fail , because those who are engaged to think the unthinkable genuinely do just that – and end up being discounted by the experts as eccentric – or seek to preserve their standing with the experts by engaging in self-censorship in order to raise only those thoughts that the experts consider to be at least nearly thinkable’.

The final lesson is not explicitly drawn out, but is evident throughout. It is one of complexity, of how one crisis or disaster can lead to multiple sub-crises in different fields or levels. Thus, in the book, the power and network outage leads, among other things, to the inability of emergency crews to communicate, the filling up of hospitals and the inability of councils to locate vulnerable people they have responsibility for because these details are all stored on computers and cloud computing services.

These issues all have resonance in the current COVID-19 crisis. The world has looked at the UK response with alarm. It is far from clear that the UK government, Prime Minister Boris Johnson, and key ministers were engaged enough with the outbreak early enough. It is equally far from clear that they were prepared to ask the correct questions of experts, and not place too much faith in advisers such as Dominic Cummings who like to give the impression of ‘thinking the unthinkable’. ‘Emotional intelligence’ has appeared lacking, to put it mildly.

Only after widespread reports of supermarket shortages circulated did the government seem to appreciate the ongoing difficulty faced by food suppliers, and how other private enterprises might contribute to public cohesion. And this is clearly a complex individual, social and economic crisis playing out at several levels. To take one example, which will grow in resonance the deeper into the crisis we get, many councils are understandably restricting household waste collections. Already cut to the bone, such services are nonetheless also vital for public health and have the potential to lead to an unforeseen secondary crisis. Similarly to Letwin’s account, this is also a crisis hitting the health service and the elderly in complex ways.

Finally, to return to technology, with a huge increase in working from home, networks have shown signs of at least creaking, while vaunted online services – online shopping, Netflix and so on – are struggling to cope with the demand or restricting quality. Were networks to crash, as Letwin warns, this would amplify the current problems by many multiples.

Letwin has therefore written a thoughtful and timely book. A Conservative MP from 1997, he stood down at the 2019 general election having had the whip withdrawn by the Johnson government over his attempts to find compromises over Brexit. It is to be hoped that someone of Letwin’s experience is helping guide resilience and co-ordination during the current crisis. Yet incredibly, at the time of writing, no minister is cited as having been given the role, and previous incumbents up to 2019 seem to have resilience mentioned only hand in hand with cyber problems. Since Letwin, none have been particularly senior. If so, and given the multitude of potential and current threats to national security, this at minimum surely needs rethought as the UK goes forward.

Alistair Clark

26^th March 2020                                 

Local and mayoral elections across England have been delayed from May 2020 to May 2021. Postponing them was necessary, writes Alistair Clark, but we must also look at the longer-term impact of Covid-19 on administering elections in the UK and globally to maintain democratic accountability under difficult circumstances.

Picture: Alison Benbow / (CC BY 2.0) licence

As the Covid-19 crisis unfolded, on the afternoon of Friday, 13 March, the UK government finally yielded to sense and agreed to postpone the English local and mayoral elections, including in London, due in May 2020. The move came only after the government had earlier in the day seemed to refuse a request from the Electoral Commission, and also separately from the Association of Electoral Administrators (AEA), for a delay to the polls. 

AEA’s letter to the Minister for the Constitution, Chloe Smith MP, cited a range of potential difficulties. These included:

• that potential candidates may not be willing to visit council premises to deliver their nomination papers;
• difficulties in polling stations, from the numbers of voters passing through, to problems recruiting staff;
• worries about the virus being spread via postal votes;
• supply chain difficulties if, for example, ballot paper printers were forced to close because staff had been infected;
• the impact on those running the elections for councils if they were infected.

In support of this, and various other bodies involved in running elections, the Electoral Commission’s letter of 12 March requested a delay until the autumn.

It is worth considering in a little more detail what this might have meant to one key aspect of elections: polling stations. Who was at risk? Obviously voters. Although turnout is low in local elections, around seven million people voted in the 2018 local elections. More than half of these visited polling stations, where they will all have been met by polling station workers.

Poll workers were therefore quite immediately at risk. Who are they? Research I’ve done with Toby James (UEA) in the 2018 and 2019 English local elections has shown that: 24–25% are retired; two-thirds are female; and their average age will be mid-50s. These poll workers are all volunteers. They’re paid, but not a large amount. From their age profile and the number who are retired, many will be in high-risk categories. Many do this work for a little extra money. Whether people would continue to do so under these circumstances is questionable. Councils already find it hard to recruit for a 16-hour, low-pay day. The risk is that many fewer will volunteer to work, making the polls undeliverable in practice. That’s before getting to the problem of putting hundreds of people in close proximity overnight for counts. Moreover, the fact that two-thirds of poll workers are female means there was a gendered aspect to this as well.

The UK government, via the Prime Minister’s spokesman, initially announced that the elections would go ahead. London Mayor, Sadiq Khan, was also reported as having been led to believe that they would run as planned with little risk. In the end, the UK government eventually bowed to the inevitable and postponed the polls. It is unclear both why the request was refused, and why the change was made. Electoral administrators have been treated somewhat cavalierly by the government in recent years, with the 2017 and 2019 ‘snap’ general elections and 2019 European elections all creating various difficulties. Vote Leave staff are now central to the UK government. They have little sympathy for the Electoral Commission.   

This was nevertheless likely to be a crisis too far for the electoral system. Chronologically, the postponement decision seemed to happen only after the Labour Party had advised their campaign organisations to stop campaigning. However, even if postponement had been agreed before that, it is likely to be an example of chaotic government communications, something that is becoming a trademark of the current government.

It is important to note that the delay does not unfortunately resolve all issues around running elections in the UK. Local authorities are still having to deliver local by-elections, for instance. Several are planned for the next week, including in Scotland. There currently seems no clear legislative route for those to be delayed.

Implications of the delay

There is some precedent for delay. In 2001, English local elections were postponed for a month because of Foot and Mouth disease. No-one knows how the Covid-19 trajectory will play out in practice. It may be that delaying for a year is the right choice. A year however is a long time, for which no clear justification has been given. There are at least two reasons to think that delay until early autumn, as recommended by the Electoral Commission, was preferable.

The first is political. Local elections are ultimately seen through the prism of national politics. Delay until May 2021 will mean that the Johnson government has effectively an eighteen-month period where it remains untested and unaccountable at the ballot box. With a Conservative government that has enacted major decisions, such as its current handling of the Covid-19 crisis and Brexit, and routinely seeks to avoid being held accountable, this is hardly desirable.

Secondly, delay until May 2021 means that there will be a bumper set of polls taking place at the same time. There will be elections for: Scottish and Welsh parliaments, English councils, police and crime commissioners, London mayor, London assembly, regional mayors and local mayors. While Covid-19 is a clear threat to electoral administration, there is also evidence that holding different levels of polls concurrently is problematic for the quality of elections. My research into British elections suggests that holding different rounds of elections at the same time leads to lower performance, while those councils running only one election demonstrated higher levels of performance. Thus, the additional combination of polls in May 2021 necessitated by the delay will likely lead to further stresses on electoral administrators.

To restate, it may be that delay until May 2021 is the right thing to do. At this juncture this is impossible to know. Depending on Covid-19’s trajectory, an initial delay until early autumn would surely have been preferable. If further delay was necessary until May 2021, this could subsequently be legislated for.

Global impact

More widely, Covid-19 has shown developed democracies the difficulties of running and administering elections under extreme circumstances. Israel’s recent election saw special polling stations set up with polling staff behind protective clothing and with medical staff in attendance. Italy postponed a constitutional referendum due at the end of March. France has gone ahead with the first round of local elections on 15 March, but with polling stations having hand gel and gloves, and the interior minister advising voters to bring their own pens. The second round must be in some doubt.

In the United States, there are already reports that fewer people are volunteering to work at the polls during primaries because of coronavirus fears, something which could have clear implications in the run up to the presidential elections in November. Lines in many polling stations are already long in parts of the US. Fewer poll workers means they’ll be longer still. The impact of the crisis on November’s elections is potentially very serious.   

Covid-19 looks set to have profound effects on societies and economies. As one important element of democracy, it is also likely to have an important impact on administering elections. If nothing else, the current crisis underlines the fact that election administration is a crucial part of democratic infrastructure. It needs to be recognised as such more widely. Election administrators across the world will be considering how to adapt to ensure everyone entitled to vote can do so securely and safely. But governments need to support those administrators in doing so, not put them and the many volunteers that elections rely on at unnecessary risk.

This Blog was first published on the Democratic Audit blog on 16th March 2020.

This review gives the views of the author, and not the position of Democratic Audit.     

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About the author

Dr Alistair Clark is Reader in Politics at Newcastle University. He has written widely on electoral integrity and administration, electoral and party politics. He is author of Political Parties in the UK, 2e (Palgrave 2018). He tweets at @ClarkAlistairJ.