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Copyright 2021, Musa Khan Jalalzai
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Political, social and financial stratifications of the British state have been extraordinarily challenged by the offensive dynamics of Covid-19 with serious and unprecedented impacts on all aspects of our life, and the ways British state functioning and managing national security challenges. The Covid-19 exposed deficiency, shortcoming and Achilles-heel of the British state institutions that never experienced such a corrigible momentum of this mortiferous virus. While failing to defeat forces of the pandemic on all fronts, our policymakers rushed to adopt mass surveillance measures to control population, manage the virus, and maintain national security dynamics. The Boris Johnson government introduced measures around biosurveillance, censorship and misinformation, and passed laws disclosing and tracking our movements, managing communications and conversations, facial recognition surveillance and checkpoints for temperature tests. The fight against Covid-19 has now entered determining juncture as the state intelligence surveillance system is paying more attention to domestic security challenges instead of identifying pandemic patients.
All resources were diverted to counter-terrorism, and foreign intelligence surveillance through strategies, planes and mass surveillance under the umbrella of coronavirus. Infectious disease outbreaks clearly imposed terrible costs in terms of human suffering and mortality, as well as economic costs that threatened progress and stability in the United Kingdom, and that greatly out-distanced the costs of prevention and preparedness measures from privacy and private life to human rights. Every kind of human dignity has been signed-away to get data and watch lives of civilian population closely and remotely, those paying the price for the improvising designed national security strategies. National security is not just about protection from state and non-state actors, but also encompasses protection from crises such as emerging infectious diseases and other health outcomes that can threaten the nations economic vitality and its way of life. Crisis management approach of the government is unsystematic and disorganized due to the unpreparedness and lack of modernization of the state institutions to professionally respond to the persisting pandemic crisis.
WHO Director-General, Dr. Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus, in one of his opening addresses noted; Over the years, we have had many reports, reviews and recommendations all saying the same thing, the world is not prepared for a pandemic. COVID-19 has laid bare the truth when the time came, the world was still not ready. Health emergency preparedness is part of the larger vision of health for all. The recognition of this potential impact has led governments around the globe to accelerate their planning efforts to combat and prepare for the fight against the pandemic (Homeland Security Council report-2006). The UN Security Council Report (June 2020) has warned that terrorist groups might exploit engagement of law enforcement agencies in fighting against Covid-19 for their propaganda purposes: A wide variety of terrorist groups have already integrated COVID-19 into their narratives and propaganda, seeking to exploit current events for their own purposes and to use the pandemic to exploit divisions and weaknesses among their enemies. The report also noted that the COVID-19 also provided fuel for existing terrorist narratives, with tropes being repurposed to intensify hatred towards particular groups, resulting in racist, anti-Semitic, Islamophobic and anti-immigrant hate speech.
We have been reading countless reports in newspapers about the weaknesses and vulnerabilities of our national and domestic security, law enforcement mechanism, Snooper Charter Surveillance, and social, political, and colourful stratifications. Still, our think tanks never found any panacea to treat these deficiencies. All these imbalances needed a multibranched answer and reasonable nostrum. Political, social, and medical racism and discrimination have been evolving in different shape, while social distances between colours, behaviours at workplaces developed into a greater crisis that have deeply impacted political and social concordance in Britain. With greater reason, the worldwide spread of Covid-19 played havoc with major globalizing processes and immersion to our civilization. International travel has been in crisis since January 2020, while migration faces new challenges. The British economy is also in a hot spot because there are over one million job losses as the Covid-29 continues to affect lives and socialization. Each of us is now living in a world with a nearly untreatable virusmany bacterial and fungal infections that were previously considered treatable are no longer responding to the drugs designed to kill them.
As the Covid-19 tiredness or sleepiness began to set in, the UK experienced another wave of COVID-19 on 05 November 2020. This time, the governments measures and strategies were designed to impose air and land surveillance to watch everyone by all means. Lockdowns caused more pain, loss of life and social and economic destruction. Lockdowns cause peoples mental health and weaken their financial position. The Centre for Mental Health estimated up to 10 million people in England needed either new or additional mental health support as a direct consequence of the crisis. The economic situation is not satisfactory, a culture of fraud, nepotism and cronyism developed gradually. Racism and extremism revolved in different shapes, while NHS shamelessly targeted black and Asian communities by taking back their right of treatment and hospitalization. Newspapers and journals published articles and news stories about the vulnerabilities of Asian and black communities flagrantly, and exhibited them as poor, source of Covid-19, weak, sick and vulnerable. These developments and social clefts threatened our lives and society.
Now, due to our negligence, the state is now in a profound, political, social and financial crisis. Security sector reforms halted while Great Reset continues to exacerbate in the speed of unemployment, economic and financial crisis. Since the onset of Covid-19, we have entered a twilight world. Our national security is under threat from all sides, our social stratification roots have emaciated, connectivity and togetherness have ended, and we look at each other with scorn and sneering, but we never realized that this way of thinking is dangerous. The current security measures and strategies of Boris Johnsons government have failed to tackle even a minor national security crisis. His governments under whelming relationship with social colours, and his personal approach to Brexit and other issues prompted exacerbation in isolation of the country in the international community. The British counter-extremism and counter-intelligence capabilities have broken. Law enforcement agencies face a multifaceted crisis, including the lack of confidence and common operational mechanism, and a lackluster technical approach to domestic security.
