Covid has exposed how incompetent the British state is, from top to bottom | Simon Jenkins

It’s not just our ministers who are rotten – our whole system of government, from local to national, is at fault

Come the day of reckoning, who gets blamed? No one could call this week’s reopening of England’s local schools anything but a shambles. The prime minister has declared that all primary schools are “safe … very, very important to stress that” and must stay open. That appears not to apply where they stay shut, as in London and possibly Manchester, Newcastle, Slough, Brighton … and perhap...