Ecuador’s election wasn’t free — and its people will pay the price under President Noboa

A YEAR ago this weekend the first Covid-19 cases were announced in Britain.
While there’s a temptation to ask: “Who could have seen what would happen next?” the truth is that it’s been a year in which the deep inequalities and problems in our society, that many of us have long called out, have been exposed: the underfunding of the NHS, the neglect of the care system, crowded and inadequate housing and the prevalence of in-work poverty.
The consequences of all of these things are now clear. In the most regionally unequal country in western Europe, Covid-19 has not been a great leveller: in the most deprived regions of the UK people have been 2.5 times more likely to die and no analysis of what went wrong can ignore the broken economic model that led us to this point.



