Matthew Carr's Blog, page 18

Project Fear: The Novel that Never Was

All writers know that not all their ideas get off the ground.  Sometimes you come up with an idea that you think has potential, but then your agent or publisher says no for all kinds of reasons that you don’t anticipate.   So here’s what happened with a pitch that I failed to launch a while back.  Consider it a salutary tale, or just one of those little setbacks that can occur in any writer’s life from time to time.  Anyway, this is the conversation that ensued when I made the following pitch to my editor, full of enthusiasm, and convinced that it had huge potential:

Me: I’ve got this idea for a dystopian sci fi political thriller.  It’s the story of how a midranking country with serious but not insurmountable social & economic problems is fatally undermined by a combination of hubris and epic political manipulation.

Editor: Interesting.  Go on.

Me: So what happens is this: The PM of the ruling party agrees to have a referendum on whether or not to stay in the EU. It’s a party management strategy…

Ed: Not the most gripping intro.  Remember, you lose me and you’ll lose the reader

Me: Wait! So the PM assumes he’ll win of course, but then things don’t go the way he plans, and a whole range of characters and political forces comes into play that our PM – let’s call him ‘David’ – didn’t anticipate. You have this toxic combination of charlatans, nationalist extremists from within his own party, dodgy data mining campaigns, some of them funded by a foreign power that wants this country – let’s call it Brexitannia – to leave the EU.   And this lot – let’s call them a gang, a cabal, a conspiracy – they convince millions of voters that the EU – a trade bloc and set of transnational political arrangements that Brexitannia voluntarily entered into – is actually a dictatorship.

Ed: Haha.  I see the comic potential…

Me: Yeah, but it’s not really funny haha, but funny peculiar, because why would a sensible and rational country believe something so ridiculous, right?

Ed: Why indeed?

Me: Because the cabal – let’s call them ‘Leave’ – tell the population all kinds of stuff.  Lies that in normal circumstances you wouldn’t believe.

Ed: Such as?

MeE: Such as there are too many foreigners here who don’t speak our language & take advantage of us because of the EU. Foreigners are stealing our fish because of the EU. We don’t have manufacturing industries because of the EU.

Ed: And people are supposed to believe this?

Me: Millions do! And then the Leave cabal – let’s call them liars – also says that we (you’ve probably guessed which country I’m talking about, ed!) will have loads of money when we leave. We’ll sort out every problem we have. We’ll be a great country again – let’s call it Great Brexitannia…They tell us day after day that leaving is going to be the greatest thing, the best thing that ever happened to us. It’ll be great and we’ll be great too. We’ll have something called ‘sovereignty’. There won’t be so many foreigners. And we won’t have to listen to foreigners telling us what to do. We’ll rule the waves – like Sir Francis Drake! And all this will e so easy, they tell us. Because greatness is just like riding a bike…and once you’ve done it, you just get back in the saddle. Because you hold the cards, while you’re riding your bike, and sailing the waves and –

Ed: Stop. You know I don’t like mixed metaphors.

Me: Ok, so there is another side in this. Let’s call them ‘Remainers’. And they point out that there are huge risks involved…They warn again and again that what ‘Leave’ is promising is not going to happen, and that there are a whole range of downsides in leaving that haven’t been anticipated that could destabilise the economy and impoverish the population, not to mention taking away a whole load of rights that we currently enjoy. So the Leavers call this ‘ProjectFear’, which is my title btw

Ed: Catchy. I like it.

Me: Thanks! So anyway, what happens is that Leave win the referendum! Shock horror! The country is plunged into turmoil! And still Remainers keep on with the warnings, and so Leave start to get nasty, and say that Remain is ‘the elite’ and it’s ignoring ‘the will of the people’even though most of the ‘people’ didn’t actually vote for this. And it goes on like this for 4 years, day in day out, and as the date that Leavers call ‘Independence Day’ approaches, it becomes clear that there really are serious downsides to leaving the EU that Leavers have deliberately ignored and never seriously prepared for…

Ed: Intriguing. So is this satire or a morality tale?

Me: Satire always has a moral message. So anyway, the country goes absolutely tits up, it becomes the laughing stock of the whole world, but then Leave keep getting elected and they get this massive majority so they don’t care & they don’t change course…

Ed: You’re aware that satire has to have some basis in reality, right?

Me: Stay with me. So this government – let’s call the PM ‘Johnson’ –

Ed: Silly name. Is that the best you could do?

Me: So even when reality is turning out to be totally different to what ‘Johnson’ said it would be, the government charges ahead, threatening to tear up agreements it’s already signed and collapsing negotiations with its former allies in order to bring about what they call ‘no deal’ or ‘clean Brexit’. And then, realising that actually does all kinds of negative implications, they say that they never said it would that great after all! And they tell the people who voted for them ‘we always told you there would be winners and losers’ even though they didn’t!

Ed: Dark. Nice twist

Me: Thanks. And meanwhile, the gov is engaging in massive nepotism, handing out contracts to its mates and in-crowd rightwing/libertarian lobbyists. It’s concealing evidence of foreign involvement in the referendum. It’s launching a fullon attack on the civil service and other governmental institutions and imposing a hardright revolution led by a man known only as ‘Dom’.

Ed: Dom?

Me: Never mind. And all this is happening in the midst of a pandemic!

Ed: Say whaaat???

Me: Like I said –

Ed: I know what you said, but –

Me: Bear with me. I know it sounds weird. So there’s a pandemic – a new disease that nobody’s seen before. It’s spread across the world. In Bexitannia it’s killed more than 40,000 people, partly because the government is more focused on Brexit than in protecting the population. It’s insane. You’ve people dying in droves in carehomes and the government won’t even join EU schemes to get ventilators and PPE or vaccines. Of course the pandemic shuts down society, wrecks Brexitannia’s economy, threatens to put millions out of work for good.

Ed: So at this point this ‘Johnson’ chap calls for a delay or something, the country comes to its senses, and starts taking pragmatic common-sense decisions to protect the population and safeguard the economy, and negotiates with the EU over how best to manage a way through the perilous months that lie ahead, both in respect to its population and also internationally, since both these things are inseparable?

Me: No.

Ed: (Pause) How do you mean, ‘no.’

Me: The hardright revolution cracks on. No delay. Clean Brexit. Lorry parks in Kent. Videos sent out to the population to tell us how wonderful it’s all going to be. New laws to reduce the powers of the devolved governments. It’s like Poland or Hungary or something. Ok, it’s like Ruritania.

Ed: And what’s the response to this? From the opposition?

Me: There isn’t any response.

Ed: Explain.

Me: There isn’t any. Because the main opposition party is frightened. It doesn’t want to be seen as ‘anti-Brexit’. And the left doesn’t care and never has. So there is no response. Even when the government fails to ask for an extension, the opposition is mute. There’s no outcry. Nada.

Ed (even longer pause): And what happens then?

Me: The country collapses into chaos! Breaks all agreements it has signed. Sinks into irrelevance, ruin, and bitter acrimony. Supply lines break down. Factories and financial companies up sticks. It all turns out exactly like Project Fear said it would, except that Leave blame Remain for all this and say that it’s actually their fault. And meanwhile the Russian ambassador boasts that ‘We crushed the Brexitannians and it’ll be decades before they rise again’ and…

Ed: Stop. I’ve got to stop you there.

Me: But –

Ed: You’ll have read out list, right?

Me: Of course.

Ed: So you’ll know we don’t publish fantasy.

Me: But, this isn’t –

Ed: Yes it is. So my advice to you is think again. Try to come up with plotlines that are rooted in reality. Please don’t come to me with anything like ‘ProjectFear’.

Me: (Puts the phone down). Damn! And I even had the perfect cover…

The post Project Fear: The Novel that Never Was appeared first on Matt Carr's Infernal Machine.

Let them eat Tim Tams

FULL TEXT OF BORIS JOHNSON’S BIRTHDAY ADDRESS

 

Good afternoon folks.  I know this pandemic thingie has been an unprecedented challenge for all of us, but I think we can all agree that my government has handled it remarkably well.  The figures speak for themselves.  Only 42,288 dead – 64,000 excess deaths if you believe the Office of National Statistics, though I do think we should take these statistics with a pinch of salt, because mors vincit omnia, and I don’t think it’s useful to apportion blame to a government, when it’s so much easier to apportion it to someone else.

I am, of course, joking.  And every death is, ah, a tragedy.  But I certainly don’t think we should be rushing to precocious iudicia or misleading comparisons with other countries, which is, why we stopped publishing comparison charts last month.  To those who say that we have the third highest death toll in the world, I would remind them that only a week ago we were number two, and it’s highly probable that the er, powers that be may yet give the rota fortunae another twirl over the coming weeks, because sic gloria transit mundi,  and I do think we should wait until the final score comes in before we decide who goes into the finals.

Having said that, I believe that it’s right to acknowledge that we’ve given Señor Covid-19 a jolly good biff on the chin and he won’t be wearing that sombrero for a while! And I’d like to thank those responsible.

First of all our fantastic NHS!    We clapped for them, and my ministers and I made sure that you saw us clap for them.  They saved my life and many others, and lost many nurses, doctors and staff lost their own lives, in part because they lacked the protective equipment that successive  Labour governments should have provided.  I personally want to thank the fantastic foreign nurses who wrestled the mugger to the ground with me,  who will be still be paying their immigration NHS surcharge even though I promised that they wouldn’t have to.

And let’s not forget the student nurses who were persuaded to cut their training short and take up six month contracts to work on the pandemic, which have now been rescinded three months early!  They too deserve our gratitude and appreciation.

I’d also like to thank our worldclass British scientists who – thanks to my government’s funding – have come up with a super new drug to help take some of the wind out of Mr Coronavirus’s sails.  I this demonstrates the kind of country we’re going to be once we have the winds of Brexit behind us!

I’d like to thank Dominic Cummings for his frankness and honesty these last few weeks, which fully justifies the faith my government has shown in him. I’d like to thank the footballer Daniel Rathbone for helping to publicise the government’s policy on free school meals.  And our fantastic health minister Matt Hancock and the fabulous Dido Harding, for promising  a test and trace app in June, which they then cancelled and replaced with the app that they had already refused, and which may be ready in September, or not.

As Matt said, he comes from Newmarket, and they always bet on two horses for every race there, which I, think we can all agree is the, ah, most sensible course of action, given the unprecedented situation in which we find ourselves.

This is why Gavin Williamson developed a worldbeating plan to reopen schools while also making sure that he had no  plan at all.  I think my good friend and counterpart Jacinda Aderne would agree that this the correct way to proceed, and would approve of our, um, efforts, on your behalf.

Of course mistakes will have been made in an unprecedented emergency of this kind, but I can assure you that we did not make any, and would not acknowledge them even if we had.

Nevertheless I understand that all this has all been a bit difficult for some of you.  It’s not ideal to know that your parents and grandparents died in their thousands because Covid-19 patients were released into care homes and you weren’t even able to visit them or say goodbye to them.

That’s why I’ve appointed Nadine Dorries to be the UK’s first ever minister for bereavement.  So if you want a little chat about bereavement, grief and loss, just drop Nadine an email and she’ll be there to lend a sympathetic ear or make a world-beating cuppa!

I’m also aware that there are an awful lot of riled-up black folk wandering round the country pulling down statues and trying to erase our history right now, and I would caution against this.  I would remind folk that we have just appointed an official who doesn’t believe in institutional racism to head a new inequalities commission,  and that there really ought to be the end of it as far as most decent people are concerned.

So now I think, on my birthday, that it’s time to leave all this negativity and acrimony behind us.  Because too much death, illness, and protest can sap a nation’s ability to go forward, and forward is really where I think we should be headed.  Plus ultra! Of course I’m talking about Brexit, because I, erm, really do think we should be cracking on with that, and ah, instead of engaging ceaseless mortuum flagellas about the last few months, give these negotiations a crack of the whip!

I know some of our supporters are restless.  Some have expressed dissatisfaction with the new blue passports, which have, curiously, turned out to be black.  I don’t believe we should, er, be judging Global Britain by its cover.

You will have heard naysayers from the Land of Eternal Remain suggest that a pandemic is not the ideal context to engage in negotiations with Mr Barnier, and that that we should be asking for an extension to the transition.   To that I say, pshaw!

Yes there was a 20 percent fall in GDP in April.  Yes the government now owes more than 100 percent of national economic output for the first time in fifty years.  Yes hundreds of thousands of jobs have been lost and many of them will be permanent.  Of course food prices may go up and supply chains may break down.  Of course there may be a second wave of the pandemic and the NHS has still to recover.

All this is possible.  But like our fantastic Health Secretary, we all come from Newmarket now, and we believe that Global Britain is the horse to bet on.

And I truly believe that if we can put a tiger in our tank and pick up a pinta we will stay on top – all the way to the sunlit uplands.  We are ready – fervently ready! –  to get some fantastic oven-ready deals with our friends in Australia and New Zealand.    We said we would get Brexit done and we would be lax in our obligations if we allowed  let Señor Covid-19 stop us from getting a great deal.  Or no deal.

So let’s end the lockdown and get back to normal.  Let’s put away the hairshirts and show some oomph!  Let’s get on with the job and become an independent sovereign nation at last.

And if all falls apart, if, to paraphrase Tacitus, we should make a wasteland and call it Brexit, then we will still have vegimite and Tim Tams.  And by the time my next birthday comes around, many of you will have forgotten all the promises I ever made or broke.

But for this birthday, I say, like Jesus, Noli mi tangere – do not touch me.  Because you gave me an 80 seat majority.  And I’m ready to give the wrecking ball another swing with all the oomph it requires, and there is nothing anybody can do about it.

 

Exit.  Accompanied by soundtrack to Benny Hill.

The post Let them eat Tim Tams appeared first on Matt Carr's Infernal Machine.

Black Sun Rising: Publication

“One of the great pleasures of writing historical fiction is the opportunity it provides to step back in time and engage imaginatively with a period that appears to be completely different from your own. This appeal has never been motivated, for me at least, by escapism. Because the past may indeed be another country, but like Joyce’s Ireland or Leonardo Sciascia’s Sicily, the present is something that you always end up writing about no matter how far you move away from it

As a writer who often deals with historical catastrophes and episodes of social/political breakdown, I have often looked to the past for warnings and precedents in both fiction and non-fiction. This was the case with The Devils of Cardona, and also with my forthcoming novel Black Sun Rising. Despite the greater historical distance, the parallels between past and present at first sight might seem clearer in a novel set in sixteenth century Aragon. In Black Sun Rising the relevance to the present seems more tenuous. The 1909 urban uprising in Barcelona known as ‘Tragic Week’ is a key episode in Spanish and Catalan history, but it doesn’t have the obvious wider resonance as the conflict between Muslims and Christians in the Spain of Philip II.

Writing it required me to immerse myself, not merely in Spanish history, but in the period of history which later became known as the Belle Epoque. As the term suggests, the notion of a Belle Epoque—beginning roughly in 1871 and ending in 1914—is essentially celebratory. It conjures up notions of  peace, optimism, artistic endeavor, economic prosperity and technological transformation that were supposedly eclipsed by the calamitous events of the first half of the twentieth century.”

My essay for CrimeReads on ‘the eerie similarities between the start of the 20th century and today’ to coincide with the publication of my new novel Black Sun Rising by Pegasus Books.  You can read the rest here.

The post Black Sun Rising: Publication appeared first on Matt Carr's Infernal Machine.

Epstein’s Monsters

In Shelley’s poem Ozymandias, a traveller comes across a broken statue in the desert consisting of  ‘ two vast and trunkless legs of stone’ protruding from a plinth, and ‘a shattered visage’ lying half-buried in the sand ‘ whose frown/And wrinkled lip, and sneer of cold command/Tell that its sculptor well those passions read/Which yet survive.’  This is all that remains of ‘Ozymandias, King of Kings’, the tyrant of an unnamed empire whose power has proven to be as pathetically ephemeral as his attempt to preserve it for posterity.

There will never be any monument to the billionaire socialite, philantrophist, financier, and serial  sex offender Jeffrey Epstein.  Millions of people will remember him only from his mugshots, and very soon few people will remember him at all.   Most of the photographs taken of Epstein over the years show the same closed, inward-looking gaze, the same faint knowing smirk of a man who abused and exploited young girls and women in the belief that he would never have to face the consequences.

There is nothing in Epstein’s criminal career to suggest that he was ever concerned about the consequences for his victims.   This was a serial predator who appeared to regard women solely as his own personal sex toys. For most of his life, he got away with it, and was able to use his wealth to bend and twist the law in ways that would not have been remotely imaginable for anyone without his networks and resources.

All this is laid bare in Netflix’s grim but compelling documentary Jeffrey Epstein: Filthy Rich. As a general rule, I’m not a big fan of televised true crime. I recognise their morbid fascination, but I’m suspicious of the motives for making these programmes and of the motives of those who watch them.  But Filthy Rich is different.  To its great credit, it allows Epstein’s victims time to speak at length about the abuse they suffered, and also its longer term consequences.

Bearing in mind that some of these women were depicted as liars and prostitutes by Epstein’s legal machine, the series unflinchingly depicts their individual traumas – and many of them were already vulnerable and traumatised even before they fell into the hands of Epstein and his ghoul-like procuress Ghislaine Maxwell – and also honours their strength, courage, and resilience in bringing Epstein to justice.

In recognising them as survivors rather than victims, it gives them the dignity and humanity that Epstein and his lawyers tried to strip from them. So this isn’t a documentary in search of morbid titillation; it’s inspiring, insightful and essential viewing, and it will hopefully help other victims of abuse to come forward,  and educate society about the longterm destructive impact of sexual violence, and the psychological techniques that underpin sexual trafficking.

Last, but by no means least, it casts light on the world that protected Epstein – a world where money, celebrity, and power overlap, and a seemingly endless procession of sleazy  middle-aged men – and also younger women – not only protected Epstein, but also participated in and facilitated his activities.  Because it is too easy to write off Epstein as a pervert or an arch-manipulator, like Jimmy Savile, who simply fooled the gullible.  Epstein’s crimes, like Savile’s were open rumours and sometimes more than that, but too many people did not act on what they believed or knew, because Epstein had reached a high enough place in society for his crimes not to matter, and because the victims of these crimes were mostly girls who did not matter.

Prince Andrew, Woody Allen, Alan Dershowitz, Bill Clinton, Donald Trump, Kevin Spacey and many others were all part of Epstein’s world.  Many of them benefited from his ‘philantrophy’, his brilliant mind, his ‘Lolita flights’, and some of them undoubtedly took part in the same abuse and exploitation that eventually brought him down.  Nearly all of them are aghast now – aghast I tell you – because these are all honourable men.  And so now they distance themselves from Epstein, or attribute their interactions with him to his philanthropy, his endowments, or his ‘passion for science.’

Some of them – such as our sweatless clown prince – are undoubtedly lying about what they knew and what they did, and some of them – such as the friends who continued to attend Epstein’s parties even after he was convicted, clearly didn’t care what he did.  Epstein is dead now, in circumstances for which the adjective ‘murky’ is something of an understatement, and many of these friends will be keen to forget all about him, and some will be hoping that the photographs and videos taken by their one-time friend never materialise

Filthy Rich reminds us why we shouldn’t forget. It makes it clear that the arrogant criminal who we see brazening it out with the prosecution lawyers is only one part of the story,  that the other monsters who were part of his circle are still out there, and that justice will not be served until they also stand before a judge and jury.

In the meantime, the mugshots of Epstein, with their ‘sneer of cold command’ can at least remind us that this is one gilded beneficiary of our corrupt gilded age who didn’t get away with it, and this grim but essential documentary shows us how that happened, and how far we still have to go.

The post Epstein’s Monsters appeared first on Matt Carr's Infernal Machine.

Meltdown in Johnson Street

There are moments in history when governments or leaders that seemed to be impregnable are suddenly revealed to be weaker and more despised than they believed themselves to be, or than many of those they ruled assumed them to be.  You might cite the 1789 Tennis Court Oath.  Or the Boston Tea Party.  Or the speech that President Ceaucescu of Romania gave on 21 December 1989, when crowds booed and interrupted him for the first time in 24 years of power.

Yesterday, one of those moments occurred exactly 22 minutes and 30 seconds into Boris Johnson’s daily briefing, when the journalist Robert Peston let out an audible sigh, following Johnson’s glib and evasive responses to his questions regarding Dominic Cummings’s movements during lockdown, and whether shops and businesses would be opening in June.  Most of those who watched the briefing will have only heard the sigh, like the hiss of a punctured balloon, or someone letting out an airbed, echoing round the paneled room where Johnson stood hunched over the podium with all the gravitas that you might expect from a bleached gorilla.

Clips of the interaction show Peston on screen, leaning back with an expression of frustration and disbelief. Peston probably didn’t intend this moment to be captured for posterity.  This is a court journalist who has spent much of the last few months using the country as a giant focus group, floating titbits of policy and briefings from anonymous ‘sources’ within the government to see how the population reacts to them.

Not the best way to manage a pandemic, but we are where we are.  And whether intentional or not, Peston expressed the despair, disbelief and teeth-gritting frustration that many viewers also felt at the callous condescension of a leader who will surely go down as the worst prime minister of the worst government in British history.

Johnson’s emergence from wherever he spends his time was the culmination of a chaotic political weekend, in which Tory cabinet ministers and MPs had taken to Twitter or television to pontificate on the movements of Brexit’s own Lex Luthor.   Not surprisingly, most of them appeared to have received a good lash of the whip, and insisted that Cummings had either not broken the rules imposed by his own government in traveling up to Durham in the same car as his infected wife, or had only done so because he was an exemplary parent in seeking childcare 260 miles from his home.

Naturally anyone who thought otherwise was ‘politicising’ the issue.  From Matt Hancock and Michael Gove to the hapless Grant Schapps, this sanctimonious chorus seemed entirely oblivious to the corollary of this message: that the millions who did not travel even far less distances to seek childcare arrangements during quarantine were not good parents and cared less about their loved ones than Cummings did.

To say that this messaging was a little tone deaf to our current predicament is understating it by a long way, in a country with the highest Covid-19 death toll in Europe, where millions of people have restricted their movements in order to save lives – exactly as the government ordered them to do.  According to the Queen our empty streets were ‘filled with love’, but certain streets in Durham were also filled with Dominic Cummings.

For most of the last nine weeks,  people all over the country have not even been able to visit their own dying relatives to hold their hands or attend their funerals, because of the obligations imposed by the government, which they accepted.

Yet here were MPs and cabinet ministers suggesting that the man who broke his own government’s rules was really the caring parent, and they did so with even realising how callous, patronising and crass this might sound.

And let’s not forget the lying.  In an article in the Spectator, Cummings’s journalist wife suggested that the family had remained in London throughout the pandemic.   Even when the Guardian and the Mirror revealed yesterday that Cummings had in fact made a second trip to Durham, with the suggestion that there might even have been a third, the chorus continued to bray.

Downing Street dismissed the Guardian‘s revelations as ‘inaccurate’ allegations from a ‘campaigning newspaper.’

Dan Hodges and the Guido Fawkes puppetboy Tom Harwood were rolled out onto the radio and television to defend Cummings.  On Twitter Caroline Flack’s name began to trend, as as government supporters accused Cummings’s critics of hounding and bullying him.

Such gutterscrapings are only to be expected from the likes of Hodges and Harwood, but it was nevertheless a breathtaking sight to watch an entire cabinet, and more than fifty Tory MPs, colluding in a cover-up in order to save the career of an unelected special advisor, even though Tory MPs were beginning to express their disquiet, and calling on Cummings to resign or be sacked.

Yesterday Johnson did neither of these things.  Instead he insisted that Cummings was merely being a good father – something that Johnson apparently feels very strongly about – that he obeyed the rules, and that Johnson therefore saw no reason to ‘mark him down.’  Inconvenient details were skated over or ignored, as Johnson repeated the same answers over and over again,  in a performance that began at lacklustre and quickly dropped several levels into the utterly abysmal.

That was why Robert Peston sighed yesterday.   Other viewers have been less restrained: the anonymous civil servant who denounced Johnson’s ‘arrogant and offensive’ performance and the ‘truth-twisters’ he or she was forced to work with, in a Tweet that sounded like a message from a hostage’s cry for help; the thousands of people venting their rage and contempt on Twitter and social media; the senior police officers, the lawyers, the Anglican bishops, and the newspapers – even the Daily Mail.

Look on Twitter and you will find the likes of Isabel Oakeshott, Peter Bone and Tim Montgomerie condemning the government.   Yes, it’s come to that. So this is a genuine turning point.

Of course it follows many, many points that should have been turning points,  and all the years of lying, manipulation, and populist fakery that went into the construction of the ‘Boris’ persona,  that enabled a foolish country to elect a man who should never have left the pages of the Daily Telegraph to the highest office in the land.  How journalists liked Peston liked to chuckle and giggle at the cheekie chappie chancer.

They’re not laughing now, because as Dylan once said, even the president of the United States sometimes has to stand naked.   And yesterday Johnson did that in public, and what he revealed was so horrific that many of his own supporters had to look away and cover their eyes.

I recognise that all this falls a long way short of the Tennis Court Oath or the fall of Ceaucescu.  As historical episodes go, the Cummings affair is low tragedy – opéra bouffe acted out by political lowlifes.  If it was a ballet it might be called Death Dance of the Charlatans.

The real tragedy is elsewhere; in the lies of Brexit and the Tory civil wars that have poisoned our politics, in the years of misgovernance that have destroyed any notion of the common good, in the catastrophic response of the Johnson government to the pandemic and the tens of thousands of lives that have been lost as a result.

But as sordid as the events of the last three days have been, they have dealt a massive blow to the credibility of Johnson and his government that may well herald the end of his premiership.  They have exposed weaknesses of character and weaknesses of leadership that should have been obvious a long time ago.  They have revealed Johnson’s ministers and many of his MPs to have been as condescending, dishonest, and abject as he is, in their servile deference to an unelected special advisor.

Their communications strategy – already dangerously awry – has now crashed and burned.  In their deference to Cummings they they have broken the vital bonds of trust with a traumatised population that is desperate to find a way out of this pandemic.

Even if Cummings goes, it will almost certainly be too late to repair the damage.  For reasons that we still don’t entirely understand, Johnson and his cronies have burned their political capital in order to save their special advisor.

In any normal country, Cummings would have been gone last week.  Instead this increasingly rudderless government has placed its own narrow political concerns above the nation’s health in the midst of a national emergency.

A government that does that doesn’t deserve to be where it is.

And if there is one good thing that we can take from this, it might be the thought – or hope – that we may now be looking at the beginning of its end.

 

 

 

 

The post Meltdown in Johnson Street appeared first on Matt Carr's Infernal Machine.

Stuck Inside a Lockdown With the Paranoid Blues Again

Conspiracy is an overused and often misused word.   At its most basic dictionary level, it refers to a group of people who conspire together.  Nothing controversial about that.  History is filled with examples of actual conspiracies, from the assassination of Julius Caesar, to Contragate or the 9/11 hijackers.

Historical conspiracies are one thing; it’s  quite another to argue that history itself is the result of a conspiracy.   To make that conceptual leap requires a shift from rational fact-based analysis to a world of emotion and belief that is often shaped by prejudice and steeped in fear, loathing, and paranoia.

This is where conspiracies become ‘conspiracy theories’, in which the ‘theorist’  makes tenuous connections between the real, the unreal, and the flat-out barking, between what people claim to be and what they actual are, between the words they use and their concealed intentions, all of which become part of an overarching explanation for why bad things happen.

This kind of thinking is not exclusive to the right, but as Richard Hofstadter famously observed, there has always been a fringe element in the conservative far-right imagination that is peculiarly attracted to a ‘paranoid’ conspiratorial worldview that depicts historical events in these terms.  Masons, Jesuits, the Catholic Church, witches, the Illuminati, Jews, Muslims, all these ingredients have featured in right-wing ‘theories’ in which the absence of evidence only confirms the ‘truth’  of the conspiracy.

In the early 1990s, the American ‘patriot’ movement was steeped in wild fantasies of the ‘new world order’ in which the UN or China and maybe Nicaragua was going to invade the United States to complete the work of the ‘Zionist Occupation Government.’

Some of these ‘theorists’ claimed to have seen black helicopters flying over America to scout out the terrain, while others warned that traffic signs had been changed to guide the incoming Chinese/UN army.   We might hold such crazed nonsense in contempt, and we should, but crackpot theories can also be lethal, as Timothy McVeigh proved in Oklahoma.

As Hofstadter argued, the absurdity of  paranoid ‘style’ does not detract from the invocation of  a demonic and all-powerful enemy that ‘wills, indeed he manufactures, the mechanism of history, or tries to deflect the normal course of history in an evil way. He makes crises, starts runs on banks, causes depressions, manufactures disasters, and then enjoys and profits from the misery he has produced.’

The coronavirus pandemic is perfect material for those who see the world in these terms, and it has already generated a shopwindow of  fantasies that Hofstadter would have recognised.  Was the virus ‘created’ in lab in Wuhan as a ‘bioweapon’ in order to facilitate Chinese world world domination?  Is the lockdown a liberal conspiracy to reverse Brexit?  Or is the quarantine actually  perpetrated by ‘Never Trumpers’ in order to undermine the president’s re-election and force ‘communism’ down the throats of the American people?

Take your pick, and you’ll find someone who can prove it to you, even if they can’t.    In the last few weeks I’ve seen anti-lockdown protesters in the UK warning that Covid-19 is the product of 5G (a ‘war weapon’), that the lockdown is leading us into a ‘dystopian version of Nazi Germany’, and that the ‘Scamdemic’ is intended to bring about a ‘new world order.’

Elsewhere, you can find people seriously arguing that the pandemic was deliberately created by Bill Gates so that he could make money by manufacturing the vaccine.  In March Piers Corbyn attributed the pandemic to ‘mega-rich control freaks Bill Gates, George Soros+cronies’ in order to produce a ‘world population cull…by their mass vaccination plan containing poison.’

In Pakistan, the rightwing commentator Zaid Hamid recently argued that Bill Gates created the virus in order to inject Muslims with a vaccine that will ‘destroy Islam’ and – wait for it – force the imposition of a New World Order.

It’s easy to mock such outrageous and malicious claptrap, and we should never stop doing that.  But millions of Germans once voted for a party which believed that Jews controlled the world and were trying to enslave and destroy their country, and that Germans were a ‘master race’ descended from Hyperborean Gods.  Ideas like this can percolate through the fringes, until a concatenation of historical events brings them to centre stage.

This week the United States crossed a small but potentially ominous milestone, when the government of Michigan cancelled its legislative session after armed protesters converged on the state capital for a ‘Judgement Day’ protest against Governor Gretchen Whitmer’s shutdown orders.  Before the protests Facebook groups called for her to be hanged, shot, beaten, and beheaded.’   Other posts denounced Whitmer as a ‘Soros puppet’, a ‘Nazi’, and a ‘baby killer tyrant.’

This toxic combination of conspiratorial fantasy and rightwing rage is not limited to what Trump called the ‘fine people’ who forced the Michigan state government to shut itself down.  In Germany last weekend, protestors across the country took part in ‘anti coronavirus protests’.  Their participants included ‘ anti-vaxxers, conspiracy theorists, left-wing extremists, neo-Nazis and hooligans, and others with no particular political affiliation’, some of whom espoused 5G conspiracy theories with an antisemitic content and/or stigmatised migrants as virus-spreaders.

The same ‘cross-pollination’ is evident in the anti-lockdown protests unfolding in the UK, as the far-right seeks to transform the pandemic into another ‘culture war’ that doesn’t quite speak its name – yet.  Tomorrow, anti-lockdown protestors in the UK are calling for demonstrators in various cities to say’ no to the new normal and no to the unlawful lockdown’ and also to condemn ‘mandatory vaccinations’.

Should these demonstrations take place, expect to hear a great deal about 5G, ‘liberty’, ‘Covidcops’, Nazism, vaccinations, and Bill Gates.  For now, these demonstrations are likely to be small, but they are a logical continuation of the political forces that brought us Trump, Brexit, Salvini, Bolsonaro and all the other populist gargoyles who have come to power in the last decade.

Beyond the whackjob conspiracy theories, there is the same selfishness, the same oafish sociopathic libertarianism, the same me-first nationalism, the same hatred of ‘libtards’ and ‘cultural Marxists’ and immigrants, the same belief in an invisible and utterly evil enemy that only they can see.

When people are angry, confused, disorientated, and afraid, they will look for scapegoats and explanations of all kinds that seem to make a kind of sense, however spurious,  and there will always be those on the right who will seek to provide them.

So the anti-lockdowners may seem like a paranoid, selfish, and contemptible minority for the time being, but as the world grapples to cope with the socioeconomic impact of the pandemic, certain politicians and governments will seek to detract attention from their own failings, and there is always the danger that the fantasies and pseudo-explanations now spilling out into the streets may prove to be more toxic than many of us would like to believe.

 

Photo by:  Becker1999 from Grove City, OH – IMG_0066a, CC BY 2.0, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index...

The post Stuck Inside a Lockdown With the Paranoid Blues Again appeared first on Matt Carr's Infernal Machine.

Why I’m No Longer Clapping

It seems a long time ago now, since the UK belatedly lurched into ‘lockdown’ on 23 March, and marked the occasion with a national call to ‘clap for our NHS heroes.’  At the time, this campaign caught the mood of a fearful population that was conscious of its vulnerability, because the government had finally told us how vulnerable we were, and which needed some form of belonging and togetherness as we all retreated into something most of us had never experienced before.

I remember very well the emotion I felt on the first Thursday of the quarantine, when I stepped outside at eight o’clock  and clapped along with my neighbors to show our appreciation of the NHS workers who were already bearing the brunt of the COVID-19 pandemic.  It was moving and oddly humbling to be part of that; to stand with my community in a spontaneous and entirely genuine expression of gratitude towards the doctors, nurses, and other NHS staff on whom our lives, and the lives of so many people we didn’t know, might depend.

Of course it should not have taken a pandemic to elevate NHS workers to the status of ‘heroes’ – or remind us us that the NHS is and always has been one of the most profound expressions of generosity, humanity and solidarity that this country has ever produced.  But those of us who clapped up and down the country that night knew we were in uncharted territory and we recognised the enormous risks that the COVID-19 now imposed on the nurses, doctors, and other key workers we applauded, and perhaps that knowledge made some of us feel a little guilty.

Since then, the #clapforourcarers campaign has become a weekly ritual, which the PM and other public figures have all encouraged and participated in.  We know this, because some of them have ensured that they were photographed doing it.  Johnson has led the applause for ‘our NHS’.   Prince Charles and Camilla have joined in.  Even lesser luminaries such as the hapless ‘Minister for Care’ Helen Whately have had themselves photographed on the Thursday clap-ins.

Before becoming an MP, Whately was a well-paid employee of the McKinsey management consultant company – a US firm which has consistently supported and attempted to benefit from NHS privatisation.   But last month Whately disseminated a video of herself on Twitter, clapping the NHS with a rictus grin,  only days after she had appeared on the Good Morning Britain show, in which she was unable to tell Piers Morgan how many people had died in care homes or even how many NHS workers had died as a result of treating coronavirus patients.

So this is a minister who could not even be bothered to look up these basic facts before going on prime time tv to talk about them, but who then had herself photographed applauding ‘our heroes’ purely in order to enhance her public image.  Just another hypocritical politician being a hypocritical politician, you might say.  Like Nigel Farage – the man who wanted to replace the NHS with private insurance – standing outside his home in full Alan Partridge mode, banging a pot last Thursday.

But isn’t it good that the pandemic has brought us all altogether?  That the near-death of our prime minister has finally shocked even the likes of Farage into a new appreciation of our carers and key workers?   It might be, if it was true.  But then you look a little closer and you notice that the same government that is asking us to applaud our carers is actually failing in its basic responsibility to ensure that these men and women are protected while doing their jobs.   You hear from Panorama that it is miscounting PPE items in order to inflate the numbers- not in order to help the NHS, but to make itself look as if really is ‘straining every sinew’ to get PPE, when it isn’t in fact, doing that..

You also learn that seven weeks ago the government downgraded its guidance on the seriousness of COVID-19 in order to force NHS staff to wear protective gowns that were previously categorised as unsafe. You learn that carers in care homes in Manchester have been ‘begging’ for protective equipment and not receiving it.

And now it turns out that throughout the period in which the government has been lauding ‘our’ NHS, it has actually accelerated the privatisation of the NHS by handing out contracts for testing, data collection, and other services to favoured firms such as Deloitte, Serco, and the US data mining company Palantir.

So they are fooling us, and doing it right in front of our eyes, even as they invite us to celebrate ‘our’ NHS; even as they ask us to applaud the ‘heroes’ who they they sent into ‘battle’ against the coronavirus without the protective equipment they should have received.

To point out these contradictions is not to question the courage, humanity, and self-sacrifice that so many NHS workers have shown throughout this crisis, or to suggest that they do not deserve to be applauded.

What I’m suggesting is something entirely different: that the government has attempted to co-opt these rituals for its own purposes, and that its veneration of the NHS is entirely bogus.  The signs were already there, when the Tory media machine began to promote its #clapforBoris campaign, which attempted with brazen and jaw-dropping cynicism, to categorise Johnson himself as a ‘key worker’ and a ‘hero’ who had fallen ill while trying to care for ‘us.’

Behind the bathos and the cultish loveability bestowed on ‘the boss’ by his supporters,  there was always the same malice and self-interest, the same gimlet-eyed fixation on the main political chance, that has characterised the Chief Grifter and his minions long before the pandemic.

You could see it in the savage responses on Twitter to the ‘You clap for me now’ poem/video, which was condemned by the likes of Katie Hopkins as ‘racist’ and ‘political’ because it tried to raise awareness of the BAME/immigrant workers who were also ‘heroes’.  It was there in the relentless and orchestrated smears and attacks on any media outlet that attempted to criticise the government’s failures.   None of this was accidental.  The Tory attack machine is directed from the top and it does what it’s told to do.

And every week the politicians who have presided over this machine continue to clap and smile beatifically outside their homes on Thursday, and cultivate a spurious unity that, in the end, is ultimately dictated not by any concern for the NHS or its ‘heroes’,  or even for the health of the nation, but only by their own political interests.

So I won’t be clapping anymore.  I will not applaud ‘heroes’ who should never have had to be heroic in the first place, and who we still have not found the decency to ensure that they are protected in the line of duty.  I won’t take part in a ritual that, to my mind at least, has been fatally corrupted by this government and its supporters, just as they have corrupted so much else, and which is now in danger of becoming a smokescreen to cover their failings and inadequacies – and the ongoing destruction of the service they claim to be supporting.

The post Why I’m No Longer Clapping appeared first on Matt Carr's Infernal Machine.

Turning the Corner

Spring is here, and even in a nation in lockdown, it’s possible to detect  a new confidence and optimism at the helm of the United Kingdom of Populist Brexit Republics (UKPBR), a sense that the darkest days are over and that we have turned the corner in the war against Covid-19.  Asked by Cathy Newman on Channel 4 News last week what the government might have done better, Matt Hancock replied bullishly that the government had only ever had two objectives; to flatten the curve and prevent the NHS from being overwhelmed, and that both these objectives had been met.

Pressed about any mistakes that the government might have been made, Hancock humbly responded that he and his fellow-ministers were ‘only human’, but insisted that they were working night and day to respond to an ‘unprecedented crisis that nobody’s ever seen before’ and that it was ‘learning from countries around the world that are doing well’ as to how to deal with it.

Next up was Michael ‘cocaine’ Gove,  who did concede that ‘We haven’t got everything right’ while simultaneously claiming that the government had in fact done exactly that.  And this week the Supreme Leader emerged from his convalescence and hailed the ‘apparent success’ in the struggle against coronavirus.  Johnson praised the ‘effort and sacrifice of the British people’ against the ‘invisible mugger’ that had brought us closer ‘to the end of this first stage of this conflict.’  Yesterday, the Great Helmsman threw in another of the overwrought ‘colourful’ metaphors that he and his followers are so fond of, and went further, declaring

We have come through the peak.  Or rather we’ve come under what could have been a vast peak, as though we’ve been going through some huge alpine tunnel.  And we can now see the sunlight and pasture ahead of us.

This is the kind of speech you might expect Churchill to give in a film in which Churchill was played by Benny Hill, or a Gettysburg address delivered by Alan Partridge.  Johnson was at pains to  take credit for this happy outcome, and claimed that ‘ that broadly speaking, and we’re learning lessons every day, … I do think that broadly speaking, we did the right thing at the right time.’

Such pronouncements have become part of the new stirring Tory soundtrack in the patriotic war movie which might be called Coronavirus Daybreak.  It’s a movie in which a compassionate, caring government leads the nation to victory against an evil ‘unprecedented’ enemy that no one could have anticipated or prepared for, by ‘following the science’ and doing what it needed to do at every stage in the campaign.

It’s above all a British movie with British heroes: ‘our’ NHS, Captain Tom Moore, Boris Johnson himself, the ‘boss’ who descended into the netherworld and wrestled with the Covid-19 monster with the help of two foreign nurses.  “We’re past the peak, it’s Captain Tom’s Birthday and we have the best carers of anywhere in the world,” tweeted Rishi Sunak yesterday. “Clapping again for our tremendous carers tonight and wishing hero @captaintommoore a very happy birthday,” tweeted Carrie Symonds, adding coyly “I also have another wonderful reason to thank the NHS this week too.”

And so do we, because the Johnson-Symonds baby has even given the war movie a Love Actually kind of ending, according to the Telegraph’s Judith Woods, who described the arrival of Johnson’s ‘bouncing Brexit boy’ as ‘balm for the soul in these anxious times…  Love him or loathe him…we can all agree that news of a baby’s arrival incontrovertibly adds to the gaiety of the nation.’

This is the kind of writing that would make Kim-Jong-Un blush, and here in the United Kingdom of Brexit Populist Republics, no coercion is required to produce such unctuous sycophantic drivel: we are simply blessed with an abundance of writers who will happily debase themselves of their own free will.

As is often the case with the Tory Party’s media machine, these comms messages are being repeated with the same consistency that characterised the election campaign: that we have come through the worst and the government is to be congratulated for getting us here.   Meanwhile the virus continues to cut a swath of trauma, suffering and grief through hospitals and care homes across the nation.  This week the Manchester Evening News  reported on the horrific care home crisis in the city:

Residents in care homes across Greater Manchester are dying painful, lonely deaths – ‘drowning’ in the fluid building up in their lungs, crying out for loved ones who never arrive and suffering nightmarish hallucinations…Staff tell of feeling powerless as they lose resident after resident to this cruel disease. They say they have seen patients test positive for Covid-19 in hospital before being moved to a care home without disclosure of their condition – risking the lives of staff and the elderly….And they live daily with the problem that’s plagued key workers from the start – the shortage of testing and PPE

In the same week a Panorama investigation found that  NHS workers across the country are still treating Covid-19 patients without protective equipment each week. The  program also found that the government had failed to stockpile equipment and had downgraded its coronavirus guidelines in order to force NHS staff to use equipment that had previously been considered unsafe.

These revelations follow a string of reports and investigations in Byline Times, the Sunday Times, and the Guardian,  that have found the government wanting at key stages of the pandemic.  At present the UK has the third highest death toll in the world, with 26,771 official deaths, though the real total is much higher.   Compare this with Vietnam, which has a population of 97 million, and no Covid-19 deaths at all.  Or South Korea, which has less than three hundred Covid-19 deaths out of a population of 50 million.

One would expect a government that has presided over these outcomes to be a little more humble before boasting of its successes, and perhaps even a little contrite.  It’s not that its claims are entirely false.  The rate of infections is falling as a result of the (belated) quarantine.  The NHS has not collapsed.  Food supply chains have been maintained.  But that does not mean that the government should be congratulating itself, or that it should be allowed to evade responsibility for the dithering and lack of preparation that has produced such a calamitous death toll, and which has exposed workers in hospitals and care homes to death, illness, and psychological trauma.

When Johnson claimed yesterday that government action had prevented the loss of ‘500,000 lives’, he failed to add that those figures referred to the government’s earlier ‘herd immunity’ strategy that was criticised by experts in the UK and abroad, and which the government continues to deny ever having implemented.

Unwilling to admit to this, Johnson merely moved the goalposts in order to deflect criticism and avoid blame.  To point out these tics is not to ‘politicise the crisis’ . Faced with a public health emergency on this scale, it ought to be a basic requirement of any democracy to ask questions about what happened and why.  But this is not what Johnson and his cohorts do, or have ever done.

In this, as with Brexit, they have refused to take any responsibility for anything that has gone wrong, or which turned out to be different from what they predicted.  Instead they have denied that anything did go wrong, or tried to blame someone else.   They do this, because their primary concern is and always has been to maintain themselves in power, and deflect or avoid any criticism that might undermine that possibility.

This is why we are now getting the historical revisionism that cuts corners wherever it can,  and the celebratory mood music that attributes cynicism and ‘politicising’ to anyone who doesn’t join in.  This is why government ministers praise a war veteran who raised the millions for ‘our’ NHS that the state should have provided. It’s why government ministers have themselves clapping the ‘heroes’ who they sent into hospital wards without even basic protective equipment – the same heroes who are being warned not to speak to the media about PPE shortages.

And as always with the Tory media machine, the national kumbaya is accompanied by a relentless smearing, dismissal and marginalisation of any media outlets or individuals who have the temerity to try and hold them to account, whether it’s Panorama, the Sunday Times, or Piers Morgan.

This is what they do, and it’s what they’ve always done, and we should never allow them to make us forget  it.

 

 

 

.

 

The post Turning the Corner appeared first on Matt Carr's Infernal Machine.

Coronavirus: Raise Your Voice and Point the Finger

There are times when it’s necessary, and even obligatory,  to establish a truce or even a temporary alliance with your political opponents in order to fight an enemy that is even dangerous and harmful than they are.  Such truces might involve all kinds of unlikely compromises and political arrangements, from coalition or unity governments to a willingness to put aside long-established confrontations and find ways of working between politicians that would not normally touch each other with a barge pole.

This is why Labour politicians joined Churchill’s wartime government.  At first sight the  Coronavirus crisis ought to require a similar spirit of cooperation, and at the very least a williness to cut the government some slack.  After all, faced with an unprecedented threat of such magnitude and complexity, it’s inevitable that even well-intentioned politicians will make mistakes, and do some things right and some things badly.

In these circumstances it behooves those who are not involved in the day-to-day decisions to appreciate how difficult these decisions are, and to support what the government does well and not jump to the worst conclusions when it does things badly.

This is what the government’s supporters have asked the opposition and the public to do, and they aren’t the only ones. Yesterday, the Guardian‘s Rafael Behr published a piece on the (digital) return of parliament, arguing that Covid-19 is an invitation to a ‘more constructive politics’ and that this possibility is impeded by the default adversarial settings of the UK’s tribalist politics. Thus

It is true that hard decisions look easier with hindsight. And it is reasonable to presume that ministers were trying to do the right thing and not, as hysterical online critics allege, conspiring to euthanise swaths of the population. It should be possible to think the government messed up while also appreciating that it is staffed by human beings under stress, not evil warlocks. But Britain has never been great at measuring political performance with nuance. The two settings are hard-boiled contempt and soft-soap indulgence.

There’s a lot to unpick here. Anyone who has spent time on Twitter will be aware that there are those who have accused the government of ‘conspiring to euthanise swaths of the population’ and ‘Tory genocide’ etc.  But Behr is also promoting his own caricatures.  And the ‘constructive politics’ that he recommends require a government that a) is well-intentioned and has the health of the population has its overriding priority  b) is willing to admit to its failures and mistakes c) is realistic about what it can achieve and  transparent, accountable, and rigorously honest with the public about what the government is doing and what it is trying to do.

All these conditions have been conspicuously absent throughout this crisis.

You do not need to be a ‘hysterical online critic’ to observe that the government -however briefly – appeared willing to accept a massive death toll in order to protect the economy and flirted with a ‘herd immunity’ strategy that it now denies ever having implemented; that we are now heading for the highest death toll in Europe as a result of the decisions that were taken and not taken in February and early March; that the Prime Minister was absent from the helm at crucial points in the crisis; that Brexit undermined the UK’s ability to manage the crisis; that Tory governments have run down the NHS to the point when it does not even have enough nurses to staff its new Florence Nightingale hospital; that the UK has mismanaged its procurement programs for PPE and ventilators and promised things it could not deliver and was unable to deliver the things that it promised.

Johnson may not be an ‘evil warlock’ but on 3 February he made a speech which made it clear that he intended to seek economic advantage for the UK from the quarantines that other countries had already begun, and claimed that the Coronavirus would trigger ‘a desire for market segregation’ that would go beyond ‘what is medically rational to the point of doing real and unnecessary economic damage’.  In these circumstances, Johnson suggested, the UK could rise ‘like Superman’ and be a global flagbearer for free trade.

Such fantasies not indicate a willingness to ‘do the right thing’, but a predatory British exceptionalism, coupled with extremist rightwing libertarianism and the delusional assumption  that the crisis would somehow leave the UK unscathed.

Since then we have seen the same fatal combination of hubris, arrogance, and incompetence repeated again and again.  Day after day a succession of hapless ministers appears on our tv screens, many of whom cannot even be bothered to find out how many people have died in hospitals and care homes the previous week, who routinely avoid the few pointed questions put to them about the absence of PPE.

On Saturday a government minister promised that tonnes of PPE would arrive the next day from Turkey.  On Sunday it was revealed that the equipment was still in Turkey and that the UK government had not even made a formal request for it.

Criticize such behaviour – or even point it out – and you are likely to be accused by the government’s supporters of ‘politicizing a pandemic’ or belonging to a ‘lefty hate mob’ or lack of ‘patriotism’.  But these criticisms have not been made by Twitter trolls or even by the opposition, but by Downing Street insiders, Piers Morgan, NHS staff and officials, civil servants, the Sunday Times Insight Team, and -very occasionally – by the Telegraph. 

It’s certainly disconcerting to find someone like Piers Morgan – a self-aggrandising narcissist at the best of times – hammering hapless and dishonest frauds like Therese Coffey and Helen Whately for their inability to hold on to even the most basic components of their brief, but there is no doubt that these minions deserve to be hammered, and we would all be better off if most of them were gone.

Regardless of Behr’s invitation to be generous, their arrogance and ineptitude are symptomatic of a government that has systematically denied and obfuscated the mistakes it has made, or attempted to blame other people else for them.  At various times the government has had the temerity to suggest that ‘EU regulations’ have inhibited the UK’s response to the crisis, and that NHS staff may be at fault for ‘misusing’ PPE.

You really need to be unencumbered by a moral compass to say such things.  Only yesterday the civil servant Sir Simon McDonald claimed that the UK’s absence from the EU’s procurement programs was a ‘political’ decision, thereby contradicting previous government claims that its failure to join these programs was due a ‘communications error.’

Yet today McDonald issued a convoluted retraction, and claimed that what he said was incorrect and ‘due to a misunderstanding.’  McDonald did not explain why he was right yesterday and wrong today, but once again it isn’t necessary to believe in ‘evil warlocks’ to conclude that he has been subject to serious government pressure, to which he has shamefully capitulated.

Such behaviour suggests once again that we are dealing, not with a government earnestly trying to ‘do the right thing’, but which  wants to be seen to be doing the right thing in order to protect itself politically, and is ruthlessly prepared to do whatever it takes to control the narrative and avoid taking any responsibility for its mistakes.

This is why the government has gone to such lengths to rebut the Sunday Times allegations over the weekend.  But the ‘political decision’ McDonald refers to is not simply a mistake.It suggests a government that preferred – at least initially – not to procure ventilators from the EU, simply because it was the EU that was offering them.

No one should be surprised by this.  Johnson’s government came to power because of Brexit and in order to do Brexit.  Its ministers were chosen not because of their ability but because of their loyalty to the Brexit project and to Johnson himself.  Even now,  the government still refuses to postpone its negotiations with the EU, and is prepared to contemplate a no deal scenario that it was clearly unprepared for even before the Coronavirus crisis exploded.

So it’s very difficult to imagine how to engage in  ‘constructive politics’ with a government like this, or to avoid the conclusion that such a government deserves all the criticism it gets, and ought to receive more than it has got.

Because people have died and will die because of what this government has done, and not done, and they should never be allowed to hide from that, or make us forget it.  And if we can’t get rid of them, we can at least retain the right to raise our voices and point the finger at those who would rather we all just shut up and applauded.

The post Coronavirus: Raise Your Voice and Point the Finger appeared first on Matt Carr's Infernal Machine.

You Clap for Me: A Celebration and a Warning

It seems a long time ago, back in the days when something called ‘normal’ existed, that we didn’t think much of immigrants in this country – especially the ‘unskilled’ kind.  In those days we learned week in and week out from our newspapers and from many of our politicians, that immigrants were a burden on ‘our’ schools and NHS.  We heard that they were stealing British jobs, that they were being ‘shipped in’ in order to undercut British workers.

We heard that they came here as ‘health tourists’ in order to access health care that they hadn’t earned or paid for; that they always went to the ‘front of the queue’ when it came to housing.  We were often told that we were ‘too generous’ and a ‘soft touch’ that immigrants came to – sometimes crossing oceans in leaky, overcrowded boats – all because they wanted to live a life on benefits at the expense of ‘the taxpayer’.

We learned that many of them were criminals and terrorists.  We were told that they ‘refused to integrate’ or learn our language; that they had such contempt for our culture that they had the temerity to speak their own languages in public to the point when you couldn’t even hear English spoken on the tube anymore, as Nigel Farage reminded us more than once.

In those days Farage routinely warned us about the Romanians who were robbing our ATM machines, and Labour and Conservative politicians spoke with frowning hand-on-hearts sincerity of the public’s ‘concerns about immigration’, while rarely if ever taking the trouble to look into whether or not these concerns were justified. or question the vicious reality of the ‘hostile environment’ supposedly designed to allay these concerns.

And then came the EU referendum and we were told that 60 million Turks were coming to our green and pleasant land, and we saw posters of Farage standing in front of a long line of mostly brown-skinned young men.  And after that we heard from Conservative politicians that EU citizens exercising their treaty rights could be ‘bargaining counters’ and that restricting low-skilled immigration through a ‘points-based system’ would enable us to ‘take back control’.

Only last December Boris Johnson was promising to “bear down on migration particularly of unskilled workers who have no job to come to” and told Sky News that “over the last couple of decades or more… we’ve seen quite a large numbers of people coming in from the whole of the EU […] able to treat the UK basically as though it’s part of their own country.”

The language was carefully chosen in order to play on all the prejudices that have been allowed to run riot for so long, and which have proven to be crucial to Johnson’s own rise to power.

And now, five months later,  so many things have changed.  Johnson’s life has been saved, in part because of the nurses from New Zealand and Portugal who watched over him in an ICU.  Doctors and nurses – immigrants or the children or grandchildren of immigrants – are dying in our hospitals.   Now we really are ‘shipping’ Romanians  over here to pick fruit because only a small proportion of Brits have applied for the 95,000 vacancies available in the farming industry.

At a time when many care homes have become coronavirus death traps,  adult social care is dependent on the 250,000 care workers held by people with a non-British nationality (115,000 EU; 134,000 non-EU).

So now it turns out that immigrants are treating our sick and our elderly just as they have been doing for years, except that some of them are dying in the process.  And now even Tory politicians are standing outside their front doors clapping for them, or praising ‘key workers’ – many of whom, surprise surprise, turn out to have been foreign.  As this marvellous video/poem reminds us, we have discovered that perhaps immigrants weren’t intruders and parasites after all, and we are invited to reflect that perhaps ‘unskilled worker’ need not have become a pejorative category, whose baleful significance supposedly increased when the people it referred to were foreign.

 

So tonight, let’s clap.  But we should see this powerful video as a celebration and also as a warning, because the racists, xenophobes, and nativists who have poisoned our politics will not allow a little thing like a pandemic to stop them. They might be quiet now – some of them anyway. They might even clap, or at least keep quiet when others do. But the politicians and newspapers that promoted and fed nationalist exceptionalism, fear and hatred of the Other because they shared these sentiments, or because they used them simply in order to get power or ‘get Brexit done’ – they will not be shamed, because they never had any shame to begin with.

When we come out of this, when the economy crumbles, when millions are unemployed, they will look for scapegoats, invaders, fake threats, cultural aliens. Catastrophe will harden hearts still further, re-freezing this anomalous thaw, because that is what catastrophes can do.

It should not have taken a disaster like this to make this country show the solidarity, empathy, and common decency that have been so conspicuously lacking these last few years as we have allowed ourselves to sink into a moral sewer, and made too many of us the playthings of charlatans, demagogues, and ‘make Britain great’ chauvinists. It should not have been necessary for a Portuguese and a New Zealand nurse to care for the Prime Minister to make people think ‘oh, so immigrants aren’t too bad after all.’ Only last December that same Prime Minister – a ‘One Nation Tory’ when it suits him and a saloon bar racist when it doesn’t.

Now he gives his ‘heartfelt’ thanks to these nurses, and to the NHS in general. How heartfelt remains to be seen, but it shouldn’t even matter. One address to the nation can never make up for the damage he’s done, and for the damage people like him have done, not just to the ‘immigrants’ who made this country their home, but to all of us, to the essential bonds of decency, solidarity, and goodwill that every society should aspire to always.

Let this poem point the way to a better way forward. Let it lead us to reflect on the putrid hatred and fear that has rotted so many brains, and brought us to the brink of disaster even before this one. Let us pay tribute to the men and women who speak these lines, and who should never had had to say them.

And let’s figure out a way to build a society worthy of them, and fight for it.

The post You Clap for Me: A Celebration and a Warning appeared first on Matt Carr's Infernal Machine.