Matthew Carr's Blog, page 19

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.

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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.

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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.

 

 

 

 

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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...

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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.

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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.

 

 

 

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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.

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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.

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Clap for Boris? You must be joking

As most people in the UK will be aware, Boris Johnson has spent most of the last week in an Intensive Care Unit (ICU).  Fortunately, he is now recovering. I say ‘fortunately’ because only ghouls wish to see their political enemies, no matter how contemptible they find them to be, exposed to physical suffering and death.

That does not, however, mean that we are obliged to accept the meanings that some of Johnson’s supporters have tried to impose on his illness during the last week. Consider the hashtag campaign on Twitter that accompanied Johnson’s transfer to the ICU, which called on the nation to come out of their houses and #ClapforBoris on Tuesday evening.

These exhortations referenced the #clapforNHS campaign that has been unfolding across the country since the lockdown began three weeks ago, which in turn echoes similar campaigns in Italy and Spain. The aim of these campaigns is simple, unequivocal, and entirely admirable: to express appreciation to the doctors, nurses, and other health service workers who have been treating patients during the pandemic.

Anyone who reads the newspapers or goes on the Internet can find the most heart-breaking and devastating testimonies of the traumas to which these workers have been exposed. Many of them have worked beyond the point of exhaustion, risking their own lives and the lives of their own families, because they were not tested or lacked the personal protection equipment (PPE) that should have been available to them in any advanced industrial economy.

Some of them have died because they lacked such equipment. That is, or should be, a national scandal. And yet these workers have shown the kind of heroism, solidarity, and self-sacrifice that is normally associated with wartime – something that was recognised in Italy, where some towns sang the old partisan anthem ‘Bella Ciao’ in appreciation of their courage.

My piece for Ceasefire Magazine.  You can read the rest here.

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Beware the Lies of March

In difficult times, it’s comforting and perhaps essential to believe that there is light at the end of the tunnel, but it’s also wise to bear in mind that there are always alternative possibilities. Historical tragedies are not like novels or theatrical tragedies.  They don’t come with redemptive endings or instructive moral messages.  They do not necessarily lead to collective sanity or wisdom.  There is no direct historical road to knowledge, self-recognition, rationality, or an upsurge in our better natures.

Such lessons may be there to be learned, and that doesn’t necessarily mean they will be.   Take the suggestion, which I’ve heard from various quarters, that the current crisis may halt the onward march of rightwing populism and its various manifestations.

This argument has various narrative strands, but its essential premise is that the flagrant incompetence and sociopathic disdain shown by leaders like Trump, Johnson and Bolsonaro in response to the coronavirus  will remove the scales from the eyes of their supporters and lead to a return to competent governance, a new reliance on expertise, and a renewed emphasis on international cooperation in managing and resolving the crisis, and avoiding repetitions.

More optimistic possibilities suggest that the coronavirus may generate new forms of transnational cooperation and solidarity, a new conception of the enabling state, new forms of economic and social organisation, all of which will leave us better-placed to deal with the impact of climate change, and repair and reverse some of the damage to the social fabric inflicted by decades of free market triumphalism and austerity.

These are all possibilities worth believing in and fighting for, but we will not have a chance of achieving any of them if we simply assume that political movements like the ones that have come to power across the world in recent years will simply melt or be shamed away in response to a disaster of these magnitude.

To do that is to to entirely underestimate the ruthlessness, dishonesty, and sheer political depravity of these movements, and the well-financed platforms through which they propagate themselves.

Take today’s piece in the Mail on Sunday, which invites readers to consider the question ‘Did Barnier infect Bojo?’  This is the kind of question that decent folk ought to turn away from with polite contempt, like a fart at a funeral.  Even more so, when the article goes on to ask in the opening line ‘ Could this be the ultimate revenge for Brexit?’

Some might argue that if mild Covid-19 symptoms are the EU’s ‘ultimate revenge’, then Johnson and the country have go off pretty lightly.   But the Mail clearly believes otherwise, in its dark suggestions that  Barnier might have been the ‘Patient Zero’ who supposedly ‘brought virus to No 10’.

It bases this hypothesis on the fact that on March 5 Barnier met the UK’s chief negotiator David Frost.  On March 19 Barnier announced that he had tested positive for the virus, and the next day Frost entered self-isolation.  The Mail‘s crack team of detectives accompanies this supposed virus trail with a picture of some of the officials the ‘stricken OM’ met in March with arrows connecting them, which tells us nothing about anything.

The article doesn’t mention that Johnson cheerily informed the nation on March 3 that he had been to a hospital with a number of coronavirus patients, where he ‘shook hands with everybody, you’ll be pleased to know.’ It didn’t do this because that would have reminded readers that Johnson is a dangerous buffoon who ignored the public health advice that his own government was urging on the nation.

Instead it delivered an article which blamed foreigners – or more particularly the EU, for depriving us of our PM in our time of trouble, and accompanied it with an insert carrying a picture of Carrie Symonds looking winsome, cuddling a dog on a pillow and ‘keeping mum about her hideout.’

Pregnant mothers, cuddly dogs, dastardly foreigners infecting our PM as ‘revenge for Brexit’ – no one can say that the Mail can’t find its way to its readers’ erogenous zones.  Well this is an intimate relationship that stretches back many years, to the not so distant days when the Mail attacked Jewish refugees and cooed admiringly over Herr Hitler and Oswald Mosley .

So, at a time when the death toll from Covid-19 is rising dramatically, when the Johnson administration has been criticized for its initial refusal to join the EU’s ventilator procurement scheme, it’s not surprising to find the Mail writing a non-story whose sole purpose is to blame the European Union.  It’s a (toxic) dead cat right there, and it’s difficult to imagine that this piece was written without the cooperation of Johnson’s inner circle.

Not content with blaming the EU for infecting our PM, today’s paper also contains a piece blaming China for the virus, with pictures of Chinese markets asking ‘will they ever learn?’ and an article from Iain Duncan-Smith on why ‘We must stop kow-towing to these despots.’

So on one page Carrie is hugging a little dog.  On the next we see pictures of ‘terrified dogs and cats crammed into rusty cages’ and warnings about Huawei.  If this didn’t come from Downing Street, it might as well.  And the Mail’s anti-China attack lines  echoes a narrative that is spreading across a wide spectrum that includes the Trump administration, the Republican Party, Nigel Farage, and alt-right ‘news sites’ like The Daily Wire.

Just to be clear: there are perfectly valid reasons to criticize the Chinese government’s response to the virus.  Some of these failings, such as the initial attempt to control and conceal the information about the outbreak in Wuhan, are undoubtedly systemic, and it is not my intention to defend that system.

But that is entirely different to the ‘blame China’ narratives coming from conservative newspapers, Fox News, and alt right websites and social media.  They are deliberately playing to racism and xenophobia in order to distract from the failures of their leaders – failings which are partly due to the leaders themselves, and which have also revealed other forms of systemic failure.

These platforms will follow this new ‘Yellow peril’ line as far as it goes, regardless of its consequences for Chinese and Asians who have become victims of racist attacks and abuse, or its impact on fighting the virus.

Because regardless of what the Chinese government did wrong at the beginning of the pandemic, the world needs cooperation between the United States and China in order to resolve it, and we need international cooperation and concerted action to eliminate it and prevent it from reoccurring.  It does not need blimpish half-wits like Iain Duncan-Smith or Nigel Farage, who crowed ‘We are all nationalists now’ in the Telegraph this month, as states across the European Union began imposing restrictions.

For Farage, the re-imposition of border controls across the Schengen Area shows ‘that in a crisis the concept of solidarity – championed by the European Union and the globalists – counts for nothing.’

This is the kind of take you would expect from Farage, for whom any form of solidarity is entirely alien, and we can expect to hear a lot more of these from all the movements that he and his kind have profited from and exploited so ruthlessly these last few years.

Farage, Trump, Bolsonaro, Johnson, Modi, Vox – all of them will use this emergency to promote hatred and division – while all the time denying they are doing anything of the kind or insisting that they are merely defending ‘their people’.

They will appeal brazenly to the fear, loathing, paranoia and the sense of vulnerability that underpins their movements, in order to reinforce their case for hardened, militarised borders, and nationalist ‘solutions’ to a problem that cannot be solved by any single nation, let alone by the sociopaths these movements have brought to power.

They will do this just as the Mail did today: ruthlessly, cynically, relentlessly, without a shred of conscience, regret or any consideration of the effects of their actions. They will do this because that is what they are.  And if we are to have any possibility of taking the world to a better place in the course of this crisis, we should never underestimate the willingness of these movements to make things worse, and to continue with the same lies, misinformation, and disinformation that brought their leaders to where they are.

 

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