Matthew Carr's Blog, page 19

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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Lockdown Sunday

This weekend was the first weekend of spring.  After a long dreary winter filled with rainy days, floods, and moaning winds, the population came out in force to enjoy the sunny weather.  At Skegness, hundreds of thousands flocked to the caravan parks and arcades on Saturday.  In Victoria and Richmond parks, cyclists, walkers and other sportif types played golf, cricket, or hung out together in small and large groups.  At Columbia Road tight crowds drifted past rows of spring flowers.  At my former home town in Matlock, bikers poured into the fish and shops along the promenade at Matlock Bath, as they usually do whenever the weather allows.

All this would be just fine in any normal year, but as everyone knows, there is nothing normal about 2020, and there is something distinctly abnormal about responding to a national public health emergency by doing exactly the opposite of what virtually every expert and your own government is asking you to do.

You could attribute this spring festival/Bank Holiday effervescence to some kind of British stiff upper lip, except that it  came only days after the Prime Minister urged the  population to avoid congregating in large groups, to maintain social-distancing, and urged pubs, restaurants and other public buildings to close ‘as soon as you reasonably can.’

Urged is the key word here.  Johnson has so far not ordered anyone to do anything, and there is almost no enforcement to ensure that the public does what he wants it to do.  Instead he has preferred to dispense sage scientific advice.  Now hundreds of thousands of people have cheerily ignored it, urged on by the likes of Tim Martin, Peter Hitchens, and many other pundits who just know that the coronavirus is all a big fuss about nothing?

There were also those who saw the weekend as an opportunity for some last-minute hoarding.  We’ve often heard these last few years, in debates about refugees, foreign aid, or membership of the European Union,  that we should ‘put our own people first’.  This weekend many people did just that, admittedly by narrowing down the definition of ‘our people’ to mean themselves and their families.

Thousands flocked to the supermarkets to buy much more than they needed, forming large queues regardless of whether they infected each other or the shop assistants.   Some ignored quotas imposed by supermarkets on how many items they could buy, carrying out multiple trips to the same car or bullying checkout assistants.  At the more extreme fringes, selfishness expressed itself as social pathology.

Last week the Royal College of Nursing warned that community nurses in uniform were being spat at in the street by people calling them ‘ disease-spreaders’.  Yesterday the Kent Ambulance Service reported that six of its ambulances had had holes drilled into their tyres, so that the vehicles could not be used.

Of course a country cannot be defined by the more sinister actions of its more vicious fringes.  We know that people have spent the last few weeks forming self-help and mutual aid groups.  They have been out collecting food for food banks, and looking for ways to help their neighbors and prepare for whatever may be coming.

Already, NHS staff have shown the heroism and humanity that we have come to expect from them, and which is too rarely recognised.

That said, the stunning indifference shown this weekend by so many people to their own safety or the safety of others did not come from nowhere.  For years, millions of people voted for Tory governments in the knowledge that these governments were ruthlessly victimising some of the most vulnerable people in society, stripping away the safety net that protected them, or mercilessly exposing migrants and refugees to a ‘hostile environment’ that made it impossible for them to participate in society.

These people were ‘scroungers’ or ‘illegals’ who were a ‘burden on the taxpayer’, whose fate was of no interest to the politicians who targeted them or the voters who brought these politicians to power.  Then there is Brexit.  In 2016, millions of people voted to leave the European Union regardless of the social and economic impact it would have on EU nationals living in this country, or their own citizens abroad,  or even on the country as a whole.

Egged on by some of the most dishonest and manipulative politicians on the continent, many of them have spent the last four years taunting at their fellow-citizens ‘you lost, get over it’ while simultaneously holding up two fingers to their former allies and neighbors.

So this is mean-spirited, fanatical, and selfish politics, and it is no surprise at all to find that many of its leading representatives think the coronavirus emergency is manufactured,  and oppose any attempts to introduce restrictive measures against, or that so many of those who once talked about protecting ‘our people’ seem to have no interest in protecting them at all.

All this is fairly depressing and contemptible,  but the events of this weekend are not simply a consequence of some kind of collective moral collapse or a failure to take individual responsibility.  They are more than anything else a failure of leadership, from a government that has dithered and hesitated throughout the crisis.

Yesterday Johnson warned the public that the government might ” need to think about the kind of measures we’ve seen elsewhere – other countries that have been forced to bring in restrictions on people’s movements altogether, now as I say I don’t want to do that.”

This is like an indulgent parent telling a badly-behaved toddler ‘if you don’t stop that I’m going to put you on the naughty step.’  As a response to a public health emergency, it is terrifyingly inadequate.  Where are the leaflets telling people what they have to do?  Where are the social media videos, which the government produced endlessly during the election campaign?  Where the public service announcements on tv and radio?  Where are the orders?

Yesterday, Tim Shipman in the Sunday Times gave some insight into what has been going on inside the government these last few weeks, in an article (paywalled) that traced the evolution of government policy from a ‘herd-immunity’ strategy’ to the lockdown policy that we supposedly have, which contained the following much-quoted revelation:

Dominic Cummings, the prime minister’s senior aide, became convinced that Britain would be better able to resist a lethal second wave of the disease next winter if Whitty’s prediction that 60% to 80% of the population became infected was right and the UK developed “herd immunity”.

At a private engagement at the end of February, Cummings outlined the government’s strategy. Those present say it was “herd immunity, protect the economy and if that means some pensioners die, too bad”.

According to the article, this position changed during a meeting on March 12, during a meeting with the government’s scientific advisers to consider Imperial College’s new predictions that 250,000 people would die if the herd-immunity strategy was continued.  These figures had such a dramatic impact that the next day,  Cummings shifted from herd-immunity to ‘ ‘let’s shut down the country and the economy.’

The article does not explain why the government ignored criticisms of the herd-immunity strategy beforehand, some of which included even higher predictions.  Even now, government ministers, including Matt Hancock deny that herd immunity ever was the strategy, though the government’s own chief scientific adviser previously claimed that it was.

No government can respond perfectly to an emergency on this scale.  There is no perfect response.  But there is best practice – which the government ignored, regarding mass testing, lockdowns, the importance of clear messaging, civil mobilisation, from other countries.

Johnson and Cummings come from a tradition that is based on nationalist demagoguery, manipulation, bluffing and lying.  Johnson’s instincts are Tory libertarian.  As a journalist and a politician he has consistently played to the too-much-red-tape ‘nanny state’ crowd that has already inflicted so much damage on our public services.

Now we face an emergency that requires the state to take decisive and radical action to protect the population.  Some of what it has done has been done well – however belatedly – such as Sunak’s emergency budget.   But too much has been done badly – and too late.

So behind the ‘Domoscene conversion’ described in yesterday’s Times, it’s difficult to avoid the impression of a government still spinning its botched response to the emergency, and still reluctant to do what is required.  Even as Johnson issued his advice on social-distancing, going to pubs, and avoiding crowds on Friday, he seemed to be struggling against his own libertarian instincts.

And now the weekend has revealed that we have gone into a lockdown-lite that is not a lockdown at all: a voluntary lockdown in which you can participate – or not. As a result hundreds of thousands of  simply ignored what the government was telling them, and behaved in ways that are likely to spread the pandemic still further.

In the weeks and months to come, we may pay a terrible price for this insouciance, and for a government that preferred to ‘nudge’ people into doing the right thing, when it should have told them weeks ago what they had to do.

 

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Ventilator Blues

When the coronavirus nightmare ends – as it will end one day – there are many things those of us who survive it will want to remember, and there are things that governments – including our own – will want us to forget.  One of them is the chronic lack of medical ventilator machines available to the NHS.

Last week, our prime minister asked sixty CEOs from British manufacturing companies to produce 30,000 ventilators in two weeks, in what he cheerily referred to as ‘Operation Last Gasp.’  No one can ever say that this is a man to let a national tragedy dampen his spirits, but for the non-sociopathic members of the public the government’s frantic quest for ventilators is unlikely to raise a giggle.

In Italy, for the last few weeks, doctors have been forced to ration these machines out, to the point when they have effectively had to prioritise which of their patients lives and dies.

This is an awful decision for anyone to have to make.  And if the numbers of hospitalised coronavirus victims meet predictions, British doctors will also be making it in the coming weeks and months.  According to last week’s modeling from Imperial College, between 60,000 to more than 100,000 people per week will require a ventilator in a three-week period between May and June.

At present there are only 5,000 ventilators in the UK.  This is more than Italy, which had 4,000 at the start of the crisis, but a lot less than Germany, which has 25,000.   So people will die because there are not enough of these machines, and they will die in the most horrible and loneliest circumstances imaginable.

This explains the frantic global search for these machines in which the British and many other governments are now engaged in, which is sending order forms through the roof for companies that already make these machines, and for engineering and manufacturing firms looking to make them.

The New York Times described Johnson’s call to carmakers and manufacturers  as ‘ a move reminiscent of the country’s mobilization to build Spitfire fighter planes during World War II.’

Stirring stuff, but medical ventilators aren’t Spitfires. They are complicated machines that are difficult to make, which require a range of different components sourced from different countries and specialised personnel to operate them.

All this will take time,  and many people will die before these machines become available in sufficient quantities.  That is a grim enough prospect.  But in this country at least, it’s made even worse by the fact that successive governments knew these machines would be needed long before the pandemic.

In October 2016, the UK government ran a three-day exercise, codenamed Exercise Cygnus, to test  co-ordination between hospitals, Whitehall and disease-tracking experts in a scenario in which tens of thousands of people were  exposed to a pandemic from a new strain of flu.

The report on the exercise was not made public, but in December that year the chief medical officer Dame Sally Davies told the World Innovation Summit for Health: “We’ve just had in the UK a three-day exercise on flu on a pandemic that killed a lot of people. It became clear that we could not cope with the excess bodies.”

Davies went on to point out: “If you don’t know you’ve got a new disease then you don’t isolate people. There was overcrowding in the emergency room, inadequate ventilation, family and friends going through. That could happen in any of our countries.”

At the time the Department of Health insisted: “ TheWorld Health Organisation recognises that the UK is one of the most prepared countries in the world for pandemic flu. We regularly test ourselves to make sure this remains the case. Any issues are thoroughly explored with the relevant agencies so that lessons are learnt.”

These claims don’t look quite so impressive now, do they?  And whatever lessons were learnt, they did not address the issue of ‘inadequate ventilation’ that Davies referred to, and there is no evidence that the May government commissioned  any ventilators as a result of that exercise of Davies’s claims.

To put this in perspective, consider the following.   Despite their complexity, medical ventilators are not that expensive, and cost between £21,000 and £43,000.

Compare that to the whopping £9.1 billion which the Ministry of Defence spent on 48 F-35 Lightning fighter jets as part of a 2006 procurement program from Lockheed Martin which is eventually expected to expand to 135 jets.

The RAF describes the Lightning as ‘ a multi-role machine capable of conducting missions including air-to-surface, electronic warfare, intelligence gathering and air-to-air simultaneously.’

This is the kind of weapon that makes a country great – according to some.  But it doesn’t look quite so glorious if you consider that 48 medical ventilators, priced at the top end of nearly £43,000 pounds each, would cost just over £2 million pounds.

Keeping to the same price, Johnson’s 30,000 ventilators would cost  about somewhere in the region of £1 billion.

No doubt the defenders of the MoD’s procurement program would claim that the Lightning jet protects us and keeps us safe, but medical ventilators also do that.  Comparing medical ventilators to fighter planes is not simply a guns and butter argument.   The lethal shortage of ventilators is a question of political priorities.  It represents a failure of government to exercise its responsibility to protect its own people.

For years governments have warned us about terrorist-borne pandemics, mass poisonings, dirty bombs, and nuclear weapons, and told us that the wars fought over there are intended to to protect us over here etc, etc.

Yet in 2016, the UK government could not bring itself to stockpile enough ventilators to ensure that its population was protected in the event of a pandemic, even though its own chief medical officer claimed that there was a shortage of these machines.

Now the pandemic is here, and many people will die who could have lived, and the virus is only partly responsible for that.

And just as this awful tragedy has cast a light on so many systemic failures and failures of governance that have accumulated over the years, let us never forget that some of these deaths could have been prevented, if we had  governments that actually cared enough about the people they were supposed to be protecting, to help them breathe when they get sick.

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One Nation Under a Virus

I’m not a huge fan of Winston Churchill.  He was racist, devious, and ruthless: a romantic imperialist who was as willing to celebrate the slaughter of ‘barbaric’ peoples who opposed the British Empire as he was to turn troops on striking Welsh miners or Greek communists   But that doesn’t mean that I don’t recognise the qualities that led the British public to accept  him as their wartime leader in 1940.

Unlike his parliamentary colleagues, Churchill came to that position after years in the political wilderness because of his determination to oppose Nazism – a position that he held even when his own party was falling over itself to appease Hitler.   As a wartime leader, he was able to unite a country that needed clarity, honesty, and determination from its government, and because he was able to articulate the national spirit of resistance in passionate and eloquent speeches that remain genuinely stirring to this day.

Read his 13 May 1940 ‘blood, sweat, and tears’ speech – or better still, listen to it, and you have a leader saying exactly what needed to be said at the time, who told his audience exactly what they could expect with no illusions, ambiguity, or false promises:

We have before us an ordeal of the most grievous kind. We have before us many, many long months of struggle and of suffering. You ask, what is our policy? I can say: It is to wage war, by sea, land and air, with all our might and with all the strength that God can give us; to wage war against a monstrous tyranny, never surpassed in the dark, lamentable catalogue of human crime. That is our policy.

Of course it took more than stirring speeches for the British public to put their trust in a Tory politician who many working people recognised as their natural enemy in any other context.

Churchill’s wartime governments were national governments that were stacked with key figures from the Labour movement.  Attlee, Cripps, Bevin, Dalton, Morrison – all these politicians were able to reach parts of British society that Tories do not normally enter.  Without their presence in government, and without the movement they represented, Churchill’s speeches would have amounted to so much eloquent hot air.

Why do I mention this?  Because we are now being led into the most serious national crisis since the war by a prime minister who idolises Churchill and has even written a book about him, and yet is manifestly devoid of even the most basic qualities that defined his idol in his finest moments.  Yesterday, Johnson announced that the country was about to enter the kind of lockdown that we have seen in Italy, Spain, and China.

This announcement followed weeks of confusion and ambiguity, in which the government appeared to be pursuing a strategy of ‘herd-immunity’ based on the notion that infections would be allowed to increase until the majority of the population had become immunised against the coronavirus

Though supported by some doctors and experts in the UK, including the government’s own scientific advisors, this strategy had been challenged by the WHO, by scientists both in the UK, and across the world, who warned that it was likely to produce a huge death toll without necessarily achieving its ultimate objectives.

On Sunday, only two days after the government’s scientific advisor Patrick Vallance appeared on ITV to defend the strategy, Health Secretary Matt Hancock wrote in the Sunday Telegraph, that this had ever part of the government’s planning, and that

We have a plan, based on the expertise of world-leading scientists. Herd immunity is not a part of it. That is a scientific concept, not a goal or a strategy. Our goal is to protect life from this virus, our strategy is to protect the most vulnerable and protect the NHS through contain, delay, research and mitigate.

To add to the confusion, it was revealed yesterday that the government had in fact been pursuing a herd-immunity strategy after all,  based on  modelling by Imperial College’s MRC global infectious diseases research centre, and that new modelling revealed that the death toll from this herd-immunity strategy might be 250,000, whereas more stringent suppression might bring the death toll down to 20,000 or even lower.

If the new modelling is correct, then the government is coming late to a suppression policy that has already been put into practice in various countries,  and which the WHO urged the UK government to undertake weeks ago.

Yet for more than seven weeks, the government has adopted a strategy of ‘containment’, in which key policy decisions were filtered through trusted journalists as outliers, to the point when it was not always clear what was the strategy required from the public.

Throughout this period the government ignored criticism from the WHO, and from British and foreign doctors and scientists that its containment measures were inadequate and ineffective.  Commenting on the Imperial College’s modelling today, Dr Richard Horton, editor-in-chief of the Lancet, tweeted.

 

It said it took a study from Imperial to understand the likely burden of COVID-19 on the NHS. But read the first paper we published on COVID-19 on Jan 24. 32% admitted to ITU with 15% mortality. We have wasted 7 weeks. This crisis was entirely preventable. https://t.co/eahwRnaBFZ

— richard horton (@richardhorton1) March 17, 2020

Why did the government ignore these voices?  If herd-immunity was the goal, who decided on this policy, and why did they choose it, despite warnings of its high death toll?   Why did the government ignore the suppression and intensive testing/contact tracing methods adopted with some success in China, South Korea, Taiwan, Singapore, or other countries?

We certainly don’t need to take claims of ‘Tory genocide’ seriously, but we do need honesty and transparency about why these choices were made, and why new choices have been made this week, because otherwise we would have to assume that we are dealing with a catastrophically inept, blinkered, and dysfunctional government that does not know what it’s doing, and refuses to admit that it may have made a terrible misjudgement.

Even yesterday’s lockdown measures were fudgy and ambiguous.  Pubs, cinemas etc were ‘urged’ to close and Johnson’s instructions were peppered with shoulds rather than musts.  In making that announcement, Johnson repeated an already unfunny joke about ‘squashing the sombrero’ in describing the ongoing attempt to flatten the pandemic ‘curve’ and mitigate its impact on the NHS.

And today, it emerged that during an on call conversation with various CEOs on the need to produce more hospital ventilators, he described this goal as ‘Operation Last Gasp’.

Call me humourless, but having read stories of coronavirus victims asphyxiating in isolation wards because they don’t have these machines – in part because Tory governments did not produce more ventilators even when the need for them was identified years ago in their own pandemic contingency planning – I just don’t feel like laughing.

This is like Churchill whistling the can can during his 1940 speech.  It shouldn’t need explaining that mass death events and pandemics that overturn societies and wreck lives and futures are not to be mined for gags, and that a prime minister who thinks it is ok to do this is not inspiring or reassuring, but callous, disrespectful, and entirely lacking in empathy or understanding of the gravity of the situation.

These failings are not just failures of leadership or failures of character.  Given the dire situation in which we all find ourselves, they ought to confirm that a government led by a man like this is actually quite dangerous.  Because everything suggests that we will need an enormous civil mobilisation to manage this crisis -something that we have never undertaken in peacetime.

We will need to requisition buildings – including private hospitals -to treat coronavirus victims.  We need wartime levels of production regarding ventilators, masks, protective clothing for NHS workers.  We will need support systems for the elderly, and for our friends and neighbors.

We may even need a food distribution program to match the huge logistical efforts in China.   We will need creative solutions to help people cope with isolation help key workers cope with childcare.  We will need rent moratoriums, increased sick pay, compensation and support for local businesses, pubs, and cinemas.

Some of this is already happening locally, but it also needs national coordination and organisation. To achieve all this, we will need the labour movement, just as Churchill once did.  We need a coalition government that reaches out beyond the yes-men and yes-women who got their positions merely because they helped Johnson do Brexit.

The problem is that Johnson is not Churchill and he is not even Kitchener – even though the tabloids tried to echo this old finger-pointing imagery this morning. This unprecedented crisis would challenge any government and any leader, led alone a government led by a man who can’t unite the country and can’t mobilise society because he can’t be trusted to do the right thing, say the right thing, or even tell the truth about what he is doing.

The government is trying to spin its latest change in strategy as a response to the virus that was always anticipated.

But it is impossible to look at this terrifying buffoon without reaching the conclusion that the virus is only part of the problem, and that the dangers it poses, and the anxieties that it induces, are partly due to him, and that if we are going to get out of this crisis more or less intact, we need him gone.

 

 

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Waiting for Corona

“The face of London was—now indeed strangely altered: I mean the whole mass of buildings, city, liberties, suburbs, Westminster, Southwark, and altogether; for as to the particular part called the city, or within the walls, that was not yet much infected. But in the whole the face of things, I say, was much altered; sorrow and sadness sat upon every face; and though some parts were not yet overwhelmed, yet all looked deeply concerned; and, as we saw it apparently coming on, so every one looked on himself and his family as in the utmost danger. Were it possible to represent those times exactly to those that did not see them, and give the reader due ideas of the horror ‘that everywhere presented itself, it must make just impressions upon their minds and fill them with surprise.”

Daniel Defoe, A Journal of the Plague Year, 1722

 

These are strange times, and they aren’t times that many of us expected to live in.  It’s not that we haven’t imagined them.  Pandemics, epidemics, plagues, alien invasions, terrorist attacks, floods, zombies, nuclear wars and cataclysms – all these possibilities have haunted the human imagination for more than two hundred years, as writers, filmmakers, security analysts and governments have contemplated various potential sources of societal and civilisational breakdown.

For many years, governments have imagined that terrorism might bring about this outcome, from the ‘anarchist bomber’ of the late nineteenth century to the collapsing twin towers.

These visions of collapse aren’t uniquely ‘modern.’  From the biblical apocalypse to the flood-myths of the Hopi Indians, different societies have considered the possibility – or the inevitability – of their own destruction.

In modern times however, such fears are often exacerbated by a persistent sense that civilisation and the whole structures that underpin modernity are fragile and easy to break.  This is one reason why we constantly turn to disaster movies with a kind of awed fascination, because the prospect of our destruction is frightening and also fascinating, and even though human societies are often much more resilient than we think, we can never entirely dismiss the possibility that there might one day be an ‘end’ to the things we take for granted.

We are very far from this outcome – at least as far as the coronavirus is concerned.  Nevertheless we are now in uncharted and unprecedented territory.  In little more than three months we have entered a world in which what once seemed incredible or impossible has become normal.

This is a world in which entire cities and countries have been quarantined or subjected to various forms of lockdown,; in which millions of people have been subjected to the most extraordinary range of restrictions ever imposed in peacetime.  In China, volunteers and state officials in hazmat suits have delivered fruit, vegetables, and even MacDonalds to entire regions, in a formidable feat of logistics and mobilisation, and phone apps now tell quarantined Chinese and Taiwanese where they are allowed to walk and whether they have gone too far from their allotted zone.

In South Korea, a single member of the Shincheonji Church of Jesus spread the virus through hundreds of people, and the state tracked down all 230,00 members of the group to see if they had contracted the virus.  In Italy and Iran, health systems have been brought to their knees by the surge in cases.  Some of them have died horrifically, isolated from their relatives and loved ones, and doctors have been forced through the sheer volume of cases to deny healthcare to some of the victims and decide who lives and dies.

All this has weakened and damaged the structures that underpin the global economy.  Stock markets have plummeted; supply chains have become frayed or broken – the whole notion of endless economic growth that sustains early 21st century capitalism has been undermined by a virus that crosses frontiers as easily as a hedge-fund or laundered money.

It remains to be seen how all this will play out.  But already it echoes all the catastrophic films and novels we have seen and read, and which also seems to go beyond them.

We now inhabit a world of fear, dread, and anxiety, in which planes turn back in mid-air to avoid a danger that is invisible and potentially omnipresent; in which Spanish police order people not to walk in parks; in which it is no longer possible to plan for anything to plan more than a few weeks or even days ahead; in which we must think not only about washing our hands and not touching our faces, but about every surface we touch, and every person we meet.

All this has obliged us to move away from each other. We are told not to hug, kiss or shake hands, but to bump elbows and maintain a two-metre distance.  We now routinely use words like social-distancing, self-isolating, quarantine, and lockdown that seem to have come from some dystopian movie.

Like the Londoners in Defoe’s fictional reconstruction of the 1665 plague, we feed on, and often horrify ourselves, with bits and pieces of fragmentary and contradictory information, that ‘spread rumours and reports of things, and …improve them by the invention of men.’

Here in the UK, we hear one day that our government is pursuing a strategy of ‘herd-immunity’ that might require up to 500,000 deaths.  Two days later we learn that the government is not pursuing that strategy, but may confine everyone over 70 to their homes for four months.

Even as we pinch ourselves to remind ourselves that this is real, we remain in a kind of ‘phony war’ situation.  In about two weeks time we expect the numbers of coronavirus victims to soar, and we anticipate some form of lockdown, with no idea how long it will last.  What we do know is that many people will die, and that most of them will the elderly and vulnerable, that is to say, our parents, grandparents, and relatives.

Many of us over a certain age know that there is a possibility that we may be the ones who die.

All this is bad enough, but it is made worse by the fact that we are led by leaders very much like the ones Shelley once described, who neither see, nor feel, nor know.  Here we have a government that led by a Poundland Churchill.  In the United States, the president is a man who has apparently attempted to bribe a German pharmaceutical company into developing a vaccine exclusively for Americans.

This is the predicament in which we find ourselves, and here in the UK, neighborhoods and communities are beginning to mobilise in order to provide each other with the support and protection that they sense will not be forthcoming from their own government.

All of us know that NHS workers will be in the frontline, and we also know that even their best efforts will not be able to save the people we care about, and that we will have to do what we can to help.

In these circumstances, it is essential to show resilience, courage, humanity, and solidarity; to prepare ourselves for tragedy and loss, and also keep in mind that one day we will get through this.  But however this ends, and however many people become sick or die, it is difficult to imagine that we can return to the same ‘normality’ that we had before.

This emergency has been societal, national, and global.  In the UK and the US, it has exposed the weakness of national healthcare systems that were already poor or inadequate, or undermined by cuts and underfunding.

In exposing the institutional and political failings that created this situation, the crisis has already called into question the priorities of the prevailing economic model and its abandonment of the public sphere.

It remains to be seen whether the coronavirus emergency deals a death blow to the populist movements that have wrought such havoc these last few years, but already it has revealed the uselessness and incompetence of some of its representatives when presented with a real crisis rather than the ones they have manufactured.

Already it’s clear that they will not be the heroes in this emergency.  That mantle goes to the nurses and doctors across the world who have worked beyond the point of exhaustion, even at the risk of their own lives; to the scientists now working in laboratories to find a vaccine; to the volunteers who stepped up without even being asked to help strangers. We should take inspiration and hope from them.

Many years ago, imprisoned for years for his political activity, the Turkish poet Nazim Hikmet wrote:

Living is no laughing matter

you must take it seriously,

so much so and to such a degree

that, for example, your hands tied behind your back,

your back to the wall,

or else in a laboratory

in your white coat and safety glasses,

you can die for people—

even for people whose faces you’ve never seen,

even though you know living

is the most real, the most beautiful thing.

It is. It always will be. And if we remember that, we can get through this. If we can organise to protect each other, and extend that net of solidarity even as we demand that our governments fulfill their duty of protection to us; then perhaps we can  turn this tragedy into the seedbed of a better future.

In fighting COVID-19, perhaps we can discover how we might respond to the even more calamitous possibilities now bearing down upon us as a result of the climate emergency.

In this way we might discover something entirely counterintuitive: that in separating from each other and withdrawing into our homes to save those weaker and more vulnerable than ourselves, we might find a way back to each other, even as we sing our songs at the empty streets, and sit between four walls waiting for corona.

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Coronavirus: I herd it through the grapevine

It may not be true that we get the kind of politicians we deserve, but it’s fair to say that if you elect politicians who have spent years inflicting needless economic pain on the most vulnerable members of society, who brought their country to the brink of economic ruin in order to fulfill a nationalist fantasy whose benefits have never been coherently or convincingly explained, then your society is not best-placed to confront the gravest public health emergency of modern times.

Italian doctors have compared the situation they are now facing to a war – a real war, not the fake kind that Tory governments have been waging against the EU for the last four years. Yesterday the government’s chief medical officer Chris Whitty predicted that 80 percent of the UK population will contract COVID-19, and that worst-case scenario planning contemplated a death rate of 1 percent, or 500,000 people.

These are staggering figures, and even if we don’t reach them, it’s already clear that we are facing a national and global emergency that requires clear, decisive and courageous leadership.   In this country at least, that is not what we are getting.  Ever since the crisis began, the government has been secretive, opaque, and dangerously vague and ambivalent about what it is doing, how it is doing it, and what it expects the population to do.

At times it seems to be looking at the pandemic through a national security prism, based round Cobra meetings and information filtered through trusted journalists and prime ministerial press conferences that raise more questions than they answer.  For more than a month now, the country has supposedly been in the ‘containment’ phase of a longer-term strategy, aimed at identifying the scale of the virus and flattening the ‘curve’ until the summer.

It has generally been far from clear how the public should participate in this ‘containment.’  Testing and contact-tracing has been weak and sporadic compared with other European countries.  Travelers coming into the country from infection zones have not been tested, public gatherings have not been banned, and government advice appears to be a continuation of libertarian ‘nudge theory’, in which individuals are encouraged, but not coerced, into taking prophylactic measures.

Faced with panic-buying and hoarding that has run down supplies in chemists and supermarkets, and made it more difficult for elderly and disabled people to get the supplies that they need, the government has been largely silent.  There has been no serious attempt to develop a national debate and encourage the kind of national civic mobilisation that is clearly going to be needed, and now testing is actually falling, and the government plans to limit it still further.

No wonder John Ashton, former regional director of Public Health England told Newsnight this week:

I’m tearing my hair out really, with this. I want to know why we are not testing, why we haven’t tested those people coming back from Italy and who are now amongst us. We’ve got a recipe for community spread here.

Ashton compared the government to ’19th century colonials’ playing cricket.  Once again, we can’t be surprised by this. If you’ve spent most of your political career lying, bluffing, manipulating, and deceiving in order to win referendums, gain political power, or drive through a dangerously ill-thought out political project without any concern for the practicalities and details of what was actually involved, you don’t become a statesman or a leader overnight.

So the Johnson government are not the go-to guys in a crisis, unless you have no other choice.  At the moment, don’t.  So we must accept a health secretary who lies about the government’s engagement with supermarkets; a health minister who becomes ill and continues to attend meetings and public gatherings until she is finally diagnosed with COVID-19 nearly five days after first presenting possible symptoms, and a prime minister who appears to be staring into the headlights of the history that is about to run him down.

But yesterday, Johnson announced that we are now moving from the ‘containment’ to the ‘delay’ phase of the government’s strategy.  There are still no bans on public gatherings, or quarantines, because the government believes that the former are counter-productive and that the UK, unlike China, South Korea, Italy, Spain, or Taiwan, will not accept the latter.  Instead we hear that ‘nudge experts’ are still advising the government on how we might moderate our behaviour.

I don’t about you, but I want more than a nudge at this point.  And yesterday Robert Peston – an insider journalist who has often acted as a conduit for Johnson’s messages, suggested one possible reason why we might not be getting it, in an alarming tweet which announced:

 

Johnson, Cummings and Hancock want UK people to acquire “herd immunity” to Covid19. Their entire strategy is designed to achieved that in a phased and delayed way, to prevent NHS collapse https://t.co/OxN3vpIqOQ

— Robert Peston (@Peston) March 12, 2020

It is still astounding to me that Dominic Cummings – an unelected special advisor – can take decisions that affect the life and death of tens of thousands of people, and the idea that this unholy trio might be pursuing ‘herd immunity’ is less than reassuring.  In an article Peston explained that ‘herd immunity… is what happens to a group of people or animals when they develop sufficient antibodies to be resistant to a disease’ and added

The strategy of the British government in minimising the impact of Covid-19 is to allow the virus to pass through the entire population so that we acquire herd immunity, but at a much delayed speed so that those who suffer the most acute symptoms are able to receive the medical support they need, and such that the health service is not overwhelmed and crushed by the sheer number of cases it has to treat at any one time.

Peston suggested that this was the strategy of ‘the government’s experts – the chief medical officer and the chief scientific advisor’ rather than the three horsemen of the apocalypse,  and this appears to be the case. According to the government’s scientific advisor Sir Patrick Vallance:

Our aim is to try and reduce the peak, broaden the peak, not suppress it completely; also, because the vast majority of people get a mild illness, to build up some kind of herd immunity so more people are immune to this disease and we reduce the transmission, at the same time we protect those who are most vulnerable to it. Those are the key things we need to do.

The problem, as Dr Philip Lee observed, in response to Peston’s claim, is that:

Herd immunity refers to the effect of immunity on a population once a significant number has been inoculated. The disease has a smaller reservoir, so even those not inoculated are less susceptible.

— Dr Philip Lee (@drphiliplee1) March 12, 2020

Peston later raised doubts about the ‘maverick strategy’ he had described:

There is no question more important for all of us than whether Boris Johnson, Dominic Cummings and Matt Hancock are right that there is no alternative to letting coronavirus run its course in the UK, and to control the peak of the epidemic so that it falls in summer when the NHS may have the capacity to cope

Peston also pointed out that this ‘is not the approach being taken by most other governments, which are banning public events, closing schools, and even – in Italy – most shops, bars and restaurants.’

And last but not least, he outlined some truly alarming possibilities:

First, by simply making the assumption that the whole UK population should in a phased way be exposed to the virus, to develop the antibodies and immunity, we run the risk that the peak of the virus overwhelms the NHS whenever it comes.  It is within the government’s own planning ranges for several hundred thousand sufferers to need in-patient treatment over the course of a few very short weeks – this terrifies doctors.

And if the modelling turns out to be wrong and the peak can’t be managed so precisely as to fall in the summer, rather then in winter, then the hospitals would find themselves in even worse straits (as would all of us).

Also the rest of the world would see the UK’s attempt to acquire herd immunity, as the scientists put it, as massively antisocial, in that it would turn the UK into a country-sized breeding ground for the toxic Covid-19 pathogens, when they are still desperately trying to suppress the numbers getting it.

These are terrifying prospects indeed, though not for everybody. Earlier this month, the Telegraph‘s associate editor Jeremy Warner compared the 1918-19 flu epidemic to the current outbreak, and noted the high death amongst working age people during the former. Warner noted optimistically

This is quite unlikely to occur this time around.  Not to put too fine a point on it, from an entirely disinterested economic perspective, the COVID-19 might even prove mildly beneficial in the long term by disproportionally culling elderly dependents

That is the thing about herds:  they can be ‘culled’.  Criticised for using the c-word, Warner remained ‘unrepentant about the economic point I was trying to make’ and insisted that ‘Any thinning out of those of prime working age is a much bigger supply shock than the same thing among elderly retirees. Obviously, for those affected it is a human tragedy whatever the age, but this is a piece about economics, not the sum of human misery.’

Obviously.  And the question remains, that even if the government would not use terms like ‘culling’ or ‘thinning out’, it may be pursuing a strategy based on speculative science that accepts a massive death toll as an inevitable outcome, and even as collateral damage.

After all, it’s one thing to suggest that the UK ‘herd’ might become immune through mass vaccination program – that is something much of the world aspires to now.  But it’s quite another to deliberately allow the virus to infect as many people as possible at a time when the rest of the world – and our closest neighbors – are doing precisely the opposite.

Like Trump, the government seems to be embarking on this strategy without any international consultation, and without any consideration of what might happen if we allow 67-odd million people to ‘take it on the chin-, to use Johnson’s characteristically sociopathic phrase.

A government that has refused access the EU’s pandemic Early Warning and Response System, that has left the European Medicines Agency, and has spent four years cutting the ties that bind it to its former allies is not going to take much account of the consequences for other countries of creating a nation of pathogen-carriers.  But the rest of us must now digest the incredible reality: that in effect we have all become the laboratory rats of Johnson, Cummings, and Hancock, in an experiment that may make a terrible situation even worse.

Even the Times (paywall) expressed its horror at this outcome in an editorial today:

The consequence of Mr Johnson’s gamble is that many more families will indeed lose loved ones than might have done if the government took the more extreme measures to stem the spread of the disease…If Mr Johnson’s gamble fails and the approach taken by other countries is perceived to have saved more lives, he will pay a heavy political price.

Not as heavy as the rest of us.  This is what Johnson always does: gambles.  But the country has already paid a high enough price for his sprees, and we need to ensure that he pays a political price now.  Because if are going to save each other and ourselves, this is not a government that we can look to for leadership and guidance.

We will have to take our own decisions at a local and community level.  We will need to look after each other, and look to other governments rather than our own, because it is very difficult to believe that the hapless shepherds now leading us towards the cull have much interest in us at all.

 

 

 

 

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Going Viral

There is no good time for a pandemic, but some historical moments are definitely worse than others.  The coronavirus has erupted in a world dominated by nationalist rightwing populist politics with an authoritarian/fascistic tinge, many of which draw their support from fears and phobias about globalisation, or ‘globalism’ as the far-right call it, that are steeped in xenophobia and racial/cultural paranoia.

Even in advanced industrial democracies, the virus is likely to increase the strains and stresses of public health systems already weakened and deprived of staff, resources and essential equipment after more than a decade of austerity programs and the even longer neoliberal abandonment of the public sphere. In the United States and in the UK, we are now obliged to look for leadership to politicians who have repeatedly demonstrated an almost sociopathic indifference to the welfare of their populations, and an aversion to detail coupled with a deep-seated hostility towards any indications of expertise or independent thought emanating from within their respective governments.

In country after country, populist nationalist movements of the right are either in power or close to power.  Whatever their differences and specific features, all of them share the same chauvinist antipathy towards international cooperation, treaties, organisations and any other mechanisms or institutions that supposedly limit their ‘sovereignty’ and ‘freedom.’  Most of them draw their emotional power from the fear, hatred and suspicion of foreigners, refugees, immigrants and anyone else coming from the ‘outside’.

All of these attitudes are likely to be exacerbated by COVID-19, and exploited by the governments and movements that have sustained themselves and come to power on a wave of toxic, selfish and exclusionary nationalism.  In some countries this is already happening.  Our understanding of the virus is also being shaped by the same partial and conflicting torrents of information and misinformation that have corrupted our politics.

In an age in which there is often little difference between the paranoid conspiracy narratives coursing through social media and the pronouncements of world leaders, it is becoming increasingly difficult to separate fact from rumour, and reach a realistic assessment of the nature of the threat we all face.

In the last week alone, I have heard or read people variously claim that the coronavirus is not particularly serious; that it will kill millions of people; that it is nothing worse than a bit of flu; that it will kill ‘only’ the elderly or those suffering from underlying health problems.  I’ve heard Boris Johnson, the Teletubby Churchill, suggesting that we may just have to ‘take it on the chin’ and let the virus run through the population, or ‘ take all the measures that we can now to stop the peak of the disease being as difficult for the NHS as it might be’ – without saying what these measures were.

I’ve heard Matt Hancock assure a Question Time audience that the British government was liaising with supermarkets to ensure that food would be delivered to people in self-isolation – an assertion that was denied by supermarkets the next day.

The virus has also produced an even more serious outbreak of verbal diarrhea than usual from the President of the United States, who has variously dismissed the coronavirus as a negligible piece of fake news, blamed it on the Democrats, and also on Obama, while also taking a little time to brag about how much he knows about it and how much he has it under control. This week Trump tweeted

there are still some very bad, sick people in our government – people who do not love our Country (In fact, they hate our Country!)The Fake News Media and their partner, the Democrat Party, is doing everything within its semi-considerable power (it used to be greater!) to inflame the CoronaVirus situation, far beyond what the facts would warrant.

The Monster’s disciples have lined up to support him. Rush Limbaugh, still working hard to justify the Presidential Award for Freedom that Trump gave him in January, has moved from dismissing the virus has a common cold, to arguing

Just as a hurricane is exaggerated and built-up, lied about before anybody knows its true strength and nature in order to advance a political agenda ― i.e., climate change ― coronavirus is being used to advance the agenda.

According to Limbaugh, this ‘agenda’ is aimed at making Trump look bad, by blaming him for any coronavirus deaths.  Limbaugh is giving his opponents too much credit, because it really isn’t necessary to do anything to make Trump look bad.  He does most of that himself, because he is bad, catastrophically, shamefully bad, and his dilatory response to the most serious national health emergency since the 1918-19 flu epidemic is no exception.

It’s been clear from the beginning that the only thing that matters to Trump is getting re-elected, and that he only sees the coronavirus through that prism, so it’s no surprise to find him and his supporters playing it down, while also seeking to blame his political opponents whenever this becomes impossible.

But conspiracy theories are not limited to the right. In the last week it’s been suggested to me twice by leftist friends and acquaintances that the virus could have been invented by Big Pharma in order – you guessed it – to make money from selling the vaccine.

No doubt pharmaceutical companies will one day make a lot of money from doing just that, but that does not mean that they ‘manufactured’ the virus – unless, like the alt-right, you believe that the world is being run by a small cabal of amazingly evil and clever people who are not only willing to do something like that, but are also capable of doing it without being detected.

Other ‘theories’ – and that is all they are – have suggested that COVID-19 is actually a ‘weaponised pathogen’ that escaped from a Chinese government bioresearch facility in Wuhan City. The same article connects this hypothesis to the advent of coronavirus in the US, noting that ‘Pandemics have also been used to chip away public freedoms’.

This is a common method of certain conspiracy theories, known as ‘joining the dots’, which easily makes the leap from what might be possible to what is actually happening, and paints in its own ‘dots’ before connecting them.  Whatever else he is doing, there is no evidence that Trump is ‘using’ the coronavirus in this way – which doesn’t mean that he wouldn’t if he got the chance.

Take away the ‘dots’, the conspiracy theories, the scapegoating and the political distractions, and there is no doubt that we are faced with a major public health emergency that is not like anything else we have ever seen.  There has never been a time when entire countries quarantined themselves to reduce the speed at which an epidemic can spread.

Already the coronavirus has pushed the global economy to its biggest crash since 2008, and we may yet see more of the same.  In China, Italy, and other countries, unprecedented emergency measures have now been imposed or voluntarily embraced.  If anyone doubts the seriousness of the threat we face, they should read this searing testimony from an Italian doctor.

Over the next few months we may be in the midst of a pandemic that will force us to change our expectations about where we travel, gather, work, and shop, how we interact with each other and meet with our friends and families.  Already we have seen alarming episodes of panicbuying, hoarding and stockpiling, which apart from their inherent selfishness are in some cases actually inhibiting the ability of hospitals to act against the disease by depriving them of face masks and anti-viral sanitisers.

Most importantly, a lot of people may die, and they will be mourned.  And many, many people will become sick,  who will need the help of their friends, families and neighbors to get through.

In the end this catastrophe will pass, but in the meantime we should be able to look at what is happening in the face, to concentrate on the facts and not the hypotheses and conspiracy theories that suit our preferences.  We should be able to recognise this crisis, to discuss it rationally and collectively, to take advice from scientists, doctors, and experts, not mountebanks – even when they bear the title of president.

We should not succumb to panic or hysteria.  We should not think only of ‘our people’ and allow the fascists and the demagogues to turn us against the designated ‘others’.  We should not seek to keep out imagined ‘plague carriers’ with barbed wire, walls, and border guards.

We should not abandon the weak, the poor, and vulnerable.  We should show solidarity, humanity, and empathy, both within and beyond our borders, and act together for the common good and in our common interests.

Because there are some events and episodes in history that we can’t choose or escape from, but when they happen we can at least decide on our response to them,  and try to act in accordance with our better instincts.

If we can do this, then we will get through this tragedy, and we may find ways to do it that do not leave our societies transformed into something even worse than they were when it first burst upon us.  Like the characters in Camus’s The Plague, we need to ‘learn in time of pestilence: that there are more things to admire in men than to despise’, and do what we can to prove that true.

 

 

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Broken English

So the government has released its post-Brexit ‘points-based’ immigration system, and no one will be surprised to hear that  ‘All applicants, both EU and non-EU citizens, will need to demonstrate that they have a job offer from an approved sponsor, that the job offer is at the required skill level, and that they speak English.’

That’s telling them.  You can almost see John Bull sticking out his jaw.  The ability to speak English ‘to the required level’ will earn any prospective immigrants to the UK 10 points.   This provision, as it was no doubt intended to, has generated a lot of publicity in our toxic press, in addition to exactly the kind of pronouncements you would expect to hear from government ministers.

Announcing the new policy, the insufferably smug Priti Patel declared ‘ it is right that people should speak English before they come to our country, that they should have a sponsored route, whether it’s through employment or a sponsored route through an academic institution.’

It’s not clear whether Patel defines this ‘rightness’ in moral or ethical terms, but one thing is glaringly clear, both from the policy and from the way it has been promoted and received: the demand that migrants must speak English has nothing to do with facilitating what should be the entirely practical and common sense goal of any immigrant to any country.

On the contrary the government is sending out a dog whistle message to Tory and UKIP voters who believe that immigrants deliberately don’t speak English and don’t want to learn it, to the point when their presence is actively destabilising British (English) culture and identity.

This sleazy anti-foreigner narrative is deeply embedded in the Brexit process, and it’s been going on for a long time, whether it is Nigel Farage complaining that too many people are speaking English on the underground, or David Cameron suggesting that the inability or unwillingness to speak English might lead to extremism, because ‘if you’re not able to speak English, not able to integrate, you may find therefore you have challenges understanding what your identity is and therefore you could be more susceptible to the extremist message coming from Daesh.’

Yeah maybe, but it’s worth noting that Cameron made these observation in January 2016, when he was gearing up for the EU referendum and looking to steal a few votes from the Farage gang.  That is is why he warned that immigrants already in the country might not be able to stay ‘if you are not improving your language.’

Lord Snooty did not say how immigrants might do this, apart from a promise of £20 million to fund ESOL classes for women, which was even then a tiny fraction of the  £160 million cuts in ESOL funding  overall since 2008.  But once again, Cameron’s warnings were not intended to facilitate the integration of migrants into the country: they were political statements aimed at the lowest common denominator voter, who have been led to believe for years now, that immigrants who don’t speak English in public are ‘refusing to integrate’ or even taking us over.

Similar ‘Speak English’ narratives have been coursing through the United States, fueled by America’s evolution into a bilingual country.  In both countries, such demands, casually recycled again and again by politicians and newspapers, have been partly responsible for the ‘taking our country back’ hate crimes we have seen these last four years, in which immigrants have been verbally or physically attacked for speaking their own languages in public or even for having an accent.

This is the constituency that the new 10 points for speaking English provision is intended to please.  At this point, allow me to get personal.  During the 1980s I taught ESOL in Willesden.  I had some great classes there, including a wonderful class of mostly Japanese and Bengali women who really enjoyed each other’s company and really enjoyed learning English.

But I also had students who struggled to make any headway, partly because they weren’t natural language learners and also because their working hours didn’t give them enough time to learn it. I remember one Sri Lankan student who worked fifteen hours in a grocer’s shop and could barely stay awake in my lessons.

Of course that may be a tribute to my teaching skills, but there is also another interpretation: learning a language is not the same for everybody.  Some people may pick up languages easily and naturally.  Others will have to work at it.  I definitely belong to the latter category.

In 1988 I moved to Spain to teach English in Barcelona.  At the time I spoke a little Spanish – hardly enough to pass any kind of test, had I been obliged to take one. Over the next nine years I learned to speak it by going to classes, self-study, language exchanges, reading books, working as a journalist, and just daily life in the country where my target language was spoken.  In the end I spoke it pretty well – not as well as I would have liked – but certainly to the point when at least four of the books I’ve written would not have been possible had I not been able to speak and read it.

I’m not trying to boast here.  It’s just that unlike many of the knuckledragging nativists who break out into an angry sweat when they see a new Polish deli has opened up in their neighborhood, or the politicians who feed and pander to their prejudices, I know what it’s like to learn a language and also to teach it.

I understand how language is acquired, and how long that process can take.  I know what it’s like to ‘balbucear’ (babble or gibber) Spanish, to go through the embarrassment of feeling tongue-tied, of people not understanding me, before I was able to express myself.

I also know that I would not have learned Spanish had I not lived there.

Had I been obliged to speak the language on entry to gain ‘points’ or admittance, I would never have had these experiences.  The same can be said of many of the English ‘ex pats’, as they like to define themselves, who have lived in Spain for years without ever bothering to learn Spanish.

God help them if the Spanish ever decide to ‘take their country back’ by telling them to ‘speak Spanish or go home.’

Personally, I think that anyone living for a long time in another country should learn the language of that country.  If you don’t do that, you deny yourself a great deal, and you really narrow the scope of what you can do or experience in whatever country you settle in.  But ‘should’ is not the same as ‘must’ – and nothing in my experience suggests that language learning is made any easier through threats and coercion.

The best thing the ‘host country’ can do to facilitate the process of language acquisition is by funding language classes that are flexible and accessible to the many different kinds of immigrant who come to them, publicising such classes, and explaining their benefits.

That said, I really don’t see the problem with people speaking their own languages in public.  I rather enjoyed Spain’s transformation into an ‘immigrant-receiving’ country in the 1990s, when you could walk round the old town of Barcelona and hear a babel of languages echoing through the streets.  Unlike Farage, I don’t give a monkey’s if I hear people speaking their own languages to each other on the underground.  I don’t feel my ‘identity’ is under threat, or that immigrants are taking me over.

So yes, why not encourage immigrants to learn English?  But it shouldn’t be a problem if they come here speaking broken English, anymore than it was a problem when I turned up in Barcelona speaking broken Spanish.

And we absolutely do not need the aggressive, chauvinistic, and small-minded tone of our politicians and press whenever the subject comes up, and the brazen pandering to the worst instincts of the public that their pronouncements and policies are intended to please.  These ‘debates’ shame and disgrace us all.

They make the country look petty, mean-spirited, and frightened.  The legitimise the thugs and bigots who think they have the right to tell people what language they should be speaking in the streets, supermarkets and public places.

So the government might give 10 points to immigrants, but it’s nil points from me.

 

 

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Corona, Corona

Fans of Edgar Allan Poe and Hammer horror films will recall Poe’s tale The Masque of the Red Death, and the Roger Corman remake with Vincent Price as Prince Prospero.   For those who don’t, the story describes the attempts by Prospero and a bunch of panic-stricken and fairly decadent medieval nobles to escape a mysterious plague known as the Red Death, by taking refuge in an abbey.

Not one to allow the mass death of the peasants  to get in the way of a good debauch, Prospero stages a masked ball to amuse his guests which takes place inside seven rooms, each of which is decorated in a different color.

The fun comes to an end when a masked stranger disguised as a Red Death victim joins the party and makes his way through each of the rooms, till he traps Prospero in the last room. Prospero discovers that the stranger has nothing inside his costume.  He dies, and the guests die too, which considering what a bunch of bastards they are is a kind of happy ending.

I can’t help thinking of this story every time a new ‘borderless’ virus emerges to disturb the fretful peace of the 21st century.  If anyone was to remake that story in our own era, it would probably take place in a nightclub, a narcomansion somewhere in Sinaloa,  or Mar-a-Lago, with the guests coked up to the eyeballs and dancing to techno.  Prince Prospero would probably be  a CEO named Dave Prospero or something,  played by Leonardo di Caprio or Benedict Cumberbatch.

You could also do an icier version at the World Economic Forum meetings in Davos.  Anyway, I digress.  Variations on the Red Death theme have already been played out in pandemic disaster movies such as Outbreak or Contagion, which Gwyneth Paltrow helpfully referred to whilst posting an Instagram picture of herself wearing a two-piece black facemask that makes her look a lot like Hannibal Lecter – were it not for the fact that her disturbed-looking eyes are more reminiscent of someone trying to work out a crossword clue:

Gwyneth is clearly worried though, and she’s not the only one.  Though she seems to believe that she’s in a movie, and uses enough p’s to make you spit phlegm, her advice is certainly more sensible than applying Psychic Vampire Repellent.

It’s up to you to decide whether she is paranoid, prudent or panicked, but it’s all too easy, confronted with these 21st century viruses that move so easily across borders, to succumb to unreason in our response to them, and talk about stockpiling or heading for some cave in the mountains or a basement underground, on the basis, that now, finally, the big plague has come that will finally wipe us out.

It was the same with Bird flu, Swine flu, SARs, and particularly Ebola. In all these cases  too many people forgot the dictum that Dennis Hopper’s Ripley teaches us in The American Friend, that there is nothing to fear but fear itself, and allowed themselves instead to give in to what Tom Clancy once called in another context ‘The Sum of All Fears.’

Clancy was talking about nuclear terrorism, what governments used to call ‘megaterrorism’, but his novel and film were an expression of the same underlying fears that so easily transform viruses into imagined agents of apocalypse:  that the world is more fragile and delicate than we think and may come apart at any minute either through the fulfillment of some Internet Mayan prophecy, a pandemic, a dirty bomb, or an incurable virus that comes from birds, apes, or pigs.

Too many people, in the rich world at least, have lived for a long time in societies when death is compartmentalised, to the point when it still seems like something abnormal, something that comes from outside.

In the rich world, and in the rich enclaves or gated communities in the ‘undeveloped’ world, people live in societies that valorise ‘security’ and generally assume that threats to our security come from beyond the secure enclaves and bubbles that  they attempt to create for themselves.

Whether it’s a walled compound in Cape Town or the European Union’s ‘space of security, prosperity and justice’ rich countries and communities have tried to create ‘safe spaces’ against a range of threats emanating from beyond our ‘walls’ – whether these threats take the form of terrorism, people trafficking, organised transnational crime, drugs…or superviruses.

At the same time we are conscious that the world is a small place, much smaller than it used to be, and the proximity of places and people that we don’t think are ‘like us’ exacerbates the desire to reinforce our defenses and build new ‘beautiful walls’ – even as this proximity feeds our collective anxieties.  This fear of ‘the world outside’ often means that viruses, like terrorism, are easily racialised or attributed to ‘exotic’ cultural habits or standards of hygiene.

So it was with Ebola, which was often presented as some sinister ‘African’ contagion, spreading from the Congolese jungle into our polished shopping mall world.  And now COVID19 has provoked outbursts or racism and xenophobia directed against ‘Asian’ people or people who simply look Asian, based on the belief that ‘Chinese people are dirty’ and other well-worn ‘yellow peril’ tropes.

Left to run unchecked, this kind of paranoia, whether racialised or not, can reinforce the retreat into nationalism, the reliance on militarised borders, the fear and loathing of immigrants and all the other pathogens that are poisoning 21st century politics and making it increasingly difficult to engage in the international cooperation and the search for collective security that is the only way out of the various cul de sacs we are currently building for ourselves.

Such fears can also leave us with a quaking sense of impending doom, in which we see extermination coming every time we look at a headline or a social media post or someone comes up the escalator wearing a face mask.  Faced with the spread of the coronavirus, it behooves us to think calmly, to listen to expert advice and not conspiracy theorists or doom mongers or crazed presidents,  to take sensible precautions and ensure that governments take them too.

It is not to minimize the threat or the very real victims of this virus, to point out that the death toll from COVID19 is still extremely low, even in comparison with the most recent seasonal flu epidemic, and that a pandemic – even if it is declared – is not necessarily synonymous with mass extermination.

And instead of trying to retreat behind fortified walls, as Prince Prospero and his companions did, we might use this virus to remind ourselves that we all live in this world together, and that we need to confront it together through common, borderless action and cooperation.

And last but not least, it’s worth remembering that we all die of something, sooner or later.  Because if if we learned to accept that very simple fact and consider what it means, we might learn to quake a little less whenever some new plague appears, and take the simplest and most obvious course of action, which always to keep calm and carry on.

 

 

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