Malcolm Blair-Robinson's Blog, page 12

UK Covid Deaths: Big Questions Loom

It is becoming apparent that the UK is leading most of the world in two specific areas. Vaccine roll out, which is good. And deaths per head of population, which is bad. More than bad it is shocking. The gold standard John Hopkins University stats show that among the leading nations, the UK tops this sombre death table table. Why?

When challenged government ministers shuffle and and defer, but they do not answer. Above all they go nowhere near admitting that it could be down to them and their muddled decision making. They promise a Public Inquiry later, no doubt in the hope it will, as is the custom, whitewash the guilty.

What has struck me as odd from the very beginning is the complete absence of any available treatment until the sufferer becomes so ill as to require hospital admission. But surely as soon as a positive test is received the patient should get local treatment at home in the form of drugs and therapies, normally led by and within the scope of GPs? Steroids, anti-viral drugs, inhalations, anti-inflammatories, etc.? Instead they are simply told to rest and isolate ‘until the symptoms subside’. If anxious about their condition they are told not to contact their doctor but rely upon a telephone help line.

The giant wave of those who then fall very ill has all but overwhelmed the NHS’s capacity to respond. And of course the death rate is horrific. But need this happen in the first place? Normally you end up in hospital with an illness, when all else has failed.

Not when nothing else has been tried.

UK Politics: Is The Johnson Government Finding Its Feet?

That depends on your political perspective. If you are a Tory maybe you feel just a little more confident, but if you are anything else, the list of failures grows with almost every passing hour. As I see it, amid muddle and misjudgment, the one bright success is the vaccination programme.

Having just had my first Pfizer jab (because I am so old in years, I think I am young at heart!) I was impressed with the speed, punctuality and smooth organization at the local surgery, normally a centerpiece for bad time keeping, congested parking and rushed consultations.

More and more media coverage focusses on the world beating roll out, driven by the reconstituted post Cummings Downing St. Press Office. So the government appears more confident, ministers more positive and above all, the bombastic optimism of Boris himself is replaced by a more measured and frank dialogue with the people. But the pandemic is not over, and the new caution suggests it may not be over by Easter. Hints are being dropped that it could still be causing restrictions  in the summer.

But even if Covid disruption vanishes from our lives altogether as the days become long and lazy, we are left with rebuilding a shattered economy, to a very different model. The hospitality, shopping and house price inflation set up, with all its attendant inequalities, food banks and child poverty, was on its last lap before anyone heard of Covid.

The notion of zero hours contracts and three jobs to pay the bills has to be replaced with a massive boost in public investment, plus high paying jobs through green re-industrialisation, backed by a transport and cyber connectivity revolution. All doable but not by a fuddled government. Then there is Brexit. And serious cracks in the structure of the Union. What a mess.

So I am jolly glad I am not a Tory. Because after nearly eleven  years in power, all the messes are of their making, driven by selfish ideology which puts individual advantage before the public good. Ever since the advent of Thatcherism, the state and its institutions have been starved of the resources to do their job properly.

Although Labour is not blameless, it was in power for 13 years, it is the Tories who have governed for 29 of the 42 years since the dawn of the Iron Lady. The outcome is a crisis in which the state has had to take control of everything, even how we spend our days. And every pound saved in so called efficiency savings over  four decades, will have been spent on stopping a total economic collapse, before the Covid/Brexit crisis is over.

You can sum it up with the slogan that we have to pull together to save the NHS.

The whole idea of the NHS in the first place was that it would be there to Save Us.

E U Ambassador to UK: The Foreign Office Fails Again.

News that alone among all the nations of the civilised world, the UK, is refusing to grant the EU diplomatic status for its mission in the UK is both childish and ridiculous. It has an awful Trumpian feel to it. Apparently this infantile government of ours takes the view that the greatest political union in European history, with its own democratically elected parliament and currency, is an ‘international trade organization’.

No wonder the fools screwed up on the Brexit negotiations.

So Can Biden Heal?

The Inauguration ceremonies of Joe Biden were impressive. Powerful, coordinated, dignified and on message. His speech, the stunning poem, the music and the vocals all spoke of healing and unity in the face of monumental challenge. There was no glossing over the stark fact that America is divided as never in living memory or maybe even  since 1861. That alone is enough, but to add to that, there is a pandemic which has killed already more Americans than all its external wars. It is still raging.

Then there is climate change with its unprecedented weather events and a summer when much of California was continuously on fire. To this inventory we have to add the shattered pieces of America’s international standing and you perhaps have the grimmest to do list of any incoming administration since that of Abraham Lincoln.

So can President Biden heal and restore? If by that we mean can he put back an America which bestrides the world and can he make the Union whole? The Answer is no. But he can and will repair and renew. That will seem to most just as good. It will not be but he will be the best he, or anyone else, could do. For there always have been two Americas. The structural flaw of the architecture was to try and make them one.

Meanwhile the rest of the world will breathe a sigh of relief that America now has a fully qualified and functional government which seeks to globally reengage and domestically clean up the wreckage of the most incompetent administration in its history. This is good. But it will also be sad.

Because the rest of the world is growing up fast and as it does, so the magic of America as a shining light of good example, like that of Father Christmas to the teenager, has faded. Instead America will be judged piece by piece, issue by issue, on what it actually does to, and for, the world at large.

And especially on what it does to itself. As for global leadership? That has gone. And it will stay very gone, until the all of the United States together demonstrate convincingly that they themselves can, in unity, be led.

2021: Wow! What a Beginning!

The United States

It has  been the case that while America and the American Dream have been and remain giants in the story of human political and scientific evolution, the notion of the ‘United’ States has always been a flawed ideal. This is because there are two interpretations of what it is.

One is that the individual is sovereign and bigger than the state, is free under the law to enjoy inalienable rights, which include absolute freedom of speech and the right to bear arms. This grouping is broadly  socially conservative, covertly  white supremacist, self righteous, church belonging, pro life and anti LGBT. Its ancestors founded the Confederacy and now it  dominates the heartland of America between the two coasts. It regards the exercise of Federal authority in domestic issues as an assault upon its interpretation of the original meaning of the Constitution, which the Confederacy re-wrote.

The other half believes in the Union as the foundation of the nation, whose authority is final. It is liberal and enlightened, focused on the future rather than the past, anti racism and any prejudice towards minorities in any form, pro equal rights and equal opportunity for women, pro LGBT rights and less committed to religious faiths and traditions. It wants gun control and interprets free speech as carrying with it responsibility for the effect on others of what you say. It is morally more permissive but more proscriptive of aggressive individualism put before the common good.

Both are committed to democracy but only when it suits their cause. When eleven states of the South chose to secede and form a looser union calling it a Confederacy, the North, for the Union, attacked and conquered, to quell a rebellion. Yet that in itself was a contradiction, because strictly in a democracy if people wish to choose a different path they must be allowed to do so. Now in  2020 the majority of Republican voters actually do believe they won, when by any measure they lost. Belief is thought to be a worthy thing. But when belief is denial of truth, it becomes a very bad and destructive thing indeed.

So what about Trump? He is the symptom, not the cause. The Union was never really there. By mobilizing, energising and yes, inciting, the forgotten bedrock of conservative America, he undoubtedly bust it apart. It is far from clear whether it can be stuck back together. Meanwhile America’s political standing across the world has crumbled from leadership to spectacle.

Further essays of these historic events will appear on this blog as events unfold.

Brexit Anger

Since the Brexit referendum in 2016 we have had to put up with the angry rhetoric of nationalist Brexiteers lying their heads off in their quest for the UK’s  ‘freedom and independence’. They wanted something they, wrongly, asserted they did not have.

Every misfortune in their lives was blamed upon the EU, and , much worse, they stoked a belief among those who were suffering real hardship, that somehow all that would end if we left the shackles of our membership of the greatest political union since the fall of the Roman Empire.

The horrors of our nation flooded with Turkish refugees, the notion that a trade deal with our former partners would be the easiest negotiation in history and that Boris had ready, oven ready, a deal which would propel us to sunlit uplands, were all tacky catch phrases in a morally bankrupt political adventure.

We now find ourselves on the brink of catastrophe, in which not a single one of these promises will be kept. This will trigger anger among the deceived. But it was also trigger a new anger. One much more menacing. It will come from the great silent majority who will discover, not just that something promised has not arrived, but that something, many things,  dear and treasured, have been taken away.

 

Brexit is Rubbish

As I write this the drama of Brexit is being milked for the last drop of uncertainty by media and politicians on both sides of the Channel and on both sides of the argument. One thing is not in doubt.

The whole Brexit project is a disaster from beginning to end. A self inflicted wound without cause, to satisfy a fetish for sovereignty by people with no grasp of its meaning, promoted by unscrupulous nationalist politicians who have repeatedly lied to persuade voters to back them, making promises which cannot be kept for an end not worth having.

So I am not on the edge of my seat today. No deal or bad deal makes very little difference. The whole idea is rubbish.

Saving Lives: Two Questions

When this pandemic emergency recedes and life returns to what will be a new normal, the questions will have to be answered. This will lead to another infamous inquiry led by a judge, which will take so long to gather evidence, write a report, with the conclusions then watered down by those criticised, who receive advance copies and the right to reply, that when copies are finally made public, they will be all but ignored. Because the world has by then moved on. That is, of course, the whole idea. Witness Bloody Sunday, Scott, Leveson, Chilcot and currently Grenfell. Or a whitewash like the utterly scandalous Hutton. There is a better way to do these things, but that is not the subject of this blog today.

What is are the questions. Or some of them. Here are two. The first is why was the decision taken to save Covid life, while endangering all other conditions requiring elective and routine treatment? The build up of this accumulation of waiting times and deferrals, is costing lives even as I write this and threatens countless others in the queue. The anxiety of the victims and the anguish of their loves ones should tear at even the hardiest heart.

Why was the decision taken to centralise testing and cut out local health departments? Although attempts are now being made to roll this back, the strategy has lead to a systemic failure of test and trace, leaving testing as an end in itself, a second wave and, were it not for the vaccine cavalry coming over the hill, even a third.

The overall point emerging is this. I have made it before. Although the world class scientific community of the UK has shone in its response, the public institutions have failed at almost every level because they have been run down and cash starved and were utterly unprepared for the crisis which swamped them. That in turn was because of the uncivilised nostrum that the state is the enemy, to be beaten and starved. In truth, of course, without a strong state, fully funded and prepared for every contingency, providing the framework within which civilisation functions and prospers, civilisation itself dies.

Maybe  Covid 19 was sent to teach us that lesson. But at a very heavy price.

 

The Covid Crisis.

Johnson talks about sunlit uplands. No doubt his enthusiastic supporters egg him on. Yet looked at from a more critical point of view, Boris is on the edge of becoming one of the most remembered prime ministers in history, but for entirely the wrong reasons. He led the Brexit campaign, which was a false prospectus for what is about to become another disaster, which will deal a heavy blow to an economy already in trouble. His government has mishandled Covid, causing one of the worst death rates in the world, at the greatest cost and with the biggest economic impact. And he has threatened the Union of the UK to the point where Scotland is on course to leave it. He could yet come good but if he does not and the pattern of misstep and failure of analysis continues, he will be remembered as the worst and most damaging of all our many and varied prime ministers.

At the heart of all this lies the ghost of Thatcherism taken literally. Among the many false and simplistic nostrums she toted around and which fools and wise alike embraced, was that running a country was akin to shopping in a supermarket. The resultant cuts in the funding of all public institutions, the mutilation by break-up and sell off of all the public utilities, coupled with the founding of the quango state, destroyed the UK as an industrial power and weakened every aspect of public life, because the state became an enemy to be dismantled, not the foundation upon which freedom and prosperity is built.

The biggest casualty of all was the NHS. It struggled with funding per capita and as a % of GDP, well below other leading democracies, trying to make sense of the mathematical impossibility of providing an infinite service on a finite budget. In other words more patients did not mean more money, as customers would to a business, which the Tories pretended the NHS was. It simply meant of a fixed amount there was less to go round. So we lived in the world of waiting times, shortages of doctors, nurses and new hospitals, winter ‘flu overload, and people in A&E waiting hours for treatment which in the past, pre-Thatcher, had been available in minutes. Then along came Covid.

Suddenly the Tory government of Boris, with its new working class supporters awaiting the fulfillment of all his leveling up promises and the riches of oven ready Brexit, saw an unimaginable political calamity ahead. The collapse of the NHS, the political jewel in the crown. On their watch, after ten years of their cuts. So the priority became protect the NHS. That has informed every step and every decision. Yet the priorities should have been to protect the economy and to save lives. That would have led us on a very different path to a much better place. But it was blocked because the NHS was on its knees even before the crisis hit.

The story is not over yet. It may not have a good ending. For Boris especially.

Sunday Blog. Boris Re-Sets: Trump in Denial

Boris

Following the departure of Cummings and co, many wondered whether Boris was actually capable of governing. Some, including me, were certain he was not. Over the past week nothing has happened to cause me to change my mind; the Devolution gaffe and the Priti Patel row merely served to reinforce my conviction. Yet I have to admit that I detect a sense of relief at the centre of government.

The shot of fresh air flowing into that hot house we call Number Ten, seems to be detectable even in my little village in the back of beyond. And in spite of continuing dramas and the festering scandal of contracts for friends, who have made dodgy fortunes out of pandemic panic, I think there is some sort of order beginning to appear.  A clearer plan, not just for the pandemic, but for economic recovery too. Maybe I am wrong. Brexit, or rather what form and its cost, will be the test.

Trump

The deranged lawsuits and briefings of Trump’s lawyer, now a laughing stock across the globe, added to Trump’s wild tweets about non existent electoral fraud, have shredded this controversial President’s reputation internationally. His refusal to concede and his general handling of his own failure, have damaged America’s standing abroad to the point where it has almost certainly lost forever its status as leader of the free world. The fact that America is polarised between two irreconcilable views of life, will make it unlikely that it will be able to restore its former glory.

When he takes office President-elect Biden will do as much as he can to repair the damage and America will remain the dominant economic power at least until it is overtaken by China. But the moral leadership, tarnished by flawed post cold war adventures, leading to endless wars and failed democracies, has now gone for good. The failures to deal with Covid 19 and the aging structures of some of its democratic institutions are the last straw. Too many other developed countries have done better on Covid and all of them have smoother running and fairer democratic processes.