Martin Shaw's Blog, page 9

THE PRIME MONGER: Johnson’s ‘Culture War’ is a Core Part of his Strategic Racism

Read my latest now in Byline Times .

5 years on, racism still shapes the legacy of Brexit and the Tory nationalist regime

Today is the 5th anniversary of the Brexit referendum. I remember it as the day I was aggressively told I was ‘not English’ by a Leave-supporting woman, as I stood outside a polling station in a sleepy Devon town – the first time in a lengthy life (as a white person in England) that I had experienced an ethnic slur, and one of several moments of political, racial and gender aggression which I witnessed that day. It was one week after the assassination of the Labour MP, Jo Cox, by a far-right extremist shouting ‘Britain first’, which was effectively the theme of Boris Johnson’s Vote Leave. 

In this intimidating atmosphere, thousands of Europeans, black people, gays and others suffered worse verbal and physical abuse, as hatreds of all kinds recorded dramatic spikes which continued in the aftermath of the narrow 51.9/48.1 per cent Leave victory. ‘We voted to send you home’, was the message heard by many ethnic-minority and foreign-born residents, even doctors and nurses trying to help sick white Britons. If they had not won, the UK would likely have experienced – if not an organised insurrection – some of the political violence which the USA saw as Trump faced final defeat on January 6th.

Airbrushed from history?

Fast forward five years, and this hostility is airbrushed out, unsurprisingly, of official commemoration and also, more surprisingly, at least partially from academic commentary. In a Guardian op-ed, Anand Menon and Paula Surridge of the UK in a Changing Europe research programme correctly write (of Vote Leave’s slogan ‘Take Back Control’) that ‘for many voters, “control” was not an end in itself but a means to more substantive objectives’. But they fail to mention that the most important of these objectives – the prime meaning of control in Leave propaganda, tabloid Brexitry and Leaver public opinion alike – was immigration control.

Indeed 23 June 2016 was the culmination of almost half a century of Powellite racial nationalism in the Conservative Party as well as the far right, and specifically of a decade of Faragism which – fusing Europhobia with anti-immigration politics – had forced the Cameron government both to adopt a hopelessly unrealistic immigration target and to promise an in-out EU referendum. In the 2016 campaign itself, the mainstream Vote Leave, led by Johnson, Gove and the Labour MP Gisela Stuart and directed by Dominic Cummings, shamelessly borrowed Farage’s method and pumped out a billion Facebook messages, hyping the ‘threat’ of 76 million (Muslim) Turks coming to the UK, in the last week of the campaign, in a successful push to bring out racist ‘non-voters’. 

The guiding thread

Following today’s commentary, you might be forgiven for thinking that this was all in the past, and Brexit has merely become a pointless nationalist exercise in economic self-harm which is aggravating benighted Unionists in Northern Ireland. But anti-immigrant racism has been the guiding thread of the five years of Brexit and the authoritarian nationalist regime to which it led. Why were first Theresa May and then Boris Johnson so adamant that the UK leave the Single Market as well as the EU itself? Above all, this was because Leave had identified the EU’s Freedom of Movement as the cause of immigration, and no Tory leader was prepared to defy this lesson of the referendum result.

If the UK had remained within the Single Market, today’s betrayals of fishermen, farmers and Unionists would simply not be happening. But after 2016 the Tory party became a radical Brexit party, hostile to all accommodation with the EU. By 2018, the two newish forms of racism, anti-Muslim and anti-European sentiment, which Farage had used to build UKIP, became Johnson’s own lodestars as he took advice from Steve Bannon on how seize the Tory crown. With his calculated ‘letterboxes’ column he first signalled to the Islamophobic Tory selectorate and then, doubling down on his remarks, to the wider electorate. In the 2019 election, he and Gove both expressed open hostility to Europeans in the UK, which they had studiously avoided in 2016 when, indeed, together with Stuart and Priti Patel, they formally promised EU citizens that nothing would change in their position.

Coming to ugly fruition

On this fifth anniversary, we are about to witness the consequences of that particular lie, ultimately a more serious one than the notorious ‘£350 million for the NHS’. Johnson, Gove, Patel and Stuart made no protest when May decided not to implement their promise; May’s Home Secretary, Amber Rudd, has confirmed just this month that none of them came to see her to ask her to realise it. Instead, after leaving Europeans in limbo for 3 years, the Government introduced the Settled Status scheme; it has received over 5 million applications but 2 million have been granted only provisional Pre-Settled Status, thousands have been refused altogether, and even those with full status have been denied a document to prove it. Worst of all, barely a week after Johnson piously commemorated Windrush Day (while still denying most of the victims the compensation they are supposed to have), an estimated 200,000 of the most vulnerable Europeans will be left out of the scheme on the 30th June cut-off date, opening up the increasing probability of a new Windrush tragedy down the line.

Some will see this as bureaucratic excess rather than racism. But racist hostility is not just a matter of the resentments of ignorant voters and the aggression of street thugs. It is a strategic tool of politicians like Johnson and Farage and media like the Mail, Express and Sun, and is institutionalised in systems like the Settled Status scheme. The Euro-Islamophobia which Vote Leave orchestrated in 2016 is coming to ugly fruition in the fate of marginalised EU citizens in 2021. 

Promise of resistance

Before 2016, institutional racism in the UK as indeed across Europe was directed mainly at immigrants, asylum seekers and minorities of colour; now it is enveloping a much larger non-citizen population from European as well as wider backgrounds. The last 5 years have gone mainly the way of the Brexiters, but the growth of antiracism in the last year or so holds out the promise of resistance. Commentators assert that the Tories are waging a ‘culture war’ or ‘war on woke’, but the core of this is an attempt to deflect anti-racist momentum, i.e. anti-antiracism. This is where their increasingly all-enveloping nationalism draws popular support, especially among older voters, but it is also where it is most vulnerable from a concerted campaign by all those affected and their allies across British society.

Note 

This article is based on my research on racism in Brexit and the Tory nationalist regime, from which I now have a 60,000-word draft manuscript – seeking a publisher! Enquiries welcome.

Sewell’s denialism is a problem of strategic, as well as structural, racism

Many of Britain’s leading antiracists have devoted themselves, over the last week, to refuting – and sometimes ridiculing – the racism denial of a new official report on ‘racial and ethnic disparities’. This document is now notorious for the attempt of its chair, Tony Sewell (right), to put a positive gloss on the ‘slave period’ of the ‘Caribbean experience’, and for having no more ambitious antiracist proposal than the abolition of ‘BAME’ (British and minority ethnic) terminology. Its central conclusion that it ‘found no evidence of systemic or institutional racism’ has cued many admirable demonstrations that quite the opposite is the case, and that the report offers little or nothing to address real problems of racism and inequality.

Much of this commentary has been, however, rather beside the point. A commission appointed by Boris Johnson and handpicked by his close advisor Munira Mirza, as part of the nationalist regime’s response to Black Lives Matter, was hardly likely to do otherwise. A swifter appraisal could have been made merely by searching for the term ‘Islamophobia’, the widely used name for anti-Muslim racism, which has been the most prominent overt type in the UK – through which hostility to people of colour continues to be legitimised – since the turn of the century. The term does not appear in the report.

Another search is also illuminating: any reference to ‘Conservative Party’ is also absent, although the evidence that the party is institutionally racist against Muslims is so substantial that the former Tory Chancellor, Sajid Javid, famously bounced Johnson (during the 2019 leadership contest) into agreeing to an inquiry into the problem. Johnson himself had, of course, used an attack on Muslim women’s dress to achieve his pole position in the party; after winning, he soon diluted the inquiry into a looser examination of how it dealt with racism more generally, whose long-delayed report, it was also revealed this week, has been sat on further for the last two months. It is hardly surprising that a governing party which is itself institutionally racist commissions a report which denies institutional racism.

However these are but instances of the larger context which has also been missed in most responses to Sewell. The report’s denial of structural racism should be seen as a kind of anti-antiracism, which in turn is part of the strategic racism which is central to the nationalist Tory regime. Brexit was won, in the 2016 referendum, only through the method of racist anti-immigration mobilisation which Johnson’s Vote Leave campaign, directed by Dominic Cummings, borrowed from Nigel Farage’s UKIP success over the previous decade. This mobilisation had been so potent that even before Johnson assumed power in 2019, Theresa May’s interim regime had thoroughly embraced it, baking anti-immigrant racism (via ending freedom of movement) into the UK’s Brexit ‘red lines’. Johnson then won the leadership by doubling down on his Islamophobic comments for the benefit of party members, and finally a parliamentary majority partly by re-emphasising hostility to immigrants and Europeans for the benefit of the Tories’ new electoral base.

The regime’s strategic racism has confused some observers because of its selective, pick’n’mix approach – favouring Jews, Hindus and Hong Kongers while targeting Muslims, East Europeans, travellers and poor immigrants generally – and because of its parallel tweaks to the immigration rules, which attempt to mitigate the economic damage of Brexit. But there is little doubt that a regime which actively celebrates the cruelty of deportation flights – even to Jamaica in the aftermath of Windrush – and dreams up ever more fantastical ways of demonising and punishing defenceless asylum seekers, is still fixated on the approach which served its leaders so well in 2016.

This is now widely described as one of ‘culture war’, and its audience as ‘cultural (or social) conservatives’. Certainly, the regime’s targeting of what can be broadly described as cultural institutions (universities, museums , the National Trust) and its cultivation of reactionary heritage iconography plays into this framing, as does the salience of wider impulses such as transphobia and even, still, homophobia, for sections of its audience. But the ‘culture’ that Johnson seeks to promote is above all racial-national; this alone glues together the full minority electorate which gives him power in the UK system.

‘Strategic racism’ is therefore a more accurate way of framing how the regime aims to maintain and expand power, as it presides over a Brexitised economy and a pandemic toll heading towards 200,000. The importance of Sewell is that this appeal has to fly against the UK’s powerful, legally entrenched normative antiracism. In this context, anti-antiracism legitimised by people of colour – which, apart from a token white man, the commissioners were – is a powerful protective shield. It does not matter that the report’s arguments are threadbare or confused, the presentation messy, and the omissions huge. What counts for the regime is that the messages – British society is not structurally racist, it’s not racist to be proud of Britain, even slavery wasn’t entirely bad, etc. – cut through, via a tame press, submissive television news and simple social media memes, to the half of the electorate to which they can realistically hope to appeal. As even the BBC website notes, surely the controversy was also ‘part of the plan‘, enabling Conservatives to pit their black commissioners against the antiracist critics. Priyamvada Gopal tweeted that if the report were a student dissertation, it would be a Fail. But as a strategic racist initiative, it was a B+. Job done.

As SW fishing industry is Brexited, Conservative answer is ‘Eat Devon’s Fish’

‘I urge everyone to help the fisherman by eating their fish’, Cllr Rufus Gilbert, the Conservative responsible for the economy at Devon County Council, told its Cabinet last week. Well I went down to Seaton’s excellent fishmongers and stocked up the freezer for a fortnight. But somehow I don’t think that ‘Eat Devon’s fish’ is going to save the fishing industry, which, to put it simply, has been Brexited.

Rufus would have done more to help Devon’s fishermen by supporting my proposal, 3 years ago, to press the Government to stay in the Single Market, even while leaving the EU. The Market, which Margaret Thatcher helped create, enabled British businesses of all kinds to sell their goods freely in Europe. But Rufus and the other supposedly pragmatic Conservatives on the Council – who knew full well that leaving the Market would damage Devon’s businesses – voted to slavishly follow their government, and rejected this.

Racial self-interest, Max Weber and the production of racism: the strategy and propaganda of Vote Leave during the Brexit referendum

This paper is finally out in Patterns of Prejudice, HERE. Here’s the abstract:

‘Shaw’s paper examines Eric Kaufmann’s idea of ‘racial self-interest’—which references Max Weber’s types of rationality in order to support ‘cordoning off’ racism from broader anti-immigration attitudes—through an analysis of Brexit, Kaufmann’s principal case. It discusses how Weber’s ideas might help us identify ‘absolute’ and ‘instrumental’ types of racial attitude and the relationships of these types to racism. Arguing that, in an electoral contest in which anti-immigration politics is highly mobilized, it is necessary to pay attention to the campaign, Shaw investigates whether these types of attitude can be distinguished in the strategy and propaganda of the 2016 Leave campaign and its leaders’ choices as well as its voters’ attitudes, and whether the campaign’s ‘instrumental’ anti-immigration attitudes can be excluded from the field of racism. Arguing that Weberian methodology implies that we should not only construct ideal types of racial attitudes but also use them to develop general, structural concepts of racism, Shaw concludes that anti-immigration politics is best conceptualized as a generally racialized field characterized by a fluid interplay of different types of racist ideas. His paper’s focus on Vote Leave, the officially recognized campaign led by Conservative ministers, also makes a specific contribution to the history of the Leave side of the referendum, correcting the idea that the populist-linked Leave.EU was primarily responsible for racism.’

Political racism and the making of ‘Brexitland’ – review article

My latest on openDemocracy: review article on Maria Sobolewska and Robert Ford, Brexitland: Identity, Diversity and the Reshaping of British Politics, Cambridge University Press, 2020.

[image error] Political racism is key to Johnson’s rise, but ‘racism’ is absent from Brexitland‘s conceptual framework

British politics has been profoundly restructured since the 2016 referendum, Sobolewska and Ford argue in their new study. Latent divides in the electorate between ‘identity conservatives’, ‘identity liberals’ and ‘ethnic minorities’ were quickly transformed into potent fractures between ‘Leavers’ and ‘Remainers’ which have fundamentally reshaped political competition, most obviously in England and Wales but also in a different way in Scotland. The book comprehensively marshalls both contemporary and historical survey data to fill out and explain this picture of change, and has been justifiably hailed by luminaries of UK political journalism as well as political science. You really do need to read Brexitland to grasp the changes in British politics in the twenty-first century, although I shall argue that it has significant conceptual and analytical limitations.

At the heart of the changes which Sobolewska and Ford address is the paradox that in the more diverse and liberal society which Britain has become over the last half-century, what they call ‘ethnocentrism’ has become more rather than less politically salient. They argue that conservatives have ‘activated’ the ethnic identity of a shrinking ‘school leaver’ white majority, while opposing liberals have mobilised and expanded the anti-racism of growing graduate and minority populations. The Conservative Party had already mobilised ethnocentric white voters following Enoch Powell’s and Margaret Thatcher’s interventions in the late 1960s and 1970s, but David Cameron’s attempt to ‘detoxify’ the party in the 2000s, amidst growing new concerns about immigration, opened the way for UKIP to powerfully link the issue with the UK’s EU membership after 2010. Cameron conceded the principle of an in-out referendum, won an unexpected majority, and the rest is history. After 2016, defeated liberals increasingly mobilised their side, helping to solidify a fracture which has changed party politics. 

Sobolewska and Ford explain recent developments as an interim conclusion to this process. By tacking sharply in Farage’s direction, in the 2019 election Boris Johnson was able to unite identity conservatives behind the Brexitised Conservative Party, while liberals were split between several parties and penalised by the first-past-the-post electoral system. They rightly conclude that in the last decade, as in the earlier period, ‘the embrace of ethnocentric immigration politics by the mainstream Conservatives … has done most to reshape British politics.’ (p. 329) However the new Tory hegemony is potentially unstable, not only because of the potential fall-outs from Brexit and Scottish independence (and, unpredicted when Brexitland was written, Covid-19), but also, fundamentally, because its ‘identity conservative’ demographic base is in relative decline.

Demography

Analysing recent electoral change in terms of the three-way split which Sobolewska and Ford propose enables them to make good sense of recent developments. However the formations are treated as demographic facts, and while the authors caveat that ‘demography is not destiny’, they make demographic change the key variable in analysing a backlash by less-educated whites to what they call the ‘conviction liberalism’ of white graduates and the ‘necessity liberalism’ of ethnic minorities. 

This type of argument is not new in British political science, where it has sometimes been associated with a sympathetic attitude towards white backlash. In their potboiler National Populism, Roger Eatwell and Matthew Goodwin (Ford’s co-author on the 2014 study of UKIP, Revolt on the Right, with whom he now clearly has disagreements) argue hyperbolically that ‘immigration and hyper ethnic change are cultivating strong fears about the possible destruction [their emphasis] of the national group’s historic identity and national way of life.’ Similarly, Eric Kaufmann places diversity’s supposedly inexorable threat to white majorities at the heart of his Whiteshift, even taking seriously the ideas of ‘the great replacement’ and ‘white genocide’. 

In this political-science landscape, Brexitland stands out for its much more measured analysis and judgements, which bring together the findings of a large group of researchers, and its avoidance of the direct political compromises with ‘ethnocentrism’ which Goodwin and Kaufmann have made. However presenting population groups, and their direct responses to immigration, as the drivers of change which political actors merely ‘activate’ – Sobolewska and Ford write of ‘the activation of ethnocentric hostilities to outgroups which had been there all along’ (p.151) – begs questions about how hostile attitudes have been produced and reproduced. 

There are two major issues. First, while one of Brexitland’s strengths is that it connects recent developments to a longer history, complications arise when it uses ethnic and educational markers to read back today’s ‘identity conservative’ group into early postwar Britain, as a demographic which is relatively unchanged apart from the challenges it now faces. Clearly it is true that three quarters of a century ago society was almost monolithically white, the majority had no further or higher education, and overt racism was widespread, but it is only with hindsight that it looks like a low-education ethnocentric group with distinctive political interests could already have existed. At the time, sociologists and political scientists saw class fractures as fundamental and racialised ethnic nationalism as class-specific, as the puzzle of working-class Conservativism in Robert Mackenzie and Alan Silver’s 1968 book Angels in Marble suggests. Indeed as Satnam Virdee argues in Racism, Class and the Racialised Outsider, racialised British nationalism was originally produced in the nineteenth-century class politics that marked the expansion of democracy and the incorporation of successive waves of immigrants into the nation, while repeatedly excluding others; it focused on the position of new working-class minorities, as it has recently on East European workers. In presenting ‘identity conservativism’ in a class-undifferentiated fashion, Brexitland also minimises significant differences between its working- and middle-class forms, evident for example in the relationships between British National Party and UKIP support earlier this century as well as in the distribution of the Brexit vote.

Second, while Sobolewska and Ford emphasise, rightly, that recent ethnocentrism draws on the legacy of earlier right-wing leaders, they present Powell and Thatcher too as responding to an already-ethnicised white majority, whose ethnic consciousness was directly activated by the experience of immigration. However, then as now, it was not just the visibility of immigrants but their ideological representation which conditioned their reception. Sobolewska and Ford refer several times to Margaret Stacey’s sociological classic Tradition and Change, a study of Banbury in the 1930s, when locals responded negatively to the arrival of (domestic) incomers who were viewed as ‘immigrants’; but we cannot simply scale up this local response to reactions at the national level. Most whites in most areas of the UK did not meet black people in the 1960s, and many whites do not meet many blacks or East Europeans even today. Local migration patterns are not the prime activators of contemporary hostile attitudes, as we can see from its fairly uniform incidence across areas with low as well as high international migration, including those where domestic migration à la Banbury is 20x international. (The national average in the mid-2010s was 9x, but nowhere was hostility to domestic incomers produced by this migration.) 

Therefore as Cas Mudde has argued, ‘immigration has to be translated into a political issue’. Yet Sobolewska and Ford are extraordinarily neglectful of the role of the most obvious translators – apart from politicians themselves – the mass media, and indeed of social media. Only in relation to EU migration in the 2000s do they mention that ‘anxieties about the arrival of a large new out-group were stoked and reinforced by persistent negative media attention.’ (p.154). As far as I can tell this is the only substantive statement about media in the entire book. Yet even before Smethwick in 1964 or Powell in 1968, the opinion poll evidence in Brexitland shows nationwide hostility towards immigration, which must have been produced for the most part by press and broadcasting coverage, including of the far right-linked protests in Notting Hill in 1958. Swathes of media research show the role of the press, especially, in (re)producing racism in the UK over the subsequent decades, including before and during the 2016 vote. Today’s demographic ‘fact’ of a white ethnic-identity ‘group’, indicated by the polling which this book discusses, is the sedimented result of long-term media coverage, editorialising and political activism, as well as informal social relations. Thus political actors, among whom we must class newspaper editors as well as politicians, have helped create the hostility which in moments like the EU referendum they then ‘activate’. For the early 2010s, Geoffrey Evans and Jonathan Mellon show that while public concern tracks the rising rate of immigration, it is also strongly correlated with media coverage, using the Daily Mail as a measure. 

Racism

How should we conceptualise these processes of translation and activation? It is striking that ‘anti-racism’ plays a significant role in Sobolewska and Ford’s analytical armoury, as a norm promoted by identity liberals, but ‘racism’ is absent, being euphemised as ‘ethnocentrism’. It is as though ‘racism’ can only have a discursive political significance, never a conceptual role in social-scientific analysis. For example, the argument that racism was a strategic choice by Vote Leave, advanced by the present writer in The Guardian, is referenced as an instance of anti-racist liberal ‘framing’, not as a potentially legitimate way of analysing the campaign. Indeed Sobolewska and Ford go even further than Goodwin and Kaufmann in avoiding ‘racism’: while National Populism denies that immigration-politics practitioners are generally racist, it does acknowledge that they sometimes ‘veer into’ racism; while Kaufmann claims that white conservatives advance only ‘racial self-interest’, he recognises racism on the margins. These writers acknowledge that racism is in the conceptual mix, even as they try to ‘cordon it off’, as their co-thinker David Goodheart puts it, from ‘legitimate’, mainstream concerns about immigration. In Brexitland, however, ‘racism’, while certainly not legitimised, really has no clear conceptual role.

This absence is about more than terminology. The puzzle underlying this book is why, in a society in which racism has been widely delegitimised and anti-racist norms are influential, racism has not only continued to be reproduced, but even become more influential. The answer that a large group of voters demand it, while substantial and growing minorities oppose it, is not sufficient. A major reason is surely that right-wing politicians and media have developed new forms of what we can call political racism. Sobolewska and Ford file comments like Nigel Farage’s about living next door to Romanians (in reality, a politer version of the Smethwick slogan about having a ‘n—-r for a neighbour’) and Johnson’s about burkas as ‘letterboxes’ as attempts to ‘defend expressions of in-group attachment or hostility towards certain out-groups as expressions of “legitimate concerns” and to exclude them from the unacceptable label of racism.’ (pp. 77-78) Certainly, for operators like Farage and Johnson, a key move is to claim ‘only’ to be representing public opinion. Can we really accept, however, that they are merely offering an interpretation, which converts these political entrepreneurs into commentators – if you like, higher-profile versions of Goodwin and Kaufmann? 

It is therefore strange that Sobolewska and Ford ascribe racism to Powell – who also claimed to be ventriloquising white working-class opinion – but fail to recognise its active triggering by his current equivalents, just because, in our period of heightened anti-racist norms, this is better wrapped up in denial. Major elements which are missing from this account are how the transition from overt to obfuscatory racism took place, and how anti-immigration politics has embedded generalised hostility while often avoiding its open expression towards particular migrant groups. There is no engagement with the theoretical literature on racism, including arguments like Alana Lentin’s that a ‘frozen’ idea of historical racism has allowed racism to be produced in new ways, which are surely relevant here. 

Reflecting in 2017, Farage claimed that, had his immigration campaign ‘been wilfully and overtly a racist message, I might have deserved some of [the criticism]. But it wasn’t. It never was. It never, ever was. It was a logical argument about numbers, society.’ This nicely sums up how the mainstream British right has dealt with the challenge. Powell also claimed to be making a ‘rational’ case about ‘numbers’ but he explicitly coupled this with emotive arguments about a poor white woman surrounded by ‘piccanninies’ who had excrement pushed through her letter-box. After his marginalisation, right-wing Conservatives, UKIP and groups like Migration Watch partly separated the rational and emotive cases, majoring on numbers of immigrants, especially when hammering down the net migration target to which they got Cameron committed. 

Yet this abstract hostility to immigration, which we can call numerical racism, was always accompanied by (1) enough dog whistles to remind voters of its meaning; (2) targeted media campaigns, for example against Muslims and East Europeans, which politicians latched onto; and (3) more or less undercover racist propaganda by the parties themselves. In the 2016 referendum, while Johnson waffled about sovereignty and ‘managing’ immigration, Dominic Cummings was targeting a group of voters with a billion Facebook ads about the ‘76 million Turks’ who would allegedly be able to come to the UK if it remained in the EU, and many similar themes. Clearly this political racism had major social consequences, not only for the victims of the popular abuse and violence it stimulated, but also for the millions whose rights were diminished.

The more difficult conceptual problem is the categorisation of the demographic groups themselves. There is obviously very good reason not to categorise Leavers as racists tout court, since voters support Brexit for a connected set of reasons including sovereignty and democracy as well as immigration control, and of course unevenly-held authoritarian and reactionary attitudes on a range of issues apart from race and immigration contribute to the political cleavage around which this identity has formed. Yet we know that the core attitudes which lie behind the Brexit identity cluster together: as Ford, Goodwin and David Cutts put it a decade ago, explaining UKIP’s advance, ‘hostility to one out-group tends to correlate with hostility to others; those who dislike immigrants tend to dislike racial minorities and to dislike the “foreigners” from the EU encroaching on British politics.’ Cummings honed his alarmist appeal on immigration because he himself believed that a sizeable part of his electorate was open to racist messaging, and in the light of the outcome it is difficult to believe that he was wrong. Nationalist, racial and ethnic attitudes appear more salient than, for example, attitudes to gender, on which more white school-leaver voters have liberal leanings. In this light, terms like ‘identity conservatives’ (or ‘social’ or ‘cultural’ conservatives), which are widely used by political scientists, have a euphemistic ring, and something like ‘authoritarian racial-nationalists’ would be analytically tighter. 

Echoing the earlier point about class, there is also some reason to question Brexitland’s categorisation of anti-Brexiters as ‘identity liberals’, because Virdee has shown that a distinct working-class anti-racism developed from the 1970s, impacting the labour movement; it is not only graduates who provided the stimulus to resist ethnic nationalism. It is also important to acknowledge that ‘ethnic minorities’, while generally reacting against Conservative and Brexiter racism, are divided, and that both anti-Muslim and anti-European hostility have considerable purchase among minority voters. (However these are qualifications which Sobolewska and Ford go some way to recognising.)

The future

Sobolewska and Ford write tentatively in the conclusion to this book of the potential for ‘identity politics’ to wane after Brexit. The Tories’ electoral dominance, they suggest, ‘would be rapidly destabilised if identity conservative voters’ attention returned to economic issues following the resolution of Brexit and the introduction of new controls on immigration. (p. 336) It has indeed been destabilised, by the Covid crisis, but this does not appear likely to end the Conservatives’ racial-nationalist approach. On the contrary, the failure of the Johnson regime’s pandemic response and the additional threat which the end of the Brexit transition poses to the UK economy and society have already led it to double down on racism, hyping the threat posed by small numbers of helpless asylum seekers reaching England in small boats, and nationalism, with the aggressive display of its willingness to defy the EU by breaking international law. As the government faces an unprecedented set of economic as well as health challenges, it appears that nationalism and racism are the most reliable of their diminishing political resources, likely to be appealed to as widely and frequently as possible.    

The authors themselves give the looming crisis over Scotland (if the SNP win an overall majority in the Scottish Parliament in 2021) as another reason to be sceptical about any possibility of a post-Brexit return to normality. A welcome feature of this book is a treatment of Scotland within the same framework as England and Wales, comparing for example Scottish Angloscepticism with English Euroscepticism, and showing how through more liberal politics the SNP built a wider coalition around its ethnocentric base than Brexiters did. Just as they use the identity-politics dynamics to explain changes in British politics through the rise of UKIP, divisions in the Conservative Party and effects of the Brexit vote, so they also show how the Brexit fracture overlain on Scottish independence divisions has transformed Scottish politics. A weakness, however, is the neglect of how this was connected to Brexit even before the 2016 referendum, when Cameron’s Tories, aided by the right-wing press, successfully used English nationalism in 2015 to mobilise voters against the ‘threat’ of Ed Miliband’s Labour being held hostage by Nicola Sturgeon’s SNP. In the emergent new crisis, the Tories and their media allies could well deepen their tentative racialisation of the Scots, just as some of them quickly mobilised ancient anti-Irish racism during the Brexit crisis of 2018-19. As Sobolewska and Ford conclude, English nationalism may be a ‘wild card’ in the coming Scottish crisis. In fact, it is not obvious at the moment how ‘Brexitland’ can be stabilised; it is as likely to end with a bang as with a whimper. What is clear is that, for the mainstreamed populist right, racism is the gift that keeps giving, as new racialisations are superimposed on old, and we need to understand the centrality of its threat.  

Only a bold democratic programme can stop Starmer becoming Labour’s third leader to be squeezed in the war of English and Scottish nationalisms

As Keir Starmer prepares for Labour’s 2020 conference he has almost closed the gap with the Tories in the polls and is ahead of Boris Johnson as ‘best prime minister’. He is currently visiting Scotland – where Labour is still very weak – and writes in The Scotsman that ‘the number one priority for governments across the United Kingdom must be protecting people’s lives and livelihoods. Yet in the middle of a global pandemic, the Tories are still banging on about Brexit and the SNP, by their own admission, are still prioritising independence. Rather than acknowledging the deep problems with their response to the virus, like the current testing fiasco or the crisis in our care homes, they are dodging blame and attacking each other.’

Starmer offers a gentle rebuke to the Scottish Conservatives for ‘refusing to stand up to Johnson as he backtracks on his own Brexit deal’, but otherwise is silent about the PM’s ferocious nationalist assault on the EU. Starmer’s calculation appears to be that he should pull in support from both sides of the UK’s and Scotland’s constitutional divides, and avoid Johnson’s provocations.

The twin-nationalist threat in the crucial 2021 elections

Yet in his attacks on the EU, Johnson is also already fighting the battle to stop a new independence referendum – as well as the 2024 general election – by painting the SNP, alongside Labour, as siding with the EU. So before long Johnson’s banging on about Brexit and Nicola Sturgeon’s about independence will require responses from Starmer. Brexit may be ‘done’ but it is far from over, and the issue of Indyref2 is rising inexorably up the agenda. With the crucial Holyrood elections taking place alongside English mayoral and local elections next spring, the Tories will only ramp up their British-English nationalism to cover their disastrous health and economic records.

[image error]One of this week’s Tory attack ads – expect the same over Scotland as Indyref2 rises up the agenda

In these circumstances, Labour could easily be squeezed by the nationalist constitutional agendas of its two main rivals, with serious consequences in England as well as Scotland. This is essentially what happened to Jeremy Corbyn over Brexit in 2019, and indeed to Ed Miliband in 2015, when David Cameron and Lynton Crosby exploited a perceived link of Labour with the SNP to obtain their unexpected majority. Bang on about health and the economy instead? Miliband and Corbyn both tried it, and look at the results.  

Starmer should beware the tendency, revived by the authoritative Left Out account of Corbyn’s leadership between 2017 and 2019, to believe that a combination of his and his allies’ personal and political failings derailed hopes of further progress on his socialist agenda. The book’s starting-point is misleading: by 2017 Brexit already defined politics in the UK, and while Corbyn navigated its currents successfully at that moment, the basis for his later disastrous failure to do so had been thoroughly prepared by his weaknesses during and after the 2016 referendum. Indeed when he became leader, Corbyn was already lumbered with the consequences of Labour’s failed responses to the threats from the independence surge in Scotland and to UKIP, which led to Brexit. 

Labour’s fatal mistake in the last decade has been its assumption that a progressive social and economic agenda is not only necessary, but also largely sufficient, for electoral success. Yet while many of both Miliband’s and Corbyn’s policies were popular, in the elections of 2015 and 2019 and of course the 2016 referendum, they were ultimately eclipsed by their opponents’ nationalist agendas. 2017 is not really an exception: Labour’s relative success was not just due to its social agenda, but owed much to Remainers swinging behind Corbyn because they believed it offered a better answer to Brexit. By 2019 many no longer believed this, and swung to the Lib Dems, Greens, SNP and even the Tories, while the latter hoovered up many Labour Leavers.

So Starmer has inherited a situation in which the entwined constitutional questions of Brexit and Scottish independence, and the different but complementary nationalisms which lie behind them, have already helped break two Labour leaders. What does he need to do to avoid a third failure, which could contribute to an even more decisive weakening of Labour and end to any hope of progress within the framework of the British state?

Scottish independence threatens a Brexit-style crisis

Left-wing and Remainer commentators tend to see the questions of Scotland and Brexit as very different, which in one sense is obviously true. In principle, Scottish independence offers a progressive prospect: a compact liberal, social-democratic nation-state within a Europe of nations. The Scottish National Party government and its first minister Nicola Sturgeon offer a similar contrast in leadership vis-a-vis Johnson’s right-wing racist populism to the one which Starmer himself proposes. It is not hard to see why their independence agenda is increasingly attractive to Scottish voters and is winning sympathy in England.

Yet despite its different ideological roots, Scottish independence has come to fore in the same UK and European context as Brexit, and threatens to cause the same kinds of problem. It is not obvious why breaking up a 313-year-old union should be easier than dissolving one of 47 years. It will involve the same complex unravelling, but without the equivalent of Article 50, the framework for the process will be even more contested between the rump UK and Scottish governments.

Moreover, pro-independence forces have not found convincing solutions to their three biggest obstacles: the currency of the new state; the mode of its re-entry into the EU; and a fiscal deficit exacerbated by declining oil revenues. In addition, since the UK has now left the EU, Scottish membership would now create a hard border at Berwick-on-Tweed.

On top of this, like the Brexiters the SNP are aiming for independence without a strong consensus in society. A 55 per cent pro-independence majority in some polls is hailed as a major advance, but like their English counterparts the nationalists will claim even 52 or 50.1 per cent as legitimation. But we have see with Brexit how a tiny majority for secession is a recipe for new polarisation, which hugely complicates the process and poisons society.

Even if the SNP had a radical programme for independence, the process of obtaining independence following a successful vote would consume them for years, as it has the Brexiters. Since the SNP has signed up to maintaining popular British institutions – the monarchy, the army, the NHS, the BBC – in new Scottish forms and has so far not fully utilised even its existing fiscal autonomy, it is likely that independence will be largely a symbolic success. 

The political costs, on the other hand, will be anything but minimal. Johnson’s current aggression against the EU is a reliable indicator of how he will fight – with the support of the tabloids – to prevent a new independence referendum, against the independence case if a vote has to be held, and to tar anyone who is not 100 per cent with him as a traitor to the English-British nationalist cause. This will be powerful ammunition for Sturgeon and could well radicalise the wider nationalist movement in unpredictable directions, as the Brexiters have radicalised, which in turn will feed the Tory case.

Labour’s only hope is ambitious democratic reform of the UK state

The lesson from 2015, 2016 and 2019 is that without attractive, coherent answers to the big constitutional questions, Labour cannot hope to compete with the Tories and the SNP when the chips are down. In this kind of polarisation, Labour could not only be wiped out even more comprehensively in Scotland, but also be forced backwards in England and Wales in 2024 – and possibly as early as 2021. 

Given how the Brexitised Conservative Party and the SNP have both consolidated their bases in recent years, Labour faces a formidable task in trying to shift the agenda around Scottish independence on either side of the border. It may already be too late. But any hope of avoiding another five years of Brexit-style regression depends on doing so.

Labour will not advance by tacking individual constitutional reforms on to a message which is largely focused on the economy and healthe. Only a clear, bold and consistently repeated case for democratic reform across the UK, equally prioritised and synchronised with the case for economic and social justice, has any chance of making an impact on the entrenched rival nationalisms.

Without ambitious proposals to remake the UK as a whole, Labour has no chance of convincing Scottish voters. Extra devolution for Scotland, while English corruption remains intact, will not be a meaningful offer. Pro-independence voters, who increasingly include Remainers, have sussed that the UK is a deeply flawed democracy, as have most non-Tories in England. Labour leads to learn from its experience under Blair: democratising Scotland but not England, as it did in the late 1990s, was not enough, and only exacerbated the tensions within the Union.

Indeed the structures of English corruption have only become more entrenched in recent years, as they have been harnessed to Johnson-Cummings’ elective dictatorship. The winner-take-all voting system in the House of Commons, the House of Cronies and Residual Hereditaries (even if they occasionally provide a minimal check on Tory excesses), the hollowing out of English local government, the ever-more aggressive populism of the tabloid press, and the ever-closer merger of the Tory party with the shady world of property developers, hedge funds, offshore and Putin oligarchs, constitute a formidably compromised political framework for British society. As the regime starts to clear away legal as well as social protections, protect democracy and citizens’ rights pose a comprehensive challenge. 

Embedded federalism in a reformed Union as a third option in any referendum

There is no doubt that Starmer gets the need for changes better than his predecessors. During the leadership election, he was clear in his support for electoral reform and a constitutional convention and linked these to a socialist case. But it is not clear that he fully understands – still less that the party as a whole grasps – the need for a bold and wide-ranging programme of democratic change as a major, constantly repeated part of Labour’s offer. Only by providing a strong, clear vision of a different kind of Britain, in which key reforms are tied together in a comprehensive progamme, is there any chance of succeeding. 

In particular, Starmer needs urgently to spell out the kinds of changes which would give Scots meaningful reasons for remaining within the UK. Not just devolution, but embedded federal solutions which give the devolved nations powerful positions within the overall constitution of the UK, will be essential – alongside proposals for general democratisation. While a constitutional convention will be needed to finalise and win widespread support for a reformed UK, Starmer must now lay out Labour’s idea for what a reformed state would look like. No one is going to change their vote on the principle of a convention, but only on a clear and inspiring vision of change.

This approach should guide Starmer’s position vis-a-vis a new Scottish referendum. If Sturgeon wins a new majority in Holyrood next year on a programme of a second vote, there will be an unanswerable democratic case for it. If this happens, Starmer should support the principle, but demand that Labour’s vision of Scotland within a reformed democratic UK be a third option in the vote. This is hardly a novel idea – after all Alex Salmond, when Scottish First Minister, wanted ‘devo-max’ as a third option in 2014 – so Starmer should challenge Sturgeon to support including a Labour option in the vote, in returning for allying with the case for a referendum.

It will be not be easy to convince a Labour Party which is still too tribal and too inclined to see constitutional issues as optional add-ons to the socialist case. But without a radical approach of this kind, Keir Starmer risks becoming the third Labour leader in a row to be pole-axed by the UK’s warring nationalisms and the radical constitutional politics on which they thrive. 

Culpable ignorance, political humiliation, and their consequences: my revision of Lawrence Freedman’s first draft of the UK’s pandemic policy history

[image error]

No.10 tweet from the day Dominic Cummings returned to work (now deleted, of course)

As the fall-out continues from the UK’s disastrous pandemic policy-making in the first quarter of 2020, which has led to date to 63,000 excess deaths, it is vital that British sociology and politics academics provide accurate critical analyses. Sir Lawrence Freedman, Emeritus Professor of War Studies at King’s College London and a former member of the Chilcot inquiry into the Iraq war, has written a first draft of the history of this process in Survival: Global Politics and Society, focusing on the period before Johnson U-turned to lockdown on 23 March. His aim is to provide a contemporary account of the crisis as material for a seemingly inevitable public inquiry.

It’s a serious contribution, but fundamentally flawed. I’ve written a 6,000-word rejoinder for open Democracy which you can also download as a PDF. Freedman rightly argues that we shouldn’t just judge with hindsight. His take is that this was a ‘poorly understood’ new disease and that therefore it was understandable that scientific advisers and ministers made mistakes. I show, however, that it was clear – despite the earlier Chinese cover-up – by the beginning of February at the latest that the disease caused by the new coronavirus could pose a very serious threat.

If any doubts remained, a widely-reported Chinese paper on 72,000 cases, published on 17 February – but completely ignored by Freedman – provided information which suggested 20 per cent of cases could need hospitalisation and 5 per cent critical care, which in the case of a large epidemic could overwhelm the NHS; while half of deaths could be of people under 70 and a fifth under 60.

For the next month, UK policy-makers failed to carefully process this information or draw the relevant consequences. Instead they stressed that most disease would be ‘mild’ and believed that if large numbers of middle-aged and young people got it, the UK could achieve ‘herd immunity’. Three months later, there have been more deaths in British ICUs among the 60-69 and 50-59 age cohorts than the 70-79 and 80+ groups. I argue that the failure to absorb and act on the available information about the nature of the threat amounts to culpable ignorance.

The ‘over-70s’ were designated the core of ‘the vulnerable group’ which also included people with various conditions, and they were to be ‘cocooned’. Certainly, many older people isolated themselves, even before the government belatedly told them to do this, but 430,000 elderly women and men were concentrated in in care homes. The Government notoriously failed to make preparations to protect them, and instructed the NHS to discharge hospital patients – even those who had had Covid – into the homes if necessary to clear beds in hospitals, thus helping to introduce Covid into some homes. In early May, it was estimated that 22,000 had died: 5 per cent of all residents, compared to less than 0.1 per cent in the population at large. Older women were 17 times more likely to die in care homes than in their own homes.

Freedman criticises the messaging around ‘herd immunity’ (while refraining to mention the second half of the phrase attributed to Dominic Cummings and other Tories, ‘and let the old people die’), but not the policy. He appears to accept that protecting the NHS was a legitimate primary aim of policy, rather than an instrumental goal in the protection of the population. He judges the government successful in achieving this goal, rather than a failure for allowing a hugely larger number of deaths than was necessary had protection of lives been prioritised. He even provides excuses for the delay in locking down between 12 and 23 March, widely seen as the fundamental error which cost many lies. He notes the care homes disaster, but doesn’t see how this followed from ‘herd immunity’.

Freedman concludes that ‘[Johnson’s] hospitalisation on 5 April and close brush with death will have left him with no doubts about the nature of the threat and that his [lockdown] decision was correct’, implying that by then the prime minister had corrected his earlier egregious errors. Yet the lockdown has proved a short respite from fundamental criticism for Johnson; indeed his mixed-messaging around the partial easing of 10 May, now compounded by the crisis over Cummings, reflected the fact that – although the idea of herd immunity has been abandoned – the policy of controlling death only to the extent that the NHS does not crash appears to have survived.

Freedman avoids the fundamental political humiliation which these failures – and their consequences in mass death – have caused Johnson, a humiliation which I compare to that suffered by Margaret Thatcher when Argentina invaded the Falklands in 1982 (as noted by Freedman in his book on the crisis) and by George W. Bush over 9/11 – which were both also caused by culpable ignorance of the nature of the threat. He therefore doesn’t explore the questions of how Johnson’s brittle, over-personalised regime is responding to this humiliation and will deal with its consequences in the coming months.

Academics should not pull their punches in writing the provisional history of this period. After all, much independent scientific and medical opinion, referred to only briefly by Freedman, has been damning of the Johnson government’s approach. I conclude that Johnson is likely to seek to prevent a meaningful inquiry. It is important to get a first draft straight now, but other means may have to be found to bring the government to account.

‘Running hot’: the Tory priority remains to manage death, not minimise it. But will they get away with the unnecessary loss of life they have caused?

[image error]

Pro-Johnson propaganda, London, 22 April 2020

“The debate is now between people who think we should suppress the virus completely and those who think we should run things quite hot, use the spare capacity in the NHS and aim to keep the R number just below one,” one official said. Another senior insider said: “You have to be clear. Running hot means more people are likely to die. That’s the decision the prime minister will have to take.” – Tim Shipman and Caroline Wheeler, The PM’s lockdown dilemma: risk killing the economy or thousands of people?, Sunday Times, 19 April 2020.

In the speculation about the British government’s ‘exit strategy’ (although officials and Tory MPs are not allowed to use the term), too little attention is being given to its fundamental objectives in the Covid-19 crisis and their larger political context. To read much commentary, it is as though Brexit (also no longer to be named) vanished the day the epidemic finally took over UK politics, and Boris Johnson and Dominic Cummings are no longer supremely interested in maintaining their popularity and power.

Clearly the crisis could bring big changes, but it is not clear that it will turn a regime built on privilege and division into an engine for social justice. On the contrary, it seems that Johnson-Cummings could face an uphill battle to fend off a growing sense that the sacrifices have been too great and that the government’s mistaken strategy and general incompetence have played a large role in this situation. This could be even more true to the extent that Johnson chooses to ‘run things hot’, as the hawks are suggesting. 

In order to persuade voters to pay the ‘blood price‘ which their policies have already exacted and will continue to require, Johnson’s entirely Brexitised Tories may have little choice but to ramp up their divisive approach. As Anand Menon and Alan Wager have recently argued, the Brexit values divide could be back with a vengeance. But will it be enough to keep Johnson securely in power?

The ‘herd immunity’ phase

It is important to grasp that the government’s notoriously relaxed attitude to the epidemic reflected much more than Johnson’s personal irresponsibility, although that has been breathtaking. After all, he missed no fewer than five consecutive meetings of the government’s emergency COBRA committee; boasted of shaking hands with coronavirus patients; attended a rugby match as late as 8 March; and worked in a wholly un-socially distanced manner to the last. Only when forced to, did he acknowledge the overriding threat which the virus posed.

The main reason for this was however that as the crisis broke, the government was still focused on – indeed fantasising about – its Brexit project, and initially saw Covid-19 as a threat to this. On 2 February, as the horror in Wuhan was becoming clear, Johnson made a flowery speech in which he warned that the response could threaten Brexit, seeing ‘a risk that new diseases such as coronavirus will trigger a panic and a desire for market segregation that go beyond what is medically rational to the point of doing real and unnecessary economic damage‘.

No wonder that the soft-pedalling of the epidemic by the UK’s medical and scientific advisers – who despite clear evidence from China assumed throughout February and early March that Covid-19 could be managed like influenza – was so convenient to Johnson, and their pursuit of ‘herd immunity’ so congenial to the eugenicist Cummings, who was credibly alleged to have talked about ‘herd immunity and let some of the old people die’.

Following from this assumption, it was agreed that a UK epidemic could not be prevented, but should be contained in such a way that maintained the capacity of the National Health Service to cope with serious cases. The principal scientific inputs into UK decision-making appear to have been from epidemiological modellers, primarily interested in the speed with which the virus would spread, and behavioural scientists, who cautioned that controls would prove unacceptable to the public and should therefore be introduced with caution, with too little advice from medical specialists. 

Flawed public health messages

In the light of these ’herd immunity’ and ‘pandemic management’ objectives, the public health messages, apart from advice to those with suspected Covid, were also disastrously weak. They initially centred on hand washing, together with a recommendation that the over-70s and those with existing conditions should isolate themselves – so as to ‘cocoon’ them from the epidemic, as a government advisor put it.

It was also frequently emphasised that most cases were ‘mild’ and the impression was therefore given that young and middle-aged adults had little to fear from the disease. This was despite a large amount of evidence from China between late January and mid-February on the frequent, unpredictable severity of the disease, including that half of all fatalities were under the UK government’s arbitrary 70 cut-off for ‘vulnerability’. 

The crisis of 12-23 March

Even as the epidemic began to escape the confines of the initial testing and tracing programme in early March, and with the sobering object-lesson of the Italian crisis in full view, the government allowed schools, large-scale public events and public transport to continue as normal. It instituted no checks on travellers from Italy (despite having earlier quarantined all those returning from China) and on 11 March allowed thousands of Atletico Madrid fans – from the region with the largest European epidemic outside Italy, where football was already banned – to travel to Liverpool, while 250,000 racegoers attended the Cheltenham Festival from 10-13 March (the area is now reported as an epidemic hot spot).

On 12 March, the government failed to introduce the general social distancing measures which many expected. Worse, it abandoned community testing and tracing altogether. However many people were adapting their behaviour, sporting organisations cancelled events, and headteachers began to close schools, as public opinion reacted to the growing crisis. On 16 March, the government followed suit, advising the public to avoid unnecessary travel and social events, and a week later finally introduced a lockdown. The 11-day delay is widely regarded as having cost many lives. 

After the government finally disavowed ‘herd immunity and introduced a lockdown on 23 March, many still believed this was its objective. In fact, the government appears to have accepted that herd immunity cannot be achieved in the short term – credible estimates of total infection in the population remain well under 10 per cent – but there remain significant continuities in policy. So what are the UK’s objectives?

The U-turn

To understand the government’s aims during (and probably beyond) the lockdown, we need to grasp the reasons for the U-turn in late March. These seem to have been twofold. Reports of the almost-overwhelmed health system in Lombardy, where both general hospital and intensive care facilities were superior to the UK’s, sounded the alarm. Meanwhile epidemiologists warned that the epidemic would overwhelm the NHS.

The Imperial College study published on 15 March, anticipating 250-500,000 deaths without a lockdown, finally concentrated minds. It seemed that the government could not, after all, tolerate mass death on such a scale. Indeed on 17 March the chief scientific advisor, Patrick Vallance, expressed the hope that the toll could be kept to 20,000 (an aspiration which could haunt the government, as it has already been hugely exceeded). 

The lockdown brought UK policy closer to that of other European countries, although it was less draconian than most. It also now gained widespread public and cross-party support, which had begun to be threatened. This support was further consolidated after 2 April when it was revealed that Johnson himself was seriously ill and was taken into ICU despite not needing a ventilator. Having ignored the evidence and believed his own propaganda, he was presumably unaware that a fat, 50+ male was vulnerable (Cummings, who is a little younger and not fat, was also quite ill but not hospitalised). Despite his manifest culpability, his acolytes, the sycophantic Tory press and his unofficial propaganda machine (see poster above) have tried to present him as a national hero merely for surviving.

Yet the UK’s hospital death toll continued on a steep upward trajectory because of cases which developed before 23 March, and a month later is barely plateauing. The overall toll, based on excess mortality and therefore including deaths in care homes and at home, as well as those resulting directly and indirectly from Covid but not recorded as such, is currently well over 30,000. It is almost certain that the overall cost of this wave, revealed in the excess of deaths in March, April and May 2020 compared to the same months in earlier years, will be at least around 50,000 lives.

The Johnson government’s aims

This rapidly increasing toll, which may prove to be the highest of any European country, is yet to prove politically damaging to the government. Yet it is clear – if only because for 6 weeks from 12 March they showed no interest in reinstating let alone expanding the community tracing and testing which (together with electronic surveillance) has been crucial to restricting the epidemic South Korea, Germany and other states – that reducing the level of mass death as such has not been their main priority. 

Instead, most additional resources for addressing the health emergency have been devoted to the hospital system, whose ICU capacity has been hugely increased, including several new hospitals constructed in exhibition centres and other spaces, while staff resources have been directed towards hospital treatment. The government’s preferred measure of success, therefore, appears to be that the hospital system has ‘coped’ and has not been ‘overwhelmed’, with patients receiving adequate care. It is not an accident that ‘Protect the NHS’ comes before ‘saving lives’ in the government’s key slogans.

The coming dilemma 

In late April, it appears that they are claiming success in this effort, as not all the additional capacity created will be utilised in this wave. It is in this context that the following choices for the Government are shaping up:

How far should they push the limits of the hospital system on a ‘just in time’ basis,  allowing the epidemic to continue to the level where most patients who meet their frailty criteria to be treated in ICUs (many of the elderly still being allowed to die in the community), while lifting some social restrictions and allowing more economic activity to recover?
What priority will they give to a renewed, expanded system of community testing and tracing, which alone could offer a reasonably safe framework for recovery without a vaccine? At the moment, while the Health Secretary is making optimistic announcements, it is reported that the Chief Medical Officer is unconvinced. Given the huge delays in achieving full testing even of health and care workers, is full community testing really on the horizon?

At the moment the best guess may be that the policy, once the peak of the current wave has been seriously flattened, will be a compromise, with some relaxations which cause some increase in cases and deaths, and some testing and tracing which contain them. Wherever the balance is struck, it seems unlikely that the government will wait until a fully comprehensive test-and-trace scheme is available for the whole population – which alone would maximally save lives – before relaxing some restrictions.

These choices could cause a serious crisis inside government. The scientific and medical advisers, having got the first phase badly wrong, may well want to err on the side of caution rather than risk an even worse second peak. On the other hand, Tory MPs are already pressing for relaxations for the sake of small and medium businesses, and some sections of the population (especially in low-infectivity areas?) may be starting to chafe at the restrictions. Johnson will have some difficult choices.

Can Johnson get away with the mass death his government has caused?

However policy for the next phase is resolved, the government will face huge pressure over its squandering of the UK’s early advantages and the unnecessary loss of life which this has caused. Several major factors could make it difficult for Johnson to escape responsibility: 

Although the NHS has been able to increase beds, staffing and equipment (except the supply of ventilators which seems to be a policy disaster) in ICUs, the hospital system has not been adequately protected. It has been unable to provide adequate personal protection equipment (PPE) even to ICU staff, and much less to staff in other hospital areas, primary care, and above all social care. 
The number of NHS doctors, nurses and other staff who have died, and the fact that many of their deaths are perceived to be as a result of inadequate PPE, highlights the cost of this failure and is already throwing a fierce spotlight on the weakness of the government’s planning.
This approach has barely included the social care system, in which large numbers of elderly residents have been exposed to disease, mostly dying without hospitalisation, in conditions which are far worse for both residents and staff than those which obtain in the ICUs. As far as care homes are concerned, ‘let the old people die’ has indeed come to pass. While many elderly outside care homes may be protected through social distancing, the approach has also left an unknown number of mainly older people to die in their own homes.
The government’s policy of designating only over-70s as the ‘vulnerable group’ has exposed many middle-aged and some young people to serious illness and death. In some highly publicised cases, call-centre operators or ambulance staff – possibly operating on the official assumption that the illness is milder in the young – have left it too late to hospitalise younger patients. Any relaxation will likely require the Government to revert to this idea of an elderly ‘vulnerable group’, bringing the coherence of their public health message into question.

Lining up the scapegoats 

Ministers are already systematically blaming the scientists, and are likely preparing to scapegoat Jeremy Hunt, Philip Hammond & co. for the weak state of the NHS, failure to prepare pandemic capacity, and austerity (Hunt’s remarkably constructive role in the crisis may be partly motivated by an awareness of this danger). There is also a nasty undercurrent of blaming China which may become more prominent.

Once the sense of imminent crisis and national unity wanes, the lockdown honeymoon will be over. Public opinion will likely polarise between those who reject the government’s careless way with life and those who resent the continuing restrictions on life and work.  Johnson-Cummings will hope that space for obfuscation will be created by an over-cautious BBC as well as their natural allies.  Yet the propaganda machine may need to go into overdrive to browbeat the critics.

In the medium term, at least, it is not certain to work. It is four long years to the next election. Time for people to forget, Johnson will hope. But time also for the idea that Covid-19 was his Iraq to take hold.

 

As many younger people die, why did the Government minimise the under-70s’ vulnerability to Covid-19?

[image error]

Dr David Hepburn tells C4 News (3 April) ‘all our ICU patients are in their 50s or younger’

A central feature of the Government’s public health advice has been the idea that the over-70s, along with people with serious health conditions, are the ‘vulnerable’, ‘at risk’ group in the epidemic. Most younger people therefore believed that they if they caught Covid-19, they would get only a ‘mild’ disease, ‘not even as bad as flu’, as was often heard only a couple of weeks ago.

Many have been shocked at the number of younger people who have died in the UK, and wonder why we weren’t prepared for this. Welsh consultant Dr David Hepburn tells Channel 4 News that ‘all our ICU patients are in their 50s or younger’. The Government is lining up its excuses, even anticipating a ‘reckoning’ with China over ‘misinformation’ in relation to the outbreak. Michael Gove claims that some of China’s reports on the virus were unclear about the ‘scale, nature and infectiousness’ of the disease. 

In an article examining the papers of the Government’s Scientific Advisory Group for Emergencies (SAGE), Professor Sir Lawrence Freedman suggests that the vulnerability of younger people, in particular, was unclear. ‘The overall picture of this extraordinary moment changes with new information about the virus itself’, he writes. ‘Policies based on the idea that by far the most vulnerable group are elderly people become increasingly suspect as the fit and young are regularly struck down.’ 

Evidence of under-70s’ vulnerability from China

The problem with this narrative is that the vulnerability of younger people is not new information. It was perfectly clear from China. Early reports from Wuhan already showed many people much younger than 70 suffering severe disease. This was widely highlighted when the whistleblower Dr Li Wenliang died aged 34 on 7th February. 

Indeed, among the SAGE papers, we find a 10th February report of an Imperial College team headed by Professor Neil Ferguson with a table, ‘Hubei early deaths 2020.07.02’, linked in the paper, analysing 39 cases. The age distribution was not tabulated but individuals’ ages were given, so we can summarise them: twelve were over 80, nine 70-79, twelve 60-69, four 50-59, one was in their 40s and one in their 30s. 

This was not a representative sample, but it is striking that figures were there, in the papers available to SAGE at this early stage, showing 48 per cent of cases under 70 and 15 per cent under 60. One would have thought that the scientists, if not the politicians, would have spotted this and looked further into it.

If they overlooked this, more representative Chinese data, based on 44,000 cases, were published on 17th February, showing the following death rates:

Deaths as a percentage




of reported cases
Percentage of


Age range
in the age group
total deaths


80+
14.8
20.3


70-79
8
30.5


60-69
3.6
30.2


50-59
1.3
12.7


40-49
0.4
3.7


30-39
0.2
1.8


20-29
0.2
0.7


10-19
0
0.1


0-9
0
0

The left-hand column was widely reproduced, and even in these figures it was quite obvious that there was a gradual increase in the death rate along with increasing age, rather than a sharp change at 70 or any other age. 

The right-hand column was not widely reported. Yet it showed that 49 per cent of those who died were under 70 and 19 per cent under 60. The number of deaths of people in their 60s who died was pracitcally identical to that of people in their 70s. There was significant death in all age groups except the under-20s. 

Another figure in the Chinese table should have rung alarm bells: almost a third of victims (32.8 per cent) had no ‘comorbid conditions’. Although later Italian data suggested that almost all victims had at least one condition, these widely used Chinese data, the major source for the World Health Organisation and UK responses, implied that the fit and healthy were also vulnerable. 

Failing to warn the middle-aged and young

Yet the British authorities drew the conclusion that the over-70s together with those with pre-existing conditions were the ‘vulnerable’ or ‘at risk’ group, and based their strategies on ‘cocooning’ them, as Dr David Halpern, head of the Government’s Behavioural Insights Team put it on 11th March, at the time when the Government was still pursuing the notorious goal of ‘herd immunity’. Even after the policy switched a week later, it was still the ‘over-70s’ who were told to isolate.

Yet the dangerous consequences of an over-overemphasising the elderly, at the expense of the middle-aged and younger groups, had become clear in Italy in early March, when doctors reported over-60s being denied intubation because of the large numbers of under-60s requiring it. 

But still the UK government failed to warn middle-aged and young people of the dangers they faced. While increasingly complaining that many in these age-groups were flouting social distancing advice, the Government failed to give them the key information which might have changed their behaviour: they were also at risk.

Half-digesting the available information, leading to culpable ignorance of the threat

I have combed the SAGE papers for scientific advice justifying the restriction of the at-risk group to the over-70s. I’ve found only one one paper which refers to the decision. This states that it was ‘to be discussed and agreed by SAGE on 10th March as a change from over 65’s’. It had been ‘modelled for 65+, 70+, 80+’, and although the modelling isn’t explained, it’s noted that ‘models using 65+, and 70+ deliver comparable results’. 

So why was the cut-off changed from 65 to 70? Even recommending protection for the over-65s would have alerted many more potential victims. Without a scientific reason, did political interference lead to this change?

In any case, it remains completely unclear why, if the Government had really taken on board the evidence from China, they would have so consistently referred to only the over-70s as ‘vulnerable’. It wasn’t that the Chinese were unclear (about this at least), still less that they had misinformed us. 

Rather ministers and, seemingly, also their scientific advisers were guilty of only half-digesting the available information. This seems to have made them culpably ignorant about the threat posed by the disease to the middle-aged and young. Indeed, having put the ‘over-70’ idea so consistently at the centre of their propaganda, they appear to have made the mistake of believing it themselves. 

As younger victims fill up ICUs, young nurses and doctors risk their lives, and older people risk being left to die in their homes and care homes while ICU beds and scarce ventilators go to the relatively young, we seem to be paying a high price for this carelessness.