Today at 11pm GMT - New borders along the LODE Zone Line in the North Sea and the Irish Sea in 2020 "THE YEAR OF TRUTH"

Since 1991, when the LODE project was first proposed, the existence of boundaries, and orienting the focus of the work to these boundaries, there has been stability in the status of the political borders along the LODE Zone Line in a period approaching three decades. These rare exceptions include the Russian incursion into the eastern region of the Ukraine, which continues to challenge the sovereignty of the nation. The other exceptions are closer to Liverpool and Hull and include the new border controls that now exists in the Irish Sea between Great Britain and Northern Ireland, as it continues to be part of the EU single market (and thereby avoiding a hard border with Ireland), and the new borders with the European Union following Brexit!

Re:LODE Radio considers the existence of this regulatory border between Great Britain and Northern Ireland to be of historical significance, whatever the problems are that are bound to emerge in the customs process of goods arriving from England, Scotland and Wales in the coming days. This border in the Irish Sea exists to guarantee the free movement of people and goods within the coastal boundaries of the island of Ireland, north and south of the border between the state of Ireland (Eire) and the six counties of Ireland that form Northern Ireland as a territory. The whole of the island of Ireland, north and south, are part of the EU single market, while Northern Ireland remains a part of the United Kingdom of Great Britain and Northern Ireland. 

But the question is: For how long?

The Brexit Institute blog (30 December 2020) considers the "last minute" consequences of the legislation that comes into force at 11pm today.

The Brexit Institute states its mission thus: 

On 23 June 2016, the United Kingdom (UK) voted in a national referendum to leave the European Union (EU) — a process known as Brexit. While the withdrawal of the UK from the EU remains clouded in uncertainties, Brexit represents arguably the most important political event in Europe since the Fall of the Berlin Wall. It upset consolidated assumptions on the finality of the EU, and simultaneously opened new challenges: for the UK constitutional settlement, e.g. in Scotland and Northern Ireland, for the relations between the UK and Ireland, as well as for the future of the EU as such.

Given the multifaceted legal, political and economic implications of Brexit, Dublin City University (DCU) has established the Brexit Institute with the aim to explore how Brexit impacts on government, business and society at large. The DCU Brexit Institute operates as a hub and a magnet for the analysis of Brexit, both from an academic and a policy perspective. Through the organization of regular events the Brexit Institute provides a leading platform to document and debate developments in the relations between the UK and the EU.

On April 7, 2020 Oran Doyle (Trinity College Dublin) had this article published on a webpage of the Brexit Institute, below a map of Ireland (see above) under the heading: 

The Good Friday Agreement and Irish Unification: Constitutional Issues

The Good Friday Agreement, which marks its 22nd anniversary this Good Friday, built a new model of power-sharing politics on the foundation of a territorial compromise. On the one hand, Ireland and Irish Nationalists accepted the legitimacy of Northern Ireland’s status as a component part of the United Kingdom. On the other hand, the United Kingdom and Ulster Unionists accepted that Northern Ireland would only remain part of the United Kingdom for as long as a majority of people in Northern Ireland so wished it.

In 1998, Irish unification seemed a distant prospect. But demographic change was slowly producing an electorate more open to unification, and Brexit has now dramatically increased the attractiveness of a united Ireland replete with EU membership. As a result, although opinions on the likelihood of a united Ireland diverge widely, the territorial compromise of 1998 is under pressure. In this post, I will review what the Good Friday Agreement has to say about Irish unification.

The constitutional issues section of the Agreement provides that it is for the people of Ireland alone, by agreement between the two parts, to exercise their right of self-determination on the basis of consent, freely and concurrently given, North and South, to bring about a United Ireland. If this happens, it will be a binding obligation on both Governments to introduce and support in their respective Parliaments legislation to give effect to that wish. An Annex to this section of the Agreement specifies provisions to be included in British legislation. This requires that Northern Ireland can only leave the UK with the consent of a majority of the people of Northern Ireland voting in a poll.

Four important points follow from these provisions. First, the threshold in Northern Ireland is a majority of its people. There have occasionally been suggestions that a supermajority should be required, or a majority of both communities in Northern Ireland. Such approaches would breach the Good Friday Agreement.

Second, consent to unification in Northern Ireland requires a referendum. However, the Agreement does not specify what mechanism is required in the South. I have suggested elsewhere that, although it might be possible for the South to authorise unification without a referendum, the scale of accompanying constitutional change would almost certainly require a referendum. This referendum could either amend or replace the current Constitution.

Third, the consent of North and South must be concurrently given. The consents need not be simultaneous, but ‘concurrently’ does impose some limitations. In my view, the two referendums must occur under the same set of political conditions, such that there is no reason to suspect that the consent given under one would have lapsed before the other consent is given. This could occur simply due to passage of time but also due to a radical change in political circumstances. For instance, would we consider consents given before and after the onset of the coronavirus crisis as concurrent?

Fourth, and often overlooked, legislation is required for unification. Referendums in the North and South would not be sufficient of themselves to bring about unification; each Government is required to introduce legislation to give effect to unification. If the UK and Irish Government agree on the form of unification, there should be few difficulties. It cannot be assumed, however, that agreement will be easy. The Brexit process is an illustration of how difficult it can be for two parties to agree on the terms of a separation. Article 50 of the Treaty of European Union—for all its flaws—at least specified clearly the legal consequence of a failure to reach agreement. The GFA makes no such provision.

What happens if both North and South vote for unification but the British and Irish Governments fail to agree or, as happened with Brexit, the British Government fails to secure the approval of Westminster for an agreement with the Irish Government. In my view, the obligation to introduce legislation applies separately and individually to each Government. If agreement is not reached between the Governments, the Irish Government would still be under an obligation to introduce legislation to give effect to the two unification votes, and the Oireachtas is virtually guaranteed to approve such legislation. At that point, unification would have occurred as a matter of Irish law but not as a matter of UK law.

In these circumstances of disagreement, events at Westminster could play out in one of two different ways. Westminster could enact legislation giving effect to unification. In that context, residual disputes between the newly unified Ireland and the rump United Kingdom (assuming Scottish independence has not occurred) would have to be resolved through international negotiation and litigation. Alternatively, Westminster could refuse to enact legislation to give effect to Irish unification. In that scenario, Northern Ireland would remain in the United Kingdom as a matter of UK law but become part of Ireland as a matter of Irish law. It would be deeply regrettable for the constitutional status of Northern Ireland once again to become the subject of legal dispute between Ireland and the United Kingdom. In designing any unification process, therefore, it will be important to reduce the risk of such disagreement re-emerging.

The views expressed in this article reflect the position of the author and not necessarily the one of the Brexit Institute Blog

Oran Doyle is a professor in law at Trinity College Dublin. This blogpost draws on a working paper co-authored with David Kenny 

Along the LODE Zone Line, at 11pm Greenwich Mean Time, new borders will change the boundaries of the political landscape of European nations, as the United Kingdom leaves the European Union.

This report by Rajeev Syal, posted on the Guardian website (Wed 30 Dec 2020), appeared in today's print edition of the newspaper, Thursday 31 December 2020, with the headline:

Parliament passes trade deal despite 'farce' claim over commons scrutiny

Rajeev Syal writes: 

Boris Johnson’s Brexit trade deal with Brussels has cleared the House of Commons as the government attempts to rush through complex legislation in just 14 hours.

The prime minister described the historic deal as “not a rupture but a resolution”, before MPs voted through the European Union (future relationship) bill by 521 votes to 73 – a majority of 448.

It meant the bill continued to the House of Lords and is expected to be given royal assent shortly before midnight.

That would pave the way for the deal to take effect at 11pm on Thursday when the Brexit transition period ends.

Parliament was recalled for an emergency one-day session to approve the EU-UK trade and cooperation agreement, concluded by Johnson and the European commission president, Ursula von der Leyen, on Christmas Eve.

Conservative, Labour and the Scottish National party MPs criticised the government for allowing for so little time for parliamentary scrutiny of the bill.

Johnson opened the debate on the UK’s post-Brexit trade deal with the EU shortly after 10am on Wednesday.

Johnson’s deal passed with ease with Labour’s support though the Liberal Democrats, the SNP and the Democratic Unionist party (DUP) voted against it.

The prime minister told MPs the deal would redefine the UK’s relationship with the EU. “We now seize this moment to forge a fantastic new relationship with our European neighbours, based on free trade and friendly cooperation,” he said.

“We have done this in less than a year, in the teeth of a pandemic, and we have pressed ahead with this task, resisting all calls for delay, precisely because creating certainty about our future provides the best chance of beating Covid and bouncing back even more strongly next year.”

Most Conservative Eurosceptic MPs were jubilant. Sir Bill Cash, who founded the Maastricht Referendum Campaign in the early 1990s, said: “Like Alexander the Great, Boris has cut the Gordian Knot.”

Mark Francois, one of the self-styled Spartans who held out against Theresa May’s Brexit withdrawal agreement, told fellow Eurosceptics they could now “lower our spears”.

Labour backed the deal, despite misgivings from 37 MPs who defied the party whip to abstain or vote against it.

Keir Starmer, the party’s leader, described the deal as “thin”, but told the Commons that Labour would back it because the alternative would be devastating for the UK.

“It’s often said there’s nothing simple about Brexit, but the choice before the house today is perfectly simple,” he said. “Do we implement the treaty that has been agreed with the EU or do we not?

“That is the choice. If we choose not to, the outcome is clear. We leave the transition period without a deal, without a deal on security, on trade, on fisheries, without protection for our manufacturing sector, for farming, for countless British businesses and without a foothold to build a future relationship with the EU.

“Anyone choosing that option today knows there is no time to renegotiate.”

Three junior shadow ministers – Helen Hayes, Tonia Antoniazzi and Florence Eshalomi – resigned from their posts after abstaining over the bill. Bell Ribeiro-Addy, the Labour MP for Streatham, voted against the agreement.

The trade and cooperation agreement with the EU runs to more than 1,200 pages. The bill is 80 pages.

The Hansard Society, the leading procedural thinktank, published a blog by its senior researcher, Brigid Fowler, describing the process as “a farce”.

The Conservative former Brexit secretary David Davis said the agreement left “issues to deal with” including Northern Ireland, fishing and Gibraltar. He told the Commons: “It’s not over. All will lead to uncomfortable decisions in the near future.”

Davis said one day was not enough time to deal with a 1,200-page treaty and further time must be given to it to enable the UK to develop its strategy.

“The EU will use the treaty to its own advantage … We have to come back to this treaty and look at it in detail at all 1,200 pages so we don’t get into conflict, don’t fall into traps, don’t get into acrimonious disputes with them [the EU],” he said.

Almost all Tory MPs approved the agreement, although former cabinet ministers Owen Paterson and John Redwood abstained. Paterson, a former Northern Ireland secretary, said he was “very torn” over the deal because the region was divided from the rest of the UK.

“I’d love to vote for this today but I really can’t vote for a measure which actually divides the UK as a different regime on tax as part of the customs union that’ll be under the ECJ, single market etc,” he said.

Opposition to the bill from the SNP and the DUP appeared to be a sign that Brexit has increased tensions over the union.

Ian Blackford, the leader of the SNP in Westminster, said many Scots would prefer to live in the EU than in a “broken Brexit Britain”.

Earlier in the day, the European commission president, Ursula von der Leyen, and the European council president, Charles Michel, formally signed the agreement.

Following a brief ceremony in Brussels, the leather-bound documents were then flown to London by the RAF to be signed by Johnson.

On the next page (page 11, Thursday 31 December), in today's print edition of the Guardian, John Crace's Sketch of parliamentary shenanigans carries the headline: 

We call it the return of parliamentary sovereignty. Others would call it a fiasco  

The headline carried on the Guardian webpage for The politics sketch runs:

On Boris's big day, Tories kid themselves this is the deal they always wanted

John Crace writes: 

Who would have guessed? When push came to shove it turned out that a bad deal was better than no deal after all. The first deal in history to put more barriers in the way of free trade than the one that preceded it. A 1,200-page treaty and 80-page bill that was granted a mere four and a half hours of what passed for scrutiny in a recalled House of Commons to allow it to become law before the end of the year. In most countries this would be called a farce: here in the UK we call it a return of parliamentary sovereignty.

At least that’s the way Boris Johnson was selling the deal to his eager backbenchers, who were all desperate to applaud his negotiating skills and brinkmanship, as he opened the debate. Such as it was. The sense of anticlimax was almost tangible. Almost as if the Tories were also having to kid themselves that the deal was the one they had always wanted.

But this was Boris’s big day out, and he was determined to milk it for all he could. It’s not often he can just about claim to have delivered on a promise, even if much of what was in the promise bore little similarity to the earlier promises he had made. Then the truth has always been a moving target for Johnson. There was certainly nothing about an extra £350m for the NHS each week. But then that bus left years ago.

The prime minister began with the good stuff on no trade tariffs or quotas and rather skated over all the potential downsides. There was certainly nothing on Brexit levelling up the UK economy: it seems to have slowly dawned on Boris that it had been 10 years of Tory governments and not the EU that had widened the equality gap in the country.

Rather Johnson tried to sell the deal as doing a favour not just to the UK but to the EU as well, because it would mean that we stopped behaving like a country that was unhappy in the relationship and kept having affairs. It’s not you, darling, it’s me. So now we would be moving on to a more open marriage where a bit of infidelity was tolerated. You got the feeling he’s used this line plenty of times in the past. To round it off, he concluded by saying that no one loved Europe more than him and to think of Brexit as a resolution rather than a rupture. Which hardly squared with Boris’s years of anti-European rhetoric. But then consistency has never been his strongest suit.

In reply, Keir Starmer first declared that Labour would be supporting the bill as the alternative of a no-deal Brexit would cause even more disruption and put more companies out of business. But having played the national interest card, the Labour leader did a quick recap of some of Johnson’s lies – only last week he had given a speech claiming there would be no non-tariff barriers when the reality was a bureaucratic pile-on – before moving on to the deal’s limitations.

Starting with the complete absence of detail for the service sector, especially financial services. The Tories had just bargained away 80% of the economy to secure the headline trade deal: the French and the Germans were laughing all the way to the bank. Then there was the lack of access to European criminal databases along with a lack of recognition for UK professional qualifications. He could go on. This was the thinnest of deals, one that had only been reached through the UK’s desperation to leave the EU before the end of the year.

Though she pledged to back the bill, Theresa May was lukewarm in her support, pointing out that she had had a much better deal on the table that would have passed if Labour had been prepared to back it. She had a point. To no one’s surprise, the SNP leader in the Commons, Ian Blackford, said his party would not be supporting the bill as Scotland had voted to remain in the EU and Johnson’s deal offered them next to nothing. He, too, had a point.

As the debate progressed, it became clear that Johnson had at least managed to achieve something no Tory leader had managed in decades. He had united his party – if only temporarily – over Europe. So it was job done for Boris, as Brexit had mainly only been about divisions within his own party. It was just a shame he had had to remove all the talent from the benches and replace them with yes men and women in the process.

Even the Brexit headbangers of the European Research Group rolled over like pussycats. In years gone by William Cash had been prepared to defend the British fishing industry and the integrity of Northern Ireland within the the UK. Now he was happily prepared to sacrifice both. Northern Ireland could become a colony of the EU and who gave a shit about fish anyway? Cash compared Johnson to Pericles and Alexander the Great. The rest of the Commons compared Cash to a man without conscience or qualities. David Davis meanwhile proved equally absurd, insisting that a worse deal with the EU was in reality a better deal than one where we retained the same benefits. Go figure. Liam Fox claimed that the union would be stronger due to Brexit. It hadn’t sounded that way.

Kevin Brennan was the first Labour MP to break with the party line by saying he would not be voting for the deal. His logic that parliament should be allowed more time for scrutiny by extending the transition period was impeccable. Up until the point you remembered that Johnson was a career psychopath and would have taken the UK out of the EU on 31 December with no deal if he didn’t get his own way.

Which was pretty much the point that Rachel Reeves made in her closing speech as she reiterated Labour’s support for what was a crap deal, pointing out the seven amendments it had tried to table in the process, as the lesser of two evils. Closing for the government, Michael Gove was his usual insufferable self. Smug, graceless, short of self-awareness – he somehow believes extra bureaucracy will make businesses “match fit” – and still prioritising point scoring over trying to bring the country back together.

The session ended with a whimper as the bill raced through its second, committee and third readings at breakneck speed by a large majority. But anyone who imagined that was the last we would hear of Brexit had rather missed the point. The lack of detail in the trade bill and the methods of conflict resolution promised a whole new world of pain. Months and years down the line, Tory MPs might not be so easily bought off if the economy flatlines. Boris had better watch his back.

Is the UK parliament sovereign, or . . .

. . . just a rubber stamp?

Re:LODE Radio continues to draw attention to the lack of accountability of moribund political classes, and their leadership across the LODE Zone Line, except that is in New Zealand. Those politicians who amplified the rhetoric of nationalism, and nativism, to persuade a disgruntled electorate that Brexit was the panacea for all ills, and a regained sovereignty for the UK parliament the solution to a "brighter" future, rest their laurels, relying on a political culture of "unaccountability", despite the institutions of a supposedly democratic system.

Mark Twain once said that "If voting made a difference, they wouldn't let us do it. "

Except there is no evidence that he did, indeed, say so. There is however this quote from “Voice of the People” column published in the Lowell Sun in September 1976 and written by Robert S. Borden:

"Has it ever dawned on the editors that the attitudes of the 70 million projected non-voters may be very consistent with the reality that the concept of voting and electing representatives is basically dishonest and fraudulent. If voting could change anything it would be made illegal! There is no way any politicians can legally represent anyone because he was elected on a secret ballot by a small percentage of voters. He then claims to represent the people who voted against him and even those who wisely chose not to participate in such criminal activity."

In 1987, following the abolition of the Greater London Council by Margaret Thatcher, the erstwhile leader of the Labour group on the GLC, Ken Livingstone, published a memoir titled:

If Voting Changed Anything They'd Abolish it

Jello Biafra, is an American singer, musician, and spoken word artist. He is the former lead singer and songwriter for the San Francisco punk rock band Dead Kennedys.

Initially active from 1979 to 1986, Dead Kennedys were known for rapid-fire music topped with Biafra's sardonic lyrics and biting social commentary. 

Biafra became a spoken word artist in January 1986 with a performance at University of California, Los Angeles. In his performance he combined humor with his political beliefs, much in the same way that he did with the lyrics to his songs. Despite his continued spoken word performances, he did not begin recording spoken word albums until after the disbanding of the Dead Kennedys.

I Blow Minds for a Living is the third spoken word album by Jello Biafra.

This is track 5. 

"If Voting Changed Anything . . ." 

Entr'acte

Bored of Boris? 

Re:LODE Radio is bored of Boris! He is the idiot in charge, and in the way that politics in the UK has evolved in the "bubbles" of "echoland" he remains . . .   

. . . unaccountably unaccountable! 

Re:LODE Radio considers that Anand Menon, director of The UK in a Changing Europe and professor of European politics and foreign affairs at King’s College London, is among the group of commentators able to articulate the what is happening with Brexit, with as clear and objective a view as anyone, who is interested in the subject, could wish for. Anand Menon writes an Opinion piece for today's print edition of the Guardian (Wed 30 Dec 2020) under the headline:

Brexit is far from done - this deal is no 'game, set and match'  

Anand Menon writes: 

It is hard to imagine a better outcome for the prime minister. Four and a half years after the EU referendum, he clinched an agreement with the EU that many thought impossible. Nigel Farage’s declaration that “the war is over” underlined that Johnson had done so without alienating even the most hardline Brexiters. If Labour’s support was the icing on the cake, a YouGov poll that showed a marked increase in the proportion of voters who thought the government was handling Brexit well (from 24% on 20 December to 37% on 28 December), was the cherry.

So, game and first set to Boris Johnson. If perhaps not quite a bagel, this was, nonetheless, a pretty comprehensive victory. Yet it is worth recalling two things about the tennis scoring system. First, (and for the benefit of some remainers) once you have lost a set, there is no point dwelling on it. Second, however easily you win the first set, the second starts at love-all. There is a lot more of this match to go – and the result is still not clear. Remember John Major’s press secretary declared that it was game, set and match to the British prime minister at Maastricht.

Even in terms of relations with the EU, there are many issues unsettled, including the EU’s “equivalence” decisions for financial services and an “adequacy” decision that would allow for the continued free flow of data. These issues are unilateral decisions for the EU. The ball is in Brussels’ court.

Moreover, problems with implementing what is both a rushed and an incredibly complicated set of arrangements are bound to arise, and will have to be addressed in the myriad new structures the agreement has created. The demand to take back more fish will resurface in five and a half years, when this transition period runs out. And as if all that were not enough, the two sides have agreed to review the whole agreement every five years.

But that is just the deal. Trickier for the prime minister is what to do with his newly won sovereignty. For many leave supporters, Brexit was a means to an end, rather than an end in itself.

A central theme of Conservative Euroscepticism for the last three decades has been the claim that EU membership imposed costly and cumbersome bureaucracy on the UK that acted as a drag on economic growth. The government argues that the UK can use its newfound regulatory freedom to invigorate its economy through what Michael Gove has referred to as “smarter and better” regulation.

Freedom, however, comes at a price. Under the terms of the newly signed agreement, moves by the UK to cut regulatory standards could be met by almost immediate retaliation in the form of new tariffs, losing the prime minister’s central (some would argue, sole) achievement in his trade agreement.

And even when it comes to specific sectors, there are difficult choices to be made. The chancellor has claimed that leaving the EU means the UK can “do things differently” to make the City of London the most attractive place to list companies in the world.

In the same breath, however, Rishi Sunak reassured us that dialogue was continuing with the EU over equivalence decisions. These will determine how easily financial services firms can trade with the EU. Yet the more ministers emphasise their desire to diverge from EU rules, the less likely EU authorities are to grant the equivalence they seek. The tradeoffs between autonomy and market access inherent in Brexit have not gone away.

Of course, a defining feature of the past four years has been a refusal on the part of the government to openly discuss or, indeed, acknowledge the existence of these tradeoffs. It was entirely fitting that, as his last shots of the first set, the prime minister declared that “there will be no non-tariff barriers to trade”, allowing businesses to do “even more trade with our European friends”.

As long as the material impacts of Brexit were not visible, this strategy worked just fine. Now, however, we move from Brexit prophecy and the government cannot hide from Brexit reality for long. Advertisements on Christmas TV, followed by Gove’s media round, were designed to ram home a very different message: businesses needed to be ready to deal with an obstacle course of new barriers to trade from 1 January.

It is those barriers that mean Johnson’s deal will depress UK growth – shaving about 6.4% off UK GDP per person over the next 10 years, according to forecasts by my thinkthank, UK in a Changing Europe.

Next year, people are more likely to notice immediate disruption and supply chain glitches from Brexit. But these effects will be masked by a short-term vaccine-fuelled economic recovery. Brexit, however, will sap our economic potential over the long term, and those effects will become clearer when the pandemic recedes into the past. Even with a deal, the impact of Brexit on the economy will be significantly greater than that of the pandemic.

Yet ministers present Brexit as a springboard from which they will be better able to achieve ambitious economic objectives. Gove implied leaving the EU meant the government could now more effectively turn its attention to “levelling up” the country. The combination of Brexit and the pandemic, however, will have the opposite effect – both imposing the heaviest costs on the poorer parts of the country.

And, as if all that were not enough, there are the indirect and, from the government’s perspective, unwanted consequences of Brexit to address. Foremost among these is the determination of the Scottish National party to use Brexit as a launchpad for another independence referendum. Polls suggest that Nicola Sturgeon will secure another majority in 2021 on the basis of a pledge to go to the people again.

Johnson would doubtless reject calls for another Scottish independence referendum. Consequently, by the time his term in office enters its final phase, he will be playing for extremely high stakes. Labour will struggle to secure a majority on its own, given the position from which it will have to fight the next election. This raises the prospect of a “progressive” coalition, and with it IndyRef2. Johnson may think the threat of Sturgeon will aid his chances of securing a second term. But much will hinge on his success in delivering on his Brexit promises.

In the UK, it is only from 11pm on New Year’s Eve, when the transition period comes to an end, that the prime minister will confront his stiffest Brexit challenges. In a country still divided down the middle, where Brexit identities remain stronger than attachments to political parties and where success depends as much on subsequent policy success as on leaving the EU itself, Brexit is far from done. Game set and match this is not.

On the ferry from Holyhead . . .

. . . to Dublin, a long standing communications route, and one that corresponds with the vector of the LODE Zone Line, Peter Murtagh reports today for The Irish Times, on the:

Ghostly atmosphere on one of last ferries to Britain before Brexit takes hold

Peter Murtagh writes: 

Thursday’s early morning ferry from Dublin to Holyhead, one of the last before the January 1st imposition of a European Union trade border between the island of Ireland and the United Kingdom, had a ghostly quality to it.

The Irish Ferries Ulysses has capacity for almost 2,000 passengers, together with 1,342 cars and 241 trucks. In the event, there were perhaps 50 cars, divided roughly even between Irish and UK registration plates.

Freight trailers were visible mainly by their absence. I saw just four.

The ship’s cafe was empty for almost the entirety of the crossing. In Boylan’s Restaurant, half the chairs were stacked on tables, such was the absence of demand. The freight driver’s separate eating area was closed, apparently due to lack of clientele.

In the ship’s shop, festooned with sweatshirts, tourist tat, perfumes and alcohol, the absence of customers allowed the crew member in charge to concentrate instead on stacking shelves for the expected onslaught of shoppers once January 1st has come - and duty free has returned.

A similar “calm before the storm” feeling attends the motorway standard A55 dual carriageway that leads from Holyhead, across Holy Island and slicing on through Anglesey to the Britannia Bridge over the Menai Strait.

For five miles outside the north Wales ferry terminal, the second busiest in the UK, one side of the A55 has been designated a lorry park, similar to the approach road to Dover in Kent.

EU Exit Contraflow, announces an LED sign amid the hundreds of traffic cones and dayglo finger posts that shepherd cars off the west-bound carriageway into Holyhead and onto the other side, leaving the approach road free for the thousands of trucks that may have to stop there if their papers are rejected at the Port and they are turned away from the ferries. But for now, the vast linear lorry park is completely empty — not a rejected truck in sight.

From 11pm Irish time on Thursday, December 31st, the UK formally leaves the EU Single Market and Customs Union, to be replaced by the trade agreement agreed on Christmas Eve between EU and UK negotiators, and since ratified by the British parliament.

What happens on the ground is anyone’s guess. Where once, and for as long as almost anyone can remember, there were no border checks on goods moving around the Single Market between EU Member States, now everything going in or out of the UK from the remaining Member States must comply with the terms of the new agreement.

That means importers and exporters, and those moving their products in or out of the UK, must have their paperwork in order. If it is not, the port operators have no option but to refuse a truck entry to the Port - hence the A55 holding area.

The whole thing is called Operation Cybi, named after the 6th century saint who founded a monastery on Holy Island and is the brainchild of the Welsh government and the Port authorities, not least Ian Davies of Stena Line who heads a team that in effect run the harbour.

Waiting for January 1st and all that comes thereafter, he describes himself as calm and mentions Y2K, the millennium bug it was feared would crash computers on January 1st, 2000, leading to global mayhem, but which in the event made virtually no impact at all.

If that happens this weekend, it will be due very substantially to planning and preparation.

“Above the water, I’m fairly calm,” says Davies, but “like a duck, I’m paddling furiously . . .” 

Note: Boylan's Restaurant is named after Molly Bloom's  manager Blazes Boylan, with whom she is having an affair, while he arranges for her upcoming concert in Belfast. Boylan is well known and well liked around town, but comes across as a rather sleazy individual, especially regarding his attitudes toward women.

MV Ulysses towering over Birkenhead

What is the latest huge ship to dock at Cammell Laird?

As the car ferry Ulysses was dominating the Birkenhead skyline on the 7 January 2017, Savannah Wylde, for the Liverpool Echo asks and answers the question.  

Wikipedia says of this vessel: 

MV Ulysses is a RORO car ferry currently owned and operated by Irish Ferries. The ship was launched on 1 September 2000 at Aker Finnyards shipyard in Rauma, Finland and services the Dublin - Holyhead route.

When launched she was the world's largest car ferry in terms of vehicle capacity.

Savannah Wylde, writing for the Liverpool Echo, asks her readers:

How many times have you gone down Campbeltown road and seen a large vessel towering over Birkenhead in the dry-dock?

Well, at the moment the Irish Ferry, MV Ulysses has visited the shipbuilders for her annual repairs and maintenance.

The 15 year-old car ferry can carry up to 1,342 cars and 240 trucks. This is alongside its capabilities to accommodate over 2,000 passengers and crew members.

All Irish Ferry Ships are taken out of service at least once a year for an annual maintenance and repairs. Usually towards the end or early beginning of the year out of busy peak-times, so they are ready for the summer and holiday rushes.

So you may want to keep an eye out for the Ulysses' sister ships MS Oscar Wilde and MV Isle of Inishmore, who are also annual visitors to the shipyard.

The Ulysses is named, NOT for the latinised name of the hero of the Odyssey, Odysseus. She is named after a novel, a miniature epic, an epyllion of and for Dublin, the modernist literary work Ulysses, by James Joyce. The last occasion that Joyce travelled to Holyhead from Dublin was in 1912, ten years before the publication of Ulysses in 1922. 

Joyce had returned to Dublin from his time in Trieste briefly in mid-1912, during his years-long fight with Dublin publisher George Roberts over the publication of Dubliners. His trip was once again fruitless, and on his return, he wrote the poem "Gas from a Burner", an invective against Roberts. He left Dublin, and Ireland, with his partner, Nora Barnacle, and his children on the evening of 11th September 1912. After this trip, he never again came closer to Dublin than London, despite many pleas from his father and invitations from his fellow Irish writer William Butler Yeats. 

Border controls, customs, and Ulysses . . .

. . . (that is the printed copies of Ulysses the book rather than the eponymous hero) occasioned some border incidents. While the good ship Ulysses continues to sail between ports, and unimpeded, this was not always the case as far as the printed version of the book was concerned.

Thanks to Ezra Pound, serial publication of the novel in the magazine The Little Review began in March 1918, an American literary magazine founded by Margaret Anderson. It published literary and art work from 1914 to May 1929, and during this period, with the help of Jane Heap and Ezra Pound, Anderson created a magazine that featured a wide variety of transatlantic modernists and cultivated many early examples of experimental writing and art. Many contributors were American, British, Irish, and French. In addition to publishing a variety of international literature, The Little Review printed early examples of surrealist artwork and Dadaism. 

The magazine's most well known work was the serialization of James Joyce's Ulysses.

This provoked the first accusations of obscenity with which the book would be identified for so long. Its amorphous structure with frank, intimate musings (stream of consciousness) were seen to offend both church and state. The publication encountered problems with New York Postal Authorities; serialisation ground to a halt in December 1920; the editors were convicted of publishing obscenity in February 1921.

Publishing the "truth"?

Ulysses is a literary work, a work of fiction. This work of fiction is not based on the "truth" of modernity and its profound re-shaping of the human condition and experience, and it is not simply "a part of this truth". . .  

. . . it is a truth!

This truth goes way beyond the material facts of the particularities and specifics of times and places, it is a multiple truth about different people in different states of motion, including moments of rest. Above all it is a work of literature and language.

Language; the collective hymn to existence. 

It includes the movements, the articulations, and the randomness of stimulation and response, of rest and reflection, systole and diastole in breath, and of thought itself as experience. Thought, and thinking as a fact. A fact in the sense that something is happening and being made, living, and not conveniently measurable.

According to Declan Kiberd:  

"Before Joyce, no writer of fiction had so foregrounded the process of thinking". 

The truth is not always welcome. It was the ‘Nausicaa’ episode that attracted immense notoriety while the book was being published in serial form by The Little Review. The fires of controversy were further fuelled by the magazine with the dada poet Elsa von Freytag-Loringhoven's defence of Ulysses in an essay "The Modest Woman."

Partly because of this controversy, Joyce found getting a publisher to accept the book to be difficult, but it was published in 1922 by Sylvia Beach from her well-known Rive Gauche bookshop, Shakespeare and Company. An English edition published the same year by Joyce's patron, Harriet Shaw Weaver, ran into further difficulties with the United States authorities, and 500 copies that were shipped to the States were seized and possibly destroyed.

Destroying books? 

Q. Why? 

A. Because they create conditions for change? 

The video montage below begins with a clip from Francois Truffaut's first non-French film was a 1966 adaptation of Ray Bradbury's classic science fiction novel Fahrenheit 451, reflecting perhaps upon Truffaut's love of books, but also a sense of a dystopian present and future. Often regarded as one of Bradbury's best works, the novel presents a future American society where books are outlawed and "firemen" burn any that are found.

Discussions about Fahrenheit 451 often center on its story foremost as a warning against state-based censorship. Bradbury, had first published the novel in 1953, during the McCarthy era, reflecting concerns about censorship in the United States. During a radio interview in 1956, Bradbury said:

I wrote this book at a time when I was worried about the way things were going in this country four years ago. Too many people were afraid of their shadows; there was a threat of book burning. Many of the books were being taken off the shelves at that time . . . 

During the McCarthy era, hundreds of Americans were accused of being "communists" or "communist sympathizers"; they became the subject of aggressive investigations and questioning before government or private industry panels, committees, and agencies. The primary targets of such suspicions were government employees, those in the entertainment industry, academics, and labour-union activists. Suspicions were often given credence despite inconclusive or questionable evidence, and the level of threat posed by a person's real or supposed leftist associations or beliefs were sometimes exaggerated. Many people suffered loss of employment or destruction of their careers; some were imprisoned. Most of these punishments came about through trial verdicts that were later overturned, laws that were later declared unconstitutional, dismissals for reasons later declared illegal or actionable, or extra-legal procedures, such as informal blacklists, that would come into general disrepute. The most notable examples of McCarthyism include the so-called investigations conducted by Senator McCarthy, and the hearings conducted by the House Un-American Activities Committee (HUAC).

McCarthyism was supported by a variety of groups, including the American Legion and various other anti-communist organizations. One core element of support was a variety of militantly anti-communist women's groups such as the American Public Relations Forum and the Minute Women of the U.S.A.. These organised tens of thousands of housewives into study groups, letter-writing networks, and patriotic clubs that coordinated efforts to identify and eradicate what they saw as subversion.

Although far-right radicals were the bedrock of support for McCarthyism, they were not alone. A broad "coalition of the aggrieved" found McCarthyism attractive, or at least politically useful. Common themes uniting the coalition were opposition to internationalism, particularly the United Nations; opposition to social welfare provisions, particularly the various programs established by the New Deal; and opposition to efforts to reduce inequalities in the social structure of the United States. 

One focus of popular McCarthyism concerned the provision of public health services, particularly vaccination, mental health care services, and fluoridation, all of which were denounced by some to be communist plots to poison or brainwash the American people. Such viewpoints led to collisions between McCarthyite radicals and supporters of public-health programs, most notably in the case of the Alaska Mental Health Bill controversy of 1956. William F. Buckley Jr., the founder of the influential conservative political magazine National Review, wrote a defence of McCarthy, McCarthy and his Enemies, in which he asserted that: 

"McCarthyism ... is a movement around which men of good will and stern morality can close ranks."

In addition, as Richard Rovere points out, many ordinary Americans became convinced that there must be "no smoke without fire" and lent their support to McCarthyism. The Gallup poll found that at his peak in January 1954, 50% of the American public supported McCarthy, while 29% had an unfavourable opinion. His support fell to 34% in June 1954. Republicans tended to like what McCarthy was doing and Democrats did not, though McCarthy had significant support from traditional Democratic ethnic groups, especially Catholics, as well as many unskilled workers and small-business owners. (McCarthy himself was a Catholic.) He had very little support among union activists and Jews. 

Part of the history of the political use of conspiracy theories?

The clip from Truffaut's Fahrenheit 451, which ends with a "fireman" brandishing a copy of Adolf Hitler's Mein Kampf, is followed by a critique and historical overview of the burning of books in Nazi Germany produced by the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum. 

Burning . . .

. . . all the books! 

In 1923, the year following the publication of Ulysses in Paris, John Rodker produced a print run of 500 more intended to replace the missing copies sent the United states the previous year. The consignment, destined for despatch from Liverpool were instead intercepted and burned by British customs at Folkestone.  

Q. When it comes to 'mores' and 'customs', what's the difference?  

A. 'Mores' are values! 'Customs' are practices!   

The publishing obscenity conviction was based on the "Nausicaä" episode of Ulysses.

Nausicaä is the daughter of King Alcinous and Queen Arete of Phaeacia. Her name means "burner of ships" (ναῦς ‘ship’; κάω ‘to burn’).

In Book Six of the Odyssey, Odysseus is shipwrecked on the coast of the island of Scheria (Phaeacia in some translations). Nausicaä and her handmaidens go to the seashore to wash clothes. 

While on the seashore they also play a ball game together. The 2nd century BC grammarian Agallis attributed the invention of ballgames to Nausicaä, most likely because she was the first person in literature to be described playing with a ball. However, Herodotus attributes the invention of games, including ballgames, to the Lydians. 

Awakened by their ball game, Odysseus emerges from the forest completely naked, scaring the servants away, and begs Nausicaä for aid. 

She gives Odysseus some of the laundry to wear and takes him to the edge of the town. Realizing that rumors might arise if Odysseus is seen with her, she and the servants go into town ahead of him, but first she advises him to go directly to Alcinous's house and make his case to Nausicaä's mother, Arete. Arete is known as wiser even than Alcinous, and Alcinous trusts her judgment. Odysseus follows this advice, approaching Arete and winning her approval, and is received as a guest by Alcinous.

During his stay, Odysseus recounts his adventures to Alcinous and his court. This recounting forms a substantial portion of the Odyssey. Alcinous then generously provides Odysseus with the ships that finally bring him home to Ithaca.

Nausicaä is young and very pretty; Odysseus says she resembles a goddess, particularly Artemis. Homer gives a literary account of love never expressed (possibly one of the earliest examples of unrequited love in literature). Nausicaä is presented as a potential love interest for Odysseus: she tells her friend that she would like her husband to be like him, and her father tells Odysseus that he would let him marry her. But the two do not have a romantic relationship. Nausicaä is also a mother figure for Odysseus; she ensures his return home, and says "Never forget me, for I gave you life". Odysseus never tells his wife Penelope about his encounter with Nausicaä, out of all the women he met on his long journey home.

By the seashore . . .  

. . . on Sandymount Strand

In James Joyce's Ulysses the author's version of Nausicaä occurs as Episode 13, where all the action of the episode takes place on the rocks of Sandymount Strand, a shoreline area to the southeast of central Dublin. A young woman named Gerty MacDowell is seated on the rocks with her two friends, Cissy Caffrey and Edy Boardman. The girls are taking care of three children, a baby, and four-year-old twins named Tommy and Jacky. Gerty contemplates love, marriage and femininity as night falls. The reader is gradually made aware that Bloom is watching her from a distance. Gerty teases the onlooker by exposing her legs and underwear, and Bloom, in turn, masturbates. Bloom's masturbatory climax is echoed by the fireworks at the nearby bazaar. As Gerty leaves, Bloom realises that she has a lame leg, and believes this is the reason she has been ‘left on the shelf’. After several mental digressions he decides to visit Mina Purefoy at the maternity hospital. 

It is uncertain how much of the episode is Gerty's thoughts, and how much is Bloom's sexual fantasy. Some believe that the episode is divided into two halves: the first half the highly romanticized viewpoint of Gerty, and the other half that of the older and more realistic Bloom. 

Joyce himself said, however, that ‘nothing happened between [Gerty and Bloom]. It all took place in Bloom’s imagination’.

From the bonfires of Folkestone to a supra-national identity . . .

. . . James Joyce's Ulysses has a very different set of meanings that have been set in play in the decades before the launching, at the end of one century and the beginning of another, in the year 2000, of the MV Ulysses.

It is Declan Kiberd that offers Re:LODE Radio the most rounded version of "the how", and "the why", of this transformation in the public reception of Joyce's Ulysses, and that it's not something that has just occurred in recent years, it's at the heart of the artist's intentions immanent in the work from the beginning. It may be challenging, but it is an art work for everyone to read, not to burn. 

Joyce was an original, in the Blakean sense. An artist who connected to "origins"! 

John Barrell's Preface to his book The Political Theory of Painting from Reynolds to Hazlett begins with these lines: 'This Whole Book', wrote Blake, in the margin of his copy of Reynold's Discourses on Art, 'was Written to Serve Political Purposes'. John Barrell then explains "This book is written to reply, 'of course it was'."

Section III of John Barrell's book is titled A Blake Dictionary and considers the use of the term 'Original' according to William Blake.

Bloomsday

In 2009 Declan Kiberd contributed to the Guardian pages (Tue 16 Jun 2009) on Bloomsday, explaining that:

There are good reasons why Dublin has taken Bloomsday, the celebration of Joyce's classic novel to its heart

Declan Kiberd writes under the headline: 

Ulysses, modernism's most sociable masterpiece 

"What a town Dublin is!'' exclaimed James Joyce to the painter Frank Budgen: "I wonder if there is another like it. Everbody has time to hail a friend and start a conversation about a third party."

Joyce's Ulysses (1922) is one of the masterpieces of modernism, accorded the same exalted status as Marcel Proust's Remembrance of Things Past or Robert Musil's The Man Without Qualities. Unlike them, however, it has become a defining element in the life of the city where it is set.

Like the prelates of the Catholic church, Joyce was perhaps cunning in setting aside a single day (16 June, or Bloomsday, the day in 1904 the book takes place) on which to celebrate a feast. When Leopold Bloom and Stephen Dedalus sit down together at day's end over coffee and a bread-roll, neither man says "do this in memory of me", yet every year the cult grows. As with so many cults, it has its routes of pilgrimage, special foods, ritual observances and priestly decoders of the sacred text.

Many of the surrealists who lived near Joyce in Paris had also grown up as Catholics – but their displaced religion was filled with edicts, dogmas and excommunications, while he by contrast appropriated the more celebratory rituals of Catholicism. As if the case with all emergent religions, the cult of James Joyce – known jocularly as The Feast of Saint Jam Juice in Dublin – has spawned its own loyal opposition. On 16 June 2004, when 10,000 Bloomsday breakfasts were served on Dublin streets to mark the great centenary, a spray-painter went to work and wrote "Bloom is a Cod" on a building-site wall. There were no inverted commas around the quotation in that instance.

Every year hundreds of Dubliners dress as characters from the book – Stephen with his cane, Leopold wearing his bowler hat, Molly in her petticoats – as if to assert their willingness to become one with the text. They re-enact scenes in Eccles Street, Ormond Quay and Sandycove's Martello Tower. It is quite impossible to imagine any other masterpiece of modernism having quite such an effect on the life of a city.

That celebration may be an attempt by Dubliners to reassert a lost sense of community, a poignant repossession of streets through which on other days of the year they hurry from one private experience to another. Although Ulysses is a book of privacies and subjectivities, a remarkable number of its scenes are set in public space – library, museum, bar, cemetery, and, most of all, the street.

The characters enjoy the possibilities afforded by the streets of random, unexpected meetings. It is this very openness to serendipity which allows Joyce to renew his styles and themes with each succeeding episode. Far from seeing "street people" as a problem, he sees them as the very basis of civilisation. Bloomsday may now be, in part, a lament for a time when Dublin was still felt to be an intimate city – civic, knowable, viable.

The book is also unusual in the history of modernism for its suggestion that there need be no conflict between bohemian and bourgeois. At its climax the ad-canvasser Bloom invites the poet Dedalus home with him for conversation and cocoa. In recording the dailiest day possible, Joyce teaches us much about the world: how to cope with grief and loss; how to tell a joke and how not to tell a joke; how to be frank about death in the age of its denial; how to walk and think at the same time; how to purge sex of possessiveness; how the way people eat food can tell us who they really are.

Before Joyce, no writer of fiction had so foregrounded the process of thinking. The soliloquists of Shakespeare and the nineteenth-century novel were aristocrats considering ultimate questions of death or suicide. Joyce offers the stream-of-consciousness of an ordinary citizen as prelude to nothing more portentous than the drinking of a cup of tea.

He shocked people by his honesty. His favourite aunt was so upset that she had her presentation copy removed from her home. "If Ulysses isn't fit to read." replied its author, "then life isn't fit to live". But he never took his extraordinary celebration of the ordinary over-seriously. When a fan asked to kiss the hand that wrote Ulysses, Joyce laughed and said "no – that hand has done a lot of other things as well".

Declan Kiberd is professor of Anglo-Irish literature at University College Dublin. His book Ulysses and Us: The Art of Everyday Living is published by Faber, and includes this photo of Marilyn Monroe in the book cover design reading (Molly Bloom's stream of consciousness soliloquy?) Ulysses.

The Spanish flu . . . 

. . . is a misnomer. Although its geographic origin is unknown, the disease called Spanish flu, as early as the first wave of the pandemic, was due to the fact that Spain had  remained neutral during the Great War 1914-18. Consequently, the Spanish government had no need to impose wartime censorship, so Spanish newspapers were therefore free to report the epidemic's effects, such as the grave illness of King Alfonso XIII, and these widely reported stories created a false impression that Spain had been especially hard hit by this pandemic.

Alternative names were also used at the time of the pandemic, alluding to the purported origins of the disease. In Senegal it was named 'the Brazilian flu', and in Brazil 'the German flu', while in Poland it was known as 'the Bolshevik disease'. 

In Spain itself, the nickname for the flu, the "Naples Soldier", was adopted from a 1916 operetta, The Song of Forgetting (La canción del olvido) after one of the librettists quipped that the play's most popular musical number, Naples Soldier, was as catchy as the flu. Today, however, 'Spanish flu' (Gripe Española) is the most widely used name for the pandemic in Spain. Other terms for this virus include the "1918 influenza pandemic," the "1918 flu pandemic", or variations of these.

In the period leading to the publication of Ulysses, and following the 1918-19 flu pandemic, James Joyce made insertions into the episode referred to as Hades that seem to add a far gloomier atmosphere. 

The Hades episode begins with Bloom (a modern Ulysses) entering a funeral carriage with three others, including Stephen's father (Stephen is Joyce). They drive to Paddy Dignam's funeral, making small talk on the way. The carriage passes both Stephen and Blazes Boylan. There is discussion of various forms of death and burial, and Bloom is preoccupied by thoughts of his dead son, Rudy, and the suicide of his own father. They enter the chapel into the service and subsequently leave with the coffin cart. Bloom sees a mysterious man wearing a mackintosh during the burial. Bloom continues to reflect upon death, but at the end of the episode rejects morbid thoughts to embrace 'warm fullblooded life'.

For example, he inserts this line (123-25) that suggests the communication style of an advertisement, along with the monetising of death: 

Got off lightly with illness compared. Scarlatina, influenza epidemics. Canvassing for death. Don't miss this chance.

The impact of the 1918 flu pandemic upon modernist literature, including Joyce, William Butler Yates, Virginia Woolf and many others has been extensively, and deeply researched by Elizabeth Outka, a professor of literature at the University of Richmond, and set out in her latest book: Viral Modernism: The Influenza Pandemic and Interwar Literature.

The Columbia Global Centers/Paris and Colombia University Press, hosted this Book Talk July 9, 2020 with Elizabeth Outka in conversation with Sarah Cole.

Watch on YouTube 

Earlier this year, as the Covid-19 pandemic spread globally across both geographical and political borders, Elizabeth Outka published this article on her literary research for the Paris Review (April 8, 2020). The article is titled:

How Pandemics Seep into Literature

She writes: 

In October of 1918, a delirious Katherine Anne Porter experienced what she termed “the beatific vision.” Close to death from the novel influenza virus that would kill 50–100 million people, Porter felt transported to a paradisal landscape, one free of the pain and fear that had overtaken her body. To the surprise of all, she survived her illness, and later transformed the experience into her powerful novella “Pale Horse, Pale Rider.” That story is one of the few literary works directly about the pandemic that killed more people in the United States than the country lost in all the twentieth- and twenty-first-century wars, combined. The experience, Porter said, “simply divided my life … and after I was in some strange way altered … it took me a long time to go out and live in the world again.”

COVID-19 promises to alter us all in strange ways. It’s a paradigm-shifting event that divides lives and cultures into a before and after. We will emerge changed, though how those changes will manifest is far from certain. The sensory details of this outbreak—the masks, the faces of doctors and nurses creased with worry and fatigue, the closure signs, the antiseptic smells, the empty streets, the stacks of coffins—will weave their way into our minds and bodies, triggering us back to this moment years in the future. For me, the experience has also held an uncanny familiarity. I have spent the last five years writing a book about how the sensory and affective climate of the 1918-1919 influenza pandemic infuses interwar literature, often in ways we have not recognized. My new awareness of the traces of that pandemic shifts my perception of this one, as if the sights and sounds from a century ago have re-emerged, becoming timely in ways I both feared and never wanted.

Comparisons between the influenza pandemic and COVID-19 have been widespread as we scramble for some map of how this outbreak might unfold. Through a medical lens, we ask which virus is worse. Do they spread in similar ways? How did public life change both then and now? Are there lessons that might be drawn or mistakes that might be avoided? Some differences between the two outbreaks are already clear: the 1918-19 pandemic killed healthy young adults at astonishing rates, and influenza seemed like a familiar rather than a new threat, despite the unique virulence of the strain, which meant it was even easier to dismiss—at least at first. And the timing mattered: the influenza pandemic came on the heels of the deadliest war the world had yet to see, an overlap that meant the pandemic received far less attention, despite killing so many more people. The second mass-death event in five years, the pandemic arrived when the world was already overrun with corpses and grief.

Yet the literature that arose from the influenza pandemic speaks to our current moment in profound ways, offering connections in precisely the realms where art excels: in emotional landscapes, in the ways a past moment reverberates into the present, in the ineffable conversation between the body’s experiences and our perception of the world.

Right now, every few days brings another reality into focus; what seemed far-fetched yesterday arrives tomorrow. The past is always another country, but the speed at which knowledge becomes outdated, naivete turns to realization, and basic truths change is dizzying during a pandemic. In “Pale Horse, Pale Rider,” Porter wove her own paradigm-altering experience into a broader meditation on the vertigo induced by such shifts. She encodes these swings in a play of styles, moving between a hallucinatory, dreamlike language to convey the virus’s invasion of bodies and a more straightforward, realist style to convey the war. Part of the challenge for the characters is to read correctly the story they are in; saturated in a war story that is terrible but familiar, this narrative is what seems real. They know their roles (male soldier, female civilian), the threat (artillery warfare), the enemies and the allies, and they know how this story ends (death for the soldier). Caught up in this paradigm, they miss that reality has changed, that the enemy is now invisible, that women face equal threats, that the home front is as dangerous as the front lines. There are consequences for misreading: as they worry over the threat to the soldier’s body in war, they circulate through restaurants, theaters, hospitals, and workplaces. Even after one of them falls ill, they touch and kiss and share cigarettes, believing themselves in the outdated story as a new delirium takes over the narrative and their lives. Porter captures the emotional and physical jolts of a constantly shifting reality, and the inherent risks in failing to adjust quickly enough to a new paradigm.

One’s reality doesn’t simply shift in a pandemic; it becomes radically uncertain—indeed, uncertainty is the reality. The unpredictability of the COVID-19 virus and all we don’t know about it means we have no idea where we are in the story or even what story we are in. Is this the first wave of something even deadlier to come? Have we reached the top of the curve? What’s the scope of the tragedy? Is the economy the real story? What do we think we know now that may prove fatally wrong? The narrative uncertainty causes many of us to turn to genre fiction and predictable movies (even if they are about disaster)—they allow us to pull down another story like a shade and sit in a place where we already know the ending. The modernist literature I spend my days teaching and studying typically grants the opposite, capturing the fragmentation and plotlessness of a postwar/postpandemic world. T. S. Eliot, who along with his wife caught the flu during the pandemic, felt weighed down by what he termed the “domestic influenza” of his health and home life, and his worries that his mind had been affected by his illness. The Waste Land — a poem about so many things and one that channels the larger zeitgeist of his moment — turns this uncertainty into a climate, with its fogs, its corpse-haunted domestic landscape, its pervasive sense of living death, and its delirious language.

The uncertainty rises, too, from the invisibility of the enemy. The consciousness is tuned to a threat that might be everywhere but cannot be seen. A world of surfaces and people become suspect, the body porous and vulnerable. W. B. Yeats captures this sense of menace in “The Second Coming,” a poem composed in the weeks after he watched his pregnant wife come close to death in the pandemic. The 1918 virus routinely drowned people in their beds as their lungs filled with fluids, and it caused sudden bleeding from the nose, mouth, and ears. The poem’s sense of chaos and horror comes, of course, from many causes, including war, revolution, and Ireland’s political violence, but the poem also speaks to the terror of an agentless, hidden threat, one that drowns innocence and lets loose mere anarchy and a blood-dimmed tide.

The invisibility of the threat in turn produces what we might term contagion guilt, a haunting fear that one might pass a deadly infection to another. Routes of transmission are known generally but rarely specifically; one fears but does not know the precise means of transfer. In William Maxwell’s elegiac novel They Came Like Swallows, which recalls his own pregnant mother’s death in the influenza pandemic, the characters are haunted by all the what-ifs: what if they had taken their boy out of school earlier? What if they had chosen the next train car rather than the first one? What if they had not entered the room that day? Such guilt can live in the mind as a low-lying presence, unresolved and unresolvable. And this guilt comes, too, in its anticipatory form—what if that touch, that visit, that missed hand wash harms a loved one or a stranger? Porter’s central character in “Pale Horse, Pale Rider” dreams of a nightmarish invisible bow that shoots arrows at her beloved, who dies again and again despite her attempted interventions.

As we are witnessing every day, a toxic brew of uncertainty and fear also flows into well-worn channels of scapegoating and cruelty, turning an invisible viral enemy into an illusory but visible foe. The xenophobia woven into a “Chinese virus” or even the “Spanish flu” sets up whole groups for denunciation. Factual medical descriptions of contagion, disease, and contamination morph into poisonous discriminatory metaphors of moral uncleanness and danger. The early-twentieth-century horror writer H. P. Lovecraft channeled into his postwar/postpandemic writing his prejudicial and homophobic beliefs that immigrant hordes and deviants were tainting pure Aryan blood lines. After the influenza pandemic had swept through his home state of Rhode Island, Lovecraft populated his stories with proto-zombie figures rising from the dead in the midst of pandemics or wars, bent on further destruction. Lovecraft transforms a miasmic blend of diseased atmospheres and deep-seated prejudices into monsters that can be seen and killed with impunity, a move that suggests the dangerous ways anthropomorphizing the threat may mask vicious discriminatory impulses.

And yet what pulses through all these works—and through our current moment—is the body itself. Virginia Woolf, who knew so much about illness and whose heart was damaged by her encounter with the 1918 virus, observes in her essay “On Being Ill” how illness and the body are left out of our art and conscious experiences. We deny how in truth, “all day, all night the body intervenes.” In the midst of acute illness, the world both narrows and broadens into the body’s suffering, an experience hidden in part because of the profound isolation it so often produces. As Woolf writes, “those great wars which [the body] wages by itself…in the solitude of the bedroom against the assault of fever” go unrecorded. The post-1918 pandemic works encode these internal battles, sometimes directly and sometimes in fragments and echoes. They capture the way a virus may shatter the body’s internal perceptions, the way fever and pain and fear of death turn reality into delirium. Porter depicts this mode by having the virus seem to infect the very prose, the cascading viral chaos reflected through the broken syntax and the invading dreamscapes, the disruption echoing “the terrible compelling pain running through her veins like heavy fire.” The Waste Land and “The Second Coming,” read through the lens of a body’s internal delirium, record hallucinatory realities, fragmented perception, the burning pain of fever and ache.

And finally, there comes the aftermath, both for our bodies and for our culture. How do such experiences live on in the cells, in the memory, in the streets? The continued sense of living death, of an experience that marks us with its shadow, echoes even after a pandemic passes. Woolf’s Mrs. Dalloway, so often read as a novel capturing the aftermath of war—which it most certainly does—also records in its title character the physical and mental exhaustion that lingers after an illness. Like Woolf, Clarissa Dalloway has heart damage from her encounter with influenza, and as she moves through the streets of London and at home, she sees her world through her sense of bodily vulnerability, her very heartbeat and its lags pulsing through the memories of her illness. The sights and sounds and smells of the sickroom float back through her consciousness, shifting the ways she perceives the London day. Whether in illness or in observation, our own bodies are busy now. They are recording our pandemic, setting in place the reverberations that will echo into our future. 

Meanwhile, the plague rages on . . .

The headline story for the Guardian at the end of 2020 "THE YEAR OF TRUTH" shows that lessons have not, and will not be learned as:

UK sees highest daily toll of virus fatalities since April amid fears of NHS being overwhelmed

And while Re:LODE Radio has been flagging the science of climate change, and the advice of scientists during the coronavirus pandemic, it is evident that multiple failures on the part of political classes worldwide to act decisively to address these challenges, will cast a shadow across the coming year, and for people living along the LODE Zone Line.

This was the front page story today

Heather Stewart and Josh Halliday reporting for the Guardian (Wed 30 Dec 2020) with the headline and subheading:

Schools chaos as 21m more people in England face toughest Covid curbs

Start of new term delayed in worst-hit areas while millions more are put into tier 4 restrictions

More than three-quarters of England’s population will enter 2021 being urged to “stay at home”, with the reopening of schools also delayed in the hardest-hit areas, as the government battles to contain the new variant of coronavirus.

Boris Johnson warned the public it was time to “redouble our efforts” against the virus on Wednesday, as the government used a one-day sitting in the House of Commons to announce a slew of tough new measures, including plunging many more areas into tier 4.

Amid criticism of the government’s fractured approach to the start of the new school term and renewed calls for a national lockdown, the prime minister said: “No one regrets these measures more bitterly than I do. But we must take firm action now.” 

It came as the UK reported another 981 Covid-related deaths, the highest daily toll since April, and a further 50,023 infections in the last 24 hours, amid ongoing fears that the NHS risks being overwhelmed in the worst affected areas. The large increase in deaths may in part be due to a lag in reporting over the Christmas period.

At a Downing Street press briefing, the government’s deputy chief medical adviser, Jonathan Van-Tam, struck a sombre note – and stressed that the impact of the extra infections that would result from Christmas mixing had not yet been felt.

“Unfortunately it is a pretty grim and depressing picture at the moment. The situation in the UK is precarious in many parts of the country,” he said.

The health secretary, Matt Hancock, announced a dramatic tightening of restrictions, with another 21 million people entering tier 4 – under which the public are urged to stay at home and non-essential retail and close-contact services such as hairdressers are shut down.

Tier 4 was only introduced 10 days ago, as the government hastily curtailed plans for five-day “Christmas bubbles” with just days to go.

It initially covered London and the south-east, where the new variant of the virus first emerged. But Hancock announced on Wednesday that all of the north-east of England, Greater Manchester, large parts of the Midlands and the south-west would be moved into the strictest tier 4 rules from Thursday morning.

This “stay at home” zone will now cover 78% of England’s population – and a string of other areas will be moved up from tier 2 to 3. All of mainland Scotland, Wales and Northern Ireland are already subject to the tightest restrictions.

Many local leaders were taken by surprise on Wednesday by the scale of the shift. Leaders in north-east England called for a national lockdown to curb the spread of the disease and focused efforts on the rollout of two vaccines. “This is a national problem and a national solution is required now,” they said.

Johnson conceded that the government had discussed the option of a national lockdown, but rejected it. “That obviously was an option that we considered intensively,” he said, but given uncertainties about how effective tier 4 measures will be in controlling the new variant, “we thought it right to continue with the tiering,” he said.

But he added: “We’re going to keep reviewing this, for all parts of the country.”

Hancock was immediately followed in the House of Commons by the education secretary, Gavin Williamson, who announced that secondary schools across England would be closed to almost all pupils for the first two weeks of term. Children of key workers and vulnerable children will be allowed to attend and those in exam years 11 and 13 will return after one week.

Williamson also said primary schools would remain shut to most pupils – initially for an extra fortnight – in some areas, but was unable to specify which they would be, leaving baffled parents searching the government website for clarification.

The Department for Education later published a list of the affected areas, which include most London boroughs and substantial parts of Essex and Kent.

This patchwork approach to reopening schools followed a tussle between cabinet ministers including Williamson, who wanted to keep schools open, and others including Hancock and the Cabinet Office minister, Michael Gove, who wanted to be more cautious.

Williamson stressed that the “vast majority” of primary schools would reopen as planned on 4 January.

The mayor of London, Sadiq Khan, questioned why some London boroughs were being told to reopen primary schools, and others to keep them closed. “It will be very confusing for parents that some primary schools will be open, and others down the road won’t,” he said.

The number of Covid patients in English hospitals surpassed the first-wave peak on Sunday, with 23,771 people in hospital with the disease on Wednesday and numbers expected to rise further as cases climb.

On Tuesday, cases reached a record high, with 53,135 reported in the UK. The Covid variant discovered earlier this month accounted for a majority of all new cases in London, the south-east and east of England, Hancock said on Wednesday.

Areas moved into tier 4 include all of the Midlands except Worcestershire, Herefordshire, Shropshire, Telford and Wrekin, and Rutland, which will all be in tier 3. In the north-west, Greater Manchester, Lancashire, Blackpool and Blackburn with Darwen, Cheshire, Warrington and Cumbria will be in tier 4. Liverpool will be moved up to tier 3.

In the south-west, Gloucestershire, Swindon, Somerset, Bournemouth, Christchurch and Poole will be in tier 4, while the remainder of the region – including Cornwall, Devon and Dorset – will be moved up to tier 3.

Hancock told the Commons that Wednesday was “a day of mixed emotions” due to the announcement of the new restrictions hours after the Oxford/AstraZeneca vaccine was approved by the UK’s medical regulator.

He told MPs: “It brings forward the day on which we can lift the restrictions that no one in this house wants to see any longer than are absolutely necessary. But we must act to suppress the virus now, not least because the new variant makes the time between now and then even more difficult.

“And so whilst we have the good news of the vaccine today, we also have to take some difficult decisions.”

Hancock said he knew the measures would place a significant burden on businesses and livelihoods but that it was “absolutely necessary because of the number of cases that we have seen”.

Andy Street, the Conservative mayor of the West Midlands, said the tier 3 rules had been unable to halt an increase in cases across the region. He said he would continue to press the Treasury for more financial support for businesses, adding: “I will continue to make the case vociferously to government, and will not relent until we achieve a breakthrough.”

Pandemics have NO borders! Pandemics are global NOT national!

This Times of India report (Dec 31 2020) shows how pandemics are a global communications related phenomenon and that it is increasingly clear that a global response is the only effective strategy in managing the crisis. This requires leadership on a supra-national level. The evidence on the effectiveness of leadership in the face of the coronavirus pandemic and the looming climate emergency shows that concerted international actions are NOT the default position of leaders around the world.

Subhro Niyogi reports for The Times of India (Dec 31 2020) with the headline:

After UK strain reaches Kolkata, families abroad worry for parents back home

Ben Jennings on the mess of 2020 – cartoon

Tue 29 Dec 2020

When it comes to the concept of transparency, as it applies to democratic institutions, democratically elected governments rarely share with their electorates what they are actually considering, and what they are actually doing. Given that the Information Wraps in the LODE, Re:LODE, along with the posts and pages for Re:LODE Radio, have focussed on migration policy along the LODE Zone Line, especially in Australia, todays report from ABC News is of great interest.

After twenty years . . .

. . . citizens of Australia get a chance to look into the workings of their government when cabinet papers are released for the record. ABC News reported (31 December 2020) on:

Seven things previously secret cabinet documents tell us about the 'last year of normality' in 2000

Matthew Doran of ABC News writes: 

Almost 250 cabinet papers from the middle of prime minister John Howard's second term in government, released on Friday by the National Archives of Australia, give a remarkable insight into how Australia was faring at a time of significant national pride.

"The Olympic Games were a very high point for Australia in the year 2000, which in many ways was to turn out to be the last year of normality," former deputy prime minister John Anderson told the ABC.

"We had 9/11 after that, the following year we had massive explosions of economic crises and the great financial crisis, then we've had political instability, then COVID.

"The relatively peaceful and enjoyable year of 2000, as we look back on it, is perhaps more appreciated now, even more than it was then."

A couple of these "seven things" . . .  

. . . mentioned in the ABC News report are relevant to the Re:LODE Radio "THE YEAR OF TRUTH" project. One of these is headlined:  

Internal angst over asylum seeker crackdown

Australia's treatment of asylum seekers over the past two decades has been the subject of significant criticism domestically and internationally.

But cabinet papers from 2000, as the nation ramped up its detention centre regime to deal with a 450 per cent increase in asylum seekers, show serious concerns raised within the government's own public service about sanctions against detainees charged over rioting and escape attempts.

Asylum seekers who had made their perilous journey to Australia by boat found themselves in immigration detention centres in places such as Port Hedland in WA and Woomera in outback South Australia.

Some were being described as "increasingly non-compliant", and riots broke out in some facilities.

Then-attorney-general Philip Ruddock brought a proposal to cabinet to increase punishments for offenders — including jail terms of five years for those who escaped and three years for inciting violence — and strip-search powers for staff at detention centres.

Cabinet agreed to the proposal, despite warnings being raised by the departments of prime minister and cabinet, attorney-general and foreign affairs and trade.

The prime minister's department said strip searches without warrants were "inappropriate", while the attorney-general's team warned it may "exacerbate the security situation".

DFAT was worried it could be inconsistent with Australia's international human rights obligations. 

The ABC News report includes this video archive material from the year 2000 covering the riots at the Woomera immigration detention centre in South Australia.

Was 2000 really . . .

. . . the last year of normality? 

The other "thing" among the "seven things" reported by Matthew Doran in this ABC News report is headlined: 

The beginning of the climate wars

The 2000 cabinet papers also shine a light on the germination of an idea — an emissions trading scheme (ETS).

As the Howard government negotiated its targets under the Kyoto climate agreement, there was broad support within the Cabinet for an "open, market-based, transparent, comprehensive and equitable system" to help tackle carbon emissions.

There was an in-principle agreement to developing such a system in November 2000, under a submission from environment minister Robert Hill.

But, there were some who were opposed to going too hard, too soon. The documents show industry minister Nick Minchin wanted any plan tied to the Kyoto agreement, voicing concerns about the impact on industry.

Qualms were brushed aside! 

Anne Davies for the Guardian also reported today on the release of Australian government cabinet papers with this story.

Cabinet papers reveal how seeds of Australia's divisive asylum seeker boats policy were sown in 2000

Anne Davies writes: 

Qualms over increasingly tough measures to deal with arrivals were brushed aside as government sought to eliminate ‘pull factors’

Over the summer of 1999 and early 2000, the number of people seeking asylum in Australia, rose by 450% to 4,175 people, arriving mainly by boat.

By June 2000 detention centres, then located in remote locations such as Woomera and in Western Australia, were experiencing riots and breakouts, as asylum seeker numbers swelled and processing times grew longer.

The 2000 cabinet papers, released on Friday by the National Archives of Australia, show the Howard government was increasingly concerned about how it could eliminate what it saw as the “pull factors” luring asylum seekers to Australian shores.

And it was in 2000 that the seeds of one of the most divisive policies in Australia’s history – the Pacific solution - were sown.

The idea was not fully articulated until after the Tampa crisis, when the Norwegian cargo ship MV Tampa was denied permission to enter Australian waters after rescuing a sinking boat carrying 433 asylum seekers.

The government introduced the border protection bill into the House of Representatives, saying it would confirm Australian sovereignty to “determine who will enter and reside in Australia”.

But the 2000 cabinet papers reveal the debate within the Howard cabinet about Australia’s human rights obligations and how qualms over increasingly tough measures to deal with growing numbers of boat arrivals were put to one side.

“This appears to have been a key moment when cabinet might have paused, reflected upon and improved the implementation of its deterrent strategy,” cabinet historian Chris Wallace writes in her essay about the cabinet papers.

In March, then-immigration minister Philip Ruddock took a submission to cabinet. It began: “A boat carrying 52 Christians from Maluku province, Indonesia, was intercepted on 22 January 2000.”

Wallace writes: “This opening sentence from immigration and multicultural affairs minister Philip Ruddock’s cabinet submission to cabinet’s national security committee quietly foreshadowed a new era of Australian politics which would explode the following year in the Tampa crisis.”

In contrast to Ruddock’s submission, the national security committee’s decision made no reference to the Indonesians’ religion, she says.

On 8 June, about 500 detainees broke out of Woomera, followed by breakouts at the Curtin and Port Hedland immigration reception and processing centres, as they were known.

As Australia prepared to host the Olympics, conditions at the centres were now making news.

An analysis of detention centre breakouts in June, considered by cabinet in November, suggested that “frustration over the perceived delay in issuing protection visas” was to blame. Detainees had false expectations from people smugglers, and actual processing times had increased because of the enormous increase in unauthorised arrivals.

By November cabinet faced “an increasingly non-compliant population, and an increasing number of detainees being refused temporary protection visas”.

Unrest was such that “it is conceivable that matters could go beyond the capacity” of Australasian Correctional Management, the private sector firm to which the government had contracted out detention centre management, and other civilian agencies to manage. Using Australian Defence Force personnel as a last resort was countenanced.

In recognition that detention centres needed to expand rapidly, the expenditure review committee agreed in May to “long-term funding” for the immigration detention centres.

The cabinet papers show the Howard government united on preferring private sector management and that it explored the idea of successful refugees repaying part of the costs of their detention. The idea of “a risk management approach”, instead of detention, was rejected.

The government was also in discussions with the Indonesian government about funding an offshore processing and holding facility in Indonesia, under the auspices of the International Organisation for Migration (IOM).

At that time asylum seekers transiting through Indonesia were largely in the community and not subject to detention. Cooperation from Indonesian authorities in disrupting people smuggling operations was judged as fragile.

“Sustainability of Indonesian cooperation is dependent to a large extent on the Indonesian government’s assessment of the costs and benefits,” Ruddock said in his submission.

Indonesia had informally sought funding, and Australia not supporting the centre “may cause the current interception and detention arrangement in Indonesia to unravel, resulting in an increased level of unauthorised boat arrivals”, he said.

He acknowledged that “the possibility of human rights abuses in an Australian-funded centre cannot be ruled out”, but went on to argue that “they would be minimised with the direct involvement of the IOM”.

Several other departments expressed qualms. The attorney general’s department voiced concerns about human rights breaches within the centre and specifically warned that any breaches of the non-refoulement obligations by Indonesia could give rise to criticism of Australia. The involvement of the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees in assessing refugee applications mitigated this risk but it was not eliminated, the department said.

“The proposal involves significant risks which would need to be carefully managed,” the Department of Foreign Affairs and Trade noted. “These include the possibility of the Australian government being associated with serious human rights violations and of the centre becoming an irritant in the bilateral relationship.”

The department also doubted the centre would stem the flow of refugees to Australia.

The Department of Prime Minister and Cabinet raised the difficulties both countries were already experiencing in returning those judged non-refugees to source and transit countries including Iraq, Iran, Afghanistan and Pakistan. It worried that the centre could fill with non-refugees with little prospect of removal, “but the costs at least would be less than in Australia”.

Cabinet agreed that when Indonesia presented a firm proposal to the International Organisation for Migration for a processing and holding centre there, Australia would negotiate a contribution to the centre via the organisation.

Ruddock’s cabinet submission underpinning this decision is “a key document in the Howard government’s march towards an absolute offshore, extraterritorial approach to the management of unauthorised arrivals by sea”, Wallace writes.

At the same meeting, cabinet considered Ruddock’s submission on sanctions for immigration detainees who engaged in “inappropriate behaviour”. These included a new “non-warrant strip search power” that Ruddock’s submission said was likely to be considered an “overreaction” by those opposed to the detention policies.

The departments of prime Minister and cabinet and the attorney general noted their concerns. The Department of Foreign Affairs and Trade opposed it outright and reminded cabinet of its own recognition that Australia’s mandatory detention and temporary protection visa regimes had already “taken us close to the minimum standards of treatment the Refugee Convention, international and domestic law, and human rights standards will bear”.

Yet cabinet endorsed Ruddock’s suite of recommendations, including non-warrant strip search powers, with the proviso that a protocol for undertaking searches and examinations be developed jointly by Ruddock and then-attorney general Daryl Williams.

Human rights and human kindness?

The Migrants' Rights Network concern about the UK Home Office's treatment of migrants was highlighted in this recent article. The article references Steve Bell's Guardian newspaper cartoon of the Home Secretary Priti Patel clothed in the image of the notorious Conservative politician Enoch Powell ("Rivers of Blood" speech), and spouting a rhetoric of reminiscent of the wartime speeches of Winston Churchill.

Migrants’ Rights Network (MRN) is deeply concerned about the Home Office’s proposed condemnation and treatment of so-called ‘illegal’ migrants. This undermines the UK’s international legal obligations – including under the European Convention of Human Rights (Art.3) – to non-refoulement, to provide safe legal routes into a country, the right to freedom of movement and to claim asylum. 

While the number of people being forced to take unsafe routes to the UK by boat has recently increased, the overall number of asylum claims in the UK has been falling. Ms. Pagliuchi-Lor, UNHCR representative to the UK, calculates that asylum claim numbers fell by 37% in the second quarter of 2020 compared to that of 2019 (Footnote 1). In the year until June 2020, the UK received over 92,600 fewer applications than Germany, over 55,000 fewer than France and Spain and over 25,000 fewer than Greece. 

This is not a new crisis; there’s no need to make policy decisions on the basis of panic.

An overhaul of the asylum system is absolutely necessary but for it to be effective and humane, we need to focus on compassionate policies. Moving asylum seekers offshore, for example, will not affect the UK’s legal responsibility to people in need. We do not want to turn the clock back on the progress we’ve made.

The Home Secretary herself was part of the Home Affairs Select Committee inquiry in November 2019 that found that: “A policy that focuses exclusively on closing borders will drive migrants to take more dangerous routes, and push them into the hands of criminal groups.” It will not comprehensively make sea routes “unviable,” as the Home Secretary is hoping.

Deterring dangerous journeys will only be achieved when, amongst other actions, we strengthen legal pathways like refugee resettlement and family reunion which allow refugees to come to the UK in safety and obtain the support needed for their inclusion in our communities. 

Working with the UK’s European partners to provide safe, legal routes is crucial for preventing people seeking asylum being left with no option but to take unsafe migration routes by sea. Criminalising and denying vulnerable and exploited individuals seeking asylum in the UK on the basis of the route they have in some cases been forced to take goes against the “fair” nature of the “fair borders bill” proposed. 

Through the community sponsorship programme and other schemes, Britons have demonstrated their compassion and eagerness to make space for refugees/migrants in their local area. The latest policies proposed by the Home Secretary simultaneously ignores the many that recognise the importance of diverse and widely skilled communities and undermines the international legal obligations that the UK is bound to uphold.

The story of racism, immigration and populist political rhetoric in the UK

Martin Rowson on Priti Patel, immigration and the NHS — cartoon 

The impact of migration upon England over the last five hundred years or so includes the arrival of protestant refugees from Europe in the sixteenth century. The arrival of the Huguenots became a significant driver in the emergence of capitalism and the basis of the British mercantile and colonialist political economy. 

The Huguenots had a huge economic impact on Britain. They revitalised the silk weaving trade, kick-started various manufacturing industries, such as cutlery making in Sheffield, and invested heavily in growing businesses.

The skills and energies of Huguenot immigrants played an important part in the transformation of Britain into Europe’s major industrial power. Many Huguenots joined the armed forces, with some even rising to the highest officer positions.

Just as Flemish and Dutch artisans had kick-started the growth of manufacturing in the Middle Ages , Walloons and Huguenots played a key part in the move to a capitalist economy based on banks, credit, stocks and shares. Huguenots were key investors in the Bank of England and its first Governor was descended from Huguenot immigrants. They were also at the heart of the growth of capitalism. The Bank - and the creation of the National Debt - meant that the government could borrow money to fight wars that enabled the British Empire to grow and protected the Atlantic for slave ships and the plantation system.

Walloons, Huguenots and later Jews were allowed to have their own places of worship. At that time the same freedom was not allowed to English Nonconformists or Catholics. However, the allowances given to Protestant and Jewish refugees paved the way to similar freedoms for other groups and helped make British society more open to religious differences.

Pogroms in the Russian Empire and the beginnings of modern-day UK immigration control

The beginnings of the modern-day UK immigration control can be traced from the final decade of the 19th Century and the political debate that grew surrounding the perceived growth in the numbers of Eastern European Jews coming to the UK.

There was particular focus on the large numbers of Russian and Polish Jews who had arrived in the East End of London after fleeing persecution in the Russian Empire.

The Russian Empire, which previously had very few Jewish communities, acquired territories in the Russian Partition that contained large Jewish populations, during the military partitions of Poland in 1772, 1793 and 1795. 

In these conquered territories, a new political entity called the Pale of Settlement was formed in 1791 by Catherine the Great.   

The territories covered by the Pale of Settlement included the western region of Imperial Russia with varying borders that existed from 1791 to 1917 in which permanent residency by Jews was allowed and beyond which Jewish residency, permanent or temporary, was mostly forbidden. Most Jews were still excluded from residency in a number of cities within the Pale as well. A few Jews were allowed to live outside the area, including those with university education, the ennobled, members of the most affluent of the merchant guilds and particular artisans, some military personnel and some services associated with them, including their families, and sometimes their servants. 

The archaic English term pale is derived from the Latin word palus, a stake, extended to mean the area enclosed by a fence or boundary. 

Beyond the Pale in Ireland 

The Pale was a term used in the context of the invasion and colonisation of Ireland by the English Normans and associated with a strip of land, centred on Dublin, that stretched from Dundalk in Louth to Bray in Wicklow and became the base of English rule in Ireland.

The Pale also features as a boundary used to locate the creation of a LODE cargo at Ceatharlach, Harristown, and documented in this Super8 Film footage of the riverbank of the River Liffey as it flows on its way to Dublin Bay. 

LODE cargo created on the banks of the River Liffey . . .

. . . at Harristown north east of Ceatharlach 1992

The river that runs by the LODE compass made at Harristown, and now contained in the LODE cargo, is the same river that runs through James Joyce's Finnegans Wake. Joyce gives the river the character and name of Anna Livia Plurabelle. See Re:LODE A Cargo of Questions:

To every place there belongs a story. . . riverrun . . .

The opening line of Joyce's Finnegans Wake is a sentence fragment which continues from the book's unfinished closing line, making the work a never-ending cycle. 

The "WAKE" begins thus;

riverrun, past Eve and Adam’s, from swerve of shore to bend of bay, brings us by a commodius vicus of recirculation back to Howth Castle and Environs.

This beginning then forms the end of the last sentence of the book:

A lone a last a loved a long the riverrun, past Eve and Adam’s, from swerve of shore to bend of bay, brings us by a commodius vicus of recirculation back to Howth Castle and Environs.

So the beginning is the end in "a commodius vicus of recirculation", and . . .

. . . Here Comes Everybody! (HCE)

Along the LODE Zone Line

Catherine the Great's creation of The Pale of Settlement in 1791 included all of modern day Belarus, Lithuania and Moldova, and much of Ukraine and Poland. Historically speaking, these territories are significantly traversed by the LODE Zone Line as it crosses Poland, Belarus and Ukraine, and form part of the LODE matrix of stories found in the Cargo of Questions Information Wraps. 

The 1821 Odessa pogroms marked the beginning of the 19th century pogroms in Tsarist Russia; there were four more such pogroms in Odessa before the end of the century. The assassination of Alexander II in 1881 by the revolutionary political organisation Narodnaya Volya was blamed on the Jews by the Russian government, and the anti-Jewish events that followed turned into a lasting wave of hundreds of pogroms that continued over several years.

A change of attitude? 

The response in British government circles on the large numbers of Russian and Polish Jews who had arrived after fleeing these pogroms in the Russian Empire set a significant change in tone and attitude. In 1898 the Secretary of the Board of Trade reported a ". . . stream of Russian and Polish immigration — in other words, the immigration of the most destitute type . . . increasing in volume year by year". 

The numbers of arrivals were highly debatable owing to the deficiencies in available statistics. Concerns focussed on perceived overcrowding in the East End of London. Political alarm was also expressed regarding the rising numbers of foreign national criminals in UK prisons, the growing demands on poor relief within local parishes and fears of degenerating health and housing conditions.

The legislation that finally emerged was the Aliens Act 1905 which was considered even at the time a flawed and inconsistent piece of legislation. It was ambivalent in its aims and constructed powers whose ostensible aim was that they should be equally applied but its underlying aim was to control a particular “problem” group.

On Thursday 22 June 2017 Ian Hislop begins his programme for the BBC with this story:

The early hours of 2 January 1906. A boat approaches Southampton docks. On board are 10 American sailors saved from drowning in the Atlantic three weeks earlier. The British authorities take one look and order them back to sea. Why? Because they have the misfortune of landing on British soil just one day after the first peacetime restrictions on immigration have been enacted. It no longer matters if they are asylum seekers, economic migrants, or 10 unlucky sailors. According to the law that will for ever change the way Britain views immigration, they are “destitute alien immigrants”. Britain’s open door has been closed to them. In a post-Brexit Britain Ian Hislop's programme was titled:

Who Should We Let In?

The First Great Immigration Row 

Here is an excerpt from Chitra Ramaswamy's review of the programme when broadcast for the Guardian (Fri 23 Jun 2017):

Hislop (granted, another posh, white, Oxbridge-educated man here to teach us about foreigners) is on razor-sharp, twinkly-eyed form, reminding us that it was not ever thus. In the Victorian era, Britain’s open-door policy of welcoming anyone who wanted to come, for any reason, was a source of great pride … and, OK, imperial arrogance. Basically, the attitude was: “We are the leaders of the free world. Why wouldn’t anyone want to come here?” How things have changed. Just look at who the leaders of the free world are now.

At one point, Hislop asks random punters when a Times leader proudly referring to Britain as “the asylum of nations” might have been written. Er, before the age of Murdoch? (The answer is 1853.) Unfortunately, our compassion has been on a downward slide ever since. A turning point appears to have been the vicious election campaign of Conservative candidate Sir William Evans-Gordon in 1900, when, in white working-class Stepney, he railed against “foreign invaders”, whipped up hatred against the Jewish community, and, for the first time in history, made immigration a national issue. Sound familiar?

Or how about Mancherjee Bhownagree, an Indian immigrant who stood for parliament in 1895 on an anti-immigration ticket, blaming “foreign pauper aliens” for everything from increased rents to increased sweating? He won. (Not that it should be a surprise that immigrants, then and now, are capable of being ultra-conservative or anti-immigration.) Hislop also unearths an impassioned letter that ran in the Manchester Guardian in 1904, glorifying the benefits of asylum and condemning racism. Its author? A 29-year-old MP called Winston Churchill.

Cover-up of the TRUTH?

The British Home Office treatment of asylum seekers is an ugly truth that the British government seeks to hide from public scrutiny. This story by Jamie Grierson, reporting for the Guardian as Home affairs correspondent in late November (Mon 23 Nov 2020), exposed how the Official Secrets Act was being used to prevent volunteers discussing 'disturbing' conditions found at the ex-barracks facility. The facility seems to many to be set up to be more like a detention centre for "illegal migrants" than a haven of security, care and solace for fellow human beings seeking refuge.

Jamie Grierson's report runs under the headline: 

Home Office accused of cover-up at camp for asylum seekers 

Volunteers have been asked to sign confidentiality agreements underpinned by the Official Secrets Act before entering an army barracks used to house asylum seekers, as details emerge of the “disturbing” conditions on the site.

The Home Office has been accused of attempting to cover up what is happening at Napier barracks near Folkestone, Kent, where there have been hunger strikes, suicide attempts, unrest and regular medical emergencies among residents.

Volunteers providing warm clothing, amenities, company and counselling to the 400 men housed on the site have been confronted with the confidentiality form by the private firm running the repurposed site on behalf of the Home Office.

The agreement, seen by the Guardian, commits the signatory to treating as confidential any information about the “service users” at the site – that is, the asylum seekers – and states that the information is subject to the Official Secrets Act, which is designed principally to protect matters of national security. A breach of the act is punishable by a prison sentence.

Bella Sankey, the director of Detention Action, said: “The Official Secrets Act is intended to protect state secrets and national security, not the government’s treatment of people who have arrived in the UK seeking sanctuary.

“Locking people up at an old army barracks is inappropriate enough, without trying to gag those who volunteer to provide basic essentials to those in need. We’ve heard reports of self harm, suicide attempts, Covid outbreaks and cramped and unsanitary dorms, meaning more – not less – public information is needed about this seemingly reckless experiment.”

Sonia Lenegan, the legal director of the Immigration Law Practitioners’ Association, said it sounded like a cover-up. “What else could it be?” she said. “It’s sinister. What reason could there be for that non-disclosure agreement otherwise? The Home Office should be doing all they can to facilitate organisations helping people. Why would you want to prevent that?”

Lenegan said the move had echoes of the approach the Australian government took to its offshore detention centres on the Pacific islands of Manus and Nauru.

She said: “This is yet another trick they’re pulling from Australia. They did this for people working on Nauru and Manus Island. Over and over again they’re learning from Australia’s playbook.”

A Home Office spokesperson said: “We have worked closely with our accommodation provider Clearsprings Ready Homes and stakeholders to ensure the Napier site is safe and secure. This includes an agreement with staff to provide asylum seekers with privacy and confidentiality as would be expected.”

Insiders said relations between the asylum seekers and authorities are reaching boiling point, as the men are being “kept in the dark” about how long they will be kept there.

On Wednesday evening, an Iranian man was taken to hospital after attempting to take his own life. Kent police confirmed they had assisted the ambulance service and no one had died. It is understood there has been at least one other attempted suicide in the barracks.

Another resident, a Sudanese asylum seeker, refused food for at least four days after repeatedly seeking answers about when he would move out of the former military camp. He is understood to have broken the hunger strike on Tuesday. The Home Office said it did not routinely comment on individual cases.

Police were called to angry scenes on Monday when the men protested over lack of information from the Home Office and contractor. No arrests were made but video footage revealed tense confrontations between the residents and security staff.

One resident, who spoke to the Guardian, was taken to hospital after contracting coronavirus while staying at the barracks. A freedom of information request submitted by the Guardian to South East Coast ambulance service NHS foundation trust revealed that ambulances were being called to the site on a weekly basis.

The Home Office has commissioned Clearsprings Ready Homes to run the site but the Guardian has learned the company, which is responsible for large swathes of asylum accommodation across the south of England, has subcontracted at least some responsibilities for day-to-day management to a letting agent and property management firm called NACCS.

An individual connected to the barracks said: “Housing severely traumatised and vulnerable asylum seekers in a crumbling former military barracks behind barbed wire with no idea how long they will be there, with little to do, and under strict surveillance, is a disaster: it’s a disaster for their mental health, for their physical health, and is exacerbating a profound sense of despair and hopelessness.

“They are told by the Home Office they will be there for a maximum of 30 days but many have been there for over two months. There is evidence of many inappropriately placed individuals at the facility, who are at increased risk in a facility of such size.

“Imagine how it feels to arrive in the UK – the end of the line – after fleeing war, persecution, famine, trafficking and other horrors, only to find yourself treated like a criminal.”

A Home Office spokesperson said: “We take the wellbeing of asylum seekers extremely seriously and those at Napier barracks are staying in safe, Covid-compliant conditions, in line with the law and social distancing requirements.”

What about the wellbeing of Christmas shoppers? Does the economy come first?

Re:LODE Radio considers it fair comment that the UK government, the authority tackling the coronavirus pandemic in England, and against the given advice of scientists in early September, to bring in a so-called "circuit breaker", triggered ineffective restrictions too late, as usual. Boris Johnson's optimism, or denial, led to a further  opening up of "Christmas shopping" when further restrictions would have significantly reduced community transmission of the Covid-19 virus. 

This montage of video includes Hull City Council showcasing the Hull City Centre Christmas decorations on 3 December 2020 in preparation for non-essential retail businesses to re-open for Christmas shopping on 5 December 2020.

Christmas shopping . . . 

. . . goes viral

Liverpool One was also open for this commercially profitable season for consumer spending. On the December day in 2020 that non-essential retail re-opened in London's Regent Street, Christmas shoppers were crowding the street while the shops were doing a roaring trade. 

Then today, 26 days later, hospitals scramble to convert theatres, recovery areas and stroke wards into ICU's!

Sarah Boseley, Health editor for the Guardian, reports (Thu 31 Dec 2020) on how at the end of this fateful year of 2020: 

University College Hospital is preparing for Covid-only care as cases surge 

One of London’s biggest hospitals has warned it is on track to become virtually Covid-only amid a surge in cases in the capital that has left it scrambling to convert operating theatres, surgical recovery areas and stroke wards into intensive care units for the very sick.

As the daily coronavirus case numbers in the UK continued an apparently inexorable rise, hitting a record 55,892, with 23,813 people in hospital and 964 reported deaths, the chief executive of University College London hospitals trust (UCLH), Prof Marcel Levi, said admissions were already spiralling beyond the first wave in the spring.

Every hospital in London was facing the same demands on beds and staff, and University College hospital was taking admissions from other hospitals that were less well able to cope, he told the Guardian.

“This is much more than we had in March and April,” said Levi, an acute medicine doctor. The 500-bed hospital has 220 Covid patients, with the numbers increasing by 5% a day, but the real pressure is on intensive care where there are now 70 very sick patients, as there were in the spring, and the number is rising fast.

“Usually in our ITU we have about 35 patients so we are already doubled in size at UCLH. We are further surging upon the request of London to 92 patients in the next week, and thereafter probably we will have to grow even further,” he said.

At the hospital, whole floors are having to be dismantled and rebuilt to the standards required for intensive care wards. As they did in March, they have had to convert five floors and equip them with oxygen and continuous positive airway pressure (CPAP) machines that help people breathe.

It came as a nearby hospital reportedly told staff it was in “disaster medicine mode”. The Royal London Hospital in Whitechapel, east London, has more than 90 patients in adult critical care units and the “number of people with Covid continues to rise rapidly”, according to an email sent to staff. It adds: “We would like to take this opportunity to reiterate the fact we are now in disaster medicine mode. We are no longer providing high standard critical care, because we cannot. While this is far from ideal, it’s the way things are, and the way they have to be for now.”

Just under half of all major hospital trusts in England – 64 out of 140 – have more Covid-19 patients than at the peak of the first wave of the virus. This includes 11 of the 14 acute trusts in eastern England and 12 of the 19 acute trusts in south-east England. The NHS said on Thursday it was making sure the Nightingale hospitals were “reactivated and ready to admit patients”.

Levi paid tribute to his “amazing” staff, who volunteered to give up their leave over Christmas and the new year to help save lives. But they are severely stretched: intensive care nurses normally work with one patient; now they may have four or five under their care.

Elaine Thorpe, a critical care matron at the hospital, said they set up 20 new intensive care beds on Christmas Eve that were full by New Year’s Eve. “The biggest thing for me is I’m dreadfully worried about my team. Nurses are having to spread themselves thinly. We’re going back to the levels where we were before, where it was one ICU nurse looking after what will be four patients, or more. And we’ve had lots of tears already.

“This is happening all over London. UCLH is not quite feeling it the way that the other hospitals are, but a little stretch on an ICU nurse is too much of a stretch and you know we’re already doing way beyond what we would not want to do. And they’re just terrified as well. We’re living it again already.”

The tears are partly because nurses are unable to give their patients the dedicated care they want to provide, as well as the distress that Covid inflicts on everyone. Thorpe tells of nurses listening to families at home pouring out their hearts via iPads to severely ill relatives in ICU, who may be able to hear but cannot reply.

But there are also tears of frustration that people are still taking risks with the virus. “It’s not about us not stepping up and doing our job. We’ve all sacrificed Christmas and New Year but it’s not about that. We’re here for the patients. But it’s in the hands of the public to stop this, and it’s not listening and tonight [New Year’s Eve] is obviously going to make things even worse,” she said.

She has seen high-profile people on Twitter claiming that hospitals and intensive care units are empty. “I just don’t understand and my team don’t understand it, and that’s the really hard thing,” she said.

We were almost there, she said, with vaccines on the way. If people had given up Christmas and new year, it could have been different, she said, but now “this is going to be weeks. None of us can see this stopping any time soon.”

Levi also thinks people have relaxed too much. The big rise in cases is not just about the variant, he says. “I think it’s fair to say that we’re also seeing the effects of Christmas shopping, where people were crowding into shops and actually not really obeying distancing rules and all that stuff,” he said.

They will cope because they have to. Levi, from the Netherlands, praises the “enormous resilience and the can-do mentality” of people in London and the UK.

“If we have to do more, we will do more, and we will improvise and we will find other ways of providing the care that we need to provide, but it is extremely tight. In my very long experience both as a consultant and as hospital director, I’ve never experienced something like this before,” he said.

They will cope with the flood because of the commitment and dedication of the staff. “I feel that we have no choice. These people need medical care. We have to deliver it. We can deliver it. And we are also quite confident that we can deliver it in a safe and appropriate way,” he said.

Henny Beaumont on Covid overwhelming the NHS – cartoon

A Happy New Year?

Border Farce?

This poster, was among many, produced by a group of friends, and based on scrupulous research, known by their group name and banner:

Led By Donkeys 

The poster design, using the ubiquitous form of a tweet, quotes the Conservative MP and Brexiteer Dominic Raab, whilst in the role of Brexit secretary for the UK government, admitting that: 

"I hadn't quite understood the full extent of this but . . .  we are particularly reliant on the Dover-Calais crossing." 

10.30 am - 7 Nov 2018 

In December 2018, four friends were discussing their frustrations with the ongoing Brexit situation in 'The Birdcage', a pub in Stoke Newington. All four men had a connection with environmental campaign group Greenpeace; Oliver Knowles and Ben Stewart were employees, and James Sadri and Will Rose had previously been involved with the group. In the referendum, they had all voted to remain in the EU. During this period, the group discovered an old tweet by former Prime Minister David Cameron. This tweet, dating from before the 2015 election, read "Britain faces a simple and inescapable choice - stability and strong Government with me, or chaos with Ed Miliband". They agreed it would be a shame if Cameron deleted it, as in their view it summed up the "failure of Britain's political leadership". They were also frustrated by the failure, in their opinion, of British media holding leaders of the Brexit campaign to account. They decided to preserve the tweet by printing it out and pasting it up. Each of them chose a statement from a pro-Brexit politician to go up on billboards as well as "tweets you can't delete", looking for the "most offensive lies, lunacy and hypocrisy" in their view. They settled on the following four old claims: "The day after we vote to leave we hold all the cards and can choose the path we want" (Michael Gove, April 2016); "The Free Trade Agreement that we will do with the European Union should be one of the easiest in human history" (Liam Fox, July 2017); "There will be no downside to Brexit, only a considerable upside" (David Davis, October 2016); "Getting out of the EU can be quick and easy – the UK holds most of the cards in any negotiation" (John Redwood, July 2016). Two years later, by Christmas 2018, with Prime Minister Theresa May's Brexit deal stuck in parliament, none of these claims had materialised, according to The Guardian.

Eleven Brexit promises the government quietly dropped

Rose designed the posters. Sadri came up with the name "Lions led by donkeys", a common phrase referring to soldiers in the First World War who were led to their deaths by incompetent and indifferent leaders. They thought it well described the relationship between the British people and their Brexit leaders. Rose shortened it to #LedByDonkeys. They had the five tweets printed at billboard size. The activists bought a ladder, high-visibility jackets to look legitimate, a bucket, a roller and wallpaper paste. On the night of 8 January 2019 they illegally plastered the David Cameron tweet over a finance advert on a billboard on the A10 in Stoke Newington. They posted a photo of the billboard to their new Twitter account, and asked journalist Marina Hyde of The Guardian to retweet it; this soon resulted in #LedByDonkeys trending on Twitter. Within a day, their billboard poster had been plastered over with blue paper.

All at sea

Andrew Sparrow reported for the Guardian (Thu 8 Nov 2018) on how Dominic Raab, the present UK Foreign secretary, "hadn't quite understood the full extent" to which the UK was reliant on the Dover-Calais crossing.

Opposition parties and pro-remain groups have criticised the Brexit secretary, Dominic Raab, after he admitted that until recently he did not fully appreciate the importance of the Dover-Calais crossing for UK trade.

Speaking at an event on Brexit and the tech industry, Raab said that consumers would lose out if new rules create delays at the border.

In comments reported by the Politico website, he said: “I hadn’t quite understood the full extent of this, but if you look at the UK and look at how we trade in goods, we are particularly reliant on the Dover-Calais crossing.

“And that is one of the reasons why we have wanted to make sure we have a specific and very proximate relationship with the EU, to ensure frictionless trade at the border … I don’t think it is a question so much of the risk of major shortages, but I think probably the average consumer might not be aware of the full extent to which the choice of goods that we have in the stores are dependent on one or two very specific trade routes.”

Politicians and campaigners, including the scientist and broadcaster Brian Cox, reacted to his words with surprise and alarm.

Jenny Chapman, the shadow Brexit minister, said: “How are we meant to trust this government to deliver a good deal for the country when we have a Brexit secretary who doesn’t even understand the very basics of Brexit?”

Labour MP Jo Stevens of Best for Britain, an anti-Brexit group, said: “We finally have an admission of what we’ve known all along – that the Brexiteers hadn’t really thought through any of the impacts of leaving the EU. These comments are shocking.”

No tariffs? Not keeping promises? Led By Donkeys . . .

. . . organised a video to be shown publicly on Dec 16, 2020, and that was projected onto the white cliffs of Dover, to expose the fact, and make accountable the man that misled British Leave voters. 

Boris Johnson is about to agree a deal which will see tariffs put on UK goods when we diverge from EU standards. This footage, from the referendum campaign in 2016, shows he misled Britain.

(Location: Dover ferry terminal)

There are lies, damned lies . . .

. . . and statistics! 

Led By Donkeys say that:

We found this footage because we've been tracking down every word Johnson said in the 2016 referendum campaign, so everyone can compare what he promised to what he now delivers. It's 200k words and its here at; johnsondossier.com

johnsondossier.com

Dover eerily quiet on Brexit eve, but hauliers fear more chaos

Lisa O'Carroll and Peter Walker reporting for the Guardian today on the freight traffic going through Dover (Thu 31 Dec 2020):

After a week of mayhem, the roads of Kent are eerily deserted, almost devoid of freight traffic as lorry drivers from all over the EU avoid Dover and the Eurotunnel as the Brexit transition period ends.

The only reminder of the potential for Brexit chaos are the miles and miles of detritus – plastic bottles, shopping bags, and even towels – strewn along the banks of the southbound M20 motorway to the cliffs of Dover.

The government modelled plans for up to 7,000 lorries stuck in Kent in the wake of Brexit trade barriers going up at 11pm on the EU side of the channel. But all the evidence suggests importers have done their stockpiling and will be avoiding the port as the UK’s 30-year membership of the single market abruptly ends.

Just a trickle of lorries entered the Eurotunnel, and there seemed to be fewer than a handful heading to Dover early on Thursday evening.

Eurotunnel said traffic was usually quiet around new year; it was exceptionally so this year because so many importers had rushed to bring supplies in before 1 January, hence the heightened levels of traffic brought to a halt when the French slapped a Covid travel ban on freight just before Christmas.

Rod McKenzie, policy director at the Road Haulage Association (RHA), said: “I don’t think we will start to see things getting back to normal levels of traffic until the second week in January. Even then I think the real chaos is going to be invisible chaos.

“People don’t know what paperwork they have to fill in, haven’t dealt with customs declarations before, and if they don’t get that filled in properly, they don’t get the Kent access permit to travel into the county, so they will be stuck at depots and distribution centres around the country.”

The Kent access permit, KAP, or “Kermit” as it has been dubbed, is mandatory for all drivers wanting to cross the Channel after 11pm on 31 December.

Officials said that so far only about 450 of these 24-hour permits had been issued. The slow take-up was feeding fears that there could be a partial repeat of the pre-Christmas chaos with lorries halted or told to turn back if they do not have the Brexit passport in the coming weeks.

Drivers without a permit could be pulled over by the Driver and Vehicles Standards Agency using automatic number plate recognition and potentially fined £300, the officials said.

The concerns have been echoed by the RHA, with estimates that 50% or more of small- to medium-sized companies might not be ready for the border checks, which could raise the prospect of chaos later in January as supply chains become forced out of Brexit hibernation.

In Ashford, just a few miles north of Dover, the hum of construction continues into the night on the 66-acre lorry park destined to be a holding pen for more than 1,000 vehicles.

Many people in the area are mourning the loss of the fields and their environmental benefits.

“The downs on the left and the vale on the right – you could walk right through to Mersham village. It was lovely to do on a summer’s evening, but obviously the government had other ideas,” said Hugh Tyman, who was walking his dog, Willow, at a small housing estate on the other side of a dual carriageway separating residents from the lorry park.

Did he vote to leave the EU? “I did support it, but we weren’t told enough about how it would work by the politicians. Now they’ve done the deal and we don’t know the ins and outs of it either. I probably wouldn’t vote for it now that I know about all the paperwork, and the travel rules changing,” he said.

Another local in a country cottage on a former rural lane shouldering the vast site was also upset and said she hoped to get compensation. “My daughter grew up looking over cornfields,” she said. “There is just a constant drone of generators and it won’t stop after construction because the refrigerator lorries will have their generators on all night. The construction workers had four days off over Christmas –it was just lovely.”

Down the road, John Lang and his wife, Cherylynn, thought they had bought a rural idyll to retire to when the Guardian first told them about the government acquisition in July. Like the rest of the residents, they said, there was no warning or consultation on the lorry park.

They lost their 360-degree view of farmland and now look out on a pine-yellow four-metre-high perimeter fence at two sides of their house. “It’s like living in a compound, it’s hideous,” said Cherylynn.

John voted for Brexit and said he was optimistic about the future but did not think it would do much for Kent, which voted to leave the EU. “I can’t see what the benefit for us here in Kent is,” he said. He said that lorries were now accidentally coming down his country lane “because the postcode is the same as the lorry park”. He hoped ultimately it would be sorted out.

Stewart Wickham, a bus driver, was delighted that a trade deal had been reached because it meant the international driver permit lottery would no longer threaten his livelihood.

“I’ve just taken the GB hockey team over to Brussels and Amsterdam, and next week we find out if we are taking to them to their winter training ground in Malaga. If there wasn’t a deal, I wouldn’t have been able to do that,” he said.

From border farce (and Border Force) . . .

. . . to border tragedy? Artwork by: Cold War Steve