Meanwhile . . . struggling against denialism in 2020 "THE YEAR OF TRUTH"

Liverpool is a nodal point that defines the LODE Zone Line for Re:LODE Radio, and . . . 

. . . there's little that's modest about Liverpool. 

. . . is how Robert Yates begins his article for The Observer (18.10.20) in the Focus section on Lockdown Britain.

Just like the 1980's? This time it feels different in Liverpool 

"Robert Yates watched as Militant emerged amid the ravages of economic decline . . ."

. . . so The Observer copy runs, and declaring that . . .

"A new self-confidence is helping the city face its latest adversity."

Robert Yates continues his article on Liverpool NOW, and in an overall positive light: 

As cities go, it’s a glorious show-off – one knockout building after another inviting you to take an admiring look.

Which makes it deeply sad then, unnatural even, to walk along its handsome waterfront – mid-afternoon, late last week – and meet barely a soul to admire the view. The river walk is made for a Liverpudlian passeggiata, for the craic and the lovely thrum of city life. Instead, only the skateboarders were out – Covid-19 with its power to empty our city streets has been a boon for them, if no one else.

And if increasing lockdown is set to be our collective fate in the next weeks and months, then Liverpool is already living our future – the city and its metropolitan area was the first to move into tier 3 of England’s new lockdown system.

It’s a familiar role, Liverpool as outlier. And early headlines responding to the tier 3 decision played off a sense of Liverpudlian exceptionalism. It was “the 1980s again”, so the story ran – a time of sharp economic decline, and of confrontation, as now, between a Conservative government and a Labour local authority, then controlled by the far-left Militant tendency.

Or if you were there – I was a schoolboy in the Militant stronghold of Walton – the memories converge on one absolute truth we signed up to: the world, most readily embodied in the “evil Tory government”, was against us. That there was a deal of truth to this position – in 1981, the then chancellor Geoffrey Howe had circulated a memo to cabinet colleagues suggesting Liverpool be left to a fate of “managed decline”; more trouble than it was worth – did not always help.

To live in the city was to be every day mounting some barricade or other, and Militant’s continual, and often pantomime, opposition took its toll. In the 1980s, few apart from football fans and journalists looking for a political fight came to visit. The city was defiant, “us against them”, felt closed and often seemed to like it that way.

The “new Liverpool” that has emerged in the past couple of decades has a different pitch: “Come see us, let us entertain you.” Its very business model thrives on being open – tourism, conferences, the pursuit of pleasure (and education) – just when Covid-19 has made being open the most difficult thing. So while the parallels with the 1980s make sense in terms of the economic challenge, the city facing them is distinct. There’s now a clear sense of a future – you get a happy idea of it talking to politicians, business leaders, schoolchildren – but this future now feels vulnerable, fragile.

“Think of the Liverpool area as an emerging economy,” says Alison McGovern, the Labour MP for Wirral South, who is a Liverpool City Region “stakeholder”. “Coming out of the 1970s and 80s was like coming out of trauma. [Liverpool lost no fewer than 80,000 jobs between 1972 and 1982] There are huge upsides to being ‘emerging’. Rates of growth are higher, there’s lots of land, relatively cheap. Loads of people want to live here. But businesses are young, they are less likely to have reserves of capital; they need support.”

The differences with the 1980s also have something to say about the changing relationship between national government and a significant provincial city like Liverpool. ‘‘In the future we could see this as a moment when we realised we could do things differently,” says McGovern. “A moment when the English cities and regions began to take more control – of economy, of healthcare, and more.”

An optimistic reading, along these lines, might suggest that if the 1980s was the end of something – the last kick, say, of an old industrial economy– there’s potential in the misery for the beginning of something new. If you felt romantic, you might describe it, as the New Statesman did last week, as the “revolt of the north”, with Liverpool this time joined by Manchester and others. Speak to Steve Rotheram, mayor of the Liverpool city region, and you feel his frustration with an incompetent centre. But, in the spirit of the city’s change, he has little time for 1980s-type bluster: “To be honest, it’s felt like an emergency. Our hospitals could be overwhelmed, and I just wanted to concentrate on securing economic support so we’re in decent shape to come out of it.”

McGovern credits as key in Liverpool’s growing sense of self the structure that comes with the metro mayors. “In my first years as an MP, it made me weep that there was no platform for discussing ideas with local relevance. Now we have that – the structures, civil servants, our own chief economist.”

In a reckoning such as this, how you build a city economy is intertwined with the wherewithal to do so. Liverpool’s confidence has had a steady series of boosts – its designation as a European capital of culture in 2008 was central – but without political and institutional structures, momentum can be lost. Also, the old “them v us” has morphed into an issue of trust. “Devolution is a big word for the question of who do you want to take care of things,” says Rotheram. “Someone in London, or people you know?” This question becomes more urgent when health and livelihoods are in play.

“Listen, let’s not get too conspiratorial,” a local businessman conspires, “but if you’re in London, making decisions, it’s easier to let things fail up here. It’s not just a Liverpool thing – look at how parts of Manchester were left to stew for weeks.”

However, whatever the levels of local control, in post-industrial “cultural” economies – consider Liverpool the model – the future is still precarious. Liverpool remains a place of substantial poverty, with many people in jobs where they need to be on site – they can’t, as many of us can, work at a distance.

A waitress at my hotel tells me she’s only had eight hours of work in the last fortnight. That feeling I had, walking the streets, of the city closing down has, for her, real implications. She’s confident, though, that the “slowdown won’t come to a full stop ... We’ve got something going on, here in Liverpool.” Which, unlike in the old days, feels like an appropriate sort of defiance.

Precious cargo . . .

Liverpool, European Capital of Culture for 2008, along with Stavanger in Norway, is usually perceived as having been a positive experience, but for some within the creative community, especially those with a strong local community base, were critical of the Capital of Culture company. Why so? Well in the contemporary context of self-confidence, the cultural programme was often reduced to a "bread and circuses" strategy, to entertain the crowds with free spectacle, thereby both justifying the costs, and providing Liverpool with the level of publicity that these headline events could muster. But these events were brought into Liverpool, and bought by the Capital of Culture, from an international arts management culture. A lot of Liverpool creative life was left out, marginalised. Was this a form of denialism, a lack of trust and faith in the diverse communities across Merseyside? It turned out to be, for some at least, an experience likened to being sold down the river. It felt as if only faint echoes of Liverpool culture were allowed to occasionally intrude into the managed proceedings. 

Echoes from the LODE project of 1992 appeared, whether by design or zeitgeist, in the 2008 Liverpool Capital of Culture Opening Ceremony . . .

. . . precious cargo

Responding to a 1991 call for proposals for a performance work commissioned by the Bluecoat in Liverpool and Hull Time Based Arts, in Hull, and to reflect on the maritime histories of these two English mercantile city ports, Philip Courtenay came up with the following concept:

Ships come and go, but where are they coming from and where are they going?

Maybe it is on the journey we begin to discover something about where we are coming from as well as the places we encounter?

We come home after a journey, but what is home? 

There is no human contact and exchange of raw material these days in the loading and unloading of cargo, must it always be containerised? 

So, thinking about the world out there is essentially a psychological, cultural and ideological projection; is it the case we are just imagining the world?

Is the the world what the news says it is? 

What is the world actually like beyond these two horizons?

Western horizons beyond Liverpool?

Eastern horizons beyond Hull?

Imagine an invisible line, a great circle to gird our planet, and that links Hull with Liverpool across the Pennines, but can also point to places in Europe, Asia, the antipodes, the Americas and the British Isles? 

Why not follow this line? 

See where it leads? 

Make cargo along this line, at various locations along this line?

Make a cargo of art, messages made out of materials connected to information? 

Bring the cargo to the dockside in Liverpool?

Unload the cargo with the help of people?

Deliver the cargo by sailing ship to Hull?

Complete the circle?

On 12th September 1992, on Hartley Quay in Liverpool, Yellow House began . . .  

. . . unloading and carrying the LODE cargo! 

Liverpool 2008 Capital of Culture opening ceremony

A group of schoolchildren carry illuminated boxes across the staging in front of St George's Hall, Liverpool, in a performance that resonates with the LODE Legacy.

However, Re:LODE Radio is bound to comment on how the performance in the Opening Ceremony differs from the performance of The Yellow House. The Yellow House were cast in a creative and central role as observant and active participants. The Yellow House created the gallery installation, and became "the actors", or spect-actors who connected audience to the contents of the LODE cargo. Everyone was learning something new. By contrast, the performance in the Opening Ceremony, we encounter what Guy Debord identified in his work The Society of the Spectacle, as the development in modern society of a capitalistic and technical process that substitutes authentic social life with its representation: 

"All that once was directly lived has become mere representation."

Debord argues that the history of social life can be understood as "the decline of being into having, and having into merely appearing." This condition, according to Debord, is the "historical moment at which the commodity completes its colonization of social life."

The spectacle is the inverted image of society in which relations between commodities have supplanted relations between people, in which "passive identification with the spectacle supplants genuine activity". "The spectacle is not a collection of images," Debord writes, "rather, it is a social relation among people, mediated by images."

In his analysis of the spectacular society, Debord notes that the quality of life is impoverished, with such a lack of authenticity that human perceptions are affected, and an attendant degradation of knowledge, which in turn hinders critical thought. Debord analyzes the use of knowledge to assuage reality: 

the spectacle obfuscates the past, imploding it with the future into an undifferentiated mass, a type of never-ending present; in this way the spectacle prevents individuals from realizing that the society of spectacle is only a moment in history, one that can be overturned through revolution.

Debord's aim and proposal is "to wake up the spectator who has been drugged by spectacular images...through radical action in the form of the construction of situations...situations that bring a revolutionary reordering of life, politics, and art". In the Situationist view, situations are actively created moments characterized by "a sense of self-consciousness of existence within a particular environment or ambience".

The Society of the Spectacle . . .

. . . and a precious cargo

"The lockdown debate misses the point" says John Harris in an Opinion piece for the Guardian Journal published on Monday 19 October 2020 in the print edition of the newspaper:

Covid-19 is a class issue

This illustration was used for the online and print versions of John Harris's Opinion piece, and is by Matt Kenyon for The Guardian.

The UK coronavirus crisis – even more so in its second phase – is all about basic inequalities – and lockdown makes these worse

John Harris writes:

Just as our final exit from the EU comes into view, noise from the media and politics about Covid-19 is sounding discomfortingly similar to the furies that erupted around the 2016 referendum.

On one side stands the political right, opposed to lockdown, apparently spurning the advice of experts, and seemingly convinced that a mixture of true-Brit common sense and derring-do will somehow see us through. The left, meanwhile, emphasises the importance of “the science”, and the prospect of disaster. As in the US, it is beginning to feel like any contentious political question will now trigger these polarised responses – not necessarily in the population at large, but certainly among the people whose opinions define what passes for the national conversation.

News coverage of the second wave has so far tended to focus on which places should go in which official tiers, the distinction between pubs and restaurants, and the decision to send students back to universities. What has not been discussed nearly as much is the plain fact that the coronavirus crisis – even more so in its second phase – is all about basic inequalities, and the kind of questions of work, housing and poverty that deep crises always bring to the surface. In other words, Covid-19 is a class issue. That may sound simplistic, but what it actually denotes is an intricate set of considerations that the argument over lockdown is not acknowledging.

Since the start of the crisis, I have been regularly talking to many of the leaders in the north of England whose anger at condescending treatment from Boris Johnson and his colleagues continues to make the headlines. As many of them see it, one reason for the recent increases in infection is that the initial lockdown affected many of their areas differently than more affluent places. Rather than retreating inside to bake their own bread and have work meetings on Zoom, people in such trades as construction, warehousing and care work had to carry on venturing outside and mixing with others in the first wave, so levels of the virus remained comparatively high, even before the summer reopening then took them back to dangerous levels. Clearly, the ability to render yourself housebound is also dependent on whether your domestic environment makes remaining at home either viable or all but impossible. The basic point was recently nailed by the Financial Times writer Anjana Ahuja: 

“This crisis has broadly separated us into the exposed poor and the shielded rich.”

Andy Burnham, the Greater Manchester mayor, recently told me about one correlation that highlights this disparity. He said that in a swathe of the country that takes in Greater Manchester, east Lancashire and West Yorkshire, Covid hotspots map on to areas that were the focus of the last Labour government’s so-called Pathfinder scheme: the programme that aimed to replace old housing by bringing in private developers, and left a legacy of unfinished work and huge resentment. “The quality of housing in those areas is still extremely poor,” said Burnham. “Lots of families live intergenerationally. It’s very overcrowded. How would you self-isolate in a situation like that?”

This is a good riposte to the oft-heard suggestion that most people who fail to follow the rules are degenerate “Covidiots”, and further proof that in a society as insecure as ours, trying to stringently control anything – let alone a highly infectious disease – will tend to be very difficult indeed. According to research done at King’s College London, only 18% of people self-isolate after developing symptoms, and only 11% quarantine after being told by the government’s test and trace system that they have been in contact with a confirmed case. Among the factors the study associates with non-compliance are “lower socio-economic grade”, and “greater hardship during the pandemic”. A lot of people, it seems, would like to do what they are told, but simply can’t.

This is the basic point the government does not seem to have grasped – painfully highlighted by Johnson’s claim that infections increased because the public became “complacent”. Threatening people with fines of up to £10,000 if they fail to self-isolate – and, we now learn, passing their details to the police – is an example of the same cast of mind, less likely to persuade people in precarious circumstances to follow the rules than to keep their distance from the authorities. The fact that some people on very low incomes are finally eligible for a lump sum of £500 to cover a fortnight’s quarantine will not solve what is obviously a massive problem; in terms of basic practicalities, it is of a piece with Rishi Sunak’s plan to pay only two-thirds of lost wages to people affected by local restrictions.

But before anyone on the left starts feeling too self-righteous, they also have questions to answer. There is a cold, dogmatic attitude in certain quarters that seems to define itself against anything that smells of Tory laissez-faire. Earlier in the year, it was manifested in rigid opposition to schools reopening, as some people averted their eyes from the inequalities the suspension of education was making worse. Now, some of the same voices stridently argue for strict national measures, as if that proposition is straightforward. It is actually not just complex, but full of potential contradictions. A prime example: given that poverty and precarity are what make millions of people vulnerable to both Covid infection and the life-threatening complications that can come with it, the hardship that any lockdown creates will make those problems even worse. This, surely, is the circuit that desperately needs to be broken, but after so many wasted years it will take a long time to do it.

In the meantime, a daily ritual of political futility goes on. Some people on the right yearn for a return to shrunken government, rugged individualism and the primacy of “the economy”, whatever that is. On the opposing side, people would like us to diligently follow the edicts of a reborn state, but social conditions are too far gone to allow many people to do anything of the kind. To those at the sharp end of this crisis, neither position will sound particularly convincing.

So it is that increasing numbers of people ignore the current political drama, and muddle through as best they can. Parallels with the vote to leave the EU are not only about the divisive arguments that have gripped the political class, but the fact that many of the same places whose experience fed into their vote for Brexit – Hartlepool, Preston, Oldham, Middlesbrough – are also suffering the worst of the pandemic. The inequality they embody remains the essence of the 21st-century British condition: four years on from 2016, this is still a country so imbalanced that it keeps falling over.

Compassion versus denialism . . .

Marcus Rashford, footballer and activist, has issued an appeal to the public to back his food poverty campaign, saying that showing compassion and empathy towards the poorest children in society is part of; 

“what it means to be British”.

Patrick Butler for the Guardian reports (Thu 15 Oct 2020) on the Manchester United footballer calling on the British public to back his food poverty campaign and to help rather than judge children: 

The footballer called on people to be generous and to help rather than judge children in families that have fallen on hard times.

“Whatever your feeling, opinion or judgment, food poverty is never the child’s fault,” he said. “Let’s protect our young. Let’s wrap arms around each other and stand together to say that this is unacceptable, that we are united in protecting our children.

“Today, millions of children are finding themselves in the most vulnerable of environments and are beginning to question what it really means to be British. I’m calling on you all today to help me prove to them that being British is something to be proud of.” 

Denialism wins - but only for now! What planet are they on at No. 10?

A spokesman for Boris Johnson indicated that; 

ministers would not support giving pupils food during breaks including Easter and Christmas; 

as reported by Patrick Butler for the Guardian on Marcus Rashford's determination to continue the campaign to end Food Poverty for children in the United Kingdom. 

Rashford, who forced the government into a U-turn on providing free school meal vouchers over the summer, tweeted: 

“Merry Christmas, kids … This is not going away any time soon and neither am I.”

The 22-year-old, who was awarded an MBE last week for his recent campaigning, launched a parliamentary petition to end child food poverty.

The petition reached 100,000 just 10 hours after it was launched on Thursday, triggering consideration for debate in parliament. 

It calls for three policy recommendations from the national food strategy to be implemented without delay:

• Expand free school meals to under-16s in households where a parent is on universal credit.
• Provide meals and activities during all holidays.
• Increase the value of healthy start vouchers – which can be used by those who are pregnant or have a child under four to buy basic foods – from £3.10 to at least £4.25 a week.

A spokesman for the prime minister said on Thursday: “We took that decision to extend free school meals during the pandemic when schools were partially closed during lockdown. We’re in a different position now with schools back open to all pupils.

“It’s not for schools to regularly provide food to pupils during the school holidays. We believe the best way to support families outside of term time is through universal credit rather than government subsidising meals.”

The Tory chair of the Commons education select committee, Robert Halfon, joined Rashford in criticising the government’s refusal.

He tweeted: “This is very disappointing from@BorisJohnson @10DowningStreet. We need a long-term plan to combat child food hunger, especially given 32% of families have had a drop in income since March. @obr_uk [the Office for Budget Responsibility] predicts 336,500 more workers facing food insecurity due to rising unemployment.”

Rashford’s campaign over the summer won him widespread praise, and he formed a child poverty taskforce with major UK food brands. Launching the petition on Thursday, he said: “For too long this conversation has been delayed. Child food poverty in the UK is not a result of Covid-19. We must act with urgency to stabilise the households of our vulnerable children.”

He added: “Right now, a generation who have already been penalised during this pandemic with lack of access to educational resources are now back in school struggling to concentrate due to worry and the sound of their rumbling stomachs. Whatever your feeling, opinion or judgment, food poverty is never the child’s fault. Let’s protect our young. Let’s wrap arms around each other and stand together to say that this is unacceptable, that we are united in protecting our children.”

Meanwhile . . .

A week ago it was reported that fees of £6,250 a day were being billed to the government by test-and-trace advisers. Sky News economics editor Ed Conway  broke the story Thursday 15 October 2020. 

The story as told by Ed Conway, economics editor under the subheading:

The government is paying individual private sector consultants million-pound wages to work on its test and trace system, according to documents seen by Sky News.

Some executives from Boston Consulting Group (BCG) helping the government set up and run its testing system are being paid day rates of around £7,000 - equivalent to an annual salary of around £1.5m.

While individual consultants may only receive a portion of that sum, it is still considerably more than than any other public sector worker.

The revelation is the latest evidence of the expense of the government's testing scheme, which is budgeted to cost £12bn this year - making it one of the most expensive government programmes in recent years.

BCG is renowned as one of the most prestigious - and expensive - management consultancy groups in the world.

According to the documents, the government has paid BCG around £10m for a team of around 40 consultants to do four months' work on the testing system between the end of April and late August.

But while the government pays the consultancy, that fee is determined by the "day rates" of the individuals working for it.

BCG has a range of day rates for public sector work and while these are generally lower than the rates they charge in the private sector, they nonetheless range from £2,400 to £7,360 for the most senior consultants.

According to the documents seen by Sky News, BCG is giving the Department of Health and Social Care a 10-15% discount for its work, however this would still equate to day rates equivalent to a £1.5m annual salary.

The revelation comes amid growing consternation about the cost of Britain's COVID-19 testing system and question marks over value for money, given problems suffered by the system in recent months.

Labour MP Toby Perkins raised the matter during a House of Commons debate on contact-tracing on Wednesday afternoon.

"Occassionally you get a story that seems, in itself, to demonstrate a much wider point," he told MPs.

"And so it was today with the scoop revealed by Ed Conway of Sky News that the government is paying, on a daily rate, £7,360 per day to the management consultants at Boston Consulting Group, who are in charge of test and trace.

"Equivalent to a £1.5m salary to individuals as a day rate, to preside over this shambolic sight that is letting down all the people in my constituency and in so many others."

Mr Perkins called for "dedicated public servants" to be drafted into the test and trace system.

"You won't find dedicated public servants being paid £7,500 per day, you won't find them on £1.5m, but what you will find is a basic competence, a knowledge of their area, a desire to make sure that the systems work before they are implemented," he said.

"And that is what we need right now in our system."

The test-and-trace system collapsed last month after schools reopened following the lockdown. Figures on 17 September showed almost nine in 10 of all Covid tests in England were taking longer than 24 hours to produce results. Since then, the government has relied on private-sector involvement, while Dido Harding, the head of the programme, has faced calls to resign. And, where is Dido? Hanging about with Boris, who is a bit of an arse (Aeneas)?

Aeneas recounting the Trojan War to Dido, by Pierre-Narcisse Guérin. The scene is taken from Virgil's Aeneid, where Dido falls in love with the Trojan hero Aeneas, only to be left heartbroken by his departure. 

It's OK! Here she is . . .

. . . and she is a class act!

This photo of Dido Harding by Justin Tallis (/AFP/Getty Images) appears on the Guardian webpage that carries today's Opinion piece by George Monbiot published in the Guardian Journal (Wed 21 Oct 2020). The caption to this image runs: 

‘The government’s irrational obsession with the private sector is symbolised by its appointment of Dido Harding to run NHS test and trace.’ 

George Monbiot's Opinion piece runs under the headline and subheading:

The government's secretive Covid contracts are heaping misery on Britain

Bypassing the NHS and handing crucial services to corporate executives has led to the catastrophic failure of test and trace

George Monbiot begins his Opinion piece with this sentence: 

If you are not incandescent with rage, you haven’t grasped the scale of what has been done to us.

George Monbiot continues . . .

. . . The new surge in the coronavirus, and the restrictions and local lockdowns it has triggered, are caused in large part by the catastrophic failure of the test-and-trace system. Its £12bn budget has been blown, as those in charge of it have failed to drive the infection rate below the critical threshold.

Their failure was baked in, caused by the government’s ideological commitment to the private sector. This commitment had three impacts: money that could have saved lives has been diverted into corporate profits; inexperienced consultants and executives have been appointed over the heads of qualified public servants; instead of responsive local systems, the government has created a centralised monster.

This centralisation is perhaps the hardest aspect to understand. All experience here and abroad shows that local test and trace works better. While, according to the latest government figures, the centralised system currently reaches just 62.6% of contacts, local authorities are reaching 97%. This is despite the fact that they have been denied access to government data, and were given just £300m, in contrast with the £12bn for national test and trace. Centralisation may be a catastrophe, but it does enable huge contracts for multinational corporations.

The Conservative mantra, repeated for 40 years like a stuck record, is that the public sector is wasteful and inefficient while the private sector is lean and competitive. Yet the waste and inefficiency caused by privatising essential public health functions is off the scale. This isn’t like rail or water privatisation, where failure has caused dysfunction within a single public service. This is about the escalating collapse of national life.

The government’s irrational obsession with the private sector is symbolised by its appointment of Dido Harding to run NHS test and trace. She worked at McKinsey, Tesco and Sainsbury’s, and as chief executive of TalkTalk. After a disastrous hack of the TalkTalk database, exposing both the details of 4 million customers and Harding’s ignorance of the technology, she acquired the moniker Dido, queen of carnage, a nice pun on Christopher Marlowe’s play. In 2014 David Cameron, an old friend, made her a baroness; she sits in the House of Lords as a Conservative peer.

It would be wrong to claim she had no experience relevant to the pandemic. She sits on the board of the Jockey Club, which runs some of the biggest and most lucrative horse racing events in the UK. Among them is the Cheltenham Festival. By 10 March, it was clear that Covid-19 was a massive problem. Public health experts were frantically urging the government to take action. The epidemiology professor Neil Ferguson estimated that 20,000 lives would have been saved if the government had locked down a week earlier than it did. Many events had already been cancelled, for fear of spreading the disease.

Then we watched aghast as the Cheltenham Festival went ahead, and 250,000 people packed the terraces “like sardines”. It appears to have been a super-spreader event, blamed by some for a spike in infections and deaths.

The racing connection might not have commended her to doctors, but could it have commended her to the health secretary, Matt Hancock? For a long time Hancock, the MP for Newmarket, where the Jockey Club has major infrastructure and investments, has drawn a large proportion of his political funding from the horse-racing industry. An investigation by the Mirror estimates that he has received £350,000 in donations from wealthy people in the racing business. Before the last election he announced: “I’ll always support the wonderful sport of horse racing.”

Harding’s appointment is not the only intersection between racing and tracing. The Jockey Club’s premier annual event is the Grand National. Or, to give it its full title, the Randox Health Grand National. One of the government’s most controversial contracts is with Randox. It gave the global healthcare firm a £133m deal, without advertisement or competition, to supply testing kits.

Randox employs as a consultant the former Conservative environment secretary Owen Paterson. It pays him £100,000 a year for 200 hours of work. Neither he, nor Randox, nor the health department answered the Guardian’s questions about whether he had helped to secure this deal. In July, following a series of errors, the government withdrew Randox testing kits, on the grounds that they might be unsafe.

These apparent connections may be entirely coincidental. But in an emergency, when decisions must be made with the utmost rigour and a relentless focus on public health, there should be no possibility that other interests might intrude, or that ministerial judgment should in any way be clouded.

Like so much surrounding this pandemic, the identity of Harding’s team at NHS track and trace was withheld from the public, until it was leaked to the Health Service Journal last month. Clinicians were astonished to discover that there is only one public health expert on its executive committee. There is space, however, for a former executive from Jaguar Land Rover, a senior manager from Travelex and an executive from Waitrose. Harding’s adviser at the agency is Alex Birtles, who, like her, previously worked for TalkTalk. She has subsequently made a further appointment to the board: Mike Coupe, an executive at another of her old firms, Sainsbury’s.

The “world-beating” test-and-trace system she oversees has repeatedly failed to reach its targets. Staff were scarcely trained. Patients have been directed to nonexistent testing centres, or to the other end of the country. A vast tranche of test results was lost. Thousands of people, including NHS staff, have been left in limbo, unable to work because they can’t get tests or the results of tests.

Having demonstrated, to almost everyone’s dissatisfaction, that she was the wrong person for the job, Harding has now been given an even bigger role, as head of the National Institute for Health Protection, to run concurrently with the first one. This is the government’s replacement for Public Health England, which it blames for its own disasters. Harding’s appointment looks to me like a reward for failure.

The test-and-trace system might be a public health fiasco, but it’s a private profit bonanza. Consultants at one of the companies involved have each been earning £6,000 a day. Massive contracts have been awarded without competitive tendering. Astonishingly, at least one of these, worth £410m and issued to Serco, contains no penalty clause: even if Serco fails to fulfil its terms, it gets paid in full. Serco has indeed missed its targets, achieving an average by September of only 58.6% of contacts traced, against the 80% it was meant to reach.

Though this is an issue of great public interest, the contracts have been shrouded in secrecy. We have not been allowed to discover how the contractors were chosen, or why the government has repeatedly appointed them without competition. Time and again, in contracts for both the test-and-trace programme and protective equipment, sums of £108m have been disbursed. No one can explain why this magic number keeps recurring. Does it lie just below some threshold of accountability? Or is the government simply handing out standard wads of money to favoured companies, regardless of the cost of their work?

What is this about? Why is failure rewarded? Why are contracts issued with so little accountability or transparency? There may be a perfectly reasonable explanation, but you might expect the government’s Anti-Corruption Champion to investigate. Or perhaps not. He is John Penrose MP, Dido Harding’s husband.

The anti-corruption champion sits on the advisory board of a thinktank called 1828. It campaigned ferociously against Public Health England, on the grounds that its efforts to regulate junk food and reduce obesity “curtail personal liberty and undermine parental responsibility”: a standard industry talking point. It called for the body to be scrapped: this happened, and Penrose’s wife is running its replacement. It claims that “the NHS’s record is deplorable” and proposes that it be replaced with a social health insurance system. It champions the idea of outsourcing patients to the Cayman Islands for treatment. When I asked the thinktank who its major funders are, it told me, “1828 does not disclose information regarding donations.”

Penrose and Harding met when they were both employed as consultants at McKinsey. You’d never guess which company got the contract for advising on the “vision, purpose and narrative” of the National Institute for Health Protection, the new body that Harding runs. OK, you would. McKinsey was paid £563,000. Again, this work was neither advertised nor subject to competitive tender. I expect Penrose will look into it.

The head of Serco, Rupert Soames, is the grandson of Winston Churchill and the brother of a former Tory MP. His wife, Camilla, is a Conservative party donor. An email of his, leaked in June, suggested that the coronavirus pandemic could go “a long way in cementing the position of private sector companies in the public sector supply chain”. It seems to me that the emergency is being leveraged by the government for this purpose. Our crisis is the privatiser’s opportunity.

The government has bypassed the lean and efficient NHS to create an outsourced, privatised system characterised by incompetence and failure. The system’s waste is measured not just in pounds, but in human lives. It is measured in mass unemployment, economic crisis, grief, isolation, long-term illness and avoidable death. So much for the efficiencies of privatisation. 

The North is NOT a petri-dish

It has been a long week for many people living, caring, working, and NOT working in the LODE Zone Line as it crosses the north of England, from Liverpool on the west coast to Hull on the east coast. The coronavirus pandemic crisis has exposed the reality of things on so many levels in societies across the world. What has been revealed, as in the meaning of the word apocalypse, NOT the end of things, BUT "an uncovering", a disclosure or revelation of great knowledge, is the gross inequality that capitalism fosters, and everywhere you can look. Against this great knowledge we see the forces of a denialism, a denialism that is all too human. Facing reality is always difficult, and hiding from reality, especially for those who have more resources  than less, is easy.

But this is also, to a greater or lesser extent, a conscious denialism, "a structure of feeling", or NOT feeling. This pathological discrepancy is being created, constructed and promulgated by ideologues who live in bubbles far removed from most people's everyday reality, in a world riven by extreme levels of inequality.

To quote from Oxford Reference on the phrase "structure of feeling", first coined by Raymond Williams in Preface to Film (1954) to discuss the relationship between dramatic conventions and written texts. What concerned Williams was the social acceptability of particular conventions — think of the theme of mistaken identity which is rife in Shakespeare's plays which without the benefit of special effects relies on convention for its plausibility. In later works, particularly The Long Revolution (1961), Williams would develop this concept further, using it to problematize (though not refute) Antonio Gramsci's concept of hegemony. 

Hegemony, which can be thought of as either ‘common sense’ or the dominant way of thinking in a particular time and place, can never be total, Williams argued, there must always be an inner dynamic by means of which new formations of thought emerge. 

Structure of feeling refers to the different ways of thinking vying to emerge at any one time in history. It appears in the gap between the official discourse of policy and regulations, the popular response to official discourse and its appropriation in literary and other cultural texts. 

Williams uses the term feeling rather than thought to signal that what is at stake may not yet be articulated in a fully worked-out form, but has rather to be inferred by reading between the lines. If the term is vague it is because it is used to name something that can really only be regarded as a trajectory. It is this later formulation that is most widely known. 

What has been revealed over the last weeks and months of the pandemic, is that there is a massive divide across the regions, in the gap between the official discourse of policy and regulations, and the popular response to official discourse, especially when it comes to the acceptability of certain conventions, conventions of care, responsibility, accountability and honesty.

The Angel of Death of the North

Martin Rowson on England's three-tier Covid system

No-dealism?

After 10 days of negotiation struggling to agree a reasonable support package for the people of Greater Manchester, the local leaders received an e-mail from Robert Jenrick at 10.12pm, delivering an ultimatum, implying that tier 3 restrictions would be imposed unilaterally if no agreement was reached by noon on Tuesday. Josh Halliday and Helen Pidd of the Guardian, tell the full story (Tue 20 Oct 2020). 

It was 10.12pm when Robert Jenrick’s bombshell landed in the inboxes of exhausted leaders in Greater Manchester. By that time on Monday, it had already featured on the 10 O’Clock News, with a clip filmed in Westminster having been given to broadcasters first.

The final line of Jenrick’s letter contained the crucial ultimatum: after ten days of negotiations, agree to the country’s strictest tier of Covid measures by noon on Tuesday or the prime minister would be told “no deal”. The implication was that tier 3 restrictions would be imposed unilaterally. “I thought: ‘Dearie me, what?!’” said Rochdale’s veteran council leader, Allen Brett. “I read it as: we’ve been naughty boys, ‘I’m going to report you to the headmaster’.”

As the UK slept, Greater Manchester got to work. Senior council officers toiled long into the night and secured an offer of £55m in business support from the government in what they thought to be a strong starting point. It was clear that ministers were not going to cave and improve Rishi Sunak’s furlough scheme, which would pay 67% of wages as compared to 80% previously, but it was nonetheless a promising development.

Sir Richard Leese, the leader of Manchester city council, was in a surprisingly chipper mood at 8.30am. “I feel better than I did last night,” he said ahead of his first meeting with the region’s other leaders. “There is at least the basis of coming to an agreement.”

Asked what odds he would put on a deal being struck, he said: “To be honest I thought we were going to do a deal yesterday. On the basis of that, then I would probably put the odds at slightly worse than 50%, but the discussions last night do seem positive. And whilst we’ve got discussions taking place I will remain optimistic.”

The clock was ticking. At 9am, Burnham and the council leaders had their first Microsoft Teams call. They agreed that £55m was not sufficient to support the thousands of low-paid workers, self-employed people and businesses who will suffer the most under tier 3 measures. Greater Manchester had its own price: £90m, though they agreed to go down to £75m if necessary.

Over the previous 24 hours, the nine Labour council leaders and one Conservative had received messages of support from across the political spectrum. But it was Tory MPs, including the influential 1922 Committee chair, Graham Brady, whose backing for the revolt against the government was most striking.

“The Tories have been much more hardline than many of the Labour council leaders. All the MPs but especially Graham Brady were saying: hold out against the government,” said one senior figure.

By noon, Jenrick’s deadline, events were moving fast. Officials from Greater Manchester had put the £75m offer to the government; ministers had nudged up to £60m. It was expected the two sides would meet in the middle. The mood was upbeat. As Boris Johnson spoke to Burnham at midday, preparations were being made in Downing Street and Greater Manchester for the two leaders to hold press conferences within hours.

Local leaders tried to keep spirits high by sharing good news from each of their boroughs. Oldham council had bought a shopping centre as part of regeneration plans; Rochdale won money for a town hall restoration. Sean Fielding, the 30-year-old leader of Oldham council, offered to fill the time by telling jokes. In the end, the outcome was no laughing matter.

At 2pm, Burnham returned stony-faced from a phone call with Jenrick. He had told the communities secretary that £65m was the “absolute minimum” they could accept, perhaps expecting Jenrick to seal the deal. Instead, Burnham returned to his leaders on Teams just after 2pm to tell them that the government had walked away and tier 3 would be imposed, meaning the closure of a swath of hospitality businesses and tightened bans on household mixing.

'We took this stand for you' 

Andy Burnham reacts to failure of talks - 20 Oct 2020

But he was still in the dark over exactly what ministers were going to impose, when and at what cost, when he turned up shortly after 4pm for an alfresco press conference outside Manchester’s Bridgewater Hall, opposite the dormant Nightingale Hospital which has been fashioned out of the conference centre usually used for Tory party conference.

The barnstorming press briefing – in which Burnham accused ministers; 

of playing poker with residents’ livelihoods; 

and won applause from a growing crowd – was almost over when Kevin Lee, Burnham’s usually camera-shy aide, rushed to the front saying: 

“I think you should read this, Andy.”

As the mayor scanned a message, Leese announced that Greater Manchester’s MP’s had just been told by No 10 “that it was going to be £22m only, and they are going to try and pick off individual councils”.

'Brutal' 

Andy Burnham reacts to government's tier 3 package live on TV - 20 Oct 2020

The crowd, which had swelled in size as word spread that the mayor – dubbed the “king of the north” – was speaking to the people, booed. Burnham appeared shocked at what he had read, declaring it;  

“brutal – this is no way to run the country in a national crisis”. It is not right to “grind people down and offer the least they can get away with,” he said.

In the end it emerged that the £22m was for test and trace only. And despite Johnson refusing five times to confirm during his own 5pm press conference that the £60m final offer of business support remained on the table, No 10 sources later insisted it did.

Outside the Bridgewater Hall, the Guardian asked Burnham if he’d have got more money if he was a Conservative mayor. “Course he would!” shouted the hecklers. Burnham was more considered: 

“This was a government elected to level up. Can it say paying two-thirds of people’s wages is in any way an act of levelling up? Of course not. It’s an act of levelling those people down and grinding them into the dirt.” 

Re:LODE Radio considers that this disastrous outcome contextualises the fact that the UK government is in denial about what it is required to do in this pandemic, whether it is around issues and concerns on health and/or the economy. The reality is that you cannot divide people's health from their ability to survive in an economic environment, one that is becoming increasingly toxic. The UK government will have to face up to its responsibilities sooner or later, but for many of the people living in England it would be;

better sooner, rather than later!

Prime Minister's Questions today in the house of Commons in the UK's Westminster parliament illustrates this perfectly. Boris Johnson begins the session telling a bare faced lie about his successor as London Mayor, Sadiq Khan. 

Sadiq Khan accuses Boris Johnson of 'blatant lie' over TfL

Boris Johnson then avoids answering the questions put to him by the leader of the opposition Keir Starmer with his usual bluster, "attack as the best form of defence" posturing, and determination to dither at all costs. Costs that Johnson and Sunak have no intention of covering, that is if they can get away with it. 

Time will tell! 

Why not bring the virus back under control with a circuit breaker . . . 

. . . instead of more dithering?

Sooner or later? Why not sooner? And what about the science?

The Manchester Evening News posted this story on the morning of Friday 16 October with a photograph of graffiti that encapsulates the cavalier attitude of Boris Johnson, and "the tracks of his tiers", when it comes to the science. As Rebecca Day says in her report, the graffiti appeared following the speech made by Andy Burnham on Thursday afternoon: 

Mayor Andy Burnham made a passionate speech decrying government pressure to put the region on 'Tier 3' lockdown due to high coronavirus infection rates.

He described the north as being treated like a "sacrificial lamb" for unproven measures. 

This image went viral . . .

Heather Stewart and Ian Sample report for the Guardian on how No 10's relationship with its scientists broke down, and published in the print edition of the newspaper on Saturday 17 October 2020, under the heading:

Not following the science - How No 10 parted company with Sage on Covid

Heather Stewart and Ian Sample write under the heading (Sat 17 Oct 2020): 

The rupture in the consensus for tackling coronavirus began a month ago as Boris Johnson tried to placate lockdown sceptics

“The base will not be sufficient."

With owlish understatement, the chief medical officer for England, Chris Whitty, made clear that Boris Johnson’s three-tier local lockdowns, which the prime minister had just set out alongside him in Downing Street, would not curb the second wave of coronavirus crashing over England.

Just hours later, a startling late-night document dump from the government’s Scientific Advisory Group for Emergencies (Sage) confirmed in stark terms that Johnson had parted ways with his scientific advisers.

With Sage’s call for action out in the open, it became clear that the national consensus in the fight against coronavirus, increasingly strained over the past six months, had ruptured. From Andy Burnham on the steps of Manchester city hall refusing to allow his city to become the “canary in the coalmine”, to furious Conservative MPs attacking the health secretary, to Keir Starmer calling for a “circuit breaker”, the prime minister was beset by critics on all sides.

And with winter approaching, there were growing concerns in government about the public’s willingness to comply with measures they could see being attacked from across the political spectrum.

The seeds of this week’s disarray were sown almost a month earlier. Whitty and the chief scientific adviser, Patrick Vallance – CMO and CSA as they are known in Whitehall – briefed Johnson on 16 September about what one person present called the “terrifying reality” of allowing the virus to go unchecked.

But eight months into the pandemic, Downing Street is unashamedly listening to other voices. “People will look at Sage papers and go, ‘Oh, they’re not following the science’, but Sage is only one part of the decision-making process, and always has been,” said a Downing Street aide.

Many key decisions are made by the Covid operations committee, which receives, as well as scientific papers, economic analysis, reports from the NHS and NHS Test and Trace, and gives updates on how other governments are managing the crisis.

“Fundamentally, this has always been the challenge the prime minister has,” the aide said. “Pretty much everyone else has a focused area. Understandably, because that’s their job – you have Alok [Sharma] looking at the impact on businesses, Rishi [Sunak] looking at the wider economy, Matt [Hancock] looking at health costs. The PM’s the one who has to tie all that together.”

Sunak allies say the chancellor is relentless in questioning the data and “pushy” where he feels ministers are parroting their department’s line without analysis to back it up. “There have been times when he’s been, like, ‘Sorry, what’s your basis for X?’, and it falls apart.”

Hancock was pressing for tough action to be taken urgently – but focused on the worst-affected areas.

By Monday 21 September, it was becoming increasingly clear inside government that Johnson had decided to try to walk a middle course, between the alarmed scientists and the lockdown sceptics in his party, including the chancellor.

“‘Circuit breaker’ felt a bit like a hammer to smash a walnut,” says a government source about the discussions that weekend, which went on late into Sunday night. “When you’re looking at cases in the south-west and south-east, to cripple those economies and totally ruin lives in a different way would feel a disproportionate response.”

While No 10 was quietly shifting towards a largely local approach, the experts on Sage were determined to send a strong message to Downing Street as they fired up Zoom for their 58th meeting on Monday 21 September.

Over the weekend, they had had time to read an eight-page paper summarising “the effectiveness and harms of different non-pharmaceutical interventions”. It was co-written by a number of Sage experts, with a cover note from Prof John Edmunds, dean of the faculty of epidemiology and population health at the London School of Hygiene and Tropical Medicine.

While most Sage papers are technical and dry, this one was different. The language was frank and bleak. It spoke of coronavirus cases rising around the country and intensive care beds filling up. A failure to act immediately, it warned, would unleash an epidemic with “catastrophic consequences”.

Most of those taking part in the meeting knew this all too well. From the opening moments, it became apparent that everyone felt the same: the situation demanded action, and fast.

They concluded that no single intervention would get on top of the outbreak. A second document, circulated before the session, gave the numbers: the impact different restrictions would have on R, which must be below 1 for the epidemic to shrink. At the time, Sage’s national estimate for R was 1.1 to 1.4. Close all bars, pubs, cafes and restaurants and R might fall by 0.2. Close the schools and it could fall by as much as 0.5.

In the event, the experts proposed a package of interventions – “required urgently” – to push the rate of new infections down and prevent the epidemic spiralling out of control. On the shortlist were a circuit breaker, or two-week mini-lockdown; advice to work from home where people could; a ban on indoor mixing with other households; the closure of all bars, restaurants, cafes, indoor gyms and services such as hairdressers; and for all university and college teaching to be online unless absolutely essential.

They felt a two-week circuit breaker was particularly appealing. The mini-lockdown could replace two weeks of growth with two weeks of decline, pushing the epidemic back four weeks. England’s struggling test and trace system would likely catch more people. An inexorable rise might become a sequence of smaller, sawtooth peaks. All the measures had downsides, but doing nothing was worse. When the meeting wrapped up, the consensus was clear: England needed decisive action.

Yet the following day, when Johnson announced new restrictions, it became clear that Sage’s call to arms had gone unheeded. The centrepiece was a 10pm curfew on hospitality – and a reversal of Johnson’s message, a few weeks previously, to go back to the office.

Some Conservative MPs welcomed the prime minister’s willingness to deviate from the path set by the scientists. One former cabinet minister praised Johnson for his leadership. “Once you say publicly that you’re following the science, then you basically have to do everything that Chris Whitty says, and I think that’s very unhealthy, because that’s asking him to do something that he’s not actually qualified to do,” he said.

One Whitehall source remarked waspishly that if the government had followed Sage, “we would never have come out of lockdown”, adding, “They’ve always wanted to let nothing happen.”

Sceptics about the circuit-breaker plan argue that it merely buys time. “It doesn’t change the fundamental path of the virus. The argument that it changes the trajectory is scientifically wrong. Unless you’re expecting it to change behaviour, in which case it’s not a circuit breaker, it’s about frightening people, and there are better ways of doing that.”

But in the face of the government’s lack of action, Sage members turned to the media to hammer home their point. Edmunds and Graham Medley, a member of Sage and professor of infectious disease modelling at the London School of Hygiene and Tropical Medicine, went public with some of their concerns.

But inside government, negotiations were ongoing about the details of a three-tier local Covid alert system. Insiders said this was actually Hancock’s idea. “He’s pleased that approach has won out,” a source said, describing the policy as a result of the “healthy challenge” between those with different responsibilities.

Among the scientists, however, frustration was evolving into alarm and fear. At a subsequent Sage meeting, Whitty looked “quite murderous”, one researcher was told after the session.

It was his Sage co-chair, Vallance, who decided to publish the minutes of the committee’s fraught discussions of September. The timing was striking: it was the earliest moment Vallance could have made them public – and it dramatically reignited the public debate over a circuit-breaker lockdown.

The release of the papers had been signed off by the Cabinet Office. Downing Street hoped the more extreme options laid out would help reassure anti-lockdown renegades on the Tory benches that far from taking an extreme course, the prime minister was holding the line.

Instead, Steve Baker and his band of rebels underlined the prime minister’s fragile base by delivering a carefully calibrated symbolic rebellion, with 42 Conservative MPs voting against the government.

The sharp contrast between the scientists’ evident alarm and the government’s modest measures hadn’t gone unnoticed by Keir Starmer. “Constructive opposition requires a constructive government,” said one source close to the Labour leader. “There’s a frustration that every time we put a proposal, it’s dismissed, only to be adopted a couple of weeks later.”

Much of the decision-making about Labour’s handling of the pandemic takes place at Starmer’s Covid committee, an inner shadow cabinet. Meeting several mornings a week by Zoom, the group includes the shadow health, foreign and home secretaries, Starmer’s deputy, Angela Rayner, the shadow chancellor, Anneliese Dodds, and Rachel Reeves, the opposite number to the powerful Cabinet Office minister, Michael Gove.

Increasingly alarmed about the trajectory of the disease, they had been discussing the idea of a short-term circuit breaker since the idea emerged from leaked accounts of Sage meetings. By the time they met on Saturday 10 October, there was “pretty much a consensus” to back a short, sharp shutdown, but they decided to wait for the prime minister’s statement to parliament on Monday before taking a public stand.

The group met again on the Tuesday morning to make their final decision. It was signed off by the wider shadow cabinet at lunchtime, and Starmer’s team contacted Labour’s metro mayors to prepare the ground.

Later that day, Starmer gave his dramatic press conference at the Garden Museum just across the river from Westminster, endorsing a two- to three-week circuit breaker, albeit with schools kept open.

The prime minister’s allies insist that they are “really relaxed” about Starmer’s intervention. They believe when the hard winter has passed, Johnson will come into his own. “When we get to the spring, and we get over the hump of this, then it will all be about building confidence; and then it gets more like a campaign. That will be a very natural groove for him,” said one.

But the mood among scientists remains gloomy. Jeremy Farrar, a doctor on Sage and director of the Wellcome Trust, described the measures as “the worst of all worlds”. His comments reflect a pessimistic mood on Sage as Covid continues its relentless march.

On Friday, the Office for National Statistics estimated that 28,000 people had caught the virus each day between 2 and 8 October.

Stephen Reicher, a professor of social psychology at the University of St Andrews and a member of the behavioural science subgroup of Sage, said: “For me, this was not just another decision. It seemed to portend something much larger in terms of the way the science is treated.” The measures, he said were a “middle-of-the-road fudge … This is like going to sea in half a boat”.

A Ship of Fools? 

Stephen Reicher's image of this “middle-of-the-road fudge . . . like going to sea in half a boat” is difficult visualise, but the trope of a ship of fools is more familiar in art, literature, drama, film and even in the philosophy of Michel Foucault  where he cited the Ship of Fools metaphor at length in his 1961 book Madness and Civilization. 

A satirical allegory in German verse was published in 1494 in Basel, Switzerland, by the humanist and theologian Sebastian Brant, and proved extremely popular. Hieronymus Bosch depicts the theme in an allegorical tryptich, as does a young Albrecht Durer.

 

A detail of Ship of Fools (painted c. 1490–1500) a painting by Hieronymus Bosch, now on display in the Musée du Louvre, Paris.

Stephen Reicher's image is perhaps closer to Edward Lear's nonsense verse The Jumblies: 

 

They went to sea in a Sieve, they did,

In a Sieve they went to sea:

In spite of all their friends could say,

On a winter’s morn, on a stormy day,

In a Sieve they went to sea! 

Plato's Republic . . .

The trope originates, very appropriately for this post, with an allegory, originating from Book VI of Plato's Republic, about a ship with a dysfunctional crew. The allegory is intended to represent the problems of governance prevailing in a political system not based on expert knowledge, such as democracies.

There’s the shipowner, larger and stronger than everyone in the ship, but somewhat deaf and rather short-sighted, with a knowledge of sailing to match his eyesight. The sailors are quarrelling among themselves over captaincy of the ship, each one thinking that he ought to be captain, though he has never learnt that skill, nor can he point to the person who taught him or a time when he was learning it. On top of which they say it can’t be taught. In fact they’re prepared to cut to pieces anyone who says it can. The shipowner himself is always surrounded by them. They beg him and do everything they can to make him hand over the tiller to them. Sometimes, if other people can persuade him and they can’t, they kill those others or throw them overboard. Then they immobilise their worthy shipowner with drugs or drink or by some other means, and take control of the ship, helping themselves to what it is carrying. Drinking and feasting, they sail in the way you’d expect people like that to sail. More than that, if someone is good at finding them ways of persuading or compelling the shipowner to let them take control, they call him a real seaman, a real captain, and say he really knows about ships. Anyone who can’t do this they treat with contempt, calling him useless. They don’t even begin to understand that if he is to be truly fit to take command of a ship a real ship’s captain must of necessity be thoroughly familiar with the seasons of the year, the stars in the sky, the winds, and everything to do with his art. As for how he is going to steer the ship - regardless of whether anyone wants him to or not - they do not regard this as an additional skill or study which can be acquired over and above the art of being a ship’s captain. If this is the situation on board, don’t you think the person who is genuinely equipped to be captain will be called a stargazer, a chatterer, of no use to them, by those who sail in ships with this kind of crew? 

Disarray? Lost opportunity?

Johnson has ignored the science and blown our chance to stop a second wave

So says Stephen Reicher in an Opinion piece for the Guardian (Tue 13 Oct 2020):

The government could have controlled the virus had it heeded Sage’s advice. Instead, England faces a limbo of lockdowns

We shouldn’t be here. Back in June, England had the opportunity to suppress the virus. With a functional test and trace system, support to help people self-isolate, a robust set of regulations to keep work and leisure spaces safe and a clear public communications campaign, we could have suppressed coronavirus into the winter.

But the opportunity was squandered. Worse, as restrictions were lifted on 4 July – what became known colloquially as “Freedom Saturday” – we were encouraged to relax, to travel back to work, to go to the pub, to mix and mingle. Meanwhile, the country’s dysfunctional, centralised and privately-run test and trace system lurched from one calamity to the next. World class? At failing to contact people and succeeding in losing data, perhaps.

The virus never went away. In some deprived communities, such as Bolton and Rochdale, infections remained endemic. As the summer faded we moved indoors, and schools and then universities returned. Infections began to rise again, slowly at first, but then faster and faster. The signs were unmistakable. If the government did nothing, England would be back to a similar number of cases that we saw in March, and the death rate would begin to climb again. The NHS would be overwhelmed.

On 21 September the scientific advisory body Sage produced a paper with a simple message: do something now or else lose control over the virus. That “something” would have to be sufficient to reduce infections to a level where the virus could be controlled without shutting businesses and curtailing livelihoods. At a minimum, that would mean restricting social mixing, closing pubs, offering university classes online and working from home.

On the day that advice was given, there were 4,696 infections across the UK. The government hummed and hawed, dillied and dallied, and by the time ministers finally made a decision on 12 October, three weeks later, infections had tripled to some 14,000 cases per day. If anything, this alarming growth meant they had to go further than the Sage advice to bring the virus under control. So what did they do?

Rather than following the science, the government plumped for an anaemic compromise between its scientific advisers and those arguing against any new restrictions. England’s new three tier system still falls far short of what Sage advised back in September. Ministers couldn’t even bring themselves to close pubs, instead opting for a nonsensical policy in England whereby pubs in areas under a tier 3 lockdown can remain open and serve alcohol so long as they also serve a “substantial” meal. This might keep Wetherspoons open, but it certainly won’t suppress coronavirus.

We now find ourselves occupying the worst of all worlds: a limbo where the pandemic drags on and causes more damage, leaving us hopeless and praying for a vaccine. The government’s policy of continuous local lockdowns will disrupt everyday lives and damage businesses, but it won’t suppress the virus. England’s chief medical officer Chris Whitty conceded as much in a recent press briefing: in an extraordinary piece of political theatre, he followed the prime minister’s announcement of the three-tier system with a warning that these new measures won’t work.

It’s not that people are unable to put up with hardship or suffering. As we saw during the first wave, people can and will make considerable sacrifices for a common cause – if they see a point to it. But people aren’t stupid. They won’t simply suffer for the sake of it. If they do give up on these lockdown measures, it won’t be because they have failed: it will be because the government has failed them.

A “circuit breaker” now seems inevitable. But little will be achieved by a temporary lockdown unless we use this time to reset our overall response. It seems this has been entirely forgotten; not a word was said yesterday by the prime minister – either in parliament or at his press conference – about resetting testing, providing support for those self-isolating or improving regulations. It seems that we have learned nothing from the errors of June, and have given no consideration to how we might avoid repeating them.

In the end the problem is what it has always been. We have a government entirely without a strategy to deal with this pandemic. We have a cabinet entirely without a vision or a strength of purpose, reacting in panic to events as they arise rather than devising the means to get on top of them. And we have a prime minister who craves approval and wants to please everyone, who lacks the strength to face down his backbenchers and ends up with half-measures that help nobody. At a time when we need it most, the country has been saddled with a woeful lack of leadership.

• Stephen Reicher is a member of the Sage subcommittee advising on behavioural science a professor of psychology at the University of St Andrews

Wales orders 'firebreak' lockdown and leaves England going it alone

So runs the headline on the Guardian front page Tuesday 20 October 2020.

Steven Morris reports for the Guardian (Mon 19 Oct 2020) under the subheading: 

First minister announces lockdown from 23 October to give NHS breathing space before winter

Steven Morris begins his report stressing the fact that England is the only part of the UK not to bring in a form of national “circuit breaker”. He writes:

The Welsh government has mounted a staunch defence of the need for a nationwide lockdown as it announced “sharp and deep” measures despite having the lowest rate of Covid-19 cases of the four UK nations.

The first minister, Mark Drakeford, insisted the two-week “firebreak” – under which schools, shops, pubs and hotels will close and citizens will be told to stay at home – was needed to prevent thousands more deaths and the NHS becoming overwhelmed.

The move means England is the only part of the UK not to bring in a form of national “circuit breaker”, even though it has been advised to do so by experts on the Sage committee, by teachers’ leaders, doctors and by the Labour party.

Mark Drakeford announces 'firebreak' Covid lockdown for Wales 19 Oct 2020 

The Welsh first minister, Mark Drakeford, has announced a two-week national lockdown for Wales to tackle the rise in coronavirus infections. The Welsh government says a short, sharp shutdown now will give the NHS breathing space ahead of a difficult winter.

Today Josh Halliday and Helen Pidd report for the Guardian (Wed 21 Oct 2020) on how the government refused to allow funding to be used to top up all workers to minimum wage in a:

'tawdry' tier 3 process

Leaders in the Sheffield city region have attacked the government’s “tawdry” and divisive approach to imposing tough coronavirus restrictions, saying its £41m deal is far less than needed and is tied up in red tape.

Chris Read, the leader of Rotherham borough council, said the region required £90m to help businesses, low-paid workers and for the test-and-trace system, but that the government was not prepared to offer a sum any higher than the £41m.

He added that government officials had explicitly told local leaders they could not use this fund to top up wages to prevent people earning less than the minimum wage.

“I found the whole process to be pretty tawdry. It wasn’t a genuine negotiation by any stretch of the imagination,” Read said.

So take a good look at my face

You'll see my smile looks out of place

If you look closer, it's easy to trace 

The tracks of my tiers 

Leadership in a crisis? 

The devolved governments of Northern Ireland, Scotland and Wales, have all chosen to face the reality of the health crisis, and taking the view that reducing transmission rates will enable a more realistic easing of the strictures upon everyday lives and livelihoods.

Gerry Moriarty reports for The Irish Times Wed, Oct 14, 2020, under the headline and subheading:

Covid-19: Northern Ireland to enter four-week lockdown

New rules announced as North reports record 1,217 coronavirus cases in one day

Lack of UK leadership in a crisis? 

The UK government has chosen to lead England, and its regions in the North of England in particular, into a three tier system where it is more than likely that most of the country will end up in tier 3! And with little prospect of an exit. This policy fudge pretends that it is all about the economy, but it's denialism at its most dangerous. 

Translating this denialism in the UK's approach to the climate crisis over the next twelve months or so, as the UK prepares for the Glasgow UN Cop 26 climate conference in 2021, will be a potential disaster for the UK and all those seeking to fulfil the promises made in the Paris agreement. 

Meanwhile in Ireland . . . 

Pat Leahy, Jack Horgan-Jones, Jennifer Bray, Shauna Bowers report for The Irish Times (Mon, Oct 19, 2020):

The Government has announced Level 5 restrictions across the State for six weeks from Wednesday night/ Thursday morning at midnight until December 1st in a bid to curtail the spread of Covid-19. The Taoiseach said the Government intends that the country will go into Level 3 when the new period of restrictions expires.

As part of the restrictions the public will be asked to stay within 5km of their home and there will be penalties for breaches. There are some exceptions such as medical reasons and essential work.

However it is a soft version of Level 5 with schools and creches to remain open, non-contact training for children in pods of up to 15 and elite level sport including inter-county Gaelic games behind closed doors as well as weddings for up to 25 guests.

Social bubble

Mr Martin announced a social bubble measure would allow people parenting alone or living alone to pair with one other household.

Meanwhile along the LODE Zone Line . . .

From Liverpool . . . 

. . . to Dingle

Across the waters from Liverpool, westwards to Liverpool Bay, Wales and the Irish Sea, the LODE Zone Line passes across the east coast of Ireland, and Wicklow. From Wicklow and its mountains the LODE Zone line passes across southern Ireland to the northern promontory of Dingle Bay, the Dingle peninsula and Slea Head.

Amid the Covid-19 regime of restrictions comes the news that the tourism industry in Dingle is concerned about the disappearance of the bottlenose dolphin known as Fungie.

Boats search for 'tired dolphin Fungie 'missing' almost a week 

Anne Lucey reports for The Irish Times (Sun 18 Oct 2020):

Fisher folk and Fungie-watchers are hoping a change in the wind to the southwest may bring the famous bottlenose back to Dingle Harbour.

He has now been “missing” from the area for almost a week.

Fungie-watchers since 1991 Jeannine Masset and Rudi Schamhart, who raised the alert on Thursday, said “it is really very hard on everyone”.

“Needless to say that we are heartbroken but also over-exhausted for we did not sleep in four days,” they wrote on their ‘Fungie Forever’ Facebook page.

They took some criticism for raising the alarm, but now most Fungie-watchers have accepted the gravity of the situation and Dolphin tour boats and other vessels are out searching.

Besides the search they have been responding to hundreds of messages.

They raised the alert he was missing and told Dingle Boat Tours’ Tom Hand and Mary and Mike O’Neill, who took them on a long search to places they could not go with their own small boat.

Their last photo of Fungie was posted on Saturday, October 10th and one the previous day shows him taking a short cut close to the cliffs in the harbour.

They also reported their belief that he looked tired on October 7th. “It was very clear the last weeks that Fungie was tired of the busy season. His whole behaviour showed that,” they say.

Jimmy Flannery of Dingle Sea Seafari Tours, a founder member of the fishermen’s group which set up the Fungie tours in 1989 said in his 33 years running trips to Fungie, four to five hours a day, this “is the most he has gone missing in 37 years of being in Dingle”.

Mr Flannery said he believes the “easterly wind” is a factor as he is always less active at such times.

He also thinks there is rich feeding outside the harbour at this time and Fungie may have gone out for food.

RTE News and Sky News report on the search for . . . 

. . . a beloved dolphin 

Meanwhile along the LODE Zone Line . . .

In New Zealand in the southern regions of the South Island, the LODE Zone Line, crosses the island, a zone that includes the City of Dunedin, the second-largest city in the South Island of New Zealand (after Christchurch), and the principal city of the Otago region. Its name comes from Dùn Èideann, the Scottish Gaelic name for Edinburgh, the capital of Scotland.

From Dingle . . .

. . . to Dunedin  

. . . and where New Zealanders have given Labour more votes than at any other election in the past five decades in the result that has Jacinda Ardern sweep to a second term after an election landslide.

The Observer reporters Eleanor Ainge Roy and Charlotte Graham-McLay in Auckland, cover the New Zealand election result (Sat 17 Oct 2020) under the headline and subheading:

Jacinda Ardern to govern New Zealand for second term after historic victory

New Zealanders give Labour more votes than at any other election in past five decade

Eleanor Ainge Roy and Charlotte Graham-McLay report:

Jacinda Ardern will govern New Zealand for a second term after the Labour party secured a historic landslide victory in the general election, attracting so many votes it could become the first party in decades to be able to govern alone.

Ardern’s deft handling of the Covid-19 outbreak and resolute belief in science and experts was credited with earning the trust of New Zealanders, who cast early votes in record numbers, giving her party more votes than at any other election in the past five decades.

With nearly 100% of the vote counted, Labour had secured 49%, with the opposition National party on 27%. Labour was expected to win 64 of the 120 seats in parliament, and National, 35. It is the best result for the Labour party in 50 years, being hailed as “extraordinary” by the former Labour prime minister Helen Clark, and “mind-blowing” by supporters.

The leader of the opposition, Judith Collins, congratulated Ardern on the “outstanding result” on Saturday night, but refused to answer questions from reporters on whether she would stay on as leader.

Speaking to 1,000 people at Auckland town hall, Ardern thanked the nation for the strong mandate. She said elections “don’t have to be divisive” and promised to govern with cooperation and positivity, adding that New Zealand could set an example by showing elections don’t have to mean people “tear one another apart”.

She said: “We are living in an increasingly polarised world, a place where more and more people have lost the ability to see one another’s point of view. I hope in this election New Zealand has shown that this is not who we are. That as a nation we can listen, and we can debate. After all, we are too small to lose sight of other people’s perspective. Elections aren’t always great at bringing people together. But they also don’t need to tear one another apart.

“At times of crisis, I believe New Zealand has shown that. This has not been an ordinary election and it is not an ordinary time. It’s been full of uncertainty and anxiety – and we set out to be an antidote to that.”

The words were interpreted as a veiled allusion to the divisive US election, due to take place in two weeks.

Ardern had tears in her eyes as she took to the podium, and appeared moved by the show of support for her party, and leadership. Earlier this week she had said she would quit politics if she was not re-elected.

The first 30 seconds of Ardern’s address was in fluent Māori – the language of New Zealand’s Indigenous people.

To cheers, Ardern said: “I cannot imagine a people I would feel more privileged to work on behalf of, to work alongside and to be prime minister for. Tonight’s result does give Labour a very strong and very clear mandate.”

If it chooses, Labour will not have to rely on a minor party to form a government.

This would make Ardern’s 2020 government the first since 1996 to govern alone, giving it a seismic advantage to pass progressive policy on issues such as climate change, affordable housing and child poverty.

In her first term as leader, Ardern struggled to enact the transformational change she had promised voters. It is understood she was stymied by her necessary coalition agreement with NZ First – a right-leaning, socially conservative minor party.

They have now been decisively voted out of government, failing to meet the 5% threshold.

Ardern has yet to decide if she will invite the Green party into government; but even without them, the new government will be significantly more progressive and left-leaning than its previous iteration.

The vote had become a referendum on Ardern’s leadership since 2017, when she morphed from a relative unknown backbench opposition MP to prime minister in less than three months.

The results suggested New Zealanders had rewarded her for her deft handling of the pandemic, which has so far spared the country the worst of Covid-19, although it is now in a recession.

Ardern’s decision to close the borders and enforce a nationwide lockdown meant fewer than 2,000 people became infected with coronavirus and 25 people died.

A record number of voters – nearly 2 million – cast their ballots in advance, accounting for almost half of the roughly 3.5 million New Zealanders on the electoral rolls.

Collins – the third leader this year of a National party beset by infighting and disunity _ often preferred to criticise Ardern’s handling of the pandemic or plans for economic recovery, rather than promote her own policies.

Ardern, who has become globally famous as a progressive leader, emphasised kindness and cooperation during her first term, and told voters she needed a second term to deliver on her promises of transformational change.

During her first term, she banned future oil and gas exploration, increased paid parental leave, raised the minimum wage, and increased benefits for the most deprived New Zealanders.

But she failed to deliver on some of her key pledges. She ditched the KiwiBuild affordable housing scheme (fewer than 500 homes were built out of an original 100,000 pledged), scrapped a proposed capital gains tax, and made minimal headway on child poverty.

She defended her progressive record on Friday, telling an interviewer that change would not happen overnight.

“I am not finished yet … I take some flattery in the idea that I would resolve a decades-long problem in three years but I can’t,” she told Radio New Zealand, of her child poverty record.

A second term brings with it a slew of challenges, with the country facing a recession, poverty and benefit figures on the rise and climate-related weather events becoming more common.

Labour’s ‘dangerous strategy’

Ardern’s popularity was at the forefront of Labour’s campaign, with one social media ad saying a vote for the party would allow New Zealand to “Keep Jacinda” as one of the top 10 reasons to vote for them. Analysts said it was a risky strategy for the party in the long term.

Jennifer Lees-Marshment, a politics professor from Auckland University, said: “She’s not trying to win anyone over, so while this appears safe for Labour, it’s actually a very dangerous strategy.”

Susan St John, a researcher for Child Poverty Action Group, said the Ardern government had failed to rein in excessive wealth, to the detriment of the poorest.

“There have been small improvements to low incomes but no transformative step changes,” St John said. “Government promises on prioritising child poverty led to very modest reduction targets that are looking less achievable on the current settings amid the Covid-19 recession.”

Election fatigue was pronounced throughout the long weeks of campaigning, but it was Labour’s promise to deliver “stability” – usually a National party slogan – that proved decisive after such a trying year.

Ardern has promised to halve child poverty by 2030, tackle the climate crisis and build more state housing. She has also promised to resuscitate the economy after a strict seven-week lockdown.

Collins crushed

While Collins, a veteran politician, was a known quantity, she was also divisive – loved and loathed in equal measure. Her upbeat energy appeared to flag in the final week of the campaign as her defeat looked ever more certain, and she will now likely face a fight for the National leadership.

Collins criticised Ardern for using “waffly” language and failing to deliver on her promises of transformational change. She said the prime minister offered “love and hugs” when what the country really needed was an experienced politician and a business hand to lead them out of the financial crisis.

But her attacks did not seem to resonate with voters.

Political analysts have described the 2020 general election as “weird”, “odd” and “bizarre”; and said it lacked the usual drama and scandal – as well as much coherency.

Ardern’s popularity at home and abroad have transformed her into the country’s first “celebrity PM” and, coupled with her Covid-19 success, many analysts judged her impossible to beat, saying her appeal as a leader stretched beyond politics.

As well as electing a new government, the ballot papers asked New Zealanders to decide on whether to legalise marijuana and euthanasia. The results of the referendum questions will not be made public until 30 October. Polling has suggested euthanasia looked likely to become legal, but support for legalising cannabis has cooled.

Jacinda Ardern thanks supporters amid Labour landslide

Leadership in a crisis 

Jacinda Ardern's standing at home, and internationally, has a lot to do with her quality of leadership throughout the Covid-19 pandemic crisis thus far. 

New Zealand's approach to the pandemic has been widely praised internationally for its quick and tough action over the virus, having completed 1,030,115 tests as of 18 October 2020.

The New Zealand government policy in tackling the pandemic is extensively covered in this Wikipedia article: COVID-19 pandemic in New Zealand; that will no doubt be updated from now during the ongoing pandemic. At the moment the article's opening summary states:

The COVID-19 pandemic in New Zealand is part of the ongoing pandemic of coronavirus disease 2019 (COVID-19) caused by severe acute respiratory syndrome coronavirus 2 (SARS-CoV-2). The first case of the disease in New Zealand was reported on 28 February 2020. As of 29 October 2020, the country has had a total of 1,949 cases (1,593 confirmed and 356 probable), of which 70 are currently active, and 25 people have died from the virus, with cases recorded in all twenty district health board (DHB) areas. The pandemic peaked in early April, with 89 new cases recorded per day and 929 active cases.

All borders and entry ports of New Zealand were closed to all non-residents on 19 March 2020, with returning citizens and residents being required to self-isolate. Since 10 April, all New Zealanders returning from overseas must go into two weeks of managed isolation.

A four-level alert level system was introduced on 21 March to manage the outbreak within New Zealand. The Alert Level was initially set at Level 2, but was subsequently raised to Level 3 on the afternoon of 23 March. Beginning on 25 March, the Alert Level was moved to Level 4, putting the country into a nationwide lockdown. The Alert Level was moved back down to Level 3 on 27 April, partially lifting some lockdown restrictions, and down to Level 2 on 13 May, lifting the rest of the lockdown restrictions while maintaining physical distancing and gathering size limits. The country moved down to Level 1 on 8 June, removing all remaining restrictions except border controls.

On 7 Jul 2020 the World Health Organization (WHO) produced this video: 

Sharing COVID-19 experiences: The New Zealand response

This video was introduced by WHO with this text:

In response to community transmission of COVID-19, New Zealand implemented a range of measures to contain the virus, including extensive testing, contact tracing and clear and consistent communications to the public. On 8 June 2020, the government reported that there was no more active transmission of the virus in the country but stressed that it needed to remain vigilant. This video tells the story of New Zealand’s response. 

On 11 August, four cases of COVID-19 from an unknown source were reported in Auckland, the first from an unknown source in 102 days. At noon the following day, the Auckland Region moved up to alert level 3, while the rest of the country was moved to level 2. On 30 August at 11:59 pm, Auckland moved down to "Alert Level 2.5", a modified version of Alert Level 2 with limitation on public gatherings, funerals, and weddings. On 23 September at 11:59 pm, Auckland moved down to Alert Level 2, after the rest of New Zealand moved to Alert Level 1 on 21 September at 11:59pm.

In the Southern District Health Board that covers the southern area of New Zealand's South Island, including the City of Dunedin, there have been 216 cases of Covid-19 to date, with 214 patients recovering and, sadly, two fatalities.

Leadership and the climate emergency

The Greens had a good result in New Zealand's general election too. 

In the 2017 election, Ardern needed the support of both the Greens and NZ First to form a Government. That mean she had to do deals with both parties. For example, NZ First got a number of Cabinet Ministers and some key policies like the Provincial Growth Fund in its coalition deal. The Greens provided Confidence and Supply to Labour and also got some Ministerial portfolios and policies the party had been pushing for. This time around, however, Labour does not need to do a deal with the Greens.

However, Ardern may choose to do one anyway and that is what will be discussed over the next couple of weeks.

Prime Minister Jacinda Ardern, with Climate Change Minister and Greens co-leader James Shaw, during her weekly post-Cabinet press conference at Parliament as shown in this report by Jason Walls.

Jason Walls is a political reporter for the New Zealand Herald and he writes (19 Oct, 2020) under the headline:

Election results: Jacinda Ardern meets Greens leaders about Government discussions time frame

Prime Minister Jacinda Ardern has finished her first meeting with Green Party leaders, after her landslide election win on Saturday night.

A spokesman for Ardern said the Prime Minister had spoken with the party's leadership this afternoon, but it was not a post-election negotiation conversation.

Rather, it was a general conversation about the election result and the timeframe for ongoing discussions between the two parties.

This comes after Ardern yesterday did not rule out working with the Greens during this term of Government.

She said the Government would be formed within the next two or three weeks.

"You know, and everyone will have seen, that I have been a consensus builder, but I also need to work with the mandate that Labour has been given as well, and I have said to the Greens that I will talk to them next week," she said.

But she said she didn't want to draw any conclusions at this point.

"What is clear is that we do have that mandate to press ahead and form Government, but at the same time, I have worked to build consensus over the past."

What do the Greens want to achieve?

Green Party co-leaders front media after final rally of campaign and outline their plan for the next term in government.

'We made history'

Watch this space . . . 

Meanwhile . . .

. . . back in Liverpool

Liverpool and the north-west of England and parts of Yorkshire have seen more than its fair share of Covid-19 cases and deaths in the community. As of 21 October 2020 the total number of Covid-19 cases in the United Kingdom stands at 789,229 and the death toll stands at 44,158, although excess deaths during the pandemic crisis have risen to the much higher level of 54,833 as of 16 October 2020.

Denialism when it comes to scientific evidence and advice is one thing . . .

. . . but when it comes to the denial of historical facts then this exchange in parliament takes the biscuit: 

"Schools that teach pupils that “white privilege” is an uncontested fact are breaking the law, the women and equalities minister has said."

Jessica Murray reporting for the Guardian (Tue 20 Oct 2020) on Kemi Badenoch telling the Commons in a debate on Black History Month that schools must offer opposing views: 

Addressing MPs during a Commons debate on Black History Month, Kemi Badenoch said the government does not want white children being taught about “white privilege and their inherited racial guilt”.

“Any school which teaches these elements of political race theory as fact, or which promotes partisan political views such as defunding the police without offering a balanced treatment of opposing views, is breaking the law,” she said.

She added that schools have a statutory duty to remain politically impartial and should not openly support “the anti-capitalist Black Lives Matter group”.

Badenoch was speaking in response to Labour MP Dawn Butler, who had told the Commons that black children are made to feel inferior by what they are taught in school and history “needs to be decolonised”.

“At the moment history is taught to make one group of people feel inferior and another group of people feel superior, and this has to stop,” Butler said.

“History needs to be decolonised. You can go through [the] whole of the GCSE and not have reference to any black authors at all. You could go through history and not understand the richness of Africa and the Caribbean, you can go through history and not understand all the leaders in the black community.”

Support for moves to decolonise teaching in the UK have garnered substantial support in recent years, particularly at universities – although a Guardian investigation found only a fifth have committed to reforming their curriculum to confront the harmful legacy of colonialism.

The former Labour leader Jeremy Corbyn also backed the calls for decolonisation, while Labour frontbencher Abena Oppong-Asare pressed for a taskforce to look at diversifying the content taught in school.

“We want all our kids, all our children, black and white, every single corner of this country, to better understand our history so our children have a true sense of belonging within British culture,” she said.

Badenoch rejected the claims, insisting that history in schools “is not colonised”.

“We should not apologise for the fact that British children primarily study the history of these islands, and it goes without saying that the recent fad to decolonise maths, decolonise engineering, decolonise the sciences that we’ve seen across our universities to make race the defining principle of what is studied is not just misguided but actively opposed to the fundamental purpose of education,” she said.

Butler responded: “Sometimes, especially during Black History Month, it would be progress if [people] could acknowledge the systemic racism that not only existed then, but has a lasting legacy now in our structures, which doesn’t for any other group.”

Labour's Dawn Butler says curriculum needs to be "decolonised" "At the moment, history is taught to make one group feel inferior and another... feel superior" . . . 

. . . as Dawn Butler explains

Kemi Badenoch, like many MP's in the Conservative party "takes the biscuit", along with a leaf out of the climate denial machine handbook, by insisting on a legal requirement to the balancing of facts, like the history of European Imperialism, or capitalism and the slave trade, with "alternative facts". We have not heard the last of the term "political race theory", and making "anti-capitalist activism" an offence, is one of the roads that leads to authoritarianism and fascism, and NOT leading to a society where freedom of expression and civil rights are valued. 

Owen Jones takes a view on the problems of "impartiality" and journalism in an Opinion piece for the Guardian earlier this year (Thu 28 May 2020), in the wake of the story of Dominic Cummings escapade to the north of England and consequent government shenanigans, and headlined with the question:

Why is the BBC bending to the government's definition of impartiality? 

Impartiality is a concept that is frequently lauded but rarely defined. It has long been hailed as a sacred guiding principle behind news reporting for the BBC. Impartiality is extolled not simply as a gold standard, but a religion. “The BBC is committed to achieving due impartiality in all its output,” declare the corporation’s editorial guidelines.

The problem with impartiality as a standard for journalism is not simply that it eludes precise definition: hoisting it as your only standard sets a trap that is easily exploited by bad-faith critics who regard the reporting of unwelcome facts as self-evident proof of bias. What would constitute an “impartial” account of the government’s response to this pandemic? Does it mean that every report of Britain’s “world-beating” death toll must be accompanied by a reminder that ministers insist it is too soon to judge their record? Would it have been “partisan” to double-check Matt Hancock’s maths when he falsely claimed the government had achieved its testing target at the end of April?

Balance and impartiality when it comes to "facts" and "dissenting voices" . . .  

. . . usually ends up with a "confirmation bias" field day, as with the notorious example of when, nearly three years ago, the BBC had to apologise for an interview with the climate change denier Lord Lawson after admitting it had breached its own editorial guidelines for allowing him to claim that global temperatures have not risen in the past decade.

Damian Carrington, Environment editor for the Guardian reported (Tue 24 Oct 2017) in a Climate science denial Exclusive on that: 

Lawson’s claim that global temperatures are not rising went unchallenged, breaching guidelines on accuracy and impartiality

BBC Radio 4’s flagship news programme Today ran the item in August in which Lawson, interviewed by presenter Justin Webb, made the claim. The last three years have in fact seen successive global heat records broken.

The Today programme rejected initial complaints from listeners, arguing that Lawson’s stance was “reflected by the current US administration” and that offering space to “dissenting voices” was an important aspect of impartiality.

However, some listeners escalated their complaint and, in a letter seen by the Guardian, the BBC’s executive complaints unit now accepts the interview breached its guidelines on accuracy and impartiality.

The complaint centred on two statements by Lawson: that the UN’s Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change “has confirmed that there has been no increase in extreme weather events” and “according to the official figures, during this past 10 years, if anything, mean global temperature, average world temperature, has slightly declined”.

The BBC complaints unit accepted that these statements “were, at the least, contestable and should have been challenged”. In fact the Global Warming Policy Forum itself, the campaign group chaired by Lawson, acknowledged on 13 August that the temperature data he was referring to was “erroneous” and not official. Senior scientists also declared that Lawson’s statement about extreme weather was wrong.

It is not the first time the Today programme has been censured by the BBC complaints unit for an interview with Lawson. A broadcast in February 2014 was judged to have “given undue weight to Lord Lawson’s views, and had conveyed a misleading impression of the scientific evidence on the matter”.

“I really thought the climate change debate had finished and that these voices of the very rich and well connected had lost relevance in the whole argument,” said Dr Tim Thornton, a recently retired GP from Yorkshire who made one of the complaints. “It’s fine that they don’t like the idea of climate change but they are on a par with flat-earthers.”

Thornton highlighted the claim that global temperatures had not risen: “Even a sixth-former would be able to tell you that wasn’t so. So the BBC interviewer, if they are talking about climate change, should have done a little bit of homework.”

In his letter to Thornton, Colin Tregear, the BBC complaints director, said: “I hope you’ll accept my apologies, on behalf of the BBC, for the breach of editorial standards you identified.”

Bob Ward, the policy director of the Grantham research institute on climate change at the London School of Economics, welcomed the upholding of the complaint but said: “There needs to be a shift in BBC policy so that these news programmes value due accuracy as much as due impartiality.

“As well as taking account of the rights of marginal voices like Lord Lawson to be heard, the BBC should also take account of the harm that its audiences can experience from the broadcast of inaccurate information,” said Ward. “His inaccurate assertion that there has been no change in extreme weather was harmful to the programme’s listeners because they may have been misled into believing that they do not need to take precautions against the increasing risk of heatwaves and flooding from heavy rainfall in the UK.”

Lawson did not respond to the Guardian’s request for comment.

Neither the Global Warming Policy Forum or its charitable arm, the Global Warming Policy Foundation, disclose the source of their funding. On their websites, the groups state: “In order to make clear its complete independence, it does not accept gifts from either energy companies or anyone with a significant interest in an energy company.”

The programme in August featuring the interview with Lawson also included an interview with Al Gore, the former US vice-president and climate campaigner, who discussed his new film An Inconvenient Sequel: Truth to Power, and another interview with the director Fisher Stevens, who made Before the Flood, also about climate change, starring Leonardo DiCaprio.

The BBC complaints team told Thornton that “the BBC accepts there is broad scientific agreement on climate change” and that “the global climate is changing and the change is predominantly manmade”. The complaints unit said a 2011 review by the BBC Trust had made clear “the requirement to avoid the impression a minority view stands on the same footing as the views of climate scientists”.

Simon Bullock of Friends of the Earth said: “It was a real choke-on-cornflakes interview, with Lord Lawson’s misleading climate denial views given undue weight and passing unchallenged. After this ruling hopefully the BBC will now move the climate debate on to how to stop our planet warming, not denying that it is happening.”

Q. What about objectivity? What about the truth? Especially in 2020 "THE YEAR OF TRUTH"?

A. Re:LODE Radio considers this is a time to philosophise with a hammer!

Friedrich Nietzsche's holiday spot in Sils Maria where he wrote Götzen-Dämmerung, oder, Wie man mit dem Hammer philosophiert, a pun on the title of Richard Wagner's opera, Götterdämmerung, or 'Twilight of the Gods'. Götze is a German word for "idol" or "false god".

Twilight of the Idols, or, How to Philosophize with a Hammer is an inspiring work, written in just over a week, between 26 August and 3 September 1888, and published the following year, in 1889. 

Re:LODE Radio considers Friedrich Nietzsche's Preface to the work is on a par with William Blake's Preface to Milton. He writes in a style that is deliberately "stimulating":  

Maintaining cheerfulness in the midst of a gloomy task, fraught with immeasurable responsibility, is no small feat; and yet what is needed more than cheerfulness? Nothing succeeds if prankishness has no part in it. Excess strength alone is the proof of strength.

A revaluation of all values: this question mark, so black, so huge that it casts a shadow over the man who puts it down — such a destiny of a task compels one to run into the sunlight at every opportunity to shake off a heavy, all-too-heavy seriousness. Every means is proper to do this; every “case” is a case of luck. Especially, war. 

War has always been the great wisdom of all spirits who have become too introspective, too profound; even in a wound there is the power to heal.

A maxim, the origin of which I withhold from scholarly curiosity, has long been my motto:

Increscunt animi, virescit volnere virtus.

“The spirits increase, vigor grows through a wound.”

Another mode of convalescence (in certain situations even more to my liking) is sounding out idols. There are more idols than realities in the world: that is my “evil eye” upon this world; that is also my “evil ear.” 

Finally to pose questions with a hammer, and sometimes to hear as a reply that famous hollow sound that can only come from bloated entrails — what a delight for one who has ears even behind his ears, for me, an old psychologist and pied piper before whom just that which would remain silent must finally speak out.

This essay — the title betrays it — is above all a recreation, a spot of sunshine, a leap sideways into the idleness of a psychologist. Perhaps a new war, too? And are new idols sounded out? This little essay is a great declaration of war; and regarding the sounding out of idols, this time they are not just idols of the age, but eternal idols, which are here touched with a hammer as with a tuning fork: there are no idols that are older, more assured, more puffed-up — and none more hollow. That does not prevent them from being those in which people have the most faith; nor does one ever say “idol,” especially not in the most distinguished instance.

Turin, September 30, 1888, on the day when the first book of the Revaluation of All Values was completed.

Friedrich Nietzsche

Duck Soup . . .

. . . is more than cheerfulness! 

Nothing succeeds if prankishness has no part in it . . 

A Groucho Marxist, and a McLuhanite, like Woody Allen would concur. War is education, and education is war. The pages of Marshall McLuhan and Quentin Fiore's War and Peace in the Global Village, contain marginalia and many of them sourced from James Joyce's Finnegans Wake.

This video edit, assembled from snippets of the 1977 film Annie Hall, written and directed by Woody Allen, illustrates the point.

And Marshall McLuhan is right here . . . 

. . . if only life could be like this 

We are all learning, and in a time of plague, similar in some respects to the conditions of war, we need reminding, as Nietzsche says, that:

The tragic artist is no pessimist: he is precisely the one who says Yes to everything questionable, even to the terrible — he is Dionysian. 

The value of life cannot be estimated, and any judgment concerning it only reveals the person's life-denying or life-affirming tendencies. 

The word "Yes" ends James Joyce's final chapter in his Ulysses, a work of psychogeography, "before the word", that, according to the Wikipedia article; 

"chronicles the peripatetic appointments and encounters of Leopold Bloom in Dublin in the course of an ordinary day, 16 June 1904." 

Ulysses, the Latinised name of Odysseus, the hero of Homer's epic poem the Odyssey, and the novel echoes a series of parallels between the poem and the novel, with structural correspondences between the characters and experiences of Bloom and Odysseus, Molly Bloom and Penelope, and Stephen Dedalus and Telemachus, along with an allusive interweaving of contemporary, events and themes of the early 20th-century context of modernity in Dublin, as well as Ireland's relationship to Britain, as part of the United Kingdom of Great Britain and Ireland. 

The last chapter is known as the "Penelope" chapter. Joyce's novel has numbered "episodes" rather than named chapters, but many have named them, so the final chapter is referred to as the "Penelope" chapter, after Molly Bloom's mythical counterpart.

The penultimate chapter 17 is called Ithaca, as Bloom  and Stephen Dedalus return to No 7 Eccles Street the home of the Blooms, just as Odysseus returns to his home of Ithaca, to be eventually reunited with his family. The final chapter 18 takes place in Molly’s bed, as Joyce gives Molly Bloom the last word, a final: 

“Yes” 

This is the affirmation of life, par excellence, bringing Ulysses to an end with her famous soliloquy: in Joyce’s own words, “the indispensable countersign to Bloom’s passport to eternity”. 

All the action, such as it is, takes place in “the lumpy old jingly bed”, in which Molly lies awake, daydreaming, leaving it only briefly. She journeys back over the events of the day to more distant memories of her youth. The bed itself has come with her on the odyssey that was her life: “All the way from Gibraltar”. Since a far off day in the Mediterranean sun, it had become for the Blooms, “the bed of conception and of birth, of consummation of marriage and of the breach of marriage” and followed them from “Raymond Terrace and Lombard Street and Holles Street” and the “City Arms hotel” to Eccles Street.

The final chapter of Ulysses, is often called "Molly Bloom's Soliloquy", because it is a long and unpunctuated stream of consciousness passage of text that follows her thoughts as she lies in bed next to Bloom. 

Molly's soliloquy consists of eight enormous "sentences". The concluding period, or full stop, following the final words of her reverie is one of only two punctuation marks in the entire chapter. The other periods/full stops occur at the end of the fourth and eighth "sentences". When written this episode contained the longest "sentence" in English literature, at 4,391 words. This figure was eventually surpassed in 2001 by Jonathan Coe's The Rotters' Club.

In the course of this stream of consciousness, Molly accepts Leopold into her bed, frets about his health, and then reminisces about their first meeting and about when she knew she was in love with him. The final words of Molly's reverie, and the very last words of the book, are:

I was a Flower of the mountain yes when I put the rose in my hair like the Andalusian girls used or shall I wear a red yes and how he kissed me under the Moorish Wall and I thought well as well him as another and then I asked him with my eyes to ask again yes and then he asked me would I yes to say yes my mountain flower and first I put my arms around him yes and drew him down to me so he could feel my breasts all perfume yes and his heart was going like mad and yes I said yes I will Yes.

Joyce noted in a 1921 letter to Frank Budgen that "the last word (human, all too human) is left to Penelope." The episode both begins and ends with "yes", a word that Joyce described as "the female word".

I said yes I will

Yes

The meaning of life . . . 

The video clip below, augmented by a scene from the Marx Brothers film Duck Soup, is from the 1986 film Hannah and her Sisters, written and directed by Woody Allen, who stars along with Mia Farrow as Hannah, Michael Caine as her husband, and Barbara Hershey and Dianne Wiest as her sisters. 

Hannah's ex-husband Mickey, a television writer, is present mostly in scenes outside of the primary story. Flashbacks reveal that his marriage to Hannah fell apart after they were unable to have children because of his infertility. However, they had twins who are not biologically his, before divorcing. He also went on a disastrous date with Hannah's sister Holly, when they were set up after the divorce. A hypochondriac, he goes to his doctor complaining of hearing loss, and is frightened by the possibility that it might be a brain tumor. When tests prove that he is perfectly healthy, he is initially overjoyed, but then despairs that his life is meaningless. His existential crisis leads to unsatisfying experiments with religious conversion to Catholicism and an interest in Krishna Consciousness. Ultimately, a suicide attempt leads him to find meaning in his life after unexpectedly viewing the Marx Brothers' Duck Soup in a movie theater. The revelation that life should be enjoyed, rather than understood, helps to prepare him for a second date with Holly, which this time blossoms into love.

This narrative from Hannah and her Sisters covers this episode and begins with a scene title quote from Leo Tolstoy, the Russian author of War and Peace:

The only absolute knowledge attainable by man is that life is meaningless 

Re:LODE Radio would argue against this assertion by Tolstoy on philosophical grounds, or, rather on philosophical grounds that are critical of philosophy. Woody Allen's character Mickey chooses to say YES to life, in the light of an experience of a kind of theatre, or cinema, of the absurd. The particular quality of absurdity evident in the Marx Bros. Duck Soup is not just silly. Duck Soup is funny, enjoyable and pleasurable, precisely because it's silliness reflects social, cultural and political realities, and allows audience to find a pathway through the mess of things to a form of freedom. In acting out, through pranksterism, a silly revelation of the way things are, the Marx brothers simultaneously cut through the veneer of political authority, exposing it as a form of gangsterism. A way out is presented therefore, leading to the possibility of release or emancipation. 

Like Nietzsche before him, Ludwig Wittgenstein was prepared to take a critical position in relation to the philosophy of his time. The "Early Wittgenstein" was concerned with the logical relationship between propositions and the world and he believed that by providing an account of the logic underlying this relationship, he had solved all philosophical problems. The "Later Wittgenstein", however, rejected many of the assumptions of his earlier work, as in the Tractatus, arguing that the meaning of words is best understood as their use within a given language-game.

Don't ask the meaning! Ask the use!

This "Wittgensteinian" axiom (although never articulated by Wittgenstein) when applied to words results in meaning coming from, and being understood, in examining how a word is being used in a particular context. Is it possible to extend this axiom to the question of the meaning of life? Is it the case that the meaning of life emanates from how a life is being lived? Living a life, therefore, creates the possibility of meaningful actions, like, for instance, struggling against denialism. 

I know "maybe" is a very slim reed to hang your whole life on . . .

. . . but that's the best we have