Going into lockdown, and especially for the furloughed, many of us thought we would use the time productively. To work on a novel. To learn a language. A daily yoga practise. Crafting. But many have found it harder than they expected, distracted and made despondent by the bad news flowing each day. Are we putting pressure on ourselves to do these things because we want to, or because under a Capitalist society, endless productivity is demanded of us? In finishing that book with haste, are we responding to an artistic drive, or a marketing schedule? It is easy to internalise the pace of work, reenacting it even in downtime, particularly in those with insecure, freelance jobs, always hustling for the next gig.
The pandemic is not a hurricane or a wildfire. It is not comparable to Pearl Harbor or 9/11. Such disasters are confined in time and space. The SARS-CoV-2 virus will linger through the year and across the world. “Everyone wants to know when this will end,†said Devi Sridhar, a public-health expert at the University of Edinburgh. “That’s not the right question. The right question is: How do we continue?â€
Something that you might not be aware of is how much newspaper, magazine and website publishers rely on affiliate marketing: if they link to a shop selling product X and you buy product X via that link, they get a small fee. Those revenues are particularly important during this coronavirus lockdown: the other big revenue drivers, print advertising and branded events, are effectively dead right now.
It’s terrible news for the industry, of course, but it’s also an indication of a wider problem: as print sales have continued their inevitable decline, publishers have repeatedly put their business eggs into single baskets – only to discover that by doing so they’re vulnerable to the whims of companies that see them as expendable. The giant tech brands have demonstrated again and again how ruthless they are. That’s how they became giant tech brands.
There are lots of examples. Many businesses find that when Google changes its search engine rankings, their traffic disappears overnight. YouTubers find that rule changes or arbitrary decisions leave them unable to monetise their channels any more. The most awful example is Facebook, which lobbied media firms to “pivot to video” to reach huge audiences; its figures were falsified – in some case viewing figures were inflated by as much as 900%. Media firms fired their journalists to embrace the new world of video; when it turned out that the new world was fraudulent and the promised money wasn’t there, they fired their video people too.
Whether you’re a publisher or an Amazon marketplace seller, a musician on Spotify, an artist on Etsy or a small business selling on social media, you’re ultimately trying to pretend that a furious, hungry tiger is a sweet little pussy cat. It’s not a question of if it’ll turn on you. It’s a question of when.
The Conservatives are working on their exit strategy. Not how we’ll exit the lockdown; how they’ll shift the blame for their failures onto others, such as the NHS. For example:
Care homes are not run by the NHS.
Care homes used to be run by councils, but years of funding cuts have seen that provision almost disappear. Today, care homes are primarily for-profit private businesses.
The state has abdicated its responsibility for providing care over recent decades. The private sector may have filled this gap but it consistently puts profits before people.
…The fact that private equity-backed firms have taken over a significant share of the UK’s care provision, fuelled by debt and driven by the prospect of rising property prices and ever-lower care costs, puts our vital social care system at ever-increasing risk.
One of my best friends is a care home worker. Like many in the sector they are on a zero hours contract and paid a pittance by a private and very profitable company; they have not been given PPE because the company doesn’t want to pay for PPE. Care homes can do, or in this case not do, whatever they want. Which is why so many people are dying in them.
The government doesn’t want to be on the hook for those deaths, or for the growing death toll among front-line NHS staff. Hence the emerging narrative that it’s all the NHS’s fault. But it isn’t. The lack of PPE for front-line workers and other key equipment is the result of government decisions and indecision going back to January.
The dread hand of news management has already kicked in: the allegation is now that key workers aren’t getting PPE because the lumbering, inefficient NHS isn’t allocating resources properly, not that the resources weren’t there in the first place. There are a lot of carefully worded claims doing the rounds, so for example the government is keen to talk about the overall number of items of PPE that have been distributed rather than the details of which items have gone where and in what quantities: there’s a big difference between a gown (which is inappropriate for aerosol-generating procedures) and an FFP2 surgical mask. If there were enough PPE, everyone in the country with a 3D printer wouldn’t be making making visors for NHS staff and nurses wouldn’t be making their own PPE from bin bags.
Still, we can count on our fearless, non-partisan press ensuring they don’t get away with it. Can’t we?
Image by Liz Gerard on Twitter. It shows the Sun’s reporting of the COVID-19 death toll last week.
The Sun’s front page after nearly 1,000 people died in a single day.
The official UK coronavirus death toll will crack 10,000 today. The real death toll, which unlike the official figures includes those who died in care homes, those who died at home and those who had not already been tested positive for COVID-19, is much higher.
Here’s an example. The figure for 8 April was 828 deaths, but none of the 828 deaths happened on the 8th of April. They happened on the 4th of March, and the 5th of March, and the 31st of March, and the 4th of April, up to the 7th of April. Some of the people who died on the 8th will be reported in the figures for the 9th, and the 10th, and so on.
What that means is that there’s a big lag between people dying and their deaths being counted, and that lag can be dramatic: the officially announced death toll for 31 March was 679, but NHS England’s statistics now say it was 1,710. The difference isn’t usually that dramatic, but it does mean that the figures are at best a guide to what’s been happening rather than an accurate picture.
[Update: that means you should prepare for very bad news in the early part of next week: there will be a lag due to the Easter holiday, so we’re likely to see a spike in numbers when those reports come in.]
However you count it, we’re now on track to have the highest death toll of any country in Western Europe, despite having had more time to prepare than the rest of Western Europe.
It is a jarring experience to wake up to a British death toll that is almost a thousand a day, and not see that number on every front page, being put to every politician in every single interview, with a demand for an explanation. It is as if those who should be asking these questions, from the media to opposition politicians, have been subjected to a mass memory-erasing exercise. Every report showing the scale of the crisis should be framed in the language of accountability and anchored in the premise of preventability. With all the benefits of hindsight, the government dragged its feet, wasted precious time and infused the issue with a sense of British exceptionalism: drastic measures need not be taken because in the UK things will somehow be different.
… It’s hard, as we lock down, to nurture an outrage that is based on decisions in the past when the loss of life is happening today – more so when the government has stealthily removed itself from the picture and shifted the responsibility entirely on to the public…
…Relocate the pain and recall that this need not have happened. Ten thousand people, in UK hospitals alone, have now died.
8,958 – total UK deaths from the same virus, excluding hundreds more in care homes
The UK has nearly one in ten of the global deaths from this virus despite being one of the most recent countries to get it.
Today’s daily death toll, 980, means for two days running the UK has had more daily deaths than the worst days in Italy or France.
That’s despite having the benefit of time to see how the virus has spread in other countries, time to order protective equipment and ventilators, time to plan an effective response. Time other countries didn’t have.
Things could have been even worse. If the football authorities hadn’t become fed up with government inaction and decided to cancel multiple big games in March, the numbers  would be even higher.
This is a political failure on a truly horrific scale.
It’s time for the press to do its job and hold the government to account.
Let’s play a little game. It’s called “show us which specific part of the emergency coronavirus legislation details which supermarket aisles are essential and which ones are non-essential”.
There isn’t one, of course. Shops are allowed to sell anything they have in stock, and you are allowed to buy it.
And it’s not just the Cambridge plod. Yesterday we had suggestions that police would check the contents of people’s shopping carts to make sure they weren’t buying anything frivolous. Last week, police were deciding that cigarettes and alcohol weren’t permitted.
So far at least this is a fairly innocuous example of something much more serious: whenever new powers are made available to people, some of those people will deliberately or accidentally overestimate the powers they have.
Whenever new powers are being considered, even in an emergency, one question should always be paramount: what could the worst person in the world do with those powers? Because once the powers have been made available, you’ll find out.
This is doing the rounds on social media right now.
It’s funny, but like the best political jokes it has sharp teeth. How many of the people standing outside clapping for the NHS on a Thursday evening voted for a party that’s stripped the NHS bare, refused to pay staff properly, refused to consider its workers key staff when deciding who can live in the UK, refused to stockpile adequate protective equipment, refused to take part in a ventilator purchase scheme for ideological reasons and conducted ongoing privatisation by stealth?
How many of the people demanding footballers pay some extra cash are making similar demands of the UK’s super-rich?
How many of the newspapers calling NHS nurses and doctors angels and promoting NHS fundraisers are owned by billionaires and published by companies carefully structured to avoid paying tax?
NHS underfunding is not an act of God. It’s an act of politicians. And no amount of charity campaigning will fill the gap between what the NHS needs and what the government has been willing to give it – especially once the coronavirus crisis is over and the government can get back to business as usual.
The NHS is desperately underfunded, its staff underpaid and its recruitment hampered by our immigration and Brexit policies. That didn’t start with this coronavirus, and if we don’t demand real change those problems will continue long after COVID-19 is beaten. And when the next pandemic strikes, we’ll be just as unprepared.
There is a campaign just now asking people to save newspapers. The gist: many are threatened by coronavirus-related advertising collapse; without them, especially plucky local ones, democracy will be under threat. The first stage is to ask the public to support them; the second, to demand government help.
We need to remember that the biggest titles – the Sun, the Mail, the Telegraph and the Times – have proprietors who are genuine billionaires; that they are individuals and come from families worth thousands of millions of pounds. And those billionaires and their companies pay their taxes only where it suits them, which means that they pay the least they can manage in the UK.
Before we hand them any money that has been paid as taxes by nurses and bus drivers in this country, we need to be certain that (a) none of the cash will swell the personal coffers of the Murdochs, Rothermeres and Barclays, (b) they themselves have spent everything they can afford to keep their newspapers going, and (c) in the future, they will pay all the tax that they should in this country – no more Channel Islands, no more Bermuda, no more Delaware.
The piece also makes a good point about local newspapers. While there are some genuinely wonderful local newspapers – the Yorkshire Post springs to mind – many local papers are nothing of the sort. They are centrally produced, low-quality publications run by firms who’ve sacked most of the journalists and asset-stripped the businesses.
when the industry talks about the ‘local press’, it wants you to think of a heroic little outfit in a small town with a hard-working staff who are in tune with the needs and habits of the community and who deliver, not just information, but also social cohesion and identity.
In reality, the press industry has been furiously trashing that entire culture for decades. Three rapacious multi-million-pound corporations – Reach, Newsquest and JPMedia – have been rolling through the local and regional press industry like asset strippers, sacking journalists by the thousand and closing titles by the hundred.
Year after year, these three have banked handsome operating profits which, to a striking degree, they have spent outside the local and regional newspaper industry.
The article suggests that any help should be conditional, and should be designed to protect journalism rather than bad and broken businesses.
as these newspapers are always quick to insist in the context of other benefit claimants – we must weed out the scroungers from those genuinely deserving of support. And we must do so with a clear eye on the future.
…Let the billionaires exhaust their own funds and pay their own taxes first. Let them make their practices and finances accessible and transparent to taxpayers. Let them make their journalism properly accountable.
for people who transition to identifying as a binary gender different from that assigned at birth, “we still also don’t know whether male-to-female and female-to-male transsexualism is actually the same phenomenon, or . . . [whether] you have an analogous outcome in both sexes but you have different mechanisms behind it”…. Other outstanding questions include what, if any, differences there are in the brains of transgender people with different sexual orientations, and between those whose gender dysphoria manifests very early in life and those who begin to feel dysphoric during adolescence or adulthood. [and we don’t know]  whether the brain differences that have been identified between cis and trans people persist after hormone treatment.
Brains are wonderfully complex things, and the mismatch between the gender we’re assigned at birth and the gender we are is likely to be multifactorial: it’s never been as simple as “being born in the wrong body” (which was always a huge oversimplification in an attempt to help cisgender people understand trans people). As one of the interviewees in the piece says, it’s likely to be “a combination between biological, psychological and social factors.”
The more we know, the more we know that we don’t know. For example:
hormone treatments might even affect regions the brain that are not commonly considered to be among those sensitive to sex steroids—specifically, the fusiform gyrus, involved in the recognition of faces and bodies, and the cerebellum, known in part for its role in motor control
There may also be differences in the mechanisms affecting the brains of trans men and of trans women, because while we both take hormones we take different hormones – testosterone for the men and estrogen for the women.
The article concludes:
For now, as is the case for many aspects of human experience, the neural mechanisms underlying gender remain largely mysterious. While researchers have documented some differences between cis- and transgender people’s brains, a definitive neural signature of gender has yet to be found—and perhaps it never will be. But with the availability of an increasingly powerful arsenal of neuroimaging, genomic, and other tools, researchers are bound to gain more insight into this fundamental facet of identity.
