Frankie Boyle is the comedian we need in these dark times.

2020 began with Australia on fire and a billion animals dead. It’s sobering to think that will be the feel-good story of the year.

He’s writing for The Overtake, a small, independent and excellent publication made by – in their own words – (relatively) normal people. If you can throw a few quid their way it would make an enormous difference – especially if you cancel a subscription to a Murdoch paper or the Daily Mail to do it.

The UK press are currently running a campaign begging advertisers not to desert them: they claim that now more than ever we need high quality journalism. Which is true, but many of the papers doing the begging – such as the Mail, the Express, the Telegraph and the Murdoch press – would have a better case if high quality journalism was something they actually did.

The likes of Murdoch will survive coronavirus – although in the US, his sons are “girding for a pandemic of public-interest lawsuits over misinformation and conspiracy theories” peddled by his TV networks, so here’s hoping – but smaller, independent publishers such as The Overtake, The Ferret, OpenDemocracy and many more need your support right now.

Back to Frankie:

The world’s worst people think that everybody is going to come out of this in a few months and go willingly back into a kind of numbing servitude. Surely it’s time to start imagining something better.

If you only read one article about Alex Salmond’s trial and the dark side of the Scottish independence movement, you should read this exceptional piece by Dani Garavelli. 

The trial effectively found that Alex Salmond was – in the words of his own lawyer, overheard on a train while the trial was ongoing – “inappropriate”, “stupid” and an “arsehole”. The defence admitted that Salmond had acted inappropriately towards multiple women, but the prosecution persuaded the jury that his actions were inappropriate rather than criminal. The issue wasn’t whether Salmond abused his power. He clearly did.

That’s not how some independence supporters see it. To them, Salmond is the blameless victim of a conspiracy, a hero brought low by sinister forces within and without the SNP. They have demonised Salmond’s victims and vowed revenge on them – something Salmond has fuelled – and they believe that Nicola Sturgeon is part of the conspiracy and should resign.

Garavelli:

It is clear Salmond is on the warpath. The question is how far will he go? Is he willing to set fire to the house he built, just to watch his enemies burn?

…Though his supporters would relish it, it is hard to see how he could shrug off the reputational damage the trial has done. More likely he will wield his power from the shadows, manipulating, undermining, bringing his influence to bear. And trying to destroy his former ally. There seems no doubt if he can bring Sturgeon down he will, and to hell with what that does to the cause.

There’s a really nasty tone creeping into the press right now, with tabloids and local press following the police’s lead and giving ordinary people a kicking. We’re not quite at Two Minutes Hate just yet, but the trickle of “look at these stupid bastards” stories is starting to become a stream.

A lot of those stories are being fed to them by the police, who are clearly enjoying their new powers: before they’d even come into play, some forces were posting on Twitter with obvious excitement about the new ways in which they’d be able to throw their weight around.

Inevitably, they are now throwing their weight around in ever more inventive ways: spending thousands of pounds on helicopters to see if anybody’s meeting their pals in the park, flying drones around to intimidate people in the street, shaming people on social media for taking a walk in uninhabited areas, and deciding what is and isn’t acceptable shopping.

[Update: less than an hour after I wrote this, the BBC reported that the police were harassing corner shop owners for selling Easter Eggs. The Prime Minister’s office has clarified that if a shop is allowed to be open, it’s allowed to sell anything it has in stock. But the episode underlines the wider problem, which is that some police are overzealous – and some of them are particularly overzealous towards members of minority groups.]

This story, from Plymouth Live, caught my eye.

Oasis might have thought cigarettes and alcohol were the only things worth living for, but police in Plymouth disagree – especially during the COVID-19 coronavirus lockdown.

It’s the tone of it that really gets to me. Welcome to “let’s chortle along with the cops”.

And you’ll need to be as rich as the bickering brothers Gallagher to keep puffing away… because just 15 packets of fags could theoretically land you with nearly £2m in fines – because the fines can double each time you flout the rules.

The story is based on social media posts by the local cops, who are happily stopping traffic and demanding to know where people are going – and then declaring whether their journey really is essential based on no law whatsoever.

you cannot just go for a drive, you cannot drive to a destination for exercise, going to the shops for beer and cigarettes is not essential.

They’re pretty essential if you’re a smoker or dependent on alcohol. And it’s not illegal to go to the shop.

It’s important that people follow the government guidelines, but this denouncing of ordinary people as villains when they are not breaking any law really disturbs me. We’re already seeing people calling the cops about their neighbours’ behaviour, often without foundation. There’s a narrative developing in the press where blame is increasingly being put on ordinary people, not those in power.

As commentator David Allen Green wrote on Twitter and later blogged, this is an extraordinary legal situation: overnight, freedom of movement, freedom of association and freedom of worship have been made illegal by a law that MPs didn’t vote on. And the police are already exceeding the powers they have been given:

Under Regulation 6(1), it is even now a criminal offence to leave your own home, unless (in effect) the police are satisfied you have a reasonable excuse.

The whole country is thereby (in effect) under house arrest.

The police, in turn, have been given wide powers to enforce these regulations, including the use of coercive force.

And in turn, again, the police are interpreting these wide powers even more widely, with roadblocks, drones, and a made-up restriction on “essential travel”.

The police are also encouraging people to snitch on each other.

On social media there are accusation and counter-accusation, as neighbours turn on each other.

People are afraid of the police, and increasingly of each other.

We all know that power corrupts, that people in authority often overreach and that powers granted in an emergency are often kept long after the emergency is over.

Green:

If it were not for this public health emergency, this situation would be the legal dream of the worst modern tyrant.

Everybody under control, every social movement or association prohibited, every electronic communication subject to surveillance.

This would be an unthinkable legal situation for any free society.

Of course, the public health emergency takes absolute priority.

But we also should not be blind to the costs.

I wrote the other day about not finding any pleasure in the misfortunes of others, even if those people are horrible. But of course some people do, especially when the people are especially horrible. Take the rapist Harvey Weinstein: news that he had tested positive for coronavirus caused much merriment online and off; I saw a comedy show last night in which the comedian chuckled that Weinstein now knew what it meant to have something inside his body without consent.

It’s a good joke, but the wider sentiment isn’t so funny. As Imani writes on Crutchesandspice.com, there’s an underlying ableism in the reaction to various famous people contracting coronavirus: it portrays the virus as a karmic force that punishes the wicked and the undeserving.

COVID19, like any other disability, disease or illness, doesn’t have a moral compass and by projecting one onto the virus, people are subtly saying that those who also contract it [deserve to get it].

Instead of chortling at Weinstein’s misfortune, perhaps we should focus instead on the fact that coronavirus could have horrific effects in prisons -– it could have a death rate much higher than in the wider population. Prisoners tend to be older and have poorer health than the rest of us. No matter what those prisoners may have been convicted of, none of them deserves the death penalty.

And nor does anybody else.

Imani:

Communicable diseases aren’t discerning. COVID19 wants lungs, that’s its only M.O. No one deserves this virus—not even those you hate.

Viruses don’t separate people into the righteous and the damned, sparing the good and judging the wicked. But some powerful people do believe that there is a hierarchy here, that some people do deserve to catch coronavirus and that others don’t. And sometimes those people say the quiet bit out loud.

There was a telling moment on Sky News this morning when the Tory politician Damian Green said that Boris Johnson having coronavirus demonstrated that “even intelligent people trying to do the right thing” can catch it.

Leaving aside the fact that Boris Johnson clearly wasn’t doing the right thing – he was boasting about shaking coronavirus patients’ hands the other week and hasn’t been practicing the distancing recommended to reduce risk – that “even” is telling: even people who don’t deserve it can catch it.

This isn’t new, of course. The concept of the “undeserving” has been with us for hundreds of years – the idea of the “undeserving poor” was quite the topic in the 1800s – and it is regularly trotted out by right-wing press and politicians. We saw it most recently when Tory MP Jacob Rees-Mogg suggested that the 72 people who died in the Grenfell fire did so because they weren’t as clever as him. And it’s back with a bang during the pandemic, weaponised by people who believe some lives – their lives – matter more than others.

In the US, as Imani notes, “The national narrative veered hard right and went from ‘we need to do all we can to flatten the curve’ to ‘maybe we should let the virus run its course and let disabled and elderly die to save the economy.’”

Coronavirus does not discriminate, and neither should we. We should be particularly alert for people in power who want to divide us into the good and the bad, the righteous and the damned, the deserving and the undeserving. Because you can be sure that their definition of “undeserving” never, ever means people like them.