The immediate response to the government’s new Covid19 messaging has been a mixture of confusion and outrage. Commentators and academics seem bemused, the only possible explanation being that the government is incompetent.
But actually, I think it’s very deliberate — and if their ultimate goal is to retain power rather than save lives — very smart.
…Covid19 will now become an inconvenient hindrance to our lives, but one that each of us needs to take personal responsibility for dealing with, and getting back to normal as best we can. In this story, government steps back and gets out of the way, because people are best left to look out for themselves. We are individuals, there is no such thing as society.
The dark corollary of course is that if you get the disease, it will be your fault — because you will not have stayed sufficiently alert.
Category: Hell in a handcart
We’re all doomed
-
If you get coronavirus, don’t blame the Tories
-
Ill communications
When you’re trying to keep people at home over what’s likely to be a hot and sunny bank holiday weekend, it’s hard to imagine a worse headline than this.
It’s from today’s Daily Mail (in England; the Scottish edition has Nicola Sturgeon saying the lockdown can’t be lifted yet). The Mail of all papers should be wary about headlines with “Hurrah” in them.
The Mail is one of several tabloid newspapers who are promising an end to lockdown starting Monday and publishing it on their front pages the day after the UK death toll became the highest in Europe. There are officially more than 30,000 people dead; the real number is believed to exceed 50,000.
Let’s see what the papers have to hurrah about.
Has the UK reached its own testing target? Nope: the much-promised 100,000 tests per day hasn’t been achieved at all. The government attempted to pretend otherwise by counting 40,000 tests posted but not received; that worked for one day, but the daily number is back down to 80-something-thousand.
Do front-line NHS workers have adequate PPE? Nope. The much-lauded order of PPE from Turkey is being sent back today because it doesn’t meet NHS standards.
Do we have enough testers and trackers in place to know where the virus is and where to target resources? Nope.
Do we have a trace, track and isolate system in place? Nope.
The official stats are online. We are currently recording over 6,000 new cases a day.
All of these things together mean that the lockdown shouldn’t and won’t be lifted on Monday in England; we may see some very minor changes, such as stopping the cops from shouting at sunbathers, but it isn’t safe to change things yet.
That’s not what the papers are suggesting, though, and as a result we’re going to have a weekend of people flouting the lockdown because hey, it’s going to be lifted on Monday anyway.
Apparently the government are deeply concerned about this; what I thought was a deliberate leak to distract tabloids from the death toll is reportedly an unsanctioned leak that’s been blown out of all proportion to produce front pages like this:
If it’s true that this isn’t what the government wanted, it’s clearly a case of reaping what you’ve been sowing: this is what happens when you don’t communicate clearly with a country, when you share policy and plans not with Parliament but with your pet newspapers, when your government cares more about PR than PPE.
-
Give me liberty and give me death
Right-wing groups are using the same playbook against COVID-19 measures they’ve used to fight LGBTQ rights.
…Influential right-wing and anti-LGBTQ groups have responded to stay-at-home orders put in place to protect Americans from the coronavirus by pushing for exemptions for churches and pastors, including by filing lawsuits, pressuring local and state governments, and working with the Trump-Pence administration.
The names are awfully familiar: the Alliance Defending Freedom, the Family Church Council, the Heritage Foundation and the Christian Broadcasting Network, among others. It’s been clear for many years that they don’t care about the lives of LGBT+ people; this suggests that they don’t care about the lives of any people.
-
The ministry of bigotry
Many people believe that the Conservative MP Liz Truss is stupid. She may have said many stupid things in her career, but she isn’t thick. She’s much worse than that.
Truss was previously the UK’s Lord Chancellor and Secretary of State for Justice, where she was responsible for defending the independence of the judiciary and the rule of law. So when the right-wing press began demonising judges and calling them “enemies of the people”, she did… nothing.
As The Secret Barrister wrote at the time, calling for her resignation:
A starker, more blatant attack on judicial independence is hard to conceive. It is one thing to criticise court rulings. Or to draw attention to judicial decisions where they fall into error. But when the legislature and executive join forces with the media to launch rocket after rocket of personal, unwarranted abuse that is intended not to criticise or inform, but to demean, undermine, unnerve, terrify and intimidate independent judges who cannot answer back, we have a genuine constitutional crisis. The separation of powers is not just breached but scorched to the ground.
…so what we have is the Rule of Law being roundly trounced and judges being threatened for having had the audacity to apply UK law to a UK legal question and conclude that the UK Parliament was supreme.
And our cowardly, charlatan Lord Chancellor, cowering in the good graces of her Prime Minister and a rampant, ugly tabloid media, sitting meekly by and watching the world burn.
This time last year, The Guardian’s Zoe Williams described her as a “self-aggrandising, sub-Thatcherite, Ayn Randophile Tory” who “represents the new Westminster at its Trumpian worst.”
It’s hard to imagine a worse candidate for the job of equalities minister, a role that’s supposed to be about protecting society’s most vulnerable people. Naturally, that means Truss was appointed the UK’s equality minister in September.
One of her first announcements was to dismiss so-called “identity politics” – minority groups asking for equal rights – and to suggest renaming her ministry to the “Ministry for Freedom”. That’s “freedom” as in “freedom fries” and “religious freedom”, not “freedom from discrimination.”
You can tell a lot about a politician by the individuals and organisations they follow on social media. Truss doesn’t follow any of the key human rights organisations, organisations representing disabled people, organisations representing muslim people, organisations representing Jewish people, organisations representing Black people and other members of ethnic minorities. She follows just one LGBT+ organisation, the LGBT+ conservatives account; no LGBT+ charities or advocacy groups, no charities representing LGBT+ kids.
She does, however, follow some of the most rabidly anti-trans organisations and individuals – organisations and individuals roundly rejected by the LGBT+ community; organisations and individuals who campaign against equality, who promote dangerous and discredited conversion therapy and who orchestrate campaigns against gay and lesbian people who dare criticise them.
Yesterday, Truss’s office removed government support for schools anti-bullying guidance because it included protecting trans kids. The guidance was designed to protect all LGBT+ kids, not just trans ones; the anti-trans groups are celebrating because to them, gay and lesbian kids are simply collateral damage in their obsessive campaign against trans people.
Truss isn’t stupid. She’s much worse and much more dangerous than that.
-
News isn’t about making you feel better
Journalism is not supposed to be a fluffy PR machine for the government (unless you’re working in North Korea, or, I don’t know, the Sunday Telegraph news desk), ready to boost your mood on a less than jolly day with an uplifting story of a dog who saved a duck from traffic, or a picture of a waving seal. It is a tool to interrogate power structures and inequality, serve the public interest and, occasionally, provide readers with something funny to read. Unfortunately, spiralling death tolls, falling stock markets and government failures – as depressing as it might be – are news, and need to be reported on.
…the media has never existed to provide a soothing mood-booster or cheerlead the government. Now is exactly the time we need challenging, difficult questions asked, even if they’re hard to hear. The waving seals can wait.
-
Money keeps you safer than masks
Yet more evidence that we really aren’t in this together: the Office for National Statistics reports that the Covid-19 death rate in England is more than double in the most deprived areas compared to the least deprived.
In the most deprived areas the death rate is 55.1 deaths per 100,000 population; in the least deprived, 25.3. In Wales it’s similar: 44.6 to 23.2 deaths per 100,000.
That’s partly because poorer people tend to live more closely together, partly because poorer people tend to have worse health, and partly because poorer people are more likely to be in jobs classed as “essential” that they can’t do from home.
-
This is not a lockdown
It’s May Day, the day when we celebrate international workers’ day. But in England many workers have nothing to celebrate: what the papers call a lockdown isn’t stopping employers from forcing people to come in to work non-essential jobs.
Caroline Molloy, in OpenDemocracy:
we don’t actually have a lockdown. The government has allowed people to continue to go to work – and allowed bosses to make people continue to go to work – far more than we’re being led to believe, and far more than most of the media seem to have noticed.
And as openDemocracy has just exposed, across large sections of the economy, many workers in ‘non essential’ jobs are being forced to show up to potentially dangerous workplaces. And some have already got sick. And some have already died.
51% of the people currently working are not working from home.
In England, unlike in Scotland and Wales, the government has not even introduced any new legal sanctions if offices, call centres, factories, construction sites, warehouses, and so on, don’t enable social distancing in the workplace. English bosses are expected to “make every effort to comply†with social distancing, but not legally mandated to do anything. Indeed, as “lockdown†progresses, the non-binding guidance has been watered down
It’s hard to disagree with Molloy’s argument that the reason the media isn’t highlighting this is yet another example of a myopic media class: if they can’t see it, it can’t be happening.
The baristas and bookshops aren’t there, and who really knows anyone who works in a call centre, factory, or warehouse?
-
Glasgow is going to lose another historic building
To paraphrase The Onion: I can’t believe this is happening in the only city where this regularly happens.
Glasgow is set to lose another iconic building, the ABC in Sauchiehall Street. The music venue – one of my very favourite places – was badly damaged by the second Art School fire and has effectively been left to rot since despite promises of its rebirth; it is now in danger of collapsing. That means the previous block on demolition is almost certain to be lifted.
That’s rather convenient for the developer, because the ABC was a major obstacle to plans to build yet more student flats.
The entire block in which the ABC sits is owned by a single developer, and the developer’s plans for a seven-story block of flats on this prime bit of real estate were rejected in 2017; the developer appealed to the Scottish Government and was turned down again. The flats would be “detrimental to the historic environment”, which included the Art School’s Macintosh building and the ABC.
That “historic environment” went on fire (for the second time) in June 2018. As the A Thousand Flowers blog reports, the developer promised to rebuild the ABC as “a world class music venue” but submitted no plans other than an application to completely demolish it.
The all too frequently toothless Historic Environment Scotland chipped in to say that, “It is our view that the applicant has not made an adequate effort to retain and preserve this C-listed building (or any part of it), and has therefore not met the tests for demolitionâ€. Garnethill Community Council have said it would “devastating and totally unacceptable†to lose the building. Omnipresent heritage fan and MP Paul Sweeney pointed out in his objection that the building hosted Glasgow’s first ever public film showing, in 1896.
Glasgow School of Art have also objected to the demolition, pointing out that there are currently no plans for the site’s redevelopment and that the ABC building, with temporary props, is under no imminent danger of collapse. Conveniently, their letter also reiterates that student flat plans for the neighbouring building have been rejected several times and that the ABC’s facade is an effective and important part of the streetscape. We can, perhaps, read between the lines here.
One pretty sure-fire way to destroy a damaged building is to leave it open to the elements. That appears to be what’s happened to the ABC.
ATF:
If the owners are granted permission to flatten the ABC, how long will it be before the student flat proposals for the neighbouring block emerge out of the ashes?
-
“How discriminatory do you have to be before you’re called out?”
Helen Belcher of Trans Media Watch explains why UK trans people are really scared right now.
For some time trans people have understood the current media debate in the UK isn’t actually about the Gender Recognition Act. Instead, it is about our basic rights to live and move as full members of our society.
…Most trans people I know in the UK are now absolutely terrified.
They understand an arcane procedure for changing legal gender is probably going to be maintained in some form.
But they realize their ability to function in any meaningful way as members of our society is about to be removed
-
Using coronavirus for a culture war
the key issue in the right’s current culture war is the lockdown, which is being presented as a freedom-sucking con – much like the EU. Mirroring the dynamics of climate denialism, those challenging the overwhelming consensus of global expertise cast themselves as lockdown “scepticsâ€. And cleaving to a rightwing populist script, these sceptics say their legitimate concerns are being silenced.