Sunday 30 May

As ever, several key issues have been jostling with each other for media coverage, all of them with very unsettling potential, including the quality of BBC journalism and position of the BBC in the wake of the Martin Bashir scandal, continuing confusion over the Amber List of countries, the rapid rise of the Indian Variant and the damaging Dominic Cummings allegations. A difficult week for the Prime Minister, but news of his ‘secret’ nuptials yesterday, when previously the wedding was planned for 2022, was clearly another attempt to deflect attention.

With 5 million bookings to currently Amber List countries, there’s a great deal at stake regarding the government’s unclear guidance, legally permitting travel to these countries but advising strongly against it. I also heard that there’s little checking at ferry ports – so much for a consistent borders policy, and we know passengers from countries on different lists are mingling in crowded airports. And has the refunds situation improved since last year? Many travellers had to wait months for refunds last year and some are still waiting, faced with closed phone lines and unanswered emails, some companies effectively closing down customer communication channels. I think I only had a £360 refund eight months later not because the airlines had just repaid the company, as stated, but because I’d repeatedly raised it on Twitter and companies don’t like the bad publicity.

There’s also little emphasis in the UK about what the destination countries require (eg locator forms to be completed) and France has prevented entry to Britons because of the Indian Variant, which will not please those with second homes there. The government struggled to even sing from the same song sheet on travel policy, Lord Bethell in the Lords and Peter Bone MP saying travel is ‘dangerous and not for this year’, causing uproar in the travel industry. On the other hand Environment Secretary George Eustice was slapped down by Boris Johnson for saying people could visit these countries if they were visiting friends. Skills Minister Gillian Keegan didn’t endear herself to Radio 4 listeners when she played the ‘we’re all in this together’ card, a typical politician’s ploy. She said although she was ‘desperate’ to visit her second home now is not the time to book a holiday to Spain, telling people to stick to the slim list of 12 destinations on the government’s Green List if they want a foreign holiday. St Helena, anyone?

Equally embarrassing last week was Transport Minister’s talking up of the Great British Railways plan, not only for its jingoistic branding but also because it apparently amounts to yet more cosmetic tinkering and retains the private ownership at the root of longstanding rail transport failures. I experienced the worst journey of my life last weekend, a journey of 4 hours actually taking 9, due to breakdowns, 50 minutes waiting for drivers and several missed connections, necessitating a bus for the last ‘leg’ in the pouring rain. The worst thing was that when passengers were turfed off the first train at Milton Keynes, there was no evidence of any contingency planning or customer communication system to take account of such breakdowns. Surely such planning is a crucial requirement when bidding for a rail franchise. Apart from one or two beleaguered staff on the platform, passengers were on their own without advice to decide how best to continue their journeys – or not.

It looks like we’ll have to wait till 2023 to see if any of the planned benefits actually materialise, such as simpler ticket purchasing systems, easier routes to compensation and more flexible season tickets.

https://bbc.in/3yLEkNz

With 4,182 new Covid cases reported on Friday (over 7,000 altogether according to some sources) and 27 more deaths, there’s further pressure on the government, including from Independent Sage’s Professor Anthony Costello, to consider delaying the lifting of remaining restrictions in June. Costello tweeted: ‘New data is very worrying. Cases and hospital admissions up 25% and deaths up 38%. June 21 step 4 looks very unlikely. The govt should be pouring resources and trace/isolate teams into hotspots. Why aren’t they doing it? Third Wave on the way?’

While the atmosphere on high streets seems mostly buoyant, cafes and restaurants full to bursting in some places, this could shortly prove a damp squib if it all has to be reined in. Even at the third step of lockdown easing roadmap on 17th May, some commentators were advising against inside mixing and there was talk of ‘hugging with caution’, rather a contradiction in terms. When the variant was discovered in at least 86 council areas, the government was lambasted for seeming to imply local lockdowns in the worst affected northern towns, like Bolton and Blackburn, in anything but name.

With no official announcement, advice on the government’s website was changed overnight to suggest there should be no travelling in and out of those areas, a position they shortly had to clarify and roll back on. This proved a humiliating and cowardly strategy, infuriating those local mayors and council leaders – let’s hope it’s not repeated. Such important changes need to be communicated very clearly, not buried on a website which only a few are likely to see. While it’s pretty clear that the Indian Variant was allowed to take hold because of the delay in banning flights from India, Matt Hancock, in media interviews, continued to attribute the rise to those hospitalised having refused vaccination, when it was later shown that some of those patients had been vaccinated once and some twice.

One Bolton couple told the local press they were being treated ‘like lepers’ after a hotel on the Isle of Wight cancelled their reservation and many could have had a similar experience. What’s the betting that despite the government rolling back on the initial ‘advice’, people from these areas might still struggle to make holiday bookings and could well lose their deposits. Commenting on the Radio 4 interview with Grant Shapps, who demonstrated the increasing tendency of the government to abdicate responsibility, one tweeter observed: ‘Common sense is an incredibly amorphous concept which displaces responsibility onto individuals. It allows the govt to stealthily remove itself from the picture and shifts the responsibility of managing risks during a **global pandemic** entirely on to the public’.

The Guardian’s John Crace wasted no time in demolishing Matt Hancock’s particular deflections. ‘It was more a question of do as I say, not as I do. “We must be humble,” said Matt Hancock. Not something that comes naturally to Matt, despite him having a lot to be humble about. Matt talks a great deal about levelling with the country but he can’t even level with himself. The reality is that the government doesn’t learn from its own mistakes as it is unable to admit it has made them. So it is destined to endlessly repeat them. The dead are just collateral damage…. Though Door Matt was at pains to point out it wasn’t really the government’s fault. Those who had got ill had no one to blame but themselves, as almost all the people in hospital had failed to get themselves vaccinated’.

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Meanwhile, as yet another anti-lockdown protest gets underway in London, Dr Helen Salisbury, GP and NHS campaigner, tweeted: ‘I hate to be gloomy but cases are up by 25% and deaths within 28 days are up by 38% this week compared to last week. We are not over this pandemic yet – but it won’t go away just because we are all so bored of masks and restrictions’. We really can’t expect overworked and underpaid NHS staff to cope with a third wave of the virus without the government properly addressing their concerns. Although the ministers and the PM in particular seem immune to shame, it must have been a blow to hear that one of the nurses who cared for the PM 24/7 when he was in intensive care has resigned over the ‘lack of respect’ shown for NHS workers. All the time we see evidence of the NHS being taken for granted (eg ‘I know they can do it’, says Matt Hancock frequently, without acknowledging that they are often ‘doing it’ at considerable cost to their own wellbeing). Describing the proposed 1% pay rise as ‘a kick in the teeth’,  nurse Jenny McGee also revealed that the PM’s staff had later attempted to co-opt her into a “clap for the NHS” photo opportunity with him during what she thought would be a discreet thank you visit to Downing Street. How cynical is that?

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With a full pandemic inquiry delayed till 2022, we have to make do with other inquiries and investigations, some of which are purely or mostly whitewash. One of these is Lord Geidt’s inquiry into the issue of payments for the Downing Street flat refurbishment, which has unsurprisingly cleared Boris Johnson of misconduct. ‘Lord Geidt, the PM’s adviser on standards, said a Tory donor had paid an invoice for some of the costs. But he cleared Mr Johnson – who was seemingly unaware of the arrangement – of breaking ministerial conduct rules’. The whole refurb was thought to have cost about £90,000 and the report didn’t state how much Tory vice-chair Lord Brownlow contributed, although it’s reckoned to be around £58,000. The report will still make for uncomfortable reading, though, coinciding with the Cummings allegations. ‘Lord Geidt questions why Boris Johnson didn’t pay more attention to who was paying for the work in his flat. Why wasn’t the prime minister more curious, he wonders? It is also critical of officials – saying the prime minister was “ill-served” by those around him when it came to this project’.

https://bbc.in/3uxMTbN

On the other hand, the National Audit Office’s recent report, which looked into ‘more than a dozen’ areas of government performance, was fairly damning, saying the virus ‘laid bare existing fault lines within society, such as the risk of widening inequalities, and within public service delivery and government itself…. Amid renewed questions over the reopening timetable, the National Audit Office (NAO) warned that from the very start of the pandemic a lack of planning had left ministers without a “playbook” on how to respond’. It’s exactly this kind of thing which is bad for our mental wellbeing, because we rightly look to our elected representatives to take care of situations, or at least address them effectively, however challenging, but time and time again we’ve seen failure and misdirection of resources. Our mental health can suffer when these scenarios occur and persist and there’s ample evidence of how mental health has been affected during the pandemic.  

‘The NAO report highlighted the need for long-term solutions across areas including the disconnect between adult social care and the NHS, failings in data and IT systems, workforce shortages and ongoing monetary shortfalls, with a warning that already-struggling local government finances had been ‘scarred by the pandemic’. The report also collated the total government extra spend on Covid-related measures, putting it at an estimated £372bn by the end of this March, taking in the full lifetime of all policies’.

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In the media there has been no end of hand-wringing and condemnation regarding the Martin Bashir scandal and how his deceitful tactics regarding the Princess Diana interview had been covered up by the management at that time and Bashir himself was re-hired in 2016. BBC Director General, Tim Davie, rather struggled in an interview on Tuesday and it can’t have pleased the Corporation that media mogul Lord Grade criticised the ‘culture of arrogance at the BBC’. But it also beggars belief that the interviews on Radio 4, for example, discussing ‘the quality of journalism at the BBC’, seemed to be unaware of how a powerful right-wing bias has increasingly intruded and news not consistent with the government’s narrative often goes unreported. ‘There is no problem with journalism at the BBC… it’s a non-story’, said one contributor on Radio 4’s Media Show. A view many would not share.

Not surprisingly, though, most media attention this week has been taken up with the allegations of Dominic Cummings, giving damning evidence to MPs on the trajectory of the pandemic. It’s long been clear that Cummings is a vengeful individual, but his evidence is convincing, and besides declaring that Boris Johnson wasn’t fit to be PM (a conclusion many reached quite some time ago), I do wonder whether Matt Hancock had any idea in advance the extent to which he would be attacked. Cummings didn’t hold back, detailing Hancock’s multiple ‘lies’ and saying there were 15-20 occasions on which he deserved to be sacked. One of the key lies, for which there is clear evidence despite Hancock’s denial, is that despite the declaration that the government had ‘thrown a protective ring around our care homes’ and the commitment to test discharged hospital patients, this had been far from the truth because elderly patients were discharged into care homes untested, causing multiple deaths. One care home manager interviewed on Radio 4 said over 65% of her residents had lost their lives.

The Times detailed Cummings’s allegations and attempts to respond to them. One of the most severe was Boris Johnson’s holiday at Chequers and failure to attend COBRA meetings and about how government operated: ‘The government’s pandemic preparations were ‘basically completely hollow’ despite Matt Hancock’s claims. The Cabinet Office was ‘terrifyingly shit’…..Cummings’s judgment on Hancock is brutal: “I think the Secretary of State for Health should’ve been fired for at least 15, 20 things, including lying to everybody on multiple occasions in meeting after meeting in the Cabinet room and publicly.” Hancock has “performed far, far disastrously below the standards which the country has a right to expect’.

The charge sheet continues, including the failure to lock down because ‘there was no plan on how to do it’, the accusation that Downing Street attention was diverted by a negative story in the press about the Boris and Carrie dog (Dilyn),that herd immunity was indeed the strategy in March 2020 and that the failure to close borders was due to concerns that such a policy would be ‘racist’. No wonder mental wellbeing generally has been affected by the climate generated by such colossal incompetence. Needless to say, ministers have been wheeled out to be interviewed in the media and have been predictably exhibiting via bluster and denial their occupation of a parallel universe, especially Robert Jenrick on the Today programme and David Davis on Any Questions. But another reason the testimony has to be taken seriously is Cummings’s admission of fault regarding the Barnard Castle saga. Some may consider this a cynical ploy, but overall, the evidence presented does present a serious challenge to the government and ministers will struggle to dismiss Cummings when they previously commended him because of his Brexit ‘achievements’.

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In defence Boris Johnson said: ‘We put £1.4 billion extra into infection control within care homes, we established a care homes action plan, I remember very clearly, to ensure that we tried to stop infection between care homes’, carefully omitting the key issue of what happened between hospitals and care homes. Again, he presumed to state what he believes the public wants when he actually has no idea: ‘What people want us to get on with is delivering the road map and trying – cautiously – to take our country forward through what has been one of the most difficult periods that I think anybody can remember’.

For his part, Hancock typically defended himself with denial: ‘These unsubstantiated allegations around honesty are not true, and I’ve been straight with people in public and in private throughout…..Every day since I began working on the response to this pandemic last January, I’ve got up each morning and asked ‘what must I do to protect life?’ A sceptical tweeter opined: ‘Hancock: ‘I’ve been straight with people in public and in private throughout..Every day since I began working on the response to this pandemic last January, I’ve got up each morning and asked ‘what must I do to protect life?’ Then didn’t do it??’

Meanwhile, one article seems designed to make us question whether Matt Hancock is an over promoted incompetent or a dastardly strategist who ‘knows which levers to pull’. ‘Hancock has managed to cling on to frontbench positions during the No 10 tenures of David Cameron, Theresa May and Boris Johnson through a mixture of political skill and overriding ambition…… His success in clawing his way back into the cabinet was a result of hard work, one former cabinet colleague said. “He is enthusiastic – Tiggerish is the right word – and is absolutely focused on doing the job.” Another said he understands the workings of Whitehall better than anyone in the cabinet other than Michael Gove. “It would be wrong to underestimate him, just because he comes across as irritating. He knows which levers to pull,” he said’. Despite ‘numerous calls for his sacking’, though, Boris Johnson has always stood by him, for a good reason, some may think: he will be the fall guy and scapegoat when this administration is properly called to account.

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But any ideas of proper scrutiny and accountability can be dismissed for the present because many are still, despite the events of the last year, taken in by Boris Johnson. The right wing press and woeful lack of political awareness in this country mean that many voters still see our PM as a bit of a rogue but all the better for it. The Guardian’s Marina Hyde analyses the ‘dangerous cult that now runs Britain’ – ‘no matter what the prime minister does, no matter the consequences, his devotees line up to heatedly excuse it….. you’ve heard a lot of denials over the past 24 hours. But the biggest UK repository of denial remains the polls, where no revelation of incompetence or failure impacts other than positively for the government…. The thing about cult leaders, typically, is that they’re charismatic, male and able to persuade people of the wisdom of things very much not in their best interests. There is simply no moral failing of theirs that could be placed in front of their followers that would not cause those same followers to passionately excuse it or love them more for it’. This all makes us sound rather doomed.

https://bit.ly/3fvCLM8

Given the nature of the last year, it’s not surprising to learn that alcohol-related deaths in England and Wales have risen 20% from 2019  to 7,423 (Office for National Statistics), the figures representing more men than women and  many more living in the poorer areas of the countries. The deaths are thought to be caused by people drinking more during lockdowns, a common response to fear and uncertainty, especially when there’s been little psychological support, but also reluctance to seek medical help. A key reason, though, has to be the cuts to drug and alcohol services over the last ten years, with some mental health services refusing to take patients with alcohol issues. It was always a mistake to separate drug and alcohol services from mental health services, when the issues are often intertwined but services do need to be available in the first place if we’re not to see rising figures year on year.

With the spotlight on the hospitality industry since the lockdown exit roadmap opened venues first to outside service, then inside, The Economist reports on a ‘headache’ which has gone under the radar in some quarters, that of staff shortages. The situation is said to be worst in London and South East and has been attributed to Brexit, students being less available and workers moving into other sectors such as retail and logistics, which opened earlier. The article suggests that the industry needs to raise wages, which have remained low, to ease recruitment. That sounds a no-brainer but it must be difficult for the owners of venues which had to close for months on end and may themselves be on their uppers.

Another article analyses some likely future scenarios for restaurants, interviewing a top chef, a restaurateur and a street food team. The chef, Tom Kerridge, said of the last 14 months: ‘I’ve tried to take all fear away from the staff….Filtered all the way through, it’s been, ‘Don’t worry, you’re all safe.’ I’ll be honest, it’s been absolutely exhausting. I’m more tired than if the restaurants are open’. Hmmm…. he’s carrying out the psychological containment role for his staff which the government should be doing for the whole population. There’s concern that social distancing measures continuing beyond June will affect business and ‘diners should not expect deals’ – interesting given reports last year of rude and demanding customers expecting just that. Although Kerridge predicts more closures, especially ‘wet-led pubs’, where profit margins are low, he sees opportunities for entrepreneurs due to yet unexploited sites and good deals negotiable on rents, so ‘it’s not all gloom’.

The others interviewed cite other key factors, like people holidaying in the UK boosting trade but the real reckoning point coming in 2022, following a tough winter and VAT and rent rates returning to normal. What emerges forcibly from this very interesting article is the amount of strength and optimism needed in this business within a climate of extreme uncertainty: it’s a salutary lesson for those of us who use restaurants but know little about what they’re up against.

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Finally, it’s encouraging to read a positive story about this business, about a Syrian man who fled with only £12 to his name and now has his own restaurant in London’s Soho. ‘When Imad Alarnab, a Syrian chef, arrived in the UK as a refugee five years ago, he could barely afford to eat. Meals were regularly skipped and a Snickers bar could be eked out over a whole day to help him survive’. The article describes how this massive achievement came about, first partnering with a charity in 2017 to host a pop up kitchen in East London, word of mouth success then leading to many more customers. One thing led to another and ‘Alarnab crowdfunded £50,000 last autumn to help secure the 60-cover restaurant on Carnaby Street, Soho’.

‘This is not because I am strong or brave,” says Alarnab, who begins to well up as staff scurry through the restaurant, prepping for their first service. “I am proof that if you try to do something good for people, something good will happen to you. This is a fact.” Back in Syria, he had lived a comfortably affluent life as the owner of three restaurants and several juice bars and coffee shops’. He lost everything during severe bombing over 6 days in 2012, then was forced to move from place to place with his wife and three daughters, before attempting the perilous journey to the UK over three months in 2015. ‘Almost 10,000 licensed premises – including restaurants, pubs and clubs – closed permanently in 2020 and an estimated 640,000 jobs were lost from the hospitality sector in the last 12 months’. Despite such a difficult operating environment, let’s hope Imad Alarnab survives and thrives.

https://bit.ly/3vzCPQB

Sunday 16 May

Confirmation of the third step of lockdown easing understandably dominated the news agenda this week but wouldn’t you just know that, like last time, the sense of release was marred by the exponential growth in Indian variant cases. These are tripling every week and there are at least 1300 cases in this country, particularly affecting northern towns like Bolton and Blackburn. We can’t be surprised at this, given the delay before putting India on the red list and further delay between announcement and implementation. During this time 20,000 are thought to have entered the country from India but, needless to say, Boris Johnson has denied that the government acted too late. Local politicians in those towns are fighting the advice by some scientists to delay the fourth step in June and the threat of local lockdowns. It’s quite striking that the government aims to remedy this situation by surge testing and vaccination, but the key factor which has never worked properly is Test and Trace. Vaccines Minister Nadhim Zawahi also stressed the need for self-isolating but key factors militating against this are the weakness of the government’s system in enforcing self-isolation and lack of financial support for those who can’t afford to isolate.

‘The PM’s words came as new documents released by the Scientific Advisory Group for Emergencies (SAGE) revealed just how worried scientists are about the variant. Modelling by Sage suggested it was “a realistic possibility” that it could be up to 50% more transmissible than the Kent variant. If that was the case, they said, progressing to stage 3 of the road map – due on Monday – would “lead to a substantial resurgence of hospitalisations (similar to, or larger than, previous peaks)”. Professor Alice Roberts tweeted: ‘The SAGE minutes published on Friday make it very clear the government has not met its own tests for proceeding with reopening. So it’s a political decision, despite the science’. Health Secretary Matt Hancock raised concerns on his Sunday morning media round by again stressing ‘personal responsibility’, prompting a number of plain-speaking tweets: ‘Little Matty Hancock ‘we’re moving towards personal responsibility’, so if Johnson’s latest gamble goes tits up, then the Gov will blame the public’.

Although tomorrow’s easing seems unstoppable, the fourth step now looks in doubt and June 14th has been given as the date when we hear whether it will go ahead on 21st. Doubts hanging over the easing measures will cause more uncertainty and anxiety in the population, especially if they feel that easing is going ahead to satisfy a date-based plan rather than evidence-based strategy. It could be particularly difficult for businesses which have had to close or only partially open all this time, some having invested substantially in the wherewithal to allow Covid-safe opening.

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Some experts have gone further, predicting a third wave if restrictions are eased tomorrow and emphasising the risk of Long Covid: millions still haven’t been vaccinated and there could be many hospitalisations despite the vaccination programme. ‘Deaths are not all that matters. The decision to vaccinate older people first was based on saving lives and preventing the collapse of the NHS. The trade-off is more infections in younger, healthy people, and while they are much less likely to die from the disease they are at real risk of long Covid, in which patients continue to suffer from fatigue, brain fog and other debilitating symptoms long after they have overcome the virus itself’.

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From Tuesday onwards the Queen’s Speech, including its omissions, took centre stage. It beggars belief that, having heard the PM boast in 2019 of a ready made plan for social care reform, this has been kicked down the road yet again. Health Secretary Matt Hancock came in for some flak on Tuesday’s Radio 4 Today programme: when challenged about lack of a social care plan he responded ‘We got Brexit done’ and said ‘We’ll deliver on this commitment (social care) just as we have on our other commitments’ (except, as we’ve seen, they often don’t). Green Party MP Caroline Lucas tweeted: ‘Matt Hancock on top form on Today- “I’m really proud that the PM is so *into* fixing social care…we’re gonna deliver”. R4: “why is it not being delivered today?” MH: “the Queens Speech is *jam packed* full of delivering”. Would be funny if not so serious – we need action today. In just a couple of months, it will be the 10th anniversary of the Dilnot Commission on social care reform. What a wasted decade’.

Journalist Polly Toynbee explains why she thinks social care reform isn’t on the government’s agenda, attributing it substantially to it being a devolved responsibility involving local authorities (although this would change if it became a national service) and also because it’s ‘invisible to most voters. When families do suddenly encounter it – frantic parents of a child with special needs, or a family needing care for a parent with dementia – they are shocked to find a threadbare postcode lottery of erratic services. Many voters who cast ballots on Thursday know virtually nothing about social care, blindly assuming it’s like the NHS, until they need it – and most won’t…… Yet again the government calculates that not enough voters benefit to be worth spending the many billions it would take to put this right’.

She explains how the government doesn’t want to lose votes by threatening inheritance expectations (although many surely already have to sell their homes to pay for care) and also reports Age UK’s shocking discovery, that last year 2,000 frail, old people a day had been refused care when asking for help. This is the reality many won’t see.

As every measure to reform social care could prove unpopular, such as tax rises, Toynbee suggests nothing is likely to happen, but didn’t at least one poll reveal that many would be prepared to pay extra tax in order to fund a decent social care service? ‘In name only is Matt Hancock in charge of the Department of Health and Social Care. In practice, the two will stay as divided as ever, until some government some time is brave enough to grasp the nettle’.

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The government was also lambasted for omitting a Covid public inquiry, although this was promised in what some saw as an unintended response to Lib Dems leader Ed Davey. The proposed delay amounts to another can kicked down the road because the Covid Bereaved Families for Justice and many others have long called for an inquiry now, so that lessons can be learned and evidence is still fresh in people’s minds. But the ‘reason’ given was that at a time when the government had to focus on the Covid recovery strategy, too much time would be taken up by those involved having to give evidence to an inquiry. In many minds spring 2022 is far too late to begin. Although the PM has said he will appear and answer questions under oath if necessary, we’ll have to believe that when we see it.

In a piece written prior to the Queen’s Speech, the Guardian identified a number of bodies involved in pressing for an immediate inquiry, including influential think tanks the Institute for Government and the King’s Fund. ‘The King’s Fund said: ‘The suggestion that everyone in government is too busy for an inquiry is a poor excuse’.  The list includes the British Medical Association, the Trades Union Congress, the Archbishop of Canterbury, the Labour leader, Keir Starmer, the government scientific adviser Professor John Edmunds, the Muslim Council of Britain and the Covid-19 Bereaved Families for Justice group which represents more than 3,000 families who lost their loved ones to the virus’. It’s quite astonishing that despite all these organisations and individuals expressing their strong opinions on the subject, Downing Street stood firm, and now we have the announcement of the timetable will they feel any more positive about it?

We also have to be concerned about the remit of the government’s ‘independent’ inquiry, whereas the King’s Fund proposed a format examining numerous areas ‘including how health, demographics and social structure increased risk, the responses of the public health system, the NHS and social care response and the handling of the economy and schools’. More broadly, it’s not an area I claim to know much about but I wonder if the machinery of public inquiries is faulty. It’s thought to take months or longer to establish an inquiry, obviously introducing further delay, and it’s unclear why it has to take so long. If any inquiry deserves urgent attention, it’s this one.

https://bit.ly/3tKn8EJ

So what did the Queen’s Speech actually contain? Some commented that it was thin gruel and you had to feel sorry for the Queen having to wheel out such cliches as ‘levelling up’ – how she must have gritted her teeth at that. We were told that the Prime Minister announced a package of 31 bills that he said would ‘unleash the nation’s full potential’, including legislation to overhaul the planning system, reform the NHS, ‘level up’ the nation and regulate social media companies for the first time. Cynically, some might say, the programme focuses on the needs of the Red Wall constituencies, including adult education and home ownership. But a particularly striking measure thought to amount to voter suppression (because many don’t possess a passport or driving license) is the plan for voter ID. Although very few have been prosecuted for this, ministers are trying to justify this measure by saying we need ‘to keep our elections safe’, when they were never in danger, except perhaps in the wider sense from the First Past the Post tradition. But how typical of an organisation which wants to avoid the challenging tasks – focus on a non-existent problem, trumpeting loudly about it, while omitting the much more pressing problem of social care. A Radio 4 listener tweeted: ‘Such a displacement, ‘bringing forward’ legislation for a problem that doesn’t exist while abdicating responsibility for the one that does’.

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The Guardian’s parliamentary sketch writer, John Crace, wasted no time in lampooning the Queen’s Speech performance, although ceremony was kept to a minimum this year. ‘This was the Queen’s first ceremonial public engagement since the death of Prince Philip, and she remains a class, deadpan act. It’s not everyone who could read out a list of Boris Johnson’s promises and give nothing away on the likelihood of at least half of them being broken. It took quite some doing not to even raise an eyebrow at some of the proposed legislation. Or at what was missing’. Alluding to Keir Starmer’s attempt to make some sense of the speech, Crace described this task as ‘…easier said than done when you’re up against a Prime Minister whose defining quality – one that voters even seem to quite admire – is to not keep his promises. So you have to assume that at least half of what Johnson says he is going to do will never happen. The trick is knowing which half is true. A near impossibility as frequently not even Boris knows’.

It was thought Starmer played it safe, saying he would ‘judge the government on its record, not its rhetoric. And the initial signs were not hopeful. The UK was on its knees after 10 years of Tory austerity even before the pandemic, and all that Johnson was offering was to paper over the cracks. How could he talk of ‘levelling up’ when there was no sign of an employment bill of workers’ rights? Where was the social care bill he had said was ready 657 days ago when he became Prime Minister? And what about the cladding scandal? If the Tories were serious about these things – along with ending conversion practices and online harms – then Labour would work with the government. If not, then the government would have its work cut out’.

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Although this has been raised before, news that  almost 5 million people are on NHS waiting lists is alarming and although Covid has obviously put the NHS under a massive strain, underfunding  of the NHS over years would have contributed substantially to this situation. The BBC’s heartbreaking Hospital documentaries have demonstrated the agonising choices surgeons and other staff are having to make every day as to who should take priority and the difficulty of ‘getting a bed’ for a needy patient when only two operations a day were allowed in one hospital featured. This week’s showed patients repeatedly being told that they were at the top of the list, but then being disappointed because an even more urgent case had to be slotted in. One viewer tweeted: ‘Obviously all private health provision in the UK should be requisitioned until the waiting lists caused by the government’s failure to prepare for a pandemic have been eliminated’.

As we know, an NHS bill was included in the Queen’s Speech, but some will argue that another NHS reorganisation is profoundly unhelpful at this time, when the service and staff need time to recover without such distractions. ‘An NHS bill is expected to give back to the Secretary of State powers to direct the service in England that were delegated under previous reforms. Clinical Commissioning Groups will be merged into a smaller number of new bodies to be known as integrated care systems, with a new responsibility to work with councils on social care. NHS England’s boss, Sir Simon Stevens, is stepping down’. Again, changes will be unsettling for many, already experiencing lack of service from GP practice, some already having succumbed to takeover by an American subsidiary (58 so far). The need to generate profits for American shareholders is highly likely to result in cutting corners, such as increased use of virtual consultations, where diagnosis of serious conditions can be delayed or not happen at all due to the GP’s only partial experience of the patient.  

‘The Johnson government’s record on public service reform is short and unimpressive. The two Conservative prime ministers before him did far too little to address the long-term health challenges facing the country, notably the increasing demands of an ageing population and the toll of chronic and mental illnesses. The failure to legislate for a new funding model for social care must be counted, along with the lack of affordable housing, among the biggest social policy failures of the past 10 years’. This article also identifies another serious problem which has been allowed to build up over the years, that is, the chronic workforce shortages, although the most significant problem is seen as lack of capacity to meet demand for urgent heart conditions and cancer treatment.

https://bit.ly/3olMNCE

This week two further items emerged to add to Boris Johnson’s impropriety

charge sheet: evidence of an unpaid debt of £535 dating from last October, prompting jokes about the possibility of bailiffs turning up at Downing Street, but also questions as how this had to be uncovered by Private Eye and not by the mainstream media. It was also confirmed that the Parliamentary Standards Commissioner, Kathryn Stone,  ‘was investigating a possible breach of the MPs’ code of conduct’, based on questions around the Mustique holiday taken by the PM and fiancee Carrie Symonds at the end of 2019. ‘The Daily Mail reported that Johnson spent 10 days on a luxury villa break worth £15,000 – provided courtesy of the Carphone Warehouse founder and Conservative donor David Ross’ but later this seemed to be denied by Ross. ‘Questions were raised when the Daily Mail said a spokesperson for Ross initially said he had not paid for the trip and described the claim as a ‘mistake’, before backtracking and saying he had ‘facilitated the trip’. There seems so much sophistry employed by those defending the PM’s activities, based on use of ambiguous language. Another underlying issue is that the Register of Members’ Interests is way out of date, with no date for the appearance of its update.

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More issues rumble on, including the very public post-mortem of Labour’s failure at the local elections, although more credit could be given by the media for Labour’s gains in the mayoral contests. It must be galling for any party when former prime ministers step forward and issue their eminence grise advice for remedying a situation, though, to be fair, they are often wiser than the present incumbents. The Times featured Tony Blair’s intervention, Blair opining that Keir Starmer was not ‘presenting a convincing vision’, ‘lacks a compelling message’ on the economy and was ‘struggling to break through with the public’. Meanwhile, the balance of power appears to be shifting, the Greens ‘surging’ and moving ahead of the Lib Dems in terms of third party position. Commenting on the party’s success, particularly in Bristol, co-leader Jonathan Bartley said: ‘Who does Labour represent any more? Who do the Conservative party represent any more? Neither of those two parties have a vision for the future. We want re-localised economies where people can work from home, we don’t want to shift hundreds of thousands of people a day on the daily commute’.

https://bit.ly/2S0TGgA

Another issue doing more than rumbling is that of former PM David Cameron and his conduct regarding Greensill. Giving evidence to two parliamentary committees this week, Cameron apparently emerged as an arrogant figure, showing no remorse for his relentless lobbying of ministers, but also one, astonishingly, prepared to play the victim card (there was no career path for former prime ministers, especially one so young, etc). ‘In an unprecedented move underlining Cameron’s fall from grace, he was brought before both the Treasury Select Committee and the Public Accounts Committee on one day. The failure of Greensill has jeopardised 5,000 UK steelmaking jobs, as the bank was key lender to Liberty Steel’.

It beggars belief that he maintained he acted ‘in the public interest’, suggesting that his approaches were designed to help the government in their pandemic plight. How shaming that he was told his persistent lobbying of ministers, begging for favours on behalf of the controversial bank he worked for, had ‘demeaned’ the position of the prime minister and left his ‘reputation in tatters’. Yet such a verdict, on the surface at least, is water off this duck’s back, demonstrating yet again the Eton ethos of ‘effortless superiority’ – the rules don’t apply to him and that he’s immune to shame. As if recognising this, ‘Rushanara Ali, Labour MP for Bethnal Green and Bow and a member of the Treasury committee, said Cameron would come out the other side of the Greensill crisis as ‘Teflon man and a great survivor’, while taxpayers would be left picking up a bill of more than £1bn from the collapse of the bank…’. Too true but Ali’s tearing of Cameron to shreds will most likely cut no ice with him.

‘During four hours of intense questioning, by two committees of MPs, Cameron repeatedly refused to apologise for his personal behaviour in launching, what Mel Stride, Conservative chair of the Treasury Select Committee, described as a ‘barrage’ of lobbying messages. Earlier this week it was revealed that Cameron made contact with ministers and officials 56 times via text, WhatsApp, emails and phone in support of Greensill. Angela Eagle asked if he was not ‘a little bit embarrassed’ about the number of messages he sent, which she said was ‘more like stalking than lobbying’.

https://bit.ly/2Qm2qxf

The Guardian’s John Crace highlighted both Cameron’s neediness (even signing off his texts ‘Love DC’) and his victim card playing. ‘What was hardest to bear was having his neediness exposed. The 56 phone calls, texts, emails and WhatsApps: each one increasingly desperate. The man who couldn’t take no for an answer. Call me, Dave…… He was just a former Prime Minister with too much time on his hands. He had written his memoirs that almost no one had read and had then had a sinking feeling that he was all washed up at 51. So when Lex had suggested he come and work for his bank as an adviser, he had jumped at the chance. It had given him a renewed sense of purpose. All he had ever wanted to do was to help people. To do good. Even now he found it painfully hard to believe that he had been duped into working for an uninsurable bank that had lent money on phantom invoices’.

It’s astonishing Cameron expected the committees to buy his version of the scandal. He stuck firmly to this and refused to disclose what his remuneration had been: ‘Dave reddened and his face developed a sweaty sheen. ‘I was paid generously and I had shares’, he mumbled. Repeated attempts to find out just how generous his remuneration package was were dead-batted. One got the distinct impression that he was scooping up about £1m a year even before share options were taken into account’. It seems the committees were not duped by his story. ‘Dave had not been undone by Greensill. He had been undone by himself. His chilled-out attitude combined with his desperation to get away from his shepherd’s hut had meant he had never bothered to ask himself if Greensill was just too good to be true’. What I always wonder about such situations is the role and attitude of the spouse or partner: did they know what their OH was up to and if so, didn’t they care? Where is their own moral compass? And what about the reputational damage the scandal could inflict on them and their families?

https://bit.ly/3eOjXr5

Although such initiatives don’t compensate for the serious underfunding of NHS mental health services, it’s cheering to hear about the growth of interest in fishing and of a mental health project based in a nature reserve have helped people boost their mental wellbeing. Many long term anglers would already have been aware of this but the tv programme Gone Fishing has considerably boosted awareness of the hobby’s mental health benefits and during the pandemic sales of fishing tackle and applications for licences rocketed, including a new interest from women. ‘Taking up a rod and reel is now even available on prescription. Greater Manchester Mental Health Trust has partnered with a local fishing organisation, Tackling Minds, to help patients with problems such as depression and anxiety. The increasing popularity of fishing is part of a general rise in the appreciation of outdoor life and nature during the coronavirus pandemic alongside outdoor swimming, walking and even naturism’.

https://bit.ly/3w8oL0h

In a not dissimilar initiative, the WWT London Wetland Centre is pioneering a ‘blue prescription’ scheme with the Mental Health Foundation, whereby people experiencing anxiety and depression can participate in a variety of activities associated with mental wellbeing, such as birdwatching, pond dipping, nature walks and habitat protection work. ‘Previous schemes involving activities such as wildlife volunteering noted clear improvements in mental health. YouGov polling for the Mental Health Foundation found that being near lakes, rivers and the sea – ahead of time spent in gardens, parks and the countryside – was rated the highest by people in terms of having a positive impact on their mental health. Using nature as a therapy is part of a wider movement of social prescribing, where exercise, social activities, home improvements and other interventions are used as effective and often inexpensive treatments’.

It’s not surprising that Health Secretary Matt Hancock has backed such schemes, as he wants to reduce demand on the NHS, but the importance of such projects in prevention is not to be underestimated. ‘Jolie Goodman, of the Mental Health Foundation, said: ‘Many people in Britain get no support for their mental health from the NHS. Projects like blue prescribing are a way for people to protect their own mental health and prevent them needing crisis support’. Research in 2019 found that a two-hour “dose” of nature each week significantly boosted health and wellbeing, even if people simply sat and enjoyed the peace. Volunteers on wildlife projects showed a big boost to their mental health in a 2017 study’.

https://bit.ly/2RVQ13B

In contrast, we could well ask if there’s anything retail giant Amazon won’t turn its hand to. It’s already opened its first contactless supermarket in the UK and now its first hairdressing salon is due to open in Spitalfields, a now fashionable part of East London. Its USP seems to be use of technology, for example testing augmented reality systems so customers can see what a style would look like before committing themselves to it. It will be interesting to see feedback – something a consumer news programme should surely include if they haven’t already.

Finally, in what seems a rather counterintuitive venture for Italy, we hear that an entrepreneur in Rome is now selling pizza via vending machine, thought to help those working unsocial hours, for example. The Mr Go Pizza booth serves 24/7 pizzas, kneaded by a machine and served with cutlery, within three minutes of ordering. ‘The concept has been met with a mix of curiosity and incredulity from Roman pizza-lovers in a city filled with street food outlets serving pizza al taglio (pizza by the slice)’.

Feedback has been mixed, but in response to sceptics and defensive traditionalists, Massimo Bucolo is clear that he’s not taking work away from pizza-makers or trying to replicate the traditional Italian pizza. ‘The big mistake is thinking that this is an attack against pizza-makers or that it will send them into crisis. In fact, Mr Go’s final product is not the same as the pizza they make … it is a cross between a pizza and a piadina [a thin Italian flatbread]’. Again, it will be interesting to see how this goes, especially when there’s more choice due to Italy opening up more over the next few months.

https://bit.ly/2STVQip

Sunday 9 May

News last week, including that a senior Tory, Scottish Conservatives leader Douglas Ross, said Boris Johnson should resign if he breached the ministerial code, has been temporarily obscured from view by the striking results of local elections and the Hartlepool by-election. The ‘catastrophic’ losses suffered by Labour including losing control of 21 councils have already prompted recriminations that these were due to weak leadership by Keir Starmer, fielding a Remainer in a Leave constituency, socialists having been expelled from the Party, a deep identity crisis and insufficiently clear policies but it’s also due to their seeming inability to cut through Conservative cronyism and false promises. Whether we like it or not, the lack of political awareness and education in this country have prevented many from seeing the true nature of the tousle-haired bluster merchant they consider their chum.

Boris Johnson has managed to convince many that, as he repeatedly said last week, his government is focusing on ‘getting things done’, whereas the Labour Party wants to ‘play political games’ (aka subjecting the government to legitimate scrutiny). The fact that Hartlepool was Labour for 57 years before this indeed suggests that voters there don’t care about Tory corruption and the number of Covid deaths on its watch, though it has to be said that the right wing press and some broadcast media have done them a disservice by trivialising issues like the Downing Street flat refurb as ‘cash for cushions’. Johnson has maintained his gung-ho rhetoric, claiming his government is ‘continuing to deliver’, when it’s done anything but in many areas of activity.

His government has wrongly taken credit for the vaccine rollout, has only partially ‘got Brexit done’ (as we see from continuing problems in Northern Ireland and this week’s showdown with French fishermen in Jersey) and the main thing which desperately needs addressing, social care, looks like being kicked down the road again. Despite saying he was ready to ‘bring forward’ social care proposals when first elected, nothing further of substance has been heard and the pandemic can’t be used as an excuse. In a car crash interview during Wednesday’s Today programme, Minister for Covid Vaccine Deployment (to use the full title) Nadhim Zahawi tried to fob off the presenter with talk about ‘cross party working’, ‘scaling up’ initiatives in some cities, but apparently social care won’t feature in the forthcoming Queen’s Speech. How much more could have been invested in the NHS and social care had not the government handed out so many billions in contracts to companies linked to the Conservatives? It’s also interesting that, having steadfastly refused cross-party consultation and working during the pandemic, the government tries to implicate other parties on social care and its failures, pretty obviously to share blame which belongs to them alone.

Our PM might enjoy glad-handing locals in Red Wall constituencies but, unlike other political leaders, he carefully avoids being interviewed on programmes like Today. John McDonnell tweeted this week: ‘Johnson’s refused to go on BBC’s Today programme. Same tactics as in general election to avoid detailed questioning. He’s playing the BBC again & getting away with it. The BBC should refuse to accept a substitute, blank Johnson’s stunts and offer their slots to the other parties’.

For all the criticism of Labour, though, we have to remember how the other parties have also struggled over the years to find a suitable leader, someone with the key qualities of charisma, effectiveness and integrity. It’s clear we are producing fewer of them these days, one possible reason being the increasing tendency of ambitious politicians to take the narrow route of public school, PPE at Oxford, then becoming a PPS to an MP before being given the opportunity to stand for their own seat, meaning they’ve never had what some refer to as ‘a proper job’. This surely means they will struggle to understand the challenges of ordinary people outside the Westminster bubble. This point has been made in several quarters, eg Birmingham MP Khalid Mahmood, who recently resigned as a Shadow Defence Minister, citing his belief that Labour had left its traditional voters behind in favour of ‘a London-based bourgeoisie, with the support of brigades of woke social media warriors’.

On Saturday it emerged that Labour campaign manager and party chair Angela Rayner had been sacked, a rather kneejerk bit of scapegoating many Labour supporters are up in arms about. All of these events could increase further public anxiety, partly because it feels as if we have no credible Opposition and we are gradually becoming a one party state to the detriment of democracy. The Guardian analyses Rayner’s performance, citing some errors but many more positive points, making her sacking look a bit like an own goal, maybe one with a sting in its tail. ‘The fact Rayner remains deputy leader is also significant. It is an elected position, which gives her an independent mandate from party members. As Corbyn found out when he repeatedly came into conflict with his deputy Tom Watson, it can be a highly important role from which she can build her own power base’.

https://bit.ly/3tA52oC

Regarding leadership, just think about the records of William Hague, Ian Duncan Smith and Theresa May for the Tories and Tim Farron and Jo Swinson for the Lib Dems, not to mention Nick Clegg, who was thought to have brought his party into disrepute by colluding with the Tories and voting for tuition fees. But it counts for something that Mark Drayford has done well for Labour in Wales, his record leading to 30 seats, with only one more needed for a majority. In contrast to England, Labour held onto all but one of its seats targeted by the Conservatives. Another point in Labour’s favour is doing so well in the mayoral elections, including London, Salford, Tyneside, Liverpool and Manchester, with Andy Burnham now seen as a future Labour hopeful.

Mention of David Miliband’s name reminded me that a few years ago, I wrote a spoof piece for a counselling journal about how a certain mental health service initiative would be viewed in 2025. It quoted ‘Prime Minister David Miliband’ and at least one commentator during the last few days has suggested that Labour won’t be rescued until he takes over.

Only when Boris Johnson saw how well the SNP was likely to perform in Scotland did he decide to wheel out a Team UK initiative, allegedly to help the country recover after the pandemic but clearly an attempt to tame and quell the pesky rebels north of the border. ‘Johnson told Sturgeon in his letter: “I believe passionately that the interests of people across the UK and in particular the people of Scotland are best served when we work together. We have shown that through the vaccine roll-out.”

The vaccine procurement programme was “Team UK in action, and I recommit the UK government to working with the Scottish government in this cooperative spirit,” the prime minister added. The Scottish and Welsh governments are likely to see this as nakedly cynical.’ Not half, when previous overtures for collaborative working made to Westminster by the Scots and Welsh governments have gone unheeded.

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Amid all the febrile speculation and debate of the elections’ fallout, the Twitter account of Larry the Number 10 cat adds a slice of perspective: beneath a photo of a serene Larry basking in the sunshine, the text reads ‘Politicians come and go; I’m here to stay’.

Meanwhile, accusations of sleaze continue: it emerged that Boris Johnson’s brother,  Jo Johnson, was made director of Dyson on 18th February 2020, after Covid reached the UK in January and before James Dyson was awarded a ventilator contract on 16th March, which had led to tax regulations being changed in his favour. In an article entitled Britain’s overgrown Eton schoolboys have turned the country into their playground, commentator John Harris traces the trajectory of the UK’s political elite, ‘a story about privilege, and the shamelessness and insensitivities that come with it. More specifically, it centres on the renaissance of an archetype that has been nothing but trouble: the ambitious, dizzyingly confident public schoolboy, convinced of his destiny but devoid of any coherent purpose – and, once gifted with power, always on the brink of letting loose chaos and mishap’. It’s truly alarming how nonchalance and shamelessness have been allowed to gain such traction, based on the Eton ethos of ‘effortless superiority’.

He points how these qualities and behaviours then lead to rules, conventions and consistency being pushed aside. ‘Part of the English disease is our readiness to ascribe our national disasters to questions of personal character. But the vanities of posh men and their habit of dragging us into catastrophe have much deeper roots. They centre on an ancient system that trains a narrow caste of people to run our affairs, but also ensures they have almost none of the attributes actually required. If this country is to belatedly move into the 21st century, this is what we will finally have to confront: a great tower of failings that, to use a very topical word, are truly institutional’.

https://bit.ly/3vNrdZW

Some of us have been campaigning for some time against the privatisation of the NHS by stealth, which has gone under the radar during the pandemic. The government’s former Chief Scientific Officer, Sir David King, pointed out that isn’t an upfront transfer as was the case with British Gas or Royal Mail, ‘but rather a gradual hollowing out, a process that has been further accelerated by the pandemic and will continue under the Johnson government. In 2010, for example, the NHS spent £4.1bn on private sector contracts; by 2019, this had more than doubled to £9.2bn’. The government has actively prevented or hindered information about these dealings coming to light, eg blocking FOI requests, thereby limiting legitimate scrutiny. It’s also thought that creating new organisations can be a way of avoiding accountability, for example abolishing Public Health England and replacing it with the UK Health Security Agency (UKHSA), headed by Dr Jenny Harries (yes, the woman who, as Deputy Chief Medical Officer took part in many Downing Street briefings, very much abiding by the government narrative).

But campaigning organisations We Own It and Keep our NHS Public have been equally concerned about the selling off of GP practices to the subsidiary (Operose) of American insurance giant Centene. This highly likely to lead to cutting corners in order to meet the objective of generating profits for shareholders – not what was ever intended for the NHS. All this is without any scrutiny or patient and public consultation and many patients will unaware that this is even happening. Meanwhile, recent research suggests that the NHS and social care need an extra £102bn to allow services to be rebuilt post-pandemic – fat chance of them getting that.

https://bit.ly/3hqwAL1

This week marked a significant change for care home residents, too late for some but reportedly wonderful for others after 14 months of confinement. Residents can now make accompanied visits outdoors without having to quarantine for 14 days. One resident’s son said: ‘You can have as many phone calls and window visits as you like, but it’s incredibly tough to have been separated in this way’, and we know from many accounts the extent of stress caused to residents and their families by the conditions imposed. These would not have been necessary had the government indemnified care homes against potential insurance claims. Needless to say, Care minister Helen Whately tried to abdicate government responsibility by attributing it to individual care homes: ‘We recognise that every care home has a unique layout, physical environment and facilities, and residents have their own individual health and wellbeing needs, which is why care homes themselves are best placed to decide how to enable visiting safely’ Again, needless to say, the Department of Health and Social Care demonstrated its occupation of a parallel universe, saying it is ‘working across government, with care providers and the insurance industry, to understand the breadth and severity of insurance problems and whether there is any action the government should take’.

https://bit.ly/3euwXSA

Many have commented on the media’s apparent obsession with summer holidays, speculating that travel to European countries will be possible at some point, but we can predict that flight prices will be sky high by the time it’s known to be safe to book. Meanwhile, most of the countries on the government’s much-trumpeted green list aren’t necessarily the places people want to go. Falkland Islands, anyone? But some good news comes in the form of the UK’s largest travel operator Tui developing PCR tests costing around £20, far less than they have been hitherto. Good news for tourists but not for the profiteering companies already purveying them.

Again on ‘re-entry anxiety’, a good article by bereavement expert Julia Samuel effectively talks about the mindfulness approach to difficult feelings many will experience on trying to enter post-pandemic life, not aiming to avoid them but tolerating and moving through them. ‘Pain is the agent of change, so allow yourself to feel the sadness, feel the confusion, feel the fear, and then over time your system will adapt to this new reality…then you can take meaning from it and that gives the opportunity for growth… People have been living with structural uncertainty for a year. That anxiety, the not knowing and the invisible health threat doesn’t just disappear because we are told we can do what we want… Some people will be optimistic and longing to see friends, but there will be others who have real anxiety, questioning if they have lost their social identity and way of connecting. The important thing is to be self-compassionate’. It’s great to see such articles, in my view, because although it is increasingly being talked about, there’s still insufficient recognition of this particular kind of anxiety, which we haven’t had to experience en masse before.

https://bit.ly/3uxdEOf

The issue of working from home (WFH) has been hotly debated recently, for obvious reasons, as it’s now possible to contemplate a return to the office. For some WFH has been welcome, cutting out commuting time, perhaps re-engaging with the local area and reducing interactions with difficult colleagues, but for others it’s been lonely and/or stressful, many juggling work commitments with home schooling children and needing to find space and sufficient broadband to work with. It seems that while many organisations are downsizing their office space, there’s a tendency to favour a hybrid model of some days at home and other days in the office. There probably is no substitute for the kind of productive interactions ‘at the water cooler’ which could lead to inspiration or at least esprit de corps. Nevertheless, as one commentator in the Times pointed out, WFH has represented a significant transfer of cost from the employer to employee in terms of higher utility bills and extra hours worked. Another commentator, writing in the Daily Telegraph, opined that WFH eventually became ‘a sterile experience’, maybe suitable for creatives but not ‘commercially minded executives’. Goldman Sachs boss David Solomon went a step further, describing WFH as ‘an aberration’. It will be interesting to see how the situation develops over the next few months.

Finally, for those who’ve wanted to get away from the ‘rat race’ altogether, a recent call for applicants to take up residence and help repopulate one of Italy’s deserted villages might have proved tempting. The Sunday Times tells us that ‘Santo Stefano di Sessanio, a walled medieval hamlet perched in the hills of Abruzzo’s Gran Sasso national park, was emptied out by postwar emigration, leaving dozens of empty stone cottages along its winding alleys’. Officials were stunned to receive over 27,000 applications from people fed up with big city life during the pandemic, but many more might have found themselves ineligible. Applicants had to be under 40 and prepared to open a business in the village. Although in return they were promised a fair rent on a house and an annual living subsidy of E8,000, such a venture could still be challenging. For example, it could prove lonely, a long way to travel to necessary facilities and a small village could limit the growth opportunities of the business. But as this is only one of the deserted villages destined for repopulation, it will be very interesting to see how the project goes.

Sunday 2 May

It already seems a long time since last weekend, when many were disturbed to see the thousands taking part in an anti-lockdown protest in London’s Hyde Park and Oxford Street, apparently allowed by the police to go ahead. Of course there was no distancing or mask wearing and a group of six women interviewed for television news sounded worryingly confused, describing the last year’s restrictions as ‘genocide’ without stopping to think what the death toll would have been like with no lockdowns. An NHS staffer tweeted: ‘When I see these ‘antilockdown’ people call a quarantine ‘genocide’, I think of rows of graves in Manaus, Covid running rampant through South America, people gasping for air in car parks outside Indian hospitals, and I feel anger, disgust and shame at their infantile narcissism.’

But last week will surely go down in the nation’s memory as the one when we could seriously wonder if finally, as accusations of misconduct against the Prime Minister pile up, Teflon Boris won’t be able to wriggle away and deflect attention from them. No fewer than three inquiries are said to be underway into his conduct including the funding of the Downing Street flat refurbishment, the effective shielding from scrutiny of a friend of fiancé Carrie Symonds, and the PM allegedly saying he’d rather see ‘bodies pile high in their thousands’ than order a third lockdown. A fourth inquiry, highlighted by Labour’s Margaret Hodge, also looks likely to enter the fray. But what a waste of public money, given all the resources inquiries take, when one, properly conducted, would suffice. It seems the reason for several inquiries is limitations on the remit of each organisation to look at the big picture. Meanwhile, many are already disillusioned by the findings of some recent inquiries, which have effectively been whitewashes.

Although there has been more media coverage of the beleaguered prime minister and his government this week, there has also been much deflecting coverage of India’s Covid crisis, almost as if the UK was not in a terrible situation itself not so long ago. Interviewed on BBC Broadcasting House, former speaker John Bercow said Boris Johnson has ‘an insouciant and flippant disregard for the accuracy of what he says to the House of Commons’, prompting a suggestion from one listener that this sounds ‘like a lot of words for lying’. Demanding that the PM reveals who paid for the renovations, Bercow told LBC: ‘We need to know who paid the bill in the first instance, it’s a blindingly simple and straightforward question.’

Earlier in the week it was confirmed that ‘generous philanthropist’ Lord Brownlow had made a donation of £58,000.Who he, we could ask. ‘Lord Brownlow of Shurlock Row in the royal county of Berkshire, who is ranked the 521st richest person in the UK with an estimated £271m fortune in the Sunday Times rich list, was revealed by the Daily Mail to have paid the Tory party nearly £60,000 towards the cost of the makeover by Lulu Lytle, described by Tatler magazine as “one of smart set’s most loved designers”…. Brownlow has donated almost £3m to the Conservatives and even more to projects and charities supported by the Prince of Wales’. Although this article reveals him as a perhaps a more interesting character than some Tory donors, operating his own company ‘as a meritocracy’, it’s no coincidence that he was made a peer in Theresa May’s resignation honours list. But, astonishingly, this donation represents only part of the bill, so questions continue as to where the rest came from and what obligations the PM would be under as a result of it. The whole issue continues to be dogged by opacity.

https://bit.ly/3eLpAVS

If it wasn’t so depressing, it has been almost amusing to witness the ministers and others paraded on the media this last week to defend the Prime Minister. Defence Secretary Ben Wallace denied a Daily Mail report alleging Prime Minister Boris Johnson said he would rather see ‘bodies pile high in their thousands’ than order a third lockdown, describing him as ‘a first class leader’. Work and Pensions Minister Therese Coffey, wriggling on the end of Today presenter Justin Webb’s stick, couldn’t bring herself to admit that declarations of funding are a law. Instead, she claimed the government was focusing on ‘the important things like climate change’, perhaps not surprisingly given the UK will be hosting COP26 later this year. These defenders are a sharp contrast to former Attorney General Dominic Grieve, who described the PM as ‘a vacuum of integrity’.

A listener tweeted: ‘One of the things that ‘makes a difference to people’s daily lives’ is having an honest, transparent and competent government and Prime Minister’. Another said: ‘Therese Coffey – can I give you my enormous thanks for explaining on Today exactly what I should, and should not, be caring about. I was getting very confused about finding myself caring about ethics and sleaze and corruption, so it’s a relief to know I can ignore them’. Meanwhile, the Prime Minister and ministers continue to spin the line that the public doesn’t care about such matters (when they have no grounds to make such assumptions), benefiting from some press collusion by way of a ‘cash for cushions’ trivialisation. An Andrew Marr programme viewer tweeted: ‘It’s very frightening to watch the mainstream media constantly feed us the narrative that we don’t care or expect those who control our fate as a country to be honest’. Of course this is dangerous because it leads to dishonesty being normalised rather than called out. Green MP Caroline Lucas tweeted: ‘There’s a reason Johnson carefully choreographs his image as casual and sloppy, down to fake ruffling of hair before he goes into PMQs or on TV – it’s to help give impression his lies are accidental but it’s a script and he knows exactly what he’s doing. And it’s dangerous’.

Increasingly used this week, the ‘sleaze’ descriptor came into its own at Wednesday’s Prime Minister’s Questions in the Commons, during which Keir Starmer forensically presented the evidence for public concerns and questions arising from them. This clearly drove the PM into a finger pointing, fist jabbing fury, the like of which must rarely have been seen in this chamber. (Is another accusation fitting here, that of unparliamentary behaviour?) Boris Johnson must be truly rueing the day he brought Dominic Cummings into his inner circle, since the much-publicised revelations of his blog look likely to exact a revenge on the scale of Jacobean drama. ‘Demands for action grew on Saturday after Boris Johnson’s former adviser Dominic Cummings made a series of allegations relating to his former boss, including that he had been plotting an “unethical, foolish, possibly illegal” plan to get Tory donors to secretly fund the refurbishment of the No 11 flat in which he lives with his fiancee and their young child. The government has since said Johnson has himself paid the £58,000 bill, but it remains unclear whether he paid directly, or received a loan from the party or a donor. Labour has also raised the question of whether the correct tax has been paid on the refurbishments and any potential gifts’.

We have to wonder whether journalist Sarah Vine (not always acknowledged by the media as Michael Gove’s wife) thought she was doing the government a favour by defending the refurbishment many have considered unnecessary, suggesting the PM shouldn’t be expected ‘to live in a skip’. A listener tweeted: ‘No one suggests he should live ‘in a skip’ but having a major refurb from an elite designer is a far cry from ensuring the Downing Street flat is functional and well-maintained. The rest is ego-driven froth in this case’.

Despite categorical denials from the PM and Downing Street staff, the BBC confirmed with various sources and witnesses that the bodies piling high remarks had indeed been made ‘during a heated discussion in No 10’ (no more f……. lockdowns – let the bodies pile high in their thousands’). They were allegedly made ‘after he felt corralled into agreeing to a four-week lockdown in November, months after it was recommended by Sage scientists to curb soaring coronavirus cases. He apparently warned he would never again back another national lockdown’. These words were experienced even more painfully by the Covid-19 Bereaved Families for Justice group, already angry at the government’s claim it was too busy now to launch a public inquiry into the UK’s handling of the pandemic. Again illustrating his occupation of a parallel universe and his capacity for taking the public for fools, the PM said suggestions he had made the remarks about letting bodies pile up were ‘total rubbish’…… What I certainly think is that this country has done an amazing job with the lockdowns. And they’ve been very difficult. And they’ve been very tough for people. And there’s no question about that’.

https://bit.ly/3aYtfyG

It’s quite striking and testament to the lack of political awareness in this country (eg one Doncaster vox pops respondent thought the PM in 2017 was John Major and another had never heard of Keir Starmer) that despite all the muck the government is mired in, the Conservatives are still doing quite well in the polls, especially important ahead of next week’s local elections. A YouGov poll for The Timesfound an 11-point gap between the Tories and Labour. The Conservatives are on 44 per cent, the same as a week ago, with Labour down one point on 33. The latest Opinium poll for the Observer suggests the issue of sleaze is getting through, but not yet affecting the parties’ standings. ‘Almost four out of 10 voters think Johnson and the Tory party are corrupt. Some 37% describe Johnson as mostly or completely corrupt, compared with 31% who say he is clean and honest. Even more – 38% – say the Conservative party is corrupt, with 31% saying it is clean and honest’.

https://bit.ly/3nDyqsZ

The Observer portrays this Prime Minister as unfit for public life, reminding us of the Nolan Principles: ‘Integrity is one of the seven principles of public life, alongside selflessness, objectivity, accountability, openness, honesty and leadership. Enunciated by Lord Nolan in 1995, they set out the ethical standards to which all those who work in the public sector should adhere. It would be fair to expect the prime minister, the most senior public office holder in the land, to set an example for other public servants’. The article shows how the Prime Minister has fallen so short on all of them. ‘That these serious allegations are entirely plausible speaks volumes about just how weak and dishonourable Johnson has already revealed himself to be. Johnson’s premiership embodies perfectly what happens when you get government by people who are motivated not by public service or the national interest but who instead see politics as a power trip that will eventually pave the way for lucrative financial gain. The lack of vision, integrity and principle leaves a vacuum that gets filled with petty infighting, briefing and counter-briefing and obsessing about whether the furnishing of official residences caters to personal tastes’.

https://bit.ly/3eFJMs4

At least one commentator believes the ‘sleaze’ descriptor is inadequate. Describing the PM as ‘utterly careless about everyone except himself’, Aditya Chakrabortty likens him to ‘one of F Scott Fitzgerald’s characters, so insulated by privilege that he will never see the wreckage strewn behind him’. He thinks the ‘sleaze’ word is way insufficient to ‘describe the actions of a prime minister who, amid a deadly pandemic, plots with advisers and public officials on how to drum up a reported £200,000 to redecorate his temporary home in Downing Street…This isn’t some fever dream about soft furnishings; it is about who advanced money to our prime minister, and what they may have expected in return, which is why it is now under investigation by the Electoral Commission. From Jennifer Arcuri to a £15,000 winter break in Mustique, every decision smacks of a knowing recklessness and an assurance that the tab will always be picked up by someone else’.

https://bit.ly/3xQKuf8

But much as the PM and ministers in their Westminster bubble might like to think they’re through the woods and can control the outcome of inquiries (since, absurdly, in at least one the PM has to give his consent, making him judge and jury at his own trial), serious deficits are appearing behind the scenes. Some senior Tories are suggesting Boris is becoming isolated and ‘uncontrollable’, without trusted aides and close advisers insufficiently experienced to deal with this fallout. One source said: ‘The prime minister is being failed here. There need to be interventions from his team but that isn’t happening. These are the moments when it matters – having people who can say no. He is surrounded now by people he doesn’t particularly trust or particularly know’. A good number of Conservatives must now be worried by what further blows formidable adversary Cummings could be planning to inflict and there’s a feeling that, of the two, Johnson has far more to lose. ‘There is now significant disquiet in the building about what Cummings could say or do next. The former adviser has said he will give evidence to a committee of MPs on 26 May’.

https://bit.ly/3edoIKO

There’s some hope the inquiries will be useful: the Electoral Commission one has ‘sweeping powers to call witnesses and refer matters to the police’ and the one by Christopher Geidt, the new adviser on ministerial standards, sounds as if its initiator won’t have the wool pulled over his eyes. He was described by a former colleague as ‘suave and charming, very proper, clipped and British with a regimental tie, but also with a touch of the spook about him’. Paul Waugh of the Huffington Post tweeted:  ‘Boris Johnson says ‘I think I’ve answered this question’, as he fails to answer the question. That may work in PMQs but it won’t work with the Electoral Commission’

But ‘Downing Street admitted that Johnson will retain the power to quash both probes and exonerate himself and ministers’, begging the question as to whether such inquiries are merely a sop to public concern.

Meanwhile, the Law Society has expressed disquiet about changes being made to the judicial review process which are thought to reduce government accountability. ‘Collectively, the most controversial proposals would allow unlawful acts by government or public bodies to be untouched or untouchable. This would harm individuals that challenged them and others who might fall foul of the same unlawful act or decision in the future. The effect of the proposals would be a fundamental distortion of the protection judicial review is supposed to provide against state action, undermining the rule of law and restricting access to justice’. Human rights organisation Liberty said the plans were ‘part of a much bigger attempt to put itself beyond scrutiny in the courts, in parliament and on the streets’.

https://bit.ly/3nCFA0w

Confirming findings already published, two further pieces of research indicate how mental health services have not been meeting patients’ needs during the pandemic, many reporting a lower quality of care. The research by University College London found that others had problems accessing medication, with appointments being cancelled and, although this could not be helped to some extent, the loss of in person care was felt acutely. It highlights what we’ve long known, that whereas services delivered digitally are satisfactory for some, for many they are not, due to a number of issues such as poor or inadequate IT systems or lack of confidence with them. One patient said: ‘Lockdown has made me feel very angry. I feel the professionals used it as an excuse to stop offering appointments. I was seeing her every week and it’s been cut to every three weeks by telephone’.

Needless to say, the NHS issued its usual defence, though it’s long been known that there’s serious underinvestment in UK mental health services. ‘The pandemic has taken its toll on people’s mental health, but the NHS has continued to provide mental health services – increased appointments were offered, including face to face, and 24/7 helplines are available to anyone who needs urgent support’.

https://bit.ly/3ubVGk1

The NHS doesn’t seem to understand how inadequate many patients and some professionals find digital delivery of services and there’s quite some debate amongst counsellors and psychotherapists about returning (or not) to face-to-face working. Research by mental health charity Mind, involving 2,000 people, found that nearly a quarter of those using NHS services reported their mental health had declined during the pandemic. Specifically addressing the move of services online, ‘about 35% said they found the service difficult to use and 23% said their mental health actually got worse as a result of the support they were offered’. Mind is warning that online delivery mustn’t become ‘the new normal’. Although some respondents liked not having to travel to appointments and appreciated flexibility on timings of sessions, Mind is very clear on what it sees as the downsides.  ‘Online therapy cannot be seen as an easy answer to fixing growing pressures on overstretched mental health services. There is no cheap fix’.

https://bit.ly/3nK0omH

On a lighter note, though you do have to wonder about the use (or misuse) of energy, unless it’s a welcome displacement from the depressing news agenda, the Sunday Times tells us how Sainsburys had to apologise for a faux pas. ‘Sainsbury’s has promised to change a picture in one of its Cornish stores because it showed the wrong sort of tea. The image at a branch in Truro depicted a fruit scone — itself an error for purists who say it must be a plain Cornish split — with clotted cream on the bottom and the jam uppermost. The done thing in Cornwall is to put the jam on first, while in Devon they start with the cream’. ‘Creamteagate’ led to a ding dong between various individuals and authorities in Devon and Cornwall, some customers threatening to boycott the supermarket. The article gave rise to numerous comments, one perhaps getting to the heart of how the dispute developed with such ferocity: ‘We need a lot more of this type of news!! The rest is boring, depressing and repetitive. This is both important and entertaining’.

https://bit.ly/2QMR5GE

Finally, some gardeners could be worried by reports in The Week of a serious shortage of garden gnomes. Apparently there was a ‘massive upswing in their popularity during lockdown’ but now supplies are running down because of problems associated with the recent Suez Canal blockage. This concern was news to me, always have been led to believe that garden gnomes were the epitome of bad taste, but perhaps I will hear otherwise!

Saturday 24 April

Last week the Greensill scandal continued to be the gift that kept on giving, fresh revelations mushrooming up every day, although the government must have been grateful for the three distractions which the media made the most of. The latest bombshell from Dominic Cummings is a distraction the PM definitely won’t be grateful for – more later. The first, of course, was the funeral of the Duke of Edinburgh, which many found moving and which caused me to reflect, not for the first time, that Brits do spectacle well. It was a shame it had to be spoiled by media coverage which included hours of what had occurred the previous week – speculation about this or that, interviews with anyone who might have had the most tentative of involvements or even sightings of the Duke, and worse – much obsequious commentary. Last Sunday BBC Royal Correspondent, Nick Witchell, was trending on Twitter for his version of it, which many also found distastefully biased and over critical of Harry.

The other distraction from Greensill was all the heat generated by the European Superleague plan, which collapsed days later following unanticipated opposition from football fans. It was interesting to see how exercised and indignant Boris Johnson and his ministers became about it, saying they would do everything within their power to stop it. They then seemed to claim credit for its collapse when it’s likely this was more due to the strength of opposition from fans. The most ironic part of the government’s intervention was exemplified by Secretary of State for Digital, Media and Sport Oliver Dowden, who castigated football bosses’ ‘greed’ and declared: ‘We will not have our national game taken away from us for profit’ and much more. The lack of awareness was astonishing, given his own government’s awarding during the pandemic of millions of pounds in contracts to profit-seeking firms with connections to the Conservatives. Pots and kettles come to mind.

The third distraction was the worrying discovery in the UK of 77 cases of the highly contagious Indian variant of the virus, coupled with the government’s decision to leave four days before implementing its decision to stop flights arriving from India.   During this time (it was said last week that nine flights were arriving daily at Heathrow from India, let alone other airports) thousands of passengers from India will have disembarked and won’t have been properly vetted by the authorities and inefficient Track and Trace. One bit of good news, though it’s a shocking indictment of Track and Trace, is the adoption of this work by more local public health authorities, which of course should have been allowed in the first place. The latest example is Hertfordshire, where public health teams are making sure that those testing positive and other members of their households can self-isolate effectively. This crucial work can begin promptly rather than waiting for an inevitably slower national system to react. The Watford Observer quotes Jim McManus, Director of Public Health for Hertfordshire: ‘The new scheme is an important step as it will allow teams at the district and borough councils to use their local knowledge of communities and their expertise to determine more quickly where people may have caught the virus, and that knowledge will help to stop the spread and identify any possible local outbreaks’.  It will be interesting to see how many other local authorities follow suit.

https://bit.ly/3sP6NOm

But back to Greensill…. ByLine Times, which the BBC steadfastly fails to even mention in its reviews of newspapers and websites, relates how the PM is using Cameron as a scapegoat. Author Hardeep Matharu describes how, ‘With his dual tactics of projection and deflection, the current Prime Minister has pulled off a masterstroke by launching an inquiry into the former Prime Minister’s conflicts of interest’. Although Cameron definitely has a case to answer, even more having emerged this week, launching this kind of inquiry against a former PM, said to be unprecedented, is arguably pretty rich coming from the current PM who has numerous accusations of corruption and cronyism levelled against him. ‘By launching this inquiry – without any discussion by opposition politicians or the mainstream media about whether similar accountability will be allowed with regards to his own, current Government – Johnson affirms to himself once more that the normal rules don’t apply to him’.

https://bit.ly/3sQPlcd

Meanwhile, based on the Sunday Times investigation, the Guardian unpacks how, (mis)using his personal contacts, David Cameron involved the NHS in an attempt to get them to adopt a Greensill payment app called Earnd. This would allegedly improve the workforce’s wellbeing by enabling them to be paid daily instead of monthly. We already knew last week about Cameron’s texts to Chancellor Rishi Sunak and his drink with Health Secretary Matt Hancock. But Cameron was also found to have liaised with Matthew Gould, chief executive of NHSX, an NHS agency promoting digital innovation, in order to request the personal details of NHS staff. Gould was already known to Cameron because he’d worked for the coalition government and was a school friend of George Osborne, Cameron’s then Chancellor. This is an example of the Eton-born calculating exploitation of contacts to achieve dubious ends, not to mention that alma mater’s commitment to instilling an ethos of ‘effortless superiority’.

https://bit.ly/3tOhq5x

We hear regularly about the NHS England Chief Executive, Sir Simon Stevens, but I admit this is the first time I heard of a Chair, who has questions to answer in this scandal. Lord (David) Prior, the son of Jim Prior, a minister in the Thatcher administration, was called upon to explain how lobbyists managed to access senior NHS staff. Again, we see how these networks operate, one contact leading to more, creating quite a complex web. Lord Prior arranged a meeting between Greensill and Lady Harding, chair of NHS financial regulator NHS Improvement. This then led to introductions to various heads of NHS trusts, with a view to persuading them to get on board with the Earnd app.

Lord Prior also arranged for Bill Crothers, an ex-head of government procurement under Cameron, to meet Julian Kelly, NHS England’s chief financial officer, in July 2019 at a meeting also attended briefly by Sir Simon Stevens. We have to wonder how it was that government officials and trusts succumbed so easily to this lobbying but one reason is clear: having been taught from early days in many cases that forging and exploiting networks of contacts is the way to get ahead, they didn’t seek to question it. This is a dangerous and unethical position they’ve occupied, apparently without awareness of the possible consequences. Shadow Health Secretary Jon Ashworth said: ‘We now need to know how many NHS leaders and officials did Cameron and Greensill lobby? How many NHS trusts in total were approached about a scheme that was really a form of usury?’

Meanwhile, Lex Greensill himself is reported to have ‘gone to ground’, refusing all interviews, an odd situation when surely he and the affairs of his bankrupt company should be investigated.

https://bit.ly/3tHwL7P

All of this has revealed the lack of boundaries in government and parts of the Civil Service, evidenced by the inappropriate use and widespread sharing of personal phone numbers for official businesses. The next thread in this complex web of chumocracy was the discovery of text messages between Boris Johnson and Tory donor James Dyson, promising to ‘fix’ tax rules in his favour if he manufactured ventilators for the NHS. As we know, Dyson’s expertise did not lie in this area and we understand that not a single ventilator was delivered.

As a Radio 4 listener tweeter: ‘What is so amazing over the Dyson story is that actual manufacturers of ventilators were ignored despite offers in favour of Tory donors who had never made ventilators. I can’t square that circle in an emergency can anyone else’. Perhaps the most ‘amazing’ thing, though, is that this behaviour was defended on air by the current Business Secretary Kwasi Kwarteng, trying to normalise  improper communication: ‘…people are trying to lobby ministers, lobby MPs all the time…. business leaders having “direct access” to ministers is good for democracy’. In response to the PM’s ‘If you think there is anything remotely dodgy or rum or sleazy about trying to secure more ventilators at a time of a national pandemic… I think you’re out of your mind’, a wag tweeted: ‘If you don’t think there is anything dodgy and sleazy about guaranteeing a billionaire tax breaks for not manufacturing ventilators at a time of national emergency then you really are out of your mind’.

Having perhaps pre-empted the onslaught of Boris Johnson’s accusations of leaks, his former adviser Dominic Cummings has now hit back with a bombshell that will surely dominate the airwaves for some time. He makes sure he threw his former boss under the bus before he himself was thrown. In his blog Cummings accuses Johnson of trying to quash a leak inquiry as it implicated an ally, and suggested that the plan for donors to pay for the flat renovation was ‘possibly illegal’. He said Johnson had behaved in a way he considered ‘mad and totally unethical’, and that he would happily give evidence under oath to an inquiry.

Beth Rigby (Sky News) tweeted: ‘This is just astonishing. Cummings publishes a complete demolition job of his former boss and No 10 team after No 10 ‘source’ briefings against him’. She quotes Cummings: ‘It’s sad to see the PM and this office fall so far below the standards of competence and integrity the country deserves’. Pots and kettles come once more to mind, but perhaps this is just one ‘demolition job’ too far, one which the slippery PM won’t be able to shake off. On Saturday’s Today programme (08.10 interview) an apoplectic Dominic Grieve, former Attorney General, unforgettably described Johnson as a ‘vacuum of integrity’, ‘running a cronyistic cabal’ and ‘chaotic government’ for ‘self-enrichment’.

https://bit.ly/3nfBf3f

Although it’s been serialised before, Radio 4’s current broadcast of its documentary series The Great Post Office Trial is bound to attract more listeners following the quashing of unsafe fraud convictions of 39 post sub postmasters, a shocking 20 years after the problems first began. Instead of looking into the possibly faulty Fujitsu Horizon IT system, many sub postmasters were accused of theft, fraud and false accounting, prosecuted by the Post Office with no police involvement and made to believe they were an isolated case. At least some impoverished themselves by attempting to put back the ‘missing’ thousands with their own money. Some of the tapes of the accused and Post Office interviews are heartbreaking to listen to, guilt clearly being assumed by the interrogators.

By the time of the conviction quashing verdict, three had died, but some of those interviewed sounded remarkably sanguine considering what they had gone through, including prison sentences, mental and relationship breakdowns. One commentator tweeted: ‘The Post Office Scandal is indeed a pitiful tale, all the more so because this was done by a public service, therefore in a sense done on behalf of us all. It makes me very, very angry. The Post Office should be deeply ashamed’. Another said: ‘The Post Office has paid 556 victims a total of £58m, that’s around £104,000 each. That is nowhere near enough these people lost their reputations for 20-years, many lost their homes, all of them lost their jobs. The damages should be 10 times what they have been given’.

https://bbc.in/32GhmbY

But what about the perpetrators? So far no media interview I’ve heard has said how the Post Office bosses at the time would be called to account for their actions, apart from the feeble suggestion by the former minister that there should be a public inquiry (aka whitewash). Former boss Paula Vennells (now an ordained priest, holding other public positions) apparently left the Post Office in 2019 £5m better off but 900 staff were wrongfully prosecuted under her watch.

The Rev. Richard Coles tweeted: ‘I think the case for a full public inquiry into the Post Office Scandal is now overwhelming. We need to establish how it happened, and when that’s clear, those responsible must be held to account, even if that path leads through the boardroom to more exalted corridors of power’. Another was more direct: ‘Vennells is still a CBE and an ordained priest! People died as a direct result of her incompetence, yet her magic invisible friend will forgive her. She should be stripped of her titles and made to stand in a queue for at least 10 years’.

https://bit.ly/3gCkNbU

Continuing the theme of ‘re-entry anxiety’, the Observer profiles a Danish ‘happiness guru’ called Meik Wiking (pronounced ‘Mike Viking’), whose role this last year has been severely challenged by the circumstances dictated by Covid 19. ‘The pandemic has launched an all-out attack on the emotion to which he has dedicated his career. With much of the world stripped of socialising and confined to cramped apartments, the past 12 months might well go down as the grimmest passage in living memory, with many people experiencing a spike in loneliness, anxiety and suffering’. Author of the now famous The Little Book of Hygge, on the ‘Danish art of being cosy and content during harsh winters’, Wiking had already set up a think tank to explore happiness from a scientific viewpoint. His Happiness Research Institute is investigating why some have the capacity for contentment others don’t and how societies can boost their wellbeing. This sounds very worthwhile, though he didn’t need to set up a think tank to discover answers to the first question. A key aspect he looks at is how, despite the bad press it’s had, the pandemic and lockdowns could have brought about a realisation of the benefits of a ‘smaller’, simpler lifestyle.

It’s worth reading this article because it’s not simplistic, despite the mixed reputation often attributed to developing and measuring ‘happiness’. He points out that the pandemic has ‘decoupled wealth from happiness’, reduced the making of social comparisons and highlighted the joy of simple pleasures which can be overlooked in a hectic lifestyle. One of the key elements his research identified was the importance of ‘a sense of purpose or meaning, based on Aristotle’s thoughts on the good life (eudaimonia)’. The pandemic and lockdowns have undoubtedly revealed that many lack this sense of purpose and meaning, which perhaps has been masked until now by busyness and socialising. It’s when such activities are interrupted or prevented that we become more aware of what could be missing in our lives at a deeper level.

 ‘I wish there was a silver bullet, but that’s not the case. I think you know a lot of the things I’m telling you: that your relationships matter, having a short commute and a fulfilling job matters, having enough money to get by matters, comparisons to others matter. Yet even if people do already know, we need to be reminded of things – such as the fact that more money does not always translate to more happiness’.

https://bit.ly/3sPDqeV

But according to some reports there are plenty who don’t seem to be experiencing re-entry anxiety (or they’ve managed to quell it), spending liberally on clothes and makeup in order to launch themselves into the world once more. It’s interesting that so many feel the urge to buy new stuff, when they probably already have plenty of perfectly ok items in their wardrobes and cosmetics boxes and there’s an obvious environmental cost to acquiring more Stuff. The queues outside shops like Primark (thought to be responsible for 8% of landfill) are a sight to behold on our high streets. Apparently items like foundation, fake tan, mascara and nail polish are ‘flying off the shelves’, retailers finding significantly increased demand each time the government announces a further stage in lockdown easing. ‘Shoppers, retailers say, are eager to jettison joggers and leggings and are seeking out bright, cheerful colours as they look forward to better times’. This might be a particular demographic, though: ‘not everyone is keen to put style over comfort, with sales of flip flops, sandals and trainers also up sharply’.

https://bit.ly/3aCUvSZ

On the subject of shopping, some sad light is being shed on the decline of bricks and mortar retail and what could be the fate of classic department stores. The Observer warns that ‘locally beloved buildings, from 1930s classics to brutalist edifices, are facing developers’ wrecking balls’, following the closure of stores belonging to erstwhile household names like Debenhams. ‘The Twentieth Century Society is taking action against the destruction or redesign of seven sites, and has concerns about the future of another 23 threatened by the reinvention of town centres following the pandemic and the shift to online shopping’.

Buildings under threat are all over the country, including Glasgow, Chester and Birmingham, where Rackhams has been the subject of an application for immunity from listing, leading to fears that it could be redeveloped in an unsympathetic way. The article quotes Matthew Vaughan, a trustee of Birmingham Civic Society. ‘It is a really high quality building that is not appreciated now, apart from locally, but will be in 10 years’ time. If it can’t be listed then it is lost. If immunity is granted it gives carte blanche to do something extensive’. Mention of Rackhams prompted some memories from years ago: there were two restaurants, the posh one with waiter service, the Lilac Tree, and the self-service one we patronised (but still considered a treat), The Gay Tray. That’s a name that wouldn’t be used now!  

https://bit.ly/3sNRzsX

Finally, as we approach the end of this gripping series of Line of Duty, which most of the nation seems to be glued to every Sunday night, creator Jed Mercurio must be struck by the sayings of Superintendent Ted Hastings reaching the highest echelons in the land (or what should be), Boris Johnson alluding this week to the need to ‘root out bent coppers’. The irony isn’t lost on us.

https://bit.ly/3vaRzVq

Saturday 17 April

After another eventful week, it now seems a long time since Monday, when pubs, cafes and restaurants could open for hospitality outside, and, with the sunny though chilly weather, it does feel that there’s a spirit of renewal in the air. There’s been as much talk about getting a hairdresser or barber appointment as there has about jabs.

But it’s important not to get ahead of ourselves, as too much over-optimism and relaxation of restrictions could causes infection rates to rise again. There are concerns about ongoing Covid ‘hotspots’, residents of two South London boroughs urged to take a test,  at least 77 cases here of the Indian variant, and the UK’s leaky border policy isn’t helping. It’s surely absurd that nine flights from India were expected on Friday into Heathrow alone. I think the real test as to whether the virus has been brought under control will be on May 17th and June 21st, if those milestones actually go ahead.

You have to smile or curse at the nerve of Boris Johnson warning people ‘not to relax too soon… people should enjoy new freedoms but remain wary of the risks’ etc when you think of the cavalier way he and his colleagues (not to mention his father) have behaved throughout.

https://bit.ly/3dpZiJm

Despite the media trumpeting our new freedoms, some businesses have sounded a note of caution, some not reopening till all the restrictions have been eased. A record shop manager said: ‘Record shops will always be about the charm and the cult of browsing in person. We are not an Argos. We need to be fully immersed in the tactile experience, or not bother doing it at all’.  A Northern Ireland machinery manufacturer has been hit with severe trading problems following Brexit, caused by the Northern Ireland Protocol itself but also new tariff rules involving the payment of European duties despite components not even destined for Europe.

https://bit.ly/3uXFsel

Last weekend the BBC flooded with an unprecedented number of complaints (110,000) over its wall-to-wall Duke of Edinburgh coverage, one caller to Any Answers even suggesting that staff including presenter Chris Mason should be sacked. Complainants seemed mainly exercised about the devotion of all its channels to the Duke of Edinburgh’s death but also about the sycophancy characterising many of the tributes, people including MPs seeming to bend over backwards to retrieve some memory of an interaction with the Duke or attribute to him some skill or achievement we’d never previously heard of. Such contributors couldn’t see the irony that the Duke himself, (‘a no fuss kind of man’, in the words of royal correspondent Jennie Bond) would probably have heartily disliked this kind of outpouring and would have urged them to ‘get on with it’. It’s worth noting, though, that 400 were about Prince Andrew appearing, 233 about BBC presenters’ disrespectful clothes and 116 suggesting that complaining was too easy! Some thought that allowing the Duke of York to speak on air represented an Establishment attempt to rehabilitate him, though it’s likely he will find himself on a stickier wicket in July with the start of the Ghislaine Maxwell trial.

It was disgraceful that for the second week running, the BBC refused to field someone to defend this coverage on its own Feedback programme so Feedback invited on a rather defensive theatre and tv director Richard Eyre, who had played a part some years ago in preparing the BBC’s coverage of such an event. So despite all the complaints of last week, will the BBC do the same today for the funeral? The Guardian opined that the BBC has been in a difficult position: ‘Although the BBC is used to finding itself in the middle of Britain’s culture wars, its handling of Philip’s death points to a deeper issue over the ability of a national broadcaster to force the country together to mourn a single individual in an era where audiences are fragmented and less deferential’. Although many will feel sympathy for the bereaved Queen and perhaps some admiration for the Duke of Edinburgh, it’s also possible that these positive feelings could be undermined by excessive obsequious and hyperbolic media coverage.

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It must have been galling for the Queen, as she deals with her loss, to have to make difficult decisions about issues like the wearing of uniforms. As Harry would have been the only one not in military uniform and Andrew had wanted to wear an admiral’s uniform, she is understood to have ruled that no military uniforms should be worn at the funeral. The royals’ valets must have been relieved to hear that.

It was a relief to read two articles which offered an alternative to the hype, from the Guardian’s John Crace and Marina Hyde. Crace gets it in one here: ‘With only a few standard clips – “he leaves a huge void”, “he just slipped away” – on offer from members of the family who actually knew the Duke of Edinburgh, nearly all the eulogies elsewhere in the media have come from professional royal-watchers who have quickly mugged up on HRH’s Wikipedia page. Prince Philip would have been gratified that his real friends had kept their silence and astonished by the number of strangers who claimed to have some insight into his personality….’

As for the recalling of the House of Commons: ‘So as ever on these occasions, the interest was less in what MPs had to say about the duke and more in what their speeches said about themselves….Prince Philip was the polymath’s polymath, Boris insisted: scientist, engineer, artist and conservationist rolled into one. Though the evidence for this was rather thin on the ground. A long-wheelbase Land Rover to carry his coffin. A bespoke barbecue for use at Balmoral. A few unexceptional watercolours. His shooting of a tiger back in the early 60s was rather overlooked’.

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‘Had Prince Philip been there to hear any of it, you could be certain he would have zoned out long ago,’ said Marina Hyde. ‘This is the sort of pontification one formerly expected only from absurdly pompous people utterly devoid of self-awareness or public standing, such as newspaper columnists.,,,, My colleague Jonathan Freedland made me laugh recently when he noted how Twitter had turned everyone into the Archbishop of Canterbury, somehow feeling that every major news story requires them to issue an official statement. Huge numbers of people now regard themselves as bound to post the sort of formal reactions to Philip’s death that were once the preserve of former presidents of the United States or the queen of Denmark’. It seems that this need to voice opinions as to how the Royal Family should conduct themselves has been quite widespread, for example former PM John Major going on the airwaves to suggest that William and Harry should use this opportunity to heal their rift, not to mention the many who said the only speaking Andrew should be doing is to the FBI.

https://bit.ly/3dsCs3C

Much airtime this week has rightly been devoted to former Primer Minister David Cameron and his involvement in the Greensill scandal, an issue which continues to mushroom up, revealing how widely the ripples have spread. It seems our current Prime Minister is rather enjoying (handy deflection from his own shortcomings) hanging his former boss out to dry, with the announcement of not one but two inquiries, though these predictably look anything but ‘independent’.

This week Cameron ‘spoke out’ after a 30 day silence to defend himself from accusations of cronyism and corruption, stressing (as does the government) that he hadn’t ‘broken any rules’. Cameron had worked as an adviser to Greensill Capital since 2018, itself an example of the unhealthy revolving doors syndrome whereby former politicians accept roles in organisations whose activities they were once involved in overseeing. He admitted that there were ‘lessons to be learned’ and that he should have used the formal channels, when it’s clear that a former PM shouldn’t have to learn these ‘lessons’. Interestingly, the ministerial code doesn’t apply to former prime ministers, though we have several times seen the weakness of this code in recent times.

Astonishingly, Cameron tried to spin the narrative that it was necessary for him to speak as his actions could have been ‘misinterpreted’, ‘likely to raise eyebrows in Westminster. As a shareholder, Cameron stood to gain potentially millions from Greensill, but his shares are worthless after its collapse’. It’s clear, though, that the lobbying ‘rules’ are themselves highly inadequate, allowing a former PM, who had potentially valuable shares in Greensill Capital, to lobby ministers including Rishi Sunak and Matt Hancock for contracts to be awarded to the now bankrupt company. In 2018 the shares were estimated to be worth £60m. Unsavoury discoveries continue to emerge, such as Lex Greensill himself having served as an adviser in Cameron’s office and a trip by Cameron and Greensill to curry favour with Saudi leader Mohammed bin Salman, months after MBS was widely believed to have been responsible for dissident journalist’s Jamal Khashoggi’s assassination.

Cameron’s heavy fall from grace is likely to feel more painful as Cameron himself, back in 2010, committed himself to regulating lobbying. You have to wonder whether the Greensill affair represents an egoistic attempt, not unprecedented in recent years, to keep one’s end up, not disappearing from public life. It’s certainly added to strong feelings in some quarters that this marks the return of ‘Tory sleaze’, though some might argue that it never went away, especially given the evidence of this last year.

Rachel Reeves, Shadow Chancellor of the Duchy of Lancaster, said: ‘This is a government mired in cronyism and scandal. It’s not good enough for the Conservatives to appoint an inquiry head from an organisation that lobbied to limit the scope of the register, then carry out an inquiry policing themselves and expect everyone to just look the other way’.

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Ripples from Greensill also include how the inquiries will be conducted. The Times tells us that Boris Johnson ‘has commissioned an independent review by Nigel Boardman, a lawyer at Slaughter and May, into the way representations were made to the government and how contracts were awarded’. But Boardman’s role has itself been questioned as he serves on the board of the private Arbuthnot Banking Group which has links to the Conservative Party. How to set up an inquiry but hobble it at the same time? The PM’s spokesman expected the public to believe that the PM is committed to transparency, when we’ve seen anything but during the last year. ‘As you know, there is significant interest in this matter, so the Prime Minister has called for the review to ensure government is completely transparent about such activities and that the public can see for themselves if good value was secured for taxpayers’ money’.

A wag tweeted: ‘Hello Rishi Sunak, I’m one of the 3,000,000 people in the Excluded Ltd. Any chance I can have your personal mobile number so I can send you a text? I know I’m not a past PM, but surely you care as much about me as Greensill, right?’

https://bit.ly/3uZ8fz8

This links to another emerging ripple, concerning the number of civil servants found to have also worked for Greensill and other private sector interests. Private sector executives, known as ‘the insurgents’, were parachuted in by the Cameron administration to shake up Whitehall.  ‘It adds to the growing list of government officials facing scrutiny for straddling public and private sector interests’. Such an unhealthy lack of boundaries between the two is bound to lead to conflicts of interest. One example is the government’s former chief commercial officer Bill Crothers, having joined Greensill while still a civil servant (sanctioned by the Cabinet Office). The key issue is about the way private businesses are able to use former officials to try gain preferential access to government contracts. That Crothers has denied any wrongdoing and said such outside roles were ‘not uncommon’ reveals just how normalised this syndrome has become.

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As the gift that keeps on giving, an additional thread, following his admission of having had a ‘private drink’ with Greensill-mired Cameron, is Health Secretary Matt Hancock being found to be a significant shareholder in a company, Topwood, which benefited from being awarded government contracts. Although this was entered in the Register of Members’ Interests, Hancock probably wasn’t expecting an investigative journalist to discover that the company is owned by Hancock’s sister, a conflict of interest kept under wraps. You couldn’t make it up that Topwood’s core business is document ‘shredding, storage and security systems’.

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A not unrelated matter is that of privatisation by stealth of the NHS, which many patients won’t even be aware of as the process has been anything but transparent. A number of organisations including Keep Our NHS Public and We Own It, have been campaigning generally and a recent focus is the takeover (facilitated, astonishingly, by NHS Clinical Commissioning Groups) of scores of GP practices by Operose, a subsidiary of the American healthcare provider Centene. In London alone 49 GP practices have been taken over, with concerns, reinforced by evidence of inadequate services offered by Centene services in the States, about potential cost-cutting measures designed to maximise profit.

The government’s former Chief Scientist, Sir David King, has now taken up the cudgels. He set up Independent SAGE last year as a challenger to official SAGE (Scientific Advisory Group for Emergencies), which advises government. There are some good people on Independent SAGE and it seems quite open and democratic as anyone can attend their meetings, which have run on Fridays online via Zoom. King has accused the government of corruption, privatising the NHS by stealth, operating a ‘chumocracy’ and mishandling the pandemic and climate crisis.

Alluding to this government’s longstanding ideological aim of privatising the NHS, King challenged the government’s argument that it had to act quickly during the pandemic so normal tendering procedures ‘couldn’t’ be followed, leading, as we know, to many inappropriate contracts being awarded for PPE, etc. ‘People say it’s a crisis – I say the government is using a crisis to privatise sections of the healthcare system in a way that is completely wrong. A fraction of this money going to public services would have been far better results…..I’m quite sure this has not been an accident, I’m quite sure this has been the plan, there has been clarity in this process. The audacity has been amazing’. It’s refreshing to hear the government’s conduct so clearly called out and it’s be hoped that campaigners, if they can’t stop the current round of GP practice sell-offs, can help prevent further inroads into the public NHS most of us are keen to preserve.

https://bit.ly/3ghftKX

The last few weeks I’ve been writing here about ‘re-entry anxiety’. Now The Week has summarised an article by Simon Kuper in the Financial Times, alluding to a ‘guilty secret’ that we’ve rather enjoyed lockdown and don’t relish the thought of ‘normal life’ returning. He acknowledges how difficult lockdowns have been for many, but also for some ‘there’s been an upside… we’ve been able to lead a simpler life and reconnect with our families. We’ve saved money, been spared stressful commutes…’ and he doesn’t mention this aspect but some have been relieved to have a reason not to attend social events and activities they find stressful. He believes that life in society is ‘unnatural, complicated and overstimulating’ so it’s not surprising that we’ve enjoyed a break from it. He ‘dearly hopes’ to ‘retain some of the soothing routines and slower pace of the past year’ but fears that once again he will get caught up in the ‘pre-Covid whirl’.

Some positive news emerged this week in the form of 4,000 university students across the UK having volunteered to tutor children from disadvantaged backgrounds during the pandemic. Although the students themselves have missed out considerably, they have given 35,000 hours of their time to help these children. The Coronavirus Tutoring Initiative, set up last year by Oxford student Jacob Kelly, got to work as soon as school closures were announced by using social media to recruit tutors. Yet again, a private and voluntary initiative has achieved what the government hasn’t. Remember last summer MP Robert Halfon (Chair of the Commons Education Select Committee) calling for the government to organise ‘armies of volunteers’ (including retirees) to help children catch up? I suspect quite a few people would have stepped up but nothing happened and as far as I know it still hasn’t and of course this will increase inequalities further.

Finally, The Week discusses another example of pandemic related unforeseen consequences. As a result of so many hospitality venues having had to move their business online and for takeaway only, there has been an unexpected demand for condiment and sauce sachets, with supplies running low. Kraft Heinz, long associated with its famous tomato ketchup, has been caught on the hop and although it’s creating additional capacity to manufacture the sachets, it could be too late to meet demand. Restaurants are resorting to different suppliers, although that won’t be the same thing. The article thinks the situation could help ‘loosen Heinz’s magical grip on the US diet and upend the condiment world order’, seen as a Good Thing. Personally, I’ve never seen the appeal of ketchup, although I did always rather like those plastic ‘tomato’ dispensers I’m old enough to remember places having as a regular fixture years ago!

Saturday 10 April

Coverage of the death of Philip, Duke of Edinburgh, announced on Friday, is likely to push other news off the media’s agenda for at least a few days. While many of us will be saddened to hear of his passing, there has been criticism of the media’s wall to wall coverage to the exclusion of other important news, not to mention the sanctimonious tones struck by some contributors. While we might all have learned things about the Duke that we hadn’t known, it’s felt that some interviewees have been casting around for something to say. Journalist Charles Moore was keen to let us know that despite a lifetime of serving a woman, the Duke was still able to ‘be a man’.

A Radio 4 listener tweeted: ‘Is every single soul who is or was a public figure going to be asked for their reaction to the Duke of Edinburgh’s passing? Some unfortunately competing with each other to achieve heights of sanctimony of the sort the man himself could well have derided’. Another said: ‘MSM are now in a downward spiral of unbroken eulogy, the first to stop will seem traitorous’.

The week leading up to this has been no less eventful than others over the last year. On Monday evening, Boris Johnson bullishly confirmed the second step of lockdown release, the changes to take place from 12 April including the re-opening of non-essential shops, hairdressers, beauty salons, and outdoor sports. It’s common now to hear people talking excitedly not only about vaccination appointments but how they managed to bag a slot at the hairdresser’s. The PM is still between a rock and a hard place, vociferous backbenchers urging him to ease restrictions sooner on civil liberties grounds, yet some experts warning that the easing could result in a Third Wave in the summer. They say much more could be done to improve (or even introduce?) Covid safety measures in venues and workplaces.

Social psychologist Professor Stephen Reicher went to the heart of the matter, the need for an effective test and trace system: ‘As England opens up, it will be even more crucial for people to engage with the test and trace system and feel able to self-isolate if they test positive. My concern is there’s all this talk about the roadmap being irreversible, that we won’t go back into lockdown, but unless you put the measures in place, it’s just talk’. Immunologist Professor Peter Openshaw reinforced this, pointing up the prevalence of people evading Test and Trace: ‘It is so vital that it works, but lots of people are opting out because of the practical problems they encounter. In some countries really effective test and trace systems have been able to knock coronavirus on the head, practically, but for some reason we just don’t seem to be able to get that together’. ‘For some reason’? How diplomatic he is but we all know the reason for its ineffectiveness.

https://bit.ly/3fZYZqc

Besides the inefficiencies of Test and Trace, an ongoing risk is the UK’s leaky border policy, planes full of tourists (up to 8,000) arriving every day according to some sources, drawing concern from Labour that the quarantine system isn’t strict enough. ‘Yvette Cooper, the Labour MP and chair of the Commons home affairs select committee, said the findings raised ‘serious concerns’ and that the Home Office needs urgently to ‘respond, explain and publish these figures’. Needless to say, Immigration Minister Kevin Foster said the government didn’t ‘recognise these figures’ and that ‘tough health measures’ were in force even for those arriving in the UK ‘on a visitor visa for legitimate reasons’.

https://bit.ly/3uCAMKO

As restrictions ease, debate has intensified over vaccine passports and vaccine certificates, the PM now giving a go-ahead for a passport trial. Pilot venues are thought to include football cup finals, the World Snooker Championship, a comedy club and a cinema. At the same time, the NHS is planning a system that will allow people to use an app or a paper certificate to allow access to major events and reduce social distancing measures. Needless to say, though, these plans are attracting flak from those concerned about civil liberties and not just from the usual source of Covid Recovery Group backbenchers. Andrew Bud, founder of the biometrics company iProov, which has been involved in Covid certificate trials, stressed the need for a workable system that balanced convenience with privacy needs and which also guarded against criminal intervention. ‘Forgery I think is a real risk…If they were allowed to happen, I think it would fatally undermine public confidence in the scheme’.

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The Times details the ethical arguments in the form of a Q&A, showing that so far 40 Tory MPs oppose the introduction of domestic certificates. It’s not yet definite that there will be a Parliamentary vote on this though there is firm pressure for one. These Tories believe that the measures will lead to a ‘two tier Britain’, but what seems puzzling is Small Business minister Paul Scully saying that certificates would not be required when pubs open up next week and on May 17 when further rules are relaxed. I suspect there will be many venues which will ask for proof of Covid status, opening up the field to umpteen different schemes and zero consistency.

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Much attention has been directed this week to the AstraZeneca vaccine and problems with blood clots in some cases, causing some European countries to halt its roll out in their vaccination programmes. Experts here have inclined to the view that the risk is small and the risks associated with contracting Covid are far greater, but fears have been exacerbated by the decision not to administer it to under 30s and by the amount of scaremongering the mainstream media continue to indulge in. The Guardian opined that ‘the course correction, as the Deputy Chief Medical Officer, Prof Jonathan Van-Tam calls it, may be slight but it will probably have a disproportionate impact on confidence’. The blood clots side effect are said to be very rare, affecting four in a million people who have had the vaccine in the UK but this policy change could make some older people refuse their second dose.

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Meanwhile, the effects of media scaremongering have resulted in further pressure on the NHS due to patients going to their local A&E on experiencing mild side-effects. A number of A&E consultants told the Health Service Journal that their department was “swamped” with patients with headaches who had been sent there by their GP. One said they were ‘scrabbling to cobble together some guidance so as to sensibly reduce the number needing investigation. I gather some units are really, really struggling with this’. This is clearly very difficult for patients, GPs and A&E departments but it’s a situation which could have been anticipated as a result of the relentless media coverage.

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Very much in the news (although you might not know it from BBC News avoidance) is the worsening rioting in Northern Ireland, some trying to ascribe this to conflict over the over-attended IRA funeral which the police allowed to go ahead but which has got much more to do with the aftermath of Brexit. Those critical of the Brexit deal’s Northern Ireland protocol say a border is effectively in the Irish Sea, leaving unionists feeling betrayed. The alleged involvement of paramilitary groups can’t be used as an excuse to dismiss the very real concerns of unionists. The Loyalist Communities Council LCC said there had been a ‘spectacular collective failure’ to understand their anger over Brexit and other issues, and the border protocol must be renegotiated. ‘We have repeatedly urged HM Government, political leaders and institutions to take seriously our warnings of the dangerous consequences of imposing this hard border on us and the need for earnest dialogue to resolve matters. We reiterate that message now’.

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Brexit is one of the main areas of our PM’s fibs and avoidances and there’s now growing pressure for these to be called out, though it doesn’t set an example that the Speaker doesn’t challenge Boris Johnson to account in the House of Commons. Journalist and author William Keegan dissects these economies with the truth in the Guardian.  ‘…..usually, if one is conned, it is over some relatively minor matter in the great scheme of things, and one learns one’s lesson. But when a significant part of a country is taken for a ride, it cannot be dismissed as a trivial matter from which it can easily recover. Such, I believe, is the condition of the UK at the moment’. He suggests that Covid is preoccupying people to the extent that they don’t yet see the effects of Brexit and points up the doublespeak of the PM’s press secretary, who said he ‘does believe in the wider principles of integrity and honesty’. Right, that’s ok, then. Doesn’t this remind us of a similar example uttered by Brandon Lewis at the time of the threatened Internal Market Bill? (This was the implication that it wouldn’t really breach an international treaty because it would only involve departing from it ‘in a specific and limited way’).

‘In his novel The Three Clerks, Anthony Trollope wrote of the 19th-century prime minister Sir Robert Peel: ‘Posterity will point at him as a politician without a policy, as a statesman without a principle, as a worshipper at the altar of expediency, to whom neither vows sworn to friends nor declarations made to his country, were in any way binding.’ Remind you of anyone? But Peel conducted several spectacular U-turns, not least on the corn laws and Catholic emancipation. If only Johnson were to do a U-turn on Brexit and, like Peel, put country before party’.

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Problems related to mental health have escalated during the pandemic, some seeking to alleviate their loneliness and anxiety in this way, for example enquiries to alcohol services are said to have doubled this year. As successive lockdowns have caused problem gambling to soar, NHS mental health head Claire Murdoch points out that gambling firms have hugely profited during the pandemic but have left the NHS to ‘pick up the pieces’ from the resulting addiction. She believes these companies should be paying a levy to fund treatment. During the last year 750 people have been referred to specialist clinics but there aren’t enough of these.

‘After seeing the destruction the gambling industry has caused to young people in this country, it is clear that firms are focused on profit at the expense of people’s health, while the NHS is increasingly left to pick up the pieces. In a year when the NHS has dealt with our biggest challenge yet in Covid-19, the health service’s psychologists and nurses have had to been treat hundreds of people with severe gambling addictions’. There’s currently a review of gambling being ‘overseen’ by the Department for Digital, Culture, Media & Sport, which is apparently, for the first time, considering an industry levy. Let’s hope the review cuts some ice.  

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The already ‘Cinderella’ mental health service has had a boost recently with the announcement of new perinatal health units. The mental health of new and expectant mothers has long been poorly provided for, for example five years ago 40% of areas in England had no dedicated maternal mental health services. There has been improvement since then, with ‘some specialist services’ in all the 44 local NHS England areas. But it hasn’t been sufficient and contributions to programmes like BBC Woman’s Hour would suggest that some of these women have felt abandoned during the pandemic due to few in person services and pressures on the NHS.

Now 26 sites, to cater for about 6,000 new parents by next April, will offer physical health checks and psychological therapy in one building. This is a very positive development which should perhaps be exported to all area of health, because the longstanding separation of mental and physical health services has encouraged silo thinking, which is unhelpful and another example of the Cartesian divide. Emily Slater, CEO of the Maternal Mental Health Alliance, said: ‘For the more than one in 10 expectant and new mothers experiencing mental health problems, and the increased numbers as a result of the pandemic, there needs to be a system of care available to support them. These new services will enable more women than ever to access vital perinatal mental health care’.

https://bbc.in/3fWOe87

The New Statesman carries an interesting article again linked to mental health and wellbeing, hinging on how we perceive the last year. For you has this been a waste of time, an opportunity for development or something in between? ‘…so many people have told me that, for them, the past 12 months do feel like a wasted year. I’ve heard them describe how they feel a form of mourning – not for a person, but for the time that has been lost.  In England, more than half of the last year has been spent in lockdown, with the rest marked by severe restrictions on what we can do, where we can go, who we can see. We have primarily been confined to our homes, instructed to “wait out” the pandemic with Netflix, Zoom, online learning and Joe Wicks fitness classes. But while we have waited, time has kept passing. Babies have been born who have never met their grandparents or known a world without masks. Children have left school without getting the chance to say goodbye to their friends and teachers’. The author feels it’s no wonder our perceptions of time and ageing have become ‘skewed’.

Many, whether younger or older, feel they have been robbed of time, unable to ‘move on’. Many are quoted on a similar theme, but the author cites a man diagnosed at 24 with an aggressive form of cancer, Luke Grenfell-Shaw, who has taken a different view. Having last year planned a charity bike ride from Bristol to Beijing, this was prevented by Covid, so instead he instead turned to other outlets like producing a podcast. Now back on course with the bike ride, he responded to the author’s having put to him these common reactions about wasted time.

‘Out of all people, maybe I have a really strong reason to be angry and resentful and upset [about the past year]. But ultimately I realised that’s an unhelpful way to think. The question really is: how can I make the most of this time? My attitude, and it’s something I learned through having cancer, is that, in life, there are often situations that we cannot control, things just happen – like cancer, like Covid. What we’re left with is a choice of how we deal with them. I believe we’ve always got that choice’. 

I don’t think these stances are mutually exclusive – it’s possible both to mourn the loss of time and opportunities characterising the last year but also to acknowledge some benefits which may have emerged and to harness our energies as far as possible on achieving our desires as we move on from this experience.  

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We’re rightly hearing more and more about the mental health benefits of being close to nature and appreciating the passing seasons. I had a good reminder of this last week, an intended one, by way of the first visit for eight months to a National Trust property. You usually have to book a slot in advance and although the last one of the day wasn’t ideal, or so I thought, it turned out well because I had the enormous garden almost to myself. There’s something very special about being able to commune with nature without the impingement of others in the vicinity. There was a splendid display along all the walks and paths of blossoming trees, camellias and tulips, with the best to come – carpets of bluebells preparing to burst forth. I can’t wait for that towards the end of this month.

The Week summarises a piece in the Daily Telegraph lamenting the rise of ‘woke’ job titles, prompted by the appointment of Prince Harry as Chief Impact Officer at BetterUp, a Silicon Valley mental health coaching company. The author finds it ‘reassuring’ that royalty has some currency in California but finds the strange title ‘jarring’, citing similar examples, such as ‘Dream Alchemist’, ‘Happiness Engineer’ and ‘Brand Warrior’. (Imagine responding to that common question ‘What do you do?’ with ‘I’m Brand Warrior for xyz’). The author worries that these are ‘non-jobs, propped up by easy money’ and that it will take a crash and serious recession to ‘clear them out’, ‘one so serious that even a Chief Impact Officer might notice’.

Finally, I realised that this blog is now a year old, so on this anniversary just to say thanks again to all followers and readers!

Saturday 3 April

A happy Easter to everyone! Whether or not you’re religious, this time of year is associated with a spirit of renewal, even more so this time as Monday signalled the easing of restrictions in England. Although ministers have long erroneously maintained that ‘most people are obeying the rules’ when sights on local high streets tell another story, it does make a big difference now officially being able to meet outside with five others. Another key difference for many will be the measures applied to care home visits, enabling residents and more family members to see each other. The terrible effects of this last year on many care home residents could have been addressed much sooner if the government had indemnified homes from potential litigation. The hollow and oft-repeated statement that a ‘protective ring’ had been ‘thrown around our care homes’ has long been shown as the fib it is, given the numbers of avoidable deaths and continued dithering over compulsory vaccinations for care home workers. But we are where we are, to quote a cliché, and we have to hope that residents and their families will be able to make up some of the ground they’ve lost this year. It would be interesting to know to what extent the government’s urge to resist the temptation to hug others is being heeded now.

Meanwhile, two news items won’t be great for confidence in the beleaguered NHS: 40,600 people in England are reckoned to have contracted the virus while they were inpatients. This isn’t to unfairly blame hardworking staff but another indication of underinvestment in the service and a contradiction of the belief that you go into hospital to be made better.

https://bit.ly/3sPLUDz

The other concerning item is the estimate that 122,000 health workers now have Long Covid, when, despite better awareness recently, there’s still a belief in some quarters that this only affects a very small number of people. The Office for National Statistics reports that 1.1 million people in the UK were affected, including 114,000 teachers. This was the first time I’d heard about effects on the teaching profession, when ministers have long insisted that teachers were no more at risk than anyone else, that schools were safe environments to work in and that teachers would not be prioritised for vaccination. The ONS found about 30,000 social care workers also had long Covid, which would be having a significant effect on those receiving care in homes and in the community.

At issue are not only the dire effects on those experiencing it but also the impact of sick leave putting even more strain on the workforce. Even within medical circles, it seems, there’s a lack of understanding. One senior medic said: ‘It is worrying that doctors with long Covid have described their condition as not understood by their colleagues’. Dr Helena McKeown, the workforce lead at the British Medical Association, commented: ‘With around 30,000 sickness absences currently linked to Covid in the NHS in England, we cannot afford to let any more staff become ill. Simply put, if they are off sick, they’re unable to provide care and patients will not get the care and treatment they need’.

Needless to say, an NHS spokesman attempted to suggest that the condition is well catered for, when it’s known that clinics and their services are still in short supply. ‘Our network of long Covid clinics is already supporting healthcare staff who are experiencing ongoing coronavirus symptoms, to make sure they get the right support’.

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Although we’ve long known that significant numbers of people weren’t self-isolating after having tested positive for Covid, thereby contributing to infection rates, it’s still a further indictment of £37bn Track and Trace that yet again the isolation part has been operating so badly. Recent findings from a study conducted by researchers from institutions including King’s College London, Public Health England and University College London shows that fewer than a quarter of people in the UK with Covid symptoms are requesting a test, while only half say they are fully self-isolating after symptoms develop. ‘Our data suggest that self-reported rates of full adherence to isolating and testing are low, as are rates of recognition of the main symptoms of Covid-19’. The researchers say the effectiveness of the UK’s test, trace and isolate system is limited. You can say that again. The results are a sharp contrast with Office for National Statistics data for the previous month, which suggest an 86% compliance rate, but the difference has been partly attributed to the ONS data being based solely on cases already in the Test and Trace system.

One of the authors, James Rubin, a professor of psychology of emerging health risks at King’s College London, said there had been improvement in adherence rates but there’s much more to be done. ‘We need to get more people to engage with the system, to recognise the symptoms, to get a test, and then to self-isolate and follow it through,” Rubin said. “We need to be getting people into the mindset of as soon as you’ve got one of these symptoms coming on, get a test. Don’t leave it a few days. Don’t wait until it resolves’. We have to ask what the government and Track and Trace are actually doing about this – like our leaky borders policy, it’s another key risk likely to impact on lockdown exit.

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It’s been notable this week that within days there were attempts to exonerate events in  key areas of government policy, leading us to wonder who on earth would be taken in by such transparent whitewashes. The first was exoneration of the police for their conduct at the Sarah Everard vigil, although it’s fair to say the police had damaging mixed messages from the Home Secretary, who had made clear her expectation that the law should be enforced but who then distanced herself from this, condemning the heavy handed approach. But it’s not only policing of protests and the like – it’s also the discovery that the police have harboured some found guilty of misconduct and criminality.

‘Her Majesty’s Inspectorate of Constabulary and Fire and Rescue Services found that police ‘did their best’ to peacefully disperse the crowd at Clapham Common in south London, remained professional when subjected to abuse and were not heavy-handed’. This is the result of Priti Patel’s ‘independent inquiry’ into the events of March 18th. We have to seriously ask how independent these so called ‘independent’ bodies are – they certainly seem to be in the government’s pocket.

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The second example is the exoneration, by colleagues including Business Minister Kwasi Kwarteng, of former PM David Cameron in the Greensill lobbying issue. ‘Of course He has not broken any rules’. A tweeter got it in one: ‘Of course he hasn’t. The rules are deliberately full of holes because dodgy behaviour is a big earner for former ministers’.

The third and most serious example is the recent finding that British society ‘isn’t institutionally racist’, a report which Doreen Lawrence (mother of murdered teenager Stephen Lawrence) said gave a ‘green light to racists’ and set back race relations in this country by 20 years. The 264-page report has 24 recommendations, but on Tuesday only headlines were released by the Government Equalities Office, an approach questionable in itself. ‘The much-delayed report by No 10’s Commission on Race and Ethnic Disparities is likely to spark an angry response from activist groups, with race equality experts describing it as “extremely disturbing” and offensive to black and minority ethnic key workers who have died in disproportionate numbers during the pandemic. The commission’s chairman, Dr Tony Sewell, said the report did not deny that racism exists in Britain, but there was no evidence of actual institutional racism’.

A Black Lives Matter UK spokesman drew attention to other key omissions: “It fails to explore disproportionality in school exclusion, eurocentrism and censorship in the curriculum, or the ongoing attainment gap in higher education. We are also disappointed to learn that the report overlooks disproportionality in the criminal justice system – particularly as police racism served as the catalyst for last summer’s protests’.

Even more doubt was cast on this report when it emerged (did the authors think this wouldn’t be checked?) that several high profile individuals cited in it had actually not been consulted, suggesting the authors’ need to boost the report’s authority. As for the government’s official response, that the UK should be ‘seen as an international exemplar of racial equality’, there are almost no words. This surely has to be one of the worst examples of government gaslighting.

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Historian and broadcaster David Olusoga, Professor of Public History at Manchester University, is one of the latest to weigh into the debate. ‘…..hundreds of experts on race, education, health and economics joined the criticism of the report for brazenly misrepresenting evidence of racism’. Olusoga picked out what was for some one of the most astonishing statements in it. ‘Shockingly, the authors – perhaps unwittingly – deploy a version of an argument that was used by the slave owners themselves in defence of slavery 200 years ago: the idea that by becoming culturally British, black people were somehow beneficiaries of the system’. The report’s defenders have hit out at the amount of abuse Commissioners have been subjected to, but although this isn’t ideal, it’s perhaps strange that they’ve been surprised by this.

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It will further undermine public trust in the government and raise public anxiety that so many highly questionable areas of policy are found to be acceptable. It seems to follow a pattern that in all these examples the reports criticise the critics, as if somehow their well-founded reactions were not valid, a kind of silencing.

But despite the denial regularly meted out by sycophantic supporters, the PM’s errors and blunders are recognised in some Tory quarters. Sir Alan Duncan, who had been the PM’s deputy at the Foreign Office, has, in diaries serialised in the Daily Mail, called Boris Johnson ‘a clown, a self-centred ego, an embarrassing buffoon, with an untidy mind and sub-zero diplomatic judgment’ and ‘an international stain on our reputation’. Oof.

Other key figures don’t get off lightly, either. Theresa May is said to have ‘an apparent lack of personality on the campaign trail…a frightened rabbit, a cardboard cut-out, her social skills are sub-zero’. Home Secretary Priti Patel is seen as ‘a nothing person, a complete and utter nightmare, the Wicked Witch of Witham’. Oof, again.

https://bit.ly/2PTF94W

An item of news covered only selectively by the media has been the detailed revelations by Jennifer Arcuri about her four year affair with Boris Johnson, politically important because of the amount of public money allegedly directed her way. ‘Boris Johnson faces an inquiry by the Greater London Authority – responsible for the mayor’s office – over claims his failure to declare his relationship with Arcuri may have been a breach of the Nolan Principles of Public Life, which are contained in the Mayor of London’s code of conduct. Arcuri was granted access to events at three top level trade missions, despite her businesses not meeting the criteria for the trips’. Expect this to be another example of media collusion in government cover-ups and for our PM more water off a duck’s back.

https://bit.ly/3cJPbii

Meanwhile, it’s almost amusing to know how much the Get Brexit Done obsessed Boris Johnson wanted the EU off his back, but how such a stance is antithetical to his ‘global Britain’ aims, as evidenced by the ongoing disputes over vaccine shortages and the Northern Ireland protocol. But isn’t it strange the government hadn’t grasped before that the EU will still be very important for UK foreign policy?

‘For this government, the EU is not a priority. It wants to focus on other parts of the world, not least the US and Indo-Pacific, as the recent integrated review made clear. Its other priority is domestic, on the post-pandemic recovery and “levelling up”. Yet across the two days we convened, it became clear that the success and impact of ‘global Britain’, as the government has pitched it, very much depends on a more productive relationship with the EU’. This article makes the clear the need for joint working through of post-Brexit difficulties rather than resorting to unilateral decisions. It remains to be seen whether our lazy, detail-allergic PM and his hardball playing Brexit minister ‘Lord’ Frost can change their longstanding habits and step up to this crucial ‘plate’.  This is ‘water’ that won’t be so easily flicked off the duck’s back.

https://bit.ly/3dx2Fgh

It’s ironic, then, that our PM is positioning himself, along with other world leaders like Merkel and Macron, in calling for a global approach to the pandemic. Twenty-four world leaders are calling for a treaty in response to the understanding that ‘a future global pandemic is an inevitability and that Covid has served as ‘a stark and painful reminder that nobody is safe until everyone is safe’. Escalating international tensions over vaccine supplies have led to calls for countries to abandon isolationism and nationalism, and come together to make way for a new era founded on principles like solidarity and cooperation’. We have to wonder if this is another example of ‘cakeism’: the UK positions itself as a global leader, calling for international cooperation, but still wants to cling to British exceptionalism and isolationism in some areas.

https://bit.ly/3miK8Zh

Having written about this previously, it’s been interesting to see more speaking up about ‘re-entry anxiety’, anxiety associated with coming out of lockdown.Former Woman’s Hour presenter Jenni Murray wrote about this in Saga Magazine and many others have expressed disquiet about lack of confidence in going out and about again, using public transport and even talking to others ‘in the flesh’. It represents a massive emergence from a kind of comfort zone many have occupied for most of the last year. A key aspect is how we dress ‘for society instead of the sofa’, but who’d have thought we’d need articles on ‘How to dress up after a year in leggings and loungewear’? It would be interesting to know how many did and will again make such preparations – not everyone, for sure. Rather than being at home most of the time, ‘getting dressed is a whole different ballgame from just wearing clothes. It’s when you plan an outfit; when you think about the optics first, and just make the practicalities work.’

This article’s author found that some dressing up really helped her mood, helping with the ‘groundhog’ days. ‘But this is not really about clothes. It is about relearning how to operate in polite society after a period in which we have gone a bit feral. Feeling self-conscious about putting on a party dress and worrying that you have forgotten how to make small talk are expressions of the same core anxiety. There is no getting away from the fact that re-engagement with the world is going to require energy’.

https://bit.ly/3mp9TqY

Communities and their resilience – what have we learned? This is the subject of the third of a three part series, Lessons on a Crisis, presented by the BBC’s Evan Davis, focusing on different aspects of the pandemic. He opened by saying ‘community is the most nebulous but the most important’ of the subjects covered. Several examples of ‘civic activism’ are described, including a Sikh food bank in Glasgow. One contributor quite rightly said how the pandemic had greatly increased awareness of our immediate environment, both the wider neighbourhood, such as the park, and your own road and home and how these can be enhanced. Davis usefully asked contributors how we can hang onto the good things communities have been doing, whether it’s Whatsapp groups or local church activities. Dame Louise Casey, known for her longstanding career in social policy and homelessness, highlighted how the pandemic had increased frailty and inequalities, including the digital divide. I think this programme clearly illustrates that while community can be a massive influence and force for good, this doesn’t reduce the need for government policy and statutory services. We can’t solely rely on what David Cameron called ‘the Big Society’.

It’s consistent with this programme’s content that, according to Ipsos MORI and BBC polling, 40% of Britons expect to do more walking after the pandemic than before and 31% plan to do more of their shopping locally.

https://bbc.in/3dytH6X

Finally, The Week, in its ‘Spirit of the Age’ section, tells of New Yorkers hiring ‘healers’ to ‘spiritually clear’ their homes after a year stuck mostly inside. One of these ‘healers’, who boasts Wall Street bankers and celebrities as her clients, is charging $700 for a small flat, during which she will spray possessions with ‘positive energy’ infused water. Others offering this service ‘roam apartments ringing a bell or chanting’. This could be thought an easy way to make money. How long before some spot this business opportunity here, or maybe they already have?

Sunday 28 March

As we pass the anniversary of the first lockdown, the British Academy, the UK’s national academy for the humanities and the social sciences, issued a major report, warning of a post-pandemic decade of ‘social and cultural upheaval’ featuring significant inequality and deprivation. Set up last year, initiated by the Chief Scientific Adviser Sir Patrick Vallance, the report has contributions from over 200 academic social science and humanities experts and hundreds of research projects.

Although recent months have seen much talk about how things have to change, it sounds as if the Academy has some doubts about this happening. ‘The British Academy warned that failure to understand the scale of the challenge ahead and deliver changes would result in a rapid slide towards poorer societal health, more extreme patterns of inequality and fragmenting national unity’. One of the main interventions needed is a major investment in public services, such as education and health, especially mental health. The report recognises the plummeting of public trust in the government, which we know contributes to the anxiety many have been experiencing. In the observations about ‘returning to normal’ not being enough there’s perhaps a hint that public services need reconfiguring as well as reinvestment, but this is a government ideologically opposed to public services. It’s likely the warnings against over-optimism are directed at our Prime Minister.

The Academy identifies three key areas for action: addressing declining public trust, deepening inequalities and worsening mental health. BA Chief Executive Hetan Shah  said: ‘A year from the start of the first lockdown, we all want this to be over. However, in truth, we are at the beginning of a Covid decade. Policymakers must look beyond the immediate health crisis to repair the profound social damage wrought by the pandemic’.

https://bit.ly/39jXzD8

Meanwhile, especially during Tuesday’s National Day of Reflection, Boris Johnson was all over the airwaves, expressing regret for the 126,000 who lost their lives (some have estimated the numbers much higher, eg 130,000) and seeming to only imply there are things he should have done differently. He repeatedly stonewalled on the need for a public inquiry now (not kicked down the road for years), resorting to the ‘the time will come, now isn’t the time’ argument and clearly hadn’t rehearsed a response to BBC Political Editor Laura Kuenssberg’s question as what he should have done differently. A rather stumbling and bumbling Boris Johnson waffled for a while, then said it had been unfortunate they hadn’t known about asymptomatic transmission. This is to entirely sidestep the major mistakes he made, which are well-known. Labour’s shadow Health Secretary Jon Ashworth said many of the errors had been the PM’s and urged him again to order an inquiry. ‘The tragic reality is we’ve seen a litany of errors from Boris Johnson’.

‘Public health should have been central to our response from the start, the failure to sufficiently financially support people to isolate has been a monstrous failure, the lack of protection for care homes was negligent, contact tracing should have been community led. And years of underfunding and cutbacks left our NHS vulnerable and exposed when the virus hit. Given future pandemic risk lessons must be learned – meaning a public inquiry is vital’.

https://bit.ly/3cpKCcL

The Guardian’s John Crace didn’t hold back on the PM’s omissions, noting that none of these errors and oversights had featured in Tuesday’s press briefing. ‘Boris Johnson hadn’t bothered to attend five Cobra meetings; he had insisted on ignoring the scientific evidence by boasting about shaking hands; he had allowed the Cheltenham Festival to go ahead. And there would have been all hell to pay if he had tried to cancel Carrie Symonds’s baby shower at Chequers. Then there was the abject failure of test and trace in its early months. The care home scandal. The over-optimistic relaxation of the rules over the summer. The refusal to adopt a circuit breaker in autumn. The complacent messaging around Christmas. The delay in bringing in a third national lockdown.So arguably what the country was also pausing to remember was the many thousands of people who had lost their lives through Johnson’s incompetence and negligence’.

It seems especially tasteless that rather than admit fault when he must have realised at least some of the thousands of bereaved would be watching, he resorted to praising the British spirit of endurance during restrictions and talking up the vaccination programme, as if these cancel out the catastrophic effects of his foolhardiness. ‘Johnson probably couldn’t do his job without a high level of denial about the mistakes he has made. If he were to seriously think of the consequences of some of his decisions, then he wouldn’t be able to sleep at night’.

https://bit.ly/3u0yrco

The Guardian reported on how the bereaved and Long Covid survivors experienced the National Day of Reflection. ‘For the families and friends bereaved by Covid-19, it is a day to quietly contemplate those they have lost. For long Covid survivors, it is a reminder the vaccine-enabled relaxing of restrictions will not do much for the bodies they are trapped in that do not work like they used to. For everyone else, it is a day to take stock. So many taken before their time. The nation grieves’. The losses have been made even more painful because of limitations on physical contact and on numbers allowed to attend funerals and wakes. This has deprived the bereaved of the necessary ritual of public acknowledgement of their loss. Covid-19 Bereaved Families for Justice UK has repeatedly called for a public inquiry and for therapeutic support for the bereaved, to no avail.

The article cites some distressing examples of the effects of Long Covid, much overlooked during the early stages. Claire Hastie used to cycle 13 miles a day to her full-time job but is now a wheelchair user on long-term sick leave. It’s shocking that the support group she formed for Long Covid sufferers has over 37,000 members but 74%  of the 268 who tried to access the patchy NHS treatment and support for this condition were unsuccessful, for reasons like lack of provision in their area or the fact they hadn’t been hospitalised. Many Long Covid sufferers feel ignored or left behind as the country moves out of lockdown. ‘……for some bereaved, this sense that society does not want to look their suffering square in the face can compound feelings of estrangement and alienation’. Let’s hope that despite the understandable wish to return to something approaching ‘normality’ (though this needs redefining) we don’t, as a society, forget those bereaved, disabled and cut off by the aftermath of this punishing virus.

https://bit.ly/3drFhB9

Meanwhile, The Conversation details six lessons the UK should have learned by now. They are: act quickly (not delaying lockdowns and circuit breakers by weeks despite evidence of mounting cases); act decisively (instead of going for half measures and unworkable steps presented as solutions, eg policy on arrivals at airports); trust people to follow the rules (lack of trust contributed to delayed lockdowns); communicate clearly (what we’ve seen is inconsistent messages throughout and the government only ‘levelling with the British public when it wants to raise taxes); tackle inequality (crucial in its own right but also as deprived communities have seen the highest number of infections); be prepared (for example not ignoring the results of major exercises like Cygnus, the 2016 three-day pandemic preparedness simulation.

One of the main points of the communicate clearly section is the damage caused by faulty messaging on restrictions, leading to absurd examples like the Barnard Castle fiasco. Many will also remember the circulation of videos and memes featuring a Boris Johnson lookalike (one being courtesy of Matt Lucas) conveying the farcically contradictory messages: you must work from home if you can, but if you can’t do go to work, don’t go to work, and so on.

‘Over the course of the past year, people in the UK have been in lockdown at least as long as they have been out of it. Even when people have officially been free from full lockdown, they have been living under some form of restrictions. It is absolutely vital that this third and longest lockdown is also the last’.

https://bit.ly/3soiY5r

These ‘lessons’ are even more vital given fears over the Third Wave sweeping through Europe now, compounded by the poor vaccination record in many of these countries and concerns over vaccine shortages. ‘If a slow down in vaccine rollout is not countered by slower relaxation, we can expect more hospitalisations and deaths. Imperial College modelling suggests the UK can expect a further 30,000 coronavirus deaths by next June’. Alarming stuff, yet people still rushed to book flights and summer holidays the minute the lockdown exit ‘roadmap’ was issued despite government advice to the contrary, and the UK’s leaky border policy never prevented the influx of potential cases. It’s a salutary reminder that we can’t just think about what the UK does – we have to take full account of what’s going on in mainland Europe and elsewhere, including the rise of new variants.

https://bit.ly/3tZ3sNJ

As ever, the UK is behind the curve, this time on limiting travel, but is now considering extending the  list of ‘red zone’ countries, currently just 35 though many more have been in the frame including the no brainer – France. ‘Official data published by the UK government on Thursday showed 412 cases of the variant first identified in South Africa had been found in the UK so far. This is the variant causing most anxiety among ministers because some studies have suggested it may be partially resistant to vaccines’. Labour’s Yvette Cooper gave Boris Johnson a challenging time on this during the week and our PM, sounding very hesitant, said they would have to ‘look at’ this (including testing haulage drivers coming from France) but that it would be difficult. ‘Looking at’ always sounds to me like sending something to the bottom of the priority list or kicking it down the road altogether.

This is so typical of the government: if something’s difficult that’s an excuse not to try it but this is not good enough. One of the problems is that ministers aren’t all on the same page regarding the level of caution to be exercised. Some commentators have been struck by the leeway suddenly given to those with second homes, where travel wouldn’t normally be allowed but now it’s permissible to travel to them if the owner’s purpose is to prepare those homes for rental. This has widely been seen as a get-out clause for the Prime Minister’s lawbreaking father, Stanley Johnson, long known for his disregard for rules. A wag tweeted: ‘Surprised Stan hasn’t been given his own show: Great Lockdown Journeys’.

https://bit.ly/3rur4YQ

As if critics didn’t have enough to lambast Boris Johnson about, he came in for more stick last week due to his habit of making throwaway remarks, which the press and others then seize upon as policy but which clearly haven’t been subjected to intelligent thought or scrutiny. More cautious colleagues and policymakers then have to scrabble around trying to tone down these shootings from the PM’s hip. One was the suggestion that pub landlords would themselves be able to decide about vaccine passports (surely a recipe for confusion and inconsistency).

He was also branded irresponsible (not to mention tactless) for suggesting that people had had ‘enough days off’ and should go back to work, when many workers have been struggling to keep going, often several workers in the same property and home schooling children at the same time. This also clashes with an emerging consensus that the future of work is more likely to be a hybrid model, working from home some days and going into the office on others. His suggestion was also out of turn because the policy is subject to an ongoing government review, so it’s likely the people working on this could feel his intervention was unhelpful, to say the least.

Another example of ‘misspeaking’ tin ear was telling the 1922 Committee of Conservative backbenchers that ‘greed’ was the reason for the success of Britain’s vaccine rollout. (‘Capitalism’ and ‘giant corporations’ had enabled Britain to secure such large vaccine supplies before other countries). Not the most sensible of remarks to make given heightened tensions across Europe regarding vaccine availability. One tweeter observed: ‘No, Boris Johnson, the success of the vaccination programme was down to the quality of our NHS with its public health service ethos.  “Capitalism and greed” helped you waste £37bn on a private industry track and trace system that doesn’t work’.

https://bit.ly/39m6J1O

As ever with our Prime Minister, though, all criticism seems to be water off a duck’s back. We have to wonder if he reads any critiques or if his ‘people’ don’t tell him about them. The most striking expression of opprobrium could well have been John Crace’s account of Boris Johnson’s Prime Minister’s Questions performance. ‘How much longer can this go on? Previous prime ministers have at least been on nodding terms with the truth, but Boris Johnson is completely without shame. Without conscience. A sociopath for whom no lie is off limits, either in his public or his private life. What counts is reality as he would like it to be’.

That he’s allowed to get away with so much economy with the truth must have something to do with the apparent weakness of the current Speaker: you can imagine John Bercow would have challenged the PM much more on his fibs and evasions, not to mention failure to answer questions. This week one example was on the reduction of troops a part of the defence review. ‘The thing that was going to happen was not the thing that was going to happen. Reducing the number of troops was not actually reducing the number of troops because fewer soldiers would actually be more effective than having more. No wonder the Labour leader looked thoroughly confused by the time he had finished his six questions. Everyone was’. This despite the Tory manifesto promise not to cut the number of troops, although these days manifesto promises seem made to be broken.

‘How much longer can this go on? Just keep delaying the public inquiry into the coronavirus pandemic indefinitely and he could remain “world king” for many more years’.

https://bit.ly/3fmMvZM

The government continues to dance on the head of a proverbial pin over compulsory vaccination for care home workers, a no brainer in the eyes of many considering the residents are sitting ducks. The libertarian ethos undermines the need to do the right thing, despite the gall of talking about having a ‘duty of care’ to residents and staff.  Remember the undertaking to ‘throw a protective ring around our care homes’?

‘The Telegraph reported that the sub-committee paper had warned that a “large” number of social care workers could quit if the change is made, while there could be successful lawsuits on human rights grounds’. This is very difficult for care home managers, wanting to protect their residents and staff but at the same time clearly up against the shortage of social care workers.

https://bit.ly/3lZFz5T

Meanwhile, there’s growing awareness of the massive falls in numbers of referrals for cancer treatment and urgent surgery. ‘Now an analysis of NHS England data by Cancer Research UK has found that the number of people urgently referred for suspected lung cancer fell by 34% between March 2020 and January 2021 compared with the same time period in 2019/2020 – adjusted for working days. That, they say, equates to about 20,300 fewer people being urgently referred’. Other cancers were affected to a lesser but still significant extent and there’s also a big backlog of knee and hip operations.

In a Cancer Research UK survey of 1000 GPs, 91% said a key factor was patients’ reluctance to attend hospitals for tests, with more than three-quarters citing patients not seeking primary care. And another worrying factor in the way primary care is increasingly run is the use of remote consultations making it much harder to spot potential cancer symptoms. The big question now is how will the NHS be supported to tackle these backlogs?  

https://bit.ly/3rqn4IR

As the debate over violence towards women continues, the Guardian discussed one of the overlooked costs of violence, that is, suicides of the women involved. These deaths have resulted from violence but aren’t counted in the usual statistics because the women have taken their own lives. Although the figures are unclear, it seems they are significant. One study suggests that of the female suicides in England and Wales, one third were victims of domestic violence. The impossibility of estimating statistics were spelt out by activist Karen Blatchford, who tweets them at Female Suicide @we_are_nina). ‘I’m dependent on local press reports of inquests and only one in 10 [of all inquests] are reported. Families are often unrepresented. The abuse might not be raised’.

In such situations it’s common to hear people ask ‘Why don’t they just leave?’ But it’s much more complicated than that and will often involve a longstanding belief on the victim’s part that they don’t deserve better. But a another major factor is the expectation or otherwise of getting help. ‘The fear of not being believed or properly supported can play a huge part in driving a suicide, says Dr Jane Monckton-Smith, a forensic criminologist who specialises in homicide, stalking and coercive control. Domestic abuse has a higher rate of repeat victimisation than any other crime, says Monckton-Smith, who has written a book about coercive control. ‘If you’re not believed, then you can’t get safety’. It means the police can’t help you, the court can’t help you – and the abuser can act with impunity. It means there’s no way out’. Critics of the current legal system feel that it should be possible to criminalise abusive conduct, holding perpetrators responsible for another’s suicide.

https://bit.ly/3dbVr1j

Related to last week’s piece about ‘re-entry anxiety’, public toilets and benches are cited in a report about loneliness and the difficulties emerging from the lack of these facilities in public spaces, proving a disincentive for people to meet up. But for a number of reasons, a survey by Opinium of 2,000 UK adults found that 32% worried that they may not be able to connect with people in the same way as before. In a British Red Cross survey, it was found that (35%) of Britons feel less connected to their community than they did before Covid-19 and 39% don’t expect their loneliness to disappear once restrictions are lifted.

‘The All-Party Parliamentary Group on Loneliness wants Boris Johnson and his government to ensure that the country has a “connected recovery”. They also want ministers to do more to close the digital divide, plan new housing developments so that residents can spend time together and fund charities and voluntary organisations that help “the lonely and cut-off”. The pandemic has shown how much we need connections of all kinds, but what faith can we have in the government addressing such a need when they’ve been blind to such socioeconomic issues in the past?

A government statement was quick to mention the sums invested in work to address the problems but it’s not just a matter of investment – it has to be effectively targeted and followed through. ‘Since the beginning of the pandemic we have invested over £31.5m in organisations supporting people who experience loneliness and a further £44m to organisations supporting people with their mental health. We recognise that the easing of lockdown restrictions will not mean the end of loneliness for many people, which is why this will remain a priority for the government’.

https://bit.ly/3suz39G

During the pandemic many of us have become so familiar with Zoom that it’s hard to imagine life without it now. It seems fairly likely to assume that its use will continue after restrictions end, in the key contexts of work, learning and social life. Now research has shown that complaints of ‘Zoom fatigue’, feeling ‘zoomed out’, are very real. Researchers at California’s Stanford University have identified four reasons for this fatigue, a major one being the effect of seeing yourself so prominently all the time on screen, ‘like being followed around by someone holding a mirror’. The second is the amount of eye contact involved, whereas normally people would be shifting their gaze from one person to another, looking at notes and so on. The third is the lack of the usual cues in this kind of interaction and the fourth is the need to remain in the same spot to ensure they’re on camera. Something not mentioned is the disconcerting time lag in the audio so people often end up speaking at once because they’ve not realised someone is already speaking. It also rather undermines spontaneity when someone wanting to speak has to raise their hand each time, one problem being that, depending on numbers present, the host can’t see all the participants at the same time and has to toggle between ‘pages’.

Perhaps the most interesting finding, though, is that last year the British Association of Aesthetic Plastic Surgeons saw a 70% uplift in requests for consultations, a significant number from men.

Finally, another form of communication, letter writing, seems to have taken on a new lease of life during the last year. Long neglected during an era of email and social media, personal letters have creatively filled time for some during lockdowns and given solace to others participating in pen pal schemes. ‘…..letters are good for us – humans thrive on activity and connectivity, and feel thwarted in the absence of those things. Letters offer a reprieve from the sameyness of lockdown, which made us simultaneously time rich and connection poor’.

An academic points out how letters are also ‘first-person accounts of history as it unfolds…..Letter-writing puts you into a speculative mode….some of the best essays in literature start as letters.” The writer of this article explained how writing letters helped her cope with the loss of her mother, a point which conveys the therapeutic nature of this activity for both writer and recipient. It’s so delightful to receive a handwritten letter through the post, given that the bulk of stuff coming through our letterboxes smacks of obligation and tedium, whether it’s the Census form or the Council Tax bill. So let’s hope this very positive development continues after the last difficult year: who will you write to next?

https://bit.ly/3m1driE

Saturday 20 March

We’re now fast approaching the anniversary of the start of the first lockdown and what a lot of water has gone under the bridge since then. Now that about 130,000 lives have been lost, it will be interesting to see how the public mourning day  (National Day of Reflection) goes on Tuesday, to be marked by a minute’s silence at noon, bells tolling and landmarks lit up at 8 pm. I wonder how comforting the bereaved and everyone else will find this, given the number of missed opportunities and errors made in controlling the spread of the pandemic. It’s also grim news that a third wave is hanging over Europe, a number of countries experiencing rising cases and some re-imposing lockdown, more alarming given vaccine shortages and poor take-up of vaccine.

https://bit.ly/3cQjGC3

All this reinforces the fact that the UK can’t exist in isolation – what happens in Europe affects the situation here. We’re hearing again, from epidemiologist Professor Neil Ferguson and others, that it’s unwise to book foreign holidays this year, begging the question of what will happen to the thousands who have booked holidays and flights with Easyjet and the like. Easyjet reported a 330% rise in flight bookings and a 630% rise in holiday bookings to Mediterranean resorts, optimism perhaps prematurely born of the lockdown exit roadmap, progress with vaccination and work on vaccine passports. If flights and holidays have to be cancelled, let’s hope the situation doesn’t result in the same lengthy procedures to obtain refunds as last year. 

The week began with continuing anger and debate about the ‘heavy-handed’ police handling of the Sarah Everard vigil last Saturday evening, prompting calls for the resignation of Met chief Dame Cressida Dick. She refused to resign but we have to ask, even if she did, would her replacement be any better and would it do anything to quell the expression of latent anger around male violence towards women? Probably not, as these issues have been building a head of steam for some years. The Times reports on policing minister Kit Malthouse calling Dick a ‘superlative officer’. He spoke after Sir Peter Fahy, a former chief constable, said that Dick’s job had been made impossible by the politics of being accountable to both the Home Secretary and the Mayor of London, diametrically opposed in their approaches. The number of people cited or quoted in the article demonstrates just how many have popped up to give their opinion on the debate.

https://bit.ly/3f0IuKa

Interest in the case was reinforced not only by the suspect having been a serving police officer but also by the Commons second reading of the Police, Crime, Sentencing and Courts Bill, the measures of which many find draconian. An example made much of is the possibility of a ten year custodial sentence for causing ‘annoyance’ to someone. The Bill is regarded in some quarters as a route to silencing legitimate protest, curbing civil liberties and undermining our democracy, measures set to continue after the pandemic as well as during it. Despite passing its second Commons reading by 359 votes to 263, though, it looked as if the government has listened for once, as the Committee stage has been delayed, suggesting a rethink on the government’s part. The parody ‘Boris Johnson’ Twitter account tweeted: ‘Not sure I’ve thought this through properly – if you can get ten years in prison for “causing serious annoyance” I think I might be in trouble’.

https://bit.ly/3lzNBlQ

Guardian sketch writer John Crace offered a typically sarcastic deconstruction of Home Secretary Priti Patel’s role in the debate. Patel’s interventions often come across as rather feeble, such as describing things as ‘upsetting’ or calling for inquiries. ‘The right to protest is a fundamental liberty’, Patel insisted. Just so long as it wasn’t done in a way that was noisy or annoying to her. From now on, any protest must be done in a whisper – preferably between 11 and 11.15 in the morning – and only be on government-approved topics….the Home Secretary did her best to deflect accusations – from her own benches as well as the opposition – that the police response had been heavy-handed, lacking in empathy and disproportionate. She had been in discussions with the Met on the Friday and Saturday before the event, she admitted, though it had completely slipped her mind just what those conversations had been about’.

https://bit.ly/3c6y5ed

Thanks to a memo leaked to the Guardian days later, we now have a better idea just what those conversations consisted of, the mixed messages resulting in the police  feeling hung out to dry. ‘One chief constable said the message from Patel and the government before the vigil had been clear, that a ban on gatherings had to be enforced’. Then, as we know, Patel weighed in to criticise the way the vigil had been handled, to give Cressida Dick ‘a dressing down’ and to order an inquiry. ‘Senior policing sources say there was no doubt of what the government wanted to be done as forces wrestled with how to act’. After all this, we have to question ‘a Whitehall source’ which suggested that Dame Cressida had a ‘good working relationship’ with the Home Secretary. One of the surprising things about such episodes is how often ministers complacently assume that the truth behind the media version won’t emerge.

https://bit.ly/3vKkTmY

Meanwhile, the Guardian published a useful discussion between men about violence against women. One contributor said: ‘But the thing is, learned behaviour is passive. These attitudes and beliefs about manhood, they’re actively taught. It’s media culture, sports culture, peer culture and porn culture. All these influences teach men certain lessons about manhood and social norms that are produced and reproduced at every level. The reason it’s so hard to deal with these issues is because we can’t just isolate individual perpetrators as pathological monsters. Because it is our society that’s producing these abusive men on a regular basis, generation after generation, across class, race and ethnicity.’ Another suggested: ‘They have to move past this idea that because they don’t go out and murder women or beat their girlfriends, they’re not part of the problem. Because they may still be perpetrating the norms of masculinity that contribute to this situation’.

https://bit.ly/3r98uFA

Alarming headlines earlier this week revealed that the NHS will be at risk unless it gets an extra £8bn within days, a situation which stems from its budget still not being settled despite the new financial year rapidly approaching. Besides coping with Covid cases, the NHS has a huge backlog of surgery and other treatments to catch up on. As if the NHS needed anything else to be rightly dissatisfied about, this latest budgetary delay will be adding to the anger about the proposed 1% pay rise (which will rumble on until the Pay Review Body publishes its findings) and claims of unhelpful pressure from ministers regarding the vaccination programme.

Alongside trumpeting vaccination progress (despite recent concerns about vaccine shortages) the Prime Minister and ministers are thought to be creating false expectations in the public about how soon they can be vaccinated, putting unfair pressure on staff. One senior NHS staffer said: ‘There is frustration that the politicians are very focused on political boasting about the success of the vaccine rollout and who’s going to get jabbed when, without taking into account the operational complexity of what that means. The risk is that these political boasting messages will create undue expectation over who can get their jab when, which risks overwhelming NHS staff who are already going as fast as they can. Staff are annoyed that the government seems obsessed with how things will play politically and in the media, but has no sense of the public health impact of such statements’.

https://bit.ly/3c6J8UK

Despite the colossal bill for Test and Trace (£37bn) we know it’s still not working effectively, exemplified by it taking a week to discover the rogue Brazilian case in South London recently. Despite cases falling in most areas of the country, reports say they’re rising in the East Midlands, with other areas looking ‘uncertain’. An interesting report on Saturday’s Radio 4 Today programme reported how Suffolk was now mostly doing its own testing and tracing, the local public health route many believed was the best approach in the first place. It’s obtaining good outcomes by receiving results very quickly and phoning people, going door to door, and using translators where necessary, a better way of getting those to self-isolate who need to. Although some aspects of the national programme still have to be used, this proves the benefits of a local approach rather than over-reliance on a slower, centralised approach, especially one costing so much.

Meanwhile, the government is coming under increasing pressure to set up a public inquiry about its pandemic management. Public figures like Dame Joan Bakewell, author Michael Rosen, film director Stephen Frears, government scientific advisors Professor John Edmunds and Professor Andrew Hayward and former head of the Civil Service Lord Bob Kerslake have added their voices to those of the Covid 19 Bereaved Families for Justice, the British Medical Association, the Royal College of Nursing, the NHS Race and Health Observatory, the Care Campaign for the Vulnerable (representing carers of those who died in care homes), the Muslim Council of Britain, the Labour Party and Lib Dems. ‘The calls came at the end of a week in which a group representing more than 2,800 bereaved issued an ultimatum to Boris Johnson that they would start legal action within weeks unless he triggered a statutory public inquiry. They want it to have the power to subpoena witnesses and evidence and to examine the reasons the UK has the worst per capita death toll of any of the world’s largest economies’.

Rosen said he wanted the inquiry to focus in part on why the virus was allowed to take hold in the UK in February and March last year, saying that he suspected ‘the government were experimenting with herd immunity without vaccination’. He said he believed he was a victim of that experiment, as were the thousands who died or are still suffering from long Covid. Unfortunately (but how much longer can this defence be wheeled out?) the usual response is to kick the can down the road, meaning lessons won’t be learned and those responsible won’t be properly held to account. ‘We are focused on protecting the NHS and saving lives and now is not the right time to devote huge amounts of official time to an inquiry. There will be an appropriate time in the future to look back, analyse and reflect on all aspects of this global pandemic’.

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But it’s not only these organisations and individuals. MPs on the Commons Public Administration and Constitutional Affairs Committee issued a blistering report on the handling of the pandemic, including criticising Michael Gove for not appearing before them, regarding this as ‘contemptuous of Parliament’. ‘MPs examined the government’s levels of transparency and openness around the data underpinning key decisions, finding a lack of sufficient explanation that it says has placed needless strain on public confidence…. accountability for decisions and the data on which they are based must be clear to ensure the trust of the public’. The government maintained that it had been ‘guided by the latest scientific advice at every stage of the pandemic’ but we now know how selective this has been. This is such an important point because lack of trust in the government contributes massively to public anxiety.

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Separately, the Times describes how a BBC documentary reiterated what we’ve already learned, about how our Prime Minister initially thought the best strategy was to ignore Covid, also ignoring medical advice to tell people not to shake hands with each other and treating the situation like ‘hysteria’. ‘A senior figure’ also confirmed to BBC political editor Laura Kuenssberg that there was indeed ‘a genuine argument’ within government about pursing a policy of ‘herd immunity’, despite the later denials. Of course we have to make some allowances for some current observations being the wisdom of hindsight, but even so it’s clear there was significantly damaging complacency and delayed action.

A reader commented on this article: ‘What is crushing is knowing that Johnson did this not because he is a libertarian but because he is so horrifically over-promoted. A chaotic and mendacious journalist and a part-time city mayor is poorly positioned to be prime minister. On what basis would Johnson take any serious decision? He clearly could not imagine, for the first time in his life, taking responsibility. We are very badly served at the moment by our politicians, but Johnson is indubitably the worst. As with Trump (who only otherwise shares with Johnson a similarly painful lack of knowledge of what his job entailed) you can’t row back overnight from decades of self-indulgent parasitism’.

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It must have been galling for some, especially Matt Hancock, having defended the former Downing Street fixer during the Barnard Castle pantomime, that Dominic Cummings didn’t hold back in his own criticisms of early pandemic policy. The Guardian’s John Crace details how Cummings described Hancock’s Department of Health and Social Care as having been ‘an absolute, total mess’, a ‘smoking ruin’ in the aftermath of its failure to provide enough PPE. He said this is why he and Patrick Vallance (no mention of the PM!) had insisted that the vaccine programme be taken out of Hancock’s hands. Heading up the Downing Street press briefing later, ‘Door Matt also did his best to swerve questions on Dom’s remarks about the Department of Health. ‘It’s a team effort….We have a positive mission, can-do spirit’. Except some parts of the team had been noticeably weaker than others. He looked miserable. All Tigger spent’.

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This abject lack of preparedness is detailed in a new book, reviewed by former Labour Health Secretary Alan Johnson. He begins his review with an almost poignant anecdote from 2007, of how the then Chief Medical Officer, Liam Donaldson, had explained to him why a pandemic was due. ‘Liam had been instrumental in shaking politicians out of their torpor not only here but, through his role at the World Health Organization (WHO), around the globe. It had been his report on infectious diseases in 2002 that sparked Britain’s efforts to prepare properly for what was to come. That report led to a ministerial committee on pandemic planning and in turn to a national response framework approved by parliament. In January and February 2007, 5,000 doctors, nurses, police officers, soldiers and civil servants took part in Operation Winter Willow, a rigorous rehearsal for the real thing’.

Swine flu duly struck two years later, though its effects were milder than had been anticipated and it seems that this later led to some complacency, whereby the government was nowhere near prepared for what was to come. In Failures of State: The Inside Story of Britain’s Battle With Coronavirus by journalists Jonathan Calvert and George Arbuthnott (HarperCollins), the authors suggest that ‘a combination of austerity and “the government’s one-eyed obsession with Brexit” had eroded our defences. There had been another scaled-down rehearsal in 2016, codenamed Cygnus, after which the official verdict was that Britain’s preparations were by now inadequate for the “extreme demands” of a pandemic. It was a danger signal that seems to have been ignored’.

Although former Health Secretary Jeremy Hunt and others have suggested that flu (the focus of Cygnus) and Coronavirus are different, Johnson points out that ‘there are more similarities than differences between the two. Both are respiratory diseases emerging from a novel virus. Both require detailed plans for containment through isolation, quarantine and contact tracing. And, crucially, both require substantial stocks of personal protective equipment. In any case, given that it had been 16 years since Sars and 11 since swine flu, we should have been well prepared for both’. Johnson details the authors’ sources of evidence and the damning death toll, ending with the profoundly depressing evidence that the vaccination programme is being used to deflect attention from the colossal scale of this mismanagement. One of the best tweets I’ve seen for a long time reads: ‘Defending the government’s handling of the pandemic by saying “but the vaccine” is like telling someone whose arm’s been chopped off that they should be grateful for the antibiotics they’ve been given by the person wielding the rusty chainsaw’.

https://bit.ly/3923tIH

It’s usually assumed that everyone is champing at the bit to get out of lockdown and back out to social venues, meeting others and going on holiday, but the situation is more nuanced than that. There’s now awareness of what’s being called ‘reentry anxiety’ which could affect us in some ways after effectively a year of restrictions on our movements. ‘Alongside anxieties about returning to the office, or socialising with people one may not have seen for more than a year, the thought of an imminent return to busy streets and train carriages can be overwhelming – particularly for those with a history of mental health issues’. One interviewee said: ‘The mental strain of lockdown ending is the biggest source of stress. It’s been such a long time since we’ve all faced ‘normal life’ that I’ve honestly forgotten what it feels like. I’ve felt safe inside my house but the outside world is unfamiliar and frightening. Socially, how do we navigate this? Where’s the mental health support for those of us returning?’

The potential for anxiety isn’t just for those with mental health difficulties. Many have enjoyed a slower pace of life, not rushing from one thing to another, but normal activities returning could result in an unwelcome FOMO (fear of missing out) feelings. Whereas this last year there’s been no choice because venues and activities were closed down, opening them could present tricky dilemmas for those wanting to preserve their quieter lives but not at the expense of missing out on meeting friends and activities they used to enjoy. Linked to this is the fear that the disappointment would be worse if we got stuck in again, only for yet another lockdown to descend.

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Long having felt deprived of access to nature, it’s pleasing to learn that today is World Rewilding Day, coinciding with the Spring equinox. ‘Backed by the Global Rewilding Alliance, an umbrella group for organisations in more than 70 countries that are looking to restore ecosystems by returning land to nature, the day will be celebrated with virtual events to share knowledge, skills and connections’. Richard Bunting, a spokesman for Rewilding Britain, suggested a definition very fitting for these times:  ‘At its heart, it’s about hope. Rewilding offers a powerful way of tackling the overlapping nature, climate and health crises’. ‘The charity is calling for nature restoration across 30% of Britain’s land and sea by 2030, with 5% of this dedicated to core habitats, such as native forest, peat bogs, saltmarshes and kelp beds.’ The article concedes that rewilding can clash with other agendas in some communities but gives useful examples of projects which satisfy rewilding criteria as well meeting the needs of local populations.

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A poignant piece of business news traces the ‘slow and painful death’ suffered by high street chocolate retailer Thorntons, which was founded in 1911. Apparently 61 shops will close, representing over 600 jobs, though an online presence will continue. Many will remember how popular this brand once was, queues down the street, but one aspect of their demise was the growing popularity of upmarket brands. ‘While fans of Thorntons recall smashing its toffee slabs with a hammer and shunning the coffee creams, today the conversation is more likely to be about the percentage of cocoa in a chocolate bar and the “origin story” of the beans’. Whereas high street bakery Greggs managed to innovate, analysts suggest ‘Thorntons found itself trapped between the old model of running lots of shops and a new order dominated by one-stop-shop supermarkets and internet brands selling direct to consumers’. One thing I’ll miss is being able to obtain unique Easter eggs because of the Thorntons custom of icing recipients’ names onto the eggs, something the posh brands didn’t do.

https://bit.ly/3tEvCgP

Finally, we regularly hear about purveyors of particular cuisines rising up in high dudgeon if they feel their creations have been misrepresented but now the normally tolerant Italians (when you think how pizza, for example, has been made in some places) have condemned a new version of its traditional carbonara pasta sauce. Or at least one has, according to Italian daily paper Corriere della Sera.  Alessandro Pipero, a Michelin-starred chef from Rome, known as Rome’s ‘carbonara king’, faults a New York cookery column for suggesting a ‘smokey tomato carbonara’, when tomatoes are not one of the normal ingredients. The traditional version consists of egg yolks, pork cheek and pecorino cheese, prompting the indignant comment that this the tomato version was like ‘putting salami  in a cappucino’. Social media users weighed in to urge ‘this madness’ to stop and Italy’s farmers association said this ‘falsification’ of traditional Italian dishes poses a threat to authentic producers. Just as well Chef Pipero isn’t checking out what passes for carbonara in some UK kitchens, professional or otherwise!