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Nothing but facts?
“In this life, we want nothing but Facts, sir; nothing but Facts!” — Thomas Gradgrind, in Hard Times, by Charles Dickens
This story (see below) is about GPs in England saying there is an inconsistent supply and distribution of Covid vaccines and that this is causing roll-out problems. Embedded in the story is something I’ve known for a long time.
I’m used to seeing standardised, lying statements from my favourite government department, the Home Office, aimed at calming people’s fears and short-circuiting discontent, when both the fears and the discontent are well founded:
“The United Kingdom has a proud record of providing protection to those fleeing persecution … All those seeking asylum are dealt with on their merits.”
No it hasn’t. No they aren’t. And today, it’s interesting to see evidence that this type of statement is not confined to the Home Office but extends across government:
Jeremy Hunt (Chair of Commons Liaison Committee): “Why are the public not allowed to know anything except the most basic information [about the supply and distribution of vaccines]?”
In reply, Johnson promised the government would publish regional breakdowns “later this week” but admitted they were likely to show wide disparities. When it came to vaccinating the over 80s, he said it was “more than 50%, well over 50% now in the north-east and Yorkshire” but added it was “less good in some other parts of the country”.
This reply (bad news as it clearly was) was not the one he was supposed to give. But not to worry. Whitehall can cope with that. The official answer remains the official answer against all inadvertent blurting out of the truth, and he will be reminded of it when he gets back indoors in case he’s asked the question again. Here’s the official answer (otherwise known in Whitehall as “the truth”):
“Vaccines are being distributed fairly across the UK to ensure the most vulnerable are immunised first and all GPs will continue to receive deliveries as planned.” — Department of Health and Social Care unnameable spokesperson.
Oh good. That’s alright then.
GPs in England say inconsistent supply of Covid vaccine causing roll out issues
https://www.theguardian.com/world/2021/jan/13/gps-in-england-say-inconsistent-supply-of-covid-vaccine-causing-roll-out-issues?CMP=Share_iOSApp_Other
Tier 5 or not Tier 5?
Who knows? The Chief Medical Officers advised it, which Michael Gove admits. But did the government do it? It’s difficult to tell whether the wishes of the CMOs have been met (the graph in the article here says only that it means “Strictest level of social distancing measures and restrictions“, which is not terribly clear). Gove was evasive, saying that the government had “no alternative other than to take every step that we possibly could” – which might range from, well, absolutely everything to only what they fancied doing in view of their obsession with getting the economy moving (they say restrictions are bad for the economy but often fail to mention that without them the economy, and everything else, would collapse). The point of the tier system, I suppose, is to try to solve this problem by a mixture of light restrictions here and heavier ones there, moving from one to another as the rates of infection change and (as we now know) the virus mutates. But this ensures that we are always behind the virus, never in front.
There seems now to be some acknowledgement of this and it looks as if the tiers have been temporarily suspended in favour of an across-the-board lockdown, similar to the first one. That first one worked, even though it was imposed later than it should have been: infection levels fell. But it was lifted too early, and infection levels rose after we were all advised it was OK to barbecue and dance in each other’s gardens and use each other’s bathrooms.
When will this new lockdown start to be lifted? Johnson thinks mid-February, when, he says, 12.2 million of the most vulnerable people will have received their vaccinations and we will have entered “the last phase of the struggle”.
I always worry when Johnson slips into his “Winston-at-war” mode (Churchill: “This is not the end, nor even the beginning of the end, but it is the end of the beginning”). It’s misleading to think of the pandemic as an enemy in a war. A scientist interviewed on Channel 4 News the other day was asked by the interviewer whether the virus was “trying to beat the vaccine”. She replied that we should get away from the idea that the virus is trying to do anything: it is simply mutating, as viruses do.
Gove thinks mid-March is more likely, when the effect of the vaccine will start to be evaluated. Let’s hope one of them is right, even if it’s only by accident. Johnson isn’t always right. On Sunday he said there was “no doubt in my mind” that the schools were safe. Today they’re shut. Still, hope springs eternal …
Cedric Chouviat – the story continues
On 3 January 2020, Cédric Chauviat, a 42-year-old delivery man on a bike, was stopped by the police in Paris (they said he was talking on his mobile phone). At the end of the encounter, Cédric was dead, strangled, with serious damage to his neck. The strangling took place first while Cédric was standing up and continued while he was on the ground. According to the autopsy, he died of “asphyxiation associated with haemorrhaging of the two thyroid cartilages situated in the throat”. The police officer involved, named as Michael P., denied strangling him and claimed he had supported Cédric’s head with his arms throughout the encounter.
Strangling was, however, an official procedure. It’s aim was to “restrain an individual by reducing their capacity to breathe and their flow of blood to the brain”. In the 2008 police training manual, there are four different kinds:
- “strangulation by locking the head and the arms”
- “strangulation from behind with the lower arm”
- “strangulation by means of [the victim’s] clothing”
- “the technique of bringing [the victim] to the ground by strangulation”
No mention of the knee, you’ll notice, but the principle’s the same. The knee on the neck is an international police method of restraint – used not only in the US (as we saw in the case of George Floyd) but in the UK (it was used on a victim, in the street, in front of witnesses, soon after George Floyd’s murder).
Nevertheless, it looked for a brief moment as if the strangulation method would cease in France after Cédric’s death and the protests following George Floyd’s murder on 25 May in the US. “The method of taking someone by the throat, called strangulation”, said the French interior minister on 8 June, “will be abandoned, and will not be taught [in training courses].” But a few days later, after pressure from the French equivalent of the Police Federation, it was reinstated pending an alternative method being found. Strangulation would continue but it would be “practised in a measured way, with discernment”!
Meanwhile, inquiries have taken place, a report delivered to “the authorities” in September, but no action has been taken by the minister of the interior. At this moment, thousands of new police recruits are learning how to strangle their suspects. And there is no justice or vindication in sight for the Chouviat family.
So, for what it may be worth, I will keep the words of Cédric’s father blue-tacked to my study door in solidarity, and as a reminder that we should all, wherever we live, and perhaps especially if we think we’ve “taken back control” of our forces of law and order, follow his example. Immediately after his son’s murder he said:
“I am the father of Cédric Chouviat; they have assassinated my son. Emmanuel Macron, I will go to war against you, against your state.”
« Je suis le père de Cédric Chouviat ; on a assassine mon fils. Emmanuel Macron, je vais en guerre contre vous, contre votre état. »
Urgent Question
It looks as if the government will legislate early next year for a complete overhaul of the immigration system so that more people can be deported more quickly and so that appeals against refused claims will be reduced to pretty much nil. This was made clear today during an urgent question by former Tory immigration minister Caroline Noakes. She became notorious when she was immigration minister for blocking asylum seekers from her Twitter page when they desperately tried to find out why she hadn’t replied to their letters. But today she was trying to sound horrified when she pointed out that asylum seekers were being put into camps in the UK without running water. But her real point seemed to be that they should be deported straightaway and not be accommodated at all. The reference to the absence of running water was slightly awkward for the immigration minister (a slightly jittery creature whose name, I think, was Phipp), who’d turned up with a line insisting that all accommodation provided was impeccable and in line with legally required standards. He kept repeating this mantra, or rather reading it out carefully, whenever anybody referred to the obvious dilapidation of many parts of what is called the “asylum estate”. But Caroline was no doubt pleased to hear that “in the next six months” a comprehensive overhaul would be given to “our failed immigration and asylum system”. The reforms would ensure that asylum seekers would be required to apply for asylum in other countries like France or Italy, “which are safe countries, civilised countries like ours”, “or indeed”, as one member put it, “like Greece”. If they turn up on our shores, they will be speedily dispatched back to the first European country they allegedly passed through (over, or even under) so that they can apply there. The reforms would likewise ensure that smuggling gangs would no longer be able to benefit from exploiting vulnerable people (nobody explained why this would be so, and the thought occurred to me that the reforms might make such exploitation more likely). Moreover (and this must have been important because lots of honourable members spoke about this), “greedy lawyers”, described by Sir Edward Leigh as “so-called human rights lawyers”, would no longer be able to “waste taxpayers’ money” on “spurious” appeals against refused asylum applications. Nobody gave an example of this practice.
So it does look as if Labour leader Keir Starmer will be presented next year with this test of his mettle. What will he do? I predict he will whip MPs to abstain in the early stages, put amendments later and, when they’re lost, he will whip MPs to vote for the legislation. That way, he will have “sent messages” to everybody, but at the end of the day he will have sent the message he most wants to send: that “Labour understands the electorate’s concerns about immigration.”
It’s a wicked world.
Rishinomics and its discontents
Quite a neat summary here (by Elliott Chappell in today’s Labour List email) of yesterday’s spending review based on Rishinomics:
“Our health emergency is not yet over and our economic emergency has only just begun,” Rishi Sunak told us as he launched into his spending review. 2.5 million public sector workers will see their pay frozen – including 90% of police, 80% of fire service and 75% of prison officers, at least 80% of secondary school teachers and 75% of those in primary schools. This, remember, just a week after the PM unveiled the biggest investment in defence since the Cold War. The Chancellor announced a new £4bn ‘levelling up’ fund that will see MPs bid for money in what looks to be the same mechanism that led to the controversy over the Towns Fund – in which the Tories prioritised spending to marginal seats ahead of the last election. He was silent on the £20 uplift to Universal Credit – the emergency top-up grudgingly given earlier in the pandemic. Failing to extend it will slash annual incomes for 16 million households by £1,040 in April. And, of course, the Chancellor rounded off all that (and much more) by going back on the Tory manifesto promise to keep UK aid spending at 0.7% of gross national income.”
“Rishinomics“ is what I’ve called it for fun, of course. It’s neoliberalism really. And this is how it always works. It isn’t simply that capitalists hate the poor (though they often do). Capitalists need the poor. So they create poverty. An executive in a finance company housed in the World Financial Centre in New York, Craig Dinsell, explained some of it to me over lunch in the Metropolitan Museum restaurant in 2012. Low-paid workers can’t expect to be paid good wages, or even half-decent wages. That would cause inflation. Actually, low pay is good for them because it gives them an incentive to better themselves and get themselves out of poverty. It gives them ambition. Without that, they would just stay in their menial jobs for life. That’s “human nature” apparently (I’d been waiting for that). This little narrative, of course, ignores the fact that poverty more often destroys ambition and hope, it grinds people down. The truth is that low pay remains part of the system because it is essential to the pursuit of profit, although Craig didn’t quite put it like that—he was ruminating on “human nature”. So this, as far as I could tell, was the best of all possible worlds—There Is No Alternative. Tina lives.[1]
I knew Craig Dinsell in the late 1960s, when he was 20. We attended an evangelical Baptist church in North London, where he played the role of gadfly to the church establishment and sang Bob Dylan songs. Now, as I said, he moves in high circles and is himself part of a rather bigger establishment (“We were invited to a dinner for Tony Blair”, he told me. “He seemed a nice guy”). Craig is a nice liberal. He reads the New York Times and advised me not to watch Fox News. I’m sure he voted for Biden.
And in that there is a warning. We justifiably feel relief at Biden’s victory. But while Reagan was the first who decisively took the neoliberal path, it was so decisive that none of his successors or their followers ever abandoned it. Including Biden. As Brando Marcetic notes in “Yesterday’s Man: the case against Joe Biden”:
“While Clinton’s neoliberal politics alienated many voters, Biden was one of the earliest adopters of neoliberalism, successfully pushing the [Democratic] party to become more like him.”
If Marcetic is right (and I confess I have only read the introduction to the book so far, but it sounds likely to me) then while the tone, the style, and most of the politics of Biden may be very different from the horrors of the last 4 years, we should beware of wanting to “get back to normal”. For “normal” still includes neoliberalism. And Joe needs to be watched. And pushed.
As for Rishi, don’t ask.
[1] Tina was the name given by cabinet minister Norman St John Stevas to Margret Thatcher because of her frequent use of the phrase “There is no alternative” to justify her neoliberal policies. In the end he had to go.
No reset for “freedom of information”
Not that I want to be repetitive, but …
Perhaps I should simply say “Watch this space.”
No reset for the Home Office
When I worked at the international telephone exchange in London (I’m obviously talking about when there were such things, so in the early 1980s) we had to sign the Official Secrets Act. We signed it when we joined and we signed it when we left. When I left, Mr Ignacek, a divisional supervisor, told me: “You have to sign the Act again.”
“What for?” I asked.
“So you don’t blab!” he said.
“Blab?” I said. “What about?!” (We were only a telephone exchange. I wasn’t John Le Carré.)
“Anything,” Iggy said. “You can’t even tell them the colour of the paint on the bloody walls!”
All that was ridiculous and funny. The story (below) of how the Official Secrets Act is being used today to cover up cruelty and ill-treatment of asylum seekers is not funny at all. It’s shameful. And yes, Priti Patel is overseeing it, no doubt with her trademark enthusiasm for bullying way out in front. But, as I said before (see previous two blogs), abuse of asylum seekers goes back through the decades and was perpetrated by governments of all shades. Why did Labour Home Secretary David Blunkett introduce the policy of separating the children of refused asylum seekers from their parents and putting them in care in order to force their terrified parents to take the family back to their dangerous home country? The Head of Asylum Policy at the Home Office in 2006, Rod McLean, told me it was because he wanted to prove to the tabloid press that he was not a “soft touch” when it came to asylum. When I told MacLean that the Refugee Council had said this policy was “not the mark of a civilised society”, he sighed, shrugged his shoulders and said: “Well, they would say that, wouldn’t they?”
And so it goes on. In our name. We have to do something about it. Get involved in one of the support groups mentioned in the article, send emails to MPs and ministers, raise the issue in your union branch, invent ways of protesting that are safe during the pandemic. We shouldn’t leave people to the non-existent mercy of our politicians and their civil servants.
Reset? As I said, “business as usual”
Remember the Tories were going to end the hostile environment? Remember how sorry they were about it? Remember how “grateful” they were to the Windrush generation? Remember they were going to “reset” policymaking after the departure of Cummings and Cain? And remember (see previous blog) how I said they wouldn’t?
Well, they haven’t. Ken Morgan’s story won’t be the last to demonstrate “business as usual” at the Home Office. And don’t imagine that it makes much difference who is Home Secretary or which government is in power. Ken Morgan’s story began in 1994 under John Major’s Tory government; we’ve had 3 Labour governments, a Tory/LibDem coalition and 3 Tory governments since then. Under all those governments, and with their connivance, the Home Office maintained its racist hostility to migrants and asylum seekers. Tory Home Secretary Michael Howard agreed with his fellow Tory Ann Widdicombe that the UK was a “soft touch” for asylum seekers and said that “only a tiny proportion of them are genuine refugees”. Labour Home Secretary David Blunkett later said they were “swamping our schools”.
If by some miracle Priti Patel was ousted from her post as Home Secretary, it wouldn’t make much difference to any of this. After the Windrush scandal broke, Tory Home Secretary Savid Javid told us that the “hostile” environment had been changed to the “compliant” environment. That’s different, isn’t it? Yes. It suggests thumbscrews.
Windrush victim refused British citizenship despite wrongful passport confiscation
https://www.theguardian.com/uk-news/2020/nov/22/windrush-victim-refused-british-citizenship-despite-wrongful-passport-confiscation?CMP=Share_iOSApp_Other
Re-what?
After the departure of Cummings and Cain, the new buzzword is “reset”. Johnson will be able to reset Downing Street, reset his politics, reset his relationship with his MPs, reset his government and reset policymaking.
Reset.
A clutter of Tory MPs have said it, former cabinet ministers have said it, and anonymous current ones. Journalists are making sure they use it. Andrew Marr will say it. Sajid Javid was said to be favourite for reset minister.
Prediction: it won’t happen (OK, it’s a hostage to fortune, and my impersonations of the prophet Isaiah have never been that good, but still). Johnson won’t stop trying to fix the judges, he will still appoint the nastiest ones to do jobs like the Spycops inquiry (the judge doing that one told counsel for one of the victims that he couldn’t ask the witness any more questions, and if he tried, “I will silence you”). Priti Patel won’t stop vilifying solicitors for doing their jobs defending their clients, and her Home Office will, as in the story below, defy court orders with impunity. The Home Office has always provided a home for lawless thugs, but I think this is the first time I’ve seen them defy a court order with such arrogance, afterwards saying “It’s business as usual”. And the Orwellian language has reached a new height: their housing subcontractor Mears sent one asylum seeker an eviction notice which read: “You need to leave this property by 11 November 2020. We understand it is a key step in your asylum journey.”
Reset? No, it’s “business as usual”.
I think I’ll stay off the news for the rest of today! And it’s raining.
Home Office accused of breaching court order over asylum seeker evictions
https://www.theguardian.com/politics/2020/nov/06/home-office-high-court-asylum-seeker-evictions-coronavirus?CMP=Share_iOSApp_Other
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