Blog Posts

sweden reprised

12/23/2020

482 words; 4-minute read

On the 10th July I wrote a blog called ‘Two Cheers for Sweden’, arguing for a broader range of criteria for success in dealing with Covid-19 than just counting Coronavirus deaths. So how’s that going? On the face of it things don’t look too good, and even the King of Sweden is now putting the boot in. The Swedish light-touch approach was criticised at the outset for the country’s much higher death-rate then neighbouring Scandinavian countries. This remains the case. (But it’s also true that Sweden’s Covid death figures are still better than heavy lockdown countries such as the UK, Spain and Italy).

It’s fair to point out that my airy claim on 10th July that the Swedes would experience no second wave has been proved completely wrong. Along with much of the rest of Europe Sweden is in the grip of a second spike of cases, hospitalisations and deaths - with more deaths at the beginning of December than at any other time during the pandemic.

It’s also true that the Swedes are adopting measures that look increasingly mainstream: reducing public gatherings from 50 to 8, banning sales of alcohol after 10 pm, moving high school teaching online, and advising mask wearing.

So does this mean that the Swedish experiment has failed, and that those of us who held (hold?) a candle for it have been sadly misled? It’s only honest to say that things are less clear-cut and more complicated than they looked back in July.

But what seems to be happening is something like policy convergence in the short term. So just as Sweden is taking baby steps lifted from the lockdown playbook, so lockdown countries are moving their own red lines in the Swedish direction. This is most obvious in the schools context. Where Sweden was the outlier in keeping schools open at the beginning of the pandemic, now virtually everyone is doing it.

Beyond the short term, the Corona jury should stay out for a few months - maybe years - yet. The evidence on other criteria - the economy, children missing out on school for months, the mental health problems that go with lockdown and isolation, lonely deaths, divided families, the non-Covid patients missing out on treatment, an increase in domestic violence, and the corrosive effects of policing lockdown - will take a while to come in.

What the last few months do seem to have shown unequivocally is that calls to eliminate the virus are utter fantasy. The question remains how to live with it, and it could be that experience and experiment are distilling a series of practices that will serve us well in the next pandemic.

Because, give the total unwillingness to address the root causes of this one, there surely will be more.

the great conjunction

12/19/2020

411 words - 3 minute read

While the particle a millionth of an inch long whose defences are destroyed by washing our hands in soap and water for 20 seconds, also known as Covid-19, continues to wreak havoc around the world, the cosmos is doing its best to entertain us.

Since the summer I have been watching Jupiter and Saturn closing in on each other in the night sky. Back in England I had a telescope, good enough to see the Jupiter’s four biggest moons (just like Galileo), as well as the rings of Saturn. Even with the telescope, the planets look tinier than my little fingernail - but it’s like the difference between a photo of Van Gogh’s Sunflowers and seeing the original in London’s National Gallery.

So I could see the planets getting closer but I had no idea until a few days ago that they were heading for a Great Conjunction, appearing side-by-side in the night sky. And closer than they’ve been since 1623 when Shakesepeare’s First Folio was being published.

Now I’m in Valencia, Spain, without a telescope, but with pretty much guaranteed clear skies every night. Saturn is bearing down on Jupiter, or so it seems on the two-dimensional canvas that’s the night sky. Last night they were half a fingernail’s width apart, and at 19.37 on the 21st December they’ll be indistinguishable with the naked eye. Yet looked at ‘from the side’ they’ll be about 650m kms distant from one another. Then they’ll begin drifting apart and won’t be so close again until 2080. For me this is very much a one-off event.

The 21st December is also the Winter Solstice, so some eight hours before the Great Conjunction the earth’s northern hemisphere will begin to tilt back towards the sun and the days will get longer. And the universe turns another notch, insensible to our trials and tribulations.

So here are we humans, stuck somewhere between a tiny particle that threatens to undo us in the short term and the motion of the quantic universe leading inexorably to heat death. The cosmos doesn’t much mind what happens to us. But on the other hand we may be the only beings in the universe capable of that thought, so we should take care of ourselves and all that sustains us.

death row and rehabilitation

12/12/2020

(376 words; 3-minute read)

As Donald Trump ends his presidency with a round of legalised murders, ex-prisoner Adnan Khan tells of a show of solidarity, empathy and humanity that invites reflection from those of us on the outside who turn our backs on offenders, whatever they may have done.

Khan tells how 700 men live in the ‘Condemned Row’ units of San Quentin Prison, California. As they’re escorted round the prison, other inmates are forced to face the wall so as not to look at them. Khan wonders how they feel at this literal turning of backs, confirming the rejection they’ve already experienced from society at large.

‘But we would still find a way to attempt to acknowledge their humanity and offer some sort of solidarity when facing the wall’, says Khan. ‘We’d slightly turn our faces, peek, try to make eye contact and give them a nod. Sometimes the nod was just with our eyes. That subtle. And they’d nod back the same way. That was our only contact with them and our only form of communication … And that simple, subtle nod relayed a message of care, empathy and moral support and most importantly, each other’s worthiness of humanity’.

Who knows what risks Khan and his fellow inmates ran as they strove to give death row prisoners a moment’s respite from the relentless routine of rejection? Removal of privileges? Reduced chance of parole? Solitary confinement? Whatever, they reckoned it was worth it to return a smidgen of pride and self-worth to those whom a dehumanising system of ‘justice’ has permanently ostracised.

So what of those of us on the outside who can make Khan’s gestures of care, empathy and moral support to casualties of the criminal ‘justice’ system at absolutely no risk to ourselves? More particularly what of those of us who deliberately refuse to do so, even when handed the opportunity on a plate? Because it happens …

We could try taking a leaf out of Khan’s book, coming down off our high horses and doing a bit more of what we profess to do: care, empathise, and spread some love.

Covid success criteria - what should they be?

7/27/2020

637 words; 6-minute read

A friend of mine recently sent me a link to an episode of the Alex Salmond show on Russia Today.

The main message from the programme (or at least the one I picked up) was that the New Zealand approach to Covid is a model for others to follow. Leaving aside the particularities of the NZ case that might have given the country an advantage to start with (small population widely dispersed, relatively few entry points that are easily covered and closed), NZ was clearly incredibly successful in keeping case numbers and deaths very low.

So, assuming the criteria for success are reduced to one - suppression of the virus - NZ was (and is, to date) clearly a massive success story.

I think, though, that measuring success by this one criterion is a mistake.

First, it’s extremely reductive as an interpretation of what ‘public health’ means. It’s been interesting to see how epidemiologists and related health professionals have come to dominate the political and mediatic interpretation of what ‘public health’ is. There is obviously much more to public health than treating Corona patients, from the mental health issues caused by lockdown to the thousands of cancer patients whose symptoms have been missed and treatment delayed because of the relentless Covid focus - and everything between and beyond.

If we take ‘public welfare’ to be the criterion for policy-making rather than ‘public health’ (however widely we interpret that term) then leaving the field to epidemiologists and virologists seems even more odd. My sister has lost her job in New Zealand as a direct result of the collapse of the NZ tourist industry brought about by the severity of the lockdown there. She is a Covid casualty too. From their public pronouncements it is hard to avoid the impression that the 650,000 people who have already lost their jobs to Covid in the UK are regarded by epidemiologists and the like as collateral damage to be put up with in the name of a greater good, much as civilian deaths in a war are regarded as a regrettable price to pay for winning the war.

How did we get to this point? One factor is the composition of the Scientific Advisory Group for Emergencies (SAGE) - and, more broadly, the triumph of science over the humanities in regard to what’s regarded as useful, worthwhile and actionable knowledge. SAGE is stuffed full of people whose expertise lies in narrow fields of medicine. Where are the historians, philosophers, sociologists and - yes! - musicologists? (A philosopher might at least have brought up the possibility of a utilitarian approach to Covid - ‘the greatest good for the greatest number’ as opposed to the deontological ‘save every Covid life’).

It might be that a more multidiscplinary SAGE would have come up with a more balanced approach to Covid, in which ‘public welfare’ rather than virus suppression would have resulted in a different policy mix (and maybe people like my sister would have kept her job).

More broadly, the severe lockdown approach to Covid, recommended by Salmond’s epidemiologist, prepares us very badly for crises such as the Climate Emergency and for participatory politics more generally. There might be a top-down, do-as-we-tell-you approach to climate change but a) I doubt it would be successful in the long term, and b) I doubt I’d want to live in the paternalistic kind of society that took such an approach.

In sum, if some malign force had been asked to design a method for sowing fear, suppressing public participation and inducing a sense of helplessness, such a force would be hard pressed to come up with something better than Covid and the SAGE-type response to it.

two cheers for sweden

7/10/2020

(796 words - 7 minute read)

For the past few months I’ve held something of a candle for the Swedish approach to Covid-19, mostly because I think that, in the Anthropocene, living with the non-human world - yes, even the lethal bits - is in the long run better than fighting it. One way or another, that’s what the Swedes have been trying to do.

Support for the Swedish approach is regarded as misguided - at best - on the grounds that it’s killed more people per head of population than its Nordic neighbours. A friend sent me an article - and there are plenty - confirming this just the other day.

Debate over? Well, no. Even if Covid success were judged solely on deaths per head of population it wouldn’t be an open-and-shut case, as Sweden has fewer deaths per 100,000 inhabitants than Spain, the UK, France or Italy, all of which went through periods of total lockdown.

But this has never been Sweden’s pitch anyway.

It’s been much more about avoiding the disadvantages of the mainstream lockdown approach to dealing with Coronavirus: collapsing economies, children missing out on school for months, the mental health problems that go with lockdown and isolation, lonely deaths, divided families, the non-Covid patients missing out on treatment, an increase in domestic violence, the threat of second and subsequent waves, the crazy Great Escapes when lockdowns are eased and the sun comes out, and the corrosive effects of policing lockdown.

Sweden has done its best to keep the economy going while other countries have shut theirs down. Has it worked? It certainly did to start with: at least in March it performed better than much of the EU as it recorded a decline of just 0.3 per cent, compared with a 3.8 per cent fall for the Eurozone.

But in today’s interconnected world Covid in one country is as tough to pull off as socialism in one country. Sweden’s small, open economy has been a victim of Covid-induced disruption of international supply chains. Truckmaker Volvo Group and carmaker Volvo Cars were both forced to stop production for several weeks, not because of conditions in Sweden but due to lack of parts and difficulties in their supply chains elsewhere in Europe. If only the rest of Europe had followed the Swedish example?

Even so, according to the Financial Times, Swedish prospects post-Covid are better than the rest of Europe, with a 7% decline in GDP comparing favourably with numbers for Germany, Belgium, UK, France, Spain, Italy, and neighbouring Nordic countries.

Sweden has kept its schools open (up to age 16), avoiding the interminable squabbles in lockdown countries between government, teachers, parents and unions. Swedes support the policy for helping with children’s mental health as well as allowing parents to keep on working.

Crucially, Swedes reckon that public health is about more than preventing Covid deaths - the opposite of the notion that has taken a vice-like grip in countries like the UK where only Covid seems to count. There are the well-documented mental and physical health problems associated with lockdown, for example, as well as the health problems that have gone undiagnosed or untreated during lockdown, including 18,000 possibly dying from cancer in the UK sooner than they should have because of Corona delays.

In avoiding lockdown, Sweden is also set to escape the problems that come with releasing it. The idea of a ‘second wave’ makes no sense, for example. While there may be fresh outbreaks like those in Germany, Italy, South Korea, Beijing, Melbourne, Leicester, and Galicia, there will be no accompanying disruptive lockdowns. There won’t be any riots protesting a second lockdown, as there have been in Belgrade. Nor will there be any need to police quarantine hotels after breakouts, as in New Zealand.

More positively, Sweden is operating a citizen-centred, everyone-for-the-community strategy that is a better model than top-down lockdown for dealing with crises like climate change. ‘Treating citizens as children lacking the judgment to make wise decisions is not a sustainable approach’, writes Elizabeth Braw of the Royal United Services Institute for Defence and Security Studies. ‘Addressing a prolonged crisis, or one that comes in repeated waves, will require citizens to be active and responsible participants in their security — not mere recipients of government instructions’.

So when it comes to judging a country’s Covid success, let’s allow a wider range of criteria than Covid deaths per head of population. And let’s not make snap judgements. As Chinese Premier Chou en-Lai is supposed to have said when asked about the impact of the French Revolution: ‘It’s too early to say’.

whose identity?

6/24/2020

(717 words - 6 minute read)

In a recent article in the London Review of Books surveying feminist manifestos, Joanna Biggs says that it’s always been clear what women want: ‘girls just wanna be human, not other’.

Indeed, but what does being human mean?

It’s been pointed out ad nauseam that ‘human’ all too often means ‘man’, so the question ‘what do women want’ is frequently answered with, ‘what men have.’ This is a bad answer. It’s bad not only because it’s wrong to define a generic term (human) in terms of a particular (man), but also because a) ‘man’ is itself a generic term, and b) what men have isn’t always good anyway.

The same might be said of the movement against racism. What do BAME people want? It’s surely not enough to answer, ‘what non-BAME people already have’. Again ‘non-BAME’ covers a multitude of different conditions, and even if we could identify some representative non-BAME person, who’s to say that that person’s life is the model on which to base BAME demands?

Let’s take a specific example of what happens if we model identity-based demands on the experiences of the dominant identity.

In a review of the BAME experience of the criminal justice system Labour MP David Lammy found that ‘between 2006 and 2014, 41% of black defendants pleaded not guilty in crown courts compared with 31% of white defendants. Consequently, black defendants lose the opportunity of reduced sentences through early guilty pleas and distrust in the system is reinforced.’

This looks unfair. It looks as though equity demands that the same proportion of blacks as whites should be able to plead guilty so as to get a reduced sentence.

But what Lammy doesn’t point out is that solicitors will often advise defendants to plead guilty to crimes with which they’ve been charged but haven’t committed, so as to be sure of a reduced tariff.

In what sense, exactly, would giving more black defendants a longer sentence than they deserve be an improvement? But that’s where Lammy’s version of fairness takes us in the absence of non-identity based criteria for fairness.

It looks as though identity-based politics needs criteria drawn from outside any already-existing identity if the aspiration to ‘be human’ is to be fulfilled.

Where is this ‘outside? One possibility is that one identity can speak for all the others. If the most downtrodden identity can be emancipated won’t that entail the emancipation of everyone?

I’m not sure any identity can claim special privileges in this regard. Marx thought that the proletariat was the universal class, so once it was freed everyone would be freed. Maybe, but might not proletarian freedom always be proletarian freedom?

The black feminists of the 1974 Combahee River Collective similarly argued that black women are the carriers of a universalist freedom on the grounds that ‘If black women were free it would mean that everyone else would have to be free since our freedom would necessitate the destruction of all systems of oppression’.

Perhaps. But first, there will always be someone lower down the pecking order who will argue that their particular form of oppression has been left out. Second, and linked, because as long as our understanding of freedom is tied to any identity’s interests it can’t and won’t be universal.

So if the ‘outside’, the universal, can’t be the property of any particular identity, where is it? Currently the best bet is ‘intersectionality’ where it’s recognised that different forms of oppression - race, class, sexual orientation, nationality, religion, gender - intersect and overlap. But intersectionality has yet to show that a movement that multiplies difference can point us towards the universal.

And that is surely what we need, because the choice is clear: ‘Feminism can ask for the things men have,’ writes Biggs, ‘or it can ask for the world to be organised differently’.

a downing street press conference

6/15/2020

(335 words - 2 minute read)

Welcome to the daily Downing Street Covid-19 press conference. I’ll be brief.

It’s time to level with the British people. We’ve shown you graphs. We’ve bombarded you with statistics. We’ve advised you to wash your hands. We’ve told you to stay away from each other.

And OK, we’ve overpromised and underperformed. Let’s be clear about that.

But today is going to be different. No graphs. No statistics. No illness prevention advice. No more promises. I’ve not even come to apologise for all the mistakes we’ve made over the past four months. There’ll be a time for that later.

Today I just want to show you a photograph. This photograph. Slide please.

This is Mount Everest in May 2019. It’s remarkable, I think you’ll agree. A human traffic jam in one of the most inaccessible places on earth.

It’s a picture of human ingenuity. Of the human spirit. Of the power of money.

It’s also a picture of death. People in that queue died as they waited hours for their turn to reach the summit. They died because they'd overreached themselves.

In sum, friends, it’s a picture of the Anthropocene, the epoch in which the drive to conquer what we used to call Nature has backfired on us. In this epoch disasters are made by humans. Disasters like climate change. Like species extinction.

Like Covid-19.

We’re all on the ridge waiting to summit. We’re getting weaker, the air is thin, the cold is intense and the technology that got us here is beginning to fail.

We could carry on climbing - but look how narrow the ridge is, how precipitous the fall on either side.

Better, we think, to turn round and begin the descent to where there’s air to breathe.

Thank you very much. Now I’ll take some questions.

To statue or not to statue?

6/10/2020

(311 words - 2 minute read; spoiler alert)

I’ve just finished reading The Memory Police, a novel by Yoko Ogawa.

It’s about an island where things disappear, and once they disappear their meaning is lost. When it is decided that an object and its meaning must be forgotten, it is disposed of or handed in to the Memory Police whose job it is to enforce disappearances. Memories are attached to things, and when the things go, so do the memories. Some things are burnt, others are thrown into the river.

Most people forget the objects and their meaning but some don’t, so they are made to disappear too.

A young novelist discovers that her editor is in danger of being taken away by the Memory Police. He is one of those who can’t forget and it’s getting harder for him to conceal his memories. She finds a place for him to hide and he goes into lockdown.

Around them more and more things are disappeared and more and more memories are lost. As they have no memory of the things that have gone, people quickly get used to their absence.

Only the editor, locked away in hiding, wonders what the world outside must be like, shorn of both objects and memories.

One day the young novelist wakes up to find that her left leg has disappeared. She hobbles out and finds that her neighbours’ left legs have gone too. ‘I guess I’m actually lucky,’ says one elderly neighbour, ‘half the arthritis in my knees is gone’.

Then right hands go, and one by one people’s body parts disappear until only voices are left. The Memory Police’s work is done because there’s no point hunting down people who are only voices.

Then the voices go too.

Windrush - 'sitting in limbo'

6/9/2020

(378 words - 3 minute read)

Last night the BBC showed the drama documentary, Sitting in Limbo, about the injustice and humiliation heaped on Anthony Bryan as a result of the Home Office’s ‘hostile environment’ policy towards immigrants.

Bryan was just one of at least 160 people (government figures) wrongfully detained or deported, and over 1000 claims for compensation have been lodged. As at 6th February only 3% of claims had been settled, which puts the hand-wringing of the current Home Office Minister, Priti Patel, into perspective.

Who was responsible for the hostile environment policy?

It’s easy to go after the Labour immigration minister who first invented the term, Liam Bryne, and it’s even easier to go after Theresa May who oversaw the deployment of ‘Go Home or Face Arrest’ vans.

But what Sitting in Limbo illustrated was the utter banality of evil. Without the collaboration of dozens of minor functionaries the policy would have fallen apart.

Bryan’s life was systematically dismantled by the immigration officers who arrested him (twice), the officials who booked him in to detention centres, the apparatchiks who demanded documentation from him that he’d already supplied, the jack-in-office who referred to his ‘alleged’ children’, and the driver of the van that took him 166 miles from London to the Verne detention centre on Portland, Dorset - among many, many others.

Any one of these people could have disrupted the hostile environment assembly line of shame and indignity by saying no, but none of them did. ‘I’m just doing my job’, said one officer asking Bryan for yet more proof of the 50 years he’d spent in the UK. ‘Yes,’ said Bryan, ‘a job that ruins people’s lives’.

Hannah Arendt coined the term ‘banality of evil’ after watching the trial of Adolf Eichmann in 1961. Some of the people who contributed to Nazi atrocities were evil, she said, but many weren’t. They were just humdrum cogs in a machine, 'following orders' - a defence against culpability rejected at the 1945-6 Nuremberg trials.

'A deportation order has been issued against you,' says one official as Bryan sits before him after months - years - battling to prove his right to remain. 'On your arrival in Jamaica you will receive the sum of £1000 to help you resettle'.

Was that official watching Sitting in Limbo last night? What was he thinking?

But ...

6/1/2020

(376 words - 3 minute read)

'But' is a short word that is sometimes asked to do an awful lot of work.

In Saturday's Guardian Review supplement (30th May), Dr Rachel Clarke tells of her time as a Covid-19 doctor. 'Behind the statistics the pandemic unfolds one human being at a time', she writes. Hers is the story of one such person, an old man dying in a Covid-19 ward, and of his sons, dazed and confused, witnessing the last hours of their father's life.

'You could argue', she says, 'that there was little point to a man like Winston' - he was old, unproductive, and probably near the end of his life anyway. Others should take precedence, the argument might continue, the young, the productive, those with more life to live than Winston.

'But,' she continues, 'to those of us close up to this dreadful disease - who see, as we do, the way it suffocates the life from you - such judgments are grotesque'. It is easy to see why she thinks this, and Clarke's account of the bewilderment of Winston's sons as they see their father's life slipping away, and their determination that he not become just another statistic in Number 10's 5 p.m. press conference, is heartrendingly powerful.

'The moment we rank life according to who most "deserves" it,' writes Dr Clarke, 'we have crossed into a realm I don't want to be a part of'.

But this is a realm none of us can escape from, not even Dr Clarke.

The lockdown Clarke thinks should continue for fear of a second Coronavirus wave has caused its own casualties. The 1.5 million Britons who haven't eaten for a whole day during lockdown, those unable to work from home, those whose operations have been cancelled or postponed, the women and young people who will do worst out of lockdown, the victims of a spike in domestic abuse, and the sufferers of extreme social isolation - all these are victims of Covid-19 too.

Are the lives of these people less deserving than Winston's? I honestly don't know, but in writing so powerfully in favour of Winston and those like him, Dr Clarke is surely in the business of 'ranking life' - as are we all, like it or not.

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Notes from a cliff-edge