Retired teacher. Lives in North West London. Grew up in Thurrock in the 1950's and 60's and consequently spent the first 18 years of his life breathing air that was 60% cement. Active member of the National Education Union (formerly NUT) and Labour Party.
On the bus, two pairs of identical twin toddlers poke each other in the face and giggle. One is wearing a bright scarlet wooly hat with two pom-poms on the top that enrages her; and she angrily takes it off every time her mum jams it on – a lifetime battle of wills in the making. The girls are dressed identically in sugar and spice pink and scarlet; to underline their distinctive similarity. “Look. I’ve got two of the same one.” The boys are in a mustard sludge colour; making the same point in a more “puppy dog tail” way. And so, we are branded and colour coded before we can talk. I recall one of the six year olds I used to try to teach to read saying very indignantly to me “Boys can’t wear PINK!” I was wearing a pink sweater at the time. I think the word he meant was “daren’t.”
Out the bus window at the bottom of the hill waiting to turn onto the Edgware road, climbing up the wall of one of those painfully thin first generation council houses that seem to exist nowhere other than Barnet – “Honey! I shrunk the house” – homes fit for heroes who weren’t quite heroic enough – there is a very small Santa seemingly caught mid burglary. Perhaps its his size, that of a wiry goblin, or the lack of any visible support or props – no sleigh or reindeer or even a ladder – that makes him look so menacing.
In a sudden break with the norm, a huge chatter of Parakeets flashes across the milky sky above the Sainsbury store, glinting green in the pallid sunlight; still an exciting shock to see, like finding a bright shoal of tropical fish in a dull suburban pond.
In the store. a bloke wearing foam antlers looks miserably at the bananas.
In the evening, Christmas lights glow in windows – some elegantly soothing, in white or deep colours like a collection of gem stones in stained glass – some overloaded and crass, an embodiment of the principle that more is all too often less, and flashing manically like alarms – inducing just the thoughts of panic, migraine and epilepsy you need for a season of peace.
In a week in which the Health Secretary has wept on TV claiming that he is “proud to be British” a reality check on just how badly his Conservative government have managed the COVID crisis and why is unavoidable.
The graph below shows the deaths per million of the UK – which
-flirted with herd immunity in February/March,
-went for one of the loosest lockdowns in Europe in April/May,
-reopened its economy prematurely over the Summer,
-hesitated over re-imposing restrictions as the virus rebounded in September/October,
-tightened them too late in November (while leaving schools open and allowing infections to rip among Secondary school students especially)
-and is now trying to keep restrictions loosened over Xmas, largely for commercial reasons,
with countries in the Western Pacific region that had a policy to eliminate the virus, not try to “live with” it. Because the figures for these countries are so small, here they are. Compared to the UK’s 877 deaths per million, New Zealand has had just 5, China even fewer with 3; and Vietnam with 0.5.
“Proud to be British”?
If you want to see that on a comparative pie graph of the deaths in each country compared with each other, it looks like this.
The Health Secretary might well weep.
It might be argued that Vietnam and New Zealand’s strategy was primarily to close down their borders and test everyone that came in – quarantining anyone who tested positive – to prevent the virus getting a foothold in the first place. So they did. But that option was available to Britain too in late February. The government didn’t take it – and was very resistant to any quarantining measures for air travelers until the end of May, just as the first partial lockdown began to relax. The current relaxation on restrictions on “high value” travelers is a clue as to why. Such restrictions would affect business travelers – and that would never do.
The comparison with China is even more damning. The initial outbreak of the virus was in Wuhan. A city of 11 million people, slightly larger than London, the capital of Hubei Province, which has 58 million people, slightly smaller than the UK and about the same as England. As the first victim of the virus, it might be reasonable to assume that the Chinese would have been taken more by surprise and overwhelmed than anywhere else; and there was a period in late December to late January in which there was definite confusion and fumbling at a local level when it was unclear what they were dealing with; but at the same time intensive work was being done on what exactly the virus was, how it originated and was transmitting itself, all of which was being shared with the WHO. And, once it was clear just how dangerous it was, the measures taken were swift, definite and had the clear aim of eliminating it. And, they worked. So, even with a significant outbreak in a densely populated urban centre that is a transport and communications hub, a zero COVID strategy was capable of closing down domestic infections. It took six weeks. It is that that has enabled the Chinese economy to recover at the speed and scale that it has done. The UK government has no excuse – because, after the Wuhan experience, they knew what was coming. They chose not to act.
Even in a comparison with other European countries – which have all tried variations on the same policy as the UK – “balancing” the needs of health against economic imperatives – and which have therefore had a similar result in balancing an ongoing health crisis with an ongoing economic crisis -the UK is in the worst four for death rates (1) so, in football terms, we’d be qualifying for the Champions League. Nothing to be proud of.
More importantly, we are heading for a third wave in January, especially if the Xmas relaxation is maintained, so a Zero COVID strategy and movement is urgently needed and all the forces gathering in different groups around this should be coming together to push to get a West Pacific result.
On Thursday evening, my son discovered this taped just outside our front door. Just next to the drainpipe – which seems appropriate.
This is a year old clipping from the “Sun” written by that deep thinker Jeremy Clarkson.
This follows the delivery of one battered UKIP leaflet a fortnight ago through the letterbox and a Brexit Party leaflet left on the doorstep a couple of months before that; both left over from the Euro Election and both the with address cut out. A very strange version of the 12 Days of Xmas this year.
Clearly someone locally – the same person I presume who sprayed the word “Tory” on every available white wall locally this time last year – including the one outside the Temple on Kingsbury Road -and has since followed up by spraying “Trump” and “Trump – Jesus” on the sides of white (and white-ish) vans on our road – feels the need both to mark his* presence and is irked by ours.
I presume that whoever it is who stuck this up – and I have two ideas who it might be – is really relieved that the country dodged a bullet last December and does not have to shoulder the burden of a government that would have made it a fairer, greener place, would not have contracted track and trace out to SERCO and presided over the worst per capita death rate in Europe and would not now be crashing out of the EU with no deal. Lucky us!
Possibly a sexist presumption, but I’d bet fifty quid its a bloke.
With all the pathetic, posturing, patriotic hoo-ha around getting the vaccination programme authorised first- nothing like authorising a vaccine developed in Germany by Turkish immigrants for a US company manufactured in Belgium to make you “Proud to be British”- and hyped up just in time to give everyone false reassurance before the Xmas relaxation of restrictions generates the same sort of third wave as we saw in the USA after Thanksgiving – the quantity of vaccine currently available has been downplayed.
The UK currently has 800,000 doses. As everyone has to be vaccinated twice, that’s enough for 400.000 people. Considering vulnerable groups, there are 3.2 million people aged over 80. In addition there are 1.3 million workers in the NHS and 1.5 million working in adult social care, so its not going to stretch very far very fast.
A million more doses are due next week, but even if that rate of supply is kept up it would take until the end of January just to do all of the over eighties; assuming that no front line workers are going to be covered at the same time.
Because it is going to take a long time, even to vaccinate the most vulnerable, any delusions that its all over are very dangerous. If you add that to Jonathan Van Tam’s argument that the virus cannot be eliminated and we are going to have to live with it forever, a worrying variant on herd immunity is starting to re-emerge.
Rather than seeing the vaccines as a tool to eradicate the virus, the logic of this is that if the most vulnerable are vaccinated, it becomes an “acceptable level of risk” for everyone else to go back to normal before they are vaccinated and therefore still in danger. This will be posed in macho, character building terms about not hiding under the sheets for fear of the virus. But to mangle one of Van Tam’s metaphors, even if all the penalty takers get on to the train that is just pulling into the station, not only will the train be travelling very slowly once it sets off, it doesn’t actually have a destination and will just keep trundling along for ever and ever amen.
The approach to schools during the tightened restrictions that have just ended has been a dummy run for this. It rapidly became apparent that secondary school students were the age group with the most rapid viral spread – but schools were kept open. The relatively small dent in viral spread made by the Mockdown, compared to the previous one in the Spring can partly be attributed to this.
Although the government in Wales has finally moved to distance learning for the last two weeks of term, without the UK government following suit – and also keeping restrictions in place over Xmas as tight as they were during Eid and Diwali – we will be heading for a third wave in January and the vaccine programme will barely dent it.
When Boris Johnson said this time last year that he had an “oven ready” deal with the EU, he neglected to point out that the oven was broken.
He is now breezily assuring us that an “Australian style” deal won’t be too bad; as retailers warn of price rises and supply shortages of everything from food to medicine.
An Australia style deal is no deal at all. Mongolia and Afghanistan have the same “deal” with the EU as Australia does. But, Australia has a certain “White Dominion” atavistic “kith and kin” resonance with a certain kind of Tory voter, all positive associations of Barbecues and beer on Bondi Beach, aspirational Neighbours style suburbia and just a little bit of “common sense” casual racism. Johnson could say “Mongolian style deal” or “Afghan style deal” instead, but that would go down as well as yak milk with these people, so he doesn’t.
Of course, Australia is currently trying to negotiate a closer trade deal with the EU, while the UK is pulling away. Total Australian trade with the EU is significantly smaller than that of the UK.
This may be partly because Australia is 9,000 miles away from Europe, whereas the UK is right on the border.
When considering the percentage of imports and exports, the difference weight of EU trade is even more stark.
The EU is Australia’s third largest trading partner but the UK’s most important.
What also has to be factored in here is that just under half of Australian trade with the EU is actually with the UK – for historic colonial reasons – so the proportion with the rest of Europe is even smaller than appears here. It is therefore less of a problem for Australia to be trading with the EU without a deal than it will be for the UK in three weeks time.
No deal means World Trade Organisation terms. That means tariffs, costs, hold ups. The cost of that will be borne by all of us and it will hit the worst off hardest and will form part of the austerity offensive already being carried through; as the costs of COVID are pushed downwards in lost jobs and cut or frozen wages while the government pulls patriotic poses, ramps up the hostile environment, lines up organisations like the EHRC to pursue culture wars, forbids any teaching that encourages “victim narratives” and pursues a rightward shift in the media environment – because they don’t want a institutionally conservative commentator that passively reflects their line, as the BBC does, they want a cheerleader generating zealous enthusiasm for the traitor hunt that is already well under way; and will be ramped up to shrieking pitch as the “easiest deal in History” fails and lorry drivers stuck in Kent queue up to piss in bottles.
When you get used to a certain state of mind, and certain conditions of life, events that shake it become emotionally destabilising. Having cultivated – even appreciated – a certain level of agoraphobia for a long time, going out yesterday morning induced a shocking elation. I found myself walking through the mist loudly whistling one of the most emphatic tunes from Shostakovich’s 5th. Quite what Shostakovich would have made of that – given that he wrote it as a pastiche of accessible, popular music – “tunes that the people could hum” – I’m not sure. How many layers of irony there are in that I don’t know.
When – and if, because you can never rule out this government just never solving the problem – we are out the other side of COVID restrictions, a lot of previously humdrum social activities will take on a manic and explosive edge.
Having got used to the gloom of living inside a false narrative, I felt a similar elation when Jeremy Corbyn’s suspension from the Labour Party was lifted; reminiscent of Basil Fawlty’s comment “Happiness? Oh yes. I remember that.” Withholding the Whip and the subsequent silencing of dissent by administrative methods meant that we were back to business as usual with an ever extending ban on discussing anything that might relate to the issue; now extending to resolutions on sponsored bike rides to raise funds for Palestinian children.
Mid winter casts the day as twilight at noon and the ten magpies that were perched and preening in the tree opposite have taken flight one by one. Ten for a bird you must not miss. I counted them all in, and counted them all out again.
Its odd having to use money. The actual stuff. A blue note with Churchill growling in the corner. I remember those. The story is that his defiant look in the picture was a response to having his cigar taken out of his mouth before it was taken. The Jam song “Down in the Tube Station at Midnight” comes to mind with the line about the Queen’s head on a coin being “smiling, beguiling” – which I always thought was “smiling big Eileen”, could never understand and thought that perhaps it might have meant something in Woking. Even so, the Queen’s head on coins in never smiling; always both graven and grave. And “beguiling” for any of her images is a bit of a stretch.
A teenager zips by on an electric scooter, his toddler sister hanging on to the handlebars like grim death.
Along the Hyde, a mural showing car sales from “between the wars” – a phrase that could describe any time really – has been painted over. Although it was probably not original; a conscious piece of nostalgic reproduction and marketing – a Ploughman’s Lunch in wall painting form – its another link gone with the engineering past of that stretch of the Edgware Road. Formerly the site of the vast Airco factory that produced the Royal Flying Corp’s aircraft in World War 1 and was, by 1918, the largest aircraft factory in the world with the most up to date equipment and which, without the state support that sustained the industry in France and the USA after the end of the war, went bankrupt by 1920. Those who refuse to learn the lessons of history…
A pair of wagtails dance and flit in the ghost space between the Loon Fung supermarket – where interesting vegetables and an extraordinary variety of mushrooms live – and the currently shuttered Bang Bang Food Hall.
I hope its not mawkish to think it appropriate and fitting that in Tim Brooke Taylor’s final appearance in “I’m Sorry I haven’t a Clue”, he finally made it to Mornington Crescent.
The writing was on the wall for Dominic Cummings – remember him (?) – when Lindsay Hilsom called out to Joe Biden after Trump’s “Red Mirage” had faded enough for it to be clear that he would be the next President of the United States – “Mr Biden, do you have a comment for the BBC?” and Biden replied, “BBC huh? I’m Irish”.
Johnson had a pre-arranged call set up with Ursula Von Der Leyen from the European Commission timed for the Saturday after the Presidential election – enough time for the dust to settle and to be sure which way the wind would be blowing.
Had it been Trump, and the former administration’s policy to undermine the EU with Alt Right nationalist currents – the better to subject it in general and Germany in particular to its economic requirements – it would have been full speed ahead for No Deal; and Cummings would still be in place. As it is Biden, with a position of getting the EU on board with the US Cold War on China, and the wind towards London now blowing very cold indeed, Johnson is in the now familiar position of having to make a screeching U-turn and try for any last minute basic deal with the EU that might still be on offer; and Cummings had to be out the door with his box.
Johnson is definitely not flavour of the month with the incoming team in Washington. One Biden insider described him as “that shape shifting creep”; leading to some of the quick policy moves we have seen in the last week. The sudden increase in military spending is an attempt to show willing to beef up the UK’s traditional role of Robin to the USA’s global Batman – nothwithstanding the perception that most of the rest of the world has that Batman acts like The Joker most of the time.
The need for a deal – as being adrift in the North Atlantic with both the EU and the US offering a cold shoulder is not a good place to be – does not mean that one will be pulled out of the bag. The negotiations are still being led by Lord Frost – an incarnation of Rosbif at its most truculent – who seems to think that mulish intransigence is a winning strategy; so they might mess up even this. However, a deal is now much more likely. The details remain to be seen, but it won’t be a good one.
It will cost us, as these estimates from a study from the LSE indicate. (1)
Cumulative hit on UK economy by 2035.
The inclination of the Labour leadership to either vote for it or abstain is problematic. This will be a bad deal. If you vote for a deal you own it. You become complicit. Unless there is a deal that includes the UK in the customs union – thereby resolving the crisis with Ireland and blocking off the deregulation and Americanisation of the UK economy that is the purpose of Brexit from the point of view of the ruling class fraction that has driven it – Labour should vote against.
What is very clear is that Keir Starmer has been relaxed about a bad deal in a way that would have had his supporters apoplectic on social media had it been Jeremy Corbyn taking the same stance. There was an eery silence from former keyboard warriors in “Labour Against Brexit” when Starmer let the possibility of an extension to the transition period go by without a whimper. The football chant “Its all gone quite over there” comes to mind. Without presuming that Starmer is a “closet leaver” – though he was always more prepared to embrace opposition to Free Movement than Corbyn ever was – this indicates that the Labour right is far more Atlanticist than it ever was Europhile.
They are more comfortable with a Biden Presidency than they were with Trump – as Trump is the USA with the mask off – but they would still have always lined up to “stand with America on the world stage”; and all other policy – including disciplinary policy – flows from that.
One of the odd features of getting older is that things start happening to your body. “Popeye elbow” is a soft swelling on the elbow that looks like a golf ball – or one of Popeye’s elbows – that doesn’t hurt and you can get away with not noticing until people around you say “Argh! What’s happened to your elbow?!”
Popeye was one of those cartoons that always had the same essential plot. Like Whacky Races or Scooby Do or, come to think of it, all of them. Briefly summarised in the words of a US Civil War General whose name I’ve forgotten who said – “Little guy’ll always beat a big guy, if the little guy’s in the right and keeps a comin’“. Which – in the case of the US Civil War – is underlined by the way the Confederate little guys lost even though they kept a comin’ in the worst of bad causes. In the case of Popeye, Bluto might have said “I’d have gotten away with it too, if it wasn’t for that meddling spinach.”
Leafy Vegetable in a can as superpower.
When I was six, I took everything literally and on faith – from stories in Sunday school to TV cartoons. I assumed that if a can of spinach would work for Popeye, it would work for me. Eating this miracle stuff would turn my sparrows kneecap biceps into surging powerhouses with tanks and battleships running through them to the accompaniment of some of Sousa’s brasher marches played at a tempo brisk enough to clear a playground full of bullies. I thought of it as a kind of personal nuclear deterrent.
It was not easy to come by in Thurrock in 1960. Eventually my parents found some small tins in a dubious looking shop in Southend Road. Not big round tins like Popeye’s, but small flat things that might have contained sardines in a previous life and could have been leftover iron rations from the Korean war. It was, of course, disgusting. And had no effect on my sparrows kneecap biceps, nor make me impervious in the playground.
The same brash Sousa marches – designed to make you feel invincible AND happy – were much in evidence in the online films of last Saturday’s pro-Trump protests in Huntingdon Beach in California. This was not huge – a few hundred – but had the wild celebratory air to it of people trying to convince themselves they had won. Denial as collective delirium; or possibly collective delirium as a condition of denial. People gathered at an intersection to cheer each other as gigantic SUVs festooned with the stars and stripes drove up and down like they were cruising the strip in a Beach Boys song.
They believe what they have to believe to make the reality around them bearable. They probably believe that they would have won if it wasn’t for those meddling Venezuelan voting machines – the latest straw to be grasped in Rudi Giuliani’s increasingly comic attempts to fool enough of the people enough of the time to bluff a different reality into being. Its interesting to note that the same machines were in use in 2016 in the same states without anyone batting an eyelid, and were adopted because they are so accurate and fraud proof – an ironic comment on the continual US claims that Venezuelan elections are always fraudulent because they keep returning Socialists to power. A gaslighter has to have some power to bluff with. Without it, he is left with the minority of the people you can fool all of the time. But there are a lot of them.
The Trumpist slogan – “can 70 million be wrong?” would skewer them on a paradox if they were self aware enough to think it through. The legitimacy of Trump’s vote is taken for granted and banked – the fraudulence of the other side equally taken for granted and discounted, so the possible counter slogan “…if 80 million say so” does not register with them. Although the momentum on their own side is smaller than that of the Democrats, that momentum is real and likely to sustain them into the bumpy period ahead.
The USA will remain in crisis. The delusions that stoke it will become even wilder, as the unbearable reality of a loss of global primacy sinks in subconsciously.
Something similar was on show in Wilhelm Furtwangler’s performance of Beethoven’s 9th Symphony to celebrate Hitler’s Birthday in Berlin on 9th April 1942, with Goebbels and other top Nazi’s in attendance. This was the subject of a recent Radio 3 programme “Is this the most dangerous piece of music ever written?” (1)
April 1942 was a point at which the Third Reich was at the peak of its power, but it must have been apparent to anyone – with any realistic sense of the balance of forces – that the only way from there was down. The Soviet Union had not succumbed to Blitzkreig and, after Pearl Harbour, Nazi Germany was also at war with the United States. Hitler’s fantasy, that the Soviet Union could be defeated almost as quickly as France, died with thousands of his troops in the frozen mud before Moscow in December 1941 and – as Vasily Grossman notes in his extraordinary novel Stalingrad – the upcoming Nazi summer offensive would only be on the southern sector of the Eastern Front, not the whole front – North, South and Centre at the same time – as they’d been able to manage the previous year. They were already weaker. But still strong enough to harbour delusions.
Furtwangler’s performance of the Ninth encapsulates this moment. The only word to describe its tempo and volume is demonic. Schiller’s hymn to humanity is turned into a thunderous shriek of ubermensch triumph – made manic by an awareness of impending disaster. The fierce urgency of then.
Furtwangler – who stayed in Nazi Germany as a significant cultural figure, but never joined the Party – has been defended with the argument that he created this ferocious performance as a piece of shocking satire or grubage; the contrast with the universalist, humane orthodoxy of what the Ninth is meant to represent designed to generate a realisation of how far the Nazis were outside it. The problem here is that the Nazis knew very well what they were and gloried in it. Goebbels, a man used to generating social force from false narrative and wedded to the notion of “triumph of the will” thought the performance was wonderful.
This difficulty with cultural satire being taken straight is also illustrated by the fate of Johnny Speight’s character Alf Garnett. The central character in Speight’s situation comedy “‘Til Death do us Part”, Garnett was an unreconstructed bigot. set up as a figure to be mocked. But much of the audience not only identified with him, but saw his tirades as a vindication of their own world view. Someone was thinking what they were thinking; and they were on the telly.
Warren Mitchell, the Jewish actor who played Garnett – brilliantly, all seething frustration and choleric rage leavened by pathos – earned a crust in the seventies with a one man show called “The Thoughts of Chairman Alf”, in which he would put on his battered raincoat, pork pie hat and West Ham scarf and monologue in front of audiences all over the country who had turned up, at least in part, to see themselves reflected on stage; then went out and voted for the National Front. What that must have done to his soul I can’t imagine.
Sellotape marks at top and bottom indicate that this has been stuck in a window.
It is an old battered UKIP leaflet from the European elections of 2019. Not one sent to me. The address panel has been cut out to remove any evidence of who it was sent to. A few months ago a similar leaflet from the same election- from the Brexit Party this time – was lying just outside the front door, also with the address panel cut out.
I assume that this is a piece of low level harassment from one of my neighbours who knows that I have been very active in the Labour Party- possible the same person who spray paints “Trump – Jesus” on the side of white vans. I have a fairly good idea of who this might be and, for now, have a watching brief on it.
We have a guard Dimetrodon. It belongs to the children who live in the flat beneath us. With staring eyes, gaping sharp toothed jaws and jagged sail, resplendently moulded in luminous yellow and orange plastic, it basks on the granite cube that acts as a doorstop for the outside alcove; a repository for any manner of garden junk that we don’t mind getting covered in spider webs and snail trails. No one has moved it. It seems at home there.
One morning last week it was gone. I thought at first that the twins downstairs had claimed it back, but then discovered it lying on its back on the concrete hard standing that used to be the base of a garage – in the days that cars were small enough to get up and down the alleyway at the back of the flats and whoever it was who lived here then had one.
Picking it up to restore it to its rightful warning perch, I saw that its front toes were missing. Something – a fox maybe – curious to see if this odd looking thing might be prey – had lifted it, trotted into the backyard and sliced off the most exposed limbs with teeth like razors, drawn a conclusion – two parts taste to three parts edibility – and dropped it before going off in search of new adventures.
So, for now, its back. No less fierce, but toeless and slightly humbled.
Urban ramblings 