It’s 105 years since the Western Front guns stopped and the Western Front ceasefire on the First World War began.
And afterwards, people remembered.
Some of the declarations on behalf of the dead have seemed dubiously warlike:
In Flanders fields the poppies blow Between the crosses, row on row, That mark our place; and in the sky The larks, still bravely singing, fly Scarce heard amid the guns below. We are the Dead. Short days ago We lived, felt dawn, saw sunset glow, Loved and were loved, and now we lie, In Flanders fields. Take up our quarrel with the foe: To you from failing hands we throw The torch; be yours to hold it high. If ye break faith with us who die We shall not sleep, though poppies grow In Flanders fields.
Read in the wrong mood, it seems terribly like Mr McCrae wouldn’t mind terribly if the UK marked Remembrance Day by carpet-nuking the Germans.
At the other extreme, it represents the “Never Again” version. Yet the German rematch 21 years later shows that there are people who are unresponsive to suggestions that they should live in peace and harmony with their neighbours, and it is tricky to shut such people up without beating them to death with a rifle butt.
And yet…
The silent cut-outs scattered around the country suggest a better use of Remembrance of the war dead. War may be beneficial, or it may be lousy, or it may be unjustified, or it may depose tyrants. Those all depend on individual wars, and indeed individual perspectives on those wars (the Falklands Conflict, for example, remains the subject of conflicting interpretations for personal, patriotic and political reasons).
But the cut out figures, the Unknown Warrior in his tomb and the lists of names on memorials around the country silently speak a truth that some seem to promptly forget upon rising to power – that war has a most terrible human cost.
I’m not going to stand looking at Reading’s cut-out and proclaim the greatness of our part in the Great War, but I am going to remember that some people died in wars, and some people still die in wars, and it is very sad, and it would be better if the people who run these things could find a better way forward where not so many people sadly die and are remembered (especially not so many people sadly die and are remembered in Mr McCrae’s faintly vindictive tones).
This has been written while flicking through my summary of Theresa May from three years ago, remembering why I don’t want her back for the summer (except possibly because it would annoy Boris if he were not only chucked out to make way for her but she got to add another three months to her tenure as Prime Minister). But there is no obvious musical comparison to do with Boris, so this summary will be done in three overlaid chapters about his relationships with people called Jeremy.
Corbyn
Some people are lucky in their opponents. Boris Johnson got Jeremy Corbyn. The two had many things in common – a career of being a nuisance, centred heavily on London, not expected to actually become party leader, not overly interested in following rules or precedents and married three times with slight question marks over how many children they had. On politics and consistency they sat at opposite extremes – Boris an enthusiastic economic libertarian, given to observations about how a Government pound spent in London was more beneficial to the people of Strathclyde than a Government pound spent in Strathclyde, changing his mind on a daily basis, against Corbyn’s left-wing economics that struggle to avoid authoritarianism, devoted to spending money wherever seemed worthwhile, sticking to the same script for forty years. Boris seemed to chuck several useful projects in London mostly because they were Ken Livingstone’s ideas; Corbyn divorced one of his wives because she thought they could afford to send the kids to a public school. It is hard to say whether the world is a better placed run by people who change their mind regardless of the facts or by people who stick to their views regardless of the facts. Thus we had the remarkable achievement by the Labour Party to possess a leader during four critical years who could claim no high ground over Boris.
Corbyn became Labour leader in the distant days of autumn 2015, when the Labour Party seemed to have concluded that the country was being run by a competent centre-ground Conservative government with a broadly stable level of popularity – points which led to a natural conclusion that the party would lose the 2020 election and did not have to fuss too much about its next leader. In any case, its next leader might not make it to 2020. Who knew? Who cared? He could be changed later.
Corbyn was not well-placed to fight for Remain in 2016 and his core supporters – unlike, as it turned out, his party’s traditional voters – were unwilling to let him fight for Leave. Though it could be said that, as a committed pacifist, fighting was not Corbyn’s style. He preferred to sit quietly and watch as Boris joined the Leave team, uttered various points of debatable veracity in the expectation that someone would give him a jolly good afternoon’s sport in the debating chamber, was shot at by the media fact-checkers on the basis of technical points about the difference between £200,000,000 and £350,000,000, and then won the referendum.
Obviously Corbyn actually won the referendum, because the Conservatives could not agree on what to do next and Boris gave press conferences which suggested that this was not an outcome that he had anticipated or wanted. His colleague Michael Gove, who had worked closely with him during the referendum, had come to notice that Boris’s public persona was rather tiring for those around him in a way that was inappropriate for a prime minister, and said so. Boris was knifed; Gove was now marked as a traitor. Meanwhile Corbyn was overwhelmingly re-elected by his party that summer. He had a mandate. He had won his argument. It was unfortunate that this was a mandate and an argument within his party. Boris needed an opposite number who would effectively engage with him on his level to keep him under control, and this Corbyn never did.
But Boris did have cause to thank Corbyn for his failure to engage in 2017, when Labour didn’t do all that badly in Theresa May’s snap general election. It deprived May of her majority, largely on the basis that what Labour didn’t say was less unappealing than what May did say. Corbyn was now obviously a great leader and May was on borrowed time. By relatively careful management of his position at the Foreign Office – not getting too many British citizens locked up overseas for indefinite periods and resigning at an appropriate moment – Boris established himself as a sufficiently serious person to govern with real Government experience who was still committed to the true Brexit movement.
Corbyn could have thwarted Boris at a critical moment by being willing to change his mind. In summer 2019 the Conservatives had no real Parliamentary majority and had become rather tetchy. The country wanted the Brexit matter shutting down by some means or another, and barring six million enthusiasts on each side were disinclined to care about the outcome. The Brexiteers in Parliament were upset about May’s deal because May had discovered that a deal was not possible on the terms of engagement that she had set with the encouragement of the Brexiteers. But crucially May did have a deal. There was merely some technical difficulty over Northern Ireland’s border with the Republic. The EU were unwilling to accept a solution which created a hard customs border where a farmer five miles to the east of Derry/ Londonderry was banned from selling eggs at a car boot sale five miles west of Londonderry/ Derry. The Democratic Unionist Party were unwilling to accept a solution which created a hard customs border where this farmer was banned from selling eggs at a car boot sale in Stranraer in Scotland. The true Brexiteers were unwilling to accept a solution which allowed a French farmer to sell eggs at a car boot sale in Dover. And the Irish were unwilling to accept a solution where the French farmer wasn’t allowed to sell eggs at a car boot sale in Waterford. Thus deadlock.
Corbyn was offered a solution of a Government of National Unity. May patently no longer commanded the confidence of anybody, and any interested party was happy to sacrifice her if it meant a useful scapegoat. He wanted a second referendum; a body of the Conservatives were willing to give him one. All they asked was that he not become Prime Minister, because Labour was not the largest party so the Prime Minister should be a Conservative. The obvious candidates were Dominic Grieve and Ken Clarke. The result of the referendum would have been a sundered Conservative Party and most likely a general election, which was inevitable anyway and which Corbyn would have won.
Corbyn said no.
After Boris Johnson became leader of the Conservative Party he spent five happy months annoying a lot of people and then made a great play of being very upset about being forced into a general election. Corbyn made a great play of being very happy about finally getting the general election that he wanted so that he could form a coalition government which would have another referendum on Brexit in a few months while doing some other stuff. Boris Johnson, by contrast, argued that if he got any majority then he would “get Brexit done” and we could all stop talking about it. Arguments that Brexit was Boris’s fault anyway were rather half-hearted, and Corbyn’s insistence that we keep talking about Brexit in a bid to get a reasonable compromise of some description at some point in the future saw his party go down to a historic defeat.
When I turned on ClassicFM that Friday morning the news bulletin was followed by this:
Which said it all really.
Johnson’s majority allowed him to discard the Democratic Unionist Party (and unionism in general) and offer the EU Northern Ireland. The Irish farmers would be banned from exporting goods to Stranraer. The EU said yes, the deal was done, and Britain left the EU under what was virtually May’s deal at the end of January 2020. It was after all only Brexit not UKxit. A week later the media had found something else to talk about.
We would not have had Brexit if Corbyn had been able to define an opinion not expressed better by Karl Marx, who naturally had very little to say on European trade and political union centred in Brussels. And we would not have had Brexit if Corbyn had been willing to create a legacy without also gaining the trappings of power. His continued presence was very useful to anyone basing their political career on the idea of old political dinosaurs stuck in the past and preventing Britain rediscovering lost greatness. Like, say, Boris Johnson.
Hunt
Jeremy Hunt has done very well out of Boris Johnson. Being the person responsible for Health in a Conservative government is basically the equivalent of walking round with a sign saying “Kill me”. His predecessor was Andrew Lansley, who had successfully become one of the most hated figures in the country with almost no effort on his part.
While Lansley was being booed by the nurses Hunt was running the 2012 Olympics, so was an obvious safe pair of hands to defuse some of the anger around healthcare. This he sort of did. In 2016 he campaigned to remain in the EU, and afterwards agreed with suggestions made by Vote Leave people before the referendum that there should be further referendum on whatever was agreed for a withdrawal agreement and ultimate trade agreement. He did not stand in the leadership election that year, and instead remained as a relatively safe pair of hands at health (barring an incident with a bell) until 2018.
In 2018 Boris resigned as Foreign Secretary, and May gave Hunt the job. He was now a holder of a Great Officer of State, and had not imploded while running health or culture, media and sport. It made him an obvious candidate for being the next prime minister – May, having chucked a majority, was evidently not going to be around for the next election so had no real future beyond the completion of the Brexit negotiations.
When May resigned Hunt became the main competition for Johnson and the two were put to a vote of the membership in July 2019. At times things looked like they might be promising for Hunt, especially when Boris and his mistress (he was married to someone else at the time) had a row of such ferocity that a neighbour called the police. In the event he scooped a third of the vote and retired to the back benches. From there he has needled the Government on Covid policy, and he emerged in June 2022 to spend a day vigorously arguing for Boris’s departure.
He never needled that effectively. One can make arguments that a lockdown places an excessive strain on the population and its long-term consequences are unjustifiable. One can make arguments that the lockdown is unjustifiable because, admittedly contrary to what might seem to be common sense, it does not actually work. (Some academics have done so.) One can argue that clapping for carers was gesture politics at its worst, and that face coverings seem to exacerbate matters given that when they were removed in England cases dropped below the Scottish level and stayed below until they were reinstated. One can generally promote the Swedish option as more humane and more effective. Like Labour leader Sir Keir Starmer, his position was in the vein of “like Boris, but a bit different, and maybe a little more”.
Hunt’s problem is that he is not one of these people necessarily enthusiastic about setting a mood or expressing a distinct opinion. He would actually have made an excellent joint ticket with Johnson – Johnson to be bouncy and enthusiastic and well-known, and Hunt to negotiate the details and make the difficult decisions. His leadership campaign to the Conservative membership was a bit “Boris without some of the stuff that you don’t like about Boris”. He was never obviously in with a great chance with the membership, who loved Boris. One wonders whether he would have done better by reverting to his original position in 2016 – a line of “I said we should have a second referendum, and I still say we should have a second referendum, because it breaks the deadlock and silences the opposition, and I think leaving without a deal is a great Boris negotiating ploy but not good financial logic”. That would have given him his own message and his own voice. But one is never quite clear whether he really has one.
For one of the things about Boris that allows him to dominate the political world is that even when he’s flip-flopping and changed his mind yesterday, he seems keen on what he is saying and committed to his policies. People instinctively follow that. Even his opponents.
Clarkson
Jeremy Clarkson and Boris Johnson went to rather different public schools. They took rather different approaches to journalism. They have both been subject to campaigns for them to become prime minister, they have both said that they would be rubbish at it, and they have both hosted Have I Got News For You.
They have also both been on Top Gear. Clarkson was the long-running host, and Boris showed up to drive a car round an airfield.
The contrast is that Boris is a disorganised figure who is apparently intelligent enough to realise that people warm to disorganised figures more than to overly intelligent figures. But he is not intelligent enough to realise that the intelligent figures that people don’t warm to are the Theresa Mays of this world – inclined to be cold, reserved and generally hard to get to know, but very clever and competent and often right, but nervous about being challenged, difficult to understand and inclined to only talk about the matter in hand – and then only for as little time as possible.
Clarkson is intelligent enough to realise that a person is allowed to understand what they’re talking about, somewhere in the depths of what they’re actually saying. If they claim to be able to do something, and march out, and do it in overblowing style, and screw it up in every way possible and several ways that are not possible, and go “Oh dear, that was wrong,” and do it for entertainment, then this is funny.
But to be funny this must be precise. Johnson can list a lot of moments where he was funny, like his waving flags while dangling from a zipwire. But he’s been bumbling through the public eye for nearly thirty years, so this is to be expected.
Clarkson, by contrast, is quite good at being daft on a weekly basis – while actually being informative occasionally. I’m not a motorist and I don’t believe in driving around office buildings, and for that matter I disapprove of driving in bus lanes, but I’m quite intrigued by these:
He is aware of traffic problems, and makes points which a lot of transport experts ignore – like the note that door-to-door journey time at the time when you want to travel is really all that matters. (This means that a 20-minute flight at from somewhere half an hour from point A to somewhere an hour from point B at 07:00 is not competitive with a three-hour drive if the customer has to be in point A until 10 o’clock, for example.) He talks confidently and lucidly about his farm, and explains with relevant exaggeration why it’s not worth the candle. He similarly makes it sound like he doesn’t know what he’s talking about by referring to “sheeps” and I have been on a train with someone who had watched the show and loved it but found that really really annoying!
Whereas Boris can do a good impression of hoping that if you say things then stuff will happen, and it doesn’t.
Clarkson of course also has hit people, said offensive things and split up with his wife. But he’s not been as much of a hypocrite, has run something other than a newspaper and doesn’t make an obvious habit of outright lying. Boris’s nonsense wasn’t even always aimed at advancing his career; often it was for his amusement. Taken together, one can end up with a feeling that Clarkson better understands the real world than Boris and would have made a rather better prime minister.
Better still of course is the intelligent person who is amiable and acceptable and knows what they are talking about, which it could be suggested the public do actually appreciate. Harold Wilson, who suppressed his supreme intelligence behind a pipe and some quips won majorities at three elections – one was against the rather disinterested Sir Alec Douglas Home, and the other two were against the rather distant and aloof Edward Heath. (Heath won another, and they got a score draw on the fourth.) Two of those majorities were rather narrow. Tony Blair, who could never be accused of being an idiot (deluded by his own intelligence, but not an idiot), discarded the pipe and the worst of the quips and also won three elections. In a row. With rather better majorities, and against opponents who were not really worse than Ted Heath.
But the irony? If Boris had come in favour of Remain in 2016 as Clarkson did, and Remain had won, he would most likely have still become Prime Minister in 2019 as the replacement for Cameron (the other likely candidates at the start of 2016 were Osborne and May; it is hard to picture Osborne being that popular with the membership, and May would probably have been pushed out at some point). He would still have been prime minister now. His relationships with Europe and half the electorate would be rather better, and he would have come in to a Government that was feeling strained – Cameron’s majority in 2019 would have likely been around 8 or 10 – but generally afloat. Sometime in 2020 or 2021 he would have fought an election against Corbyn, and if it had been May 2021 he would almost certainly have won his 80-seat majority. A more relaxed environment would have supported him being more of a figurehead than the ultimate decision-maker riding to the rescue of the British people, with less concern about enemies plotting at every turn. He would still have had to deal with Covid, but it would not have come straight after Brexit so the country might have had the political energy to deal with it. And, of course, perhaps most critically, Cameron would have fired Pincher and done it properly.
Instead he made himself an isolated figure in a hardline wing of the party – a relative liberal who wanted to be liked lost amongst the “sod ’em” libertarians who are happy for anything to be legal provided it’s what they wanted to do anyway. He does not look to have been happy there. The rest of the country has gone off him, and ultimately this cost him the job he wanted. It is hard to feel sorry for him. The great decisions that we are told he got correct – Ukraine, vaccines, doing something to respond to Covid – are stuff that it was hard to get spectacularly wrong. The small decisions, like not backing dead cabinet ministers after they were clearly doomed or not listening to Jacob Rees-Mogg, he managed to make a mess of. We are told that he will be fondly remembered for his success at Brexit, but it is worth noting that Ted Heath is not particularly remembered for taking us into Europe in the first place. Heath, so far as anyone has heard of him these days, is at least as widely remembered for the Three-Day Week. Most likely the whole affair of our European membership, being of little relevance to the wider national story, will be brushed beneath the carpet of history.
We await evidence of a realistic replacement prime minister who understands the damage that paying out free money in 2020 has done to the economy and is willing to restore this situation without resorting to pulling down the nation’s infrastructure.
This is an old-sounding post because it is an old post, found while flicking through unpublished drafts and wondering if I should finish some of them. I wrote it in May 2020 or thereabouts. For some reason I didn’t hit “Publish”. Maybe it felt too much like a revolt against the then-fashionable (but now largely exploded) concept of lockdowns (if you still think they work, go to Our World In Data and compare the UK with Sweden) in its enthusiasm for the question of whether there were loopholes in the rules. I preferred to feel that any decisions I might or might not make regarding my ability to follow Covid regulations were being played out quietly and offline in view of the popular hysteria of the era, without suggesting to the Gestapo that I might be worth monitoring in case I happened to cave in one Tuesday afternoon. My apologies for cowardice to anyone in a similar situation to whom this post would have offered some moral support in concluding that the whole business was so badly framed as to be ridiculous. Anyway, I think the penultimate paragraph has aged well even if the rest of it is now irrelevant. It remains as I found it half an hour ago, untouched since mid-2020, despite thoughts about adding some more explicitly vengeful comments here and there – I have merely got round to finding a suitable opera to follow the promise of an opera, which for some reason I hadn’t got round to doing. Maybe actually the reason why this wasn’t posted was because I then had a pleasant evening watching operas on the pretext of selecting one to round off the post and went to bed in a better temper.
___…___
There has been some discussion lately of the law created by the Government last week (without telling anyone else) which overruled the old principal that “An Englishman’s home is his castle” or, as one African president put it while blocking a law banning homosexual activities, “If people want to go into their bedrooms and do stupid things then that’s their business”.
Anyway, originally Section 7 of The Health Protection (Coronavirus, Restrictions) (England) Regulations 2020 (S.I. 2020 350) said this:
Restrictions on gatherings
7. During the emergency period, no person may participate in a gathering in a public place of more than two people except—
(a) where all the persons in the gathering are members of the same household,
(b) where the gathering is essential for work purposes,
(c) to attend a funeral,
(d) where reasonably necessary—
(i)to facilitate a house move,
(ii)to provide care or assistance to a vulnerable person, including relevant personal care within the meaning of paragraph 7(3B) of Schedule 4 to the Safeguarding of Vulnerable Groups Act 2006,
(iii) to provide emergency assistance, or
(iv) to participate in legal proceedings or fulfil a legal obligation.
This has been widened over the last few weeks and as of Sunday just gone now says the below. The crucial bit is the appearance of the words “or private” in paragraph 1:
7.—(1) During the emergency period, unless paragraph (2) applies, no person may participate in a gathering which takes place in a public or private place—
(a) outdoors, and consists of more than six persons, or
(b) indoors, and consists of two or more persons.
(2) This paragraph applies where—
(a) all the persons in the gathering are members of the same household;
(b) the person is attending a funeral, as—
(i) a member of the deceased person’s household,
(ii) a close family member of the deceased person, or
(iii) if no-one within paragraph (i) or (ii) is attending, a friend of the deceased person;
(c) the person concerned is an elite athlete, the coach of an elite athlete, or (in the case of an elite athlete under the age of 18), the parent of an elite athlete, and the gathering is necessary for training or competition;
(d) the gathering is reasonably necessary—
(i) for work purposes, or for the provision of voluntary or charitable services;
(ii) to facilitate a house move;
(iii) to provide care or assistance to a vulnerable person, including relevant personal care within the meaning of paragraph 7(3B) of Schedule 4 to the Safeguarding of Vulnerable Groups Act 2006;
(iv) to provide emergency assistance;
(v) for the purposes of early years childcare provided by a person registered on the Early Years Register under Part 3 of the Childcare Act 2006;
(vi) to enable one or more persons in the gathering to avoid injury or illness or to escape a risk of harm;
(vii) to continue existing arrangements for access to, and contact between, parents and children where the children do not live in the same household as their parents, or one of their parents;
(e) the person concerned is fulfilling a legal obligation or participating in legal proceedings;
(f) the gathering takes place at an educational facility and is reasonably necessary for the purposes of education.
(3) For the purposes of this regulation—
(a) there is a gathering when two or more people are present together in the same place in order to engage in any form of social interaction with each other, or to undertake any other activity with each other;
(b) a place is indoors if it would be considered to be enclosed or substantially enclosed for the purposes of section 2 of the Health Act 2006(4), under the Smoke Free (Premises and Enforcement) Regulations 2006(5).”
So, let’s pick holes. (Never write long legislation. The shorter the law, the fewer the holes.)
The first paragraph is a blanket ban on more than six people being together outdoors and more than one person being indoors.
The second paragraph is a list of exceptions. a) means that you are not committing an offence by sharing an indoors space with people with whom you are normally resident. b) allows attendance by a small number of people at funerals. c) allows people training for the Tokyo Olympics this summer to continue doing so, although as the Tokyo Olympics are cancelled this subsection seems to be entirely irrelevant. d) covers a long list of miscellaneous exceptions and get-out clauses. e) stops people using it as an excuse for leaving prison, and f) allows schools to re-open.
The third paragraph is the interpretation.
Let’s start with paragraph 3. Sub-paragraph a) defines a gathering for the purposes of paragraph 1. It is rather odd since, if read literally (the proper way of reading English law), it means that if you have a friend round at your house purely for the purposes of feeling that there is someone else present and for no form of interaction – you sit in silence two metres (6.6ft) apart for two hours and read separate books (or, better still, one reads a book and the other plays cards) – then the section does not apply to your activity because you are not engaging in a gathering according to sub-paragraph 3a. If the host offers the guest a drink, or discusses the book (or the progress of the card game, or how you pay poker with yourself – a useful skill which you soon learn when in lockdown alone) then it becomes a criminal offence.
Obviously if we use the purposive (European) approach then this get-out does not apply, but happily we all voted four years ago to say that we weren’t in Europe. Literal approach it is.
Paragraph 1 fulfils the rule above that the shorter the rule, the fewer the holes, so there is no fun to be had there. Let’s turn to paragraph 2.
Sub-paragraph a) raises certain entertaining questions over a definition of household, which we will come back to. Sub-paragraph b) is inherently not entertaining so we will pass on, and sub-paragraph e) is fairly clear.
Let’s have a spot of fun with sub-paragraph f), as we may wish to discuss whether:
certain schools count as educational facilities;
whether the contact is necessary when the children could be sent away to read Wikipedia;
what sort of education is being provided.
For example – if one runs a social club based around learning and performing operas which meets weekly in a spare classroom in the evenings at a local school, then this is:
an educational facility; and
necessary in order to be educated on how to perform the opera.
You might say that I don’t need to know how to perform an opera. The response to that is that education teaches:
how to do specific useful tasks;
how to apply those skills to broaden your mind further;
how to make the best out of life through development of general skills and learning how to apply them to learn further skills;
Social awareness and understanding.
The value of opera is admittedly debated, but given the tradition of Government funding for opera houses it could be deemed to be a useful task. It is highly mind-broadening and provides another way of looking at the wider world. And it develops social awareness by considering how the various characters are reacting to the situations that they find themselves in. Thus it is arguable that an opera rehearsal at a school involving, say, a chorus of about 450 people for maximum effect, counts as a legitimate gathering.
Right, back to sub-paragraph 2d). This is actually rather important – specifically the clause at (vi). You can gather to avoid injury or illness or to escape a risk of harm.
There are a wide multitude of circumstances that this can cover – it is likely primarily written for domestic abuse victims – but for people in my position of solo resident with bouts of depression this is a clause to keep in mind. If you are feeling seriously suicidal – in the “contemplating sticking fingers in live light bulbs socket” or “running out in front of cars reckoning it’ll be best if they don’t brake” category of suicidal – but having a friend round for the afternoon stops you from feeling suicidal and gets life back on its feet for a bit, then you should be reasonably able to argue that you are avoiding injury and escaping a risk of harm. If you are avoiding injury and escaping a risk of harm, then paragraph 2 applies and you may participate in an indoor gathering with people from outside your own household. (But it is simpler to meet them outside, and generally healthier too, unless it happens to be raining and you’re sitting on a wet bench.) Obviously you have to be able to argue that this injury would be likely to occur, though preferably not to the point of being able to cite a list of hospital visits caused by failed suicide attempts.
(I have long had a view that under a slightly mangled view of the English legal principle of equity then if the lockdown is doing you rather more harm than good then you should be able to read-in a bit of leeway until it gets closer to balancing out. It is nice to see this in the statutory instrument.)
Right, back to paragraph 2 sub-paragraph a). Define a “household”. Obviously if you live in an ordinary 1930s middle-class family of two parents and two children in a 1930s semi-detached house in a garden suburb then you are a household, and all is clear and simple.
If you live in a 76-room mansion with twenty servants then you and your servants constitute a household.
If you live in a 76-room three-wing mansion containing an extended family, where each wing is self-contained and has doors doubling as what a business would call “Chinese Walls” so that the various bits of the extended family can live independent lives, then matters are a bit more complex. If you don’t normally see Uncle Lord Chedzoy because he lives two wings away and has separate kitchen, bathroom and driveway, then are you in the same household? (Obviously it will turn out that you are because your maid is quietly seeing Lord Chedzoy’s undercook, but from your placid above-stairs perspective you may feel that you’re in separate households.)
There always used to be a distinction in English rental law (I forget whether some person abolished it; from the approach of my landlady in my lodgings at university I think it’s still in force) that if you share a kitchen with your landlady then you do not benefit from the protection of the Rent Acts. This term is every bit as alarming as it might sound – it means that your landlady can walk into your room one day and tell you to pack and go. (She didn’t, as it happens.) If you have your own kitchen to which your landlady does not in the usual course of things have access (because you have quiet enjoyment of it) then you do have protection of the Rent Acts (or their successors) which means that you have to be given a statutory period of notice to quit.
This is merely mentioned because it seems a reasonable basis to deem that if you share a kitchen then you share a household with your landlady. But if you don’t, then you might not. On the other hand, if you share a front door, a set of coat hooks and a boot rack with your landlady (but not the kitchen) then you’re still coming into pretty frequent contact, whether with each other directly or with the sleeves that the other person has been coughing into.
What about a four-storey townhouse divided up into eight flats with no landlady present, whether self-contained or not and whether or not they have locks on the doors? What does the household look like? Are all these people in the same household? (It cuts both ways – if they are, then they can associate together; but if they are, then they must self-isolate together.)
What about a property where you live and work? Plenty of people live in these at the moment. Gatherings where reasonably necessary for work purposes are legitimate. But what are work purposes?
Well, obvious, duh – where you do work. But how does one define doing work? People at work discuss stuff not related to work. I had a ‘phone call recently with my line manager about my objectives for the year which spent about five minutes on that somewhere in the middle of an hour-and-a-half discussion on how we each were (or weren’t) coping with solitary existence in the lockdown. If you have a work colleague round to your house to discuss a document that you’ve found you can’t coherently discuss over the ‘phone then that surely that counts as work purposes? You might move on to a discussion over a glass/ mug of something, perhaps during a break, about the football repeats, or the television, or how they’re coping – but the primary function of the session is work.
What if you have a friend turn up while you’re working from home to be a non-interactive presence in the corner and you start using them as a sounding board for your work? That’s work. You’re discussing work. Your employer is getting something out of it. Admittedly your friend isn’t employed by your employer, but what sort of picture is appropriate for a slideshow on how to fill vacancies caused by the impact of coronavirus on your business is a work question, not a social one.
Well, there is a way to establish this. Every day the Prime Minister hosts a number of people in his house for what he says are work purposes (such as listening to him talking to a TV camera). Presumably some of them pause for a natter afterwards, because they’re humans. All that is required is for one of these people to be identified by the police constable on the door, arrested and prosecuted for offences under S.7 of The Health Protection (Coronavirus, Restrictions) (England) Regulations 2020 on the basis that they were present indoors with a person who was not a member of their household while carrying out non-work-related discussions (for example, the weather, or the state of Matt Hancock’s garden, or how Boris’s Sprog is progressing). If they get six months, then we know that when having colleagues round to discuss business matters we should stick firmly to the point. And if they don’t then we know that team-building barbeques are a legitimate way of spending summer evenings.
You may be a better-informed reader and have already seen it.
Effectively, the Government has noticed that road traffic collisions tend to go uninvestigated except in so far as required for criminal prosecutions, insurance payouts and negligence actions. This creates a rather piecemeal approach that will endeavour to allocate blame (not always very successfully) without considering road safety in the round.
In some cases collisions are made more likely by features of the road. Here’s an example. From this dubious drawing it may look like a standard signal-controlled T-junction.
Who has to stop at the red lights on the far right then?
Now it looks tidy until you discover that the pelican on the right that controls traffic vanishing off down East Road is semi-synchronised with the main junction. It will never show red unless the main set of traffic lights for traffic approaching along West Road are also showing red. But those only show a red aspect when they need to protect someone turning right out of South Road onto the main road – otherwise motorists can bomb through freely between East Road and West Road at 40mph. Once the main junction signal is showing a red aspect, the pelican is free to change to red as well.
So the key risk is that converging right-turn traffic (coming in from the bottom) will be authorised to turn right by a dedicated filter and immediately approach the pelican crossing showing a red (and occasionally will get very upset about the pedestrian in the middle of the road).
There is also a secondary risk because the pelican is synchronised to the green on the main road. Because that only changes to a red aspect when someone wants to turn right onto the main road, if nobody wants to turn right out of the side road then the signals for the main road keep showing green and the pelican crossing never changes. This introduces the possibility that pedestrians will get bored and cross anyway in what they think is a big enough gap. If this is a reasonably open 40mph road then distance and speed can be rather difficult to judge for both pedestrian and approaching car, especially at night.
The secondary risk is exacerbated by the fact that someone who wants to cross the road on the left-hand side of this junction has to go all the way over to the right-hand side, so this may be the fourth crossing they’ve encountered in a 200-yard detour.
There aren’t many of these junctions, so naturally there aren’t a lot of accidents so the local authority is happy with the risk introduced by a pelican crossing that should really be part of the main junction (and be more liberal about changing).
If we had a nationwide body that chanced to investigate an accident elsewhere at a junction with similar concepts then it is more likely that the local authority would be told to redesign the traffic light cycle.
This is good for the motorists as a whole, because it is less likely that someone will be hauled up for causing death by dangerous driving, stripped of their licence and be sent to the slammer for 12 years because they misread a badly-designed set of traffic lights. We should be aware of “human factors” stuff which can be roughly summarised as “people are careless, stupid and habitual” – “I’ve just gone through a green light so I can relax for a couple of hundred yards once I’ve taken this corner and avoided the traffic island”.
A road collision investigation team would benefit from cars being fitted with black boxes of course, and this may become more of a thing (more efficient for checking how fast the driver of car U734 GHF was going when the brakes were applied than measuring black skid marks on the road). I believe some cars already have them.
But its main upshot should be better-designed roads and redesigns of the more accident-inducing designs. Note that being accident-inducing may not mean that it is an accident blackspot. It may just mean that people keep having unreported near-misses that make using the road more stressful (few people will call out the police because someone pulled up suddenly at a red light) and when an accident does occur it is deemed that no specific person was at fault.
Of course if no specific person was at fault then no insurance needs paying out, nobody will go to prison, nothing can be done and nothing needs changing, so a body which says “well, actually the road design really didn’t help, learner drivers should be encouraged to focus right through a junction until they are back on plain road and the Highway Code needs some clarifying” should help to improve the road network’s base safety.
The next thing will be to issue motorists with periodic updates on how to drive better, and possibly introduce some form of route knowledge assessment. (Come on. It is a bit ridiculous that someone can just drive to Cardiff and try to pull out onto the Gabalfa Interchange in rush hour without even looking at the Google Streetview first. Note the tiny stub on the roadsign for the first exit, which you can end up using if you are not careful. Happily there’s another sign further up which makes it clearer, though this is hidden behind a wall and another sign as well as coinciding with some bilingual writing on the road.)
Meanwhile it is not a given that this will happen, so roll up and provide some encouraging comments on the consultation document.
We can then try to get the accident-related annual £28,400,000,000 hidden subsidy to the road network down to somewhere more in the range of the normal overall railway one (which a review for the Rail Delivery Group a few years ago found was actually an annual subsidy of about £100,000, plus a £12,000,000,000 subsidy from the rail industry to the road industry by saving the road industry the costs of trying to carry displaced rail traffic – these roads are very heavily subsidised compared to the alternatives…).
The basis for the article – that lots of people on the Continent (and in independent Ireland) have been jabbed is Good, but the tone is very much of the “Brexit was rubbish, because in the end we would have been better off had the EU done our vaccines” school. Now I was in favour of Brexit as little as the next rabid pro-European, but let’s have a reasonable basis for our arguments and a reasonable evaluation of what isn’t working about a given method of work.
So, let’s take a comparison piece from Our World in Data, from which the Guardian claims to have got its data.
In General
We did it,” said Ursula von der Leyen in her annual state of the union address last week. With more than 70% of its adult population now fully vaccinated against the coronavirus, Europe is, “against all critics, among the world leaders”.
Nine EU countries, including Portugal, Spain, Ireland, France, Belgium and Italy, have now administered one or both doses of a Covid-19 vaccine to a larger share of their populations than the UK, with a further five having overtaken the US.
We can all agree that the silliest decision ever made by a United States of America Government official was to go for self-government; the country would be much better off with direct rule from London. The Covid response has highlighted this, as has the whole business in Afghanistan. And have you tried using American public ground transport? So the fact that the EU is doing better than the USA is no big surprise.
Four points on the statistics. One is the not-wholly-relevant one of averages between individual areas under a common vaccine board – some places will be above and some will be below. If you take any chunk of countries at a given moment and assess them on something then some will be doing better than others, and to an extent if they are all reasonably well-run then the precise order will be a bit random. If you took this statistic for the UK in mid-May then you’d find that England, Scotland and Northern Ireland had vaccinated about two-thirds of their populations and Wales had vaccinated three-quarters. This does not in itself mean that Wales is the best administered area.
A numerical point, partly explaining the discrepancy in Wales, is that Wales and Portugal have the bonus in this regard of relatively small populations compared to England and Germany, so an efficient vaccine programme making reasonable use of a sensible number of convenient facilities can have a big impact very fast. (But also the Welsh pulled their fingers out and did a good job at it. One suspects they were partly stung by the January stats where they were badly trailing the English and suggestions of rationing the Welsh share of the vaccine were getting replies from England of “if you’ve got some spare, can we have it back please?”.) An interesting question is “how did Portugal take so long to vaccinate ten million people?”. Back in February the UK had given one jab to marginally more people than the whole EU. Speaking of actual numbers, instead of percentages of population, Bolivia has vaccinated more people than Ireland – 4.2 million as against 3.7 million.
The accuracy-related point is that according to World in Data (at the time of scribbling) Italy’s percentage of total population jabbed is only a smidgen above the UK. Ireland, Spain, Belgium and Portugal are well ahead; Spain is the only one of these with a population comparable to England. France is a little below, having recently overhauled Germany. The EU average is just below that. The US has slowed up, albeit having jabbed over 180 million people, and percentage-wise is trailing other former British colonies like Malaysia – though is much better off than Australia. (This incidentally is why there is some concern in the US about easing other Covid restrictions. The vaccine situation is not directly comparable.)
The healthcare point is that the success is getting a vaccine into arms pronto. One does not win a race by turning up at the finishing line when all the other athletes are towelling down and racing past them to do a further lap. If you ranked this clump of countries for six weeks in June and July then the UK would be top by some margin, and on the one-jab percentage-of-population rating the UK was top from December 13th 2020 until July 27th 2021, when it was overtaken by Belgium.
Equality
One major point of the EU is to promote more economic and social equality across the continent, and help poorer nations catch up while smaller nations can punch their weight.
Success is far from even across the bloc: poorer states, such as Romania and Bulgaria, are struggling, with 27% and 16% of their populations vaccinated.
That’s not happening. The richer Western nations are still performing better than the poorer Eastern ones even under an EU-managed rollout. Poland’s even behind the USA… (The Bulgaria statistic, down below Covid-ridden Peru and consistently just better than the Lebanon, is really rather depressing for the European project.)
Pushing take-up
National vaccination drives have also been boosted, sometimes dramatically, in more than a dozen EU countries by domestic health passes, now needed to access anything from museums and gyms to cafes, shopping centres and trains.
In other words, in the EU you have to be jabbed or you can’t take a train to go shopping and have a cup of tea. In the UK this does not apply. How you enforce such a thing on people travelling between unstaffed halts or wandering into open publicly-accessible buildings is another matter, which is one reason why in this country we haven’t bothered. The fact that we haven’t bothered means that there isn’t a major direct boost to you personally to getting vaccinated, excepting being able to tell NHS Test-and-Trace callers to cordially consider calling someone else if contacted with a request to isolate. There is merely a boost to the entire country from reduced healthcare requirements and potentially to you at an undetermined later date from not falling ill. The massive easing of restrictions in England and the optimism of no more lockdowns is the bonus of most people getting jabbed. There is a certain fallback to national stereotypes within the UK – the English are optimistic and opposed to any limitations on life, while the Scots are dour and fatalistic.
Several EU nations evidently have ensured that you cannot live a normal life without getting vaccinated:
Austria, Belgium, Cyprus, Denmark, France, Germany, Greece, Hungary, Ireland, Italy, Luxembourg, the Netherlands, Portugal and Slovenia are among the EU countries to have introduced some form of Covid pass.
and thereby effectively given their people no choice but to do so.
If their primary aim was to increase the number of people getting vaccinated, some schemes – certainly in more vaccine-hesitant countries, such as France – do appear to have been successful.
This is on one level quite appropriate, if the aim is vaccination at all costs short of breaking into houses and vaccinating everyone inside, but the English (perhaps Anglo-Saxon?) approach tends to involve more caution about slippery slopes to future restrictions. Witness the unwillingness, even at the height of New Labour’s War on Terror and its enthused paranoia about whether Mrs Next-Door was building a home-made bomb, to carry confirmation that you are who you say you are and that you have a right to be in the country (or just to walk through a metal detector to enter a service station, though the last time I went to the National Exhibition Centre in Birmingham they were walking every visitor through such a detector and doing bag searches). The attitude being taken by the central Government in the UK would almost certainly be different if we had a Labour Government – see Wales – and if we correlate mask-wearing in public with the party make-up of Parliament then we may see reasons for a) Brexit and b) the Conservatives’ irritating tendency towards sufficient majorities and long-term polling leads.
Anyway, the main point is that you can achieve many things with a metaphorical cattle-prod. This one appears to be independent of the EU.
Youth vaccination
Further to increasing vaccination rates, many member states have – in contrast to the UK – already administered first jabs to as many as 80% of 12 to 17-year-olds.
Let us undermine all of the above blogpost, and its inferences about how great the UK vaccination programme is, by pointing out that the question for any vaccination programme is not “will this signal my eternal virtue?” nor “will this make my national statistics look better?” but “does it have any long-term health benefits?” Considering that the vaccine is perfectly capable of killing people if not properly managed then its use should be assessed sensibly.
Plus “Would those vaccines be better off in the arms of sub-Saharan Africans?” All the arguments at the beginning of the year were that they would. Of course, we must acknowledge:
Moreover, the Commission president said, the EU had exported half its vaccines: “We delivered more than 700 million doses to the European people, and we delivered more than 700 million doses to the rest of the world. We are the only region to achieve that.”
This is a major failing by Boris, unless he’s been doing this without telling anyone. (Assuming of course that the EU exported vaccines are actually donations and not that the major vaccine-producing factories are all in the EU, which has then been busy selling them to countries like the UK. That would be a bit like crowing that Oxford is the only net exporter of Mini cars.)
Government skills
With no relevant procurement experience, however, the commission approached talks with manufacturers like trade negotiations, prioritising price over delivery deadlines. Some contracts were signed months later than those of rival buyers.
We were always led to believe that the UK Government couldn’t procure beer in a brewery, so the idea that the EU was worse is quite remarkable.
Overall
Rather than being a marathon not a sprint, as EU officials like to say, vaccination campaigns should probably be both. But after a slow start that will certainly have cost lives, the EU’s collective approach may, finally, be paying off.
No. The countries that were always going to get in first got in first. The countries that left to themselves would struggle to vaccinate half their population have not vaccinated half their population. Apart from eight weeks between January 23rd and March 18th this year, the UK case fatality rate moving average has been below the EU’s. At the start of July a Covid-positive person was over ten times more likely to die of Covid in the EU than the UK – this improved to percentage errors, but has widened back to three times more likely. The case rate in the UK is higher, so the overall death rate is above the EU’s, but this is because the most stringent UK restrictions are amongst the slackest around. Not because of a vaccine programme.
Instead we must remember that Ursula von der Leyen is a politician making a political speech, and that the non-leading nations include several places like Egypt that have barely started vaccinating.
Which is a pity, because it’s nice to blame stuff on Boris.
(It’s also nice to have slack restrictions and freedom to go to places without being shouted at, of course, and I therefore particularly favour the UK vaccine programme because it got us to a reasonably safe place to ease restrictions before almost anywhere else.)
Fifteen months too late, of course, and fourteen months after his lead advisor realised the same thing. (There seems to be a trend here.)
His resignation would be nice, but more value would be him ditching the rules earlier in light of this realisation. (Come on, Mr Hancock. You know it makes sense. If social distancing goes then you can spend more time with her, subject to the usual moral and legal objections raised by your wife and her husband.)
In such an event I think it would be possible to correlate this little Gilbertian number to it somehow, though some slight rewording to possibly involve Hancock, his aid and Boris would be useful:
(Why someone decided to shift one of Ruddigore‘s more notable numbers into Pirates of Penzance is another matter entirely.)
Our top bod in some branch of Public Health England has come out and Said Things.
Specifically, that we may have social distancing and mask restrictions “for several years” until Covid eases in other countries.
This at a time when half the adult population has had a Covid jab, many of the people at very serious risk have had two jabs, and a reasonably average small city of a couple of hundred thousand people will have maybe 150 positive cases.
Now, I may be the only one, but I am keeping to restrictions, wearing a mask and not visiting my relatives on the basis that the current rules will not be around for very much longer (a substantial easing week tomorrow, all gone by July).
If it is going to be around:
for years;
based on the activities of 7-8 billion other people whose behaviour I cannot influence;
based on the views of other Governments, many of which deny that there is a problem;
then could someone kindly explain to me why I am bothering?
By the time this person thinks I am going to be allowed to visit 95-year-old relatives on a legal basis again they will most likely be dead anyway.
It’s not like we’re allowed to go to these other countries anyway, and we’re all being told not to go on holiday this summer to these other countries that have problems, so who are these people who are bringing back a new strain every half hour?
And why are we wasting all this money on a vaccine that won’t get rid of the core restrictions – that a six-hour train journey to see distant relatives is spent in an uncomfortable suffocating mask, and when you get there you can’t hug them, spend the night with them or sit round a lunch table with them anyway?
It is high time the experts acknowledged an unpalatable truth – that if what they have said and done has worked then by August we won’t be needing to listen to them on a daily basis any more. Being deliberately negative about the long-term social possibilities does not help a lot of us and risks a view of “might as well go back to normal then”. Boris understands this, much as this then means he keeps writing big positive flowery cheques about Christmas and Autumn and last May and so on that he then decides he can’t cash.
Elections in the USA are odd things to an UK observer. The President of London (we call him the Mayor) is elected by a sort of form of proportional representation where each voter marks a first preference on the ballot paper (for who they want to win) followed by a second preference (for which of the Conservative and Labour candidates they would like to win). All the votes are totted up, the top two candidates (usually Conservative and Labour, excepting 2000 when it was Conservative and Red Ken) are identified and the others are eliminated (acid baths generally). The second preferences for the less popular candidates are redistributed amongst the top two (where relevant) and one of these two wins.
The equivalent to the US system would be that every London borough gets to vote individually for who the majority of people in that borough want to win, and then the boroughs are allocated a number of votes based on their population and importance at some point, and those votes are allocated to the candidate that the borough voted for, and the candidate who gets most of those votes wins.
The main function of this is that it stops people voting for irrelevant and special-interest parties. (It is also supposed to stop the big states bullying the small states, on the assumption that the President doesn’t bully the small states anyway once elected.)
In the UK almost all the votes are counted on the night, even for complex things like the Mayor of London, and the new Prime Minister can be kissing hands with the monarch within 12 hours of the polls closing. It is shockingly quick – though not as quick as monarchical succession, which is instantaneous. (The business of Government must continue.)
Of course in the UK Government has all been at a standstill for the last six weeks because there’s been an election on; the Government can’t do anything interesting during the election, and the MPs (and most of the Cabinet, and the Prime Minister) are technically not members of Parliament but merely candidates for seats. None of this thing where you can appoint judges during election season in the UK. Not that UK judges are political creatures anyway.
So the idea that there won’t be a result from the US election for weeks and any new President won’t be in office for months is a bit ridiculous.
Not that my personal betting is that there will be a new President.
The final polling was something like Biden 52% against Trump on 44%, but that’s a nationwide result. That could mean that everybody in California is going to vote for Biden, which would be very cute – but won’t be of any more legal use for him than if 51% of the people in California vote for him.
Instead matters rest on swing states, in the way that they rest (usually) on marginal seats in the UK. The darling Beeb identified 10 of them – if Biden wins the right ones, or indeed all of them, then he’s President.
Thing is:
Arizona and Florida are very close;
Pennsylvania and Nevada are not much better;
Voters for Trump are more likely to be uncertain about telling pollsters this (he is hardly popular in certain areas);
The general impression is that Trump-voting is a vote for the President whereas Biden-voting is at least partly against the President, and voters who don’t want something are a very uncertain basis on which to fight an election. (Ask the Remain team in the Brexit referendum.)
If we go with the Beeb’s current predictions, and give Biden Wisconsin, Arizona and Michigan on top of the Democrat-leaning states, then Trump loses and we are apparently all happy.
If however we assume Trump picks up an on-the-day gain of one-to-two percentage points from:
being the incumbent;
shy Trump voters;
soft Biden voters not turning up;
polling uncertainties;
then Trump can expect Arizona, North Carolina, Pennsylvania, Florida and Georgia, which on top of the Republican-leaning states is enough to put him back in the Oval Office for a second term.
I personally am no enormous lover of Trump, but have not seen great signs that I should be enamoured of Biden. I have some sympathies for those who don’t really buy career politicians, and I’m not that certain about a party that can’t attract successful younger candidates.
However, we will all find out what happened when the Supreme Court rules on who won.
I’m sure I can make this picture meaningful in some way, but I cannot immediately think of anything so we will make do with it being a picture of a vast burning nuclear reaction going on a fairly long way away:
Taken eleven years ago from a hillside above Llwyngwril/ Rhoslefain, looking out over Cardigan Bay. There are usually some quite good views from up there looking out at the Lleyn Peninsula, but this one seemed to stand out as generally striking.
For a change, here is something informative. Possibly of particular interest to anyone who has not come across Map Men before, and of especial interest to anyone who considers the team to lack obvious diversity (whose complaints may or may not be undermined by the line “As with many badly-drawn borders, it starts with the British”). I believe discussions of diversity and equality have been going on while coronavirus has been happening, but following them would involve following the news and I have some bookshelves to organise.
(I know the important stuff. Government rubbish, country going down the drain, people being needlessly oppressed, we’re all going to die, nothing’s as good as when I was a lad, survivors need to vote for someone else next time. And so moving on – next week’s about to happen and I need to prepare for my next round of efforts to make the world a better place in those parts of life that I can control.)
Need to remember to pop out when I’ve finished writing this and water them…
Alongside is a climbing plant which got planted somewhere which seemed logical when I had a garden that consisted of a patch of mud, and which has recently been moved into a pot to get it away from the enthusiasm of the box plants.
Meanwhile I’m trying to decide if drawing attention to this particular song on the night that the Four Governments of the United Kingdom decide their latest set of lockdown tweaks is likely to be read as some kind of political statement, and if so which way…
(Oh, what the heck. They’re funny, as I have previously expounded about on this blog’s most popular post, and worth reaching for at awkward moments. The problem with gentle satire – or indeed any satire taking the mick out of a position by featuring the logical extreme – is that it ends up sounding rather like a person at the extreme end of that spectrum, and as there usually is someone out there – uttering daft self-contradictory statements and being terribly puffed up about it – the satire can be mistaken for the original. Thus there’s a spot of debate in the Youtube comments to this one that relates to persuading people that this song is not offensive. Flanders & Swann had periodically used a number called “Bring Back the Birch” which expounded on a history of torture, violence and bloodshed as a possible way of discouraging crime, culminating in “Bring back the flogging, for you – not me”. Unfortunately, as Flanders observed, “half the people we did it to thought we were in favour of it – so subtle was the satire. Just needs re-writing I suppose.” The Goodies had the same problem in South Africa, That Was The Week That Was somehow got away with a song about lynching blacks and knifing white supporters of equality in Alabama featuring a chorus of black-and-white minstrels, and I might have had another example a moment ago which has slipped my mind.)
Official Gawain Blog 