Criticise
"Criticism may not be agreeable, but it is necessary. It fulfills the same function as pain in the human body; it calls attention to an unhealthy state of things. If it is heeded in time, danger may be averted; if it is suppressed, a fatal distemper may develop"
Winston Churchill
Whenever I hear the word criticise, I tend to think about American wailer Alexander O'Neal and his slick brand of 80s R&B, and in particular his big hit, er, 'Criticize'.
Midway through the track, O'Neal pipes "don't criticize my friends", and this line has sprung to mind of late when it comes to how the Government have handled the Coronavirus crisis, and how the press have handled the Government in return.
It is said that the first duty and priority of Government is to protect its people, and that the role of the press is to hold those in power to account. Well, it's fair to say that both have been failing in their respective jobs in recent times.
Most would accept that these are difficult, unprecedented times. There is no Government in more than seventy years that has had to face a challenge of this scale. A silent and invisible enemy is upon us, an executioner whose face is well-hidden. And that invisible enemy took down our leader, Prime Minister Boris Johnson, for a while. Things like this don't happen during peacetime.
But we are led to believe that we are Great Britain, for whom no challenge is too great.
Well, at the time of writing, almost 15,000 British people have died from this terrible disease in the space of just over a month, with far more to follow, and it is looking like it will destroy our economy too. To put this into context, around 3,500 British people died during the Irish Troubles, which lasted just over thirty years. It is the equivalent of more than a hundred Hillsboroughs. 179 British Armed Forces personnel or MOD civilians have died in Iraq since March 2003. This is a national catastrophe from which it will take us years to recover, while Professor Sir Jeremy Farrar, an expert member of SAGE has said that "the UK is likely to be one of the worst, if not the worst affected country in Europe".
Yet we knew it was coming. We saw it take hold in Wuhan, and we saw it spread westward. But in January, Foreign Secretary Dominic Raab stood in the House of Commons and told parliament that we were well prepared for what was coming, saying that the NHS was "ready to respond appropriately to any cases that emerge". At the same time, certain sections of the press accused those expressing concerns as being "scaremongers", while some dismissed the virus as nothing more than a heavy dose of flu.
Two months or so later, we don't seem to have the semblance of a strategy, we're still greatly short of ventilators in ICU units, those on the frontline are desperately short of PPE - the Royal Stoke had to make an appeal last week after being let down by Government, and some nurses have been wearing bin bags - and our record on testing for the virus is nothing short of pathetic. And I'll say it again, almost 15,000 British people have died in the space of just over a month; and it's possible that some of these didn't have to.
So, where did it all go wrong? And where have the press been?
Firstly, it is clear that we were slow to respond, did not take the developing situation seriously, and our strategy has been non-existent. Indeed, our strategy could be best described as muddling on from one crisis to another, and yet there were many other countries that we could have looked to for guidance.
Let's take our neighbours Ireland as an example. Just across the Irish Sea, they began the pandemic with roughly the same number of ICU beds (6.5 per 100,000; the UK has 6.6 per 100,000). Yet as of last weekend, there had been 6.5 deaths per 100,000 in Ireland as opposed to 14.81 per 100,000 in the UK. Basically, people are dying more than twice as fast here in the UK.
So what did Ireland do that was different to what we did?
Ireland locked down a lot sooner than we did. They closed their schools a lot sooner than we did. While we let a quarter-of-a-million people descend onto Cheltenham, the Irish Government cancelled St. Patrick's Day, and got very serious, matter-of-fact messages out, leading to the Irish people buying-in. We got mixed-messages for a while ("the pubs are still open; don't go to the pubs"), which has surely added to the lack of seriousness that some are giving to the situation, and our own lockdown has been nowhere near as tight as elsewhere.
What's that? Ireland is too small to make a fair and valid comparison? Well how about Germany? Germany: 500,000 tests a week; UK: 341,000 tests IN TOTAL. Germany: 34 ICU beds per 100,000; UK: 6.6 ICU beds per 100,000. Germany: mild symptoms are treated; UK: mild symptoms ARE NOT treated. Ladies and gentlemen, this combination of systematic failure and underpreparedness means that the UK has three times more Coronavirus deaths than Germany.
And we shouldn't forget the political failure around the herd immunity theory that was a big part of the UK Government's initial thinking. It may seem like a long time ago now, but at the beginning of March, Prime Minister Boris Johnson was boasting of shaking hands with people in hospitals that had been dealing with Coronavirus cases, saying that "handshaking must go on", appeared on national TV to explain the Government's approach suggesting that the virus may have to be allowed to sweep through the population, and that we may have to "take it on the chin". The Prime Minister was also reported to have joked that an emergency project to build more ventilators ought to be called "Operation Last Gasp". But I suppose that was just Boris being Boris.
And another serious failure of Government has been the inability to secure sufficient numbers of ventilators to help address the large numbers of people that would be entering ICUs across the country. The Government decided that the best course of action was to make an impassioned appeal to businesses to build and provide, and there is nothing wrong with that in principle. But what they did do was to seemingly dismiss an EU-led common purchasing scheme for ventilators. Between 13th February and 30th March, our Government missed a total of eight (8) calls or meetings between heads of state or health ministers, meetings that we are still entitled to join. We subsequently missed the deadline to join the said scheme. Was it a case of cock-up or ideology?
Of the businesses that have been engaged by the Government to knock out the required ventilators, the highest profile have been Dyson and JCB, both of whom had not manufactured ventilators before, and in fact specialise in vacuum cleaners and big diggers.
But hey, messrs. Dyson and Bamford are ardent Brexiteers, and have donated healthily to the Conservative and Unionist Party, so I guess that means all is well?
Well, last week, Health Secretary Matt Hancock stated that over the next fortnight, a further 18,000 ventilators must be delivered, installed and manned. Billionaire Sir James Dyson had promised 10,000 of those, and that promise is yet to materialise.
The biggest delay in delivering the required ventilators is in the securing of regulatory approval for their use, and it seems that some are struggling to achieve this. But this may be because a ventilator built to the Government's minimum specification published for their ventilator challenge would prove useless in treating Coronavirus patients. What was it that Rishi Sunak said, "whatever it takes"?
And let's talk about PPE. Now you would think that this would've been the simplest task. Round up as many masks, aprons, gloves and suits as possible, and get them to those on the frontline. Yet there are literally thousands of workers that are still short of PPE, and at the same time, close to 40 NHS workers have died as a result of Coronavirus. Let's be brutally honest here, this is a massive health and safety failure, and in any other set of circumstances, there would be a call for corporate manslaughter charges. On 15th March, Boris Johnson promised that all who needed PPE would have it by the end of the week. This did not happen. And to add insult to injury, in an interview with the Today programme, Matt Hancock insinuated that NHS staff had been over-using PPE, and at a daily press conference last week, Hancock also went on to tell them not to use PPE unless they really need to, a blatant case of victim-blaming. And now, PPE is starting to run out, but still, at least there will be some badges, eh?
The provision of PPE is pretty basic stuff, and you'd think that with a situation as serious as this, we would be able to at least get those basics right. Apparently not.
The other aspect of more successful Coronavirus strategies that we have failed on, has been the ability to test and then contain. Most countries that have been seriously affected by the virus have tested extensively, yet we haven't. It is accepted that this is one of the trickier parts of dealing with Coronavirus, but I find it puzzling that we are failing where others are not. It is now the middle of April, and we are currently testing around 18,000 people a day. Matt Hancock promised that by the end of this month, we would be testing 100,000 a day. How in the hell are we going to achieve that Mr. Hancock?
So, we have almost 15,000 people dead from this terrible virus, and it is possible that we will be the worst affected country in Europe. The PPE situation is beyond farcical. And the 100,000 tests target is obviously unrealistic. All of this adds up to what is shaping up to be a serious dereliction of duty from the Government. This is a national disaster on an unimaginable scale.
Yet where are the press? What are they doing to hold those responsible to account?
The line of questioning at the daily press conferences has been dull and pedestrian at best, and most of the time, has let the Government and their officials off the hook. In fact, over the past few weeks, the only high-profile media figure that has been holding their feet to the fire has been Piers Morgan.
Indeed, their biggest concern appears to be how long the period of lockdown is going to last, something which will inevitable grow given the OBR's apocalyptic economic projections. Is this a case of reporters being pressurised into asking such questions from their employers due to concerns about loss of advertisement revenue, with reporters complying due to fears for jobs?
Or is it something else?
When Boris Johnson and the Tories won the December General Election, the reaction in newspapers like the Daily Telegraph was basically a series of orgasms in print. But when we think about Boris Johnson the politician, we shouldn't forget that Boris Johnson is a journalist. He was a journalist before he went into big time politics, and he was still writing a weekly column for the Daily Telegraph - for a reported £250,000 a year; nice work if you can get it... - prior to becoming Prime Minister.
And while it was awful to see Boris develop Coronavirus, it was also awful to see the tone of the press change. By the end of last week when it was clear that he was happily recovering, a certain element of the press began to elevate the Prime Minister to the status of a British hero. Indeed, articles from the likes of Allison Pearson ("the health of Boris Johnson is the health of the body politic and, by extension, the health of the nation itself") and Dan Hodges were beyond cringeworthy, and were close to communist-like propaganda; their copy would not have looked out-of-place in Pravda, while the Sun is currently nothing more than a bad Boris Johnson fanzine. This section of the press basically created a personality cult, and this was at a time when almost 1,000 British people lost their lives over a 24-hour period.
Does Boris Johnson get a free pass from these people because they see him as their man, "one of them"? A fellow journo? A friend they don't want to see criticised?
He is certainly being stoutly defended by them at the moment, and any hint of criticism is pounced upon quickly, and this has spread more generally. Indeed, I have witnessed on social media people getting piled-on for asking perfectly reasonable questions, or for being even mildly critical of the Government's handling of the crisis. People that have criticised are being demonised and accused of 'playing party politics', and this is wrong.
Criticising the Government when justified is not playing party politics. It is OK to criticise. It is healthy to criticise. And if the Government is failing in its duties towards its people, it is absolutely necessary to criticise. And this becomes all the more important when the press are failing to ask the questions that need to be asked during a national catastrophe.
If you're fed up because all we want to do is criticise, well, do something about it. Boris Johnson might want to get one of his old Churchill books out, because he was a man that certainly understood the importance of criticism.
Midway through the track, O'Neal pipes "don't criticize my friends", and this line has sprung to mind of late when it comes to how the Government have handled the Coronavirus crisis, and how the press have handled the Government in return.
It is said that the first duty and priority of Government is to protect its people, and that the role of the press is to hold those in power to account. Well, it's fair to say that both have been failing in their respective jobs in recent times.
Most would accept that these are difficult, unprecedented times. There is no Government in more than seventy years that has had to face a challenge of this scale. A silent and invisible enemy is upon us, an executioner whose face is well-hidden. And that invisible enemy took down our leader, Prime Minister Boris Johnson, for a while. Things like this don't happen during peacetime.
But we are led to believe that we are Great Britain, for whom no challenge is too great.
Well, at the time of writing, almost 15,000 British people have died from this terrible disease in the space of just over a month, with far more to follow, and it is looking like it will destroy our economy too. To put this into context, around 3,500 British people died during the Irish Troubles, which lasted just over thirty years. It is the equivalent of more than a hundred Hillsboroughs. 179 British Armed Forces personnel or MOD civilians have died in Iraq since March 2003. This is a national catastrophe from which it will take us years to recover, while Professor Sir Jeremy Farrar, an expert member of SAGE has said that "the UK is likely to be one of the worst, if not the worst affected country in Europe".
Yet we knew it was coming. We saw it take hold in Wuhan, and we saw it spread westward. But in January, Foreign Secretary Dominic Raab stood in the House of Commons and told parliament that we were well prepared for what was coming, saying that the NHS was "ready to respond appropriately to any cases that emerge". At the same time, certain sections of the press accused those expressing concerns as being "scaremongers", while some dismissed the virus as nothing more than a heavy dose of flu.
Two months or so later, we don't seem to have the semblance of a strategy, we're still greatly short of ventilators in ICU units, those on the frontline are desperately short of PPE - the Royal Stoke had to make an appeal last week after being let down by Government, and some nurses have been wearing bin bags - and our record on testing for the virus is nothing short of pathetic. And I'll say it again, almost 15,000 British people have died in the space of just over a month; and it's possible that some of these didn't have to.
So, where did it all go wrong? And where have the press been?
Firstly, it is clear that we were slow to respond, did not take the developing situation seriously, and our strategy has been non-existent. Indeed, our strategy could be best described as muddling on from one crisis to another, and yet there were many other countries that we could have looked to for guidance.
Let's take our neighbours Ireland as an example. Just across the Irish Sea, they began the pandemic with roughly the same number of ICU beds (6.5 per 100,000; the UK has 6.6 per 100,000). Yet as of last weekend, there had been 6.5 deaths per 100,000 in Ireland as opposed to 14.81 per 100,000 in the UK. Basically, people are dying more than twice as fast here in the UK.
So what did Ireland do that was different to what we did?
Ireland locked down a lot sooner than we did. They closed their schools a lot sooner than we did. While we let a quarter-of-a-million people descend onto Cheltenham, the Irish Government cancelled St. Patrick's Day, and got very serious, matter-of-fact messages out, leading to the Irish people buying-in. We got mixed-messages for a while ("the pubs are still open; don't go to the pubs"), which has surely added to the lack of seriousness that some are giving to the situation, and our own lockdown has been nowhere near as tight as elsewhere.
What's that? Ireland is too small to make a fair and valid comparison? Well how about Germany? Germany: 500,000 tests a week; UK: 341,000 tests IN TOTAL. Germany: 34 ICU beds per 100,000; UK: 6.6 ICU beds per 100,000. Germany: mild symptoms are treated; UK: mild symptoms ARE NOT treated. Ladies and gentlemen, this combination of systematic failure and underpreparedness means that the UK has three times more Coronavirus deaths than Germany.
And we shouldn't forget the political failure around the herd immunity theory that was a big part of the UK Government's initial thinking. It may seem like a long time ago now, but at the beginning of March, Prime Minister Boris Johnson was boasting of shaking hands with people in hospitals that had been dealing with Coronavirus cases, saying that "handshaking must go on", appeared on national TV to explain the Government's approach suggesting that the virus may have to be allowed to sweep through the population, and that we may have to "take it on the chin". The Prime Minister was also reported to have joked that an emergency project to build more ventilators ought to be called "Operation Last Gasp". But I suppose that was just Boris being Boris.
And another serious failure of Government has been the inability to secure sufficient numbers of ventilators to help address the large numbers of people that would be entering ICUs across the country. The Government decided that the best course of action was to make an impassioned appeal to businesses to build and provide, and there is nothing wrong with that in principle. But what they did do was to seemingly dismiss an EU-led common purchasing scheme for ventilators. Between 13th February and 30th March, our Government missed a total of eight (8) calls or meetings between heads of state or health ministers, meetings that we are still entitled to join. We subsequently missed the deadline to join the said scheme. Was it a case of cock-up or ideology?
Of the businesses that have been engaged by the Government to knock out the required ventilators, the highest profile have been Dyson and JCB, both of whom had not manufactured ventilators before, and in fact specialise in vacuum cleaners and big diggers.
But hey, messrs. Dyson and Bamford are ardent Brexiteers, and have donated healthily to the Conservative and Unionist Party, so I guess that means all is well?
Well, last week, Health Secretary Matt Hancock stated that over the next fortnight, a further 18,000 ventilators must be delivered, installed and manned. Billionaire Sir James Dyson had promised 10,000 of those, and that promise is yet to materialise.
The biggest delay in delivering the required ventilators is in the securing of regulatory approval for their use, and it seems that some are struggling to achieve this. But this may be because a ventilator built to the Government's minimum specification published for their ventilator challenge would prove useless in treating Coronavirus patients. What was it that Rishi Sunak said, "whatever it takes"?
And let's talk about PPE. Now you would think that this would've been the simplest task. Round up as many masks, aprons, gloves and suits as possible, and get them to those on the frontline. Yet there are literally thousands of workers that are still short of PPE, and at the same time, close to 40 NHS workers have died as a result of Coronavirus. Let's be brutally honest here, this is a massive health and safety failure, and in any other set of circumstances, there would be a call for corporate manslaughter charges. On 15th March, Boris Johnson promised that all who needed PPE would have it by the end of the week. This did not happen. And to add insult to injury, in an interview with the Today programme, Matt Hancock insinuated that NHS staff had been over-using PPE, and at a daily press conference last week, Hancock also went on to tell them not to use PPE unless they really need to, a blatant case of victim-blaming. And now, PPE is starting to run out, but still, at least there will be some badges, eh?
The provision of PPE is pretty basic stuff, and you'd think that with a situation as serious as this, we would be able to at least get those basics right. Apparently not.
The other aspect of more successful Coronavirus strategies that we have failed on, has been the ability to test and then contain. Most countries that have been seriously affected by the virus have tested extensively, yet we haven't. It is accepted that this is one of the trickier parts of dealing with Coronavirus, but I find it puzzling that we are failing where others are not. It is now the middle of April, and we are currently testing around 18,000 people a day. Matt Hancock promised that by the end of this month, we would be testing 100,000 a day. How in the hell are we going to achieve that Mr. Hancock?
So, we have almost 15,000 people dead from this terrible virus, and it is possible that we will be the worst affected country in Europe. The PPE situation is beyond farcical. And the 100,000 tests target is obviously unrealistic. All of this adds up to what is shaping up to be a serious dereliction of duty from the Government. This is a national disaster on an unimaginable scale.
Yet where are the press? What are they doing to hold those responsible to account?
The line of questioning at the daily press conferences has been dull and pedestrian at best, and most of the time, has let the Government and their officials off the hook. In fact, over the past few weeks, the only high-profile media figure that has been holding their feet to the fire has been Piers Morgan.
Indeed, their biggest concern appears to be how long the period of lockdown is going to last, something which will inevitable grow given the OBR's apocalyptic economic projections. Is this a case of reporters being pressurised into asking such questions from their employers due to concerns about loss of advertisement revenue, with reporters complying due to fears for jobs?
Or is it something else?
When Boris Johnson and the Tories won the December General Election, the reaction in newspapers like the Daily Telegraph was basically a series of orgasms in print. But when we think about Boris Johnson the politician, we shouldn't forget that Boris Johnson is a journalist. He was a journalist before he went into big time politics, and he was still writing a weekly column for the Daily Telegraph - for a reported £250,000 a year; nice work if you can get it... - prior to becoming Prime Minister.
And while it was awful to see Boris develop Coronavirus, it was also awful to see the tone of the press change. By the end of last week when it was clear that he was happily recovering, a certain element of the press began to elevate the Prime Minister to the status of a British hero. Indeed, articles from the likes of Allison Pearson ("the health of Boris Johnson is the health of the body politic and, by extension, the health of the nation itself") and Dan Hodges were beyond cringeworthy, and were close to communist-like propaganda; their copy would not have looked out-of-place in Pravda, while the Sun is currently nothing more than a bad Boris Johnson fanzine. This section of the press basically created a personality cult, and this was at a time when almost 1,000 British people lost their lives over a 24-hour period.
Does Boris Johnson get a free pass from these people because they see him as their man, "one of them"? A fellow journo? A friend they don't want to see criticised?
He is certainly being stoutly defended by them at the moment, and any hint of criticism is pounced upon quickly, and this has spread more generally. Indeed, I have witnessed on social media people getting piled-on for asking perfectly reasonable questions, or for being even mildly critical of the Government's handling of the crisis. People that have criticised are being demonised and accused of 'playing party politics', and this is wrong.
Criticising the Government when justified is not playing party politics. It is OK to criticise. It is healthy to criticise. And if the Government is failing in its duties towards its people, it is absolutely necessary to criticise. And this becomes all the more important when the press are failing to ask the questions that need to be asked during a national catastrophe.
If you're fed up because all we want to do is criticise, well, do something about it. Boris Johnson might want to get one of his old Churchill books out, because he was a man that certainly understood the importance of criticism.
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