More simple messages for plebs*

Older readers might remember the big issue of the day pre-corona -- the Brexit talks. Now those seem to be on hold at the official level, but parties are manoeuvring for advantage as ever:

UK-EU talks on post-Brexit relations 'in deep freeze'

Brussels laments London’s failure to table comprehensive legal text to work on

“The first big difference is that we have a fully fledged proposal in line with the political declaration while the Brits have only tabled a few things, much less than we expected”, one senior EU diplomat said.

That old dodge again, partly explicable no doubt as Briefings for Britain told us, because there is a clash between culturally-rooted French anxiety to dot every i and cross every t in any agreement, while the good old pragamatic Brits prefer to negotiate things as and when they arise. It is also a shaming strategy,as Varoufakis revealed in his book on the EC, and  cue for useful idiots to assert Brit incompetence.

There may be another vested interest at stake with serious implications for flows of money:

The two sides need to agree on whether or not to extend the transition period by “up to one or two years” before 1 July.

In the same article one interesting snippet:

The former Brexit secretary David Davis has suggested in recent days that the coronavirus pandemic would limit the damage of failing to secure a deal because trade would already have been reduced to a minimum.

 And there might be a quiet change of ground in this:

The main sticking points between the UK and the EU remain on so-called level playing field commitments to ensure that both sides retain high standards in the fields of environmental, social and labour regulations. Brussels is seeking non-regression from EU standards and for the UK to “harmonise” with Brussels on state aid rules that limit subsidies.

Apparently, these emphasised (by me) terms mean a lot to bureaucrats and are a retreat from earlier demands for 'full compliance' back towards the actual terms used in the Political Agreement.

Elsewhere, hints of a revival of confidence in some old and familiar arguments about how to campaign to win over illiterate and gullible plebs. S Sodha, the 'chief leader writer at the Observer': 

Media experts despair at Boris Johnson's coronavirus campaign

It’s easy to look at the photos from last weekend of teeming parks and crowded pubs [in some parts of London] , and attack people for being selfish and stupid [more ways to demonstrate your own superiority too]. But at least as much responsibility lies with the dire lack of a concerted public information campaign from the government [really?]

Any information campaign needs a clear instruction, wrapped up in messaging that persuades people to change their behaviour....“‘Flatten the curve’ ['meaningless jargon' for Sodha] might be the strategy but that doesn’t make it your key message. It makes the problem seem more abstract and distant from people’s lives,” Nicky Hawkins, a communications expert at the Frameworks Institute, tells me....None of the government communication has explained in simple terms why staying at home makes such a big difference to infection and hence death rates...

Shame is a dreadfully ineffective way of trying to motivate people to change their behaviour [Someone ought to tell H Freedman in the Guardian and those offering prim but vicious disapproval on the BBC -- step forward -- yes-- E Maitlis]

Dominic Cummings, made his name testing different messages in real time on Facebook to quickly ascertain which pro-Brexit messages worked [while the usual 'communications experts' failed miserably] . Yet the government has been incredibly slow off the mark in even using the free advertising it has been offered on social media.

Apart from anything else, I wonder where this journalist has been for the past week. TV and even the little bit of social media I see has been absolutely awash with nice simple explantions offered at dictation speed in primary colours by patronising petty bourgeois. Videos show us how to wash our hands,what 'self-isolate' means and how we must obey banal bullet-pointed 'rules'.

We have had lots of idiotic diagrams showing geometric progressions as models for the spread of infection, backed up by silly interviews in which even panicking health professionals claim they show that one person can (and thus will) infect 60,000 people. We've had innumerate presenters reading scripts showing us how Italy and the UK both had 233 deaths in one day last week and so the curves will replicate each other in the future (because 233 is a magic number). 

We've had only limited attempts to discuss the Imperial College model and to compare it with the much less scary Oxford model (only the Times has done that). Even my nice 'ordinary' neighbours know that the overall death rate, which makes the headlines daily , includes people who would have died anyway from 'underlying conditions' or old age, despite the publicity given to one or two exceptions.They ask who the fark decided on 2 metre exclusions and why the numbers of ventilators have suddenly become a key issue as if they were magic machines.

They have seen all sorts of self-important busybodies assume some moral high ground on the basis of some suddenly acquired shallow expertise and start lecturing the rest of us on our responsibilities to 'save the NHS'.

They might sympathise deeply with weeping nurses or patients on video begging us to stay at home -- but see them as victims rather than experts.

There is a great danger that all this simplistic stuff will become simply unbelievable again, just as Project Fear did, and only expose the patronising and deeply insincere interests behind it, to the eternal discredit of the moralisers. I don't know if opinion polls will eventually uncover this reaction as they did (and then only partly) with Brexit.