EU still wants to regulate forever

An astonishing demand from the EC to regulate the Irish agreement by establishing  an 'office' in N Ireland

 the European commission is expected to press the case to open “a technical office” in Belfast, three days after the government rejected an EU “mini-embassy” in the Northern Irish capital. ... The EU is refusing to drop the issue, amid fears Boris Johnson’s government could renege on the Brexit withdrawal agreement that requires Northern Ireland to follow EU single market and customs rules.

The protocol specifies UK officials are responsible for implementing EU law, but EU officials have the right to be present during any activities related to putting it into practice. It does not specify the right to an EU office....The government says it is ready to support ad hoc visits, but the EU argues it would be impractical for officials based overseas to be routinely flying in [they've never been one for unnecessary travel].

The Barnier crew might have scented an opportunity for obstruction since the recent Elections delivered more useful Northern Irish EU idiots:

 A narrow majority of Northern Irish MPs, it has emerged, [now] back the EU plan for a Belfast office.

A Gove indiscretion seems not to have helped:

EU concerns about the British commitment to implementing the protocol escalated after Gove told the Brexit select committee on Monday that the joint committee was an opportunity to “develop” the protocol. The EU has always said the joint committee can only implement the withdrawal agreement.

A classic clash of political cultures again! At least Graun coverage is definitely improving. Normally there would have been much stronger support for any proposal from our European neighbours however blatantly and ideologically bureaucratic.

M Kettle seems to be consolidating his membership of the new petite bourgeoisie:

No 10 played the media brilliantly....many journalists [had begun] to question Johnson’s and the government’s continuing fragility...Then came the news of the birth

The wrong kind of personal seems to have become political in this case. M Barnier clearly needs to regain ground with a new baby, maybe with A Merkel? 

It is still all a bit grudging:

the birth of his and his partner’s son now also vaults across much of the bitterness that many will always feel about his political career – a bitterness that, it is crucial to understand, large parts of the population do not feel towards Johnson in any way [who exactly is he addressing here, I wonder] ...Yet there is still something inescapably different about this particular prime ministerial birth. Johnson is a personality politician of a kind Britain has never known....Now he has done it again by becoming the first unmarried prime minister to have a child in No 10.[The Guarnida still cares about that?] 

Baby Johnson is likely to be a much more public part of the Boris brand...The baby fits perfectly into [his] highly individual, iconoclastic form of “being” rather than “doing” leadership.

Gaurndistas who still want to drip on and on about 'Europe' must see the agenda slipping away from them. Maybe their morale is failing because they can't do solidarity-generating dinner parties any more and there are no demos in the cities?

On the one hand, he leads a government whose only serious purpose is to break Britain from the European Union and its regulatory regimes. On the other, it is a government held together by Johnson’s idiosyncratic mix of English nationalism, social liberalism and activist one-nation Toryism. Covid-19 has played to this latter version of the government, not the anti-regulatory, pro-Brexit version. With the pandemic and its consequences now so consuming, the idiosyncratic version – more than ever dependent on Johnson himself – is the one in the ascendant.

Then a rather Oedipal point to end:

Is there anyone out there who still thinks the role of the individual in politics is trivial when measured against the struggle of class against class, and the clash of historic forces [which might have been his marxist Dad's view]? Johnson’s career is a living and breathing negation of such thinking [no serious marxist would have any problem dismissing little Kettle's shallow analysis, of course]

Johnson fails to ward off approaching asteroid.

G Hinsliff in the Gruniad adresses a crucial issue for many Graunyfolk:

Why Boris Johnson isn't getting the blame for coronavirus 

They had such hopes! The virus would inspire a popular uprising because the Government had not ordered enough PPE, Tories would be swept out of power following massive demos and press campaigns, and Brexit would be abandoned. Alas...

The happiest people in lockdown are those most capable of finding solace in small things [most of the population that is, without constant restless unfocussed anxiety], and it’s this dramatic lowering of expectations under pressure that might help explain the baffling paradox in politics right now....somehow, blame slides off our prime minister – 60% of Britons think that a government led by the man who missed five Cobra meetings about coronavirus has handled the epidemic well, according to YouGov,

the left [and the entire Gurdina organization] has always underestimated Johnson’s natural rapport with voters , even after he won a Brexit referendum followed by a landslide general election, and is still doing so now. Not everyone is thinking what you’re thinking, to put it simply: millions of Britons either still actively like Johnson, or are willing to give him the benefit of the doubt... a third of Labour voters, half of Liberal Democrat voters and 49% of remainers agree. 

 YouGov’s extraordinary findings, when tracking changes in the public mood, [show] that happiness is rising again after plummeting at the start of lockdown, while stress and fear are declining after an early spike... Logically, the situation hasn’t got any less frightening....[People are] dangerously open to the defence Johnson is now apparently trying to build ahead of any public inquiry, that is that this was an unprecedented global crisis in which everyone made mistakes but he nonetheless did his best.

 The unprincipled shyster! Finally identifying the beam in her own eye,Hinsliff concludes

no opposition to Johnson will succeed unless it first understands why, whatever happens, so many people want so badly to believe in him.

She might not have to go far for material. Petty bourgeois have deeply irrational and conservative beliefs and tastes too, except in some safe 'imaginary' areas. Even a Graun colleague argues: 

 Take the safe option: it's time to ditch edgy fads

The 21st century seems so unhinged, it feels as though it’s drastically in need of a friend to confiscate its phone and force-feed it a sensible mug of Horlicks. So as we enter a new decade, it’s time to wake up to the obvious truth that sometimes playing it safe might be the smarter option. Sure, it won’t necessarily make for great social media content or keep trend forecasters in business, but the tried and tested route at least offers proven enjoyment.

Elsewhere, a 'positive psychologist' sees an opportunity for trade and writes:

what can we do during Covid-19 to become an emotional coach for our kids?  

Lots of professorial advice follows:

For home-learning, you can set a language assignment that involves your kids creating an “Emotions Dictionary”. Have them look up the full range of different emotions, define each emotion [not actually easy, in fact], put it into a sentence and write about how that emotion might show itself during family lockdown. You can add an art lesson to this by having your child draw or paint each emotion [modern expereimental artists like F Bacon have been trying to do this unsuccessfully for years] ....As parents, we can also take comfort in knowing that “this too shall pass”. The anxiety or frustration you had this morning during family lockdown will give way to a sense of relief that your family is safe, gratitude for the kindness of a friend, pride that your family is adapting and having little wins [eg small signallings of virtue?] along the way during this time of crisis....A key part of building emotional intelligence is being able to name one’s emotions. [didn't she say that earlier?]  You can encourage your child to explore their emotions using the metaphors of weather....create a positive playlist of songs that boost your mood. Include songs about resilience, triumph and overcoming negative events.

It looks pretty much like the jolly old commonsense of the middle classes given by Observer agony aunt M Frostrup who has no qualifications in psychology at all, from what I can see. The link does point to a published study of emotional literacy, finding positive changes after an intervention programme (but not allowing for the Hawthorne effect -- any intervention of any kind has positive benefits), and there remains a bit of a problem in this:

However, the participants did not share a common language to describe, and had different knowledge and understanding of, the term emotional literacy (pp 416--7)

It is just not that easy to find reassurance for those for whom it is a fearful world. After all, the Graun also reports that:

Mile-wide asteroid set to pass within 3.9m miles of Earth

  And  what is Johnson doing about it? Nothing!

 

Linguistics,science and new petty bourgeois superiority *

A brilliant contribution today from David Shariatmadari ('a Guardian editor and writer. His book Don't Believe A Word: The Surprising Truth About Language [was] out in August 2019') who evidently needs a bit of a plug. As a demonstration of the npb cultural skills necessary to work out what people 'really mean', 'in effect', it is masterful:

'Invisible mugger': how Boris Johnson's language hints at his thinking 

things aren’t readily accessible to the five senses [by plebs anyway] – whether abstract concepts like Brexit, or invisible pathogens – tend to get “translated”, via metaphor, into easily graspable images...That process, though, is not a neutral one. As linguists such as George Lakoff have pointed out [as if it wasn't already bleedin obvious], the metaphors we choose both reflect our prejudices and influence our approach to the world. With Brexit, no deal was either a “cliff edge” or a “clean break”, depending on where your sympathies lay....The “physical assailant” metaphor is one way to look at the challenge of coronavirus, but it is not the only one.

Shariatmadari himself, like a good Grundinist, does not like (physically) violent metaphors, (he probably thinks they cause violence -- see the review of his book below) and adds:

Some have taken to social media to complain that the idea of the “surprise attack” disguises the fact that the government had many weeks to prepare a better response to the pandemic than the one it has executed...People with cancer have long lamented the drawbacks of framing the disease process as a “battle”...And the prime minister’s idea that we “wrestle [coronavirus] to the floor” would seem at odds with the patient, precise work that will have to be done, over many months, to keep it at bay.

What more evidence do we need that the man's a brute and cad, and that Brexit was a terrible mistake? 

Shariatmadari's book was reviewed very favourably in the GRaun at the time, in a demonstration of how dog sometimes licks dog, at least if they live in the same kennel :

Shariatmadari’s general approach to language is pro-diversity and anti-pedantry....it is a meaty, rewarding and even necessary read. ...This book makes a good case for seeing linguistics as “the universal social science”...If life can be differently worded, it can be differently lived [that's the whole basis for 'political correctness' and thought policing, right there].

In a graun editorial:

The last 10 years have undermined the ability of the government to respond effectively and efficiently. As the UN rapporteur on extreme poverty told the Guardian, the “most damaging aspects of ‘austerity’ cannot and will not be undone” and represent “the fatal weakening of the community’s capacity to cope”....Even today ideology plays a bigger part in the government’s response than many insiders care to admit. A more proactive mindset might have seen the state mobilise an effort to track down those in need of a coronavirus test and offer it to them. Instead voluntarism remains the creed of the current government which opted for an online booking system for tests that was predictably overwhelmed within hours.

State mobilisation instead of voluntarism -- strange times for liberals. And here's the real anxiety:

A virus as communicable as Sars-Cov-2 means that the health of the richest is dependent on the health of the poorest.[As Victorian politicians learned during the London cholera epidemic of the 1830s]

There are more examples of the astonishing and entirely opportunist npb volte-face which we saw beginning with climate change scares, the Grun -- the Graun!! -- has a good word to say for 'science'.Surely science is deeply implicated in phallogocentrism and colonialism,not to mention human exceptionalism and a consequent exploitative stance to the natural world? The old folderol about feelings and emotions best captured by poetry or 'sensing' seems to have vanished in a classic binary flip to the other pole, ending in a naively positivist almost religious view of 'science'. Luckily, plebs won't know anything about science either, so it will be a chance to do some finger-wagging and demonstrate social superiority as usual.

These choices may be informed by science. But they will be guided by a particular political morality, which will not be as evidence based or as rational [!] as science.

Newsnight's Arts graduates and luvvies have also been smugly citing 'the science', or at least a few simple numbers and graphs dug up by precariously employed researchers, to rebuke the Government at every turn, of course. At first, it was about the shockingly low number of ventilators acquired for the NHS. Strong leadership was needed to instruct people to make ventilators, if not make the trains run on time.

Now, a Graun item might be of interest:

UK to halt several ventilator projects after fall in demand

Many available devices remain unused owing to lockdown and less invasive treatment

Culture warriors ride again

An attempt to give the coronapanic some legs, while social distancing in the Bourdieu sense with this:

Boris Johnson's lockdown is the latest target for the right's angry culture warriors 

For weeks we have heard that merely asking questions about the government’s handling of the coronavirus outbreak is “politicising the crisis”. But now some people on the right are indeed making the pandemic political – firing up the culture wars forged in what now feels like the prehistoric age of Brexit....

Luminaries of the leave campaign have jacked up familiar themes to revive a well-worn narrative: of patriotic ordinary people set against “whingeocrat” metropolitan elites and woke leftists who hate Britain. [but, symmetrically,] critics of the government’s slow, muddled response to the pandemic... may overlap with the remainers of old

Warming to hir (aka his/her) theme, R Shabi says:

the lockdown... is being presented as a freedom-sucking con – much like the EU....Mirroring the dynamics of climate denialism...the culture-war narrative is, as ever, a rhetorical smokescreen, deflecting substantive arguments. And just as Brexit was a delivery mechanism for hard-right ideas, lockdown scepticism is about promoting an ideological agenda.

Looking to future campaigns, but with an excuse already prepared..

What’s really being contested is the kind of society that will emerge once this is over....Brexit populists and big-state haters are worried....battles we will face over the shape of our future society... show... how existing divisions may be manipulated for political advantage [heaven forbid!].

The sceptics are currently out of sync with public opinion. But as we know from painful experience, we can’t assume this will always be the case [the stupid old public again --what are they like?] .

It is well established in Grudina minds that culture wars are now waged only by sinister right wing forces. Their own pathetic efforts have been ridiculed, and the term become one of abuse, so now they use it only for opponents. But it takes a threatened cultural warrior to recognise a culture war, and this is a group that can recognise an opportunity for culture war in anything. There seems to be positive delight in returning to the struggle, being able to reinforce social boundaries and to weave together whole worldviews -- classic new petty bourgeois cultural activity.

Meanwhile, in a so-far silent and tactfully indirect dialogue with P Toynbee, J Harris notes a tendency to neglect or downgrade the elderly in recent events, partly because:

Far too many people have fallen into the habit of using the generational split in views about the EU as an excuse for thinking of older people as impossibly reactionary and therefore worthy of sneering contempt.

Tired rhetoric survives coronavirus

Pressure grows from the EU (needing UK funds as long as possible) and useful idiots in Parliament and the press (straw-clutchers who can't believe they lost,and think they will win if there is a next time) for an extension to the transition period. This bid seems to have been delivered with all the charm we expect, and with the same tropes that proved so helpful to the Remain case before:

Boris Johnson must extend the UK’s transition out of the EU for up to two years to avoid compounding the economic damage of the coronavirus pandemic with a hugely disruptive and disorderly Brexit [please God...not the threat of expensive strawberries at Wimbledon time], according to a close ally of Angela Merkel.

Röttgen, a member of Merkel’s Christian Democratic Union party, said: “Before the current coronavirus crisis, I think it would have been possible to have a minimum agreement with the UK on the broad outlines to avoid a crash [the UK crashing out with no deal], {Welcome back!} with more detailed negotiations then taking place afterwards...“I can’t imagine now that this is possible, given the fact that all the EU countries, Brussels and London are so absorbed by the pandemic

Delays have crept in because the technocrats can't master Zoom.

EU officials have said that concluding deals on such complex issues – already a lengthy and tortuous process – is far more difficult without face-to-face meetings. One high-level EU source said: “You can get so far but what you can’t do is go away into small groups of six or eight people in a dark [no longer smoke-filled] room and hammer out the final, vital details. That is not possible in a virtual meeting.”

An open admission of caucus politics and conspiratorial underpinnings. The Observer link is to another story with the same themes which actually has nothing to say about the rival merits of f2f and online. It does name some possible useful idiots though: 'Philip Rycroft, a former chief civil servant at the now defunct Brexit department' and 'Sam Lowe, a senior research fellow at the Centre for European Reform thinktank'

The scheme faces the same problems identified in the GRaun earlier (below):

Johnson would have to reverse legislation that, in effect, bars him from seeking an extension, and he would have to agree additional financial contributions to the EU to pay for that extension....

No real chance then, but wait.... some more useful idiots might have been recruited:

Another senior EU politician involved in the talks said there were signs of division appearing on the UK side, with some civil servants and Tory MPs believing the UK had to find a way to abandon its opposition to extending the transition:

The Observer editorial already is on the battle bus, of course. There is a new twist (at first) to the links between the virus and Brexit:

It is now painfully clear, as the government struggles to defeat the Covid-19 pandemic, that Britain is paying a heavy price for the Brexit distraction in the early weeks of 2020...Brexit continues to be an unwelcome, unnecessary and damaging distraction today. Many, including this newspaper, believe it always was. 

A mere distraction that occupied over 2 years of debate and a General Election -- what was the fuss all about?

There is a different metaphor (at first) :

What sane government, at this time of unprecedented economic, financial, social and human distress, would deliberately risk further, massive disruption to vital trade, business, investment and security lifelines? Yet thanks to the Brexiters, this second catastrophe – a calamity of choice – is racing towards us like a runaway train loaded with explosives. [But then back to an old friend:] Britain is getting set to jump off a no-deal cliff [to avoid a train?] at its moment of greatest vulnerability.

We all know who is to blame:

There is limited capacity and even less inclination among EU leaders to divert effort and resources, amid an extraordinary crisis, into a rushed negotiation, just to suit Johnson’s artificial timetable...Britain’s negotiating positions are inflexible to the point of obtuseness...a no-deal crash [keep saying 'no deal' and 'crash', just as before] looms large because there is almost certainly not enough time to achieve the most rudimentary, bare-bones free trade agreement

These are not the acts of responsible, sensible political leaders [meaning only British ones,of course, not sophisticated if blasé European diplomats] . Brexit was always a largely delusional, dishonest project. Now it is entering the realms of fantasy and nightmare [must be awful, locked down in Islington] ...the only rational course is to swiftly apply for a Brexit extension of at least one year and preferably two, agree additional budget contributions and actively cooperate with the EU on measures to rebuild a pan-European economy that remains vital for UK prosperity.

The EU itself doesn't seem too keen on this pan-European economy though, does it? Pan-Europeanism seems a rather abstract and even more sentimental virtue to be signalling. The old claims to cultural superiority ('rationality') can still be maintained though, and there is now a chance for a bit of shroud-waving.

There are hints in Whitehall that more grounded Tories understand that continued intransigence over an extension cannot be sustained. It should be evident to even the most ideologically obsessed that taking back control cannot mean kicking away yet more human, economic and social props as the national edifice trembles and people suffer and die.  

And triumphantly to end, as a kind of schadenfreudisch consolation for the fury and terror they have worked up for themselves:

Brexit isn’t done.

Finally, The Observer cartoonist makes yet another witty and thoughtful contribution, more or less the same as several others. He is obviously exhausted. Can't they furlough him at least?

 

It's deja vu all over again

It could be years ago, as the ticking clock is turned back/forward [I wish I'd never read French philosophy] in the latest complaint from Barnier:

Michel Barnier has suggested the UK is running down the clock in talks over the future trade and security relationship with the EU...Barnier appeared exasperated by the British team...Barnier cited four areas where progress had been “disappointing”, including on a deal for future trade in goods.

The areas include fishing, of course, and a regulatory role for the EU,  says the Times. 

UK responses seem pretty robust at the moment:

“We regret that the detail of the EU’s offer on goods trade falls well short of recent precedent in free trade agreements it has agreed with other sovereign countries,” [a UK] spokesman said. “This considerably reduces the practical value of the zero-tariff, zero-quota aspiration we both share.”... “If we are to make progress now, we need to focus on agreeing a future relationship that has a comprehensive [free trade agreement] at its core, like those the EU has agreed elsewhere. We support high standards. But there is no need for novel and unprecedented ‘level playing field’ rules, for example tying us to EU laws, or a role for the EU court. What the EU proposes is unlike anything agreed in other such FTAs and we will not agree to it here....“Finally, we are ready to work to agree a fisheries agreement which reflects our rights under international law to control our own waters, & provides for annual negotiations over access based on scientific principles. We won’t agree to continuing the Common Fisheries Policy.”

Most ominously of all for the EU, there might be some support for the view expressed by D Davies a week or two back, that the general depression of trade after corona might actually mitigate the worst effects of no deal. I imagine this turns on the argument that volumes of trade will be depressed anyway, and that innovation to beat supply problems with covid might also manage any arising with no deal?

A UK spokesman instead openly questioned the value of the deal being offered by Brussels when compared with a no-deal outcome.

Even the Graun editorial is prepared to see some drawbacks to EU membership:

Europe has struggled to make common cause against the virus. In particular, it has bickered over how to support the most affected European economies against the consequences of the lockdown. In spite of innumerable acts of cross-border solidarity on the medical front, the rich nations of Europe have proved reluctant backers of the continent’s embattled poorer economies...the EU’s southern member states are reluctant to borrow their way out of the problem, in part because they fear that to take on more debt would deepen the inequality between the EU’s south and north...this issue is urgent and could still pose existential questions, as Emmanuel Macron said this week, for the EU itself.

 Bureaucratic compromise is on the cards, but this time the GRaun seems less enthusiastic:

Ms von der Leyen said afterwards that the EU would be trying to create a funding mechanism that allowed for a balance of grants and loans....This will be anything but easy. Familiar disputes about the size of the EU budget have not disappeared. Indeed, the UK’s departure had made them trickier. Now, in time-honoured fashion, the EU has also kicked the can down the road over the recovery fund...

The issue might just be causing some more anxieties for Grudinista policy on extensions:

If the Brexit transition was to be extended into 2021, the UK would have to extend its budget contribution too. It is hard to see the current British government contributing to the EU recovery fund as well.

 So the Gruan has to offer its readers a nice simple ideological binary:

But if the choice for Britain lies between cooperation with a divided EU and cooperation with a United States led by a delinquent president who advocates ingesting disinfectant, it would be a no-brainer.

New petite bourgeoisie turn to 'contact clusters'

An unintentionally ironic piece in the Graun today by G Hinsliff

Social distancing isn't going to end soon. So how do we live with it? 

Surey the npb do not need help living with social distancing -- it's their habitus, their very life! However, chances to develop reassurance and pick up the latest forms of cultural closure have obviously been affected by the lockdown -- no more dinner parties, in Islington or anywhere else. So what to do?

And that’s where the idea of quarantine buddies comes in - although Prof Stefan Flasche, epidemiologist and mathematical modeller at the London School of Hygiene and Tropical Medicine, prefers the formal term “contact clustering”.... families or a group of friends could agree to form an exclusive social pod

As usual, our sophisticated European friends have set the precedent:

Belgium’s elegantly (d'accord!) named “deconfinement” committee has proposed letting groups of up to 10 people meet socially once a week, so long as it’s always the same 10

They can rely on class dynamics to produce that sort of exclusivity. Actual social contact, f2f, is still the default:

we  [must] eventually seek the safest way of letting human nature express itself..there are no risk-free ways out now, only ways of minimising the risk both to an overstretched NHS and to individuals, and difficult conversations about precisely what we are all prepared to bear. Until more research is done, it’s impossible to know whether gradually expanding the quarantine circle of trust beyond immediate households should be part of that conversation

Expansion by invitation only, I assume? 

Why not use online formats?

 [Prof Flasche is] an epidemiologist and mathematical modeller at the London School of Hygiene and Tropical Medicine [and also] the father of a four-year-old who struggles to interact properly with her friends through screens

Good enough for me.'Proper' interaction among the npb involves, as we know 'bodily hexis', or 'body language' as teachers call it, which is too subtle to be captured adequately by those awful often stark close-ups of just faces.

Wisdom of the ages

Apologies for lack of content lately. Everyone still seems obsessed with this other thing. Meanwhile, addressing the meta-issue of social distancing and class closure that underpins new petitie bourgeois reactions to both Brexit and corona, I happened to be reading a bit of Marx's 18th Brumaire... (as you do if you can't get to B&Q), an hilariously sarcastic read if a bit contextual, and came across this, written in the 1860s:

The bourgeoisie, in truth, is bound to fear the stupidity of the masses so long as they remain conservative, and the insight of the masses as soon as they become revolutionary. (18th Bru. ch VI)

 

Johnson's cheerfulness proves Brexit is behind Covid

Still space for a little hate session in the Guardina today. In one of the least surprising headlines ever, P Toynbee (or a sub) declares:

Boris Johnson is the wrong man in the wrong job at the wrong time 

the Sunday Times didn’t even wait for him to stumble back to Downing Street before firing off its devastating attack on his cavalier incompetence over the coronavirus outbreak... it chimes with everything everyone [!] already knows [!] about Boris Johnson’s character....There was a real sense that he didn’t do urgent crisis planning

Toynbee's 'knowledge' of Johnson's character reveals one of those npb skilled readings of character, of what 'really' informs his actions 'in effect'.

Exaggerated or not [!], hearing that the prime minister took two weeks’ holiday at Chevening as the virus began to spread in the UK will stick in the public memory....But this we know [again]: our government is singularly unsuited to the task and unfit for purpose. In his absence, Johnson’s lack of seriousness is reflected in his abysmal choice of cabinet, selected for all the wrong reasons. Dominic Raab, Priti Patel, Elizabeth Truss and the rest were chosen for Brexitry and hatred of the state....Brexit embodied their mindset: break away, break things and disrupt.

Meanwhile, the cad seems unfairly happy about something -- his personal survival? Toynbee wants hypocritical public gloom?

Michael Gove reported on Sunday that the prime minister is “in cheerful spirits”, but that’s bafflingly inappropriate. Cheerful? About what? Good croquet on the blossom-strewn Chequers lawns?  There are scores of dead doctors and nurses among some 20,000 dead citizens, and rising. 

 His incompetence was based on his 'natural antipathy towards the state', and includes:

bungled ventilator procurement [leading to] products unfit for Covid-19 patients...[U]nder austerity [so Cameron and Osborne really?] , there was a deliberate 40% cut in emergency personal protective equipment stockpiled for an epidemic.... a three-day epidemic simulation in 2016, Exercise Cygnus, ... uncovered a critical shortage of intensive care beds, morgue capacity and PPE...[T]he failure to test, trace, isolate and treat every single case [!], which the World Health Organization now [!] says should be a pre-condition before countries loosen their lockdowns.

Newsnight led the BBC to demand nightly more and more ventilators of any kind, regardless of their fitness for Covid patients, of course. 

Toynbee does admit that

No government could be fully ready for this: future lessons will be learned from South Korea and others.

But the main conclusion is as predictable as ever:

When the prime minister returns, his single most reassuring act would be to prolong immediately the Brexit transition

In allied if opposing news, and turning to Corbynist paranoia for a change, the Canary has suggested that the ST article has also been much cited by every other Fleet Street dog as a despairing move to preserve traditional newspapers:

a growing cry of corporate journalists pleading with people not to share snippets of the article without linking to it.

Of course, for the Canary:

The blame for the unfolding catastrophe coronavirus has brought can be laid at the corporate press’s door. Because without them (and a healthy dose of some in the Labour Party actively undermining Corbyn), Johnson wouldn’t have been in charge during this in the first place.

We can acquit P Toynbee and much of the rest of el Gordino  of that accusation, of course,although I still think that much of their irritating posturing had a reverse psychology effect.

Populism, paranoia and the pandemic

N Cohen in the Observer is spot on for much of his piece:

A global wave of injustice could follow the global pandemic....A few might experience lockdown as something close to a holiday and rhapsodise on the joys of home baking and box sets. As insiders stay inside, they save the money they would have spent in shops, restaurants, hotels and travel agents - the places where the insecure, the luckless nine out of 10 in the bottom half of earners who cannot work from home, once made their livings.

 What applies to individuals applies to corporations and private equity funds that are strong enough to buy up distressed assets at a fraction of their pre-crisis value. ...private equity is likely “to play both sides”: soaking up government largesse and profiting from market mayhem. It won’t, [a spokesperson] concluded, “look great when we consider the political economy of the pandemic a year from now”. [Examples include] the manoeuvres of the US private equity firms thinking of deploying hundreds of billions of dollars they hold in reserve as high-interest loans to struggling companies. The arguments this month about a Chinese state-owned investment firm buying up the British chip manufacturer Imagination Technologies...As the economic crisis we are entering looks worse than 2008, worse indeed than anything anyone alive can remember, the rise of corporate giants seems assured.

It’s not a recipe for social peace..  Democracy was [seen as] a racket [after 2008]. Taxpayers had to rescue the richest people in the world and then suffer years of stagnant wages and cut public services to meet the bill. If you need a one-line explanation for populism, this is the best there is....

Still seeing populism as a pathology, of coure, not as a rational response.He mentions Nazis and Stalinists in the article -- but not Brexit specifically. It's a dog whistle?

Overall, only a bit of petty bourgeois class interest grounded in the usual uncomfortable place between ruthless 'big business' and proto-fascist 'populists'.

There is always the witty and subtle Observer cartoonist to amuse us: