Culture wars now worry npb journos #25

This really is getting a bit tired, but journos have to make a living and they are probably locking down as much as anyone in London. Even so, N Cohen's piece today is poor. The headline alone makes it readily skippable (but I persisted):

The right cannot resist a culture war against the 'liberal elite', even now 

Poor old liberals, helpless victims of culture wars as ever.

It begins with a kind of look back to the analytic journalism he once practised:

conservatives are warning of the dangers of jumping to hasty conclusions. Before I go any further, I must therefore say our newly scrupulous masters have a point. The league tables of national Covid-19 death figures are not the last word on the crisis, and may look different in a few weeks. 

But that might get in the way of a good rant so:

That’s that done, then. Everybody happy? Good. Let’s get on with it.

 Ooh --cynical! There are certainties after all:

In the world as it is, rather than as it may be [positivism even] , a shameful fact [a fact with a value] is undeniable. The highest Covid-19 casualties are in the US and the UK, where the mendacities of the populist right have deformed society. It turns out that being governed by Anglo-Saxon conservatives is a threat to the health of nations. Their rule kills the old and blights the futures of the young

When he says 'highest Covid-10 casualties' he means the gross figure, no doubt, not the rate per million, where the USA lies near the bottom of the table with Italy and Spain currently above the UK too. He clearly thinks there are no problems with the 'factual 'status of these measures. Once, he thought citing gross figures was misleading, of course, especially if they appeared on the side of buses during a campaign.The Covid death rate gross figures have become sacred for Newsnight and C4 News too.

Warming to his own class war:

The British new right, “alt-right”, populist right, call it what you will, sees itself as sceptical and independent, even if its supporters’ reactions to all events are as predictable as speaking clocks. Class plays its part, as it always does in England. We are witnessing the Oxbridge arts graduate’s fear of expertise, particularly the expertise of scientists who cannot cut a good figure or turn a catchy phrase. In Johnson’s days at Oxford, they were dismissed as “northern chemists” ...Confronted with an emergency they do not understand, modern rightwingers reduce complexity to culture war, and dismiss advice they cannot take with the only reason their limited minds can comprehend: the political bias of the “liberal elite”....

The accompanying photo for the story does show just how diverse modern Oxbridge arts graduates must be:

 
Cohen would need separate analysis for the leading right wingers in the USA, of course, who are not Oxbridge arts graduates on the whole, but, apparently ideologies are not that closely connected to class differences after all:

differences with the US are more of tone than substance....

 It's enjoyable stuff,and there is much with which to agree, although I would add that new petty bourgeois groups are also unable to cope with complexity and opt equally enthusiastically for simple virtues and culture war. But then we get to pretty obscure stuff

Neil Ferguson’s [ace stats modeller and chief pessimist] liaison [highly publicised for breaking social distancing rules] with his lover [moves] from a personal failing to abide by his own guidelines into evidence of a leftwing plot... [Evidence for this?...] Toby Young, Johnson’s friend and I would say his greatest admirer on Fleet Street, said that, because the lover had campaigned for leftish causes, he was “99% sure” that the majority of scientific advisers everywhere in the world were leftists with an ideology that was pushing governments into panic measures.

Odd to give so much weight to desperate controversialist Toby Young.  Also odd to finally ally yourself with scientists and experts against arts graduates [he did PPE at Oxford]  but needs must. All that remains now is to rebuke the lower orders too. It is rather attenuated this time though:

As faith melts away [that's all it ever was], people will be less inclined to believe ministers when they say it is safe to end lockdown, and less inclined to trust the government’s tracking apps

Corona is not the WW2 Luftwaffe, explains Guardina columnist

A few more attempts to draw solemn lessons for Brexit from corona: P Wintour in the GRaun writes:

The coronavirus pandemic underlines the need for greater international solidarity, including more cooperation between Britain and the rest of Europe, all 27 European Union ambassadors and high commissioners to the UK have asserted in an unprecedented joint statement....The statement celebrating Europe Day [borrowed clothes?] also represents a reassertion of EU unity and the continuing relevance of European values within the UK.

Going for gravitas:

One ambassador said of the statement: “This is not about getting British people to change the referendum decision, [heaven forfend!] but just to say we are not ashamed of what we represent, and have much in common with the British people.”...The statement said the ambassadors regretted but fully respected the UK’s decision to leave the EU, though it also reasserted their belief that European nation states, proud of their individual histories, are “stronger together”.

Meanwhile,J Freedland is more obvious in this, although it starts with an old favourite of mine:

As Churchill’s grandson, the former MP Nicholas Soames, reflected in a BBC interview on Thursday, seven decades ago people had had to get by on one egg a week, but “these days there’s practically a riot if you can’t get strawberries in November”.

Freedland soon hits his stride though:

war and disease are not the same [fancy!]. Covid-19 reduces no buildings to rubble; it drops no bombs from the sky [who was it that did that again?] ....Victory in Europe was a victory of an alliance, won at a high cost in British, Commonwealth, American and especially Russian blood. Not for nothing did Churchill’s VE day speech spill over with “gratitude to our splendid allies”.

Which segues into the entirely predictable narrowing and shaping:

Not long after VE Day, Churchill was pressing the case for what needed to happen next. “We must recreate the European family in a regional structure called, it may be, the United States of Europe,”  ...He hoped Britain would join the European Coal and Steel Community, the precursor of the Common Market. Close ties to our European neighbours were precious, Churchill argued, even if that sometimes meant “the abrogation of national sovereignty”....In today’s Downing Street there’s a Churchill tribute act who led the campaign to wrench Britain away from its allies in the European Union, who has made Brexit into a defining credo and who has presided over a government that passed up three chances to protect its doctors and nurses from a deadly virus, lest joining an EU procurement scheme be seen as engaging in treacherous European cooperation.

OK, a few points: Churchill probably did not mean we should join anything like the actual current EU, of course, and post-War Europe was not what it is today. People will cheerfully abrogate national sovereignty if necessary -- say to form a wartime alliance -- but not necessarily to meet the goals of the modern German economy. Of all the wartime allies, only 'our European neighbours' seem to remain in Freedman's vision of international cooperation. There is no evidence that joining any EU procurement scheme would have helped protect our doctors and nurses, and I would like to see the case for ideological anti-Europeanism being responsible. Apart from that ...

I won't show you mine if you don't show me yours

So it's come down to this level:

The UK should be denied access to an EU crime-fighting system until it agrees to share more fingerprint data [and DNA profiles] with member states, a European parliamentary committee has said...“We would like the UK to move our way …[indeed] ... to move forward to European Union standards for the sake of building up a future relationship that is mutually beneficial and thus not giving any space for the advantage of not being a member of the European Union [leavers must be punished] and yet enjoying all the information tools.”

British government officials say the UK makes huge volumes of data available in comparison with other member states....British authorities are sharing DNA data from British-based criminals, but not criminal suspects, although it gets full access to equivalent data on suspects from other EU countries...In recent months MEPs have condemned British authorities for failing to pass on details of 75,000 convictions of foreign criminals to their home countries, while accusing the government of “deliberate violations and abuse” of a vast EU database used by police and border guards across Europe.

the system has also come under fire from civil liberties campaigners, who say there is a lack of democratic oversight.

any decision to cut the UK out of the existing DNA sharing agreement would see EU law enforcement lose access to the UK’s DNA database, which holds profiles of more than 5 million people and 500,000 samples from crime scenes.  

The links are interesting, and it is not at all easy to choose sides, of course. The failure to pass on details was reported in January:

The UK has failed to pass on the details of 75,000 convictions of foreign criminals to their home EU countries and concealed the scandal for fear of damaging Britain’s reputation in Europe’s capitals, the Guardian can reveal....The police national computer error, revealed in the minutes of a meeting at the criminal records office, went undetected for five years

Minutes of an ACRO criminal records meeting last May – deleted from the ACRO website after the Guardian story was first published – state: “There is a nervousness from Home Office around sending the historical notifications out dating back to 2012 due to the reputational impact this could have.”

The offical story from the UK, opting as ever for incompetence over deliberate policy is:

“The issue arose when it was noticed that not all relevant DAFs [daily activity files] were sent to ACRO, for example in cases where the subject had dual nationality...“As a result, a software script has been developed at Hendon, the PNC headquarters, and is due to be released in the next software update schedule (the date of which is yet to be confirmed).”

The scandalous deliberate violations and abuse were reported in a Graun story also  in January:

[British authorities] are basically only interested in people coming into the UK,” ... “People going out of the UK – if there is an alert, they are not warning the European authorities, so we are not safer.”...the EU concluded that British authorities had made “unlawful” full or partial copies of the SIS database. The report said “major deficiencies in the legal, operational and technical implementation of SIS” in the UK ...had not been remedied, despite concerns first raised in 2015. The litany of problems pose “serious and immediate risks to the integrity and security of SIS [Schengen Information system] data”...[although an EU official] dismissed claims that the US government had access to the EU database via the UK’s illegal copies. 

Asked whether the database issue could be a problem for Brexit negotiations, [Ms] In ’t Veld [Dutch MEP, same one as in the first story] said: “I very much hope so,” adding that the report showed “violation upon violation”. She added: “If [in 2015, the UK] didn’t care about the rules then, how are we going to make them respect the rules if they are not in the EU any more?”

The question surely shows the problem though? We didn't respect the rule when we were in the EU -- so staying in wouldn't change anything? She just wants to punish us, as usual?

Brexit worse than virus?

 Unusual Euro gloom in the Graun, lightened only at the end with a bit of EU schadenfreude:

Coronavirus threatens future of eurozone, Brussels warns

Pandemic risks exacerbating economic and social divisions between countries

The economic output of the Eurozone is likely to shrink by a record 7.75% in 2020 and rebound by just 6.25% in 2021, with unemployment rising from 7.5% in 2019 to 9.5%....Greece’s gross domestic product – is forecast to shrink the most, by 9.7%, owing to the closure of its tourist industry. GDP in Italy and Spain are is expected to contract by 9.5% and 9.4% respectively...Germany is expected to have a far less dramatic contraction than most, and recover more swiftly even though the economic downturn (6.5%) is still expected to be the country’s deepest since the second world war...Austria, Croatia Slovakia and Poland are the only other countries expected to return to 2019 levels of economic productivity by the end of 2021...“Such divergence poses a threat to the single market and the euro area – yet it can be mitigated through decisive, joint European action,” Gentiloni said.

 Yet there is some bitter cheer for Those Who Drip On and On:

The commission said the UK economy was expected to shrink by 8.3% by the end of the year, as a result of lockdown measures, with investment down 14% and unemployment doubling...Only the GDPs of Greece, Italy, Spain and Croatia are expected to contract more than the UK’s....the end of the transition period would “dampen economic growth, even if a free trade agreement between the EU and the UK was concluded.

Naturally:

The UK would be expected to grow by 6% next year, according to the commission, if the status quo in terms of trading relations was maintained.

Elsewhere, even T Garton-Ash seems a tad worried that the Dream might be over. There are good and bad scenarios (what else would we expect from liberals?) :

On the one hand:

the EU, which earlier this week convened an international meeting to raise funds for fighting Covid-19, becomes a prime mover of global collective action.

 But, on the other, a nightmare future:

In Europe, wealthy northern European countries such as Germany and the Netherlands simply don’t show the necessary degree of solidarity with the battered economies of south European eurozone members. Instead, they use the EU’s crisis-justified suspension of limits on state aid to pump public funds into their key industries, and the gulf between northern and southern Eurozone states grows wider. In a couple of years’ time, a populist like Matteo Salvini, or someone even worse (yes, it’s possible), gains power in an Italy where public debt is now about 160% of GDP and blames all the country’s woes on a lack of north European solidarity....Meanwhile, in the eastern half of the continent, Hungary remains a dictatorship, with Viktor Orbán’s temporary emergency powers mysteriously becoming permanent.

The EU, no longer a community of democracies, and torn along both its north-south and east-west axes, gradually weakens and disintegrates. Left to their own devices, its member states fail to provide adequate job prospects, social security and an ecologically sustainable future for their younger citizens. And so, as already shockingly foreshadowed in our poll, they turn to authoritarian solutions. Europe looks ever less to the US, ever more to China.

  And there is a chance for reader comments/cheap copy as ever:

we’ve also set up a self-interview facility for anyone with 10 minutes to spare to tell us your best and worst European moments, and your hopes for Europe in 2030. Thus far, the fall of the Berlin Wall has been the most widely mentioned formative moment and Brexit the top-scoring worst moment. But maybe this coronavirus moment will overtake them both.

Virus inspires realism over Brexit #94

The response to Covid-19 is shaping up nicely as another symptom of the criminal inability to listen to Observer columnists, even if it might have lost some of its early appeal. N Cohen runs the old trope through yet another cycle:

Invocations of the wartime spirit, so characteristic of Brexiters who have never fought a war [unlike N Cohen] , led to the dallying with the possibility of “herd immunity” [not epidemiological modelling then]  Britain could take the Blitz, so it could take the virus. Meanwhile, the love of simplistic slogans and over-promising so characteristic of the Brexit movement has been displayed to the point of tedium.... a Brexit movement “impervious to reason and incapable of engaging with complexity” has reached its terminus. ..we have a dilettante PM, a cabinet of nobodies and a civil service policed by Vote Leave propagandists, who can fool the country in a referendum but have no idea how to manage it in a crisis....What’s over is the glib, deceitful spirit of 2016 with its false promise that bills need never be paid.

Johnson destroyed the careers of Alistair Burt, David Gauke, Justine Greening, Dominic Grieve, Philip Hammond, Ed Vaizey and many another Conservatives with ministerial experience because they wouldn’t inflict a no-deal Brexit on Britain. He sent others to the backbenches...I am not asking you to like the Conservative politicians Johnson pushed aside, only to accept that the emergency demands the services of ministers who know how government works.

 Are we seriously being urged to cheer for Spreadsheet Phil and Dominic ('Endless') Griev(ance)? Even if they don't know or care how their own Parliamentary democracy works?

In his righteous outrage, and possibly showing his desire to express more sympathy than thou, Cohen even stoops to shroud-waving, just one more time, before the peak is passed:

There are many reasons why yesterday’s retailers of counterfeit optimism have become today’s frightened pessimists. To be precise, 27,510 reasons – and rising.

Brexit will lead to the death of the whole population of Ireland

The Graun today wheels out another chapter of Project Fear, the trope that just keeps giving. Politicians must sit down and rack their brains to find something that will be disastrous IF there is the worst kind  of 'no deal' , when the UK never communicates with anyone in the rest of the world about anytrhing forever. I thought we had scraped the bottom after 3 years, but new crises offer new possibilities for the alert moral entrepreneur:

Brexit 'could impede coronavirus contact tracing on island of Ireland' 

The tracing of number plates, flight passenger lists and coronavirus test results could become impossible unless the UK agrees a deal on its future relationship with the EU that includes security and data-sharing arrangements.

Although a local NI politician is quoted, the hand of the EC is also apparent in this 'technical note' from Brussels which offers a helpful:

reminder of the scale of the challenge facing businesses and now health authorities in the face of a national health emergency.

There is the eternal split between bureaucrats ('if we leave the transition period without a deal and there is legal uncertainty around our information governance framework that would put contact tracing particularly in border areas into risk') and pragmatists ('“Let’s get it up and running and we will work round the rest of it when we get to the end of the year and we see where we are in regards to Brexit.”')

Meanwhile, in another story:

The British government is quietly seeking access to the European Union’s pandemic warning system, despite early reluctance to cooperate on health after Brexit, the Guardian has learned....According to an EU source, this would be “pretty much the same” as membership of the system....However, the EU is not prepared to offer the UK full membership of the EWRS [have they actually asked forthat?] , an online platform set up in 1998 where public authorities share information about health emergencies...Instead, EU officials propose to “plug the UK into” the system when a pandemic emerges, similar to arrangements for other non-EU countries.

See -- we now realise we just can't cope without them and we have to beg favours. However: 

The UK government spokesperson said: “The safety and security of our citizens is a top priority. The UK is ready to discuss how our citizens can be kept safe and benefit from continued international cooperation on health security following the end of the transition period, where it is in our mutual interest...“Any such arrangements must align with the fundamental principles of respecting the UK’s political and economic independence, recognition of the UK and EU’s status as sovereign equals, and ensuring the UK has control over its own laws.”

British charm and legal action to domesticate Johnny Foreigner

The Graun suggests that one problem with the talks seems to be the lack of chances to show that desite all the bickering, one is really a jolly good chap:

The source close to the UK’s negotiating team said last week’s talks, conducted by video conference, worked well but it was more difficult to build up a personal rapport when communicating remotely.

It used to work with Johnny Foreigner, but EU reponses seem quite churlish in reponse to this aristocratic charm:

“Everybody knows that the UK is the world of betting men [?], but betting alone won’t result in a trade agreement. The continent is as engulfed by Covid as the UK, so I wouldn’t bank on leaders having much time to cater to British fancy,”

 Real underlying issues continue though:

“What is slowing us up is the EU’s insistence on extra provision, notably the level playing field area, aspects of governance and, of course, there is no meeting of minds on fisheries. If they continue to insist on their position on a so-called level playing field, and on continuing the common fisheries policy, for example, we are never going to accept that....not so much that they are negotiation positions as they are what an independent state does.”

I suspect the last bit is what is leading to incomprehension as ever. Meanwhile:

The EU has accused Johnson of backsliding on promises to uphold common standards on the environment, health and workers’ rights – the so-called level playing field. [not actually in the protocol as argued below]  Under pressure from coastal member states such as France, Ireland, Belgium and the Netherlands, Barnier has also insisted there will be no trade deal without an agreement on fishing rights. [They mean the common fisheries policy, while the UK means negotiated agreements?] 

Business still goes on as usual in some areas:

Eleanor Sharpston QC, advocate general to the court in Luxembourg, has lodged two claims challenging her replacement by a Greek lawyer before her term in office was scheduled to end next year.

 And in other chambers:

[Lawyers] argue that while the withdrawal agreement between the UK government and the EU has resulted in the UK as a nation leaving the EU, the fundamental status and rights of the British citizens of the European Union cannot be removed without their consent.

Stephen Hocking, a partner at DAC Beachcroft, said: “In the withdrawal agreement, the EU council purported to remove fundamental individual rights from a group of citizens of the European Union, namely UK nationals, without any due process and without any reference to them. In doing so it acted unlawfully....“EU citizenship is a citizenship like any other, and it confers individual rights on citizens that cannot be taken away by an agreement between governments.”

 Even Verhofstdat seems to agree with that claim:

“People received European citizenship with the treaty of Maastricht. Will be interesting to see, if a government decides to leave, its citizens automatically lose their European citizenship. They shouldn’t do!” 

Elsewhere,Toynbee rightly urges action to prevent a surge in youth unemployment post-virus, but nearby, the GHraun offers another priority:

A precaution against spreading infection and a signifier of being a good citizen, the face mask may yet give new meaning to a ‘must-have’ accessory