Boris Johnson's big, green car con

 

Boris Johnson's latest wheeze is to declare that there will be no more new petrol- or diesel-fuelled cars sold in Britain from 2030. Don't get me wrong - clean air is good. Hell, after five years of living in the UAE, working as a motoring journalist, owning a gas-guzzling SUV, and travelling business class for press trips, I should probably atone for my carbon footprint. It was like a coal miner's lung.

It's not the idea that is the problem. It's the lashings of bullshit that come with it.

First, Johnson can say whatever the hell he likes. After all, why break the habit of a lifetime? He knows he won't be prime minister in 2030. He won't have to actually see this idea through. He won't have to take any real responsibility for the government's role in funding infrastructure, determining policy, or liaising with the private sector to make this happen.

It's a calculated risk. He's smart enough to know there will be a bit of an outcry but it's better to have a few people howling about the latest war on cars than let them get too worked up about the government's ongoing mishandling of Covid-19 or the looming Brexit debacle.

It's not all doom and gloom. Charging infrastructure is certainly improving and the range for electric cars has become longer in recent years. Indeed, the range of a couple of hundred miles is ample for the driving many of us do on a day-to-day basis. Electric vehicles often make sense for local authorities too - if the vehicle is only going to be buzzing around the borough, there's little risk of running out of charge. Fast-charging technology is getting better every year.

But for a lot of us, used to being able to fill up a car with a fossil fuel quickly and easily, making the transition to electric cars will take a mindset shift as well as potentially being expensive. Half an hour for an 80% rapid charge will seem like too long for a lot of people, especially when they need a car for work. Business secretary Alok Sharma revealed how stunningly out of touch he is with real people in a pandemic when he was talking about £20,000 electric cars as being cheap on Sky News yesterday morning. 

A decade should be plenty of time to make the transition, if there was a competent government running the show, but I am not convinced that Johnson's electric vehicle policy, part of a 10-point "green industrial revolution" has allowed a big enough budget.

£1.3 billion to roll out charging points in homes, streets and on motorways probably won't be enough. Currently, the government offers up to £350 for households to install a charging point. With around 75% of adults in the UK holding driving licenses, approximately 20 million households will need a charging point - that's potentially a subsidy bill of up to £7 billion. A lot of houses and apartment building car parks will need charging points. 

Obviously, it's entirely reasonable for companies such as BP and Esso to fork out for charging points at their petrol stations. But this smells like the government pulling a big figure out of their collective arses in the hope that we'll all be so impressed by the sheer size of £1.3 billion that we won't work out what it really means.  

Similarly, £582 million in grants to buy zero- or ultra-low-emission vehicles is a petty cash drawer figure in terms of government spending.

And "nearly" £500 million over the next four years - so less than £125 million per year - for the development of mass production of electric vehicle batteries really won't go that far. The government statement on the 10-point plan adds that this is part of £12 billion in state spending on developing electric car manufacturing with "potentially three times as much from the private sector". So that's money that we cannot count on, especially if car manufacturing goes down the toilet post-Brexit. After all, it's not as if we will be able to make all components or source all materials from the UK - with inevitably buggered-up, expensive supply chains from the EU, it becomes a less attractive investment. 

Then there are concerns about the supply chain ethics of certain raw materials for electric vehicles, such as the mining of cobalt in the Democratic Republic of Congo, which supplies 60% of cobalt for this sector. The second-biggest producer of cobalt in the world is Russia and its output is 83% smaller than that of the DRC. Wonderful.

Of course, there is an attempt in the statement to desperately appeal to their newly won Red Wall voters and Conservative voters elsewhere with the pledge to create electric vehicle sector jobs in the northeast of England, Wales and the Midlands. For the northeast, this pledge comes just as there are renewed reports of Sunderland losing its Nissan plant if a no-deal Brexit goes ahead - this could be a pre-emptive strike to convince people that this is how the jobs will be replaced. Ironically, it is faintly reminiscent of Margaret Thatcher convincing Nissan to build the Sunderland plant to help replace jobs lost when the coal mines closed, with access to the EU market as a major selling point. 

But Boris Johnson has not got any of the convictions of Thatcher and he certainly does not have her work ethic. There's no real detail in his plans for the automotive sector about how the money will be spent, and no breakdown on practical things such as budgets for retraining workers and retooling factories. At least Sunderland has experience with building the electric Nissan Leaf. Apart from the electric Mini and the possibility of an electric Jaguar, a lot of money will be needed to ensure electric cars can roll off production lines in Derbyshire, Swindon, Norfolk, Warwickshire, Cheshire, West Sussex and Luton.

But this is not a government that does details.

The point in the plan about public transport has nothing much to say to areas where public transport is non-existent. There is a pledge to spend £4.2 billion in "city public transport". Given that in London, TFL's 2019-2020 budget was £10.3 billion, £4.2 billion across all UK cities is going to spread out very thinly indeed. Again, Boris Johnson pukes out numbers that are more than we'll ever see in our bank accounts and expects us to be impressed without question. 

Still, it's all on brand for Johnson. It's all big-sounding numbers and bumper sticker soundbites, as ever. He was supposedly a green Tory mayor for London but that was a con too. This is the idiot mayor who wasted £1.4 million in a failed attempt to "glue" pollution to the capital's roads and removed the congestion charge exemption for hybrid cars. Basically, he got away with developing a reputation for being an eco-friendly mayor because he was photographed riding a bicycle like a saggy-suited clown.

Boris Johnson's figures for his "green industrial revolution" are as rubbery as the condoms he seems to be incapable of using. It's bluster and waffle, there's a strong whiff of pork-barrelling, it is more simplistic sloganeering.

He is a charlatan, a fraud, a major league con man, someone who has fooled voters for years on an industrial scale, the wrong person to be in charge of anything let alone an environmental programme this nakedly ambitious - put that on your electric car bumper sticker.

Peter Sutcliffe's mirror on misogyny

 

Peter Sutcliffe is dead and nobody should be upset that he is gone from this world. We will never know exactly how many women he killed or attacked. We will never know exactly how many lives he ruined. 

Thankfully, today's coverage is centred largely on the victims and the people left behind to pick up the pieces after women they loved were taken cruelly away from them. 

Naga Munchetty did an excellent interview on BBC Breakfast this morning with Richard McCann, the son of Wilma McCann, believed to be Sutcliffe's first victim. She was compassionate, she let Richard speak through his grief and complex feelings about his mother's death and the man who was responsible, she reassured him that he has nothing to be ashamed of. 

The appalling events between 1975 ad 1980 could have ended much sooner - Sutcliffe was interviewed nine times before he was finally brought to justice, and the Wearside Jack hoax tapes were a devastating distraction, wasting police time, allowing Sutcliffe to kill more women. Misogyny infested the West Yorkshire police force at the time, fuelling incompetence. This horrific account of a press conference is sickening:

Today's coverage of Sutcliffe's pathetic demise has not been perfect. The footage that did not need to be broadcast was that of a jovial interview with one of the killer's former colleagues. We saw the unedifying spectacle of a man laughing as he said they all knew Sutcliffe was the Yorkshire Ripper and that he even answered to this name. And still he laughed, reducing dead women to workplace banter.

It is vile misogyny, just as it is vile misogyny to diminish some of the victims as "just prostitutes" rather than individual women with their own stories, often of hard lives, of limited choices. It is vile misogyny to dismiss any of the victims as somehow asking for it, to create a hierarchy of dead women from sainted virgins to scorned sluts. 

But this is what happens when sex workers are among the dead, as if their lives matter less than those of other women. This narrative reared its ugly head for years in discourse surrounding the Yorkshire Ripper just as surely as it did a century earlier when Sutcliffe's grotesque namesake, Jack the Ripper, was terrorising women in London. 

Our dead bodies are not there for workplace banter, for our corpses to be picked over by hideous vultures seeking to push misogynistic narratives from our carrion, for making people feel better about their attitudes to women, for helping people convince themselves that the safety of some women is more important than that of others. 

Instead, let us take this moment to remember the names of the victims we know and to reflect that we may never know the names that would surely complete this tragic list:

Wilma McCann

Emily Jackson

Irene Richardson

Tina Atkinson

Jayne MacDonald

Jean Jordan

Yvonne Pearson

Helen Rytka

Vera Millward

Josephine Whitaker

Barbara Leach

Marguerite Walls

Jacqueline Hill

And these are the women who survived attacks by Sutcliffe, more women whose lives will be forever affected by his violent hatred of women:

Anna Rogulskyj

Olive Smelt

Tracy Browne

Marcella Claxton

Marilyn Moore

Upadhya Bandara

Maureen Lea

Theresa Sykes

Say their names. Say all their names.

Photography: Tasha Kamrowski/Pexels

The pandemic of "honour" killings

 

Let's start calling so-called "honour" killings by their real name. They are misogynistic murders. They are the murders of girls and women who have done nothing wrong. They are murders committed almost exclusively by men, although women can be complicit. They are murders with vile motivations such as a taking false offence, feeling an unwarranted sense of shame, a desire to control girls and women in everything they say, do and think, a heinous jealousy that is never flattering, a desire to maintain a sickening patriarchy where men and boys enjoy freedoms that they deny to the girls and women in their lives.

The disgusting reality of misogynistic murders was brought into sharp focus last week with Honour, the ITV drama based on the 2006 murder of 20-year-old Banaz Mahmod at the hands of her own father and uncle. Three of her cousins and two family friends were also convicted in relation to her killing. Her non-crime was to leave an abusive forced marriage and find happiness with a new boyfriend, who killed himself 10 years after Banaz was murdered. 

Banaz had gone to the police multiple times to share her very real fears that her life was in danger, even naming names of the people of whom she was rightly terrified, but she was not taken seriously until she went missing. Her body was found in a suitcase buried in a derelict garden in Birmingham, after she was killed in South London a few miles from where I'm now sitting. She is buried at the cemetery down the road. Her family tried to insult her one last time with an unmarked grave but a granite memorial stone now marks her final resting place, paid for by the Iranian and Kurdish Women's Rights Organisation (IKWRO), police officers and Nazir Afzal, the tenacious lead prosecutor in her case.

One of the most heartbreaking aspects of the ITV drama was the portrayal of Diana Nammi by brilliant, brave Saudi actress Ahd Hassan Kamel. Diana is a British-Kurdish activist who came to the UK as an asylum seeker, founding IKWRO in 2002. There is a scene where she expresses her sheer frustration that because she is a woman, she is not considered a leader in the community where Banaz and her Iraq-Kurdish family lived.

But Diana is a leader. It is so important that Britain has elevated her to this status because of her important work, which included helping bring Banaz's killers to justice. In 2014, she received a Barclays Woman of the Year award,s a Women on the Move award from UNHCR and named one of the BBC's 100 Women. In 2015, she received a Voices of Courage award from the Women's Refugee Commission in 2015 and an honorary degree from the University of Essex in 2016.  

This is important because Britain needs to be better than the misogynistic murderers of Banaz Mamod, to take a stand, to speak the truth that there is nothing honourable about honour killings. A vital part of this is for Britain to be a place where women, regardless of their ethnicity, are empowered to be community leaders, to be taken seriously when they defend vulnerable girls and women and denounce misogynistic, patriarchal cultures - all of them everywhere - in no uncertain terms.

Appalling stories such as that of Banaz Mahmod are low-hanging fruit for racists. There will always be the people whose first reaction is to blame immigration, to claim that if "these people" weren't allowed in the UK, then such murders wouldn't happen here. 

This is a dreadful notion for two reasons. 

Firstly, while Banaz Mahmod would not have been killed on British soil if her family didn't come to the UK, it is entirely possible that she could have been killed in similar circumstances in Iraq - the problem of so-called honour killings would simply happen elsewhere and that is equally as unacceptable as when it happens here. The banning of immigration and, in particular, the stopping of all asylum seekers being allowed to seek safety in the UK, simply moves the problem to other countries. If Britain is serious about the moral high ground and about stopping the bloodshed, it is essential that we condemn all so-called honour killings, no matter where they happen.

And secondly, it is wrong to claim that such murders are only the domain of immigrants, that the only hands that are gripped around innocent necks or holding knives or tightening ligatures or pointing guns in the name of false offence or bringing supposed shame to families and, in particular, to men belong solely to foreigners.

In the UK, the number of women killed by current or former partner is on the increase. Data from the Office for National Statistics showed that 80 women were killed by a current or former partner between April 2018 and March 2019, a 27% increase on the previous year.

If you think these men's motivations are any different to those of the pathetic men who were offended by Banaz Mahmod making her own life choices, you're mistaken. When women are murdered by men close to them, it doesn't matter what colour anyone's skin is or whether anyone's family has been in the UK for a few years or since Roman times. The killers are still men who hate women. They are still offended because a woman has dared to leave or spurned advances or was perceived to have strayed or flirted or fell short of some impossible standard. These men, just as surely as Banaz Mahmod's killers did, feel a misguided and bogus shame, feel like they have lost control of women they considered their property, feel their pitiful male pride has been wounded by women who would not comply. 

If we are serious about ending this misogynistic turf war that is fought on women's bodies, more needs to be done. We should absolutely engage with all communities in Britain, to uphold courageous people such as Diana Nammi who shine a light on this hatred and violence at great personal cost. But we also need to acknowledge that murderous misogyny is not exclusive to any one community or ethnic group. It is a dark stain on every town and city and as long as women are killed by people close to them every single week, it shames us all.   

Photography by Joanne Adela Low/Pexels 

How to fall in love with a country again

 

Oh, how we whined and whinged when it became apparent that, for a number of reasons, a holiday in the UK was going to have to replace our usual September jaunt to somewhere warm and European. It just wouldn't be the same as lolling by a pool in Corfu wiling away the afternoon with endless gin fizzes or hiring an open top car to explore every corner of Rhodes. Indeed, as we booked rooms in two old hotels at Grange-over-Sands and Peebles, both places where people used to travel in pre-antibiotic days to "take in the air", we resented every penny of the price. We could have a week in Menorca for the same price, dammit. Would it even feel like a holiday if we did all our travelling in the car rather than leaving the trusty Volkswagen at the long-term parking at Gatwick and jumping on a plane?

But as we left the M25 hellscape and hideous traffic around Birmingham behind us, Cumbria hovered into sight and we found our hotel overlooking the Irish Sea at Grange-over-Sands. Sure, it wasn't the most soundproofed of hotels - I am still convinced the couple in the room above us were moving furniture in between acts of copulation - and the breakfast service could have been a bit better organised, but the picture above was the view from our room. When we opened the florid, floral curtains and were greeted by a scene that definitely beat the "sea glimpses" promised on another holiday, there was an overwhelming sense that it was going to be OK.

It was better than OK - work worries were forgotten, we ate, drank and were merry, like all good holidays there was "the incident" (in this case, my sense-of-humour failure after a misreading of Google Maps in the rain in the Lake District), we saw new places and revisited old favourites. When we crossed the border, we had to pre-book our pool time in Peebles, which does kill the spontaneous swim, but we had lovely weather, which is always a bonus on any trip to Scotland. The big coats, packed pessimistically, remained unworn on the back seat of the car.

Of course, no matter where I go, I can't quite divorce myself from politics. After all, I am the nerd who went to Cyprus on holiday and wrote about the tragedy of the abandoned resort of Famagusta, and went to Menorca and ended up writing about feelings of solidarity with the Talayotic people who lived on the Spanish island from about 1400BC until AD1287. 

And so it came to pass that on last week's UK holiday, we could not be unaware of government's ongoing cack-handedness with the coronavirus pandemic. Whether it was loving how the wearing of a mask improved the olfactory experience of using public toilets or wondering how necessary masks were while aboard a boat that was open to the wet and wild elements on our one day of shitty weather, we were conscious of the virus. 

On the way back to London, we stayed with the in-laws in the north-east for a few days, just as the region went back into a partial lockdown - the chat as I got my hair done for a considerably cheaper price than in the capital was of confusion over the latest restrictions, in between utter disdain for Donald Trump ("He's out of his box!") and sympathy for "lovely" Keir Starmer having to self-isolate. North-eastern salon banter never fails to surprise, amuse and delight in equal measure.

In Scotland, we noted the contrast between Peebles and Jedburgh. Peebles was lively, shops were open and busy, there was an air of prosperity, a sense that this historic town was going to be OK no matter what an uncertain future might hold. But Jedburgh, equally bursting with fascinating history and general prettiness, was ultimately a depressing lunch stop - it was hard to find an open cafe for lunch, barely any shops were open, pubs were boarded up, there was neither hustle nor bustle. 

Both towns, along with plenty of places where we stopped in Cumbria, had plenty of signs indicating funding from the European Regional Development Fund - a source of valuable income that has now dried up. These funds are unlikely to be easily replaced, especially as the government's absurd or corrupt attempts to prevent pandemic-related economic disaster drain money away from everything from funding tourism promotion to ensuring the decrepit but clearly once brutally beautiful lido at Grange-over-Sands is properly restored any time soon.

But while I may still be angry about the sorry state of British politics, my anger is tempered with a renewed love for my adopted country and the many lovely people we met along the way. I have a desire for the UK to be the best it can be be - and one thing I do know is that it deserves better than either the elected and utterly risible Johnson government or the hypothetical Corbyn government that was never going to happen because, like it or not, he was never going to resonate with large swathes of voters across the places I visited and revisited on what was a truly wonderful holiday.   

Toppling Edward Colston was important and right

Two of the most useful things I studied at university were statistics and a history elective called "Public History". As the name suggests, it was all about how history is presented to the public, including statues. We studied the reasons why statues were erected, what statues are meant to achieve and how old statues stand in a modern context.

Statues are almost always erected as an act of celebration, to honour and remember people considered to have achieved great things. When we erect a statue of someone, we are literally putting them on a pedestal, we are forced to look up to them, whether we want to or not. When a statue is torn down, it is usually an event fuelled by anger, by the need to triumph over whatever it was that the statue stood for. 

In the case of Edward Colston, it stood for celebrating a man who trafficked human beings.

Between 1680 and 1692, it is estimated his company transported 84,000 men, women and children. But his apologists will claim that his statue was for his charitable work, so that somehow makes a man who treated the equivalent of almost the entire population of Bath as chattel a perfectly acceptable guy to cast in bronze for all the world to see. 

But even his charitable work was unsavoury. While there is nothing to be gained by closing down the schools he helped found, it is important to recognise that at the time, his philanthropy was tainted by his own High Church Anglican religious bigotry. He insisted that children of Dissenters be refused admission. Dissenters were the protestants who separated from the Church of England during the 17th and 18th centuries, including Quakers. The school rules included the expulsion of any boy who had been caught attending a church service outside the Church of England. Boys became apprentices upon graduation but could not be apprentices to Dissenters.

By the time his statue was erected in 1895, the act which abolished slavery in Britain had been in force for 61 years. This makes the morally lazy argument that we can't judge an old statue on modern values ridiculous.  

The other pathetic argument for leaving Colston on his plinth was that the statue should be removed by "democratic processes". Oh please. Sit down. Since the 1990s, there have been peaceful, polite campaigns to remove the statue. But, as Professor Kate Williams pointed out in a brilliant Twitter thread, plans in 2018 to put up a plaque to put Colston into historical context hit brick walls when some councillors objected to the wording and Bristol's Society of Merchant Venturers got involved because they didn't want any mention of the 12,000 trafficked children or the selective nature of his philanthropy. Pulling the statue down and throwing it in the river has been a bold, powerful, important statement. Sometimes being polite is a waste of time.  

But merely pulling down statues will not end racism in the UK any more than having two female prime ministers has ended sexism. Shadow justice secretary David Lammy suggested that these sort of statues should be in museums where the historical context can be discussed, where they will actually become a means of education rather than something for people to walk past and pigeons to shit on. Very few people ever learn anything particularly profound from a statue and they are not usually erected for pedagogical purposes. The notion that statues of racists need to stay put to educate people on racism is embarrassing.

And that brings me to my other useful university subject - that of statistics. When we look at racial inequality, the criminal justice system is quickly placed under the spotlight. By the government's own statistics, black people are stopped and searched way more often than white people - the rate for the whole population is seven in 1,000 people are stopped and searched but for black people, this is 38 per 1,000. For white people, the figure is four per 1,000. Last year, 27% of the prison population identified as an ethnic minority compared to 13% of the overall population. Before a case even gets to court, black men are 26% more likely to be remanded in custody at the Crown Court than white men. Once in front of the beak, black men are 53% more likely than white men to be sentenced to prison for an indictable offence.

Crucially, according to a 2017 Ministry of Justice review, young black people are nine times more likely to be locked up than young white people. That means that for first offences, young black people are ending up behind bars more often than young white people - and this is where the cycle of crime so often starts, with a focus on retribution rather than rehabilitation.

Simple changes such as only locking up first-time offenders for serious violent crimes, such as rape, murder and armed robbery, could help, along with eliminating custodial sentences for non-violent crimes. The money saved on keeping people of all skin colours in overcrowded prisons, which are not conducive to rehabilitation, could be invested into education, training and counselling for young and first-time offenders. The "broken window" policy of cracking down hard on first offences, no matter how minor, does not work.

Class plays a role in disadvantage too. It is naive and simplistic to think that Malia and Sasha Obama are not privileged while declaring a young white man on a council estate born into multi-generational unemployment is a shining example of white privilege. There are intersections when it comes to who holds the aces in the game of life, who will be able to reach their potential and who will fall by the wayside. But being born with black skin is still a lightning rod for prejudice on sight, for attracting the attention of police when you're minding your own business, for fearing being pulled over for a minor traffic offence, and being a target of hate. 

Policies which encourage investment in high quality comprehensive education so that "rough schools" are not permanently accepted as being rough because that's just the way it is will help the white kids who are disadvantaged as well as the black kids. The same goes for investing in high quality, affordable social housing, ensuring equitable access to healthcare and allowing greater access to higher education. And so and so forth - the policies that will help black people help society as a whole. Why would anyone object?

And while we're at it, Priti Patel could easily put an end to all Windrush deportations and ensure that every family affected receives compensation.

Pulling down the vile Edward Colston was an important moment in history, along with the powerful image of a black woman taking her place on his empty plinth to address the crowd with a megaphone, but even if every statue of every slave trader is rightly removed, there is still so much that needs to be done to improve the awful statistics.

Image credit: Prachatai/Flickr

Moving on from Cummings going to Durham with the Dompologists

The Dompologists came out in force as soon as their hero was busted. Apparently, Dominic Cummings going to work on what should have been his first day at home for a 14-day quarantine; driving 260 miles non-stop to Durham with a child in the car while he and his wife were both possibly contagious so they could be near the person who was their only childcare option; the person who was the only childcare option apparently incapable of travelling alone to London if required; being tragically unable to ask a single friend or family member in London to drop off groceries or medication during quarantine; being unable to pay for a grocery or medication delivery service despite having a pretty good combined household income; driving his child to hospital in Durham with his wife while still possibly contagious; driving to Barnard Castle on his wife's birthday with his wife and child in the car on a 60-mile round trip to test his eyesight; not sharing the drive home with his wife even though she can drive; his wife writing a column for the Spectator about life in lockdown which omitted the salient fact that they'd buggered off to Durham; testing the capacity of a Range Rover petrol tank to its absolute running-on-fumes limits; being the parents of a four-year-old with a cast iron bladder; and retrospectively editing a blog post in April 2020 to give the impression that he warned everyone about the coronavirus last year - all mean that he didn't break any of the rules he helped to set and therefore he shouldn't resign.

Instead, a pathetic rebranding of Dominic Cummings, father of the year, erupted. It was quickly pointed out that the whole "he did what any good dad would do" line insulted everyone, especially those struggling to juggle kids and work, and all who had followed the rules since March.

So, the Dompologists started yelling: "LET'S MOVE ON AND TALK ABOUT THE IMPORTANT ISSUES!".

OK. Sure. Fine by me. Let's talk about the important issues. How about we start with childcare? Seriously, I've never heard so many people who have never previously breathed a word about childcare talk so much about childcare when they leapt to Cummings' defence.

Let's talk about childcare not just for now - although that is important - but for the long-term. What can we do about (mostly) women giving up careers because childcare costs meant they were literally paying to go to work? What about incentivising employers to subsidise childcare, offer more flexible hours or working-from-home opportunities to help families? Hell, if anything good can come of this wretched virus, it might be the penny dropping for presenteeism-obsessed employers in regard to trusting staff to work from home. At the same time, though, how about recognising the need for people who work from home to have access to childcare? And what about affordable, high-quality childcare for people on low incomes? Maybe some of the Conservative MPs who smashed the red wall could raise this issue on behalf of their working class constituents?

Perhaps the craven cabinet ministers who all spinelessly tweeted embarrassing boilerplate nonsense about Cummings being a plucky little battler who was struggling with childcare could show the same concern for families up and down the country? I could introduce them to someone I know, a single father raising a severely disabled teenaged daughter while working from home. I'm sure that meeting would prove very instructive for the government front bench.

And let's talk about how shamefully outrageous the Downing Street rose garden press conference was. Why was an unelected adviser allowed to use that particular space to defend himself on live TV?

But more importantly, if the Dompologists want to talk about the big issues of the day, let's talk about how Cummings' defence blew wide open the rifts among Brexiters, and how it became painfully clear that the main reason Boris Johnson hasn't sacked him is because he is too scared to try and be prime minister without his trusty adviser.

Cummings came across as being puffed up with his own self-importance during his rose garden statement but he had a point - to Boris Johnson, he is important. Cummings was quite right to talk up his importance to the running of the country - this is the pedestal on which Johnson placed him and now he's incapable of taking him down.

We have a prime minister who is self-serving, unpleasant, cowardly, bullying and lazy. This PM gig has not panned out like he thought it would when it competed for top billing in his masturbatory fantasies at Eton. As a result, he relies heavily on Cummings, having been way too impressed by the effectiveness of the "Take back control" slogan of the Brexit campaign.

Since then, Classic Dom's simplistic slogans have been the order of the day. To be fair, "Stay at home, protect the NHS, save lives" was clear and effective. It was an instruction the Cummings himself found impossible to follow but it made sense. Now we have the shitshow of "Stay alert" with a government rushing to ease lockdown rules because public trust has eroded. It seems the government has figured everyone is just going to flock to the nearest park or beach anyway. Bizarre rules about allowing six people in your garden as long as nobody sits on the sunlounger or uses the toilet abound. We're being warned not to have sex with anyone outside our own households but we can let the cleaner, nanny or estate agent in, if required.

Today, we witnessed the Rees-Mogg-inspired farce of MPs queueing in a ridiculous conga line to vote in parliament, along with a drive to force all 650 MPs back into the House of Commons before it's safe to do so, all because the PM is useless without his braying fan club behind him. The pared-back parliament with limited numbers in the house and questions by Zoom exposes Johnson as an incompetent blatherer, a desperate haystack of a man, obviously out of his depth, reaching for Latin Christmas cracker jokes when he has no answers.

Dominic Cummings isn't urging the PM to take a step back and look at this mess with a cool head. He's probably delighted with the chaos - after all, we are edging towards his libertarian wet dream where everyone does the hell they want so they can all be blamed when there's a second spike in COVID-19 cases. And he is happy to continue to lead Boris Johnson down this pitiful path, regardless of whose lives it might cost, along with leading us over an irresponsible no-deal Brexit cliff for good measure. One unelected man has way too much power. That is what has emerged from the scandal over the drive to Durham. That is what is so outrageous and that is why we should stay angry.



Photo: Ninian Reid/Flickr

Alert or alarmed? Conservative communication at its worst

As soon as Boris Johnson pivoted from "Stay home" to "Stay alert", I had flashbacks to Australia circa 2002. The John Howard government, in all its wisdom, spewed forth the slogan "Be alert, not alarmed" in regard to being vigilant about terrorism. 

Of course, by this stage, plenty of people were alarmed about the threat of terrorism in a post-9/11 world and it was never entirely clear what "be alert" meant apart from maybe going above and beyond the usual neighbourhood watch curtain-twitching if you suspected someone might be plotting a terror attack. Alertness didn't stop four young Australians getting killed in 2005 when they were enjoying a night out in Bali, nor did it stop the 2014 siege at the Lindt Cafe in Sydney's Martin Place, in which 18 people were taken hostage and three people were shot dead. 

Should the people who went out for a night on the razz in Bali or the people who were going about their business, meeting friends or colleagues for coffee in Martin Place have been more alert? Of course not because it's is a load of victim-blaming nonsense.

That's the problem with telling people to "stay alert" - at what point does alertness give way to ridiculous paranoia? And how meaningful is advice to stay alert? 

Staying alert is reasonably sound life advice in that it's smart to be aware of one's surroundings, pay attention while driving or keep an eye on the kids when they're swimming in the sea, but how does it apply to a virus that is invisible but deadly? It won't jump you from behind and nick your wallet, despite Boris Johnson's crap mugger analogy after he emerged from hospital like scruffy Jesus. It won't cut you off like Prince Phillip when you have right of way at a T-junction. It won't drag the kids underwater like a freak wave at Tenerife.

In any case, we are already alert. 

For weeks now, people have been rolling their eyes, tutting or yelling at people who don't respect social distancing on footpaths or can't follow simple one-way systems in supermarket aisles. Hell, some people are reporting their neighbours to the police, be it for non-crimes, such as sitting in the sun for a bit, or genuinely dangerous petri dish situations, such as having a load of mates over for a party.

And people were alert enough to avoid public transport unless absolutely essential until this morning. 

Boris Johnson's new "Stay alert - Control the virus - Save lives" message was coupled with a pre-recorded address to the nation last night which avoided the scrutiny of parliament. The advice seems to be to go back to work if you can't work from home, unless you work in a pub, restaurant, barbershop, hairdressing salon or beauty salon; try to walk, cycle or drive to work if you can; and only take public transport if there is no other option. But this was issued at 7pm on a Sunday night, without the accompanying 60-page guidance document, and without any real advice to employers to make sure the workplace is safe before calling people back to work. 

The overwhelming message that cut through was "Shit! I think I have to go to work tomorrow!", probably followed by assorted panics, such as "Shit! Childcare!" and "Shit! I can't get to work unless I take the tube!".

Cue packed tubes in London this morning as people were either called into work by unscrupulous employers who couldn't possibly have done all the due diligence required to make workplaces safe between 7pm last night and 9am this morning, or people who saw the message from the prime minister as a non-negotiable order to get back to work ASAP. For many of these people, it was a decision that was based on fear of unemployment, even if it put their health at risk - and not everyone who went back to work today would have been empowered to walk off the job if they didn't feel safe. 

A construction site worker on a zero-hours contract is not going to be in the same position of power and self-determination as someone who can merrily keep working from the comfort of home. This virus is not the great leveller some say it is.

The poor messaging from a table-thumping Boris Johnson last night was compounded by a hapless Dominic Raab this morning who stammered his way through an interview with the excellent Michal Husain, admitting that maybe it would be better to wait until at least Wednesday to go back to work and, at the same time, refusing to come out and say that workers who don't feel safe should be able to walk off the job without fear. He expressed a faith in the willingness of employers to do the right thing that was, at best, cute and naive and, at worst, a reckless, irresponsible means of washing the government's hands of a likely second spike in virus cases.

It's so easy for people to claim the government's messaging was perfectly clear when they have the luxury of working from home. It's so easy to accuse people of not knowing what the word "alert" means. It's so easy to set the bar so low for this government, even though they have a well-paid communications team at their disposal.

And it's so easy for the latest example of poor communication from this government to be misunderstood - or understood and followed because there was no choice to do otherwise - possibly with the worst possible consequences.

Photography by Circe Denyer

Of course COVID-19 is political

The COVID-19 pandemic should not be an excuse to score cheap political points. It is not an excuse to wish death on politicians and their loved ones like a psychopath. It is not the time for ridiculous, batshit conspiracy theories about 5G causing the pandemic. It is not the time for anti-vaxx pedlars of death and disease to spout ignorant, science-denying twaddle. And it is certainly not a time to become a racist bellend. But it is political. It is naive to think otherwise. 

Countries across the world are relying on their governments for leadership, to figure out the best way to manage this terrible virus, to support healthcare systems, to know what the hell individuals can do to stop the disease spreading, to ensure the scientists working on a vaccine and a cure have everything they need, to work out what role charities and the private sector should take, and so on.

This means, obviously, politicians everywhere are making decisions - and it is naive to expect that certain decisions won't be politically motivated rather than for the greater good. In every democracy, this means they should be held to account - every decision that our leaders make affects our health and our wealth. We all have a huge stake in this. And in every country that is not a democracy, this should be the catalyst for increased transparency and public participation as a positive after-effect of the pandemic - after all, if you think the official mortality figures coming out of China or Iran are accurate, I have some magic beans and a time share in Narnia to sell you. Then again, the UK isn't bothering to include care home deaths in official stats so we still need to lift our game in terms of accuracy and transparency.  

In no country should COVID-19 be a time for cultish, blind loyalty to any leader of any political stripe. I'm glad Boris Johnson didn't die of COVID-19. And I'm glad Carrie Symonds, his pregnant fiancee, is doing well. Hell, I'm glad that he is recovering for a few weeks rather than working because that is what every coronavirus patient should be doing after they leave hospital. I am also glad that the attempt to stir up a national round of applause for the prime minister's recovery was a massive damp squib. A nationwide chorus of clapping and pot-banging for one man would have been embarrassing, unnecessary and definitely cultish.

And while Johnson may now join the immune herd for COVID-19, he is not and should not be immune to criticism or scrutiny - and neither should the hapless cavalcade of assorted incompetents, yes-men and women, charisma-vacuums, intellectual lightweights and slippery moral bankrupts who are filling in for the PM at the daily briefings.

It is clear that political decisions have been made which are not necessarily in our best interests, such as declining an invitation to join a European Commission-funded scheme to stockpile essential medical equipment, to have constantly dropped pandemic planning from the agenda since 2016, and for Boris Johnson to have found better uses for his time, such as meeting a dancing dragon for Chinese New Year instead of attending a COBRA meeting - or indeed attending five COBRA meetings on COVID-19.

At a time when we should be re-evaluating our relationship with China on multiple levels, including taking a stand on human rights and animal welfare issues and getting over our reliance on cheap goods often manufactured to low standards and in awful working conditions, the photograph of Boris Johnson gurning gormlessly at the dragon is not ageing well.

Yes, it's true that the relevant cabinet minister chairs COBRA meetings but given these meetings were about a global pandemic, it is negligent at worst and lazy at best for Johnson to simply not bother with these ones. Imagine the outcry in an alternative universe if Prime Minister Corbyn missed five COBRA meetings because he was pottering about on his allotment or attending a Venezuelan solidarity Zoom meeting. The very same people who are demanding we leave poor little Boris alone would be foaming at the mouth at the very thought of Corbyn neglecting his duty so comprehensively. Hell, imagine any prime minister in living memory missing such meetings.

In January, when PPE supply chains should have been bolstered and early scientific advice heeded, Boris Johnson was distracted by January 31's Brexit day brouhaha, something which at the time he thought was going to be his greatest triumph, his most memorable speech, the iconic photograph for the history books - but now it seems like a lifetime ago. That was a political decision as well as a negligent one.

To those who are upset about the much-villified "mainstream media" going over past decisions of recent months, please try to comprehend that it is important to flag up the mistakes that have been made. If only we had a leader who could graciously admit to and apologise for mistakes in the way that Emmanuel Macron did - that would be a good first step on the road to accountability and to quickly learning from mistakes which have surely cost lives. There will almost certainly be some sort of inquiry further down the track as to how the government handled the pandemic, when lockdown restrictions have been lifted or at least relaxed. But for now, we need decisive action from accountable leaders who are prepared to admit to errors and work their arses off to fix them.

Getting upset because The Sunday Times and Reuters have pointed out these failings in great detail is absolutely pathetic behaviour. Michael Gove was on brand on Marr this morning when he admitted Johnson didn't attend five COBRA meetings but gave the mealy-mouthed excuse that cabinet ministers chair such meetings, while simultaneously making a dig at journalists, a more articulate but equally venal version of Donald Trump's constant whines of "fake news". This was political manouevring on Gove's part - he appeared to be Johnson's loyal footsoldier but his defence of Johnson missing meetings would collapse in a light breeze and he knows it. He is not an idiot. Gove, ably assisted by his wife, Sarah Vine, a Poundland Lady Macbeth, would most likely be delighted if the pandemic cost Johnson his job. Again, let's not be naive here.

The next political decision to watch is in regard to an extension to Brexit negotiations, which has a deadline of June 30. The government is adamant that the UK won't ask for an extension but they may be left with little choice if the EU decides it has bigger virus-shaped fish to fry for the rest of the year. The British economy can recover from COVID-19 or it can recover from a no-deal Brexit after December 31 this year, but to try and get through both economic and social shocks, most likely concurrently, will be wantonly destructive. We have no choice but to deal with COVID-19 but we do have a choice about taking a more responsible approach to Brexit. Either way, it's a political choice and it will affect us for years to come.




Image: Mikhail Denishchenko

Of dead cats, engagements and babies

Ever since Boris Johnson romped into power with an 80-seat majority last December, he has created a cottage industry of dead cat-dumping. He got into training years before the election when he explained the art of dumping a dead cat on the dining room table to create a distraction when you're losing an argument in a column for The Telegraph in 2013. 

And last June, when he wanted to be the Conservative Party leadership frontrunner without any of the scrutiny, he took the heat off by claiming to paint wooden models of London buses for fun. As a bonus, this weird claim helped drop Google results about dishonest Brexit referendum claims emblazoned on buses, and his shameful waste of public money with the dreadful "Boris buses" when he was mayor of London, way down the list.

So it comes as no surprise that the PM's lust for dropping dead cats continues apace, now he has the job to which he has felt entitled since he was a boy. 

Reviving the ridiculous idea of a bridge between two remote points in Scotland and Northern Ireland a few weeks ago was a classic of the deceased feline genre. Johnson knows full well why it would be an expensive, dangerous engineering nightmare, although this probably won't stop him spending more of our money on a feasibility study even though the outcomes are a foregone conclusion. 

It took a serious brass neck to drop the big bridge dead cat - Johnson does not have a great track with bridges. The Garden Bridge debacle from his time as mayor wasted millions of pounds of public money, raised as-yet-unanswered questions about corruption and conflicts of interest, and the stupid project was ultimately, mercifully abandoned by an exasperated Sadiq Khan, his successor as mayor of London. It was the inevitable result of letting Joanna Lumley dictate urban planning.

But talking up a big, dumb bridge between Scotland and Northern Ireland was an excellent distraction from big issues around that time, such as the Streatham stabbing, which could be directly attributed to the early release of terrorist offenders on the watch of the Conservative governments over the past decade. This dead cat also stalled any proper scrutiny of the UK's Brexit negotiation preparations ahead of talks with the EU, which are due to resume this month. What a handy fictional bridge that was!

And yesterday, we were treated to the news of Boris Johnson's engagement to Carrie Symonds, complete with an early summer baby on the way. But this does not necessarily automatically fall into the category of dead cat, despite Twitter last night exploding with claims of ex-pussies. There were a few appalling commentators urging Carrie to take advantage of Britain's liberal abortion laws - but here's the thing about being pro-choice. It means you do not condemn women for making choices that you wouldn't make for yourself. 

Even with Johnson's notorious virility, it is preposterous to suggest that he and Carrie planned a productive bunk-up late last year that would coincide with an engagement/pregnancy announcement to fall on a weekend where the Sunday papers had plenty of embarrassing front page options. 

Anyone who knows about female biology would realise they have been aware of the pregnancy for a while, and anyone who knows about the Conservative Party's need to appeal to social conservatives would realise the announcement would have to wait until after Johnson finalised his divorce with Marina Wheeler, his second wife. Who knows if they really did get engaged last December and, frankly, who cares? It was just a necessary part of the announcement to appeal to Tory pearl clutchers. And the pregnancy announcement obviously couldn't be delayed forever. 

In any case, if it was a dead cat, it was a pretty unsuccessful one. While the engagement/pregnancy made its way to most front pages - and it is naive to expect otherwise - it was really only The Sunday Telegraph which went for the full-on, Hello!-magazine-style gush-fest. I'm not surprised there was no byline on that story - any journalist with even the tiniest shred of credibility would be embarrassed to have that on their CV.

The Mail on Sunday ran the Instagram photo of a stubbled Johnson kissing the cheek of a beaming Carrie but tempered the soppy, sickly claim to an "exclusive inside story of their love" with a "CRIPES!", which was probably the reaction of plenty of people across the country yesterday. And across the bottom of the front page is a damning story about a leaked government memo that demonstrates that not being content to "fuck business", Boris Johnson may well be tempted to fuck farmers as well in his quest to give Dominic Cummings his wet dream Brexit.

The Independent ran an old photo of the happy couple with a discreet caption but went big, and rightly so, on Sir Philip Rutnam's departure from the Home Office amid claims of bullying, lying and intimidation by Home Secretary, Priti Patel.  Bizarrely, the apologists for this wretched government seem to think Priti Patel's existence as a powerful woman of Asian heritage is some sort of gotcha-headfuck for those who oppose this government. Nope, sorry, Johnson fans, Priti Patel does not get a leave pass from scrutiny because of her gender or ethnicity. How patronising.

The Sunday Times and The Observer also led with the Home Office troubles, with both pieces holding Priti Patel's feet to the fire. The ST added a teaser for an exclusive on the forthcoming budget with news of entrepreneurs losing a big tax break. The engagement/pregnancy headline was a wry "What a good day to announce a No 10 baby", while The Observer went with a picture caption of the happy couple, and a story at the bottom about Matt Hancock's absurd plans to pull NHS doctors out of retirement to deal with the coronavirus. 

The Sunday Mirror made the obvious "Carrie to go into labour" pun and described her salaciously as the "PM's lover" in a splash of barely disguised judgement. But the lead story was still an exclusive on Mo Farah's ongoing drug row.  

And The Daily Star, which exists in its own glorious bubble of madness, had no mention of engagements or babies at all. Instead, it went big with "QUACKERS - Plastic ducks barred from charity race to save the planet", along with some Love Island gossip.

So it was reassuring that, apart from the Sunday Telegraph, the newspapers weren't too badly distracted by the PM's personal announcement, news that was, in all honesty, as predictable as it is banal.

Of course, the ball is now in Johnson and Symonds' court - with wedding plans and a baby due in a few months, there are plenty of dead cats they could gleefully drop, especially if negotiations with the EU go as pear-shaped as many expect. 

There are golden opportunities for pictures of an engagement ring to be sent out into the ether, wedding dress design speculation is compulsory, maybe some hints will be dropped about the decor of a Downing Street nursery, and because every pregnant woman in the public eye must have her private choices exposed, there is plenty of scope for the "Will Carrie give birth naturally to whale music?" genre of intrusive journalism. 

Will they opt for privacy or will they happily let fluffy wedding-and-baby stories take on a life of their own next time Johnson cuts his own throat, fucks up, or would rather not face hard questions about the path on which he and Classic Dom are dragging the country?  

Photography by rawdonfox/Flickr

Rest well, Caroline

As ever, whenever a celebrity dies, especially when they die young, suddenly and tragically, the internet comes alive with the inevitable public grief, hand-wringing, assumptions from people who claim they knew exactly what happened in that unfortunate person's final sad weeks, days and hours, and there is a rush to apportion blame. 

But with the news only breaking last night about the suicide of Caroline Flack, we only have certain facts available. We know she took her own life, we know she was due to face trial for the assault of her boyfriend, Lewis Burton, we know the CPS alleges that she hit him with a lamp while he was asleep, we know he didn't want to press charges, we know that she pleaded not guilty, we know that a condition of her bail was that she was not to contact her boyfriend. 

And there is plenty we do not know. 

We do not yet know what the post-mortem or inquest will reveal. And there are things we will never know, such as whether this story may have had a happier outcome if she was allowed to see her boyfriend before the trial, or indeed what the outcome of the trial would have been. We won't know of a not-guilty verdict or find out how she could rebuild her life after an acquittal - or what would follow for her and Burton in the event of a guilty verdict. 

The only thing we can be sure of is that if she was found guilty, she'd become the anti-poster-child for the "See? Women can be abusers too!" brigade. That brigade had already come out of the woodwork, shitting on the whole concept of presumption of innocence. Nobody is saying that women cannot be the perpetrators of domestic violence - of course they can - but everyone accused of this dreadful crime has the right to a fair trial. 

This brigade of (mostly) angry men was emboldened by pictures published by The Sun of a bloodstained bed at Flack's flat, pictures which, horrifically, were still on the newspaper's website at the time of writing. The publication of the bloodied bed was, at best, in poor taste and, at worst, not in the public interest, particularly before her trial had taken place.

There is a rush to blanket-blame "the media" for Flack's death - and she has long been an object of tabloid obsession, particularly after she dated a 17-year-old Harry Styles when she was 31. No age of consent laws were broken, but eyebrows were raised when Styles was photographed leaving her flat. It didn't take long for her to be pigeonholed as a "cougar", a sexually aggressive and adventurous seducer of younger men, a woman who is seen as a threat to the ideal of a demure, compliant woman. 

She became an easy target for hate and it wasn't restricted to the usual tabloid suspects. Everyone with a Twitter account and a misguided sense of moral righteousness could pile in. 

And the public lapped it up. If there wasn't a market for these sort of salacious stories, they wouldn't be written or broadcast in the first place. We feed the beast when we click on the links. Entertainment journalists are often quick to defend their profession, to point out that it's not an easy job (it's not) and they are obliged to constantly seek out the stories that will get the clicks and the sales (also true). But it is unfortunate that in the quest to keep eyeballs on screens and papers, fingers furtively scrolling or turning pages, that not only does accuracy often fall by the wayside, but public interest tests fall short and there is little time to pause and contemplate if a story is kind or even necessary.

Advocating the end of entertainment journalism or holding "the mainstream media" solely responsible for Flack's death is reductive and simplistic, ignoring the role of social media in this complicated story, especially as that was the only way Burton was able to communicate with Flack since December. However, it shouldn't preclude entertainment journalists from pausing to think about how they cover stories, especially those involving celebrities who may be vulnerable, may have mental health issues, may be struggling with addiction, or may simply be going through a tough time, as can happen to any one of us. 

The guidelines for reporting on suicide, issued by the Samaritans, are an excellent resource - it is not a restriction on press freedom to report responsibly.

Ultimately, gossip is part of human nature. That's never going to change. We devour gossip about our friends as readily as we devour celebrity gossip. Hell, I have an episode of The Bachelor burbling mindlessly away in the background as I write this and I just rolled my eyes as a doe-eyed blonde used her one-on-one time with the prized Colton, the hot, virgin bachelor, to call her mother for the first time since her release from prison. I'm not going to pretend I'm immune to taking a pervy interest in the lives of beautiful people I'll never meet. Of course, with every celebrity death, there's always one sneering blowhard who feels the need to comment "Who?" under a tweet or Facebook post, as if not knowing about a figure in popular culture is some form of moral superiority. 

But the truth is that none of us are superior. We're all flawed and farty and prone to awkwardness, even those who, on the surface, appear to have everything under control. And any one of us could end up in as dark a place as Flack found herself in her lonely final hours. May we all pause to be kind to each other and to ourselves.

Photography by Alex Borland.

Wanting young people to suffer: the new sadism

It starts out as a seemingly harmless thing that most of us have heard from our parents or grandparents: "Young people today! They don't know they're alive! They know nothing of the suffering we went through as kids..."

Hell, as I become an increasingly old hack, I'll roll my eyes at journalism graduates when they baulk at having to make a phone call or look aghast at the days of heavy reliance on fax machines or dial-up internet only being available on one computer in the office. But I'd like to think that I'm not a bitter sadist, mercilessly wishing we could all go back to the paste-up era of newspaper production, or wanting to deprive young journalists of the convenience of fast internet to teach them a lesson.

But the cries of young people not knowing true suffering now go beyond the jocular overtones of the "Four Yorkshiremen" sketch or laughing at trigger warnings supposedly demanded by the snowflake generation. There's a nastiness, a disdain for comfort, a yearning for good old days that were actually terrible, a desire to see young people have as hard a life, or harder, than previous generations, rather than wanting to see the next generation be more successful, more comfortable and more prosperous.

Misplaced nostalgia for WWII is a good example of the new sadism, and it is particularly embarrassing when it comes from people who were not alive during the horrors of WWII or have never served in the military. Someone who courageously tweets anonymously as Brexit Stonking Majority Tory tweeted the following miserable nonsense:

In 1941 teenage RAF pilots were flying old MK1 Hurricanes & putting their life on the line against Luftwaffe veteran pilots in the brilliant ME109F.
Remainer teenagers today.... #marr

The image is a still from a video of a pink-haired teenager dancing joyously in support of the UK staying in the EU rather than spending his youth bombing neighbouring countries in a war that we won with the help of European allies (but don't tell Brexit Stonking Majority Tory that...).

We've had almost four years of Brexity blathering along the lines of: "We got through two world wars, we'll survive Brexit!" to jolly people along in the face of evidence of a forthcoming recession, increased prices, bending to US standards to get a trade deal with Trump, job losses and anything else that indicates that the leave campaign's grand promises turn to dust upon any contact with reality.

The reality is that leaving the EU will most likely lead to hardships - because Brexiters can't refute this, they are instead revelling in the possibility of suffering, getting their pitiful excuses in early, saying it'll be a price worth paying for some intellectually bankrupt notion of sovereignty, rather than preparing to take any responsibility for any hardships which might come as a result of their vote.

Wishing another war on young people to somehow harden them up is appalling. There are already plenty of young people across the world suffering the horrors of war on a daily basis. Adding more young people to their number won't make anything better for anyone. 

Liz Kershaw joined in the sadistic idiocy last month in an awful attempt to squash the notion of period poverty, that anyone in the UK was suffering from a lack of access to sanitary products. She tweeted:

Sorry if this is gross.
But #periodpoverty FFS?!
My mum had to use old rags which my grandma boil-washed and she re-used.
How did she ever manage to get a scholarship to grammar school, go to Uni or become a headteacher without free tampons???

The most charitable reading of this tweet is that Liz Kershaw is an eco-warrior, calling for more widespread use of reusable sanitary products, but she's really just advocating a time when things were harder, especially for girls and women. There are certainly very good reusable sanitary pads on the market today but they are not cheap and they do rely on access to good laundry facilities. A return to shoving any old rag in in your pants is a return to, at best, the risk of a humiliating bloodstained accident and, at worst, the risk of infection. Liz mindlessly generalises from the example of one person and glorifies suffering as a result. She is the same woman who twisted the 430 job losses in East Anglia as a result of the closure of the Philips factory as some kind of Brexit benefit so you'll have to forgive me if I fail to see any altruism in her sadistic period tweet.

Still, the good news for anyone crowing about the possibility of young people suffering or wishing hardship on them all is that their sadistic dreams are coming true. There are measurable examples of things getting worse rather than better for the next generation.

Last year, the Institute and Faculty of Actuaries reported that life expectancy in the UK is declining and it is a trend rather than a statistical blip. Compared with 2015 figures, the institute now expects men aged 65 to die at 86.9 years, down from 87.4 years, and women aged 65 are likely to die at 89.2 years, down from 89.7 years. While this is not on par with Chad, with a life expectancy of 50.6 years, it's not something we should be celebrating either as it reflects a decline in healthcare, living standards, individual affluence and the overall economy.

The Learning and Work Institute projected last year that the UK will drop four places in world literacy and numeracy rankings by 2030 - so the good news for the sadists is that we're apparently less healthy and less educated.

Housing is becoming less affordable too, even if those pesky kids quit spending their deposit on avocado toast. A report released by the Office of National Statistics last year revealed that on average, full-time workers could expect to pay an estimated 7.8 times their annual workplace-based earnings on buying a home in England or Wales in 2018. The figure was 7.6 times annual earnings in 2016 and 3.6 times earnings in 1997. And these figures are based on people in full-time employment - this does not take into account the gig economy or people languishing on zero hours contracts when they would love job stability.

This is not catastrophising or being what Boris Johnson, a man who cares little for facts, stats, details or nuance, would call a "doomster and gloomster". This is modern reality.

So, well played, sadists! Take a fucking bow. You're achieving your dream of the next generation having it worse than you did. If this is what you need to do to feel proud, I feel sorry for you - but I feel even more sorry for the young people who are genuinely suffering, even if you're deluding yourself that they're all pampered softies living a life of luxury.




Photography by kai Stachowiak

Childhood memories up in flames

In 1982, I was six years old and we lived in a cul-de-sac called Nicholi Crescent in Wagga Wagga, Australia. Everyone knew each other - we used to play tennis on a makeshift court painted onto the road by a neighbour, safe in the knowledge that no cars would ever speed through. At the end of the dead end, there were acres of long grass - we played there too, never thinking of the possibility of a snakebite, in pre-nanny state Australia. These days, the long grass has been replaced by houses, the cul-de-sac bulldozed into a street, although it's still called Nicholi Crescent. A snoop on Google Street View shows that our old house still has the terrible yellow 1970s glass on the front, although the magnificent Nicholi gum tree, the one in which I got stuck in 1986, is gone.

One warm Thursday night in 1982, we got home from late night shopping to find the end of Nicholi Crescent on fire. Everyone was staring from their front lawns as the fire brigade went to work. I even remember what I was wearing - pale blue pedal pushers and a blue floral shirt handed down to me from close family friends with slightly older daughters. My photo ended up in the local paper, the Daily Advertiser. It was a picture of me, my mother and the old lady next door with concerned expressions on our faces, but nobody was hurt and nobody lost their home.

It was terribly exciting. 

Being in the paper was akin to being famous for a few days in Wagga Wagga in the 1980s. The next day, I got to wear my pink dress to school - unafraid of burglary, the windows were left open when we went shopping and my uniform, lovingly, nerdishly laid out for Friday, reeked of smoke. I had a great story for class news that day - a fire, the newspaper photographer, my pink dress in a sea of blue and yellow checked school uniforms - I loved the attention.       

But that was 38 years ago. I can't remember what caused the fire at the end of Nicholi Crescent but neither can I remember any discussion of climate change. Throughout my Australian childhood, serious bushfires across the country made the news in summer, there were long, hot days, and droughts. But this summer's fires and temperatures have gone to the next level. This time, bushfire season started in September, which is still spring in Australia. 

It has been relentless. For many farmers, droughts have become the norm rather than the exception, and yet still, Scott Morrison refuses to accept that the climate is changing, that it cannot be ignored as a factor in these horrific, destructive fires. 

In 2013, the CSIRO (Australia's Commonwealth Scientific and Industrial Research Organisation) released a report which found that Australia can expect higher temperatures, more extreme heat and longer fire seasons. Then, in 2014, the CSIRO released a report that found since the beginning of the 20th century, average annual temperatures have increased and, crucially, in the 50 years leading up to 2014, temperatures increased at twice the rate than in the previous 50 years. Alongside this increase, rainfall has decreased. The data is real and there was a time when it wasn't being ignored.

In 2011, Prime Minister Julia Gillard introduced a carbon tax - in three years, this tax helped reduce carbon emissions but in 2014, Prime Minister Tony Abbott repealed the tax and ramped up coal production and carbon emissions have been increasing ever since. The summers keep getting hotter, the coral of the magnificent Great Barrier Reef is suffering a visible extinction event, and this year's bushfires have, at the time of writing, destroyed more than 900 properties, killed nine people with four people missing, and burnt more than 5.1 million hectares. Oh, and funding for the CSIRO has been cut by the federal government, which should surprise nobody who knows about this wretched government's anti-science, anti-environment agenda.

 It is no longer terribly exciting. 

The fire at the end of my street in 1982 happened at a time when there was limited awareness about the human impact on climate. It all seemed so innocent at the time but we had no idea that we were contributing in ways big and small to the situation we have today. 

It's easy to mock Greta Thunberg for saying her childhood has been stolen. It is easy to say that she should be in school, that she is being manipulated by powers bigger than her, but she is right to suggest that economic growth is meaningless if it comes at great environmental cost. Instead of directing ire at a teenager (and in some vile cases, expressing a desire to inflict physical violence on her), that energy would be better spent finding solutions.

Unfortunately, I can't see the Australian government stepping up any time soon.

_________________________

If you're feeling powerless to help Australia, especially from other countries, here are some links where you can make donations, although it would be nice if the federal government stepped up and ensured adequate funding made its way to the states. If this summer is any indication, Australia will not be able to continue to rely on volunteers to back up the full-time firefighters. Scott Morrison's thoughts and prayers can, with all due respect, get in the bin.

Red Cross Bushfire Appeal 

New South Wales Rural Fire Service

Victoria Country Fire Authority

St Vincent de Paul

The Lions Club appeal for the north coast of New South Wales

Port Macquarie Koala Hospital

  

Photography by Kim Newberg