Media radicalisation in the US and UK

 

Perhaps many people outside the United States do not realise how dangerous the attack on the United States Capitol was. The views from outside the Capitol, which is all the media could immediately show, seemed harmless enough. The reality was very different. Five people died, including one policeman. As one Republican described, seeing the faces of those trying to force their way through a police barricade to get into the House Chamber

“I saw this crowd of people banging on that glass screaming. Looking at their faces, it occurred to me, these aren’t protesters. These are people who want to do harm. What I saw in front of me was basically home-grown fascism, out of control.”

We now know that this was a well organised attempt to capture leading politicians. We don’t yet know, as some Democrats have alleged, whether the attackers had inside help from some Republican politicians. What we do know is that the attackers believed that the elections had been stolen from them, and these claims were repeated and acted on by a majority of the Republican politicians even after the Capitol attack. As there is not a shred of evidence that Biden’s election was illegitimate, those Republican members of Congress are guilty of supporting a democratic destroying lie that was behind the attack on Congress.

There are a minority among Republican politicians that would like to break from Trump. Liz Cheney, the House Republican Conference Chair, said

“There’s no question the president formed the mob, the president incited the mob, the president addressed the mob. He lit the flame”.

But only 10 Republicans in the House voted to impeach Trump, while the remaining 201 abstained or voted against. It is very unlikely that enough Republican senators will find him guilty in the Senate. A key question is why.

It should be in the interests of Republicans to impeach Trump, because that is the only certain way to stop him running again in 2024. Republicans shouldn’t want Trump to run again because his behaviour has put off a minority of Republican voters. That was true before the election (Trump did worse than the party in Senate and House races) and it is even more true as a result of his behaviour since. The two seats in Georgia, which looked like going Republican, voted Democrat after the events at the Capitol and Trump campaigned there. Immediately after the attack on the Capitol many Republican politicians disowned Trump.

But then the Republican base fought back. The reason why Republican politicians will not impeach him is the support he still enjoys among Republican voters, and particularly Republican activists. 64% of Republicans support Trump’s recent behaviour, and 57% want him to run again in 2024. As many Republican voters approved the attack on the Capitol as opposed it. There is a history of extreme Republican candidates defeating moderate candidates in primaries, so few Republicans want to upset the Republican base by opposing Trump, even after the attack on the Capitol. Trump himself is ready to finance campaigns against his critics in the Republican party.

So the Republican party are trapped by their pro-Trump base, and there is no obvious way out for those who oppose Trump. The Republican party therefore remains the party that does not respect democracy. A key question for the future of democracy in the United States will be whether voters understand that when they vote in two and four years time. Do they understand that a vote for the Republicans could be the last time they get a real choice in who governs them? As I argued some time ago, the only way you can rescue right wing political parties from the extreme place they have got to in the US and UK is to defeat them time and time again, or to change what is keeping extremism going.

Academic analysis of how the media influences people has normally focused on elections, and all of the studies I have seen suggest a strong influence on voters. I think their influence on party activists on the right is just as important. The traditional and respectable media in the US was clear that there was no evidence of fraud in the 2020 election, and that Biden won fairly. It was the extreme right wing media, including Murdoch’s Fox News but also One America News, Rush Limbaugh and numerous social media outlets, that pushed the idea that Trump had really won.

This media is crucial in allowing many Republicans to believe what Trump was telling them. I think this is the key difference between now and when the last Republican president was impeached. For a long time voters were reluctant to have Nixon impeached, but eventually they agreed it should be done. But back then there was no significant media pretending it was all a giant conspiracy. Back then there were no significant people or organisations with money threatening to bring down any politicians who voted to have Nixon impeached.

I doubt if Biden has the votes to curtail the ability of Fox News and others to continue to radicalise the Republican base, even if he was minded to do so. We therefore have to hope that voters will continue to vote against this Republican party. The danger is that the mainstream media begins to normalise the Republican party once again, and a President with a Senate that blocks many of his reforms finds his popularity falling, and ends up in the position Obama was for six of his eight years.

In the UK we do not have primaries, so the direct power of the Conservative Party base is much less. The way the authoritarian right was able to win power in the UK was through a new party of the right that threatened the hegemony of the Conservative party, and through a referendum. Yet voters still had to be convinced to vote for a Prime Minister that illegally suspended parliament. That happened in part because the media landscape in the UK is much worse than in the US. I thought otherwise when I first started this blog, but that was before the Conservative party started turning the screws on the BBC. While in the US both the Trump supporting press and broadcast media are in a minority, in the UK the right wing press is a majority of the printed media and the BBC finds it difficult to deviate from the lines pushed by the government and that press.

However the situation in the UK may be about to get a lot worse, with GB News headed by Andrew Neil and the Murdoch owned News UK TV. Both new channels look like they are pitching to a right wing audience, and both are funded by people or organisations that have funded other right wing endeavours. Ofcom is supposed to ensure balance in broadcasting, which is why Sky News has never become Fox News. But with comment rather than news outlets like LBC and Talk Radio, Ofcom has taken a less strict view about what balance is.

The danger is that the two new TV channels will try and push that boundary further to the right. This is the context in which totally unfit Paul Dacre’s rumoured chairmanship of Ofcom should be seen. The danger is the creation of a right wing media bubble, where people who read the right wing press do not watch BBC News but one of these two new channels. Coupled with a FPTP system which favours social conservatives, and a Conservative party that exploits that and a social liberal vote which is divided among many parties, if these new media outlets are successful such a right wing bubble could ensure Conservative governments for a very long time.

Why vaccines alone are not enough, how the UK government could mess things up again and which European country will eliminate COVID first?

 

Why has the UK government decided to apply serious travel restrictions to incomers because of COVID now, almost a year after the pandemic began? What took them so long, and what has changed? The obvious answer to the second question is vaccination and mutation.

We don’t know how much the vaccines so far approved will stop people passing on the infection to others, but what evidence we have suggests there will be at least some dampening effect. Israel is likely to provide the first firm evidence on this. That will reduce R, the number of people one infected person passes the illness on to. What vaccines will certainly do is substantially reduce the chance of people getting ill from COVID.

The danger is that, as vaccines are rolled out, the virus develops the ability to bypass them through mutation, so vaccines either don’t work at all against this new variant or work less well. This doesn’t seem to have happened to a large extent yet, and it isn’t inevitable, but it has happened to a small extent and it would be unwise to assume it will not happen. The chances are that variants are likely to emerge in other countries first, so it makes sense to try and stop that variant entering into the UK for at least as long as possible.

While this provides an excellent justification for creating travel restrictions today, it doesn’t explain why effective general restrictions were not imposed before. (There have been requirements to self-isolate, but these seem largely voluntary.) A cynic might say that the underlying UK strategy is and always has been herd immunity, but I think that only applied at the beginning of the pandemic. After then, with UK cases more often than not higher than elsewhere, the incentive for effective and generalised border controls was not enough to motivate this government.

While the chances are that any variants that can bypass vaccines will emerge abroad, it is possible they will emerge in the UK because we are vaccinated in an environment of widespread infection. The big danger left is that Johnson will once again relax lockdown restrictions too soon, before enough people have been vaccinated. The quicker we reduce case numbers in the UK, the less chance there is that a vaccine-resistant mutation develops in the UK. In addition the more cases there are, the easier it is for an overseas variant to multiply. No restrictions on people entering can be 100% safe, as New Zealand recently found, and a complete ban on people entering is not feasible because of returning nationals. Johnson should know this because his failure to get case numbers really low over the summer allowed the UK variant to develop and multiply.

It makes sense to reduce UK cases as quickly as possible to very low numbers, to reduce the chances of mutation and increase the chances of isolating any variant that comes in from abroad. Whether you call it zero-COVID or elimination or whatever, that strategy has always been the one that minimizes deaths and gets the UK back to normal as quickly as possible. Vaccines don’t change that reality, they just make it easier to implement. One argument put forward against an eradication strategy has been the costs of quarantine in hotels, but now the UK government is doing quarantine that argument falls away.

Just as the UK is now imposing quarantine for incoming travellers, or requiring recent tests, the same is likely to happen in other countries for similar reasons as their vaccine programmes are rolled out. For a period of time we will have many Western countries where there is much reduced inward human travel. This is an outcome that I imagined happening many months ago once the scale of the pandemic became clear, and should have happened if best practice had been followed.

Once such a situation comes about, it creates two sets of very positive incentives for countries imposing quarantine. First, each country has a strong incentive to eliminate the virus, so that they can free travel up with other countries that have done the same. We will get travel bubbles being formed. Those bubbles will be fragile, as they have been for Australia and New Zealand, but they represent the beginnings of international cooperation to eliminate the virus.

The second incentive for those countries that do eliminate COVID is to get other countries to do the same, so free travel between countries becomes possible again. But even with quarantine, risk can only be completely eliminated when all countries have eliminated the virus. So the second incentive is to get the vaccine to poorer parts of the world as quickly as possible, with the help of international cooperation.

That is the strategy that the UK should now follow. However the UK is a country that has more than a 100,000 dead from the virus, with currently one of the highest death rates in the world. This reflects in part the fact that we have a weak Prime Minister, who is very indecisive, puts off decisions, wants to please and is easily swayed by pressure from others. We already have a large number of Tory MPs and business people who are clamouring to end the lockdown whatever dangers that brings.

The problem is that Johnson does not only listen to scientific advice, which is to avoid any relaxation for some time. He also listens to his MPs, some of whom have very strange but strongly held views on lockdowns. He has already said that he hopes to reduce some restrictions at the end of February, despite also saying that closing schools will be the first restriction to end and it probably will not happen until Easter. Of all the restrictions in the current lockdown there is a strong case for getting schools back first, but any relaxation of other elements of lockdown before then makes that less likely or more dangerous. Time and time again Johnson has gone for short term popularity with terrible long term costs, using as an excuse a trade-off between health and the economy that does not exist beyond the very short term.

Another indicator that Johnson may mess things up is how he has oversold vaccines. They have been presented as the solution to the pandemic, rather than as a key tool among many in ending the pandemic. With new infectious variants already circulating, we cannot be sure that the vaccination of everyone who is willing to be vaccinated will be enough to achieve herd immunity (see also here). But the main reason why vaccination is not enough on its own is the generation of variants. As this excellent discussion from Anjana Ahuja suggests, Taiwan, China, Australia and New Zealand are the examples to follow, and vaccination will make it much easier to follow that strategy.

It would be nice to be optimistic that some other Western countries will follow this advice. Unfortunately, while most European governments are not as foolish as ours, very few have shown much wisdom either. Read this from Le Monde on how Macron is also putting off the inevitable as cases climb. To quote, Macron “does not want to let this measure be imposed as long as the figures do not show the urgent need for it. With around 20,000 new cases per day, France can still avoid it, he believes.” You only need to look at the data to see how unlikely he is to be right.

It is an interesting question why no Western government has learnt the lessons from the East. Why do none have a leader who is prepared to go with the science? Instead we have politicians who balance what the experts say with pressure from small businesses and others in various sectors to do the opposite. Everyone wants financial support and Ministers of Finance worry about the cost. Few with any power seem to realise that the strategy that minimises costs, disruption to business and saves the most lives is locking down hard and fast, and trying to minimise cases. The media reflects the myopia of actors rather than leading. (How many discussions on how Australia has handled the pandemic have you seen in the UK broadcast media, and has it been greater than discussions of Sweden?)

The common idea as to why Australia and New Zealand have followed an eradication strategy from the start is that it is easy because they are islands with less international travel than European countries. That is not quite right for Australia. COVID policy is determined at the state level, and the states have imposed land border restrictions between each other when outbreaks have occurred. We can only hope that once European countries start imposing international travel quarantines as their vaccine programmes are rolled out, and now they have a better understanding about how not to handle the virus, some at least will follow Australia and adopt eradication as a goal.

I think it is likely that once a few European countries do this, most will follow as the advantages of an eradication policy become clear. As Norway already has a variety of border controls including hotel quarantine in place, and a low number of cases, my guess is that Norway may be among the first European countries to adopt elimination of COVID as a strategy. Finland, which also has strict entry requirements and a relatively low number of cases, is another possibility. With a head start in terms of vaccine supply it could be the UK, but with a Prime Minister who says he wants to wait before learning from past mistakes I somehow think it won't be. 

The two sides of austerity.

 

I thought I’d use the FT’s mea culpa on austerity to make a point which is easily missed in public debate. Sustained austerity of the kind inflicted on the UK from 2010 until quite recently was terrible for two types of reason. The first, that most people focus on, are the cuts to government spending (shrinking the state) that went well beyond trimming any fat and caused real hardship. The second is macroeconomic. Cutting government spending in a recession is never a good idea, and when interest rates were stuck at zero it was a disaster.

To highlight that distinction, I’m going to claim (with a few provisos) that the current Chancellor in this recession has so far not made the second, macroeconomic mistake. In that sense we have not seen a second wave of austerity. However with very limited exceptions he has continued to maintain the cuts in government spending that were made during the earlier austerity period. In that sense austerity has never gone away.

Austerity in terms of shrinking the state has not gone away

There is so much misleading analysis based on public spending aggregates around. Here are figures for the main components of current public spending over the austerity period. They are as a percentage of GDP, as they always should be for this kind of analysis but hardly ever are (Source IFS).

You can see that all these components of public spending have fallen substantially as a share of GDP over the austerity period from 2010. I have started the chart from financial year 2004/5, because spending in 2009/10 may be unusually high because of the recession. As it is difficult to read from the chart, here is the percentage of spending as a share of GDP in 2017/8 compared to 2004/5 for each component (figures for 2017/8 compared to 2009/10 in brackets): Pensioners social security 87% (82%), other social security 82% (73%), Health 111% (93%), Education 86% (74%), Defence 85% (77%), Law and Order 74% (69%). The extent of the squeeze on public spending over the austerity period is crystal clear. As the per capita numbers from this chart from a different IFS source makes clear, recent increases in public spending hardly dent this picture.

The one apparent exception to the tale of devastating cuts in public spending is health. Yet the idea that the government proposed and the media accepted that health had been protected is an illusion, because historically health spending as a share of GDP has tended to increase, as this chart shows (source).

Health spending in the 1950s was around 3% of GDP, in the 1990s just under 5%, and in 2005/6 around 6.5%. The reasons are many. As we grow wealthier we like to spend more of our income on health, a gradually ageing population, innovations in what medicine can do and so on. That implies that keeping the share constant is actually a squeeze. That is why the health service was near collapse before the COVID crisis, which forced the government to relax the squeeze to some extent. The fact that health spending needs a growing share of total national spending has profound implications for taxes that I’ll come back to later.

All these numbers square with experience on the ground. Delays in the administration of justice are getting worse and worse, and it is not just because of COVID. The squeeze on welfare has helped lead to the widespread use of foodbanks:

If you want to know why foodbank use has gone up so much, it’s a combination of a cruel and arbitrary punishment regime for claimants and a dramatic fall in the relative incomes of the poorest households, part of which is a consequence of austerity. (Chart from The Resolution Foundation.)

We now have ample evidence that the attempt to squeeze the state since 2010 has caused widespread hardship and dislocation. The belief among many on the right was that there was substantial inefficiency within the public sector and starving resources would increase productivity. It might have done that, but it has clearly gone too far in many areas. This is one half of the fundamental problem for those who want to squeeze the state in order to reduce the tax burden (as Osborne did). The other is health spending.

As I noted earlier, the share of health spending in GDP has been steadily rising. That in turn reflects greater demand for health services. With a health service that is largely free to those who use it, that means a rising level of taxation to pay for it unless you can cut elsewhere. For decades you could cut elsewhere, because the end of empire and then the peace dividend allowed large cuts in defence spending. That option seems to be no longer available, which means taxes in some form have to rise to pay for the NHS. The Conservative party is still in denial about this. As the media and therefore parts of the public are also in denial, that forces Labour to match Tory promises not to raise certain taxes in order to win elections.

Austerity in terms of macroeconomics has largely gone away

In 2010 the idea that it was a good to cut government spending in the middle of a deep recession where interest rates were stuck at their lower bound went against macroeconomic theory (undergraduate and state of the art) and evidence, and as a result most academic macroeconomists did not support austerity. However macroeconomic institutions like the IMF and OECD did for a time, and this, along with governments in the UK, US and Eurozone, is the consensus that the Financial Times refers to in their mea culpa.

Why governments and international organisations supported austerity is a complex question that I have spent many posts analysing. Without doubt, a desire to reduce the size of the state was part of the story. The important point, which is not completely clear from the FT piece, is that most academic opinion thought it wrong at the time, so in that sense the facts have not changed. All the evidence in 2010 said austerity would reduce output, and it did.

The short term cost of austerity was a delayed and weaker recovery. That is standard macro, as I was at pains to point out when the FT declared in 2013 that Osborne had won the battle over austerity. My own estimates put the cost of that delayed and weaker recovery at around £10,000 in lost resources per average household. That is bad enough, particularly for those who became unemployed, but it may not be the worst macroeconomic outcome of austerity.

The productivity puzzle, about why UK productivity growth was so weak after 2010 compared to other countries, has many potential explanations, but I suspect one important part of the puzzle is austerity. Again I’ve tried to explain why in economic terms before, but we can make the point very simply as follows. The experience of firms since WWII has been that almost without exception governments support recoveries from recessions. They cannot stop recessions happening, but they can ensure through monetary and fiscal policy that they are short lived. 2010 broke that understanding, which is bound to have had a significant negative impact on firm’s willingness to invest and innovate. In other words austerity may have permanent effect in reducing GDP and real wages.

As the FT notes, both the OECD and IMF now recognise that in a recession where interest rates are at their lower bound you need fiscal stimulus. Does this government? No, in the sense that it has never recognised its mistake in 2010. Yes, in the sense of how it has dealt with the pandemic. If you applied George Osborne’s logic to the pandemic, the priority should be to cut spending to reduce the deficit caused by fear of the virus and lockdowns. There would be no support for those furloughed. Policy would be like the US but with austerity rather than fiscal stimulus.

That Sunak has done the right thing, and not followed Osborne’s example, suggests he also recognises the folly of austerity. Indeed, his ill-fated (because far too early) Eat Out to Help Out scheme suggests he’s also prepared to actively help any recovery. Osborne’s measures in contrast hindered any recovery.

However we have to add a large number of caveats. The first is that his support has not been complete, and he has done little to cover gaps. His refusal to increase sick pay is both mystifying and dangerous. His successful attempt to delay a national lockdown to deal with a second wave was criminal, and that has had a terrible impact on the economy as well as health. He was too late to recognise that the second wave would need a furlough scheme like the first, and many lost their jobs as a result. I describe these as caveats because they could be motivated by attempting to gain favour among the ‘reckless right’ group of Tory MPs who don’t believe in lockdowns. However they could also be motivated by a worry about the public finances, which qualifies the extent to which he has thrown off austerity at a macroeconomic level.

To add to this is a forward looking caveat, clearly set out in Dodds recent impressive Mais lecture. There is a danger that Sunak will want to cut taxes just before the next election (if it is 2024), and to achieve that he may embark on fiscal consolidation before an economic recovery from the pandemic is complete. His public sector wage freeze may be part of that. This suggests that Sunak, like Osborne, is tempted to make macro policy fit the political cycle rather than fit the needs of the economy. We don’t know if he will do this, but that is something to look out for.

What is clear is that Sunak believes that he should follow a responsible fiscal policy once the recovery is over. The key here is not the word responsible, but how he defines it and how that is achieved. The danger is that he may, through his own wishes or those of his backbenchers, focus on spending cuts as well as tax increases. That is why the Universal Credit issue is a problem for him, but it is also a much more serious problem for those in poverty. Reversing the recent increase in Universal Credit, even if there is a one-off payment or some short delay, would substantially increase the unacceptable and growing level of child poverty in the UK, as the Resolution Foundation has shown (figure 20).

That Sunak is contemplating a cut rather than an increase in Universal Credit illustrates that, even if he has forsaked austerity in terms of macroeconomic strategy, he is unlikely to forsake austerity in terms of lower public spending and a reduced welfare state.

Who caused our current COVID crisis: an example of public deception by the media and government

 

Let me start with what the public thinks:

It is a straightforward question and the majority of the public give a clear answer. Unfortunately that majority are wrong. There is no doubt that the rise in COVID cases over the last month is a result of government failure. Let me set out what the government’s mistakes were.

1. Having ended a lockdown that still left the level of cases pretty high, the government reverted to their Tier system. Much the same tier system that had led to the November lockdown in the first place. London was put in Tier 2.
   
   

2. The warning signs were immediate. Cases started rising rapidly from the beginning of December. We now know why, but you didn’t need to know why (or be any kind of expert) to know that the existing tier system was not working.
   
   

3. Johnson continued with the idea of giving everyone a 5 day Christmas break from anti-COVID restrictions. Even if case numbers had been low it was a reckless policy, but with cases high and rising as they were in early December it was positively criminal.
   
   

4. It took until the middle of December for the government to move London into tier 3. Cases were now at levels that exceeded the peak that prompted the November lockdown. Schools that attempted to close early were ordered not to by the education minister.
   
   

5. On the 19th December, Johnson partially abandoned his Christmas plans, with a new tier 4 covering London and some other areas starting on 21st December. With the new virus variant likely to be present in all parts of the country, it made sense to implement a national lockdown, but instead he clung to the tier system.
   
   

6. On 22nd December SAGE recommended a national lockdown with schools closed, but like all of their suggestions since the beginning of the second wave their recommendations were ignored by the government. 
   
   

7. On Monday 4th January schools went back,and Johnson repeated his mantra that schools were safe, even though hospitals were already overstretched. Yet later that same day Johnson finally announced a national lockdown that would start the following day, with schools closed except for the children of essential workers. It had taken two weeks for Johnson to finally follow SAGE advice. That two weeks delay may mean around 10,000 additional deaths. He knew from his mistakes in March what just a week of delay in imposing a lockdown could do in terms of new infections and deaths, yet this time he waited for two weeks. He even allowed kids a day to mix in school, perhaps infecting each other and later their parents, before he finally followed the science. He uses the new variant as a false excuse (the numbers tell the story), but as a member of SAGE said, “you make your own luck”.
   
   

In short, the government had stopped following the science since the start of the second wave, and as a result the second wave had been allowed to grow to equal the first wave in size. Variants emerge when cases are high. If the government had followed its own scientific advice (as Keir Starmer had urged) they could have avoided a major second wave that put the health service into crisis. 

When a government ignores its own expert advice, bad outcomes that result are their responsibility alone. The rise in COVID cases over the last month is the result of pointless government inaction, and not the fault of the public.

So why do only a proportion of Labour voters, and virtually no Tory voters, understand this? The obvious point that is always worth repeating is that most voters don’t follow events and their causes that much, and so gain information largely from the newspaper they read or the main news bulletins they watch. They probably will not know what SAGE advised. 

With that level of engagement, most people did not see or read much criticism of the government’s actions, and that they do see can be dismissed as normal political banter. However they do see plenty of discussion of whether the public are obeying the rules, and may observe individual instances of rule breaking themselves. The government and its press encourages this line of discussion. As a result, the majority of the public recall that discussion, rather than the role of the government, when asked which was more important.

How important is this? In a recent Observer poll 45% disapproved of Johnson’s handling of the pandemic, compared to 35% who approved. If you ask more specific questions about how the pandemic was handled, 72% said that the government had not acted fast enough, while 25% wanted a government that tried its hardest not to enter lockdowns (which is a pretty good summary of the government’s recent behaviour). So the government has hardly won many votes as a result of its failures in dealing with the pandemic.

However that is setting the bar too low. The reluctance of this government to deal in particular with the second wave is no ordinary government failure. It has cost tens of thousands of lives. Although most other European countries have not handled the pandemic well, that does not mean the politicians that allowed that should get a free pass! In addition, the UK has allowed more to die (COVID deaths per million) than most other western European countries: higher than France, Germany, Netherlands, and the Scandinavian countries. Current deaths per million are higher than any other western European country.

The scale of the disaster that the government has encouraged is incredible. We are near 100,000 excess deaths, which is at WWII levels. As I pointed out two weeks ago, unlike austerity this government enabled disaster has hit most the demographic where the majority voted Conservative in the last election. The last six months should have been a Suez moment for Johnson, showing his strategy for keeping his citizens safe to be the disaster it is.

Now just imagine if a Labour government had been in power over the last year and made the mistakes this government has made. (This is an unrealistic thought experiment, because any Labour government would have followed the science.) The newspaper front pages (including those that support the centre or left) would be all about the mistakes the government had made. We wouldn’t see many stories about people not obeying the rules, but instead stories about ‘loony left’ MPs who believe lockdowns don’t work. The issue of the day would be when the Prime Minister resigns, and there would be calls for an immediate election. Given the scale of the disaster we have seen, all that criticism would be entirely justified.

This thought experiment reveals the extent to which the media are hiding the enormity of the government’s failure. This deception is what happens when the right controls most of the press and has tamed the biggest broadcaster through intimidation and key appointments. With perhaps an end to the pandemic in sight, but when deaths are still high, it is time for Starmer and the entire opposition to this government to start being explicit about the harm the government has done.

They need to talk about how the government is responsible for tens of thousands of unnecessary deaths. The government had a duty to care for the elderly and vulnerable and they have failed in the worst way possible. As Ian Dunt writes, "This is, without hyperbole, the most severe and unforgivable example of government failure we have seen in our lifetime."

The opposition needs to make it clear that the ‘saving the economy’ excuse is short sighted and deadly, for both lives and the economy. The opposition needs to highlight the many Tory MPs, the reckless right, that have been telling Johnson to do even less than he has done.  While there was a case to tread carefully at first, now is the time to take the gloves off so that voters understand who was to blame at the next general election.

Trump tries to incite a putsch, and his UK cheerleaders reveal their own contempt for democracy

It appears as if the Facebook ban on referencing this blog has been lifted. Many thanks to all those who complained to Facebook. I doubt I will ever know who persuaded them to ban it. 

Would be democratic dictators, elected heads of state who want to ensure they can never lose an election, should know the first rule to staying in power. It is to control a sufficient amount of the media. Convincing your faithful that the mainstream media is fake news is not enough. What that sufficient amount is will depend on many factors, including the voting system for President. It may be, for example, that given the advantages a united right wing socially conservative party has in the UK, control of a majority of newspapers and a compliant BBC may be sufficient to ensure Johnson is PM for as long as he likes.

Trump also has the advantage of a biased system (the electoral college), but he did not have enough control of the media to win the 2020 election, or provide sufficient credence to his pretense that he really won. Fox News, his once biggest media supporter, called the election for Biden. But he came close, with nearly 48% of the vote and by small numbers in the key electoral college states. A large part of that 48% actually believe he won. We were not far away from a second Trump term.

When would be democratic dictators lose elections, they have a choice. They can either accept defeat, or attempt to overthrow democracy. Donald Trump, having exhausted every legal means to stay in power (and some illegal ones), took the ultimate step last week and organised a putsch against Congress as it was affirming his successor. What seemed fairly harmless outside the Capitol was anything but inside. The objective of at least some of those inside was to capture politicians who had incurred Trump’s ire. Five people are dead, including one of the policemen who were bravely defending politicians as they were evacuated.

Trump attempted to capture through his appointments the institutions that ensure the survival of democracy, much as Johnson is now doing in the UK. For Trump it turned out not to be enough. His appointments to the supreme court were not willing to overthrow a fair election. The Republican party has resisted and distorted democracy as far as it could since the Nixon years, and it supported Trump while he was in power, but now it needs to decide what to do. The horrific attack on Congress has solidified a three way divide among Republican politicians.

The first group are those Republicans who were prepared to vote against, and even campaign against, Trump in 2020. The best known of that group are the Lincoln project, who produced this ad for the election but only showed it after the attack on Congress. The second are those in the Senate and Congress who were happy to support Trump when he was in power, but don’t want to take part in the charade of pretending he really won in 2020. The size of that group was increased by the attempted putsch, either because they want to preserve democracy or they don't like failure. The third are those who are prepared to go along with throwing doubt on the election, and include 7 senators and 138 representatives (over 65% of the caucus). Incredibly these politicians continued this charade even after the putsch had failed.

Is this the end for Trump? There is nothing preventing Trump trying to run for President in 2024. His greatest asset is the large section of the population that he successfully radicalised while President, aided by the Republican party, Murdoch’s Fox news and others. He could be charged with a crime and still stand. It would be much more difficult to run for President if he was in jail, but my guess is that he can pay enough lawyers to keep him out for the necessary period. If he is charged with serious crimes he has an added incentive to stand. The big question is will those Republicans who don’t want to give him another term be able to stop him?

It will be very hard to do so. If he wishes, he can continue to energise his base and keep his flame alive. With many challengers against him in the primaries, none may be able to capture enough votes to stop him. You might think that encouraging a putsch against Congress and waiting far too long to call it off, half-heartedly, might do him some damage among Republican voters as well as politicians in Congress. But a poll taken shortly after the attack had 45% of Republicans supporting the attack. It will be interesting to see if that number diminishes as a result of the Twitter and Facebook bans.

If it does not, Trump's base could continue to be a formidable force in Republican politics, much like the Tea Party before it. That could easily be a winning majority in the primaries for 2024, but whether you are pro or anti Trump may dominate congressional elections before then. That is why so many in the House of Representatives kept up the charade that he won in 2020, despite knowing that it would fail. What will decide how much Trump influences Republican politics over the next four years will largely depend on what Trump wants to do, which in turn may depend on whether he thinks he can win and the state of his finances. Some Republicans may regret not impeaching him when they had the chance, and they may come to regret not impeaching him now. 

Even if he retreats from the political scene, the Republican party that supported him is still there, and the Murdoch outlet that created an alternative reality for his supporters is still there, just as they are still over here. While it is right that Democrats go after those involved in whatever way with the putsch right now, in the longer term they need to reintroduce a modern version of the Fairness Doctrine to curb Murdoch's power to distort reality.  

Those who had supported Trump in the UK were quick to try and rewrite the past. Some tried to portray the attack on the Capitol as just a scuffle that had nothing to do with Trump. Rather more suggested that the attack on the Capitol was proof that Johnson was not a UK version of Trump. Others in the UK said that those who tried to reverse the Brexit result were no better than those attacking Congress. Yet others acknowledged the threat from the far right and tried to equate it with some imagined threat from the left. That these arguments were even made tells you that the UK is in the same situation as the US was in during 2016, delusional about what was going down or pretending to be.

Let me deal with the ‘no better than Remainers’ argument first. This one betrayed the most about those who were making it. The idea that a campaign for a second referendum could be equated with an attempted putsch suggests a mindset that shows no respect for democracy. It shows people who have become so blinded by populist rhetoric that they cannot see the difference between having a second democratic referendum and storming the seat of government.

What about trying to ‘both sides’ this with an imagined threat from the left? It is equally ridiculous, but unfortunately may be more widely believed. No Conservative MP has been murdered by some far left nutter, and no plot to kill another Conservative MP by a member of the far left has been thwarted. No Labour Prime Minister has suspended parliament. Corbyn could not suspend parliament even if he wanted to. The myth of a threat from the left was deliberately stoked by our populist government and their friends, and it belongs in the same category of myth as Trump winning the 2020 election.

It was Trump himself who called Johnson ‘Britain’s Trump’. The Biden White House is said to regard Johnson as a physical & emotional clone of Donald Trump. Johnson's fascination with Trump, and the over the top praise for Trump that came from both Johnson and other ministers, went well beyond the normal tone adopted by UK heads of State towards the POTUS. Of course the two men are very different in many ways, but they are both right wing populists. They invoke the ‘will of the people’ when they mean half the country, at best. They are both inveterate liars. Johnson, like Trump, is totally lacking in empathy for the less well off in society.

To say, as some have done, that Johnson is at heart a liberal or libertarian whereas Trump is an authoritarian deliberately misunderstands Johnson. Was he being liberal or authoritarian when he sacked anyone competent in his cabinet and replaced them with spineless lackeys? Was he being liberal or authoritarian when he tried to break international law, or ordered water canons as Mayor of London? Is he being liberal or authoritarian as he tries to overcome any obstacles to the power of the executive? Neither are liberal on trade or immigration when it suits them not to be. Was Johnson being liberal when he appointed Pritti Patel? When Johnson dismissed the danger of using emotive language like "surrender bill" by saying the best way to stop death threats and honour Jo Cox was to support Brexit, you could imagine the same words being spoken by Trump. (HT @dasvee).  

Both failed to deal effectively with the pandemic, using the immediate damage any control measures would do to the economy as justification. As a result both let tens of thousands of the people they are elected to protect die unnecessarily. Johnson, like Trump, has no respect for a pluralistic democracy and wants to destroy all obstacles in his way. Johnson suspended parliament illegally and now wants to stop the judges stopping him doing it again. He may not have encouraged a crowd to attack parliament, he just closed it down instead.

Trump is half the story about what has happened to the United States over the last four years. The other half is a Republican party that has been happy to cheer Trump on, supported by a right wing propaganda machine financed by lots of billionaire money that is only interested in retaining Republican power. We now have our own version of that same party and that same machine, and their reactions to the attack on the Capitol reveal that they too put power above respecting a pluralist democracy.

 

But there is an important difference between the UK and US. The mainstream media in the US treated Trump's putsch as the criminal attack on democracy it was. When Johnson closed down parliament, our mainstream media treated it as just one more day in politics. 

Why the UK’s COVID crisis should be personal for so many Tory voters

 

There are around 16 million over 60s living in the UK, nearly a quarter of the UK population. They are the most at risk from COVID: catching the virus could be a matter of life or death. To them the government’s handling, or rather mishandling, of the pandemic should be a matter of acute personal concern. It certainly is for me. Around 60% of over 60s voted Conservative in the last election.

The NHS is currently at breaking point. Tired and demoralised after almost a year of COVID, doctors and nurses find their hospitals are full and we haven’t yet seen the impact of Christmas and New Year. Whereas Johnson acted in March to save the NHS, this winter he decided to save Christmas instead, until he was forced to backtrack at the last minute. You can blame people for not following the rules, but the government should plan for how people actually behave, not how they should behave.

There are so many errors that led us to this dreadful crisis. Let me list the main mistakes, ordered by time..

1. March itself, while Johnson dithered about whether to follow SAGE advice. That is estimated to have cost around twenty thousand lives but it also was a factor in subsequent mistakes. By allowing cases to build up he made things much harder subsequently. The government’s policy seemed far too laid back at the time, but we now know there were crucial delays between the science changing and policy changes (see also here).
   
   

2. Because cases were so high, it took some time to get them back down. The longer it takes, the more impatient populist politicians and small-picture Chancellors become. What should have happened in April was that the government promised to get cases right down to very low levels, so that subsequent flare-ups would be more manageable. An eradication strategy would have been better, but to be fair that only became a consensus policy among experts around late summer. What Johnson and Sunak did was relax the lockdown too soon, so we ended up with a significant caseload that was not falling in the summer. They also weakened compliance as a result of a well known episode.
   
   

3. Another way you can deal with flare-ups in cases is to have a very good test and trace system. The government promised one, but ended up doing the opposite while spending far more than they needed. It reflected their ideological obsessions: a hatred of government and a conviction that the private sector could always do better. They couldn’t, and local government health teams were left to do the tracing the government’s centralised system failed to do, but by then it was all too late. What it should have been able to do is reduce cases over the summer, but it failed. Rather than accept their error, they kept on with their failing system wasting huge amounts of money. As Chris Giles has noted, the UK spent more and achieved less than other countries.
   
   

4. When cases stabilised in the summer, the government should have started thinking about how it would deal with the return of schools and universities. Instead they seemed to act as if the pandemic was over! They told people to stop working from home, and Sunak even devised a scheme to get people back into restaurants which research suggests significantly increased cases.Once again they ignored what was happening in other countries.
   
   

5. This and the return of schools and universities led to a significant increase in cases. It started to become difficult or impossible for people to get tests. SAGE recommended on 21st September a two week circuit break to try and reverse the upward trend. Sunak was against it and Johnson ignored the advice of his experts. Sunak in particular seems to be in denial, insisting that the furlough scheme will be brought to an end, causing many people to lose their job.

Cases continued to increase exponentially, because the government was doing nothing. Johnson said that people had become “complacent” and “a bit blassé” about transmission, perfectly describing himself. In reality if cases were stable in summer (R=1), you would expect cases to be rising as summer ends (people spend less time outdoors) and schools and universities return. There is nothing unpredictable about the second wave the government is allowing to develop, yet even when it becomes clear the government shows no interest in doing anything to stop it besides blaming the public.

6. Finally in mid-October the government moves, but rather than a national lockdown it introduces different levels of local control: the tier system.  Which tier you are in seems largely based on how many cases there are, rather than the speed at which they are increasing. This system formalises what many have feared, that the government is content to see cases rise up to a certain point.

As a result, the tier system becomes a kind of escalator. The lower tiers don’t do enough to stop local cases rising (in part because people move between tiers), so they become just staging posts before the inevitable move to a higher tier. The tier system slows the pace of the national increase in cases, but national R remains above one. To state the obvious, that allows hundreds to continue to die, and makes a national lockdown all but inevitable.

7. At the end of October, the Prime Minister bows to the inevitable and announces a national lockdown, although not as strict as in March. The lockdown begins to work, and cases start falling. Yet foolishly he states an end date for the lockdown, when any sensible lockdown should end when cases have been largely eliminated, and not by some arbitrary date.
   
   

8. At the start of December the lockdown had brought cases down from an average of nearly 25,000 a day to something like 15,000 a day (based on specimen date data). The Prime Minister stuck to the beginning December end date for the lockdown, and the country moved back into much the same tier system that had previously failed, with London in Tier 2. As Johnson was intending to allow a Christmas break, this was an almost criminal decision.
   
   

9. The warning signs were immediate. Cases started rising again the moment the lockdown ended, if not slightly before. We now know that this was partly due to a much more infectious strain of the virus. The more virus there is around, the more likely it is to mutate. The government, by allowing a high caseload to persist, and provided the environment that made mutation more likely.
   
   By 12th December the number of cases had surpassed the pre-November lockdown peak, yet the government did nothing except move London into tier 3. The government continued with its plans for a five day Christmas break, in what was obviously now a second wave to rival the first in size. It was madness, just based on the numbers alone, without any knowledge of new variants. Yet we had to wait until the 19th of December before the Prime Minister changed his Christmas plans. We were seeing a repeat of March, but this time the government’s failure to adjust its actions to the data looks like overwhelming the NHS.
   
   

10. Tiers are pointless when you have a new highly infectious strain gradually spreading across the country. We should be in national lockdown, with the start of school postponed, because of the new virus strain, as SAGE advised on 22nd December. Yet once again the government has done too little, too late, because it ignores the science. You don’t avoid lockdowns by delaying them, you just ensure they go on for longer. All the controversy about when to get the second vaccine is only happening because the government has lost control of the virus and refuses to do what is needed to regain control.

You might say it is all very well making these criticisms in hindsight, but that is not true. I, together with many better qualified experts, made these criticisms at the time. In May in the Mirror I said that the first lockdown should aim at getting “daily number of new infections down to single figures” to save lives and the economy. In June I wrote in the Guardian that there was no health/economy trade-off beyond the very short-term. Under many of the points above you will find links to my own blogs making much the same arguments at the time mistakes were being made.

How can a government that lived through March 2020 not just repeat the same mistakes again, but make worse mistakes? There are obvious people to blame. Tory MPs with their head in the sand, following a Death Cult that says all we should do is protect the vulnerable. Much of the right wing press pushing articles advocating the same, by journalists who keep getting things wrong but carry on regardless, like all the people who said there wouldn’t be a second wave based on obvious nonsense. A broadcast media that indulges such nonsense rather than ignoring it or putting it down. But when a Prime Minister, supported by his ministers, ignores medical advice again and again, the responsibility rests entirely with him.

The evidence for other countries is now clear. As New Zealand and Australia have shown, you first drive cases down to as close to zero as you can, and then act quick and hard whenever there is a flare-up. That allows you long periods where everyone can behave normally, and the economy can return to normal. The cost of that policy is to have a quarantine system for people coming into the country, not of the ineffective kind enacted in the UK but proper quarantine as done in the countries that have successfully dealt with COVID. Devi Shridhar estimates that following this kind of policy could have saved over 80% of lives lost to COVID in the UK.

The people most at risk from this pandemic are those who predominantly voted this government in. Their lives are at risk mainly because of government failure. In contrast the Labour opposition has acted more responsibly, following the science. They should be switching their votes from Tory to Labour in their millions. But the newspapers they read are doing their best to hide the truth from them, the broadcast media with a few honorable exceptions chooses not to enlighten them, and recently it appears the government has resorted to trying to hide what is happening in hospitals. So those over 60 will continue to vote for a government that through its failures is literally killing them.