Faff and Bluster from Westminster
30 January

Whilst it's been a dull week on the domestic front, there seems to have been an enormous amount of faff and bluster emanating from the Palace of Westminster.

Earlier this week, our Prime Minister made the announcement that the official number for deaths from Covid-19 in the UK was now in excess of 100,000. When asked if the government could have done more to saves lives, he opined that "we did everything that we could to minimise suffering and minimise loss of life in this country as a result of the pandemic."

Many may beg to differ with him.

It was around this time last year that the world began to hear about something that was going on in China. Wuhan City went into lockdown on 23 January 2020. On 30 January, the World Health Organisation declared a "public health emergency of international concern". As a consequence, NHS England declared its first ever "Level4 Critical Incident" on 31 January, coincidentally on the same day as the UK's membership of the EU was terminated.

We now know that COBRA meetings to address the potential crisis with Covid were held on 24 Jan, 29 Jan, 5 Feb, 12 Feb and 18 Feb. We also know that our Prime Minister was not present at any of them.

It would be useful to know what his feelings at the time were about the approaching healthcare challenges. Luckily, he made a very public statement in Greenwich on 3 February during a speech about world trade. The defining moment was this statement.

...and when there is a risk that new diseases such as Coronavirus will trigger a panic and a desire for market segregation that goes beyond what is medically rational to the point of doing real and unnecessary economic damage, then, at that moment, humanity needs some government somewhere that is willing at least to make the case powerfully for freedom of exchange.

That element of economic science (freedom of exchange (trade)) was - and probably always has been - the most important factor in the calculations made by the Prime Minister and his team rather than the science of epidemiology or the behavioural science of giving clear guidance on boundaries to behaviour.

The Alt-Right in this country seem willing to go full Trump now that the Master is no longer of any significant presence.

Labour's deputy leader Angela Rayner has suggested that Tory MP Sir Desmond Swayne has been spreading misinformation on Covid. His response to the accusation has been to play the stifling of Free Speech card: "We are getting very close to thought crime... I believe in freedom of speech. Perhaps the Labour Party doesn't"

This is a Steve Bannon tactic. The free speech Sir Desmond advocates includes telling people that the NHS is "manipulating" hospital capacity data and that masks are a way for the government to "control" people.

He is unapologetic though he is truly a gift that keeps giving. His memoires are a riot of unforced disclosure. Not quite "Being thrashed to within an inch of my life made a man of me" but very damn close. His main achievement as far as I'm concerned has been to make Sir Keith Joseph look halfway sane.

Even Trevor finds his reported behaviour abhorrent. However, he also wonders about Angela Rayner deliberately supplying misinformation about the danger of Covid to school teachers in work. I think that the schools situation has always been a bit more of a knife edge argument. It depends on how much weight you put on the evidence that suggests that young children are transmitters of Covid rather than sufferers from its effects. If you don't emphasise that possibility then Kier Starmer may well be correct about teachers not being in any danger. If I were still a teacher, would I want to take the risk?

I don't know enough to make a judgement about the current risk levels but I would say that teachers are vital key workers alongside NHS Staff. If we want to get the country back to work, then the kids must go back to school. If that's a priority then vaccinating teachers asap becomes a no brainer and so trying to calculate the risk level is irrelevant.

This is not the ends of the earth but it is another clear sign of rush and muddle by the government which has been picked up by The Times.

Now that Brexit is done, the government has a desperate need to make sure that they have done their best to ensure that cogent, clear and timely information is passed on to businesses and citizens so that they can avoid falling foul of the new circumstances and so that the government can avoid taking some of the flack as people start realising more and more what has changed. A cost effective, immediate and instantly editable way of managing this flow of information is through a website.

I don't suppose that any government department employs its own website design and management staff these days. All the major jobs with be farmed out to consultancy firms. It is therefore enormously important that the project specification is very specific and detailed.

Unfortunately, in this case, the government has not learnt its lesson from previous website clangers and has not inserted a clause into the contract specifying that visual display material should be sourced from within the UK. Hence, the face of the new information site is a German model who posed for a German photographer at a German factory. Elsewhere on the site, you can find photographs of a haulier from Thailand and a builders' depot in Brazil.

To save time and money, the web creation firm is likely to have accessed a digital library of stock images and simply cherry-picked the most visually suitable. They didn't vet the source country of the images because they weren't told that it was an issue.

As I say, the world didn't end but, for a group of politicians who have been so adamant that we should free ourselves from European shackles, the current crop don't seem to mind continuing to outsource work there - as with British passports being printed in France.

And we can also this weekend breathe a sigh of relief that an immediate revision of the workers' rights that had been guaranteed under the EU's Working Time Directive will not now happen. The Daily Telegraph raised the alert at the beginning of the month and the government has been taking soundings and weighing up the possibilities over the past three weeks.

Following the current government's usual protocols, Business Secretary Kwasi Kwarteng briefed the nation ITV News on Wednesday before he made a Commons statement on Thursday. No further review will be taking place at present and there are no plans to reduce workers' rights. All of which contrasts vividly with the articles and pamphlets that Mr Kwarteng has been writing over the past five years which point to a very keen interest in conducting a review which does exactly that. Maybe enough Business leaders, Trades Union leaders and opposition Labour MPs came knocking on his door. Maybe enough of them said that it wasn't a good idea for the government to be seeing eyeing up the forty hour working week cap in the middle of a pandemic when front line staff were demonstrating their commitment to their work on a daily basis.

Eternal vigilance will be required.

It is all particularly galling for, as James O'Brien pointed out, much of the circumstances which Brexit supporters are complaining about stem from the UK now having Third Country status with the EU. And guess which country was heavily involved with the authorship of those rules back in the day? Yes. It's another ironic whammy.

In the Kimberley kitchen, I cracked open a cookbook and we partook of an old favourite which Ross tells me would in Hull be called Turd in the Hurl.

He seems to be well on the way now to getting his dentistry sorted and also his overwhelming lethargy. He's also had his assessment meeting for a series of deep crisis counselling sessions and that went well with suggestion that the first series of sessions would be likely to start sometime in the spring. All of this is having a tangibly positive effect on Ross making him brighter and less gloomy.

I spent Saturday afternoon tuned into Wagner's Der fliegende Holländer on the free daily streaming service from the New York Metropolitan Opera. This was probably the last cinecast I could have attended at FACT in March of last year but, for a variety of reasons, didn't go.

One of my main stumbling blocks was conductor Valery Gergiev but, as it turns out, aside from the odd precipitous change of tempo, his reading of the score is pretty clear supporting the Romantic gestures of the score without trying to show off with extremes of balance or volume.

Evgeny Nikitin has a dry rather than juicy baritone and a bit of a Bayreuth bark as well but is more than passable in the title role. Anja Kampe is well worth her star status at present with a full bodied voice but I suspect that the vibrato will go the way of Heilige Gwyneth's as the years pass. She gave Senta's Ballad her utmost and told a story which is what it is but doesn't often sound as such.

I was initially taken with the stormy, dreamy setting of the presentation. Many of the incidental touches were apposite rather than being clever ideas on display. However, the design didn't really go anywhere as the piece continued with much repetition and not a lot of sense of cycles waiting to be broken. The apotheosis was nicely handled. I think that this is one to catch at FACT sometime if it is ever repeated there though it really will depend on the cast and conductor.

My sister, Linda, has been reminding me about my Popeye performances as a busy four-year-old.

Moving into a new house when I was about four, I continued running through the kitchen and out onto the drive leading to the garage and back garden. The problem was that the new step had a big step down onto concrete rather than being a flat run.

Basically, I face planted a few times before alternate measures to do with laying down old mats and rugs for me to fall on were instituted. Linda has been told by my mum that I would run and leap out the back door expecting to run in mid-air like Popeye.

I'm not so sure that I had any such conscious intention though adults may have rationalised it in that way. I think I was just too much in a hurry to think ahead and was maybe borderline hyperactive.

My aim was (and still is) to bring joy into people's lives.

When I was about four, I was asked at a family gathering "What do you want to be when you grow up, David?" Everyone expected the usual fireman, space explorer, etc answer. Being a serious child, I screwed my face up in profound thought and answered "A clown." In a straightforward working class gathering, this was disruptive.

Provocation and dissent hung in the air until my aunt asked quietly "Why do you want to be a clown, David?" "Because I want to make people laugh," I replied. There was a general sigh and a nodding of indulgent heads.

They really didn't understand how seditious I was being.

Most people still don't understand that aspect of my persona.