Michael Gove plans to tweak river pollution laws to encourage housebuilding. This was occasion enough for the Royal Society for the Protection of Birds (RSPB), an agglomeration of ‘The Fin, Fur, and Feather Folk’ and ‘The Plumage League’, to bestir itself, and to enter public life for the first time in opposition to the idea.
Organisations like these fill a niche in the English mind. The RSPB is one. So is the National Trust, the Church of England, the Women’s Institute and the Heritage Railway Association. They are mustily Rotarian. They are endearingly local. Their membership is charmingly old; their remit is charmingly narrow. They usually carry the stamp of royal patent, with all that that entails. They are cute. They speak to a certain idea of England that is, not quite Victorian, but certainly a kind of midcentury Christopher Robinesque. They are – for some reason – inextricably bound up with the person of Paddington Bear, and with Harold Macmillan.
Most of these bodies have now clashed with the current administration, over various issues. This hasn’t passed without comment. But here’s the strange thing about these rows. They are never about the actual substance of disagreement. Rather, it’s about the fact that these bouts are occurring in the first place. They are said to augur ill for the future of British society. We know that things are in dire straits, apparently, when even the guild of bird watchers feels compelled to enter upon political life. Things have gotten so bad that an ancient Middle England has been shaken from its repose, and is, in extremis, finally speaking up. Have you really even got the bloody British Hedgehog Preservation Society coming out against you? You’ve done it now, soul sister.
Interventions from these groups follow a familiar template. These organisations, all of which employ PR teams, are keenly aware of their twee mien, and trade on it lavishly. And so, the main method is to affect a kind of political virginity. This underlines how awful the target is for having driven these sweeties to such a precipice. In the RSPB’s case, this was accomplished through a particularly insipid tweet:
LIARS! @RishiSunak @michaelgove @theresecoffey you said you wouldn’t weaken environmental protections. And yet that’s just what you are doing. You lie, and you lie, and you lie again. And we’ve had enough.
The staccato sentences. The childish diction. The incredulous tone. The apparent shock that politicians might lie. It all suggests an organisation that is charmingly unworldly, and endearingly untutored in public affairs. The same is true of Archbishop Justin Welby’s interventions on refugee policy, which are always delivered in a coltish and halting cadence. This is Paddington Bear raising his voice for the first time, quiveringly, to speak out against divisive populism.
After these initial sallies, cute organisations can – if attacked – always retreat into the safe bailey of schmaltzy apoliticism: part of the furniture; part of the eternal pattern of English life.
Why is this so effective? It relies on a number of illusions and deceptions about what modern England is, and what these organisations are.
These bodies strike against the measures that one might put under the broad heading of Right-wing populism: feeble attempts to control the border; feeble attempts to disperse the roaming prides of newts that block HS2’s path. It is curious, then, that the rhetorical power of these attacks rests on an idea of British society in the 2020s that is solidly Little Englander. The notion that these organisations represent the ancient conscience of England relies on a certain picture of life outside of London: of fields, clipped and verdant, dotted with bowling clubs. Need I add the blousy, blue-rinse matrons? Of course, this is all nonsense. In 1968, the Kinks could sing of The Village Green Preservation Society with ironic affection, as something that was passing, or already gone. When John Major claimed that England was still the country of “old maids bicycling to Holy Communion through the morning mist”, nobody believed him. The bowling club is now a drive-thru Taco Bell. The church is now a dogging ‘hub’. The village florist is now a vape shop. The society that produced these organisations is gone; they speak for no one but themselves.
There’s also a collective amnesia at work when it comes to the groups. As late as around 2010, bodies like the RSPB were used as a Clarksonian shorthand for killjoys and sneaks. And well-funded ones, too: powerful enough to play the perennial heel to Britain’s motorists, fox hunters, developers – and Jeremy Clarkson himself. This is of course still the case. We are reminded that the RSPB – to take one example – enjoys revenues of £158 million a year, with a substantial chunk of this coming directly from the taxpayer. It’s only recently that these groups have been able to conflate themselves with the Outraged of Tunbridge Wells, and so claim the narrative mantle of the knitting circle that took on Whitehall, and won.
So, what to do? Sure, these organisations shouldn’t receive public money. These streams have to be cut off. But this would take legislation, legislation takes time, and Paddington Bear and his confederates need to be dealt with right now. Those who do not wish for the RSPB to exercise a veto over their lives need a rhetorical attack of their own. Here are two suggestions.
These organisations pose as the embodiment of ancient English sentiments. From this deep cup, two can drink. Another current in our island story is the old hatred for the conscientious meddler, for the well-funded busybody. This feeling, taken very far, was what did it for the English monastaries. Use it.
A second clue might be found in a scene from the recent film Oppenheimer. This is when President Harry Truman loses patience with our hero’s qualms about the nuclear destruction of two Japanese cities, reminding him that he was the one who had to take the decision, and bear the consequences. We might say something similar to bodies like these. It is, ultimately, nothing to the RSPB whether more houses are built. They have the luxury of myopia; the people’s elected representatives do not. There’s a reason why we didn’t traditionally franchise out governance to sectional interest groups, especially those without even a crude financial stake in things staying on a basically even keel. Paddington Bear has no place in the councils of state, and should be shown the door.
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Within the Telegraph article we find:
It didn’t need to swing. Not the first time nor the second nor the third. As Albert Einstein almost certainly didn’t point out: the definition of insanity is doing the same thing over and over and expecting a different result.
So let me get this straight. The PM initally didn’t believe in lockdowns. Neither did the Hancock, Witty and Valance trio? Dominic Cummings – who looks abit odd and almost certainly is – contacted his mates to come up with terrifying models of apocalypse if we didn’t close the country down and impoverish and destroy great swathes of our lives and businesses and economy.
And I’m the unmasked, unvaccinated baddie? Really?
The real scandal is that the general public trusted them too much, and in effect showed a batch of group thinkers that they could get away with murder. Back in 2020, as the panic developed, I thought that it demonstrated how the German government got away with what happened in the 1930s.
A lot of people dislike or mock The Spectator but you cannot fault their willingness to give platforms to unpopular/alternative views
One of the reasons I am a subscriber. I do not mind having my assumptions/prejudices challenged – provided the arguments are well made and not woke nonsense. I think that The Spectator broadly gets this right.
The comments section to Fraser Nelson’s column (geddit?) is quite illuminating too.
The petri-dish for infection monitoring, the Diamond Princess, had all elderly passengers aboard, some 3,000 plus if memory serves. The ‘rampant,’ contained infection onboard killed 14 souls, a fatality rate of .0037. Compare and contrast the real world numbers with the woefully inaccurate tripe arrived at by Ferguson.
It had passengers and crew across the age range. It showed that many youngsters were not infected, those that were had negligible or very mild symptoms.
Those most affected and among whom the fatalities occurred were 70+.
In other words – it was a Common Cold – not even ‘flu – epidemic, milder than most.
Thanks for the steer. It prompted me to google the precise numbers. Suffice it to say, Ferguson was no nearer the real world. 3,711 pob.(Persons on board), comprising 1,045 crew, median age 36. Zero deaths, 145 infections.
Passengers, 2,666. Median age 69. 567 infections, 14 deaths, all 70s and 80s.
You’d have thought somebody somewhere would have used those numbers to temper the wildly inaccurate modelling. Obviously not.
And remember what the MSM reporting about the Diamond Princess was like. Selective with the truth comes to mind for the usual suspects, esp BBC News.
The problem with Sage/modellers is that they appear to know the square root of f. all about how virus behave, transmit and the immune system.
But there again nobody knows, or ever will know, precisely how and why some people get ill and others don’t.
For example, there is the Seattle trawler case, and the Argentinian trawler case. How did so many trawlermen, completely isolated from the outside world for weeks, “catch covid”? And also it was discovered that some actually had antibody protection to this “completely new virus”.
Then there’s the experiment in Belgium or (Holland?) nursery schools. Over three winter months one was thoroughly deep cleaned every day ie to eliminate all pathogens on toys, work surfaces etc and the other just normal cleaning. Rigorous testing proved that the deep cleaned one was virtually virus/bacteria free – the other wasn’t.
The result – virtually identical levels of sicknesss/absences (the dirty one being slightly better). I can’t find the link, but I believe it is one of Tom Jefferson’s favourites.
I’m no virus denier but surely the above blows a pretty big hole in Germ Theory – which, funnily enough is bigpharma’s God.
Much proper research is desperately needed re immunology/vaccinology, sorry, gene therapies and virus.
Won’t happen – no money in it and besides mRNA will be able to cure us all of everything.
“But there again nobody knows, or ever will know, precisely how and why some people get ill and others don’t.”
Well largely we do. It depends on the state of the immune system in each individual which depends on general state of health, age, but also every individuals physiology – genetic influence – is different to the next.
This is why real CoVid deaths were among those with weakened immune systems, 95% of whom were over 80 with one or more serious medical conditions and who were near death.
It also depends on previous exposure to pathogens. Measles was mostly not fatal to Europeans, but European colonists infected the South American natives with it in whom it was nearly always fatal, because it was a pathogen never before present in their environment.
It also depends on the level of exposure to a pathogen. (A bit like poison is a matter of dose. )
And North American natives were affected in the same way, not necessarily Measles, but at least by locally unknown bugs imported by colonists.
I accept what you say entirely, and am aware we know a lot about these matters and that’s why I used the term “precisely”.
Of the many books and articles I’ve read, mainly immunological, one particular phrase resonates often, and that is “the mechanism behind thiis is not fully understood”. Then there’s the synergy and cascades of immune responses to consider.
Thus in those many cases one simply doesn’t know how much more there is to know – you could be nearly there or miles off (study the man hours/years to discover, for example, inerferon/s). It’s what you don’t know you don’t know that’s the problem.
“The beautiful cure” by Daniel M. Davis. 2018, if anyone’s interested. ( I am not he by the way), details history of immunological discoveries and latest research.
I would be interested to hear your, or anyone’s views om the trawler cases?
So Cummins executed a Coup d’État.
He should be put in the Tower awaiting the sensation of a short, sharp shock, from a cheap and chippy-chopper on a big black block.
It certainly seems that his hero worship for voodoo mathematical medical modellers swung the day.
I wonder how many entirely preventable deaths, injuries (mental) he and his ilk caused.
FWIW, the only thing he got right was his opinion of Hankok.
I believe the Spectator/Heneghan piece is now outside the paywall, it’s brilliant We needed a Covid inquiry – but this isn’t it | The Spectator
https://petermcculloughmd.substack.com/p/savoy-declares-independence-from
Got this from Dr Mike Yeadon’s Telegram channel. Can any of our European members verify?
“What is the point of the Covid Inquiry? It should be to establish which parts of the government’s pandemic response worked, which parts didn’t, and what to do next time. Instead, it is a farce – a spectacle of hysteria, name-calling and trivialities.”
Professor Heneghan’s opening para in his Spectator article which is superb – how on earth does this man keep up this work rate – but I have a big issue with “what to do next time” which amounts to conceding that the pandemic was real and almost invites Billy and the boys to get on with their next release.
As tof would point out – there was no pandemic.
Top class work by Professor Heneghan and at least when the pantomime whitewash is over and we have “lessons will be learned ” nobody can deny Professor Heneghan’s outright debunking.
The standard SIR model of 1927 goes up and down and has no dependencies on change of behaviour – and fits the data from India at the time, flu in an English boarding school and presumably numerous other datasets. When Covid struck the settled science was ignored.
‘When some Swedish academics started to call for lockdown based on Ferguson’s work, Giesecke agreed to go on Swedish television to debate them. As did Anders Tegnell, his protégé. They gave interviews non-stop, in the street and on train platforms, making the case for staying open. They showed it was possible to win the argument.’
Great! But, meanwhile, in Socialist Fascist Britain:
‘Broadcast content relating to the Coronavirus
Published on 23 March 2020
……..we remind all broadcasters of the significant potential harm that can be caused by material relating to the Coronavirus.
This could include:
• Health claims related to the virus which may be harmful.
• Medical advice which may be harmful.
• Accuracy or material misleadingness in programmes in relation to the virus or public policy regarding it.
We will be prioritising our enforcement of broadcast standards in relation to the above issues.
In these cases, it may be necessary for Ofcom to act quickly to determine the outcome in a proportionate and transparent manner, and broadcasters should be prepared to engage with Ofcom on short timescales.
Ofcom will consider any breach arising from harmful Coronavirus-related programming to be potentially serious and will consider taking appropriate regulatory action, which could include the imposition of a statutory sanction.’
‘Sanctions may include:
Another matter that the inquiry should be looking at: Socialist fascist state censorship.
At the beginning of the epidemic, the “case” numbers followed Farr’s Law. They were clearly not going to reach Ferguson’s estimates, if it was assumed that the mechanism of development of the epidemic was not significantly different to others. In particular, the infection had peaked before the first lockdown, especially if measured by “back working” to time of infection rather than time of case. Figures from Public Health England, published daily at the time. [NB: the sudden drop off in the last two days is an artefact of the daily reporting system and does not represent the final data for those days.]
”case’ numbers’
Yet another matter for the enquiry.
‘Until now (4 February 2022) COVID-19 cases have been reported at the individual level: every positive test taken and reported by one person has been considered part of a single case record, initiated by their first positive test.’
UK HSA
‘The Trust did run the assay for 40 cycles and cited this is standard for many PCR assays.’
PCR Testing in the UK During the SARS-CoV-2 Pandemic – Evidence from FOI Requests, April 2022
‘Infectious virus was associated with mean Ct values of 18.8 ± 3.4 (median 18.7)
Not obtaining infectious virus was associated with mean Ct values 27.1 ± 5.7 (median 27.5) (see the figure)
Samples with a Ct value below 23 yielded 91.5% of virus isolates.’
CEBM Aug. 2020
In view of the above, can we have any confidence in NHS case numbers?
Why don’t we have an inquiry into that…..oh……hang on……..
Shame the Speccie did not speak up loudly at the time.
All it seemed to want was to get rid of Boris and then get rid of Truss because she was not their preferred candidate for PM, so they attacked her until Sunak was appointed without a vote. So much for their democratic credentials.