Dorothy Byrne, former Head of News and Current Affairs at Channel 4, caused a minor ripple in the news pond last week when she made public reference to the Open Society Foundations’ recent democracy barometer of 2023, which had found that faith in democracy was plummeting among the young. According to the Foundations’ survey, 35% of 18-35 years-olds around the world say that having a leader who “doesn’t bother with parliaments or elections” is a good way of running a country (the highest of any age group). An article in the Times reported that Byrne cited these figures in the James Cameron Memorial Lecture at City University (sadly, no recording or transcript exists) which seemed to indicate that the figure for the U.K. specifically was 29%.
This is, of course, concerning if true. But it is perhaps more concerning that Byrne – ostensibly an intelligent person who is now President of Murray Edwards College at the University of Cambridge – is so incapable of thinking through exactly why this cratering in support for democracy might be taking place among the young. In this, of course, she is not an outlier (she is entirely emblematic of her class), and perhaps it is unfair therefore to single her out. But it is useful to do so all the same, because her analysis is so illustrative of the failures of our ‘thought leaders’ to actually think very hard about very much at all.
In Byrne’s world, you see, the problem is really all about Boris Johnson. She has form in this regard, having publicly denounced his “lying” before. But in her lecture at City she seems to have – without naming him – given him centre stage. The reason why young people have lost faith in democracy, she tells us, is “dishonest politicians”. And this means that the issue is fundamentally (yes, you’ve guessed it) inadequate fact-checking by journalists. What we need, she tells us, is for media outlets to inform us when politicians are “lying”. It is only then that faith in democracy will be restored.
It’s all about Brexit buses, in other words: the founding myth of Remoanerist-centrist-dadism, in which everything in the world that has gone wrong since 2016 is the fault of a disputed figure on the side of a campaign vehicle, and in which the only way to fix everything is for journalists, academics and right-thinking politicians to make sure that the stupid proles are never duped into voting for anything so silly as Brexit ever again. (The American equivalent, one presumes, is Donald Trump’s compendium of ‘lies’, handily put together for us by the Washington Post.)
The holes in the argument are, of course, big enough to drive a truck through. It assumes that politicians and spin doctors have not been publicly and notably ‘lying’ for a very long time. It imagines a fantasy world in which the public expects politicians to tell the truth and is violently disillusioned when they don’t. It conveniently ignores the fact that if the proportion of British young people who have no faith in democracy is 29%, this is actually a lower percentage than the international average, suggesting that if anything our politicians are considered somewhat more trustworthy (hated less, might be the better way of putting it) than they are elsewhere. And it entirely overlooks the fact that for older age groups – also exposed to Boris’s ‘lies’ – the percentages of people lacking faith in democracy are lower.
But much worse than the flaws in Byrne’s argument are the many other variables it overlooks, and which a thoughtful person ought really to have picked up on. Just off the top of my head:
- There’s the fact that our elected politicians essentially suspended ordinary democratic processes for the duration of 2020-21 and ruled by executive decree – advised by unelected ‘scientific experts’ – on the basis of there being an emergency, and presented this as a perfectly natural and indeed necessary way to solve problems.
- Then there’s the fact that whichever party gets elected we seem to get more or less the same suite of policies in relation to all of the issues that matter – tax, immigration, national debt, the NHS, benefits, Net Zero and so on.
- And then there’s the fact that when the electorate voted to leave the European Union in a national referendum, journalists and MPs lined up in their droves to tell people they didn’t know what they had voted for, and then connived to their utmost to overturn the referendum result on the basis that voting only matters when votes are cast the right way.
- Then, while I’m at it, there’s the fact that whenever a politician, anywhere in the world, strays a millimetre to the Right of centre, his or her legitimacy – and by extension the legitimacy of the process which got him or her elected – is immediately called into question by journalists labelling him or her ‘far Right’.
- And then of course there’s the fact that whenever U.K. or international courts rule against an elected decision-maker, they are cheered to the rafters by the ‘thought leaders’ of the day, no matter whether that decision-maker is attempting to implement a policy which the electorate have explicitly voted for – and, indeed, often in spite of that fact.
Given all of this, is it any wonder that our young people’s faith in democracy is flagging? Whichever way they turn, they are being told firstly that when voters vote for anything they choose badly; secondly that it is perfectly legitimate – and indeed desirable – to ignore voters, all things considered; and thirdly that the best way to solve problems is through Government ruling by decree on the basis of the advice of experts, and thereby circumventing democratic oversight entirely. Put that way, it’s remarkable, quite frankly, that well over half of youngsters still exhibit basic faith in the democratic process despite its flaws – and this, in its own way, puts a somewhat heartening spin on the entire daft story.
Why does Byrne overlook all of this? Boris Derangement Syndrome is an easy answer, but probably doesn’t entirely capture it. The truth, of course, is more simple yet: as a terribly clever TV exec and now terribly clever Oxbridge college President, it’s probably been a while since her views have really been challenged. In this, she acts as a microcosm for our ‘new elite’ establishment – invincible in the belief that they know best, but constitutionally incapable of looking beyond their own class interests and thereby taking into account what is actually going on in the society ‘beneath’ them. The truth of the matter is that this disconnect between the governing classes and those they purport to govern is the beating heart of the problem when it comes to decaying faith in democracy. But good luck getting any of them to face up to that. Far easier to blame Boris – and far easier to indulge in the fantasy that it’s journalists and ‘fact-checkers’ who can get us out of the quagmire.
Dr. David McGrogan is an Associate Professor of Law at Northumbria Law School. He is the author of the News From Uncibal Substack.
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‘As he is set to take Collins’s old job as NIH Director, there now is hope for the future. It falls on Jay’s shoulders to restore the integrity of medical and public health research so that it deserves to regain the trust of the public. He is one of the few scientists with both the track record and humility to do that.’
Spot on. If anyone knows of a better summary of the covid debacle, I’d like to see it:
‘It is an epidemic that’s hitting the United States and everyone’s worried about what the death rate is from it. I did some research on the spread of the disease, but I’d been reading the literature on how deadly it was. So the first reports for H1N1 were really high, 4%, 5% mortality. And I noticed in the literature, there were a whole series of serial prevalence studies, studies, essentially, of antibodies and what they was that for every case of H1N1, there were 50, 100 people that had it that they didn’t identify, the public health hadn’t identified.
When I saw the World Health Organization in 2020 say that we have a 3% mortality rate. They were very cagey about what they meant, but I knew what they meant. They meant that three out of 100 people that had been identified with COVID died from it. And they were looking at Chinese data, they were looking at Italian data. And the first thought I had was, well, maybe this is like H1… It’s a respiratory disease, respiratory virus. It spreads very, very easily, obviously. It seems likely that many more people have had it than had been identified. Our testing resources weren’t all that good at the time. So that was what motivated me in that piece was we don’t know the mortality rate ’cause we don’t know how many people actually had been infected. I wanted to know the denominator.
We did one in Los Angeles County and we did one in Santa Clara County, which is where Stanford is. We learned that in both LA County and Santa Clara County, there were 40 or 50 infections per case identified. 40 or 50 per case identified.
The problem is that if you have a situation in mid April, 2020, where 3, 4% of large Metro centers had evidence of the disease already, you know the disease is very, very infectious, that’s a strategy that cannot work. At that point what folks should have realized, including folks like Fauci and the CDC should have realized, is that a strategy to stop the disease from spreading down to zero was not possible.
The typical finding in these seroprevalence studies is that for people that are under the age of 70, there’s a 0.05% mortality risk. So 99.95% survival after infection for people under 70. For people over 70 it’s 5% mortality. So 95% mortality, 95% survival, a huge difference. It essentially changes smoothly with age. So roughly speaking, I’m 53, my infection fatality rate from these studies is something like 0.2%, 99.8% survival if I get infected.
So herd immunity is not a synonym for zero COVID. I think Hancock, I think, that’s the mistake he made there. The other thing about herd immunity with these disease is, it was clear in October of that year of 2020, and even more clear now that if you are infected, you actually gain substantial protection against re-infection. So there was a study that was just released actually recently, but verifies a whole long line of studies. At one year… This is out of Italy. At one year after infection, 0.3% are reinfected.
we sent people in the early days of the epidemic that were infected with COVID back into nursing homes who then infected a large number of vulnerable people, instead of realizing who the vulnerable were and seeking to protect them, that was the scarce resource. We thought hospital beds were a scarce resource. Most parts of the country in March, April 2020 were empty hospital beds.’
Jay Bhattacharya 21 Oct 2021
The indictment is that various experts around the world had correctly identified covid as a novel common cold coronavirus from February 2020 onwards.
But no-one listened to the real experts……and Lady Hallett is not listening now.
Why not?
And another thing…….
Why has it taken U.S. democracy to get us to the point where someone who really knows what they are talking about is appointed to clear up the public health shambles, corruption, when all that the supposedly exemplary British democratic system can do is saddle the taxpayer with a £208m inquiry wandering slowly and expensively down an illusory yellow brick road…..with a bunch of total nincompoops in charge?
Systemic reform is indeed required…….
Interesting question
Americans just seem more right wing than people in other rich world countries
More religious people
Maybe because it’s a younger nation founded on the idea of freedom from tyranny
Also the presidential system allows for an outsider to barge in unlike our parliamentary system
I am not sure about “systemic reform” (whatever that is). We had the chance to reject the Uniparty and most voters didn’t take it. People with views like mine seem to be in a tiny minority here
I don’t think it’s the Americans (in the US), it’s that Europe has been suffocated by the EU infrastructure, along with Establishment Smugness. In the UK, it is shown by the lack of STEM (and Business) expertise in Westminster and Whitehall:
https://conservativehome.com/2020/11/18/luke-tryl-were-failing-to-turn-pure-research-into-new-industries-a-challenge-which-the-government-must-help-to-meet/#comments
And:
How the Deep State Fails Britain:
https://youtu.be/5EK3diXgqbI
Well in the US there was a majority vote against the Establishment
Not in the U.K. or France or Germany- not yet anyway
It is possible that many of those taking part in the Inquiry are behaving in a defensive way, or if you are a real cynic, some might be opportunistic. As many were, selling junk of one kind or another. But despite the negative commentary here yesterday about Jay B’s appointment by Trump, it does seem like a wise move; we’ll see.
If you can keep your head when all about you are loosing theirs and blaming it on you….
Jay Bhattacharya is that man.
…and there you have almost the entire Covid fiasco in a few short paragraphs…. I say almost, because Kulldorff doesn’t touch upon the dreadful amount of politicking, power play, and corruption that also drove the fiasco, almost undoubtedly in every country
Never forget that the contribution to the Covid fiasco of the noble, learned and historic Mother of Parliaments included the immortal wisdom that “a Scotch egg is a proper meal”
That, and a debt of say £400Bn, plus £200m for the utterly pointless whitewash Hallett inquiry
Yet further proof that Trump is racist.
Interesting that almost all of the Indian Subcontinentals chosen by Drumpf worship VISHNU in some form or other, because the AntiChrist is also associated with Vishnu (who is also associated with Metatron).
Such Indians pretend that they worship the Great God Brahma, but shove him into the background while really worshipping the Evil Vishnu and his Evil ally Shiva=Satan, who are both protected by the Hideous Moon Spider “Goddess of All India” called Kali-Allah, the Goddess of Death. Here she is riding a white horse across a Lake of Blood, while seated on a saddle-blanket made from the skin of her own son. Here she is called “Palden Llamo KALI-deva” by the Tibetan Buddhists. Different name, same bug.
Sounds daft, I know, but you will eventually see.
She is the one the Tibetan Buddhist monks ask to choose the next Dalai Lama, believe it or not. Truth is stranger than fiction.
Note the Crescent Moon above her head, and the head of her skinned son dangling below her foot, with his skin spread out beneath her. You can also see his hands on either side, where his skin is tied around the horse as a horse blanket. This is “The Mother Goddess of All India”, who is especially fond of human sacrifices.
Then the Muslims, Hindus, Sikhs, & Buddhists say to the Gullible Christians of the West, “Oh, don’t worry, we worship the same God as you!”
And yet another professional, who really ought to know better, maintaining there was an actual pandemic. These people will go to their graves clinging on to the fallacy there was a chuffing ”pandemic”! Hey, maybe if we obsessively test for flu using the exact same approach as we did with ‘Covid’, we can enjoy pandemics every single year…
Anyway, great work by Martin Victor Sewell here;
”To say that this is a comprehensive review of the COVID literature is an understatement. I commend Martin’s work to you.
A seasonal influenza-like illness became a pandemic of governmental overreach and collective hysteria. Lockdowns turned out to be the greatest health economics mistake in modern history, face masks served no useful purpose in the community, in schools or in healthcare, whilst vaccinations were effective against severe COVID-19 in the elderly in 2021, but ultimately likely did more harm than good.”
https://metatron.substack.com/p/the-effectiveness-of-lockdowns-face
He calls it an epidemic, which it was….in the same sense as, in Britain, we get Influenza Like Illness epidemics on a regular basis.
You could argue that a ‘pandemic’ is an epidemic accompanied by panic.
There certainly was a great deal of unnecessary panic in 2020.
Mr Bhattacharya did a great deal more than almost anyone else to allay that panic.
At least in my humble estimation, he is a living legend.
P.S. Unnecessary fact: Epidemic was a 1991 heavy metal album released by the prescient band ‘Panic’. It included the tracks ‘Blackfeather Snake”, “High Strung”, and “Hypochondriac”.
Why do you keep saying that? You do know the article was written by Kulldorff, and you did see the bit where he says “The only major country which took an evidence-based approach to the pandemic was Sweden”? There is a huge difference between a pandemic and an epidemic, which I’d expect somebody in Kulldorff’s position, and his colleagues, to know. Language is key and you most certainly cannot get away with using these two words interchangeably and expect to maintain any sort of credibility.
There was a ‘casedemic’. Without those fraudulent tests none of it would’ve been possible. Deaths due to government policies and at the hands ( and neglect ) of doctors are what killed people in any greater number than any other flu season.
Also, anybody pro-death jab, such as Ioannidis, most certainly have lost any respect and credibility, as far as I’m concerned. Profs Fenton and Neil have debunked this particular topic many times now. To say these injections saved any lives is pure bunkum.
I made the mistake of assuming that your comment would have been directed at Bhattacharya and the article above.
My apologies.
Hear, hear!
No.
The just ‘reward’ for Fauci would be to have his reputation comprehensively dismantled such that he lives out his meagre few years left in complete disgrace.
And preferably behind bars. He and Bill Gates of Hell could share a cell
I wish I had your confidence that science will prevail in the £200 million UK enquiry.
Delighted to see this appointment as I was to see RFK Jr. Trump is appointing all the right people to roll back the authoritarianism of the last few years. No wonder they tried to kill him
The medical profession will be bereft of integrity for the foreseeable future. Heinous crimes have been committed.
Measures must be put in place that ensure the corruption of Big Pharma, Regulators, Journals, Health organisations, is never allowed to destroy our established ethics and morality again.
Assisted dying bills are extremely dangerous in our broken society.