Body Bags Protest -

Construction Workers Call To 'Shut The Sites'

THE Construction Leadership Council (CLC ) have just shockingly announced that construction needs to stay open and social distancing for coronavirus can be ignored for up to 15 minutes at a time, if a job cannot be carried out by one person alone. This watering down of official guidelines for building sites will pass on infection to their family members and send hundreds to their deaths.

No construction worker wants to put their family at risk, but they also need to pay their rent, which is why the electrician, bricklayer, carpenter, engineer and union safety rep who participated in the direct action also called on the government to pay every worker, irrespective of whether they are a direct employee, self-employed or an agency worker.

'Shut The Sites' activist went on to blockade a nearby Laing O'Rourke’s building site, sending a clear message to the CLC, major contractors and the government - if you don't shut down construction and keep people safe, then workers are going to
do it themselves.

The protest took place of 28th April - International Workers Memorial Day The global Day of Action by unions over deaths in the workplace. The slogan for the protest is “Mourn the Dead – Fight for the Living”.

So after the protest, the construction workers paid their respects to their fellow workers who had died at the bronze ‘Building Worker’ statue at Tower Hill in London. Shut The Sites spokesperson, Dan Dobson said:

#ShutTheSites is taking off as a grassroots movement on construction sites across the UK, made up of workers who disagree with the Government policy of keeping sites open. At least 100 NHS/Care workers have now died from Covid-19, the Government have shown that it cannot protect or provide PPE for the genuine front line key workers, so how are non essential construction workers meant to fare? All non-critical sites need to be stopped and all workers need to be paid, regardless of their employment status."

Note: A full risk assessment was carried out prior to the action, full PPE was provided and control measures were put in place to reduce transmission of COVID-19.

Vital medical equipment is being shipped abroad despite NHS shortages!

Medical Equipment Being Exported Abroad Despite NHS Shortages

I'm no conspiracy theorist, but I'm beginning to wonder if that Bunteresque Johnson, and his sidekick, Dom Cummings, aren't exploiting this national emergency to kill off the elderly and the baby-boomer generation in order to cut the social security/pension bill. It may be a kind of “Shock Therapy”, disaster capitalism, approach to cutting public expenditure.


Dominic Cummings is on record as saying  it's "too bad" if the elderly die of the virus, – he later denied saying this - and how else can you explain, the cack-handed way the Government have gone about dealing with this crises?


Health Secretary, Matt Hancock, told us on 23^rd January, that Professor Christopher John MacRae Whitty, the Chief Public Health Officer for England, had revised the risk of the UK population getting the coronavirus from "low to very low" and said that the country was well prepared and well equipped to deal with it.


Since then, tens of thousands of people have died of the virus (a thousand in one day), and NHS staff are complaining of a lack of personal protective equipment (PPE), and their difficulty in getting tested. There is also a shortage of respiratory equipment.


A week ago, Bill Gardner, of the DailyTelegraph, wrote that millions of pieces of PPE were being shipped from Britain to Europe despite the NHS shortages. He wrote:


“Last week five million surgical masks and more than a million respirators were packed onto EU-registered Lorries by one UK wholesaler …and shipped from British warehouses to Germany, Spain, and Italy, despite severe shortages in the UK.”


According to Gardner, UK firms had told him that they had “no choice” but to keep selling lifesaving gear abroad because their efforts of help had been repeatedly ignored by the British government.


Milton Pena, who was an orthopaedic surgeon at Tameside Hospital, for 17-years, told me recently that the failure to do widespread testing and not to count coronavirus deaths in the community was 'premeditated', i.e. deliberate government policy. According to MailOnline, No 10 abandoned widespread testing more than a month ago, so the true scale of Britain's outbreak is a mystery. And why is this country still exporting PPE to other countries, when NHS staff, are complaining of a shortage of it, which is putting their lives at risk?


What's also curious is why 15,000 air passengers a day, are still flying into British airports even from high-risk countries, and aren't being screened or quarantined or even observing rules on social-distancing. They just walk onto the streets of Britain, after being given a leaflet, advising them to self-isolate for two weeks, if they feel I'll after landing.


Public Health England have said that screening  is ineffective and the Foreign Office, maintains that there is no evidence that closing borders or travel bans, would have any effect on the spread of infection. Yet, many other countries have done the very opposite. Professor Gabriel Scally, of the Royal Society of Medicine, told the Financial Times:

"The UK is an outlier. It is very hard to understand why it (the British government), persists in having the open border policy. It is most peculiar."


And while this is going on, we're being told to stay at home, keep three metres apart, and risk fines and prosecution, if we infringe lock-down restrictions, much of which is of dubious legality. You couldn't make it up; it's like something out of a comic opera.

Locked Onto Influenza?

by Les May

SPARROW Hawks and birds which hunt like them seem to have the ability to lock onto a specific target and however much it weaves and dives remain doggedly on its tail.  Did something similar happen in January and February when the response to the potential for a Covid-19 pandemic was being thrashed out in the UK?  Was there a fixation on the type of response which has worked in the past with respect to Influenza epidemics.  Essentially that amounts to ‘you can’t stop Influenza, so rely on mitigating the harm it causes’.  Did the UK government’s advisers ‘lock on’ to an Influenza response strategy and fail to consider possible alternatives?

There are two important differences between Covid-19 and Influenza.  Covid-19 has a higher death rate and a longer incubation period than Influenza.  The first means it is even more dangerous, the second that there is a longer window in which to test, trace and track potential sufferers.

I am prompted to ask these questions because New Zealand, which followed a different strategy after abandoning mitigation, now believes that it has largely eliminated community transmission of the virus and is in the process of easing its ‘lockdown’ measures.  Of course New Zealand has a much smaller population than the UK, but if we standardise the infection rate in terms of cases per million of the population we find that for New Zealand the numbers are about 300 per million and for the UK they are about 2,300 per million.

The strategy followed by New Zealand was ‘containment as a stepping stone to elimination’.

The steps needed to make such a strategy work were discussed in a paper published in the New Zealand Medical Journal on 3 April 2020.  Some of the requirements for making elimination work which were presented in that paper are:

‘Elimination is a well-recognised strategy for infectious disease control, and New Zealand can draw on public health experience of eliminating a range of human and animal infectious diseases.  In particular there are lessons to be learned from the measles and rubella elimination strategy, albeit with the difference that we do not yet have an effective vaccine for COVID-19.  Past experience has taught us that there are three factors that are critical to elimination success: 1) high-performing epidemiological and laboratory surveillance systems; 2) an effective and equitable public health system that can ensure uniformly high delivery of interventions to all populations, including marginalised groups (in this instance intervention is focused on diagnosis, isolation of cases and quarantine of contacts rather than vaccine); and 3) the ability to sustain the national programme and update strategies to address emerging issues.

The essential elements of an elimination strategy for COVID-19 are likely to include:

1. Border controls with high-quality quarantine of incoming travellers;

2. Rapid case detection identified by widespread testing, followed by rapid case isolation, with swift contact tracing and quarantine for contacts;

3. Intensive hygiene promotion (cough etiquette and hand washing) and provision of hand hygiene facilities in public settings;

4. Intensive physical distancing, currently implemented as a lockdown (level 4 alert) that includes school and workplace closure, movement and travel restrictions, and stringent measures to reduce contact in public spaces, with potential to relax these measures if elimination is working;

5. A well-coordinated communication strategy to inform the public about control measures and about what to do if they become unwell, and to reinforce important health promotion messages.’ (my emphasis)

https://www.nzma.org.nz/journal-articles/new-zealands-elimination-strategy-for-the-covid-19-pandemic-and-what-is-required-to-make-it-work

https://www.stuff.co.nz/national/politics/120784539/man-for-this-moment--epidemiologist-michael-baker

I have repeatedly suggested that we should watch carefully what is happening in China and not get too ‘hung up’ on the accuracy of the figures it publishes.  This is what the authors of the paper have to say:

‘The strongest evidence that containment, on the path to elimination, works comes from the remarkable success of China in reversing a large pandemic.  Of particular relevance to New Zealand are the examples of smaller Asian jurisdictions, notably Hong Kong, Singapore, South Korea and Taiwan.’

In the UK the stable door was left wide open and the horse has well and truly bolted. We have had 20,000+ deaths so far and to get out of ‘lockdown’ we are going to have to have in place the measures which might have eliminated some of this pain if they had been applied earlier, detection identified by widespread testing, case isolation, contact tracing and quarantine for contacts. Questions need to be asked of someone.

********************************** 

Quarantine measures may be introduced at UK airports?

John Holland -Kaye Boss of Heathrow Airport

John Holland, -Kaye, the boss of Heathrow airport, is urging the Government to introduce mass screenings for passengers - temperature checks, antibody tests, and a requirement that passengers carry health passports to "prove they're medically fit." He thinks that British airports are coming under unfair criticism over the Government's decision not to test.


At a time when British citizens are being advised to stay at home and to keep three metres apart and face prosecution and fines for violating lock-down restrictions, you might find it astonishing, that a government source has said, "More than 15,000 people arrive in the UK each day from virus-hit countries."

Incredibly, passengers are just given a leaflet at British airports and told to self-isolate for two-weeks if they feel ill after landing, and walking unchecked, onto the streets of Britain. Officials have admitted that there is no way of enforcing this.


Yet, the screening of passenger arrivals at UK airports, has been ruled out as 'ineffective' by Public Health England. While other countries have introduced screening for passengers at airports, have closed borders, and have restricted air travel, the British Foreign Office have said:


"There is no evidence that interventions like closing borders or travel bans would have any effect on the spread of the infection."


Health Secretary, Matt Hancock, has said that the flow of people coming into the country would not make a significant difference as the virus is already widespread and that screening of passengers at UK airports isn't happening because the number of people has "dropped very dramatically."


On 23 January, Hancock told the House of Commons that the Chief Medical Officer for England, Professor Christopher John MacRae Whitty, had revised the risk (of contracting Covid-19) to the UK population from low to very low and that;

"While there is an increased likelihood that cases may arise in this country, we are well prepared and well equipped to deal with them. The UK is one of the first countries to have developed a world leading test for the new coronavirus  and the NHS is ready to respond to any cases that emerge... the public can be assured that the whole of the UK is always prepared for these types of outbreaks and will remain vigilant and keep our response under constant review in the light of emerging scientific evidence."

Since the Health Secretary made this statement in January, saying that there was a very low risk to the UK population, and that the Health system was well prepared and well equipped to deal with it, tens of thousands of people in the UK have died of the virus, including many elderly people in care homes, and even Hancock, now admits, that the virus is 'widespread', throughout the UK.

Despite his assurances to the public that the government had everything under control, hospital's across England have reported a lack of personal protective equipment for front-line NHS staff - which is necessary to treat people with the virus, such as surgical gowns, face masks, visors - and a failure to test doctor's and nurses, to see if they're infected. There is also a shortage of respiratory equipment.

The Health Secretary's blase attitude towards this Covid-19 epidemic may well cost thousand of more British lives, and it is questionable, whether Boris Johnson and his government, have really abandoned their initial strategy of letting the coranavirus run its course, a kind of shock therapy, that is to be imposed on most of us.

VIP's, like Johnson, Hancock, and the Prince of Wales, have all had the virus and were tested very quickly and received first class medical treatment. For the rest of us, the hoi polloi, - who've been thrown under a bus, by Johnson, it is 'herd immunity'.

Keep Watching China

by Les May

THIS morning just after 7o’clock, I watched a Sky News presenter, who for reasons which completely baffle me was standing outside 10 Downing Street, ask a hapless government minister ‘when are schools going to reopen?’, a question he could not possibly answer.

At the moment we do not even know whether the numbers of new infections, as measured by the figures published at the end of each day, are fluctuating randomly around some stable figure, indicating a plateau, or are actually falling as appears to be the case.  Using the published data for the period after 8 April it is possible to calculate* that there is approximately a 1 in 9 chance (11%) that we would get figures like this if the number of new infections was in fact stable and not really falling.  This is hardly evidence that there should be an easing of the so called ‘lockdown’.

It seems to me utterly irresponsible for the media to constantly use ‘personal stories’ of the difficulties that people face being cooped up, e.g. with children in small spaces and no garden, to subtly intimate that the government should be able to tell us when various restrictions are going to be eased. You can only have an ‘adult conversation’ when both sides are willing to behave like adults.

I suggest that the sensible thing to do is to keep watching what is happening in China.  You don’t have to believe the quantitative data, i.e. the figures which are published regarding infections and deaths; look at the qualitative data, i.e. how and when China is easing controls on movement and allowing facilities to reopen. Parts of China which have been living under strict controls for three months are only now beginning to reopen.  This may be a clue there about how long some of our own restrictions need to be in place.

* Any test is complicated by the so called ‘Monday Effect’.  The test I used is the non-parametric Cox-Stuart test for trend modified to take this into account.  The figure I give is approximate, but indicates the need for continuing caution.

https://influentialpoints.com/Training/binomial_and_related_tests.htm

(Look about half way down the page.)

^ The figures for China may indeed be suspect, but does anyone take the US figures for testing seriously?

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uW56CL0pk0g

************************************

Mr. Charalambous: 'Publish my reply in full'!

'Not a petition' maybe a woke manifesto?

 Editor:  Charles Charalambous has asked that we
publish his e-mail in full for our readers 
to judge.  In it he accuses us of making
'mispresentations of my views on your blog'.
Later on he goes further and suggests:  
'On reflection, I can only conclude that your 
misrepresentation of my views and communications 
with you are more likely wilful than not. Among 
other things, this goes against the principle 
of free debate in the labour movement.'  

We must leave it to our readers to decide if 
Mr. Charalambous views have been portrayed by us 
 either as 'mispresentations' or 'misrepresentations' 
or that we are further guilty offending 'against the 
principle of free debate in the labour movement.'  
As yet, Tameside Trade Union Council of which 
I am the secretary, has not signed-up to 
Mr. Charalambous's manifesto on Covid-19, but
we have at least published it in full on this Blog.

 ********************************

Brian,

I WILL take the time to make three brief points in answer to your blog postings that refer to me:


1. Clearly, you have either missed the point, or are deliberately choosing to miss the point (I won't suggest anything worse) in order to generate more content for your blog. The appeal to trade unionists (bit of a clue there) which you refer to is not a petition to the government, as is obvious from the part you quoted ("Let's come together to push for the basic emergency measures that democracy requires.") and from the introduction to the list of basic emergency measures, which you carefully avoid referring to or quoting.

2. You have chosen to only publish the first part of my last reply to you, which ended:

I am not interested in correcting the mispresentations of my views on your blog - not because of any supposed "chains around some brains" (an ambitious claim based on limited evidence, I'd say Les), but because I have better uses for my time.*

By all means, feel free to quote Ludwig Wittgenstein and Karl Popper, but I would be more impressed if you engaged more directly with what people are living through today in the UK and worldwide.

3. You continue to mispell my name, despite spelling it correctly in your earliest post about me, and even after spelling it correctly (once) in an entire piece devoted to musings on spelling and grammar. My name is in black and white in my communications with you. Do you have a learning disability, or are you just being childish?

On reflection, I can only conclude that your misrepresentation of my views and communications with you are more likely wilful than not. Among other things, this goes against the principle of free debate in the labour movement.

Please therefore publish this reply in full and stop using my name to make spurious points in your blog.

Regards

Charles Charalambous

*  We did in fact publish what Charles Charalambous said as a comment...

'I am not interested in correcting the mispresentations of my views on your blog - not because of any supposed "chains around some brains" (an ambitious claim based on limited evidence, I'd say Les), but because I have better uses for my time.'

Tuesday, 14 April 2020 at 10:02:00 BST

*******************

Resolutionary Socialism Changes Nothing

by Les May

IN 1988, I was still teaching in a Rochdale school.  One day during the autumn term all the staff were summoned to a meeting after school finished.  We were surprised to see the Diana Cavanagh, the then Director of Education, standing at the front waiting to talk to us.

She had come to tell us that a small group of parents had moved to call for a ballot of parents which would decide whether the school should ‘Opt Out’ of Local Education Authority (LEA) control and instead be controlled directly by central government.

Though people’s motivations differed, there was little enthusiasm for such a move.  Some were against it just because it was a Tory policy, some felt it flew in the face of local democracy and local accountability, some were concerned that it was the thin end of the wedge which would lead to a worsening of our pay and conditions of employment, and some simply did not trust the headteacher.

After everyone had had their say a resolution was put to the meeting condemning the proposal. It passed without obvious dissent.  At this point it looked as if that was all that would happen.  Then someone stood up to object to leaving it at that.  I am sufficiently immodest to say it was me. What I went on to say was that simply passing a ‘resolution’ was a complete waste of time. If we wanted to defeat this move we had to contact all the parents of the children at the school, visit them and explain what ‘Opting Out’ meant and why we opposed it.  Without any debate it was agreed that an ad hoc committee should form to organise the mechanics of contacting parents and because we would need money to pay for letters to parents a collection was quickly organised. I assumed we would see everyone give a £1 or so.  When the ‘hat was passed round’ at least one £10 note went into it from one of the Maths teachers.

Letters went to newspapers to publicise our activities.  Lists of names and addresses were sorted into routes which a two person team could follow. Night after night in the first couple of months of 1989 we tramped the streets visiting parents, listening to parents and soliciting their vote in the forthcoming ballot against ‘Opting Out’.

It was all worth it, because the parents voting against the proposal.

In 1995 there was a proposal to use the Gort Sand pit and Wilderness Quarry sites for a Greater Manchester Council landfill site.  A group of people, each for a different reason, objected, came together and fought this. It took work to make it happen, but we were so persistent that eventually a full public inquiry was held in Rochdale Town Hall. In the end the Inspector did not agree with us and the site was used for landfill.  Was it worth it?  Yes it was!

Some people think that ‘activism’ is passing a resolution, writing a wish list, denouncing someone as a ‘racist’ or a ‘fascist’ or … just fill in your own preferred epithet here, or producing a Twitter storm.  Every week some petition or other falls into my e-mail inbox. It’s there briefly before going into the trash. Signing a petition may make some people feel pleased with themselves, but if you want to change things you have to do the work, even if sometimes you lose.  Before the last election the lady I tramped the streets with in the winter of 1989 was on my doorstep canvassing for the Labour party.  She’s still doing the work! 

****************************** 

Virtue Signalling & Petitioning Governments?

by Brian Bamford

ON the 14th, April Charles Charalambous commented: 

'We seem to be talking at cross-purposes.  An editorial 

in a political publication does not aim to be a philosophical tract, 

and by definition its starting-point is a particular worldview 

(which, evidently, you don't share).'

Charles Charalambous represents a body affiliated to the 

4th International and is editor of Labour Internationalist.

Northern Voices doesn't favour the kind of petitioning

culture which Mr. Charalambous credits by describing

this practice as a 'world view'.  We do not want to 

be a wet blanket, but we believe this approach could 

have unintended consequences.  Charles is a lead
signatory of the petition we publish beneath my critique.

BELOW A BODY of trade unionists have emerged in the current crisis to call upon the government to institute certain changes and to submit to a list of demands in  a campaign to relieve the pressures upon us.

Is it a wish list?  Or is it merely virtue signalling by persons who are simply displaying their own impotence?

It might be as well to recognise that there are more than one type of petition:

Protest petitions generally aim mainly to show discontent; they play the same role as demonstrations: safety valve, expression of dissatisfaction in relation to an act, decision or policy. In an age of internet and social media, protest petitions can gain traction very quickly.  The Trump petitions some time ago when 2 million people signed a petition opposing Donald Trump’s state visit to the UK are but one example of this type, as was the one that received over 4 million signatures asking for a second EU referendum.

Substantive petitions aim primarily to change a situation.  This tends to
relate to issues that people feel very strongly about, either because they are personal and affect them directly, or because they are part of a very strong
set of convictions held over a period of time.  So these are very different to protest petitions.  Recent examples include the petitions on Meningitis B,
the one(s) on Grouse shooting, and the one asking that stillborn babies are 
given a birth certificate – the latter one with far fewer signatures.   Ultimately, this type of petition aims to change a situation, but in the process of doing so it aims first and foremost to raise awareness.

Cristina Leston-Bandeira situates the process within a broader policy-
making context.  She explains that petitions are an effective way of raising awareness or showing discontent, and that the adoption of public demands
into policy remains subject to the usual political process.


She writes:
'As we know, it is very rare for policy change to happen quickly; if not 
originated by the government, it is usually the result of sustained campaigning through a variety of means. Whether a substantive petition achieves a change 
in policy is often not the main question.  The key starting point is whether it raises awareness of the issue, and whether it raises the profile of a specific 
issue enough to lead government to eventually agree for change.  After all, 
one of the most famous cases of petitioning – votes for women (if you prefer 
a more grown-up account then try here) – took a few years and more than 
one petition before it actually led to any change.  So, different petitions have different purposes and perform different roles.  Petitions also enable what is known as the “fire-alarm” role: an opportunity to raise issues bottom-up, 
outside the political agenda.'

In the case of the petition below this slow process in policy change may
simply serve to display the helplessness of the proponents of the demands.
Thus it could have the reverse effect to that intended by the signatories.

**************************************

Trade Union Petition Covid-19:

Let’s come together to push for the basic emergency measures 
that democracy requires.

We reject “One rule for the rich, another for the rest”!

Protect working people, not the banks and big business!

The working class must defend its own interests, and on an independent basis!

Requisition the £350 billion given to the banks and businesses 
and apply it to these emergency measures to directly protect the population:

– All personal protection equipment (PPE) of the necessary standard to be 
sourced immediately, including by requisition, and delivered immediately 
where needed by NHS staff and care-home staff;

– Requisition big companies to serve in the production of ventilators, masks,
testing kits, healthcare beds and everything that is lacking today in the NHS;

– Free diagnostic testing for all, free antibody testing for all. All private testing
and processing facilities, as well as all other private healthcare resources,
to be immediately requisitioned and incorporated into the NHS.

– Free distribution of masks to the whole population;

– Ban “temporary” lay-offs and job-cuts;

– Ban bogus self-employment;

– Full pay immediately, not in May or June, for all self-isolated workers, 
whatever their work status;

– Paid time off to care for children when there is no other option available;

- All employers to be legally bound by the Health and Safety at Work etc. 
Act 1974, the Management of Health and Safety at Work Regulations 1999, 
and the Employment Rights Act 1996, which together give employees the 
right to leave their place of work if they feel they are in “serious 
and imminent” danger;

– Financial security for all: scrap Universal Credit;

– Moratorium on all debt and the payment of rent and rental charges
(utilities, etc.);

– All social benefits and support allowances to be paid immediately, 
not in May or June;

– Staple foods and basic goods to be distributed for free to people in difficulty;

– Requisition vacant/available premises to provide accommodation to
the homeless and poorly-housed;

– Scrap all Private Finance Initiative (PFI) contracts, which have been
a tool for commercialising education and privatising the NHS;

– Repeal the Coronavirus Act 2020, replace it with properly scrutinised
measures that do not restrict civil liberties.

We, workers (full-time and part-time, on secure and insecure contracts), homemakers, pensioners, students and youth, say: These 
are immediate measures that are needed to avoid medical and economic carnage. They cannot wait.

We will not accept more of the same – what is happening now cannot be allowed to happen again.

First signatories:

Mike Calvert, Deputy Branch Secretary, Islington UNISON, London (pers. cap.)

Charles Charalambous, ex-President, Torbay and South Devon TUC (pers. cap.), Editor of Labour Internationalist

Stefan Cholewka, Secretary, Greater Manchester Association of Trades
Union Councils ((on behalf of GMATUC)

Sheila Coleman, Unite Community, Liverpool (pers. cap.)

Jane Doolan, UNISON NEC member, Branch Secretary, Islington
UNISON, London (pers. cap.)

Paul Filby, Labour Party member, Liverpool (pers. cap.)

Stephen Hall, President, Greater Manchester Association of Trades
Union Councils

Diana James, Assistant Branch Secretary, Islington UNISON, London
(pers. cap.)

Paul Kelly, Vice President, Greater Manchester Association of
Trades Union Councils

Doreen McNally, Unite Community, Liverpool (pers. cap.)

Henry Mott, Branch Secretary, Southwark Unite, London (pers. cap.)

Billy Murphy, Unite Community, Liverpool (pers. cap.)

Tony Rimmer, Vice-Chair, Unite 567 Branch; Chair, Bootle CLP;
Liverpool47 surcharged Labour councillor (pers. cap.)

John Sweeney, Labour Party member, Leave activist, London (pers. cap.)

Margaret K. Taylor, Labour Party member, Treasurer, Rochdale
Metropolitan Borough Trades Council (on behalf of RMBTC)

Matt Webb, general secretary, Brighton & Hove District
Trades Union Council (on behalf of B&HDTUC)

Sarah Wooley, general secretary, The Bakers Food and Allied Workers Union (on behalf of BFAWU) 

I endorse these demands

In a personal capacity / On behalf of my organisation

English speakers: Grappling with the Grammar

 by Brian Bamford

SOME time ago my co-editor, partly-what jokingly, questioned my spelling and grammatical abilities, and I was reminded of this when more recently a commentator and meticulous Marxist complained in a P.S. 'You can at least take the trouble to spell my name correctly.'
 

The name, Charles Charalambous, had a French ring to it and, to be honest, I had some trouble getting it right.

 'FORGET GRAMMAR' & start 'acquiring a vocabulary'

As it happens I'm just reviewing a book entitled 'The Conspiracy of GOOD TASTE', and I was researching what the art critic Wyndham Lewis had had to say about vulgarity, slang and what he calls slum city English, as well as his thoughts on art and architecture.  On this very subject of the English language Lewis in his essay 'MEN WITHOUT ART' commenting on H.L. Mencken's treatise, The American Language, had cause to write:

'English is of all languages the simplest grammatically and the easiest to make into a Beach-la-mar* or pigin tongue.  Whether this fact, combined with its "extraordinary tendency to degenerate into slang of every kind," is against it, is of some importance for the future - for it will have less and less grammar, obviously, and more and cosmopolitan slang. - Mr Mencken is of the opinion that a language cannot be too simple - he is all for Beach-la-mar.  The path towards analysis and  the elimination of inflection, has been trod by English so thoroughly that, in its American form, it should today win the race for a universal volapuk.  Indeed, as Mr Mencken says, "the foreigner essaying it, indeed, finds his chief  difficulty, not in mastering its forms, but in grasping its lack of form.  He doesn't have to learn a new and complex grammar; what he has to do is forget grammar.  Once he has done so, the rest is a mere matter of acquiring a vocabulary".'

I suppose that I became more aware of the limited forms of English grammar, my mother tongue, not at school but while living in Spain and trying to get my head around Castillian Spanish using a book entitle 'Colloquial Spanish', while at the same time working among people speaking Valenciano [a form of Catalan] in the 1960s, yet I hadn't realised that English has this special quality through its limited grammatical form which lends it a vitality and richness that adds to its universality.  Wyndham Lewis warns 'There is, it is true, the difficulty of the vowel sounds'  It seems that according to him 'Standard English possesses nineteen distinct vowel sounds: no other living European tongue except Portuguese', so Mr Mencken says, 'possesses so many'.  Modern Greek, it seems, 'can boast only five'.  The answer, according to Lewis, is the neutralised vowel, which he says 'supported by the slip-shod speech-habits of the native proletariat, makes steady progress' in America.  

Perhaps, it occurs to me, this formless grammar of English may explain why the Brexit lobby triumphed in the referendum.  Wyndham Lewis writes that:  'Watch your vowels should be our next national slogan!'  And he adds, 'The fatal grammatical easiness of English is responsible, however, for such problems as these, as much as the growing impressionability of the English nation, and the proletarianization, rather than the reverse of the American.'

Hitherto, while England was a powerful empire, run by an aristocratic caste, its influence on speech and even the psychology of the American ex-colonies was paramount.  Yet today, the tables have been turned and cultural domination has for long been coming from Hollywood and elsewhere across the pond.  Lewis foresaw this in 1934 saying:  'the cinema brought the American scene and the American dialect nightly into the heart of England, and the "Americanising" process is far advanced, "done gones," "good guys" and 'buddies' spout upon the ips of cockney children as readily as those to the manner born of New York or Chicago: and no politically-powerful literate class any longer now, in our British 'Banker's Olympus,' to confer prestige upon an exact and intelligent selective speech.'

BREXIT, 'Airstrip One' & '1984'

Wyndham Lewis well understood the proletarianision of the anglo-saxon people in which he grasped, in the 1930s, that '...if America has come to England, there has been no reciprocal movement of England into the United States: indeed, with the new American nationalism, England is deliberately kept out: and all the great influence that England exerted formall - merely by being there and speaking the same tongue and sharing the same fundamental political principles - that is today a thing of the past.' 

It would seem that this process is now well developed and should progress further as we associate  ourselves more closely with the United States and Trump and his cultivation of American Nationalism.

Later than this in the 1940's George Orwell he portrayed England as 'airstrip one'.  Air  part of Oceania covers the entire continents of America and Oceania and the British Isles, the main location for the novel, in which they are referred to as ‘Airstrip One’.   Within the novel, London is the capitol of the province called Airstrip One, which is itself part of the nation of Oceania. Oceania is one of three world powers, and is composed of the Americas, the Atlantic islands including the British Isles, Australasia, and the southern portion of Africa.  In this novel unofficial language of Oceania is English (officially called Oldspeak), and the official language is Newspeak.

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*   C19: quasi-French, from bêche-de-mer (trepang, this being a major trading commodity in the SW Pacific; hence the name was applied to the trading language)

**  commenting on 'Air Strip One' one commentator writes:  'I'm pretty sure it's a satirical jab at the perceived takeover of Britain by the United States.  Just as in real life the US has filled Britain with its airbases, in the world of 1984 the entire country is seen as just a minor offshoot of US military power, a mere "airstrip" for the USAF to launch their warplanes from. We already know that the United States has taken over Britain; this is stated explicitly at the very start of Chapter III (War is Peace) of Emmanuel Goldstein's magnum opus:'

Lib Dems respond to Centre for Cities study

Centre for Cities: High debt levels in North leave people badly prepared post-Coronavirus
 

THE Liberal Democrats have responded to a Centre for Cities report warning that high debt levels in Northern England and Wales will leave people poorly prepared for the post-coronavirus economic downturn.

Their new research maps debt levels in England and Wales and found that in Northern England and Wales’ cities, people have the highest levels of debt relative to their incomes.

On average, for every £5 people earn in Warrington, Swansea, Sunderland and Wigan, they owe around £1. This compares to Oxford and Cambridge where people owe just 35p for every £5 they earn on average

Liberal Democrat Spokesperson for the North John Leech said:

“Report after report and analysis after analysis shows the North hit hardest. From schools to busses, pensions to child poverty, and now debt.

“Let’s be absolutely clear: this is another example of the undeniable and devastating result of decades of overinvestment and relentless focus on London and the South, and it cannot be solved overnight with warm words.

“It’s time to take the North/South divide and its impact on people’s lives seriously.

“Ministers, MPs and councillors must listen and commit to investing in the North, and they must do it with real urgency to guarantee real equality across our region.

“Only the Liberal Democrats are standing up for the North. We will continue fighting to rebalance our regional economies, making sure those in the North are not continuously left worse off and build a brighter future where everyone gets their fair share, no matter where they live.”

ENDS.