WORST 20 VIRUS OUTBREAKS IN ENGLAND

A digital billboard in Bradford city centre warns the public about keeping safe.

The government has drawn up a list of 20 councils facing the worst coronavirus outbreaks in England, with Bradford, Sheffield and Kirklees identified as areas needing “enhanced support”, according to a classified document leaked to the Observer and the Guardian.

As evidence mounts that the relaxation of lockdown rules is leading to a resurgence of Covid-19 in some of England’s most deprived and ethnically mixed areas, officials have ordered the army to deploy extra mobile testing units, which will be sent into a series of hotspots around the country from this weekend.

Public Health England (PHE), the country’s lead infection control agency, 

briefed local government health chiefs last week that ministers were considering publishing a ranking of the 10 councils most affected by new outbreaks, which could be released within days. Councils fear the data will be used to enforce more local lockdowns of the kind imposed in Leicester, where all but essential shops must stay shut, schoolchildren have been sent home, and pubs and restaurants remain closed.

The top 10 ranking is likely to be based on a document circulated to local health chiefs on Thursday, headed “official sensitive”. The chart, compiled by PHE and reproduced here, ranks the 20 councils with the highest proportion of positive cases. Leicester remains at its head, with 5.7% of individuals who underwent a test found to have the virus. Kirklees, in West Yorkshire, was not far behind, with a 5% rate. Bradford, and Blackburn with Darwen in Lancashire, were the next highest.

Titled “local authority areas of interest”, the table is based on testing between 21 June and 4 July. It identifies six areas of “concern”. More serious cases are labelled as needing “enhanced support”, with three councils in this category. One – Leicester – is listed as requiring “intervention”.

The document states “these areas are currently under investigation by the local public health protection teams”. “Testing access is being increased in areas including Bradford”, it says, and the areas listed are “associated with workplace outbreaks which have contributed to the increase in infection rates”.

Last month, 164 workers at a meat factory in Kirklees tested positive, and at the beginning of July, a bed factory in Batley, which is administered by Kirklees Council, was closed after eight workers were found to have the virus.The communities most affected have several factors in common: poverty, poor health and a high proportion of non-white residents.

The top 10 is likely to change daily, although some areas will remain severely affected for weeks, health directors believe.

 

 

“Those on the list are going to be characterised by higher deprivation, higher black, Asian and minority ethnic (BAME) communities and denser housing,” said a public health director briefed on the plans.

“Some are going to be in the list for the whole period of the pandemic. The drivers are structural and demographic, so the pattern of spread will reflect the inequalities that already existed. Some of the most strapped-for-cash councils are going to be dealing with some of the worst outbreaks.”

Areas with large south Asian populations, particularly where several generations may share a home and live in crowded conditions, are among those emerging as particularly at risk.

Hand sanitiser at Kober meat processing plant in Cleckheaton, confirmed as the location of a localised coronavirus outbreak.

Bradford has the highest proportion of people of Pakistani origin in England.

The council has today deployed testing units, staffed by the armed forces, to its Bowling and Keighley districts. Residents will be able to be tested without an appointment. Similar units will be deployed in Blackburn and Sheffield.

“Bradford has a higher infection rate than most but it’s coming down due to action we’ve taken,” said council leader Susan Hinchcliffe.  “We welcome the dialogue with government.  We’re already doing more testing than any other authority in the region, but want to do more.”

Bradford has asked for its own mobile testing units, more environmental health officers, support to pay full wages to low-paid workers having to self-isolate, and funding to develop its own local test-and-trace system.

Officials have not yet outlined what metrics will be used to impose further lockdowns, but it is understood a system based on the German model is under discussion.  This would involve a threshold of 50 weekly positive tests per 100,000 of the population in any given council.  Once that is breached, special measures could be triggered.

Data made public on Thursday shows Leicester is currently on 116 new cases per 100,000 of population per week, down from 140 two weeks ago.

Rochdale is in second place, with nearly 33 cases, down from over 50 three weeks ago.  Kirklees is also suffering high rates, as are Bradford, Blackburn with Darwen, Rotherham and Bedford.

The health secretary, Matt Hancock, announced the UK’s first local lockdown on 29 June as Leicester reported 944 new cases in a fortnight.  Non-essential shops and schools were shut, and pubs and restaurants were unable to reopen. 

Legislation to enforce the restrictions was pushed through parliament.

Desperate to avoid Leicester’s fate, councils are lobbying for a “graded response”, the local public health director said, with a rolling back of some elements of lockdown, such as larger gatherings, rather than closure of whole sectors. “What we want to avoid is the secretary of state making clumsy, unhelpful interventions, so we are getting ahead of the curve, understanding what our problem is and acting to address it.  But we are hampered by slow reporting of data and absence of data,” they added.

Councils have only just begun to receive a breakdown of new cases by postcode, and this is arriving weekly.  Health chiefs say they need the information daily if they are to spot outbreaks in time to stop them spreading.

The plans to publish a top 10 were discussed on a regional call with Public Health England, two public health directors confirmed.  “They seem to be intent on putting it into the public domain,” said one of those on the call.  “We have expressed some concerns over how they do it, as the data does need to be interpreted. Nonetheless, I welcome transparency.”

The classified list of 20 at-risk councils uses six metrics including number of cases per 100,000 of population per week and per day, percentage of individuals testing positive as a proportion of all tests, and “exceedances”.  This is where councils are issued with a red light because they consistently have more positive cases than forecast by a government algorithm. A slightly lower number of exceedances leads to an amber light.

The chart also shows the number of community outbreaks per council over the last week. Outbreaks are classed as two or more positive tests in a single setting, such as a workplace, school or prison.

The Department of Health and Social Care said it did not have a set trigger, but would use a range of data to decide where and how to act, stating:  “We have been transparent about our response to coronavirus and are always looking to improve the data we publish, including the way we update testing statistics.

“The list of the 10 local authorities with the highest weekly incidence of coronavirus is already publicly available in PHE’s weekly surveillance report.

“All councils in England now have the ability to access testing data, right down to an individual and postcode level.  If councils feel they require more assistance with data, of course, PHE is able to help them.”

Kirklees and Sheffield councils were approached for comment.

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Why 'Black Lives Matter' Will Fail!

by Les May

THE proximate factor in the murder of George Floyd is that the USA has militarised police forces; the notion of ‘policing by consent’ is absent. Trump does not want any international legal oversight of the actions of the the US military with regard to possible ‘war crimes’; should we be surprised that strong legal oversight of US police officers is resisted?

As of 30 June 2020 a total of 506 civilians were shot in the US, 105 of whom were black. In 2018, there were 996 fatal police shootings, and in 2019 this figure increased to 1,004.  For comparison the rate of shootings per million of the population was: black 31, hispanic, 23, white 13, other 4.  These figures speak for themselves.   By comparison the average number of fatal police shootings per year in England and Wales in the 15 year period 2004/5 to 2018/9 was less than 3 in a population of about 60,000,000, that is about 0.05 per million.

https://www.statista.com/statistics/585152/people-shot-to-death-by-us-police-by-race/

https://www.statista.com/statistics/319246/police-fatal-shootings-england-wales/

Faced with a fatality rate from police shooting which is 200 to 600 times higher than in the UK one might have thought that saving lives, black, brown and white, by demilitarising US police forces, would be central to any widespread response to the murder of George Floyd. Seemingly it isn’t.

Instead of attempting to attain measurable objectives like improving police training and making officers accountable every time they use a firearm, the emphasis is on ‘racism’, something for which there is no objective measure and having all the explanatory power of asking ‘how long is a piece of string?’ It’s a popular badge to display because it allows the wearer to get a warm glow of satisfaction from ‘calling out’ racists. If by chance the murder of George Floyd causes anyone to remember their humanity and dare to say they think all lives matter, you can call that racist too!

https://eu.usatoday.com/story/news/nation-now/2016/07/13/why-saying-all-lives-matter-opposite-black-lives-matter/87025190/

And if you have any time left over from combating racism you can always spend it ‘dismantling cisgender privilege and uplifting Black trans folk’ or ‘disrupting the Western-prescribed nuclear family structure’ or you could ‘dismantle patriarchal practice’ or even ‘foster a queer‐affirming network’. You will find the quotes by scrolling down the page at:

https://blacklivesmatter.com/what-we-believe/

But if all this is too much for you then why not buy the tee-shirt for a mere $25* and get back to denouncing someone on Twitter?

https://blacklivesmatter.com/

Things are not much better in the UK. Check out the website at https://www.blacklivesmatter.uk/ and you will find the disclaimer, ‘We are not affiliated with either Black Lives Matter USA or the political arm of the Black Lives Matter (Activist Coalition) UK who are purported to be affiliated with BLM USA.’

In the UK the response to the murder of George Floyd has been to facilitate the rise of groups of ‘activists’ who think that symbolic gestures like tearing down statues actually achieves something which will improve the lives of real people, and the energising of self promoting academics.

The media are for now superficially supportive, but this is all too reminiscent of the #MeToo movement. Dr David Starkey has unwittingly managed to contribute a couple of ways of keeping BLM in the news, but eventually the media will move on to another story.  Unfortunately it won’t be the one about inequality in the UK and the US. Getting a few black faces in the boardroom won’t solve that.

*$25 would pay for one sixth of an operation to correct cleft palate, or all of an operation to correct ingrowing eyelashes plus 40 doses of antibiotic to treat an eye infection of children and adults in Africa.

https://smiletrain.org.uk/sightsavers uksmile train

https://www.sightsavers.org/

AUTHOR'S FOOTNOTE:

In the article I mentioned a disclaimer which read ‘We are not affiliated with either Black Lives Matter USA or the political arm of the Black Lives Matter (Activist Coalition) UK who are purported to be affiliated with BLM USA.’

If you check out the website https://uk.gofundme.com/f/ukblm-fund which appears to be the group referred to in the disclaimer, you will find passages like ‘a commitment to dismantle imperialism, capitalism, white-supremacy, patriarchy and the state structures that disproportionately harm black people’ and ‘we lift up the experiences of the most marginalised in our communities, including but not limited to working class queer, trans, undocumented, disabled, Muslim, sex workers, women/non-binary, HIV+ people.’

You’ll also find the group have been given £1.2 million by 35,000 donors. At the risk of being tedious I will mention that this sum would change the lives of almost 7500 black children in Africa who were born with a cleft palate and face a lifetime of ridicule and social isolation, or pay for nearly 75,000 ingrowing eye lash operations or nearly seven and a half million doses of a drug to cure trachoma and prevent this many black people going blind.

Clearly all those donors have different priorities to mine.

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Let's Talk About The War

by Les May

SIR John Hawkins is considered the first English trader to profit from the demand for African slaves in the Spanish colonies of Santo Domingo and Venezuela in the late 16th century.  In other words he, along with Sir Francis Drake, was a slave traders as well as privateer.

From 1577 onwards Hawkins was Treasurer of the English Navy.  He rebuilt older ship and helped design newer, faster, sleeker, more manoeuvrable ‘race-built galleons’.  These were the ships that he and Drake commanded when with less than fifty ships they took on and defeated the 130 strong Spanish Armada in 1588.

The stories around this have sometimes been described as forming the ‘foundation myth’ of English identity; plucky little England standing up to more powerful bullies and giving them a ‘bloody nose’.  Nearly five hundred years later it was woven into another now British myth in Edward Shanks’ poem ‘The other little boats’ (see below)

On 13 July 1916 my uncle Tom died during the battle of the Somme, when ‘lions were led by donkeys’.  His name is on the war memorial in Littleborough near Rochdale. Somewhere in Germany there will be memorial with the name of a man who died the same day.  On the island of Tiree there is a tiny graveyard and in it are fifteen stones recording Merchant Seamen whose bodies washed up on its beaches in WW2.   Near Kiel is the Möltenort U-Boat Memorial it records the names of the 30,000 submariners who died in the same war.

In Europe we have learned to live with the knowledge that our past and those who peopled it, were imperfect.  We do not demand that the names of the U boat crew who fought for the Nazis be erased from memory.  We honour them as brave men, like we honour the imperfect men who ran up the beaches of Normandy in 1944.

It is that capacity, to not forget what happened, but also not to hold grudges about it, that gives me a sense of pride in being British.  Perhaps that is just something that my generation, who knew people on both sides who had lived through WW2 and are thankful it did not happen to them, can feel.  Particularly amongst students it seems that it is being replaced by an intolerant and puritanical insistence that only those whose views are deemed acceptable in the present should be remembered. Hawkins and Drake had better watch out.

If I take a somewhat jaundiced view of this it is nothing to how I feel about those privileged academics who, no doubt with an eye on furthering their careers, have decided that ‘the sins of the fathers shall be visited upon us even unto the third and fourth generation’.  Yes, Hawkins and Drake had better watch out.

The Other Little Boats

A pause came in the fighting and England held her breath
For the battle was not ended and the ending might be death
Then out they came, the little boats, from all the Channel shores
Free men were those who set the sails and laboured at the oars.
From Itchenor and Shoreham, from Deal and Winchelsea,
They put out into the Channel to keep their country free.
Not of Dunkirk this story, but of boatmen long ago,
When our Queen was Gloriana and King Philip was our foe,
And galleons rode the narrow seas, and Effingham and Drake
Were out of shot and powder, with all England still at stake.
They got the shot and powder, they charged the guns again,
The guns that guarded England from the galleons of Spain,
And the men that helped them do it, helped them still to hold the sea
Men from Itchenor and Shoreham, men from Deal and Winchelsea,
Looked out happily from heaven and cheered to see the work
Of their grandsons' grandsons' grandsons on the beaches of Dunkirk.

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

Not just about chlorine chicken

This isn’t just about chlorine chicken

 by Brian Bamford

GEORGE ORWELL wrote an essay 'In Defence of English Cooking' that:
'It will be seen that we have no cause to be ashamed of our cookery, so far as originality goes or so far as the ingredients go.  And yet it must be admitted that there is a serious snag from the foreign visitor's point of view.  This is that you practically don't find good English cooking outside a private house....  It is a fact that restaurants which are distinctively English are hard to find.' [1945]

Over half a century later in the Caterer & Hotelkeeper Millennium Supplement, on the 23 December 1999 claimed:
'Rationing was reintroduced in 1940, a year after the outbreak of the Second World War.  It continued until 1954, casting a shadow over any real culinary progression. Post-war London's leading restaurants were almost entirely run by Continental Europeans.'

And yet it goes on to argue:

'Outside the capital, though, the general state of food being served in most restaurants was abysmal, apart from rare exceptions such as Sharrow Bay in Ullswater (which opened in 1949) and the Bell at Aston Clinton.'


Raymond Postgate who went on to jointly write The Common People with G.D.H.Cole, helped to found The Good Food Guide.  Postgate a socialist, who helped to found the Communist Party of Great Britain, laid down some rules for fighting a war for English food wrote:



'Navigating a British restaurant during the middle of the twentieth century was in its way not so different from scoring a drink in Sweden before the outbreak of hostilities.  Postgate likened it to war.  The “Rules for Eating Out” published in the first Guide , from 1951-52, refer to restaurant staff as “the Enemy” and recommend battle tactics.'  And he advises:

“Take a long time reading the bill of fare, and see that your wife decides what she wants first. If the Enemy hears one of you say: ‘I’ll have whatever you do, dear’, he immediately decides he has no serious foe to encounter. What you want to impress on the establishment is that it has to deal with a pair of people who know exactly what they want, and are implacable.” ( GFG 19)

Adding in his recommendations:  'While diners and waiters were engaged in conflict, rules of war did apply, and the encounter should be civil even if it was not yet civilized. “You wish to give the impression not that you are angry with this particular restaurant, but that you are suspicious, after a lifetime of suffering.” ( GFG 19)'

His basic justification for the founding of The Guide is clear:
 'The Guide had become necessary because the suffering had lasted longer even than the lifetime of many GFG users: “For fifty years now complaints have been made against British cooking, and no improvement has resulted.” ( GFG 7)'


Serious entertaining was more likely to be done in private houses, where most professional chefs were employed, or in gentlemen's clubs - there were 200 at the turn of the century, compared with about 40 today.  Restaurants were frequented mostly by aristocrats and the gentry.  Women, of whatever class, were rarely seen in such establishments.

Derek Pattison & the 'Veblen good'

In response to the recent news that members of the US Congress have written to the US negotiator, calling on him to get rid of the UK’s ban on chlorinated chicken ‘once and for all’ DEREK PATTISON writes:
'I think it is true to say that people are economic maximizers and though we can make choices, our choices are always constrained for a variety of reasons.  This could be economic and also due to our social/class position in society .'

So speaks Pattsion, the economist, on behalf of the most miserable of sciences; forever labouring the price of everything and the value of nothing.  What would Raymond Postgate, founder of the Good Food Guide have to say about that?

When I did my degree in sociology at Manchester Poly. it was structured around economics, because at that time it was considered  that of all of the social sciences it was the closest to a 'natural science' like physics etc.  Do we want to eat cheap chlorine chicken suitably swilled with the chemical from the USA?  Yet when we considered this science of economics our attention was drawn to 'inverted demand curves'  and the effect of what came to be called a Veblen good as a type of luxury good for which demand increases as the price increases, in apparent contradiction of the law of demand, resulting in an upward-sloping demand curve. A higher price may make a product desirable as a status symbol in the practices of conspicuous consumption and conspicuous leisure.  A product may be a Veblen good because it is a positional good, something few others can own. *

This is a sociological consequence which determines a price according to a snob value.   Here the effect on demand depends on the range of other goods available, their prices, and whether they serve as substitutes for the goods in question.  The effects are anomalies within demand theory, because the theory normally assumes that preferences are independent of price or the number of units being sold. They are therefore collectively referred to as interaction effects.

We can imagine that after Brexit cheap chlorine chicken will quickly become the food of the poor.

Another writer John Wilkins writes:  'And so we have the climb down.  The ban will be dropped and low animal welfare, chlorinated chicken will be UP on our supermarket shelves.'


The concession in this case has been that low welfare products will pay a higher tariff (the tax charged on imports) than high welfare products.  But even if the US agrees to this, there is no guarantee that the tariffs rate won’t be cut later on.

Mr. Wilkins adds:  'This is fundamentally about the right of our government or any government to set standards and regulations on things that people care about, whether on animal welfare, climate standards, workers rights, public health, environmental standards or anything else.'



Worryingly, the government is trying to present this as a win for the environment minister, because even though the promise that a ban would be maintained has been broken, it turns out that what the trade minister, Liz Truss, actually wanted to do was not only overturn the ban but also reduce all tariffs on chicken to zero! 

The Decline of English Food 

When George Orwell was writing in the post-war years there was rationing, and as he says 'Pubs, as a rule, sell no food at all, other than potato crisps and tasteless sandwiches.'  Meanwhile, at that time, the 'expensive restaurants  and hotels almost all imitate French cookery ... while if you want a good cheap meal you gravitate naturally towards a Greek, Italian or Chinese restaurant.'

Raymond Postgate believed that the decline in English cuisine went back to the Industrial Revolution, when he claimed that the young migrant women from the rural areas who moved into the cities had lost contact with their grandmothers thus distancing them from their traditional recipes and ingredients. 

The concession is that low welfare products will pay a higher tariff (the tax charged on imports) than high welfare products.

But we know agribusiness has been lobbying hard on this, and 47 members of the US Congress have written to the US negotiator, calling on him to get rid of the UK’s ban on chlorinated chicken ‘once and for all’.  Former trade minister, Liam Fox, said last month that “the US would walk” if it had to comply with the UK’s animal welfare standards.[5]

And so now John Wilkins says 'we have the climb down and the ban will be dropped and low animal welfare, chlorinated chicken will be UP on our supermarket shelves.  The concession is that low welfare products will pay a higher tariff (the tax charged on imports) than high welfare products.  But even if the US agrees to this, there is no guarantee that the tariffs rate won’t be cut later on.

'Worryingly, the present government is trying to represent this as a win for the environment minister, because even though the promise that a ban would be maintained has been broken, it turns out that what the trade minister, Liz Truss, actually wanted to do was not only overturn the ban but also reduce all tariffs on chicken to zero!' 


It is hard to believe that the quality of English cuisine will improve as a result of these recent developments in UK-US trade relations and animal welfare.

************************* 

*   Veblen goods are named after American economist Thorstein Veblen, who first identified conspicuous consumption as a mode of status-seeking in The Theory of the Leisure Class (1899).^[1] A corollary of the Veblen effect is that lowering the price decreases the quantity demanded.^[2]

A Veblen good is a type of luxury good for which demand increases as the price increases, in apparent contradiction of the law of demand, resulting in an upward-sloping demand curve. A higher price may make a product desirable as a status symbol in the practices of conspicuous consumption and conspicuous leisure. A product may be a Veblen good because it is a positional good, something few others can own.

Veblen goods are named after American economist Thorstein Veblen, who first identified conspicuous consumption as a mode of status-seeking in The Theory of the Leisure Class (1899).^[1] A corollary of the Veblen effect is that lowering the price decreases the quantity demanded.

Veblen goods are named after American economist Thorstein Veblen, who first identified conspicuous consumption as a mode of status-seeking in The Theory of the Leisure Class (1899).^[1] A corollary of the Veblen effect is that lowering the price decreases the quantity demanded.^[2]

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.

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

*   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:'

Tackling the Trump Phenomena?

How the liberal left fails to get it!

by Brian Bamford

ON the morning of the US presidential election the New York Times ran a leading article by a team of its journalists entitled 'With Trump, a storm below the calm' in which it was claimed ''Donald J. Trump is not sleeping much these days'.  As the US voters were turning out this New York Times' leading story reported:

'In the final days of the presidential campaign, Mr Trump's candidacy is a jarring split screen:  the choreographed show of calm and confidence orchestrated by his staff, and the neediness and vulnerability of the once-boastful candidate now uncertain of victory.'

This crack team of reporters then tell us under a headline 'FALLING INTO DESPAIR' that:

'The closing phase of Mr. Trump's campaign has been punctuated by swaying poll numbers and dizzying mood swings.  It started on Oct. 7 with the release of a recording in which Mr.Trump was caught bragging about forcibly kissing women and grabbing their genitals.  Many Republicans decided that Mr. Trump's already shaky campaign was over.  Some despondent young staff members at the Republican National Committee on Capital Hill.... took to leaving their desks early, in time for happy hour at bars.  They complained that Mr. Trump had not just lost the election but was dragging down House and Senate candidates, dooming the entire party.'  

After Mr. Trump won, one political pundit sympathetic to M. Trump seeking to make sense of the Trump phenomena urged us to re-read George Orwell's essay 'Wells, Hitler and the World State'  in Horizon in August 1941 .  What Orwell wrote of H.G. Wells in 1941 was that 'He was, and still is, quite incapable of understanding that nationalism, religious bigotry and feudal loyalty are far more powerful forces than what he himself would describe as sanity.'

What we could call the Anglo-Saxon liberal left in the UK and the USA today, in the main, suffers from what Orwell had to say about H.G. Wells.  On this NV Blog we published a post-election report from the Avaaz team: a global campaign network that claims it 'works to ensure that the views and values of the world's people shape global decision making'. 

The Avaaz team says it is a '44-million-person global campaign network' and that 'Avaaz members live in every nation in the world; our team is spread across 18 countries on 6 continents and operates in 17 languages.' 

The Avaaz team in their analysis say:  'We wanted to write from the heart about what just happened in the US, and what's happening around the world', and of Mr. Trump they write '..... the most powerful nation in the world will be led by a breathtakingly ignorant, bigoted, violent, pathologically lying, sexually predatory, vengeful, authoritarian, corrupt reality TV star.'

The Avaaz team conclude in their study:

 'It's the Media Stupid -  Despite ALL the evidence to the contrary, the American public overwhelmingly sees Hillary Clinton as MORE dishonest and corrupt than Donald Trump.  This, by itself, is the reason why Trump is president.  And it's the media's fault.  ....  On the one side, we have ruthlessly sophisticated partisan propaganda media pushing Trump, and on the other an 2impartial” media that chases fake scandals and ratings and suggests false equivalence between the sides in the name of appearing balanced.  This is the dynamic that gave us Brexit as well.  We desperately need a smarter media...'

That is not something I can recognise from my own reading of the New York Times in the run-up to the US presidential election, consider the quotes above which were very typical of that newspaper's attitude to Donald Trump before the election.  It does seem to be true that there are similarities between the Trump victory and Brexit.  There seems to be a strong reaction against a kind of global mentality which has existed on both the left and the right.  The nationalistic spirit of our times as expressed by Trump and Brexit may not be a sane and sensible development, but it represents a powerful cultural force which the liberal left often underestimates.  The reason the left fails to grasp the importance of Trump and Brexit is that the left is too optimistic and too locked-up in the kind of mind-set that comes from the kind of Whig Theory of History that claims that things are always improving. 

The Avaaz team analysis falls back on :

'This (situation) is a HUGE opportunity, let's rise to it – change doesn't happen in a steady, linear way.  We human beings learn best from crisis and calamity.  Our brightest lights emerge from our deepest darknesses.  World War II gave us human rights and the United Nations.  And the darkness of Trumpism could help us build the most inspiring movement for human unity,....'

It is a quote that perhaps best illustrates the clear gulf that lies between the mind-set of the working-classes and the politically-minded classes in this country and seemingly the USA.  The Avaaz team idea is that 'the darkness of Trumpism could help us build the most inspiring movement for human unity and progress the world has EVER seen, to not only beat back Trumps in each of our countries, but to do so with a new, people-centered, high-integrity, inspiring politics that brings massive improvement to the status quo.' 

In a curious way the above analysis is a more optimistic version of how George Orwell in his essay on 'Catastrophic Gradualism', describe how some left-wing intellectuals explained away the crimes of the Stalin regime in the USSR thus:

'History necessarily proceeds by calamities, but each succeeding age will be as bad, or nearly as bad, as the last.  One must not protest against purges, deportations, secret police forces and so forth, because these are the price that one has to be paid for progress: but on the other hand “human nature” will always see to it that progress is slow or even imperceptible.'

(Common Wealth Review, November 1945)

Orwell in his correspondence with Dwight MacDonald in 1946, wrote 'If people think I am defending the status quo, that is..... because they have grown pessimistic and assume there is no alternative except dictatorship or laissez-faire capitalism.'  

Today, in the November issue of 'The Word - The People's Paper' - we can read the pessimistic thoughts of Tariq Ali and his verdict on the Trump victory: 

'A huge defeat for the liberal extreme centre establishment.  Read Friedman, Krugman in the NYT and Freedland in the Guardian for virtually identical grief:  it makes comic reading.... Many White workers who voted Obama did not vote for Clinton.  He failed them and she offered nothing new.  Nothing.  Unliked and untrusted, all she wanted was power.... The US Left has lacked a political party since Eugene Debs's time... '

Despite the best efforts of those on the left it is hard to see much to cheer about so long as the progressives fail to appreciate the nature of social change among working people in both the USA and the UK.

Spain's Superior Sins!

Is Danczuk in trafficing in toenails lowering tone of Political Sin?

THE historian, Felipe Fernández-Armesto (10^th, February 2016) in El Mondo below ponders how Simon Danczuk, 'Pobre Simon Danczuk', may be devaluing the corrupt  practices of politicians to the level of something like comic opera.  While at least Spanish politicians approach a swindle in an intelligent worthwhile way with an eye for the economic value of the transaction Danczuk's dalliances in 'delinquencies' seem 'tonterias' or 'stupidities' by comparison.  By being titillated by a prostitutes toenails Danczuk would seem, on the face of it, to put even Mack-the-Knife from  Bertolt Brecht's 'The Threepenny Opera' in the shade.
For original article in El Mondo go to  

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FELIPE FERNÁNDEZ-ARMESTO. 10/02/2016 03:02.

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Política y sexo, mala conjunction

by Felipe Fernández-Armesto

HOW MUCH, dear reader, for a bit of toenail?

The idea  would never have occurred to me to sell my toenails until I read the narratives of the journalists in the sex scandal that has raised big interest in the United Kingdom.  I refer to the case of the Labour MP, Simon Danczuk, who denounced his predecessor in the House of Commons,  the liberal Cyril Smith, known for his supreme fatness, yet also for his fame for his frankness that alarmed his colleagues.

Thanks to the intervention of Danczuk, Smith is now disgraced as a pedophile homosexual.  Now   Danczuk, since the failure of his marriage, has started a correspondence with a young girl of 17-years, proposing various sexual options that have been specified in reports published but that,including a good 'whipping'.  It is thought that he met a web fetishista where the girl sells – I cite the text of the Daily Mail:  'bits of her toenails' and samples of dirty underwear. 

I am very old and understand little of what's happening in the world of today.  Yet this history is very disconcerting, I suppose for everyone.

Two aspects , above all, are for me incomprehensible.  In the first place, the revelation that there exist such situations on the web leaves me perplexed.  How does one decide to announce an asset which will produce an offer?  How do you calculate its value?  Is the underwear that has been used to a state of great filthiness worth more than that that is only slightly soiled?  And the toenails, are they worth more more if they've been well used?  Is a big one of more value to a small one? Or is one of the small finger or of the attractive foot worth more for its daintiness than that of the fat foot?   Or maybe it is a question of colour.  One very brilliant, perhaps, will be more desirable sexually than another painted....

I don't want to have the cheek to imagine what the consumers do with the products obtained in the situation embraced by Señor Danczuk.  The underwear that serves let's suppose to wash-up the dishes, that results may work out more economic and more efficient, if I don't equivocate....  But, these toenails!  I confess that I am preoccupied.  Which perversion serves me? I don't suppose they are edible, like the rich feet of the pig that you cook in Galicia on the days of San Lázaro accompanied with chorizos or laurel sauce.  I don't go to connect to the web to realise investigations, nor go to register with a client and a pour over pornographic messages to fall over  Yes I have enough problems for me to inscribe on Skype with the object of making contact with persons whose names are evidently fictional, such as 'SexyKitten' and 'Spankykins'.  In case how then does a reader get things clear.  The requirement, in each case, should I maintain a decent silence and turn to the English poet, Alexander Pope, who said 'ignorance is bliss'.

Now I'm left perplexed with the persecution that we have in England with the disgraced sexually frustrated MP (Simon Danczuk).  In Europe, we are not wanted to bar our leaders as a consequence of sexual questions.  Making propositions to prostitutes is not, until now, the most grave offense.  Clearly Danczuk had thrown the first stone in denouncing Cyril Smith, and could be accused of hypocrisy.  But the 'pecado' that Smith did was presumed homosexual paedophilia:  quite distinct, from Danczuk's proposal of a session of 'ñaca-ñaca' to a lass that sells dirty underwear on the internet.  I know that the sexual practices we permit in one society, may be distinguished from that of others who would not accept those same practices.   These are always difficult to compare.  What one can say is that the important thing is that that the sex act is consensual.  For this reason, within the current legal doctrines, we would permit routine fornication, while always denying paedophilia and, within the sexual propositions, we'd admit good humour and condemn the repulsive...

In the case of sexual excess played out by politicians I can't find any coherent criteria.  In the United States, for example, Bill Clinton was able to keep the presidency despite having entertained Monica Lewinsky in the White House, while the Senator Gary Hart had to renounce his aspirations for the presidency for having an intrigue with a divorced woman.  In the 'case of Clinton', the consensus is not clear, because the young girl was working under the orders of the President, meanwhile in the 'case of Hart', the mature Señora was independent, and seemed to participate with enthusiasm with her lover. 

Eliot Spitzer, in another manifestation more recent example of the prudishness of the United States,  led to the resignation of a governor of New York for consorting with prostitutes.   The evidence that these relations were consensual and that they were paid special elevated prices – which, according to the citizens contributes most gravely in this case.  In France, we see, (Holland) abandon a series of women didn't damage a president of the republic, meanwhile in Italy , in the 'case of Berlusconi', the promiscuity without discernment only served at once to realise the machismo of the former Prime Minister.  Then we have poor Danczuk, who did no more than exchange text messages with a sales-woman of toenails.  He never met her or went to bed with her.  We don't even know if he had the consolation of acquiring toenails or garments of used underwear.  Yes,  we can accuse him of  bad taste; yes he may be stupid or pathetic; but he is not a monster like his predecessor in the House of Commons. 

There is no value to extend the sexual discussion, that would be basically irrational.  Nor does it deserve the trouble of studying the attitude of the public regard for the sexual stupidity of politicians because we can see this has an echo of the same irrationality.  Cases like that of Danczuk are part of the real world, even though some may think it alien, and throughly intelligible to a person of my generation.   Yes one can comment about the fraud of the electronic posts or drink powdered coca, or spend ones time following celebrities on Facebook, Twitter or YouTube.  Until now one can vote on Celebrity Big Brother.  Also one is able to show interest for the pieces of toenail  of a prostitute.  For me, they are all are equally stupid!

But at least a clear conclusion that we can get out of this mess in over the interest in Danczuk:

In Spain in political life we are lucky to experience cases with much more frequency in financial corruption than sexual scandals, the body of interest of the Spanish public is in the sex lives of singers, actoresses, sportmen and the members of Royal families.  I agree that a councillor in the town of Toledo  ---- who had to resign for performing in a pornographic homemade video; but this was more for the difficulty of maintaining the dignity of his position than for the supposed erotic vice.  In Italy, we have the examples in the general elections, like the notorious Ciccionina, without any consequence.

In Spain, for a change, we are immersed in a list of hundreds of politicians implicated in frauds or bribery...  Therefore, the proper question to ask in the New Year with the cases of 'ERE' in Andalucia, 'Gürtel (with his 'Bárcenas' case' ), 'Nóos', 'Pujol', 'Púnica', 'Rato' and 'Torredembarra', 'the Popular Party of Valencia' ... without mentioning other examples of rumours or accusations that have been brought the courts, like that of Gómez of the Serna and I don't know how many more.

I believe we should be happy about our major affliction of our sexual corruption. But what are we make of the fiscal fraud, the bribery or the embezzlement of funds compared with the delinquency of Danczuk!   Which is a more logical, clever, coherent and practical of all those (economic) sins our own politicians commit  or those of the less fortunate people (like Danczuk)?  We don't have a major elite in the moral respect, but compared to the rest (Danczuk etc) our sins are more intelligent.