Reassessing our perspective

Subject: Reassessing our perspective 

The global pandemic we are currently experiencing has brought us all low in many ways. The fear of becoming measured as a statistic, dying a particularly disturbing  death, the lungs filling with mucus which are own immune system has manufactured in response to the virus is not pleasant. It's also emotionally challenging to recognise that whilst this is a war of survival, unlike a conventional war where the enemy is identifiable as the enemy here the enemy could be a neighbour, a friend or a member of your own family.
It's this sinister all pervasive aspect which frightens us most. We see on our televisions the destruction and loss of life in Syria and Yemen but it's a conflict between men and these conflicts have gone on since time began. Of course our war with infection has always been with us. The lives lost in tropical countries due to unsanitary water or bugs inflict a terrible price on anyone living a poverty stricken life but it all usually flies under our radar, other than when we see the terrible pictures issued by the charity industry in search of donations.
The Spanish flue pandemic in 1918 infected 500 million people and killed 50 million.
In World War One there were 40 million casualties of whom 20 million died but this pales in comparison to the 70 million who were killed in the Second World War.
Death on this scale often loses much of its significance through time and the fact that in war the combatants are recognisable as other men usually seen as a collective from another country. Virus's loses that collective identity and become indiscriminate. Cholera, Bubonic plague, Smallpox are some of the most brutal killers seen on earth with Smallpox fore instance  racking up an astonishing death toll of 300 to 500 million people over the decades it's been around. On this scale our virus is relatively benign and given the strides in modern medicine we are confident we can disengage it by use of a vaccine. In the days of the bubonic plague no one knew what was causing the deaths and still less how to overcome it, now a days we have the confidence that mankind will find solutions and we generally leave it to the experts to do just that.
The damage to the economy is also repairable but in the course of repair many businesses will die and not recover. Our collective memory will mark this time,  I hope not only as a time when we lost the opportunity to do the things we expect to be able to do but also we will gain the realisation that much of what we do is inconsequential and hedonistic. Perhaps being able to reassess our perspective is a small price to pay

The Sword of Damocles

Subject: The,Sword of Damocles 

As Spring slowly begins to reveal itself with crocuses and tulips opening their faces to the passing sun only to be cruelly cheated by the cold wind. It's still too soon for the wild flowers which burst into life in the woods and the hedgerows, the primrose and the snowdrop, the daffodil so loved by the poets are still hiding, awaiting their turn to enrich our visual world after the harsh reality of winter. 

The walks this year are banned to the hiker, other than those of them who are willing to brave the raucous shout from an unfriendly drone. The caravan parks, the speedboats and dinghy sailors are all home confiscated by the virus to their back garden, if lucky enough to have one.
I hear the young children forced out of school, shouting and screaming in their pent up exuberance to run off some of that energy but of the teenager we see nothing, locked away in their bedrooms entertaining themselves in the surreal world of the chat room.
What of their pent up energy, suffusing their libido with uncontested dreams and unfulfilled desire. A few, with two fingers in the air roam the streets with a bottle in the inside pocket and a pouch of spliffs in the other. Not for them the responsibility of self distancing, rather the virus is just another concoction made up by adults and mustn't get in the way of 'having a laugh'. Unconscious of the the ramifications of infecting their families, especial gran who lives with them, they narcissistically assume it won't trouble their age group and so why bother.
The streets and the open spaces are empty. The shops are empty along with the car parks, the pavements quiet and unused, a ghost town without ghosts. It reminds me of the 1950s film "On the Beach" where a submarine sets off from Australia to see if anyone is alive after an atomic war in the Northern Hemisphere. The streets of New York are empty, its citizens dead, a sailor from the city breakers away from the submarine to be last seen walking up the empty radioactive street on his final mission to get home.
The old and young alike are facing, for the young at least what it's like not to be able to enact their political right of freedom.
The air is full of evil potent and only the unbeliever has the confidence to go about their business as if nothing has happened. To them the dying are simply a reminder that we all have to die and instead they quote the number who die from road accidents as a reminder that death is inevitable. On the other side there is paranoia with regimes of hand washing and the constant cleaning of surfaces. Even the envelope which plops through the letter box is treated as if it's radioactive. Parcels are left on the doorstep and sprayed to decontaminate. Siren voices proclaim the rules and heaven help you if you are old and constantly reminded that the Sword of Damocles hovers above your head, 24/7.

Saying thank you

Subject: Saying thank you.

Last night at 8 o'clock I went out into the street to join the people in Grace Gardens to clap and show my thanks to the NHS workers, the doctors and nurses who are risking their lives each day in this battle against the unseen, insidious enemy the Corona virus. From the self imposed security of our houses we offer our thanks to these modern day heroes who present themselves for duty at the hospital each day, risking their own lives initially the threat of contamination on their journey in on public transport and then, face to face to face with critically ill patients, they do what they can with limited resources.

It's a strange surreal moment to go out onto the street and begin to clap. Slowly others emerge and begin clapping, we look at each other sheepishly aware of the strange circumstances attached to the act of clapping when the object of your clapping isn't there to hear you. The Brits are naturally reticent people with their tribal reluctance to show outward emotion, where the term "stiff upper lip" was invented to described the act of keeping emotion in check at all times. People, my neighbours up and down the street have turned out twice now on Thursday 8 pm on the dot, doors opening men women and children emerging like moles from the sanctity of their warm nest.  Still well isolated the family groups self consciously wave perhaps to the family across the road but no street party, no mixing to say hi afterwards each family when the clapping ceases they turn and retreat through their front door, this social act of thanksgiving is over and the moment of togetherness  to say thanks, is at an end.
Perhaps it lacks the romance of the Italian balcony scene we saw on the television a few weeks ago with musicians and opera singers giving a magical display of camaraderie, acknowledging the gift of the medical workers with their own talent. The evening here from a temperature point of view is more chilly the people more phlegmatic, more in keeping with the temperament of the people who live on this island but the message  is no less real. Thank you for continuing to come to our aid not withstanding the swingeing cuts imposed over the last ten years by Downing Street, nor the scandalous delay in procuring the protective gear to make these workers safer.
The people living in Grace Garden can't do much to remedy the incompetence of government, (other than vote them out at the next election) but we can and do say thank you to the much pilloried NHS and count our lucky stars we don't live in the USA.

When are we going to get mad,

Subject: When are we going to get mad.

One of the characteristics, at least of the middle class in the UK is the polite and almost deferential way we deal with authority. Even the press who's numbers are mostly made up of university educated middle class people have an aversion to getting upset with  and aggressively challenging the Establishment. It's bad manners inculcated from early child hood and seen as rude to argue with those in power. Every day at the Prime Ministers press briefing the questions get politely asked and each day the questions on testing get batted away into the long grass. No one loses their temper, no one challenges these ministers, equipped with their pre prepared answers, whitest we continually hear of the frustration on the front line from the health workers.

A women who works in the NHS related her story on the radio of her trip to one of the centres set up to test NHS staff for the Covid 19 virus. She had her ID and NHS card and her hospital employment number but on arrival was told she couldn't be tested because she hadn't received an instruction to be tested. Irrespective of working in a hospital environment work which is crucial since without the effort from all employers within the hospital the system breaks down and all patients, virus or no virus patients will all suffer. So if someone who works in a hospital and turns up for a test, for god's sake give then one.
It's the hide bound, centralised bureaucracy which gets in the way of making the system smart and reactive to a fast moving target. The woman returned home after the debacle  and immediately set out to try to get this approval documentation but who ever she rang no one knew either about the need for an instructive letter or how to get one. Only in our mad, mad, over complicated, over centralised decision making world can nurses and hospital staff be made to jump through hoops to do the proper thing and try to get a test.
Germany is testing 500,000 per week whilst we are struggling to test 8,000 ! 
It's ridiculous, astounding, criminal, that the testing response is so far apart, especially considering the procedure is vital to understanding who is contagious and who is not.
Not more than three weeks ago Boris Johnson told us not to worry, it was more like flue to which we had to let it spread and gain a natural immunity.  How out of touch he was, how incompetent how dismissive given that governments, across the globe were singing a very different tune.
How can the government be so incompetent, so scurrilously out of touch with the needs on the ground. It's a place which so many in the establishment know little about in this 'two tier society' where people are separated at birth into two separates spheres two different routes through a life where the only commonality is the air we breath.

Are the old more dispensable than the young

Subject: Are the old more dispensable than the young.

The global pandemic has caused us to consider many ethical and moral questions, not least does the saving of an old persons life have more value than the saving of a younger person. Should a doctor ration the occupancy of ventilators for the young with the argument that the older persons life is nearly finished and the young can be more productively kept alive.
There has always been a point when the doctor makes a decision not to continue treatment of a patient to alleviate any further suffering if no cure is in sight but this is very different since being allowed to continue to live by being helped to breath through the ventilator does assume that there is light at the end of the tunnel.

Much of modern day medicine is focused on keeping people alive by artificial means whilst waiting for the body to find its own remedy to illness or for new treatments and drugs to come along and effect a cure. It's often questionable, the extent medical intervention seems to go beyond the call of duty and people are kept alive because they can rather than in the best interests of the patient. Is it never in the best interests of the patient to let them die and how often we are incredulous at the pontifications of government not to allow, under carefully controlled circumstances, people to choose for themselves to end their own life if their lives have become intolerable.
How much more problematic that one can oversee the rationing of ventilators and yet harass the loving relatives if some one seeks an end to their life at a clinic in Switzerland and they have been a party to the event.
Do years 'still to live' equate equally with those lived. Is there an equation between the value of a citizen who has lived a blameless life and is old and a younger person who may have and may still commit all kinds of crime and be an ongoing problem to the society which saved him in preference to the pensioner.
'First come first served' against a valuatory  accountancy which perhaps takes all kinds of estimates into the mix. Not only age but their social history including time spent in jail, perhaps the school they attended, any disabilities they might have, any religious affiliation  even their gender might effect their score.
It's an Orwellian world where the Hippocratic Oath is turned on its head and lives, when at their most vulnerable are in the hands of the expert who owes his living to a committee who's ultimate duty is towards the shareholder.

Day 4

Subject: Day 4

As each morning we are thrust into the front line of last nights Covid 19 battle for the lives of the unfortunate people who had been too close to someone carrying the virus or had picked it up by touching the surface of something on which the virus lay in wait like a bear trap in the undergrowth. Lives brought short by the unseen killer which lies in wait for all of us as the pandemic rolls out across the nation. Shops and offices become no go areas except for the unwary, of whom there are still surprisingly many prepared to chance their arm in a flagrant disavowal of every bit of advice coming from that segment of society who in the past we would have sought our cue. In today's wall to wall information blanket we are bombarded with advice on what to do and yet such is the distrust of large parts of society for their betters, the sight of a politician flanked by experts makes us run for cover.  I know people who resolutely refuse to believe that the pandemic is for real even as the death toll rises. These are intelligent people who feel it's an event being overplayed, not quite fake news but part of the establishments incessant need to keep us on edge and malleable.
Of course the executive have done themselves no favours by previously describing this virus as being tame, something which if allowed would run through the populous and build some sort of herd immunity but ever mindful of their political future, overnight they did a U turn and ordered a close down of all none essential industry and the self quarantine of virtually all citizens. It's like listening to a friend who has lost a packet on a horse he had asserted was a sure bet but now the story is, the ground was too heavy, the jockey positioned the horse badly, or the trainer had thrown the race to get better odds at the next meeting. All could be true and only goes to show that advice is only as good as hindsight. Our hindsight at the moment is that we were let down by the posturing of the political elite and especially let down, the medical staff who have to go in to fight the contagion with one arm tied behind their back. Even as I write the ordering of essential equipment has still not been given and firms are still awaiting the confirmation of orders we also missed the opportunity to purchase equipment such as ventilators and protective gear by dither. Now the prices have trebled and the stocks depleted. If this were commerce we would be heading for bankruptcy.
So whilst the young chafe at their inability to go to the pub or have a collected rave in a barn in the countryside they still roam the streets angry at the imposition of some sort of constrain to their lives. Constraint is a forgotten adjective, to be forced into doing something goes against their concept of their rights, their whole raison d'etre, the sanctity  of the individual and his or her right to do what ever comes to mind is now challenged by an authoritarian diktat, stay at home. The image of young men flocking to the registration stations on Kitcheners call "Your Country Needs You" is far gone, as is the social glue which bound a young person to their family and it's values. We are all individuals and must leave the familiar to seek our fortune this is what is important today and the inconvenience of a virus epidemic can't take precedence over an innate narcissism which rules current thinking today.
  

Is there penance in the virus

Subject: Is there penance in the virus 

As the worlds financial system goes into free fall will there be winners and losers or will it be only the poor who really lose out.
Generally speaking the poor are always financially fragile with earnings barely able to make it to the end of the week whilst conversely the rich have deep pockets. Of course the poor are more used to having little and making do whilst the shock of loosing much of their wealth will psychologically be a difficult for the wealthy and for some, an unbearable strain knowing the "gravy train" is coming to an end. The definition of a gravy train is when money is made with little effort and this pretty much describes events from 1980 when in the Anglo/Saxon world at least, Reagan/Thatcher economics and the unfettered capitalism of Milton Friedman's neo liberal free wheeling concept of market forces, demolished much of the fabric of the rules based Keynesian system. Reagen in America and Thatcher in the UK unleashed the idea that markets could solve all economic variances and therefore, magically the market became the arbiter in the financial equation of our lives.
The enforced shutdown of the economies who wouldn't listen or take heed as in the Chinese case, imposing their own stringent rules which in the short turn imposed hardship but in the long run allowed earlier reopening of business with the important advantages that that will bring on the world stage from here onward.
Conspiracy theory's as to the advantage of a dictatorial communistic, quasi capitalistic economic system was able to apparently overcome the effect of the virus being able to shut down and isolate the people virtually overnight whilst democratic nations have to first gain a consensus and only then close down, leads one, if only fleetingly to wonder if this was not some sort of plan given China was losing out on the trade war with the US, to infect and bring western capitalism to its knees.
But that's another story. This one is to question the obscene rise of inequality and wonder if, after we pass through this seismic interruption of 'business as usual', that wiser heads in the mould of Maynard Keynes, might refashion our ideals on a more  utopian outcome.
Whilst earnings on capital far exceed those of work the imbalance will continue. Only taxation can redress the balance and the sooner these tax havens and the rigging of a companies earning by selective domicility are outlawed can we begin to reclassify our concept of earnings.
The monstrous leap in wealth of certain individuals, completely out of proportion to anything which could be construed as to the common good. When executive pay has moved from 20 times the mean of a companies pay scale to currently 300 times the mean. When cities become unaffordable to the ordinary citizen who, until 40 years ago worked and lived in suburbs much as they had for 200 years before slowly but surely these city suburbs have become unaffordable to all but the wealthy.
This disproportionate accumulation of wealth has been largely the result of deregulation and to reassume any sort of balance capital markets the speculators who trade them have to be reigned in. The speculative rent market and the hoovering up of property by a few has to be stopped. Leissez faire capitalism which has not only excluded the majority of people from earning a decent living from the proceeds of one job but has distorted family life to the extent that many of the children from these undernourished families have gone feral, a generation lost.
Perhaps if society is forced to reexamine its role and politicians are forced into enacting the checks and balances which used to be in place then the effect of the virus will have been worth it.

When the final tally of the dead is made

Subject: When the final tally of the dead is made.

As the virus tsunami  hits and envelops us more and more each day, as the death toll rises exponentially the people trying to deal with it on the front line the doctors and nurses in our hospitals received last night a round of applause from the citizens right across Britain in a spontaneous thank you which must have been both rewarding and emotional for them.
And yet, despite many calls from these brave people they still have to make do with inadequate protection as they fight the virus on the wards. The call to order and receive the appropriate kit, even the simplest face masks seems to have fallen on politically deaf ears. The politicians seem to be unable to acknowledge the the dilemma the doctors and nurses are when they are asked to treat patients with the virus and continue to obfuscate and deny the facts laid in front of them from scenes in hospitals in Italy and Spain.

Instead they nominate a smooth talking public school boy, Robert Jenrick, Secretary of State for Housing to do the rounds on the media. As he bats away all the sensible questions we are asking with the resolution of Geoff Boycott at his best, we see the well oiled salesman who would never let truth get in the way of a prepared statement, never to be swayed by possibility that he is wrong, always to follow the party line, come what may.
Not a moments hesitation, not a grimace of doubtful recognition that the answer he had just given totally ignored the question he had been asked as he ploughed on with his lines like a well rehearsed actor. It's like watching an automaton, part man, part robot, programmed to do a job of work no matter how distasteful.
Who is this man Robert Jenrick  wheeled before us, the font of all knowledge, the man who knows the answers or at least has read the Parliamentary book on sticking to a story when the facts unfurling around him are plainly contradictory.
It's politics in its worse form, a corruption of what we assumed when we turned out to vote. Lies and deceit are the characteristics of the crook, the embezzler but more and more, especially under the reign of Boris Johnson as he tries a poor imitation of evoking the 'churchillian spirt', pounding the lectern with his fist, flanked by his fall guys the medical and scientific experts, he denies and then contradicts, he hides behind platitude and avoids the facts at all costs.
It's denial on a grand scale and it's message to us all is that the protagonists of firstly doing little and then reversing all previous advice and insisting, too late in the day on closing down the nations population by insisting they stay at home, that the advocates, that we delay our response and accept natural immunisation assumed to be effective when people catch the virus in what was called 'the herd' effect, have themselves succumbed to the virus.
Boris Johnson, Mat Hancock, and now Dr Whitty the chief Medical Officer have all withdrawn from daily contact with the virus. It's only a couple of weeks ago that with a collective voice they tried to minimise the problem even whilst Rome was burning around them. A lack of direction and a lack of action to obtain the supplies of a virus test kit, protective garments for doctors and nurses, ramping up the procurement of ventilators or ordering a clamp down on the movement of people, all this happened on their watch and in many ways they all will have blood on their hands when the final tally of the dead is made.

A parallel universe

Subject: A parallel universe 

Who writes the script for the journalists,  journalists  who seem to be suppressing their journalistic right  of asking challenging questions. It's as if they have given up trying to be rational with a man who seems to claim that the earth is flat.  Boris Johnson has just appeared before the television cameras to say that his plea for the public to practice social distancing hasn't worked and that he is now providing guide lines as to who and which sections of the public can leave their homes, other than for shopping and must conduct their work from home.

Only key workers such as NHS workers, transport workers, carers  of vulnerable old people, refuse collectors, postmen, delivery drivers and the supermarket shelf packer, generally people who can't work from home. This exclusion leaves a huge swath of people exempt and exposed to not only catching the virus but bringing it home to infect the very people he  insisted should self isolate.
The graph of the rise of the infection in Italy is being replicated here with the same step by step exponential rise which in Italy and now Spain has overwhelmed each country and brought their respective health service's to their knees.
The catastrophe unfurling before our eyes could have been avoided if we had taken note of what was happening in Europe, if the Government had decreed a ban from going out, if we had tested the population for the virus so that we knew who was a carrier and could isolate them before they could infect others. The South Koreans led the way with thousands of their people tested virtually from day one and it worked with the infection rate now in the hundreds not the many thousands as it was at the hight of their epidemic.
We could have chosen to learn from them but we chose not to. We chose  to to ignore the facts on the ground preferring our own facts enunciated each night by the two wise men flanking Boris. According to their modelling the infection rate was best absorbed within the population (the herd effect) and that at worst the majority would only experience a mild infection. The sight of the death toll in Italy and Spain and the incredulous  voices from across Europe and the world at large as to our attitude eventually made Johnson back peddle. Even now he has refused to make the decisions which we see made in Italy, Spain, France and Germany where cities have been placed on lock down.  In London, Manchester, Leeds and Liverpool its business as usual for many. The Tube and the buses run as normal, the building sites carry on as usual and that segment of society who can't do their work on a computer from home are left in limbo having to come to work as usual, fearful that if they don't they will lose their job. Heathrow still has flights in and out,  the perfect incubator trailing the virus right into the heart of our major city.
We clearly operate in a parallel universe, the universe according to Boris and the one which is disintegrating not 50 miles away on the continent of Europe.

Something will have to give

Subject: Something will have to give.

As bad as the corona virus is for our health how draconian is it for our financial stability. On the one hand a large swath of the populous are losing their incomes without sight of their work reappearing in the near future. The small business's or self employed individual has been cut off at the knees with his outgoings, the mortgage, the credit card servicing, the food on the table all still having to be met but no income to do it.
The flower seller, the barber, the sandwich bar, the garage, are all involved in the lockdown which includes their clients. The trades people who service the increasingly complex infrastructure on which we all depend are soon to be left floundering without even the fragile resource of people who are employed on contracts which protect them, in part, from the day to day vagaries of the self employed. Much of business and the financial health of the country requires that the wheels of commerce keep turning, its a juggle as money flows in and out to meet fixed the overheads but what will happen when it all seizes up and multiple bankruptcy papers are served. Will these business's return to the high street or their places in the back ally, will the trauma be too much or will the entrepreneurial spirit survive.
Is the spectre of Mad Max raging outside the city gates a nightmare too far or is it what men and women do when the structures are destroyed. How close to unraveling does the social contract have to go before gangs roam the streets and fathers take matters into their own hands to feed their families.
There was always a fine line between what the people could be expected to accept and what neoliberal capitalism exploited from the system. Zero hours contracts and welfare top ups which allow the minimum payed employed individual to survive whilst assisting the employer who was unwilling to see his or her profit reduced to pay a living wage whilst we the consumer, always fixated on low prices to sustain that love fest we all have for that thing called consumerism. If we were prepared to pay the right price even if  it limited our consumption, at least the old fashioned relationship between what you could afford and what you couldn't would be re-established. We have become hoodwinked into believing we are wealthier than we are. The credit card has distorted our sense of value, we buy when we can't afford it, we are oblivious of our shaky finances and it's at times like this when the financial pledges made by governments across the world will have to be paid back that the final reckoning comes and it's usually the poor who lose most. A sticking plaster is being applied but the underlying fault line of too much unsecured credit will haunt us when the creditors ask for their loans back.
Who will come out on top it's hard to say but the Chinese response to the virus makes them the front runner in dictating the terms of any recovery. We in the west will have to come to terms with the trillions of un-backed dollars which are being printed as we speak in an attempt to keep the US ship afloat but following the banking bailout in 2008 which already severely weakened the fiscal arrangement, something will have to give.

Virus inaction

Subject: Virus inaction 

Much has been made of Boris Johnson's decision to join the rest of the world and seek a safe harbour in accepting at last what is happening around him. At last he has climbed down from his assumption that by allowing the virus to spread, 'herd immunity' would limit the death toll to 250,000 - 350,000 - 500,000 which his experts were suggesting was an acceptable price to pay. Now he has succumbed to the call to stop assuming that a call for the general public to use its common sense would be enough and that the people would make the decision not to gather in pubs clubs cinema theatres or any places where entertainment is on offer, on their own. Close proximity mixing was seen to be crucial in the fight against the virus, it was a move that might clinch the battle and even though he had been brought struggling to the alter as a reluctant bride, at last he had uttered the words "I do".
In the same breath he said that he would never close the tube or public transport and that a general curfew was not being contemplated, and generally he avoided the thorny problem that whilst thousands of white collar workers can work from home, 70% of the workforce can't work from home and they are out each day using public transport which must be just as toxic as the pub.
There is simple no joined up thinking from Number 10 or from the management of the thousands of small and medium sized business's which are asked to carry on as normal. Contracts are enforced even though the contracts were envisaged before the virus came to light which creates the need for a reasonable reassessment as to whether there is still the need, or the urgency for the work to be completed on time. It's as if, in a surreal world the things we envisaged would still remain in tact, that the  time lines are still in place and have to be conformed to, that workers must submit to the economic consequences of being hired and fired if they voice their fears as if nothing has changed.
That grey underbelly of workers, the shelf packers, the cleaners, the production plant workers, the cameramen and the sound technician, the woman working on the till, the bus driver, the men and women working for the police and most importantly the workers in our care homes and those who daily go to work for the NHS are all at risk as we try to keep the show on the road. They are the forgotten piece in the Boris's jigsaw, they must chance their luck whilst the managers isolate themselves at home behind their computer screen.
It's a fact of life that firemen risk their lives in a way that we would be squeamish about, that police officers engage with that dark side of our city streets, threatened each shift with life threatening issues. We rarely put ourselves in their shoes on the assumption  that, as with our armed force personnel they signed up for it knowing full well the dangers. But now we are asking a 'minimum wage worker' possibly the mother of children  to shoulder the brunt of this exposure to the virus war that's unfurling.
The only responsible reaction of government is to give the new troops the equipment to fight the battle for us. In the NHS the protective garments seem shoddy, almost Heath Robinson compared to what is in use in Italy and Spain let alone China and South Korea.
Even masks are in short supply and it's scandalous to assume that we can't come up to the plate and meet their needs properly.
The other equally serious mismanagement issue is the lack of testing for the virus. In Korea they are testing people at the rate of 50,000 a day which gives them a real time picture of who has the virus and who doesn't. This Is crucial in combatting and isolating cases before they have time to transmit the virus but in this country we limit the testing to those who already show signs of having the virus. Again we are behind the game line hopelessly inadequate to forestall its spread, we dither, possibly at the cost of providing the test, always with an eye on the balance sheet, never on the true cost lying behind our inaction.

Leadership

Subject: Leadership 

And still there is no sign of any white smoke coming from above Number 10 Downing Street, still no indication of leadership, still no sense that as the world around shuts down in an attempt to protect its citizens, we in England are prepared to open our eyes and acknowledge that only with the severe restriction on the movement of people will we get close to snuffing out the virus.
Stating the obvious we only had to look to China to see how they dealt with what was then an epidemic, the state decreeing a total shut down. South Korea the same brought the illness under control and minimised the death toll by strict self discipline, the people themselves imposing a total curfew. In Europe we experienced the opposite as countries applied their own modification of isolation, a sort of half and half attempt distinguished by a lack of firm government with the result that Italy and Spain are both on their knees with their health service's struggling to cope and the doctors having to make the impossible decision of who gets the spare ventilator and who will die without it.
And whilst all this is going on we in the UK inch forward, making half baked decisions, doing U turns, ignoring the pleas for a more rigorous approach to limit the contact people make with each other.

It was as if Boris Johnson and his advisors only saw the problem in terms of statistics, that people are dispensable and that 50,000 deaths is a price worth paying. It reminds one of the generals in the First World War who's only method of fighting the enemy was to commit more and more men to their deaths in a bloody attrition in the trenches.
Johnson flanked by his trusty advisors the Scientific chap and the Medical man plainly caught in the headlights of a disaster but unable to turn the wheel. Daily they face the same batch of questions from the press, daily they play a straight bat, submitting each question to a well practiced answer, that we in Britain know better than the rest of the world. It's a sort of 'jingoistic empire drum beating refrain' which has led us to fall further down the economic ladder as we 'dither and dather', apparently unable to make the important decisions.
Johnson clearly out of his depth mouthing platitudes about how we will defeat this by our common will as if 'wishing it away' we're an answer. With his eyes on the economic consequences rather than the humanitarian he is lothe to pull the trigger and order a shut down relying, as poor management does on the individual making the decision for him. The bars and pubs remain open whilst he relays an the individual's abstinence to stay away. And it's only through the strong stance by the executive of the various sporting bodies that sporting fixture have been called off. He has belatedly closed schools but the mums and dads are still left with the dilemma whether to go into work or not. The white collar workers have been told to work from home but no word of the fate of the millions of blue collar workers who each day are expected to turn out and continue to work as normal.
The ignorance on the street is appalling as young people flippantly break any sensible self imposed curfew to rather party whilst Rome burns. The indecision leaves many people forced to still make the virus ladened route to work since to stay at home would risk their continued employment and face the sack. The guys who offer their trade skills on the building sites are still expected to turn up for work as if the virus were a fabrication a fiction of the media another fake news story, knowing that any future work depends on their attendance today.
How many will contact the virus and die is in the hands of the statistician, the questions have become mathematical and the human content pushed to one side.
Johnson in his blind avoidance of the scenes all around him has blood on his hands. His apparent indifference to the appalling dilemma being played out across Europe marks him as a person not fit to lead a nation. His CV is litters with gaffs but this is far more serious than his dalliance with women or his ineptitude whilst heading the Foreign Office
The people mesmerised by his laconic blather elected him as their Prime Minister expecting a new style of government, well they have one, it consisted of sitting on ones hands (washed of course) whilst all around him crashes and burns.

The States responsibility

Subject: The States responsibility.

It's hard to know what is producing the worst effect, the spread of the virus with the infected totals inching upwards or the news of the panic on the financial markets at the consequences of industry and commerce shutting down and the effect that will have on our financial stability.
The virus we know kills people at an exponential rate but only it seems amongst certain segments of society. Perhaps, as in wartime, decisions are taken which accept the loss of life such as in Hiroshima and Nagasaki or Dresden in the latter stages of the Second World War. The aim was to bring the contagion of war to a close by shocking the adversary and bringing them to the negotiating table, the death toll was assumed a price worth paying to limit more deaths.
In the UKs unique decision to seek 'herd immunity' in other words to let the virus spread until a majority of people have it when, it is assumed our bodies will gain an immunity through natural self immunity. It's a case of numbers. We no longer try to protect everybody, as is usually the moral case and willingly confirm through our actions that the death of the old and in-firmed is a price the Government is willing to pay, a  decision unprecedented  in peace time. Clothed in scientific assumption and statistical modelling it removes the individual from the equation and deals only with best economic practice.
They might be right, perhaps this virus is unstoppable and the economic toll of closing down so much of our society's economic activity is a price too high to pay.
One of the conundrums of modern medicine has been this trend to use new medical procedures to keep the sick alive when old and past their actuarial best. The willingness to distort what would, a decade or so ago have been the time to let a person, past a certain age go and die as part of the natural order of things has been supplanted by technology.

The cost in terms of resources both medical and economic in so far as the stress it produces on hospitals and the actuarial assumptions made regarding pensions, distorts both industries and results in ever increasing costs which have to be met by the tax payer. In a world ruled by the balance sheet perhaps the virus has given us a get out clause, an escape route from our moral indebtedness to the old who have become incapable of producing and have become lodged in the loss column. In an age where the single bread winner has been replaced by both adults in a family having to work and the children rapidly becoming an expensive social responsibility, with parenthood now coopted by the state in terms of the crèche reaching into the child's upbringing where preschool meals meet the criteria of the meal time and the school is evermore expected to take on the role the parent used to play.
In this Orwellian scheme of things is it any wonder that another section of society is presumed the States responsibility to do with as it wishes.

Favouring the few not the many

Subject: Favouring the few not the many.

Every morning I'm drawn like a ghoul to the facts and figures coming from all parts of the globe regarding the corona virus pandemic. I'm fascinated by the hold it's getting on all of us and its seemingly unstoppable progress irrespective of what we do. The stock markets crash and like watching  a dying dog, the market twitches into life the following day only to fall back as the day progresses. The list of events which many people support is dwindling fast and soon the supporters will be forced into finding something else to fixate on. The television will be the first port of call with most channels reporting on the virus spree and the panic of a new dawn in which some of the things we take for granted will be no more. 

The economic well being is fragile and many of the small businesses, the coffee shops, the sandwich bars, the whole occasional purchasing enterprise outlet will be stripped of clients and faced with rents to pay, may foreclose for good.  The clear out from the weaker sections of society might be seen as a blessing by some financial sectors as it terminates their contractual arrangement early. The beds in hospital blocked for weeks by the sick and vulnerable will be reallocated to those waiting in the corridor and the flow of bodies through the system will regain some sort of fluidity. Having a clear out is always seen as a good thing, chucking out the old well worn wardrobe, making space in the cupboard so you can see what you have and need.
It's a question of need when you really get down to it, not to be maudlin  or sentimental the clear out is probably necessary, purging the weak to make space for the strong. 
The theory's floating around the internet  about who started what and why are legion at the moment.
The Chinese to hit at the soft underbelly of western capitalism especially as the US imposes sanctions or the US taking out their only competitor to bring as promised the jobs home  Iran or Russia, what about North Korea. It has always been the threat of the silent scourge, some pathogen let loose amongst the enemy and sitting back to see what happens.
Of course it might just be Mother Nature asserting her hold  and reminding us of all the false gods we create when we become oblivious to the fact that we are all vulnerable from a health point of view and even more so from the vagaries of an economic system built to favour the few not the many.

Frightening the horses

Subject: Frightening the horses.

It's a mad crazy world. What seems common sense is contested by the 'experts' and we the uninitiated are put back in our box by those who know better.
I'm speaking of the 'corona virus' and the advice we receive from our Prime Minister,  flanked as always by his team of experts who, if and when the wheels fall off, can be thrown to the dogs for giving poor advice. What seems sensible, to withdraw all contact from possible carriers of the virus by closing down most if not all aspects of social interface is deemed unnecessary at the moment because, it is argued we must allow the virus to progress through the society in the hope that we will produce the antibodies to fight the contagion. The people who die are 'collateral damage', to  use that wartime phrase, much favoured by the warriors amongst us but not when used to evaluate casualties  in peace time.
Perhaps the enormity of war and battlefield jargon is appropriate when potentially we face a fight against the virus and collateral damage, the smoke screen we need to hide the truth of innocent people killed in combat will in the wider scheme of things be appropriate, perhaps we simply can't afford to be squeamish. It's not to over egg things to say, thousands of people will die, people will lose their jobs, families will suffer and only in wartime does it provide any equivalence.

As the nation, nay as the whole world reaches a tipping point health wise, the financial reverberations caused by having to close factories, offices, schools, sporting events, travel and hotels will be dire and cause much mayhem. The new shaky ramshackle world of part time employment, the low wages which have to be propped up with taxpayers contributions are now the building blocks on which this society is built. It used to be the case that social responsibility towards each other started in the employment arrangement but this has  steadily been eroded by successive governments. Globalisation 'of the means of production', exporting decent jobs to the farthest corners of the globe, exploiting the poor to work all hours possible without any surety of contractual employment has the knock on effect of the Gig economy with its inherent instability and low unsustainable wages.
No unemployment insurance for them, no margin for error if earnings dry up, no place to hide when the economy falls apart.
So what started as a Chinese phenomena and our genuine amazement at the draconian measures used to corral people into their homes, or the self discipline of the South Koreans who willingly withdrew and isolated the virus from spreading within a month or so we, led by Boris are hesitant to do anything for fear of 'frightening the horses'. Perhaps when this is over, the horses will thank us.

See you tomorrow John

Subject: See you tomorrow John.

Buzz, clunk hiss, the machine rotates around me as I lie, semi naked on a platform which itself clunks and judders me into position for the first dart of radiation aimed at the malignant cells laying inside my prostrate gland.
I never knew I had such a thing as a prostrate until having visited the doctor he described its inhibiting, slightly crushing effect on my urethra, the tube which carries my pee from the bladder. Many men in their late 50s begin to have problems when going to the toilet and back in 2008 I had begun to plough that furrow, the first of many to the doctors surgery. Up to that point I had prided myself from being 'doctor free' and assumed, as we all do that the present will continue into the foreseeable future. There were no sign of the dark clouds building on the horizon, the assumption of a lifetime was that the body could be relied  upon, even when all else was breaking around you. That reliance we have and make up, that our bodies no matter how damaging our use of the body was, the beers we drank, the food we ate, the lack of proper exercise it was all just part of an ideocentric  game we played in what was then our fun filled extravagant lives.
Buzz clunk hiss the machine springs to life measuring its target positioning its strong death dealing rays in the appropriate area an area of the body unfortunately too close, to the vital daily functioning of that 'waste disposal' function  which, by the marvel of evolutionary design are clustered in our nether region, a sort of sewerage plant  close to their intertwined cousins who's job is to replace this old life with new.
The accuracy of the attendants positioning of the body and the stillness we are encouraged to assume is important whilst, buzz clunk hiss, the robotic machine seeks out  the tumour. Its crucial, as is a full bladder which apparently helps distance some of the organs away from the sizzle of the X-ray. Maybe in an emergency it will put out the fire.
Passive and enthralled by this surreal event we lay and wonder at our predicament. No longer the proud upright homosapien, we are reduced to a a partially naked piece of meat, laid out on the table for all to see and compare notes. Buzz clunk hiss the 'procedure' continues as a string quartet sounds through hidden speakers playing the same miscellany of tunes in an effort to calm the nervous and entertain those with an ear for this kind of thing. The meat is still trying still to maintain its dignity even whilst under the gaze of the young nurses and reflects that having become the centre of a scientific marvel, one must at least try to find out how it all works.  Scrambling to put on trousers and readjust to meeting the outside world I want to know why the. X-ray beam isn't static like some sort of laser gun. I am told that the three dimensional aspect of the prostrate requires a three dimensional attack but how does it miss the cluster of bits and pieces close by which are getting on minding their own business but which, to my untutored mind might fall foul of a rotational Star Wars type attack.  No one seems to have the answer and, as with so much in medicine, one is required to pipe down and let the experts get on with the business of tampering with what, up to that moment you had thought was yours.
The machine gives a sort of sigh when it has finished, as if reluctant to let you go, the surrounding bits and pieces withdraw, the bed quietly moves you out of the mechanism and you are free to escape emerging to the sound of the chirpy muse reminding you, "see you tomorrow John".

Failing to smell the coffee

Subject: Failing to smell the coffee.

How are we to cope with the phenomena of mass migration. How can we cope with the arrival of thousands of men women and children who come from backgrounds and cultures so far removed from our own.

As Turkey loosens it's grip on the migrants who fled Syria and Afghanistan and these migrants pick up their belongings and flood to the Turkish / Greek boarder in their thousands, potentially hundreds of thousands, how do we in the West react to this invasion from the East.
Invasions, (the take over of sovereign land) are usually the result of war, the victorious army dictating the conditions, the defeated, subordinate and cowed and whilst the wars in Afghanistan and Syria are the impetus behind the exodus from those countries, also mixed up in this one way flow of people are the 'economic migrants' from Africa as well as those parts of the world where poverty is symptomatic.
How do we judge who we should let in or keep out. How do we fit our principles of being an open non racist country with our concern of the effect that a colonisation by people who do not necessarily share our values will have over the long term. Our traditional way of life has changed for ever in many of our cities and we make the assumption that the change is for the better because to do otherwise would be to admit failure in past decisions.
I travel each day to my appointment with the machine which is zapping my cancer cells (along no doubt with the healthy cells close by) in a taxi driven by an Afghan man. We have struck up a friendship as we discuss the world problems particularly those in his own country and as a Muslim, his life in this country. He has a 4 year old daughter who he idolises and his descriptions of family life make him a role model of a man trying to do his best for his family. He and his family are possibly indicative of the ones you see on the dusty road or in the camps waiting for news as they try to leave the iniquity of war or economic no hope for the streets paved with gold in Europe.
His own baggage seems to have been assimilated into a sort of Anglo/Afghan way of life. The Mosque and the tradition of speaking Dari at home whilst, to all intents and purposes he assimilates to being just another hybrid of the British multicultural,
multiethnic society we have attempted to create.
I enjoy his company and his politics and yet if I met him on the street I would assume him to be foreign to my way of thinking. Is it the case that we all have more in common with each other than we are prepared to accept. Is our prejudice the stone we wear around our necks, holding us back by failing to allow us to look up and smell the coffee.

Corona Virus

Subject: Corona Virus 

The world is in lock down. The financial markets are in a frenzy. People open their newspapers or tune in to the news broadcasts with evermore alarm as the Corona virus sows its seed into the fabric of nations around the world.
Amidst all our surety and self entered confidence, a virus similar to that which causes many people to die each year, the influenza virus, has caused the world to panic. Goods fly off the supermarket shelves as people make the provision to withdraw from normality and hunker down in their homes away from the crowds and the possibility of infection.
Are we though over reacting are we getting things out of proportion, are we panicking because we are being fed facts and figures in this blow by blow contest which, if we were to elevate the flue virus in the same way and would also scare the pants off all of us.
I am nearing 80 and it would seem a prime target, if I catch the virus to succumb to some sort of respiratory condition so obviously I must be careful not to mix in the crowds but with the bulk of the population no such 'sword of Damocles' hangs over their head and one wonders why the story isn't more proportional. Of course the death toll in Wuhan has been dramatic as it is in Iran and South Korea. The infection rate in Italy also leaves that country very vulnerable but death comes in many forms and disguises. The deaths on our roads are far more alarming but we never flinch from going out in our motorcar  in an effort to avoid becoming one of those statistics.
Is it a question of presentation, is it part of that mass panic which forbids 'crying fire' in a crowded cinema. Is it the manipulative power of the story which, from the soothsayer to the Red Top, distorts our sense of reasoned decision making. Do we always follow the herd.
The reporting of the so called pandemic (of which I only questions the severity of the consequence) has filled our media each day as confirmed cases rise exponentially each day with maps showing the hot spots, China a sea of red the Middle East also cherry red but strangely Africa seems unaffected. India also has few reported cases.  These are the very areas where one would expect contagion given the poverty and the population density.  Is it under reporting or is it that people die in such numbers in Africa and Asia that there is a callousness in finding the cause of death when it happens and that people who have the virus are not registered as to it being the cause. South America also seems unaffected and perhaps the same is true, death is no stranger to some societies and it's cause is an every day fact of life and is therefore immaterial.
Stay in if you must, practice safe hygiene and indulge yourself with kicking the ankle or bumping the arm of friend or foe. It seems to me to be the perfect moment to get your own back by being a more vigorous with the ankle tap. Perhaps a well executed Kibisu-qaeshi with plenty of Waza would be appropriate in settling a few old scores.

Its not the size of your wallet

Subject: It's not the size of your wallet.

The weather is dreadful and rightly it's pointed out that the coastline in Australia, particularly the Queensland coastline, dotted with bleach white high rise buildings clustered towards a beach from where one can hear and be enchanted by the rhythmic roar of the surf pounding onto the beach. Why on earth the refrain goes, would we want to live in rain soaked Blighty.
Catching the early morning wintery rays of a sun, just emerging from its visit to that other world, not the heat bath that Brisbane receives but the gentle  wispy warming breeze which, zephyr like can turn on its head and bring a gale at the drop of a hat.
The weather in the UK (I must use the term whilst I can) often brings four seasons in a day and locally the taciturn response is to ignore what the weather is doing since it won't last and will soon turn to something else, hopefully more pleasant.  Our beaches are not flooded with a sunlight which soon gets oppressive but instead is like an old fashioned monochrome print with the shadows giving depth to the field of vision highlighting a lack of constancy on what we see making for a far more interesting landscape. The twisted logs and the flotsam thrown up from last nights storm are a far more interesting explorative beach space than the uniformity of mile upon mile of  pristine sand. It's like the comparison between Dubai and Whitby. The one modern and for most of us unaffordable, a plaything for the rich and famous,

Whitby on the other hand is organic, a place of and for ordinary folk to wander around its quaint streets and shops full of bric-brac,  not Gucci a St Lauren but silly hats and sticks of rock.
This chaotic intemperate landscape has bred a benign population in which two of the first words a child learns in "please and thank you". The habit of excusing yourself when someone bumps into you as if it were your fault tests the assumption that we are not individuals living separately but social animals who need to respect each other.
This respect is evident all around but manifests itself in the way most of us drive cars. The car the individualists fetish, the badge we wear to announce how well we have done in life meets a sort of Damoclean conversion when on the street, in the traffic as we signal to others to go ahead or quietly acknowledge the difficulties if someone has got in the wrong lane and needs space in yours. There are many countries in which its citizens would contest their bit of road with the fervour of Dunkirk but not the Pom, here we gracefully acknowledge our need to cohabit.
It's this ability to largely avoid confrontation which makes us squirm when we see someone being overly demanding, be it in a shop or in a hotel. We automatically take the other persons side and filter in a whole raft of reasons why the service had caused such an uproar. The very word "service" is an anathema to many of us and usually makes us poor employees when asked to fit the role of waitress or shop assistant. We feel on a par with those around us easily able to carry the social conversation by being respectful but not subservient.
So when people contrast the Sunshine Coast with Swansea Bay, behind the lack of  Sunshine and cream lies a quality of independent bloody mindedness which asks simply to be judged on the way I respect and judge you, not the size of your wallet.

A walk along the beach

Subject: A walk along the beach

The sun had just appeared over the horizon and the early morning light suffuses everything in a welcoming light. The sound of the rhythmic crash of waves rolling ashore right along the coastline, a rhythm not quite set in the stars but in the equally mysterious effect of the moons gravity, one moment drawing up the oceans around Sydney whilst releasing its grip on those off Swansea.

This morning the waters were high, the beach reduced to a narrow strip of sand transformed by the tides bounty, thousands of small shells thrown up and stranded as the sea retreated. Each shell once the home of some crustacean a shelter for some sea creature in a world below the water line.
The sand is wet and smooth as each droplet  of sand nestles into place alongside another as the water runs away for the sand to dry. Millions upon millions of particals of sand which form the basis for all that lies in the space between the waves, a subsoil to provide a unique uniformity between the landmass.
As we walk the air is fresh as only the sea air can be, little or no pollution only the slight briny salty smell which seems to open up the air passages and allow more air in. Crunch crunch the shells underfoot are flattened by our Gulliver like weight as we plough on impervious to the destruction. The flotsam and jetsam detritus that is of a different nature to the shells also litters the waterline. A waterlogged wallet a ragged shirt, a branch of a tree and an empty can of beer, they are from that other world, a world on our side of the divide between the aquatic and our earthbound existence.
The sun is rising higher as the light takes on a harder edged, more invasive  as it differentiates the shadows from hard objects. That comforting early morning watery light that filters the real from the unreal is disappearing fast and soon the strip of sand will lead us up to the path which runs around the Swansea Bay a favourite commute for hundreds of walkers and cyclists who soon begin to appear as the office bell rings it's invitation to work and make money.
For us no such unsavoury call, we have the day ahead and breakfast to find.

Getting old.

Subject: Getting old.

The implicit advantage of growing old on a desert island must be that you do the ageing bit in isolation, far from the prying eyes of those who would have an opinion.
Getting old is never a reassuring sight especially for ones children who have from their early years seen you as some sort of pillar, some sort of surety and strength to rely on. Now as the physical strength clearly dwindles and in their eyes we become not only doddery but also that dreaded thing, a liability, something to worry about in their busy lives. The world has turned full circle, then we fretted for their safety, now they fret for ours.

Our mind usually races ahead of the body searching endeavors which the sluggish body is loathe to venture, especially so when we get old. The mind, as fresh as a daisy doesn't pause to think that the old braggart, the body is struggling to keep up, not only keep up but even start out on the journey. As the knee or ankle joint begins to give a twinge of pain, making us hobble around a bit and start to look like that old person we used to see in the street, the concept shifts. The self image of old age is not attractive. We don't visualise that the person who walks slowly down the stairs or limps between the supermarket isles was once someone's dance partner or belonged to a team kicking a football around but now struggles to use  the TV control. 

The mind is continually at play, skipping reality and professing amazement that others don't understand our own self image, of what is real to us. Oldies can still drive a car and make their way to appointments, they can still engage  in everyone's idea of what the world is but somehow there is an intolerance of the older person wishing to be even there. They yearn for the oldie to be safe and sound in bed, secure from any imagined crisis, tucked away like a museum piece, with a fragile sign, 'don't disturb'  on the end of the bed,
Our struggle is to make everyone realise that the stereotype of old age varies from person to person. In some, whilst the bones ache, it's only an inconvenience, not a reason to close us down, to rather assume they can, do than can't, to ignore the gait,  not close the gate, to know that the intention as always is to be in the present  not the past.

Into the unknown

Subject: Into the unknown.

What would it have been like if I had been born with a black skin.
The organs under that skin, the heart and the lungs, the stomach and the intestine are common to us all as is the brain but the colour of the skin identifies the person and sets in train the prejudice which bedevils their lives when living as a minority in a country to which their ancestors knew little or nothing and because they are visible as a minority the majority are given a chance, for good or bad to interpret this prejudice in what ever way they wish.
Generally speaking. a white person is free from the evil of the collective stereotype, (unless of course living in Nairobi or Tokyo), we may be categorised in terms of nationality and gender, we might presume to believe we know the characteristics of a Frenchman or an Italian and be prejudiced towards them but, until they speak, we are blissfully unaware of any difference between us and generally we soon come to terms with the difference since we conceptualise the image we see with the images we have of our own kith and kin.
When a person is black. Immediately there is an instinctive mismatch, (as there is when we see the Burka) our brains don't compute in the way it does when we are face to face with with someone who is tribally unfamiliar, The Colonial prejudice lodged in our minds,  the films and the novels written about tribal practice or alternatively the image of a subservient native dominated by the white bwana.
If I were a black man, or woman, the narrative would be very different. A back story of oppression, and suppressed and the traditional assumption of subservience, these days is replaced with outrage.
It's a similarly narrative if I had been born a woman, a Muslim or a Hindu,  born fat, instead of thin, tall instead of short all, these birth chances would plot quite a different journey, In today's world, shrunk by the realisation that in the cities, people, right across the world have a remarkable similarity and it's only the politics and culture that divide us. Unfortunately politics and culture make up a large component of how we behave and our assumptions are based on this cultural religious and political divide rather than what makes us similar.
The modern assumption, that being fat, thin, tall or short, man or woman, black or white, makes no difference, we cry when upset, we laugh when happy, misses the point that in many societies the cultural demand outweighs the commonsense standpoint and carries less weight.
Life's experience is personal, it's different for each of us. The edicts from the European Court to act on a remit, set in an artificial paradigm does not match what is happening in Rawalpindi. A black man living in Marseilles experiences a different set of values to one living in the Sorbonne. A woman growing up in Ghana lives a very different life to someone in Manchester. Each attribute factors inherent in the specific community or sub community in which they live and which has little or no reference to laws made in Brussels.
The exclusion principle is at work, be it the Orthodox Jew in Stamford Hill, or the gang of black youths in Streatham, the doorman barring my way into the Ritz Hotel, its the 'them and us' principle which holds us back , an act of self preservation we shrink from knowing.

Universal Credit

Subject: Universal Credit.

One of the disadvantages of reality tv is that it's depressing, it's depressing to see how people are forced to live in quite acute stress, often through circumstance outside their control. It also reveals how financially inept people are unable to budget, unable to limit their expenditure on non essentials, unable to curb the desire to blow what ever money comes their way and let the future take care of itself.
For a whole set of reasons (including indigestion) I switched on the television  quite late at a time when usually I'm sleeping and enjoying the good life of my dreams. BBC 2 were showing a program which attempted to tell one side of the story of Universal Credit, how moving onto a single monthly benefit payment has effected the claimants used to living on a weekly paid benefit.

The issue of why people use and depend on benefits plagues this country. A system of low wages and now, the gig economy, in which employers offer employment dependent on the business need with no contractual responsibility towards their employees, has made the workplace at the bottom end of the job spectrum extremely precarious. Rent is the largest expenditure, the rest, food, clothing and transport plus entertainment, the television, a packet of fags, beer and drugs and that's your lot in this pared down analysis of what it takes to live on in 2020.
Clearly many of these people are not particularly bright and have few opportunities to improve themselves. They are the children born of claimants to Welfare a state who were themselves claimants two generations ago. They live a life (sic) in a state within a state where the sheer impossibility to live a normal life is denied them partly  through an educational system which ill-equips them to find proper contractually secure work. It's a subculture where the responsibilities we imbibed from our own parents which we take for granted is missing. It doesn't make them bad people, just financially incoherent, unable to budget because their income is so variable in an infamous zero hours contact system, a never ending Helter Skelter having to adjust their financial spend from month to month because the safety net which welfare payments are supposed to provide, now takes a month to five weeks to adjust and bring into line the income fluctuations when set against the minimum income calculated when they went on Universal Credit.
Of course it's easy to disparage this under class, especially when the real dropouts often the husbands are seen in the shadows hovering up the scraps. Perhaps for them two years national service wouldn't go amiss, especially if they were trained into some sort of useful trade for when they return to civilian life. The women, usually mothers, often with quite large families have a different profile and given it's apparently their human right to fall pregnant and have kids, maybe a financial incentive to limit the family might work.
What ever the cause it is pretty soul destroying watching these people buffeted this way and that as they try to make ends meet. It's all a far cry from "Angela's Ashes" the horrific story of growing up in a tenement in Ireland but never the less it faces us with a view of life which is so mentally disturbing, removed as it is from the one we know and yet maybe living only a few doors away.
The act of providing a social catch-net was what was envisaged by Attlee's Socialist government in 1947. Temporary financial assistance to tie one over whilst you found another job or recovered from sickness. It has these days become a lifestyle for many at an enormous cost to the taxpayer (as much spent  as on education) and a worrying fiscal drag in an economy which struggles to find its role in modern economics.
It's another one of those moments when you think how lucky to have been born in a different era.

Fragmentation becomes the norm

Subject: Fragmentation becomes the norm.

In a rapidly politically fragmenting world where old alliance's are being discarded and old hegemonies challenged, where and on who do we now put our money.

As the influence of the US is openly challenged by the EU, China, Russia and other countries some of which a year or so ago would be thought ally's of the US, these countries now begin to search for new links with, on the one hand the old Cold War enemy Russia or the new kid on the block, China.  If the solidarity afforded by NATO and the security packs we have through NATO are called into question, by our insistence of the use of Huawei, how do we prevent the rifts from widening.

In the period of the Cold War things were perilous but so much simpler. The enemy was communism, be it in Russia or China and the ideological barriers were simplified. Now with the rise of globalism and the importance China plays in the functioning of the Global model of trade, we injure a relationship with an authoritarian power such as China at our peril. We blindside our distaste for the internal tyranny against the Uyghurs or the working conditions for millions of its own people, it's human rights violations, all for a piece of the China pie. Our moral compass is deflected by the lodestone, 'profit', it's the number one religion supplanting all previous considerations, including those amongst which an ethical component was high on the list. The impotence we feel in the throes of Trumps intolerance to any one who disagrees with him, matches our distaste for the monolith which is China. We have become the meat in the sandwich, the bit actor who stands in the wings off stage, watching the play unfurl, being a part of but reduced to a watching brief, insignificant but certainly effected.
Without the watching brief which America provided the playground is awash with unruly children scratching each other's eyes out. The Middle East, the Far East, the Indian Subcontinent have become hotspots of discontent each with an ability in settling old score to bring us all down eventually.
Macron wants to have closer links to Russia, we in the UK under our glorious leader Boris want to ditch Europe for America. China has bought up much of Africa, the Far East and now chunks of Europe, including, ominously ourselves.  South America is collapsing under right and left wing dictatorships who posing as popular movements, bring the people out on the streets, tasting teargas and water-cannon for their troubles
It's like watching musical chairs but what happens when the music stops. What happens when debt moves from trillions to quadrillion's. What happens when climate change becomes a reality and not simply the impassioned cry of a teenager.
'Money talks' goes the song in 'Forever in blue jeans'. It's taken over all other methods of measuring success or failure,  it's a discourse where nothing else matters other than, "how much is he worth" and of course we make the tragic mistake of mixing up worth with value.
Perhaps it's always been like this and only the magnifying influence of the Internet brings into focus the crass activities of our fellow citizens. The instinct to rush out in the playground and settle a squabble rather than letting old feuds be settled the traditional way with some blood letting. Another aspect of the nanny state of mind where it is thought that exposure to danger is bad and where we attempt to sanitise all human relations. Perhaps 80 years of protective custody has cast a spell over us and made us avoid the reality that divisions run deep and that whilst pockets of multiculturalism work in the hot house of politically correct pressure the instinct is to uphold ones own sense of unity be it culture, religion, class or tribal perspective. Fragmentation then becomes the norm not the exception.