Boris and his ministers' claims to have “followed the science” don't mean much - They didn't prepare properly, they were careless & they acted too late

It seems all that any member of the UK government has to do to silence criticism of their handling of the virus epidemic is to say “We were following the science. Are you questioning the expert advice of scientists and medical experts?”. This immediately gets the desired “of course not” response from the journalist, like a hypnotist saying “look into my eyes, you are feeling very sleepy” to someone very susceptible.

Nor are Keir Starmer or the Labour front bench ready to bring up such obvious questions as why, with the exception of 200 British citizens who had been in or near Wuhan, most people flying into the UK from then covid-19 outbreak centres like China, Italy and Iran were not put through mandatory quarantine or testing (1) – (2).

The assumption seems to be that to question any expert’s claims or opinions is to commit the unforgivable sin of “populism” and become a demagogue who ignores facts.

This is based on a view of scientific and medical opinion on any subject as always unified, or that the majority opinion among experts must always be accepted. Yet there are often disagreements among experts. For instance on 12^th March the UK’s Chief Scientific Officer Patrick Vallance held a press conference along with Boris Johnson in which he explained that the government’s strategy was based on spreading the virus through enough of the non-vulnerable population that they would develop “herd immunity” and not pass it on to those most at risk (3).

This was immediately met with criticism by hundreds of experts . Professor Hugh Pennington later said such a strategy was impossible without vaccines, which are likely a year to 18 months from having gone through enough trials to be proven safe and effective. The response was so negative that it contributed to the government disowning herd immunity and claiming it had never been their strategy (4) – (6).

Yet the Chief Medical and Scientific officers who approved that strategy are seen as beyond criticism. So when they tell us that “there is no evidence” that mandatory quarantine and testing of people flying into the country from countries with outbreaks of it would have slowed the spread of covid-19 we’re meant to accept it without question (7).

The other line used was that it had been tried in Italy and failed. This ignores the fact that air travel is the obvious means by which the virus spread so fast. And that Italy brought in a flight ban too late. Yes, many people with covid-19 will have flown into the UK before we knew about it. So maybe it’s too late to make a difference now. But surely if they’d done it early on, reducing the number of additional infected people entering the country would be a way of at least slowing the spread of the virus until we have done enough trials to find effective treatments and/or vaccines for it?

And every government in the world says it’s basing its policies on the science, yet different countries have very different policies. Sweden has no lock-down at all. The UK still has 15,000 people a day flying in even during “lock-down”, while Singapore banned all flights entry except cargo and humanitarian ones. And the UK has also said it plans to implement quarantine on anyone arriving in the country for the second phase of the virus (8) – (9).

 The UK government’s own advisers even disagreed among themselves on what lockdown measures to take, and opinion polls, as much as WHO advice and numbers of deaths and cases, drove changes in policy in mid-March (10).

Then there are Boris’ speeches – like one on 3^rd February in which he said “And in that context, we are starting to hear some bizarre autarkic rhetoric, when barriers are going up, and when there is a risk that new diseases such as coronavirus will trigger a panic and a desire for market segregation that go beyond what is medically rational to the point of doing real and unnecessary economic damage, then at that moment humanity needs some government somewhere that is willing at least to make the case powerfully for freedom of exchange, some country ready to take off its Clark Kent spectacles and leap into the phone booth and emerge with its cloak flowing as the supercharged champion, of the right of the populations of the earth to buy and sell freely among each other. And here in Greenwich in the first week of February 2020, I can tell you in all humility that the UK is ready for that role.” (11).

This sounds like Boris was initially more worried about “over-reaction” to covid-19 harming the economy than he was about covid-19 killing lots of people. The Conservative party from Thatcher on has always prioritised the economy above everything, even when policies based on this actually damaged the economy in practice. Thatcher was strongly opposed to Apartheid in South Africa, not so much because it was racist, undemocratic or morally wrong, but because she saw it as economically inefficient (12).

Add that to the “herd immunity” press conference and the failure to quarantine or test people flying in, and it looks a lot like the UK government’s initial strategy was initially the one it later disowned – “herd immunity” and “letting the virus, as it were, spread through the population” as Boris put it in a daytime TV interview, though he did not explicitly say this was his position, only “one of the theories” (13).

Then, when Professor Neil Ferguson of Imperial College London estimated a worst case scenario of half a million people dying as a result, and the opinion polls on the government’s handling of the crisis didn’t look good,  the government decided it better do something fast (14).

Failures by May’s Government in 2017
– And by Johnson’s in 2020

True the WHO didn’t say covid19 was a pandemic and a serious threat until 11^th of March. But epidemiologists had been warning for years that another respiratory virus pandemic like the Spanish flu of 1918 was only a matter of “when and from where?” not if”, especially after SARS , MERS and Swine flu epidemics (15) – (16).

In 2017 the UK Department of Health rejected advice from its new and emerging respiratory viruses threat advisory group (nervtag) to stockpile personal protective equipment (PPE), for all NHS staff, on grounds of cost. Telling them to change the advice to exclude eye protection on grounds of cost (17).

In the same year the NHS held Exercise Cygnus simulating how it would deal with a respiratory virus epidemic The final report was made classified (18). So it is not credible for the government to claim no one could have predicted this. The only parts that were unpredictable were when it would arrive, and where it would start.

And it was no secret to anyone that the Chinese government’s public statements can’t be trusted, nor that big, powerful countries like China have disproportionate influence in bodies like the WHO. China had previously tried to cover up SARS at first too. So any government that didn’t assume the worst case scenario on covid-19 – and that the reality could well be much worse than the Chinese government or the WHO were saying – was being negligent.

This, again, was excessive faith in experts, and in this case experts operating under major political pressures from the bigger members of their organisation.

Graph - Excess deaths are the amount that deaths in a particular week exceed the average number of people who died in that week in the previous 5 years. Many experts believe this is a good indication of the impact of covid-19, though not all excess deaths will be due to it. Source – Sky News report using data from the EUROMOMO project at the University of Copenhagen.

Trump’s accusations against the WHO, while obviously an attempt to distract from his own failures, have some basis in fact. Taiwan had sent experts to Wuhan to talk with doctors there in January. On January 16th they reported that the virus could be transferred between humans. At the time the Chinese government was still claiming it could only be caught from bats ; although a WHO official had told the press on the 14^th that given the SARs and MERS pandemic, it would not be surprising if it could be transmitted between humans, and that this may have happened in 41 cases. Taiwan being excluded from WHO meetings also helped the Chinese government give a false impression of the threat level from the virus. (19) – (20)

We shouldn’t ignore experts,  but remember views among experts in the same field may differ. Those in official positions working for governments or international organisations may be chosen for having the views those in power prefer to believe. Senior ranks of some expert bodies may be more politicians than experts, willing to modify their views to keep their position, or rise higher. Then CIA director George Tenet’s assurance to President Bush that proving Iraq had weapons of mass destruction would be a “slam dunk” was one example.

And if opinion among the government’s expert advisers is divided, as we know it has been in the UK, the advice is likely to end up being to take less action rather than more, to get concensus.

True, Boris and the current cabinet were not the government in 2017. But they were the government by December 2019, when we first knew of the virus in China. And in late January, when the UK got its first confirmed case.

A study in the Lancet in early as January 24^th warned that the virus could be transmitted between humans, and that the estimated mortality rate of over 3% was similar to that of the Spanish Flu at an estimated under 5%, with both diseases killing so many people because they were so contagious.

On the 31^st of April another study in the Lancet said that ‘Therefore, in the absence of substantial public health interventions that are immediately applied, further international seeding and subsequent local establishment of epidemics might become inevitable. On the present trajectory, 2019-nCoV could be about to become a global epidemic in the absence of mitigation. Nevertheless, it might still be possible to secure containment of the spread of infection such that initial imported seeding cases or even early local transmission does not lead to a large epidemic in locations outside Wuhan. To possibly succeed, substantial, even draconian measures that limit population mobility should be seriously and immediately considered in affected areas, as should strategies to drastically reduce within-population contact rates through cancellation of mass gatherings, school closures, and instituting work-from-home arrangements, for example.’ (21)

A summary of the last sentence was tweeted by the editor of the Lancet, Richard Horton, on the same day.

The first confirmed case of covid-19 in the UK had been 2 days earlier on January 29^th. No serious measures were taken. A month later on 28^th February the first proven case of transmission  between people in the UK. Still no action. The Cheltenham Festival even went ahead in early March (23).

It would be two more weeks before any serious measures were announced. Implementing lock-downs sooner, and making them include more limits on numbers flying in and quarantine of those allowed in, could have contained and slowed the spread of the virus, reducing deaths.

The government claim this would have resulted in people not obeying lock-down measures because some would think it an over-reaction. But New Zealand seems to show otherwise. While its lockdown didn’t come till around the same time as the UK’s, it began it before there were any confirmed deaths in the country – and its public are mostly abiding by it. The government in the UK could have explained the seriousness of the situation at any time by using the Lancet studies and other evidence as back up. They chose not to. It’s hard to believe that Boris’ reckless character and his and his party’s ideological beliefs weren’t a big factor here. It was a huge mistake and many people thought at the time that the government was crazy not to be bringing in more measures sooner (24).

Even on the economic impact the evidence from studies of lockdown decisions by different US cities in the 1918 pandemic is against the idea that there is a trade off between economic impact and avoiding virus deaths. The cities which locked-down soonest and for longest had both the least deaths and the fastest economic recoveries – though most of their lock-downs didn’t last more than 6 weeks (25).

The 1918 pandemic also gives some grounds for hope though. It killed so many people partly due to poor hygiene and not enough social distancing or isolation, especially among patients in field hospitals – things we’re partly avoiding. And the Spanish Flu is thought to have ended not due to immunisation – as it ended before vaccines were available, but because deadlier strains of a virus are less likely to survive as a dead host can’t continue passing the virus on, so evolution favoured mutation into less deadly strains. Might covid-19 do the same? (26)

 

(1) = BBC News 29 Jan 2020 ‘Coronavirus: Britons on Wuhan flights to be quarantined’, https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-51292590

(2) = Daily Mail 22 Mar 2020 ‘Coronavirus chaos at UK borders as flights from Italy, China and Iran - the countries with the biggest coronavirus death tolls - continue to arrive, with up to 7,500 travellers entering Britain in a week’, https://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-8139529/Flights-Italy-Iran-China-landing-Britain-despite-UK-coronavirus-lockdown.html

(3) = ITV News 13 Mar 2020 ‘UK's chief scientific adviser tells ITV News he hopes Government's approach to coronavirus will create 'herd immunity'’, https://www.itv.com/news/2020-03-13/uk-s-chief-scientific-adviser-tells-itv-news-he-hopes-government-s-approach-to-coronavirus-will-create-herd-immunity/

(4) = Press & Journal 23 Mar 2020 ‘Professor Hugh Pennington: ‘Herd immunity is a crazy idea, not really supported by any sound science’, https://www.pressandjournal.co.uk/fp/news/politics/uk-politics/2093482/professor-hugh-pennington-herd-immunity-is-a-crazy-idea-not-really-supported-by-any-sound-science/

(5) = BBC News 14 Mar 2020 ‘Coronavirus: Some scientists say UK virus strategy is 'risking lives'’, https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/science-environment-51892402

(6) = Politics Home 15 Mar 2020 ‘Matt Hancock insists 'herd immunity' not part of government's plan for tackling coronavirus’, https://www.politicshome.com/news/article/matt-hancock-insists-herd-immunity-not-part-of-governments-plan-for-tackling-coronavirus

(7) = Telegraph 09 Mar 2020 ‘Banning flights and screening arrivals will not stop coronavirus spread, says Chief Medical Officer’,    https://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/2020/03/09/banning-flights-screening-arrivals-will-not-stop-coronavirus/

(8) = Metro 18 Apr 2020 ‘Flights still bringing 15,000 people a day to UK with no screening’, https://metro.co.uk/2020/04/18/flights-still-bringing-15000-people-day-uk-no-screening-12574861/

(9) = www.independent.co.uk 27 Apr 2020 ‘Self-isolate for two weeks’: What a new government quarantine policy for arrivals to the UK could mean’, https://www.independent.co.uk/travel/news-and-advice/coronavirus-flights-ferries-tests-heathrow-airport-a9484616.html

(10) = New Statesman 01 Apr 2020 ‘The real reason the UK government pursued “herd immunity” – and why it was abandoned’ , https://www.newstatesman.com/politics/uk/2020/04/real-reason-uk-government-pursued-herd-immunity-and-why-it-was-abandoned

(11) = www.gov.uk 3 Feb 2020  ‘PM speech in Greenwich: 3 February 2020’, https://www.gov.uk/government/speeches/pm-speech-in-greenwich-3-february-2020

(12) = www.theguardian.com 10 Apr 2013 ‘How Margaret Thatcher helped end apartheid – despite herself’, https://www.theguardian.com/world/2013/apr/10/margaret-thatcher-apartheid-mandela

(13) = Full Fact 10 Mar 2020 ‘Here is the transcript of what Boris Johnson said on This Morning about the new coronavirus’, https://fullfact.org/health/boris-johnson-coronavirus-this-morning/

(14) = See (10) above

(15) = The Lancet 01 Jul 2018 , Editorial ‘How to be ready for the next influenza pandemic’, https://www.thelancet.com/journals/laninf/article/PIIS1473-3099(18)30364-5/fulltext

(16) = JAMA 09 May 2007 ‘The Next Influenza Pandemic: Can It Be Predicted?’,
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC2504708/

(17) = www.theguardian.com 27 Mar 2020 ‘Advice on protective gear for NHS staff was rejected owing to cost’, https://www.theguardian.com/world/2020/mar/27/advice-on-protective-gear-for-nhs-staff-was-rejected-owing-to-cost

(18) = www.telegraph.co.uk 28 Mar 2020 ‘Exercise Cygnus uncovered: the pandemic warnings buried by the government  ’, https://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/2020/03/28/exercise-cygnus-uncovered-pandemic-warnings-buried-government/

(19) = The Nation 03 Apr 2020 ‘The WHO Ignores Taiwan. The World Pays the Price’, https://www.thenation.com/article/world/taiwan-who-coronavirus-china/

(20) = W.H.O 27 Apr 2020 ‘Timeline – COVID-19’, https://www.who.int/news-room/detail/08-04-2020-who-timeline---covid-19

(21) = The Lancet 15 Feb 2020 ‘A novel coronavirus outbreak of global health concern’, https://www.thelancet.com/journals/lancet/article/PIIS0140-6736(20)30185-9/fulltext

(22) = The Lancet 31 Jan 2020 ‘Nowcasting and forecasting the potential domestic and international spread of the 2019-nCoV outbreak originating in Wuhan, China: a modelling study’, https://www.thelancet.com/journals/lancet/article/PIIS0140-6736(20)30260-9/fulltext

(23) = Metro 19 Apr 2020 ‘When did coronavirus first come to the UK?’,  https://metro.co.uk/2020/04/19/first-case-coronavirus-uk-covid-19-diagnosis-12578061/

(24) = New Scientist 13 Mar 2020 ‘Why is the UK approach to coronavirus so different to other countries?’, https://www.newscientist.com/article/2237385-why-is-the-uk-approach-to-coronavirus-so-different-to-other-countries/

(25) = www.dailymail.co.uk 11 Apr 2020 ‘How lockdowns could also flatten the 'economic damage curve': Study shows cities that cracked down harder during 1918 Spanish Flu pandemic recovered quicker financially than those that didn't’,  https://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-8210647/Study-suggests-lockdowns-economic-damage-alternative.html

(26) = The Conversation 17 Mar 2020 ‘10 misconceptions about the 1918 flu, the ‘greatest pandemic in history’, https://theconversation.com/10-misconceptions-about-the-1918-flu-the-greatest-pandemic-in-history-133994

Buccaneering by Cameron's Bank and Hedge Fund Pirate Friends in the City is the reason many Scots and English people would like to get out of the UK

Prime Minister David Cameron says we must save the UK as it’s a “brilliant, buccaneering country” (1) – (2). That’s an interesting choice of words. Buccaneers were pirates. How appropriate from a Prime Minister whose party gets most of its funding from the banks and hedge funds who are the modern international, government approved, pirates, stealing billions from 99.9% of the world’s population (3) – (4).

The hedge funds and banks even buy up food and stockpile it to push the price up to make money on “futures trading”, starving the world’s poorest people for profits that go to already super-rich investors, stock market traders and senior managers (5). David Cameron and much of his party are not ashamed of this, but proud of it.

To them Elizabethan England with its state approved pirates, or “privateers” like Sir Francis Drake, is a wet dream they want to bring back – and through privatisation, lack of regulation and eroding the welfare state, they are succeeding.

Big banks, hedge funds, energy companies and supermarkets are the privateers of our day, buying the right to steal from millions and avoid taxes in offshore tax havens through donations to party funds. They’re worse than the privateers, because at least the privateers were stealing from other governments and rich merchants, while the modern privateers steal from the vast majority including the very poorest.

The Coalition government has blocked even modest EU attempts at increased regulation and restrictions on bankers’ bonuses. Chancellor George Osborne has gone to court to block EU caps on bankers’ bonuses. For Cameron and Osborne there must be no restrictions on buccaneering. Cap benefits for the poorest, but bankers have to be able to pay themselves whatever they like (6).

With the number of people reliant on food banks in the UK having increased from under 50,000 to around half a million in the first few years of their government, they are also heading us back towards Elizabethan era levels of poverty and inequality. Like Tony Blair, they are very relaxed about this, as they’re not the ones who have to go hungry or watch their kids go hungry (7) – (8).

And this is the kind of thing David Cameron thinks will make Scots want to stay part of the UK? Even many English people would like to escape that kind of organised kleptocracy. Buccaneering isn’t popular when the buccaneers are the super-rich, stealing from the majority and making the poorest go hungry.

The best thing Scots can do to end this is vote Yes and go independent, both to save our own people, and to provide an example of supposedly impossible alternatives working; an example that no UK government would be able to ignore.

 (1) = www.guardian.com 07 Feb 2014 ‘David Cameron sets out 'emotional, patriotic' case to keep Scotland in UK’, http://www.theguardian.com/politics/2014/feb/07/david-cameron-scottish-independence-referendum-olympic-park

(2) = www.gov.uk 07 Feb 2014 ‘The importance of Scotland to the UK: David Cameron’s speech’, https://www.gov.uk/government/speeches/the-importance-of-scotland-to-the-uk-david-camerons-speech  (see paragraph near end of speech which begins ‘And I passionately hope that my children’ – final sentence of paragraph reads ‘Our great United Kingdom: brave, brilliant, buccaneering, generous, tolerant, proud – this is our country.’)

(3) = BBC News 9 Feb 2011 ‘More than half of Conservative donors 'from the City'’,
http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-politics-12401049

(4) = Bureau of Investigative Journalism ‘Tory Party funding from City doubles under Cameron’, http://www.thebureauinvestigates.com/2011/02/08/city-financing-of-the-conservative-party-doubles-under-cameron/

(5) = Independent On Sunday 01 April 2012 ‘The real hunger games: How banks gamble on food prices – and the poor lose out’, http://www.independent.co.uk/news/world/politics/the-real-hunger-games-how-banks-gamble-on-food-prices--and-the-poor-lose-out-7606263.html

(6) = Guardian 25 Sep 2013 ‘Osborne bats for bankers' bonuses citing risk to City from EU cap’, http://www.theguardian.com/politics/2013/sep/25/osborne-bankers-bonuses-eu-cap

(7) = BBC News 30 May 2013 ‘Food bank reliance in the UK triples, says Oxfam’,
http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-22715451

(8) = www.parliament.uk 18 Dec 2013 ‘MPs debate Accident and Emergency Services and Food Banks’, http://www.parliament.uk/business/news/2013/december/opposition-day-18-december-2013/

The Real Michael Foot

“We are not in this world to find elegant solutions, pregnant with initiative, or to serve the ways and modes of profitable progress.

No, we are here to provide for all those who are weaker and hungrier, more battered and more crippled than ourselves.”

Michael Foot MP, 1983

Michael Foot has been caricatured as having been an ineffective leader, as having been responsible for Labour’s election defeat in 1983 and as senile, ‘loony left’ and too naive and weak to oppose real threats. He was none of these things. He was the only leader who all the fragments of a divided party would accept at a time when all parties were divided because none had any working solution to "stagflation"; and both main parties were divided on Europe. He was intelligent, honest, blended principle with pragmatism and was as much a democrat as he was a socialist. Unlike his successors he accepted that Labour party policies were decided by votes by its' membership. He was against the appeasement of Franco’s fascists and Hitler’s Nazis when Churchill and Roosevelt were still backing the fascists as the supposed "lesser of two evils" - and he volunteered to serve in the Second World War, but he was also against wars that didn’t have to be fought. Some of the policies of the 1983 Labour manifesto were controversial - on unilateral nuclear disarmament and leaving the EU for instance - but overall it certainly wasn't any more extreme or 'ideological' than Thatcherism with its blindly ideological monetarism, but because the Murdoch press were allied to Thatcher they painted a very one sided picture which too many people accepted as fact. Thatcher would also have lost the 1983 election if it hadn't been for the Falklands war, because monetarism failed - it cut inflation but increased unemployment by 50% from 2 million to 3 million. That war was entirely avoidable (and Callaghan had avoided it in a similar situation a few years earlier) yet many voters rewarded Thatcher for her failure to avoid it, despite the many deaths and destroyed lives involved.

Foot was not to blame for the divisions in and splitting of the Labour Party, which were due to Stagflation which began under Heath

The 1983 election has been presented as a failure which was supposedly all down to Michael Foot’s leadership failures. This is hugely unfair and simplistic. The Labour party was deeply divided before Foot became leader. These divisions were the result of ‘stagflation’ (unemployment combined with inflation) which was first seen in the 1960s but became much worse under Heath’s Conservative government in 1973 after the Arab members of OPEC increased oil prices to put pressure on ‘western’ governments who backed Israel after the Arab defeat in the 1973 Israeli-Arab war. The causes of stagflation are still debated by economists. One theory is that a sudden increase in the price of a vital commodity such as oil can cause inflation of the prices of other things which at the same time leads to reduced economic growth as profit margins are cut or wiped out by increased costs for businesses.

Another is that it may be due to a governments printing more money or providing more credit (causing the value of money to fall as the supply of it increases relative to the demand – one cause of inflation as the same amount of money is now worth less than it was before) while excessive government regulation and taxation of businesses can simultaneously cause ‘stagnation’ – reduced economic growth and increased unemployment.

( My own, very amateur and partial, explanation is that it may also be the result of rapid economic growth combined with very unequal distribution of the new wealth created by that growth, so that the majority have less money to spend, leading to inflation of prices due to the increased money supply produced by growth, combined with reduced spending by most consumers, reducing demand and so causing unemployment and reduced economic growth – the counter-argument being that the wealthy will invest their extra money, providing investment to new businesses)

Like the ‘credit crisis’ the ‘stagflation’ of the 1970s was a worldwide problem. Of course, like the credit crisis, the suffering caused by it in the ‘developed’ world was fairly minor compared to the constant hunger and illness of most of the population of the ‘developing’ world, but people struggling to pay the bills were still stressed and tired – and votes would go to whoever could present a convincing solution to the crisis.

The Wilson and Callaghan (both Labour) governments of 1974 -1979 faced stagflation and didn’t know what the causes of it were, nor what the solution to it was any more than anyone else did (previously there had been recessions or inflation, but never both at once). They adopted a watered down version of Milton Friedman’s right wing theories of complete free trade and monetarism (later adopted with greater enthusiasm and even more disastrous results by Pinochet in Chile and Thatcher in Britain).

In accordance with this theory they cut public spending and went to the IMF for a loan. The IMF, as usual, attached all kinds of monetarist conditions including more public spending cuts and tax cuts. Unemployment in the UK reached an unprecedented 2 million. Thatcher’s Conservative party promised in opposition to cut unemployment. In government it made further cuts, making more public sector workers unemployed, leading to them having less money to spend, leading to private sector sales and profits falling, leading to higher unemployment in the private sector too. Unemployment would soon reach over 3 million.

The right of the Labour party blamed the trade unions and the left wing of the party and it’s Keynesian economic views and idealism for losing the 1983 election. (Keynesianism is an economic theory calling for increasing public spending and cutting taxes during recessions to get out of them, while cutting public spending and increasing taxes during economic booms to prevent unrealistic expectations of infinite growth leading to a sudden panic and crisis. Labour had become too socialist and too idealistic in their view. Keynesianism had been developed as a solution to the Great Depression of the 1930s. It worked then, but stagflation was a new problem.)

The left blamed the right of the party under Callaghan for cutting public spending, accepting the IMF’s monetarist principles and so sacking public sector workers – and refusing to accept the demands of striking trade unionists - causing many of Labour’s traditional allies and supporters to stay at home and not vote. In their view Callaghan had lost the 1979 election by not being socialist enough.

Under the right of the Labour party (reluctant monetarists) and the right of the Conservative party under Thatcher (enthusiastic monetarists) monetarism was adopted in the hope that it would end stagflation. Monetarism provided a theory to explain and control stagflation. This was all about controlling the money supply through the amount of notes printed by central banks and the interest rates they set. Unfortunately when governments tried to put the theoretical solutions into practice to try to solve stagflation the results were terrible. Where inflation was reduced it was reduced only at the cost of massively increased unemployment and reduced economic growth. The inflation part of ‘stagflation’ had been cut to nothing, but the stagnation was through the roof. The wealthiest (and in the UK some middle income earners) got better off; for the wealthiest it was an ‘economic miracle’; but the percentage of people unemployed or in poverty rocketed.

Much of the left and the right of the Labour party were now bitterly opposed to each other. Michael Foot was the only person in the Labour party who was so universally respected that every faction in the party would accept him as leader. The worst split took place under Foot’s leadership, with much of the right of the party (social democrats rather than Socialists) forming the SDP and then the SDP-Liberal Alliance with the Liberal party. However it’s unlikely that any party leader could have prevented this. Despite this the Labour party got 27.6% of the vote in the 1983 election with another 25.4% going to the Alliance. Due to the First-Past-the-Post electoral system though the Alliance’s 25.4% share of the vote got it just 23 seats (3.5% of the MPs in parliament), while the Conservatives, with 42% of the vote got 397 seats (62% of the 650 seats in parliament). So if anyone’s assigning blame for Labour losing the 1983 election the Labour MPs who began the SDP – David Owen, Shirley Williams, William Rogers and Roy Jenkins and – must take a large part of the blame. They may point to Foot taking the party too far to the left as the cause of the split, or blame the unfairness of the electoral system – and both of those claims have some truth in them, especially the second one, but they knew the 1983 election would take place on a first-past-the-post electoral system. They may have thought that Labour was now doomed by factionalism and extremism and that a new party was the only hope of holding off Thatcherism. In the event a third party in the first-past-the-post election system failed almost totally. Under a proportional system the Alliance and Labour would have got over 50% of the seats between them to the Conservatives 42% and Thatcher’s government would have been a single term one.

How voters rewarded Thatcher for failing to avoid an easily avoidable war, hundreds of deaths and thousands of ruined lives

Thatcher’s key vote-winner in the 1983 election was a wave of nationalistic jingoism over Britain’s defeat of Argentina in the completely avoidable Falklands War. The Argentine military junta was looking for a ‘patriotic’ war to distract from mass unemployment and political murders. Thatcher, with the worst poll ratings of any Prime Minister to that point, may also have been looking for a patriotic war to distract from her government having increased unemployment to 3 million in its crusade to break the trade unions and the Labour party, after promising in opposition to reduce unemployment. When the junta had made noises about the Falklands under her predecessor Callaghan the Labour government was persuaded by the Chiefs of Staff to send some destroyers to show Britain would fight if the Argentines invaded. When the same problem came up under Thatcher her government decided to withdraw the last Royal Navy ship – the HMS Endurance – from the South Atlantic, giving the Argentine military the impression that Britain wouldn’t fight for the Falklands (1) , (2).

The motive may have been a patriotic war for votes, or it may have been Thatcher’s narrow-minded obsession with cutting public spending as being a good thing in itself (her Defence Minister being chosen for his enthusiasm for spending cuts) which led to HMS Endurance being recalled to save a mere £3 million from a budget of hundreds of billions a year. Either way the decision cost 907 lives – 255 of them British, left 907 families grieving and wounded 1,845 people. Some of the wounded, like Simon Weston, who suffered severe burns in an Argentine missile attack on a British destroyer, still bear the physical and emotional scars. After many years of facial reconstruction operations and mental illness caused by seeing many of his friends and comrades burning to death Simon has partially recovered and has written several successful books on his experiences (1), (2).

If the electorate had been thinking straight Thatcher should have lost a lot of votes for her government’s incompetence or cynicism in losing so many lives totally un-necessarily. Instead many of them rewarded her for winning a war that she could have prevented.

The false caricature of Foot as naive pacifist

Michael Foot as Labour leader decided to back the war on the basis that the people of the Falkland islands wanted to be under British rule and that the Argentine invasion was unprovoked aggression and a breach of the UN charter and international law. He also condemned Thatcher for her ‘betrayal’ of the Falkland islanders in failing to signal to the junta that British forces would defend the islands.

Despite this most of the press – especially Murdoch’s ‘Sun’ Tabloid – tried to present Foot as a senile, naive, old pacifist blinded by ideology using quotes from him like “I am an inveterate peace-monger”. Foot was certainly a peace-monger when it came to avoidable wars but he was no appeaser. Once the Argentine forces invaded the Falklands he backed military action. He condemned the Chamberlain government over it’s appeasement of Hitler after the German invasion of Czechoslovakia just as loudly as Churchill did. (He also volunteered to serve in the army after Britain declared war on Germany, but was turned down due to his severe asthma.) Unlike Churchill he had also campaigned against the Baldwin government’s appeasement of Franco’s fascists in the Spanish Civil War in the 1920s (in which British Conservatives from Chamberlain to Churchill had no criticism of the government policy of not arming the elected Republicans and anarchists while making no attempt to stop Hitler and Mussolini sending arms, troops and entire squadrons of bombers to fight for Franco’s monarchists, largely on the grounds that fascists were seen as preferable to communists. The results of the policy were to make the Republicans reliant on Stalin and the Soviet Union for arms, dividing the Republicans and ensuring a fascist victory.) At that time Roosevelt was still referring to Mussolini as "that admirable Italian gentleman" (3), (4).

Foot was also opposed to the Iraq war, though he didn’t stop supporting the Labour party over it.

Foot, like Churchill, was prepared to fight when the alternative was to appease fascist regimes bent on world conquest and with the militaries to carry their threats out; Unlike Churchill he never backed wars of choice and Empire like the Boer war though.

The false caricature of Foot as ‘loony left’ - and the reality of a principled, reasonable, educated democrat

The Murdoch press also tried to paint Foot and the Labour party under him as ‘loony left’ using invented stories, like the ones about Labour controlled councils banning singing ‘baa baa black sheep’ as racist.

On nuclear weapons he took an uncompromising position of unilateral disarmament which not even his former hero Aneurin Bevan had adopted – but with the ‘Gang of Four’ and their supporters having left the party the majority of the party supported this position. I’m one of many people who disagree with this policy (in fact it's one of the few issues that i'm closer to Thatcher's views on), but Foot never forced this policy on his party in the 1983 Labour Election Manifesto. Under his leadership all decisions on party policy were decided democratically by a majority of the members. Critics may point out that union block votes compromised internal party democracy here - and they have a point - but today under 'one member, one vote' (which, in fact, still doesn't give equal votes to all members in conference or leadership elections) votes are irrelevant, because if the party leadership dislike the result, they ignore it. The last Labour leadership election was almost Soviet style, with only one candidate - Gordon Brown - on the ballot, with party members denied the right to vote for other candidates because too few MPs supported other candidates - most MPs being largely selected due to the influence of party leaders.

Since Foot never took the power to decide party policy himself he can’t be blamed for adopting policies supported by the majority of party members, whether they lost the party votes or not (and they may actually have increased the turn-out of Labour's core voters). Nor did Foot ever lie to get support for a policy he supported, the way Blair did on Iraq.

After Kinnock replaced Foot as leader democracy died in the Labour party. Under Kinnock, Blair and Brown votes by party conference are taken as ‘non-binding’ on the party leadership – in other words if they don’t like the result of a vote they ignore it and write their own policy instead. From Kinnock on if the party leader dislikes a candidate selected by a constituency party the leader or the National Executive Committee vetoes their candidacy and imposes a candidate they chose themselves – sometimes suspending or expelling the entire constituency party if it objects. The Conservative party is barely an more democratic internally. As a result the membership of the three largest parties in the UK has fallen steadily.

There have been a lot of crocodile tears since from party leaders about ‘public apathy’ and phony ‘attempts to reconnect with the voters’, but the truth is that party leaders have centralised all decision making in their own hands. While telling party members they have a duty to campaign for the policies and principles the party stands for they completely ignore the views of their members on what policies the party should have and removed the power to choose candidates by democratic votes too; So party members have left in droves. When one of the main parties has been out of power for a long time there’s a short-lived rise in membership as people too young to know what it was like in power the last time join up, along with some degree of opportunism. After the reality that their views are not wanted where they conflict with the latest u-turn by the leadership sink in they leave again. So Labour membership rose rapidly in 1997, but is now lower than ever before.

If you have an electoral system designed to hugely over-represent two large established parties and under-represent (or not represent) anyone else - and you then combine that with the members of the big parties having no say in what the parties’ policies are – the sad but obvious result is that a large minority of people are discouraged and give up on trying to influence their country’s government or politics at all.

Under Tony Blair billionaires like Lord Sainsbury made donations to party funds, were made Lords and then cabinet ministers – just as under Cameron the Conservatives have made Lord Ashcroft a Lord for making big donations to party funds – and if they win the next election they’ll make him a government minister too. Michael Foot never let big donations from billionaires influence party policy, nor did he ignore democratic votes by the majority of party members on policy.

Foot was a pragmatist on many issues. For instance he supported the Blair and Brown governments on their introduction of a national minimum wage and successful peace negotiations in Northern Ireland.

While I concede those two things were real achievements of ‘New Labour’ in government i can’t support them. I admit that the Conservatives would be even worse than Blair or Brown have been, but Blair and Brown continued and expanded the worst policies of the Conservatives under Major . They expanded the PFIs and PPPs begun under Major (resulting in increased taxes but cuts in the number of fully trained staff in the NHS and in schools), increased public subsidies to privatised rail firms (while they pushed rail fares up at several times the rate of inflation), continued arming and backing dictatorships and human rights abusers; and lied in order to take us into a war which could only cost more lives than it saved – and increase terrorism rather than reduce it.

That only underlines the fact that Foot was far more of a pragmatist and far less of an idealist or extremist than some of his critics said he was though. The one exception was his support for unilateral nuclear disarmament, but that was understandable in someone who heard live reports of the effects of the Hiroshima and Nagasaki bombings.

Having said that he never abandoned his principles – and his principles were not idle intellectualism, they were about helping those who needed the help.

Foot said that “We are not in this world to find elegant solutions, pregnant with initiative, or to serve the ways and modes of profitable progress. No, we are here to provide for all those who are weaker and hungrier, more battered and more crippled than ourselves. That is our only certain good and great purpose on earth..”

Thatcher meanwhile missed the entire point of the parable of the Good Samaritan by saying “No one would remember the Good Samaritan if he only had good intentions. He had money as well.”.

Margaret Thatcher was far more extreme and ideological in most of her policy positions than Foot ever was, but because her policies involved cutting taxes on the wealthiest, breaking the trade unions using anti-union laws and allowing Murdoch’s News International to avoid taxes in return for his newspapers’ support in elections much of the media shone a kindly light on Margaret Thatcher. Someone who wore the right clothes was forgiven for destroying the lives of thousands through an avoidable war and through a calculated policy of creating mass unemployment to drive down wages and break the trade unions and the main opposition party. Meanwhile Michael Foot, an honest, intelligent, principled, democrat was presented as if he was a senile lunatic because he wore a warm coat over his suit and black tie at the Cenotaph. Thatcher, responsible for so many needless deaths and so much suffering by the unemployed, the homeless and the opposition to Apartheid in South Africa (who she refused to help in any way and denounced as “terrorists”) was seen as a great heroine. Foot, who served both his country and the causes of democracy and equality worldwide, was looked down on as inferior for his sartorial inelegance. That is a measure of how shallow, how trivial and how confused our view of things can become when we allow manipulative alliances between media barons and politicians to distort our judgement and draw our eyes away from what’s really important. Michael Foot may have looked like he was wearing a “donkey jacket” at the cenotaph, but looking at his record and Margaret Thatcher’s there’s little doubt about which one often wore ideological blinkers that brought disaster and which one always fought to reduce the suffering of others.

Sources

(1) = Lawrence Freedman ‘The Official history of the Falklands War’

(2) = Anthony Seldon & Daniel Collings ‘Britain Under Thatcher’ , Chapter 2, page 20

(3) = Anthony Beevor ‘The Spanish Civil War’ , Chapter XI

(4) = Wolfgang Schivelbusch 'Three New Deals : Reflections on Roosevelt's America, Mussolini's Italy, and Hitler's Germany, 1933-1939' p. 31

Cameron's speech pretends 'big government' caused public debt, when de-regulation has caused private debts, bailed out by the public sector

David Cameron’s speech on the economy presents public debt as if it’s the cause of the economic crisis, when the actual cause is private debt, created by the same de-regulated ‘enterprise economy’ which he offers as a solution to the crisis (1).

Most public debt is not the result of ‘big government’ over-spending on the public sector, but of big companies donating to political parties and getting massive subsidies from the public sector as a result.

The most notorious example is of course bailing out debts run up by private banks due to a mixture of deregulation by liberals and conservatives alike on both sides of the Atlantic and an attempt by the Clinton administration to provide housing for the poorest without public spending or public housing , by requiring banks to fund it. The banks refused to accept a loss on this and played pass the parcel with the debt instead (2).

Much of the rest of the public debt, from PFIs and PPPs to Export Credit Guarantees for British Aerospace, is also due to government subsidies to big private companies under both Conservative and Labour governments.

Cameron claimed he would end the “undermining of our public sector professionals”, while simultaneously instituting a public sector pay freeze and cuts.

This continues the strange belief that all money going to the public sector impoverishes the private sector. In fact private firms would struggle to operate without education, transport and law enforcement; and cutting public sector pay and jobs is likely to lead to knock on job losses in the private sector.

If we were living under a vast state economy that allowed no private firms to compete he might have a point. The reverse has been true under Labour and Conservatives though - a few huge private firms in each sector buy massive public subsidies with relatively small donations to party funds.

The last time the Conservatives won an election claiming it would reduce unemployment caused by Labour was 1979. Thatcher’s government rapidly increased unemployment to over 3 million.

Sources

(1) = Conservative Party 02 Jan 2010 ‘Speech, David Cameron: We can't go on like this’,
http://www.conservatives.com/News/Speeches/2010/01/David_Cameron_We_cant_go_on_like_this.aspx

(2) = NYT 30 Sep 1999 ‘Fannie Mae Eases Credit To Aid Mortgage Lending’,
http://www.nytimes.com/1999/09/30/business/fannie-mae-eases-credit-to-aid-mortgage-lending.html