Double speak and double standards

They are playing us for fools.

They said we were prepared for the coronavirus. That we had “fantastic, world-beating” testing; that the NHS was fully equipped and ready.

Then the bug arrived. And it turned out that we’d sold all the fantastic equipment abroad or run it down in austerity.

They told us not to worry. We must wash our hands, but apart from that, it should be “business as usual”. Shaking hands – even with people treating virus patients – was just fine.

But, just in case, they put out an appeal for ventilators (having "missed the email" about joining a European procurement programme. Maybe, post-Brexit, anything from the EU goes to spam). Ventilator manufacturers and suppliers put up their hands, but they didn't return the calls. Maybe a “patriotic” vacuum cleaner tycoon with a Singapore HQ could help? Or maybe not.

The World Health Organisation urged every country to “test, test, test”. So at that very moment, we stopped. Because “the science” said so. Except it didn't; we simply didn't have the capacity to carry out the tests. Because they had ignored offers from university research labs up and down the land and instead relied on friends in private industry.

It didn't matter, though, because there was a “game-changer” antibody test round the corner that would check whether healthy people had ever been ill. That, they said, would be far more effective in this battle/war against our invisible invader/enemy/foe than a system to check whether ill people had covid and, if so, who else they might have infected. That was more than two months ago. They are still promising both.

Then they toyed with the idea that it would a good thing if more than half the country became ill because that might stop them becoming ill later. Then they denied ever thinking such a thing.

People started dying. But they had "underlying health conditions", were very elderly and "probably would have died soon anyway". There was still not much to worry about. Most people would get only "very mild" symptoms.

While China, South Korea and New Zealand limited movement - and their death tolls - the British way was to keep calm and carry on. It seemed that "they" valued “liberty” and “freedom” over life. The liberty to watch football in Liverpool in the company of fans from covid-riven Spain; the freedom to travel from across the country to bet on horses jumping over fences in Cheltenham.

Everything would be fine. We just needed to wash our hands while singing Happy Birthday – or, if you were Jacob Rees-Mogg, the National Anthem.

People started dying in larger numbers. Including younger, healthier people. And it didn't look so fine. So they told us to make only essential journeys and not to visit or even isolate in our holiday homes - apparently without realising that millions of families don’t have a second bedroom, let alone a second home. So we went to the seaside instead and created essential traffic jams all the way to Cornwall, the Lakes and the Peak District.

Tougher measures had to follow. Schools were to close. Pubs could stay open until midnight, but customers were urged, pleeeeease, to forgo the "Englishman's inalienable right" to enter them one last time. Funnily enough, the advice was again disregarded.

Finally, they told us all to stay indoors, full stop. The Queen was enlisted to tell us we were all in it together and - in keeping with the favoured wartime motif - to echo Vera Lynn’s promise that we would meet again.

A week later, a cabinet minister was caught jaunting to his second home. Was he sacked? Did he resign? No. He was wheeled out to speak for the Government at the Downing Street briefing that very day..

There were mumblings about a lack of hospital equipment, and Michael Gove promised on national television that “thousands” of ventilators would start arriving the following week. A few turned up on time. Have the rest ever surfaced? Who knows?

Soldiers built pop-up hospitals in exhibition centres, stadiums, airports. Look at our Great British heroes, achieving so much in so little time. Anything Wuhan can do, we can do too. Except protect lives. But there were no extra nurses or doctors to work in the new hospitals, so they couldn’t take any patients and were mothballed.

And still people died. But the only ones they were counting were those who had gone to hospital and had been tested – while alive - to see if they really had the virus. And they still weren’t doing that many tests. So the numbers weren’t too frightening. Anyway, everyone was too busy praying for the Prime Minister, who was in intensive care "fighting for his life".

Even when the death toll hit 1,000 a day, there were reasons for rejoicing: Boris was safely back at Chequers with Carrie and an old man called Captain Tom had raised a million pounds for the NHS by walking round his garden, the last lap witnessed and saluted by a military guard of honour.

Doctors and nurses begged to be tested because they couldn’t work if they had a sniffle, even if it wasn't the dreaded Covid. Who was to know?

"They" promised that testing would be “ramped up”. It wasn’t. But they ostentatiously clapped for carers on Thursdays.

Doctors and nurses begged for protective equipment so that they could do their jobs safely. "They" said they'd bought billions of "items" (a single glove counting as an "item"). There was plenty to go round - "if used properly". And they clapped on Thursdays.

Doctors and nurses started dying. "They" paused for a minute’s silence, then carried on telling us how wonderful the country and its heroes were. Especially Captain Tom, whose reward for a walk that had raised £10m, then £20m, then £30m, was to “virtually” open one of the ghost Nightingale hospitals.

They promised again and again that testing would be ramped up – to 100,000 day by the end of April. A target “smashed” by sending 40,000 in the post (who knows if they arrived, were conducted properly or ever processed) and 30,000 or so to university labs for research purposes.

Hidden away from all of this, old people were dying by the dozen in care homes all over the country. But they weren’t counted. Was that because they didn’t count? Hadn’t that genius pulling the strings of government expressed the sentiment that if a few old people died, so be it?
Hadn't over-60s been warned that if they fell ill they would be at the back of the queue for a ventilator? Hadn't over-85s been asked not to go to hospital because they might want to avoid "being a burden on the NHS" and "dying alone"? Hadn't over-90s been telephoned by their GPs asking them to sign DNR forms - and been overruled when they declined?

One old person, however, was to be venerated above all others. Captain Tom, now the proud owner of an England Test cricket cap, was promoted to colonel for his 100th birthday.

Carers pleaded for protective equipment, but there was none to be had, because the rest of the world had gone to market in January while they were worrying about bongs for Brexit, and the limited supplies were needed for the NHS heroes. Never let it be said that they weren't imaginative in trying to make up the shortfall: they bought some gowns from a Turkish T-shirt salesman, but they weren't up to standard, and the Daily Mail helped out by flying in a few bits and pieces amid great fanfare.

At last they started counting everyone whose death certificate included the word Covid. And even after they’d counted them in, there were still 10,000 more deaths this spring than last that they couldn’t explain.

But no one should think that they didn’t care about the aged dying: "Lockdown started for them before the general population". Had it? Other than the blanket order for over-70s to shut themselves away for 12 weeks?

They’d thrown a “protective ring” around care homes “from the outset”. By block-booking 160,000 places to free up hospital beds? Great idea, if only they’d tested the patients before discharging them.

Families may have been barred from visiting care home residents, but the carers themselves were coming and going with not a test or a bit of PPE in sight.

Never mind. We were soon rejoicing again because Carrie had had a baby.

Yet the natives were still restless, stuck indoors, home-schooling their kids and Zooming. So "they" let us visit garden centres – though not for tea and cake. The Queen was rolled out again for the VE Day celebrations – not commemorations? And they knighted Captain Tom. For walking round his garden.

He ended up raising £39m, against an original target of £1,000. Amazing. Would he have been honoured for the £1,000? The actual walking would have taken no less effort, his personal achievement no smaller. Of course not.

The difference was a PR-savvy daughter and a government/country desperate for something joyous.

We needed it. We now have the highest death toll in bald numbers in Europe and, last week, the highest per capita in the world. But, having spent seven weeks proclaiming our “success” in combating the virus, they suddenly declared international comparisons "unhelpful" once we’d claimed the European championship.

The scientist whose research prompted the lockdown was caught having a visit from his lover in breach of the rules; a man who worked on the SAGE committee for nothing. They got rid of him pronto.

The man who effectively runs the country - and probably wrote the rules - was caught driving with his wife and son 260 miles to isolate at his parents’ country farm when both adults thought they had Covid. "They" clung to him like ivy to a willow tree. For he was all they had. Without him, they'd be even more clueless.

These were, they said, exceptional circumstances. Because who would care for the boy if both were ill? As though no other parents in the country had faced such a dilemma over the past two months. He was, they said, right to follow his instincts as a father. As though no other father in the land ever gave a thought to the care of his child or set aside his paternal instincts in order to obey the rules as most of us understood them.

It was reasonable, they said, for a man to drive 30 miles to a beauty spot when his vision was “weird” to test whether he could see well enough to drive back to London. On Easter Sunday, his wife’s birthday, or Day 15 as he pointedly called it, in the full knowledge that infected households are supposed to isolate for 14 days.

So reasonable that Michael Gove asserted on LBC that he, too, “on occasion” had driven to test his eyesight.

So reasonable that a succession of Cabinet ministers dutifully and desperately tweeted in unison that it was so - unaware or untroubled that their arrogant corvid tone jarred with the nation's Covid ear.

To take our minds - or rather media minds - off Cummings, they launched the "track and trace" programme early - but it didn't work - and upped testing capacity to 200,000 - but didn't actually do that many. On the back of these "advances", they started doling out daily treats, patronisingly aimed at what they thought the proles wanted: promises of pubs re-opening, horses racing again. The Premiership helpfully announced that the season would soon resume.

The supportive papers duly obliged with the good news non-Dom headlines, but for once the people were not convinced.

"See friends and family from Monday," they said on Thursday. But please not over the coming sunny weekend (the last weekend before many go back to school or work), they added on Friday - knowing full well that we wouldn’t listen to that bit.

Having declared for months that they were “following the science”, they defied the scientists to tempt us with goodies as dangerous as anything Snow White, Hansel or Gretel might be offered in the woods. “Go outside”, they told the vulnerable. By their own measures, the infection rate was still at "level 4", yet - to save Cummings - lockdown was being eased as though it were at level 1, which was supposed to be when the greatest risk had passed and a vaccine was available.

People are dying. The economy is wrecked. We’re heading for a no-deal Brexit precipice. And still they use words like “fantastic” and “world-beating”. Don't they understand that this isn't a competition; we don't want to beat the world. We just want our families to be kept safe and to be able to hold our Mum's hand as she dies.

Instead we’re living in an Orwellian dystopia "led" by an absentee figurehead prime minister of Churchillian delusion who signed up for the glory, not the gory. A man devoid of integrity, insight and ideas; a man totally lacking the appetite, application or ability to perform the job attached to the title he craved; a man who thinks charging immigrant health workers extra for the service they provide - whether they use it or not - is the "right thing to do".

A world where three-word slogans masquerade as policy. A world where clapping on Thursdays and feting 100-year-olds who see the NHS as a charity case (another embarrassing blip and Captain Tom will be in the Lords) have become a substitute for paying and equipping health staff properly. A world where they fly the Union Flag, publish photos of babies, dogs and princesses, and get the Queen to talk to the nation from time to time. In the hope that we won’t notice the rest.

They are playing us for fools.

Why did the Daily Mail bury the story about the white terrorist who murdered Jo Cox?

Killers: Michale Adebolajo, Thomas Mair and Michael Adebowale

If Jo Cox had been a pro-Brexit Tory MP and her killer Thomas Mair a jihadist Syrian, what would the Daily Mail have done with the story?
As with many questions posed by that newspaper, the answer is that we don't know - but we can speculate. And most Mail watchers would speculate that the report of Mair's conviction and sentence would be a little further forward than page 30.
The positioning of today's court report - behind several pages on the Autumn Statement, a bit of frippery about Father Christmas and a story about "laughing" Calais migrants dialling 999 from the Channel - has raised eyebrows.
As has the main thrust of the Mail's spread, based on a conversation with a neighbour, that Mair might have been motivated by a fear of losing his council house to a family of immigrants. That and his dismay that his mother had married a black man.
How's that for a Mail hat-trick: blaming two  women - his mother and his victim -  a black man - his stepfather - and possibly non-existent immigrants? (The piece says he may have been mistaken in thinking that a foreign family was lined up to be given a home in his under-occupied house.)
Where were the questions about how Mair had been radicalised, the rise of far-right factions, secret cells and the like?

Here are some possible explanations:
It was a busy news day with Philip Hammond's first budget.
Mair never said a word, so it was impossible to know what was really going through his mind.
It had all been on television, radio and social media all day, so there was nothing new to add.

OK, so those don't really cut it. Let's try the flow of the paper.

A decision will have been made during the day to let the determinedly upbeat coverage of the Autumn Statement run from the front, right through the paper, until all angles had been covered, with the leader and comment pages forming a natural bridge to "the rest of the day's news".
After all that politics, the reader would need a rest, so some light relief was needed. Hence the positioning of the Santa story. A run of news stories that could be told relatively quickly -  rather than something that would require a spread - would also be in order.
This is partly a question of varying the "pace" of the paper and partly a matter of satisfying the advertising department. With all those clear pages for the budget up front, there would be ads to pack in before editorial could be allowed another open spread.

An alternative approach might have been to put Hammond on pages 1 and 2, followed by something lightweight on 3, the Jo Cox case on a spread or two from page 4, another breaker, and then the budget as a "pull-out" through the centre of the book.
Even taking into account the Brexit significance of the budget, it's a fair bet that  the running order would have been something like that had the killing been an act of Islamic terrorism. There might even have been space for a bit on the front.

No two news days are the same, but it is possible to flesh out such speculation with evidence from another brutal street murder with another victim whose working life involved serving the public: Lee Rigby.

Pages 1-7 of the Daily Mail on the days after the murders of Lee Rigby and Jo Cox

Fusilier Rigby was killed by a pair of black men in Woolwich in May 2013. Footage of one of the assailants holding a bloodied machete as he shouted into a cameraphone about avenging Muslims killed by British forces added to public horror at the crime. On the day after the murder, the Mail gave over its first seven pages to the story.
When Jo Cox was stabbed and shot during the referendum campaign, the Mail led on the murder (keeping its Cliff Richard puff), but then offered a bit of Seb Coe and Monty Don's begonias before returning to the story from pages 4 to 7.

It could be argued that the Rigby murder lent itself more to the blockbuster treatment: the unprecedented nature of the attack in the middle of the afternoon, the availability of pictures of the killers and the many witnesses to what was later described as their attempt to secure martyrdom through "suicide by cop" - attacking the police in the expectation that officers would be forced to fire on them.
The Mail certainly seems to have made that distinction. The Express also made more of Lee Rigby than it did Jo Cox. But - with the exception of The Times - other newspapers' coverage of the two murders was remarkably similar.
James Harding's Times gave far less space than the rest of Fleet Street to the Rigby killing, but under John Witherow's editorship, it marched in step with its rivals on Cox. The Mirror devoted one more spread to the murder of the MP than it had to the soldier.

Here's how they compared:

So if we accept that the papers generally regarded the killings as of roughly equal importance, did that stance follow through to the endings of the trials that led to two of the murderers being given whole life sentences and the third being ordered to serve 45 years?
All three were at some point in the proceedings described as "terrorists" and as "lone wolves". Police in both cases expressed concern about the difficulty in coping with individuals minded to kill for a "cause" and the potential numbers of such terrorists. Were those descriptions and their ramifications also treated equally once sentences had been passed?

This is how the Daily Mail covered the cases:

On the day the Rigby trial ended, the paper led on 80 people being hurt when a West End theatre ceiling caved in. Not quite the Autumn Statement, but a decent story. It didn't warrant the whole of the front page, however: there was still room for a puff for the following day's Christmas TV guide. The first mention of the trial came with the first of two spreads on pages 6 and 7.
Today the paper has faced flak for being alone in having no mention of Jo Cox on its front - but it could argue that that was because the budget story was so important that it demanded the entire page.

And while every other paper gave the Mair story more prominence than the Mail did, only the Times and Telegraph matched the space they had allocated to the sentencing of  Michael Adebolajo and Michael Adebowale three years earlier.
Here's how treatment of the two stories compared:

The Times and Telegraph are notable not only for the parity in the space given to the two cases, but also because they have gone beyond the "human interest" elements of today's story - Brendan Cox's statement and Mair's background -  to consider the impact of the rise of the far-right and the danger that disaffected "loners" might turn into terrorists. 

Whatever your view on that, if it is legitimate to be alert to the radicalisation of individual British Muslims - "home-grown terrorists" as the Press likes to call them - then surely the same must apply to white supremacists and neo-Nazis?

The Mail's coverage today was shoddy. But it was far from alone in being found wanting. 

Why did so many papers fail this test?

Because of the Brexit link?

Because of a reluctance to see where a tide of nationalism can lead?

Or simply because they can't accept that white British terrorists are as every bit as bad as brown ones from overseas?

And then there's the small matter of the serial killer who murdered at least four gay men being tucked away on pages 48 and 49 of the Mail. On balance, if a story warrants a headline like this, the chances are it should be further forward in the book than a spread on "the ads elf and safety forgot".

The Brexit audit

In four weeks' time it will all be over. The UK will have decided whether its future should be as part of the EU or outside of it.
The referendum on June 23 is not an election in which candidates offer manifestos packed with promises of what they will do if they win. There can be no promises because nobody knows what will happen after the votes are counted. All anyone can do is gaze into a crystal ball. And that ball is pretty cloudy.

For Brexiteers, the future means freedom from Brussels bureaucracy, the right to control who comes into the country and how our money is spent.
For Remainers, the future means stability, the continuation of partnerships across a whole range of spheres from science and research to trade and environmental initiatives.

For national newspapers fighting for survival in an age where people generally get their news from television, social media and apps, this campaign should have been an opportunity to prove that they are still relevant, and a chance to demonstrate print journalism's advantages over the screens.
Scrolling down on your mobile, you see only one item at a time. Pick up a newspaper and you can see everything at a glance: the main story, the sidebar, the panel. How better to see all the arguments? How convenient to have one side's view on one side of the page and the opposing stance on the other. It's called balanced reporting and good old-fashioned newspapers are uniquely placed to offer this kind of journalism.
Have they taken this opportunity? Have they proved themselves invaluable sources of information for a confused and rather irritated electorate?

Are you joking?
The right-wingers have gone all-out for Brexit, with the white-tops shouting at readers that they MUST vote to leave the EU, while the left-wingers have been muted. The Mirror's instincts seem to be to Remain, but it is struggling to come to terms with the idea of being on the same side as David Cameron. The Times is trying to be even-handed, but the only paper so far rising to the occasion is the i, which seems genuinely interested in informing rather than instructing its readers. This real shame in this that the paper's key selling point is that it is "concise". If only those with more space would adopt a similar strategy, they might reap some benefits. Maybe in the last four weeks of campaigning they will.

It should be remembered that newspapers are not obliged to offer balanced coverage. They are entitled to take a standpoint and press that view. Campaigning journalism has a long and glorious history. If the Daily Mail, Daily Express and Sun truly believe that Britain and its people would be better off outside of the EU, there is nothing intrinsically wrong with their arguing that case.
They have, however, all signed up to be regulated by Ipso and to the editors' code of practice.
The relevant clauses of that code state:

The Press must take care not to publish inaccurate, misleading or distorted information or  images, including headlines not supported by the text.
​
The Press, while free to editorialise and campaign, must distinguish clearly between comment, conjecture and fact.

An Oxford University study published this week looked at nearly a thousand articles published in the two months after David Cameron announced the date of the referendum and found that 45% of them had been pro-Brexit, 27% pro-remain, 19% were mixed and 9% were neutral.

SubScribe does not have the resources of Oxford's Reuters Institute for the Study of Journalism, but it is going to attempt an audit of the nine mainstream paid-for national papers' coverage of the last weeks of the campaign. This will be published on the mothballed website here.
To start with, you will be able to click on any of the titles to see the pages they have produced over the past week and make your own judgments on the headlines, prominence and projection of stories. These collated pages, which will be updated regularly, are those that directly refer to the EU debate. That means that if one paper regards overturned refugee boats from Libya as part of the issue, they will be shown; where another treats the Mediterranean tragedies as separate, their pages covering that story will not be included.
There is also a brief resumé of events in the campaign since last Monday, so that you can decide whether they have been reported clearly, ignored or overplayed.
And when all that has been put together, there will - naturally - be some SubScribe commentary on the way things are going and possibly some straight reporting of issues that the Press seem to have missed.
Your feedback will be much appreciated on this, especially in pointing up anything missing from the "events" round-up.

Thank you.