Here in Queensland (my place of exile since 2005) we are in Week 5 of the so-called lockdown. The last week of the previous school term involved working at home, then there was a two week school ‘break’ – not ‘holiday’ as we were informed. We have just completed the second week of the second term, so the third week of home schooling. Fortunately, the premier of Queensland has said that because we have all been good and listened to nanny, there are going to be some relaxations of the rules today. As I type these words, there have been 1,033 confirmed cases in Queensland and six (yes, six!) deaths. For Australia as a whole, those figures are 6,767 and 93 respectively.
In no particular order, I’d like to share some thoughts about what the past month or so has revealed about the state of our society.
The first and most obvious point to make about Covid19 is about the appalling behaviour of the media during this crisis. The modern media is no stranger to hyperbole – everything is either the best thing ever or the absolute end of civilisation as we know it. Journalists appear to be entirely ignorant of history and can only comment on the most recent events; if they do mention history it’s usually a tendentious interpretation of events in the 1930s. Witness how many lists of ‘best ever’ football matches only contain games from the Premier League.
Mental health professions refer to ‘catastrophising,’ the irrational belief that things are much worse than they really are and that the future holds nothing but bad news. During the Brexit debacle, sections of the media claimed that the UK’s economy would collapse if the country left the European Union. And don’t even bother discussing the insane way much of the media reports on the antics of the buffoon in the White House. The media bullied spineless politicians into this lockdown and now constantly ask about when it is going to be lifted. If only someone in government had the courage to tell these self-important journalists to go jump in a lake; it’s an interesting counterfactual to think about what the media would have done if the Orange One had panicked – they’d probably be opposing lockdown and demanding calm.
Hot on the heels of the reptiles in the media, my second thought is on celebrities. It is clear that these narcissists are finding it very difficult to cope without the attention and worship they are used to. Singing songs from your mega-mansion, almost always decorated in a vulgar fashion that would make the Emperor Nero raise an eyebrow, does not prove ‘we are all in this together.’ This Twitter user knows the score…
There is an episode of The Simpsons set in the future where it has become illegal to be a celebrity and newsman Kent Brockman advises people of the number to contact if anyone sees one. If only.
Combining the previous two points, there is an undoubted class element to the lockdown. It’s all very well to sneer at the little people from your tacky mansion and it’s easy to berate people going to the park from your second home in Tuscany. Real people have to go to real jobs, they can’t just write racist screeds for The Guardian or spout garbage from the comfort of their vast, booklined studies on Sky News. And yes, I wrote ‘real people’ and I mean it in the same way Harvey Keitel meant it in Reservoir Dogs.
Another feature of our times is the insistence of a certain type of politician and/or media commentator on the importance of experts. I’m all in favour of expertise – anyone who says they don’t want an expert surgeon for their mother’s operation, an expert lawyer to write their will or an expert teacher for their children is a liar. But I’m afraid politics, particularly democratic politics, is not the exclusive realm of experts. Politics involves choices, often not between good and bad outcomes but between bad and equally bad outcomes. Once does not have to be a disciple of Jeremy Bentham or John Stuart Mill to acknowledge that politics is not the pursuit of perfection but of the greatest good for the greatest number. Presenting the current crisis as a choice between the economy or saving lives is both childish and emotionally incontinent.
Leading on from the previous paragraph, it is clear that experts are as prone to disagreement as anyone else. Most politicians today come from an arts or legal background and seem scared of science and scientists. This crisis has proved that there is no such thing as ‘the’ science (and, as an aside, doesn’t the media’s obsession with a Swedish teenager undermine their cult of expertise?); science is a methodology, it is not a set of rules handed down from Mount Sinai. As a brutal analogy, the atom bomb was developed by expert physicists but it was a political decision to drop the bomb on Japan. And remember, you are only an expert in what you are an expert in; having a Ph.D in the history of Byzantine fireplaces doesn’t make you an expert in the spread of novel viruses – you may as well get your political opinions from that tramp’s mate Brand.
As well as their cult of experts, some journalists appear to love international organisations. Now is not the time to revisit the arguments over the neoliberal European Union, the fantasy utopia of pseudo-leftists. The worship of the alphabet agencies has a long pedigree so why should the coronavirus crisis be any different? The World Health Organisation does seem to have an odd relationship with the Chinese Communist Party and its leader appears to have a fairly distant acquaintance with the truth. This is emphatically not an endorsement of some of the mad anti-WHO conspiracy theories online but like its parent organisation the United Nations, the WHO seems both inept and corrupt. This is a depressing reality with so many of these international organisations that once they reach a certain size they become institutionally corrupt. Witness FIFA, a giant money-laundering syndicate rather than a sporting body, or the appalling behaviour of Oxfam in Haiti.
You can link all the above points into the one rage-inducing fact that coronavirus has made as plain as day – that there are large number of people who are either obscenely wealthy or drawing vast salaries for doing very little work. Jeff Bezos, the head of Amazon, has an estimated fortune of $139,730,000,000; if he lived on the US median wage of $48,516, he could survive for 2,880,080 years. Grinning hippy and all-round ‘nice guy’ Richard Branson demands half a billion quid from the UK government despite having a fortune in a excess of £4,000,000,000 and not having paid income tax for fourteen years. The vacuous and multitalentless Beckman woman has more than £300,000,000. These figures are an obscenity.
The appalling wealth cornered by the top 0.1% is mirrored by the abhorrent amounts earned by their cheerleaders in the media. Hundreds of thousands of pounds for reading off an autocue, that halfwit Piers Morgan on £1,100,000 for putting his ignorance on display whilst Laura Kuenssberg gets over a quarter of a million from the BBC poll tax. The whole salary structure is completely out of whack with MPs giving themselves an extra £10,000 expenses on top of their £80,000 salaries during the lockdown. Even the sainted NHS can’t get its priorities right with thousands of non-medical staff on six-figures wages and some VSMs (Very Senior Managers) paid in excess of £200,000.
My list of enemies of the people is getting longer by the day.
Mike's Place 
A lot of good stuff, our NHS has and always will be, a bottomless pit with respect to finance. Basically it’s too large to manage and needs to be bought in line with commercial guidelines. Trouble is it has become a policalm”hot potato” and no polical party has the guts to do something, it’s easier to keep quiet and get more money out of ordinary tax payers.
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