Gravy Train, Social Media, Wellies, David Hume, Test and Trace, Moral Dilemmas

Weekly come the stories of huge sums of public money spent with seeming disregard for value, without tender or transparency, for services of dubious value or poor quality, to companies and consultants which often have close links to power. Though public attention is fixed on lockdowns and curfews, a bad smell grows - and the government would be wise to start clearing the air...

A sweet manufacturer from Co Antrim swapped gob-stoppers for gowns and won contracts worth £107 million without competitive tender. Ayanda Capital, a family office specialising in currency trading and private equity signed a £252 million contract for safety equipment, later supplying 50 million masks that could not be used. While there may be good reasons for these decisions, the government's persistent secrecy on this front does not allay suspicions of incompetence at best and deals for mates at worst.

Occupying the next carriage of the gravy train we have the management consultants, the global giants populated by former government advisers...

It emerged that the bill for private consultants on Covid-related projects had reached £175 million...

Dido
Henry Fuseli (1741-1825)
Yale Center for British Art [Public Domain]

The smell worsens around the test and trace system, run by the McKinsey alumna Dido Harding... More than 1,100 consultants from Deloitte are now working on test and trace... that executives at Boston Consulting Group are being paid as much as £6,250 a day for their input...

There's nothing wrong with good private companies filling gaps where necessary, but long term we should be aiming for a public sector that has in-house expertise and does not require armies of management consultants to keep the cogs turning...

(Clare Foges, The Times, 2020)

Isn't it ironic to note that in direct contrast to these consultants there is to be a pay freeze for  public sector workers?

(See Dec 18 - Consultants and Dec 1 - Dido Harding)

*Sir, Working in the Civil Service in the early Eighties we had it explained to us that a cheap consultant would just take what we told him, print it in fancy folders and sell it back to us. From then on we always quoted the lager advert of the time saying that they were "reassuringly expensive".

Anything you paid for was viewed as inherently worth more than anything you got free from the public sector. And as my MP, Meg Hillier, has found, anything spent on consultants counts as capital and is thus investment, which is good, whereas anything spent on public sector workers is running costs, which is bad. To this was added the view that any public sector capacity held in reserve for emergencies was slack, waste or the like, hence micro-management by way of national targets for just about everything.

It is this combination of no contingency reserve and an abject deference to the private sector that produces the unedifying spectacle of taxpayers' cash being gifted to faceless and unaccountable firms while benefit claimants and furloughed workers are told they have to make do with less.

(Nik Wood, London E9, The Times, 2020)

Social Media

Inconvenience of Life 11
David Reekie (b,.1947)
Photo Credit: National Museum of Scotland [CC BY-NC-ND]

... Leeching our joy, corrupting our synapses, destroying our capacity to concentrate, eradicating democracy, addling us with fomo, giving us tech neck and scroller's thumb, disrupting our sleep, destabilising the very idea of "truth", then making us suicidal.

It's the new smoking and we should all give it up. Now. Except - we're not. We've never used it more, thereby compounding our terrible anxiety re all the above with guilt and shame. Truly, we are lost and all we can do about it is share more funny alpaca videos.

Unless: is it that bad, actually? I mean, yes, it sucks our time and our focus like a tactile glowing portable leech, uses its algorithms to predict and control our responses like a dispassionate tech overlord, and provides a medium whereby people might insult each other anonymously - but so what?..

Whilst I'm fairly sure that the internet is cooking me slowly from within, a microwave for my soul, enabler of my corrosive narcissism, platform for my trolls, I also think that all that is preferable, to the alternative, which, according to most of the DITCH YOUR SCREENS propaganda I've encountered, mainly involves wild swimming...

Another argument in favour of ditching your screens is that it will allow us to re-form deep and meaningful connections with other people, in real life, and real time, with eye contact and one-on-one authenticity, the kind of intimacy we've forsaken for dropping the occasional "MISS YOOOOOOOU" on to a friend's Facebook feed, which is fine, except have you met other people? Largely they're awful...

(Polly Vernon, The Times, 2020)

Well Polly, you seem to have outlined many of the disadvantages of using social media yet seem determined to carry on. So carry on up the Fomo. For you, it seems, the pleasure, if that's the right word, outweighs the risks. 

(See High-tech pillow, Nov 20 and Instagram, 18 Dec)

*Last week, two related news items appeared on the same day. First, that young people who are unhappy with their appearance are most likely to develop depression, and second, that 60 per cent of eight-year-olds use messaging apps that are meant for teenagers.

Neither came as a surprise to me. From the time I entered my all-girls secondary school, I've seen countless friends succumb to severe mental health challenges: from depression to bulimia. I don't think it's any coincidence that we came of age as social media boomed, lying about our age as we signed up to Facebook and spending our teenage years desperately updating our profile photo in an attempt to garner strokes of that hallowed "Like" button.

Worryingly the habit has persisted into our twenties. When I speak to friends who have mental health difficulties, they often scroll through Instagram as they chat about those same difficulties, comparing themselves to a filtered, one-sided version of someone else's life (or a size-zero influencer who gets paid more the less she eats). I know these things are harmful now but I didn't as a teenager: why would you know at an age when you think you'll die alone unless you have a boyfriend?

We need to be honest with ourselves that social media is largely unhelpful when you're young and have mental problems. It's fashionable to spout creative rationales of how social media allows for connection and inspiration, citing uplifting quotes on Instagram and body-positive feeds (which instead of featuring normal-sized women, are often just full of skinny girls pictured eating huge burgers).

Deanne Jade, head of the National Centre for Eating Disorders says that the first thing she asks patients to do is switch off their phones and computers so that they can reset the way they think. Why is this so hard for some children and their parents to understand? The first thing I do when I'm feeling low is log out of Instagram or, if I'm stressed close my LinkedIn tab. Social media is a fairground hall of mirrors and when you're too full of emotion to see it's a distorted version of reality, you'll go mad if you stay.

As we exit the pandemic this spring, and children can interact once more in normal social settings, we have to stop making excuses for staying on social media when it's unhelpful. The harsh truth is that parents whose children are suffering from poor mental health need to find a way to get them offline.

(Pravina Rudra, The Times, 2020)

Wellies

A Staithes Fisherman
James Charles (1851-1906)
Photo Credit: Pannett Art Gallery [CC BY-NC]

Forget stilettos. Thanks to the pandemic's effect on lifestyle, fashion-conscious consumers may finally be seeing the benefit of practical footwear...

Hunter - a British welly brand that dates back to 1856 - had a 114% rise in sales of its classic Original Tall Boot design compared with last year. Sales of its Balmoral boot, designed for hiking, have risen by 110%. The Danish fashion brand Ganni launched its recycled rubber Country Stovler design in September. The first delivery sold out in weeks, even with a price tag of £215...

The welly fits into the so-called Cottagecore trend, with its fields, farms and mud. A picture of a young Princess Diana in the countryside wearing Hunter in 1981 has become a style reference for a new generation.

"An increased number of people in my peer group [are] wanting to head out of the city and into the countryside to escape what's happening," says the stylist Melissa Tarling. "Yes, this might sound slightly trivial in the grand scheme of things but what better way to do this than to be wearing your practical and elevated pair of wellington boots."

(Lauren Cochrane, The Guardian, 2020)

The cottagecore trend, eh? A price tag of £215, Diana becoming a "style reference" for a new generation. "Slightly trivial in the grand scheme of things", Melissa? Surely not.

David Hume

The principal of Edinburgh University has defended the renaming of the David Hume tower over the 18th-century philosopher's views on race.

David Hume (1711-1776), Historian and Philosopher
Allan Ramsey (1713-1784)
Photo Credit: National Galleries of Scotland

Peter Mathieson said the decision was made on the grounds that a black student might feel "deeply uncomfortable being in a building named after someone who considered him a lesser being than other humans".

Professor Mathieson said that "as a white person myself I find it difficult to dismiss or trivialise the lived experience of one of our black students, or to categorise the discomfort as 'woke' or 'snowflake' as some have done.

The move, which has prompted a furious reaction from some of the university's leading academics, came after a petition from student activists, who said that a previously unpublished essay by the philosopher showed he was a racist...

Internal correspondence seen by The Times, shows the decision to rename the tower 40 George Square was taken without consulting senior academics, who told the principal it had caused "substantial external damage to the university's reputation."...

Hume's views on race, they say, were common in his day but were "marginal to his body of ideas," adding: "Those views are not the reason the building is named after him. It is in recognition of his enduring influence in philosophy, history and political economy... to address this issue solely on the basis of the matter of one racist footnote is simplistic, and not appropriate for a serious university."

(Magnus Linklater, The Times, 2020)

Why weren't the senior academics consulted? And Charles Darwin, be afraid, be very afraid, that buildings named after you will be renamed if the agitators get their way.  (See Letters Nov 24)

Test and Trace

St Roch
Carlo Crivelli (c.1430-c.1495)
Photo Credit: The Wallace Collection
[CC BY-NC-ND]

... One of the criticisms of the Government's approach to test and trace is its failure to adequately engage with local public health bodies. Indeed, local authorities have been able to reach a higher proportion of contacts than Serco has. Such organisations have years of experience in managing outbreaks of infectious diseases and are able to raise awareness and engage communities in ways that a one-size-fits-all approach simply could not replicate.

This is not a matter of ideology without an evidence base. It is entrusting a highly complex task to people who have experience in the field. This should not be controversial.

We still cannot get the basics right, but the government seems hell-bent on pursuing Operation Moonshot: a £100 bn programme which aims to be carrying out up to 10 million tests a day by early 2021. There is nothing wrong with ambition - I just wish they'd stop trying to run before they can walk.

With hospital admissions on the rise, particularly in northern England, the Government needs to be candid about test and trace failures - and fix them before it is too late.

(The Secret Medic, The i, 2020)

I don't think there's any chance that the government will be candid about test and trace failures and Serco, the firm that recruits contact tracers and manages a large proportion of the country's test sites, have just had their test and trace contract extended. (You might just have to investigate St Roch!)

Moral Dilemmas

The Judgement of Zaleucus
Ambrosius I Franken (1544-1618)
Photo Credit: The Fitzwilliam Museum [CC BY-NC-ND]

First, you need to picture the sandwich. This was a 6ft-long party sub from a local deli, with loaves of bread braided together to make one super-sandwich - nearly twice the standard width and loaded with fillings. It would have comfortably fed 20 to 25 people, and there were far fewer coming over to watch the fight.

But the host had not accounted for Alan. While the group was distracted by the TV, he ate more than half the sandwich by himself.

"What I thought would be a total non-issue has ballooned into a huge problem," Alan began his online post the following morning.

His host's girlfriend had exploded at him, calling him an "incredible pig" for eating 3-4ft of a 6ft sandwich. Alan's protest that he had brought homemade chicken wings to share ("sort of my speciality") fell on deaf ears, as did his offer to order pizzas for the group.

The next day Alan awoke to angry texts telling him that he had embarrassed himself.

"I figured I could post here to see if what I did was really that bad," Alan wrote on the online forum Reddit. "Was I the asshole for eating that much of the sandwich?"

It's a question that all but the most oblivious of us sometimes ask: am I the bad one in this situation?

Am I in the wrong for wanting to bring my dog to social events? For having a destination wedding? For telling my boyfriend he can't order KFC because I can't eat it? For telling my six year-old stepsister she isn't my real sister?

In an age of uncertainty, Reddit's Am I the Asshole? forum exists to set us straight. It is where some 2.4 million people gather to review accounts of real-life wrongdoing, before delivering their verdict: YTA ("You're the Asshole") or NTA ("Not the Asshole")...

(Elle Hunt, The Guardian, 2020)

Amazing, absolutely amazing. Every issue reduced to a yes-or-no-poll in which everyone gets a vote and presumably the "verdict" is reached on which response receives the most votes. There is no question of an individual taking responsibility for his/her own actions, for working out their own moral codes. Critical thought and judgement are totally lacking. Was the individual not brought up to distinguish right from wrong? 

By the way Alan was voted a YTA but he should have known that what he had done was a selfish act - shouldn't he?