Independent Sage, Cronyism, A Foreign View of the UK, Drunk Football Coach

 ... It was in February   that the seeds of   Independent Sage   began to germinate.   That was when King   (Chair of Independent  Sage) first noticed our   divergence from the   rest of the world.

  "I was a little bit   puzzled by the fact that WHO (World Health Organisation) advice had gone out, but we weren't following it."

The orders from the World Health Organisation were to "test, test, test", but there seemed, he felt, to be no urgency. Elsewhere, it was not the same.

"I love Greece; I go there often. And I know quite a few people in the government and the British embassy. I called them up to find out what Greece was doing.

"They were following every bit of WHO advice. In February, they started sending ships to China to buy equipment for their hospitals to handle the pandemic. They were preparing everything in advance, getting themselves in a position where they could test and trace and isolate everybody who had the disease.

Then, when they had their first death, they went into lockdown. At the time of writing, Greece has had fewer than 200 deaths.

In contrast, he remembers watching Boris Johnson, incredulous. "Remember the prime minister shaking hands with six people in that hospital who had Covid-19? Who gave him that advice? Because he was playing with death. He wasn't taking it seriously."

(Tom Whipple, The Sunday Times, 2020)

The question has to be asked. Why did the UK not follow the advice of the World Health Organisation?

Cronyism

Studies made in the House of Lords
John Lavery (1856-1941)
Photo Credit: The Fitzwilliam Museum [ CC BY-NC-ND]

The Russian billionaire and newspaper proprietor Evgeny Lebedev and the prime minister's brother, Jo Johnson are amongst dozens of new nominations for peerages announced by Downing Street, while Theresa May's husband is in line for a knighthood.

...The Tory donor and city grandee Michael Spencer is nominated for a peerage.

...Reacting to the announcement of the nominations, Norman Fowler, the Lord Speaker, said:

"This list of new peers marks a lost opportunity to reduce numbers in the House of Lords. The result will be that the house will soon be nearly 830 strong - almost 200 greater than the House of Commons. That is a massive policy U-turn. It was only two years ago that the then prime minister pledged herself to a policy of "restraint" in new appointments. It was the first time that any prime minister had made such a pledge."

(Simon Murphy, Jim Waterson, The Guardian, 2020)

The House of Lords has over 500 members of political parties including Tory and Labour advisors, fundraisers and functionaries.

It is the second biggest legislative chamber in the world after the Chinese National People's Congress, which represents a country of 1.4 billion people. The Communist Party dominates the Congress. Who dominates the Lords? Bishops, judges, landowning Lords and various wealthy people. Reform of the Lords has been going on since 1911 and nothing much has changed.

Why not get rid of the lot of them and if any of the present incumbents thinks they're doing a good job let them stand for election.

A few days later.

Sir, Claire Fox will not be the first revolutionary communist to join the House of Lords. That distinction belongs to Wogan Phillips, who succeeded his father as Baron Milford in 1962. Having joined the Communist Party in the 1930s, Phillips served as an ambulance driver during the Spanish civil war and stood, unsuccessfully as the Communist candidate for Cirencester & Tewkesbury in the 1950 election.

In his maiden speech in the House of Lords, Phillips called for the abolition of the upper chamber. I trust Baroness Fox will do the same.

(Dr Alison McClean, Bristol, The Times, 2020)

A foreign view of the UK

Joshua Chaffin, an American who has recently become the Financial Times New York Correspondent, gives his view on what he will miss after spending five years in this country.

Adieu
Edmund Blair Leighton (1852-1922)
Photo Credit: Manchester Art Gallery [CC BY-NC-ND]

...In no particular order:

I miss the Question Time music. I miss that moment in every Question Time when somebody in the audience barks, in effect, "You're all bastards!" and everyone roars their approval.

...I miss the convivial vibe of the families at the cricket club where my son played - in contrast to the self-loathing dads and baying mothers on the sidelines of our son's soccer team in New Jersey.

I miss the woman in south Wales who wore pearls to meet me for a cup of tea at a supermarket cafeteria in Pontypool. I miss the woman from Sheffield who made me understand that sharp elbows are the defining feature of the middle class everywhere.

...I miss the sight of the cocky young men, with Beckham-esque haircuts and shaves, nursing pints outside a pub on a Friday afternoon - and the sense that only the costumes have changed since Shakespeare's time. I miss the horrid suits worn by your estate agents under the mistaken assumption that they confer some sense of trustworthiness.

I miss how you underestimate, and overestimate, your importance to the world. I miss our cheap and cheerful local state school. It got the job done, and then some.

...I miss your grudging acceptance that, even if you're not all in this together, you are probably stuck with one another.

...I miss the jumble of all your opposing parts and how each enhances the other - the toffs and the working class; Johnson and Corbyn; the bankers and the miners; the north and the south; Yorkshire and Lancashire; and on and on. I know you desperately want to be rid of each other. I do. But, I, as an outsider, see you as a great boisterous family, and could not imagine you in any other way. Really.

... I miss your refusal to pathologise shyness and your tolerance of eccentricity.

(Joshua Chaffin, The Independent, 2020)

Drunk Football Coach

If buses could talk, the history of football would be littered with yarns about the shenanigans of generations of players, in particular the messers and comedians who always gravitated to the seats at the back. They still can't talk - at least not yet - but it seems they have minds of their own these days.

On Saturday the coach that was supposed to transport the Oxford United squad to Accrington Stanley's Crown Ground refused to play ball. The interior had been doused with a sterilising anti-coronavirus spray that is laced with alcohol. When the perfectly innocent driver blew into the on-board breathalyser, the sensors apparently detected the ambient alcohol and immobilised the vehicle. The passengers had to scramble for cars and taxis to get them to Accrington.

They made it on time and won 4-1. This is a new yarn for the genre with a suitably novel twist: the players were models of sobriety - it was the bus that was drunk.

(Tommy Conlon, The Times, 2020)