The Nurse and the Chancellor

Elon Musk’s purchase of Twitter has set the cat among the pigeons (or perhaps that should be the Mountain Bluebirds, for that is the bird the Twitter logo is based on) with concerns raised that in the name of free speech, Musk’s version of the social media platform will mean less moderation and the reinstatement of previously banned individuals like Donald Trump, Katie Hopkins, and Steve Bannon.

A Mountain Bluebird

Musk has described himself as “a free speech absolutist,” which infers that Twitter will indeed reduce moderation and reinstate those previously banned Twitterers; absolutism suggests that nothing is off limits, and that in the name of free speech, anything goes.

Elon Musk is paying $45billion for Twitter. Picture: Financial Times

What constitutes free speech depends, to an extent, on who is saying what, and who is hearing it. One man’s free speech is another’s hate speech; free speech is not the right to say whatever you like about whatever you like, whenever you like.

Just as free speech must allow the publication and promulgation of views that are not universally popular, so it must also bar hate speech, viz the incitement to violence and racial, sexual, and religious discrimination. Musk’s absolutist stance does not automatically infer that Twitter will no longer moderate or remove such posts, as some are claiming, although the extent to which Twitter’s policies in this area changes, if it changes at all, will no doubt be closely monitored.

Social media allows anyone to express an opinion on absolutely anything; one might say it positively encourages and provokes people to express opinions on any subject, even those of which they are particularly ignorant.

A lack of knowledge of a subject is no bar to expressing an opinion, it actually seems to be a positive incentive for some people. Thus, Bob, a retired bus driver from Barrelmouth-on-The-Woe, feels perfectly comfortable – entitled and obliged, even – to post his views on subjects as diverse as gender identity, Brexit, covid, Partygate, the tax affairs of the Chancellor’s wife, or the relative merits of Lionel Messi and Christiano Ronaldo. Funnily enough though, as soon as someone like Gary Lineker or Gary Neville posts an opinion on politics, Bob will tell them to “stick to football,” on which basis of course, Bob ought only to post on the subject of bus driving. *

For many people, being an ex-professional footballer means you can't comment on politics

Bob is wrong about the Garys, they have every right to make comments on any subject they wish, as does Bob. I suppose that Bob’s point would be that Gary Lineker (8.4m followers), and Gary Neville (5.1m) have much more reach than Bob (102 followers), but there is plenty of balance to views that Bob finds objectionable.

Meanwhile, Bob will post his views on topics like covid – perhaps on the effectiveness of masks or vaccines – and will do so in a thread started by an expect (an epidemiologist or virologist, perhaps), and will challenge that expert’s view. If Bob and his ilk are themselves challenged, they will doubtless claim that they have “done their research,” by which they mean they have searched online until they have found a random article from someone who is probably equally as unqualified in the subject, but which supports their point of view. This, they believe, adequately rebuts the argument of an eminently qualified and experienced expert. Google allows everyone to believe that they are an expert on a subject from reading a single webpage. In 1984, George Orwell wrote that “ignorance is strength” – he might equally have said that ignorance is knowledge.

Another interesting Twitter phenomenon relates to what might be called poverty shaming, whereby anyone who is finding it hard to makes ends meet is instantly blamed and shamed for their situation. A recent BBC news item about a part-time nurse who cannot afford enough food for her and her three children, meaning that she sometimes has to go without, provoked a predictably hostile response from some Twitter users. “She should go full-time, then“ wrote one. Another asked where the children’s father was, another suggested that she could adequately feed her family for 50p per day by eating nothing but Asda’s budget pasta, and that they would love to know what she spent her wages on, implying that they were being spent on fripperies rather than essentials.

Similarly, despite the cost of living crisis and the spiralling house prices that make it increasingly difficult for first time buyers, Kirsty Allsop thinks that giving up Netflix and take-away coffee will enable people to save enough to get on the property ladder, and plenty agree with her. I do take her point; giving up Netflix and a Starbucks a couple times a week ought to save you enough for a deposit on a one bedroom flat in my area – provided you’re prepared to wait 35 years.

People in the situation the BBC’s nurse find themselves in are often berated for owning a flat-screen TV (is there any other kind these days?), a smartphone (increasingly an essential rather than a luxury), and having a broadband connection (try working from home or having your children do their school homework without broadband). Perhaps our nurse and her children should come home from work and school and entertain themselves with books and board games until the lack of natural light forces them to go to bed sustained only by 50 grams of plain pasta.

Those who criticise our nurse and her ilk are probably just one pay packet away from being in the same situation themselves. The poverty shamed often find themselves in their situation through little fault of their own. Perhaps they have separated from their partner and had to reduce their working hours to look after their children, and now they are faced – as are we all – by an increase in the cost of living unlike any we have seen for fifty years. The poverty shamed are often depicted as feckless wastrels, demanding to be provided with luxury on benefits, but many are honest and hardworking, and have just fallen on hard times. That fact that 40% of Universal Credit claimants work FULL-TIME suggests that the problem lies elsewhere, and as costs rise and wages don’t keep up, this issue will get worse.

Oddly, those who criticise our impoverished nurse are equally likely to laud multi-billionaires like Elon Musk and Chancellor of The Exchequer, Rishi Sunak, and to admire the fabulously wealthy and their canny manipulation of tax laws to reduce their liabilities.

It has been suggested that instead of paying $44 billion for Twitter, Musk would have better used his money to give every one in America a million dollars; he would still have had $7 billion left. That was never going to happen, but now he has spent that money he will probably want to see a return on his investment, will we see some changes to the platform, like the introduction of adverts, or a fee to skip them, as is the case with Spotify and YouTube? (Edit: It has been pointed out to me that this maths is way, way out! To give everybody in America $1m, you'd need over 300 trillion Dollars. In my defence, these weren't my maths, but I should have checked rather than take them at face value. All a bit irrelevant in that no one is ever going to give everyone in a country a slice - no matter how large or small - of their fortune).

Finally, for those concerned about changes to Twitter, especially the platform’s policy on free speech, I leave you with these words from Curtis Stigers: “Oh damn now twitter isn’t gonna be friendly & warm & loving anymore.”

* Bob is a fictitious character, of course, but I'm sure we've all come across Bobs. 

 

Living With Covid

Government policy in England is now that we live with covid. If the success of that policy is measured by the number of people who are indeed living with it – that is to say, they have covid – then it has been a remarkable success.

One in thirteen people in England had covid during the week to 19^th March, that’s a whopping 4.9 million people, a record number for the pandemic.

When the next set of weekly figures are released, I would guess that that the number will be even higher. In all, there have been 21.2 million cases of covid in the UK since the pandemic began and the number of people we know who have it will soon be greater than those who have not. You'll be a member of a minority group if you haven’t had it. At present I know of more people who have covid, or who have recently had it, than at any time since the pandemic began in March 2020.

It came as little surprise to me that, after two years of successfully dodging covid, I succumbed a week or so ago, and I have a pretty good idea where and when I picked it up.

I first thought that I had something on Friday 25^th March, when I woke up with a sore throat. Whenever I get a cold, it starts with a sore throat, and I had a cold a few weeks ago that started with a dodgy throat. That cold was the mildest I can remember, but I had taken the precaution of doing a lateral flow test then, which had been negative.

On this particular Friday I was keen not to be positive as in the evening I was due to see Genesis at The O2. Having paid a princely sum for my ticket, and having had the show cancelled twice already, it was with some trepidation that I dropped the fluid into the LFT device, and waited. To my enormous relief, it came back negative, although I was quite probably positive already. Apart from the sore throat, which abated during the day, I felt perfectly fine.

I apologise profusely to anyone I may have I passed covid on to at The O2; clearly I must have had it, because the following morning, when I took another LFT, it came back positive.

The next step was to book a PCR test – a week later and that would have been more difficult, since free LFTs and PCRs have now been withdrawn, and all the testing centres have closed. Donald Trump was rightly ridiculed at the start of the pandemic when he said that the only reason the USA had record case numbers was because they were doing more tests than anyone, and our government seems to have taken that view on board – make it harder for people to test, and watch the case numbers tumble (or not, it seems).

Booking a PCR was simple, and half an hour after logging on to the government website, I’d booked a test, driven there, taken the test, and driven home again. Twenty four hours later I got an email – the PCR was positive, which was no surprise.

By any measure, I have been lucky. On the Saturday I was blowing hot and cold, had a sore throat, and a cough, and felt a bit weary, a bit like a cold.

Over the next few days, the sore throat abated, I felt less weary, and the only real symptom was the occasional cough. Unlike coughs I’ve had with colds, this one at least did not keep me awake. Not actually feeling tired did that. Sleeping was fitful to say the least. Overall, the symptoms have been very mild, for which, I thank the vaccines.

Unfortunately, having covid coal boxed things that I had planned. A recording of the BBC show, The Infinity Monkey Cage, and concerts by Simple Minds and 10CC all had to be missed.

Nine days after the original LFT, and I’m still coming up positive. I need two consecutive days with negative LFTs before I can officially stop isolating, but the NHS app says that I can stop on 5^th April, which is likely to be earlier (just), anyway.

I reckon that I caught covid at the Backyard Comedy Club in Bethnal Green on 22^nd March when I saw Paul Sinha’s radio show being recorded (see The Perfect Pub Quiz). Hardly anyone wore a mask at the venue, very few did on the trains and tubes going there and back.

The Backyard Comedy Club is owned by Lee Hurst, an outspoken critic of vaccinations, lockdowns and masks; the irony that I probably caught covid there is not lost on me. While Hurst is entitled to his views, I am sure that without the vaccine I would have been much more ill; had everyone at his venue worn masks, I probably would not have caught covid anyway.

Hurst is not alone in his opposition to masks. Many others are frequently on radio and TV repeatedly expressing similar views, some on the basis that masks don’t do any good; some believe that masks are a tool of government to control us. I am in favour of their continued use in some settings; public transport, shops, theatres, or indoor settings where people are in close proximity. It cannot be coincidence that case numbers have surged since mask mandates were relaxed.

Masks aren’t effective, some people say. I wonder, do those people use tissues, or handkerchiefs when they sneeze or cough? If so, why? If a mask doesn’t stop transmission, what use is a crumpled piece of Kleenex? Frankly, why not just sneeze in other people’s faces?

If masks are no use, then presumably, this age old advice can be ignored?

I confess that I have been wearing masks less since the rules were relaxed – there’s a sort of peer pressure, I suppose – and I now think that I was wrong to do so. To that extent, catching covid is possibly my own fault.

No matter how careful we are, the relaxation of restrictions, concomitant with a more transmissible strain means more and more people becoming infected. The degree to which they fall ill will depend on a number of variables, but there can be no doubt that if the percentage of infected people becoming seriously ill and possibly requiring hospital treatment remains unchanged, the actual number of people falling into those groups will continue to climb.

The herd immunity strategy proposed by the government in March 2020 was quickly discredited and dropped, but given that at that time it was held that it would be achieved once 60% of the population had become infected, increasing case numbers mean we seem to have readopted the policy, albeit by inertia.

Whatever the policy – and government seems not to have any sort of proactive covid policy at all now – we have without doubt reached the point where covid is regarded in much the same way as the common cold.

How appropriate a course of action this is for the unvaccinated or for the immunosuppressed remains to be seen: I have my doubts.