Remember when the USA was being run by that strange orange whackadoodle who used to say crazy shit about injecting yourself with bleach? Remember how that Very Stable Genius saw the world exclusively in relation to himself, and paid this "compliment" to our very own Alexander Boris de Pfeffel Johnson?
"They're saying Britain Trump. They call him Britain Trump. That's a good thing. They like me over there."
The bleach advice aged like milk, but while no literate Brit ever called Johnson "Britain Trump", except to mock the massive satsuma-faced toddler,* the comparison has resonated with people who are far smarter and more thoughtful than Trump himself. For Simon Wren-Lewis, the parallels between the two are tragic rather than comic:
One of the persistent features of Trump’s period as president was his obsession with Fox News. He preferred to get his information from Fox News than internal government briefings. In time Fox News started to understand this, and some of its journalists started directly addressing him in their shows. Why did Trump do this? Because all populists are narcissists who want to be admired their people. Most of the time, Fox News obliged...
...If we believe Cummings, Johnson too is obsessed by the media read by ‘his people’, and in particular his own paper The Telegraph. He looks to them to check he is being admired. So when this and other right wing papers started publishing anti-lockdown nonsense, it got to him. As the Prime Minister who had locked down the economy he was no longer admired by these newspapers. This overrode any ability to understand the reasons why lockdown was necessary (and quick and hard lockdowns particularly), so he became over the summer a lockdown skeptic.
The parallels between Trump and Johnson are striking but they're not exactly breaking news. What is interesting is where the far right/libertarian pressure that drove Britain Trump to botch the lockdowns is coming from. Because the "anti-lockdown nonsense" Wren-Lewis talks about didn't come from out of nowhere.
As Wren-Lewis points out, a lot of it is being propagated by the right-wing press, presumably reflecting the agenda of its oligarch owners.
But what's behind the Covid denialists who posted photos of empty NHS wards and claimed that the pandemic's a hoax? or the celebrity bobblehead who whinged that he paid the salary of NHS staff, who should be thanking him, rather than the other way round?
Did this furious anti-mask, anti-vaxx, anti-NHS anti-statist intervention arise spontaneously from the grass roots? An earlier post by Simon Wren-Lewis presents evidence that this is probably not the case. Back in 2018, he blogged about where the UK public was at, and it didn't seem to be with the small state libertarian vision of freedom from the big state:
When the public are asked about who should own and run various activities, there is clear support for more rather than less public involvement....
...Note that only about 10% want privatisation of the NHS, which has continued rapidly under this government. A government that reduces ernment spending and taxes, and pushes privatisation of the NHS, seems like a government of the few and not the many.
The post-pandemic outpouring of appreciation for our very statist National Heath Service seems to validate what Simon says.Whatever you think about the claps for carers, or the media focus on Captain Tom's fundraising efforts, appreciation for the institutions we have and the people who work for them seems to be genuine. Applications for nursing courses for autumn 2021 were up nearly a third from the previous year.
You might still argue that Brits (or at least the English majority in our fracturing Union) are socially conservative, but you'd have a way harder time arguing that they're libertarian small statists.
There's evidence that the "lockdown scepticism" that didn't come directly from the right wing press was largely the result of an AstroTurf campaign funded by people with deep pockets and the same far right-libertarian agenda as the right wing media owners. A by-no-means-exhaustive list of examples includes:
- UsforThem
UsforThem, a parents' lobbying group, appears to operate as part of a network that disseminates pseudoscience on the pandemic, for instance, around the role of schools in transmission, masks, safety measures, as well as other issues such as PCR tests and COVID-19 death certification...
...In June, UsforThem coordinated a pre-action legal letter to Education Secretary Gavin Williamson, obtained by Byline Times under Freedom of Information, threatening the Government with a judicial review if it did not re-open schools without safety measures.
The letter was prepared by the same global multi-billion-dollar law firm, DLA Piper, which has advised the Government on its COVID-19 response. (Nafeez Ahmed, Byline Times).
- The Oxford COVID-19 Evidence Service, a disinformation hub apparently cooked up by individuals linked to finance, the American right and a network of right wing lobby groups. The Oxford COVID-19 Evidence Service's dubious claims seem to have been thoroughly debunked, but not before undermining pblic trust in public health responses to the pandemic:
This has worrying echoes of big tobacco's concerted, and unfounded, attempts to cast doubt on the scientific consensus on the links between smoking and cancer. Doubt is their product.The damage to public discourse has been done. Large segments of the population seem to be convinced that the scientific community is fundamentally divided on how to respond to the COVID-19 pandemic. But this is untrue. (Byline Times).
- Health Advisory and Recovery Team (HART)
HART was co-founded by Graham Hutchinson, who has coordinated the group prior to and since its inception. He was listed as a member of the group until mid-February.
Hutchinson is an active proponent of COVID-19 pseudoscience and other conspiratorial disinformation. He has claimed that “vaccination is pointless” and implied that vaccines are part of a genocidal global conspiracy: “An urgent message for those wanting a Vaccine Passport. Do you realise your passport will need to be kept up-to-date which means they could at any point, for example, say you needed to have a vaccine a week to do anything? #Cashcow #Control #Genocide.” ...
...Elsewhere, [Hutchinson] tweeted that “99% of the corona bollocks was to get rid of Trump” and praised Donald Trump for being “against climate” and “chasing paediphile [sic] rings”. (again, Byline Times)
- Then there are wealthy individuals on the libertarian right, like Simon Dolan, the Monaco tax exile who took Matt Hancock and Education Secretary Gavin Williamson to court over the restrictions, arguing the Coronavirus regulations were "the most onerous restrictions to personal liberty" and furiously denounces both public health measures and any suggestion that he promotes dangerous conspiracy nonsense (which he self-evidently does). Or the property tycoon Richard Tice, who has raged against people staying away from offices for reasons which have nothing at all to do with the waning profitability of his huge commercial property portfolio, obviously.
- The Great Barrington Declaration advocating a ‘herd immunity’ approach to the COVID-19 pandemic, a product of the Charles Koch Foundation-funded American Institute for Economic Research (AIER).
- As Nafeez Ahmed's article points out, the Conservative Party’s own COVID Recovery Group (formerly the European Research Group) seems to be tied in with this shady lobbying network because of course it is.
- And then there's the Reclaim Party, fronted by that NHS-hating celebrity bobblehead. Apparently the asset manager and political donor Jeremy Hosking, who came in at 351 in the 2019 Sunday Times Rich List, provided £5 million for the bobblehead to spend time allegedly campaigning for the position of London Mayor, while splashing his anti-"woke" anti-lockdown, anti-socialised healthcare talking points all over the front pages of compliant newspapers (it's amazing what £5 million will do for the profile of a flaky no-hope candidate).
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| Attack of the celebrity bobbleheads. |
I could go on, but you get the picture. You've got a public which is broadly OK with the idea of socialised healthcare, and have been broadly amenable to the various measures needed to get the country through the pandemic on one side.** On the others you have a few polemicists in the right wing-media, speaking out on behalf of a largely AstroTurf lockdown backlash being fabricated by a tiny clique within the economic elite, afraid of the inevitable big government element of any serious response.
And in the middle is the Prime Minister of the United Kingdom, paralysed by indecision, like a donkey between two hay bales.
*© Stuart Maconie.
** There are real people who are very much not OK with lockdown measures, but the objections are, as far as I can see, to do with individual economic circumstances, not the sort of implacable ideological opposal to the principle of lockdowns we've seen from the activists who've been trying to undermine them. If your job is the one that goes, or you're not eligible for furlough, or you're one of the left-behind self-employed who fell through the cracks, of course you're going to be desperate and angry.
*** .gif credit.
