Day: 21 October 2020

Animal Farm was a staple of the GCSE English curriculum. Animal Farm taught the young to fear the USSR. Animal Farm taught us about the ‘inevitable’ collapse of revolutions into tyranny. That the intellectuals would cower in fear, the workers would be exploited, and the rhetoricians and CEOs would smugly enslave the population whilst “watching over our welfare”. It taught us that “several of them would have protested if they could have found the right arguments”. But that in a climate of fear, “no one dared speak his mind”. We read Nineteen Eighty-Four as teenagers. And realised that “no one ever seizes power with the intention of relinquishing it”. That the “whole aim of Newspeak is to narrow the range of thought” making free thinking “literally impossible, because there will be no words in which to express it”. That “there was truth and there was untruth, and if you clung to the truth even against the whole world, you were not mad”. That “sanity is not statistical”. Writers are the prophets of our age because they are bold enough to see through the smog of everyday existence to those recurring patterns of history and human nature. At a time when we are too terrified to peel off our masks and speak out – when it becomes simpler to conform than ...

Tiers of a Clown Andy Burnham accused the Prime Minister of playing a “game of poker with people’s lives” after he imposed a Tier 3 lockdown on Greater Manchester without agreeing a support package. Talks between the Government and political leaders in Greater Manchester broke down yesterday afternoon, with Andy Burnham and co holding out for £65 million and Boris and his ministers only being prepared to offer £60 million. The upshot is that Greater Manchester is now only going to get £22 million. At the 5pm presser where Boris tried to spin this to his advantage, Deputy Chief Medical Officer Jonathan Van-Tam – or JVT, as Boris insisted on calling him – produced a series of charts appearing to show that, in his own words: "Pretty much everywhere in England is now heating up to some extent." But his slide deck told a different story. For instance, the slide illustrating the geographical spread of positive cases (wrongly described as the spread of "COVID-19") showed the rate of infection falling in many parts of the country. Van-Tam made much of the fact that hospitals were admitting more and more Covid patients, particularly in the North West, as shown in the slide below. But what this chart doesn't show – and which no journalist asked about, unfortunately – is that Covid admissions in ...