THE CURSE OF HISTORY

What is the historical context of the latest conflagration in the Holy Land? To read the opinion columns in the Times and Telegraph , you might be forgiven for thinking of it as an inconvenience endured by north London Jewish schoolchildren. On television meanwhile, it would appear to be the unacceptable justification for Israel's " wholesale destruction" of Gaza (Channel 4); or something to do with an organisation (Hamas) "proscribed by the UK government" (BBC); or a completely irrelevant aspect of a humanitarian disaster in one of the most densely populated places on the planet (ITV). By contrast, government spokesmen in London seem to think it has got something to do with the right to protest in the UK, in which they appear opposed to the Metropolitan Police which has its own "Islamic experts"(sic). In Scotland meanwhile, the main narrative arc has been defined by the disruption of the travel plans of the First Minister's parents-in-law. Quite so.

Yet very nearly two thousand years divided the building of the Temple of Solomon and the eruption of Islam into the Holy Land in the Seventh century. In between times, Christians also staked a claim to land the size of which is out of all proportion to the global and cultural significance attached to it. Of this in the UK, we are almost almost wholly and wilfully ignorant.

In 1995 as part of the Oslo peace accords, Israel (then led by Yitzhak Rabin) agreed to hand over 40% of the West Bank to Palestinian control that was just short of full sovereignty. By which stage, both the PLO and a number of Arab states including Egypt and Jordan had fundamentally recognised Israel's right to exist in peace.  Even the former implacable hostility of Syria had been somewhat mollified. In the Oslo II settlement, Rabin too acknowledged the need for an eventual Palestinian state so that the two sides could separate "out of respect for each other rather than in enmity". In 2000 at Camp David in the USA, his successor Ehud Barak was prepared to concede 92% of West Bank territory and all of Gaza to the Palestinians. A deal was also offered to the Syrians for a return of the Golan heights, captured by Israel during the Six Day War. Ultimately both deals foundered on the vexed question of the status of Jerusalem ( the Israelis offered a return of East Jerusalem and for shared sovereignty of the Western half ) and the line of the frontier with Syria once the Golan had been restored. In both cases, Arab and Palestinian maximalist demands scuppered the chance for a long lasting settlement. It would be fair to say that in seeking an accommodation with its Arab neighbours and the Palestinians, the Israelis had been taking far more of a risk (exchanging land for a mere paper promise of peace ) than were their counterparts. Indeed Rabin paid for this risk with his life - he was assassinated by a fellow Jew who opposed any concessions to the Arabs. But the fundamentals of the conflict had radically changed. By recognising each side's right to exist and to enjoy a home they could call their own, the Arab Israeli conflict was turned from an existential question into a political one.

Scroll forward two decades and the Palestinians are back to Square One and Syria has been consumed by a vicious civil war which has been going on since 2011. In the West Bank Palestinians are represented by an increasingly defunct and corrupt Palestinian authority and in the Gaza strip by the Sunni Hamas. Among their diaspora in the Lebanon, they have thrown their lot in with the Shi'ite Hezbollah. It would also be fair to say that the latter two are Islamic death cults united by an incoherent yet murderous plan for "jihad" which has the avowed aim of not only erasing the state of Israel but also of driving the Jews out of the Holy Land. 

Has Israel been as guilty of squandering a peace which had been so tantalisingly close?  Its politics have been increasingly dominated at the margin by right-wing and fundamentalist interests which are suspicious or hostile to any accommodation. Its current Prime Minister Netanyahu has a history of resiling from commitments to the Palestinians made by his predecessors. More seriously, the increasing Jewish settlement of the West Bank since 2000 in the form of armed redoubts has been a complete breach of good faith and been condemned not only by the UN but also by the Israeli Supreme Court - one of the reasons perhaps why Netanyahu has recently tried to trim its sails, to massive public protest. Indeed, the regressive policies of the various  right wing Likud administrations of Benjamin Netanyahu have arguably placed Israel in one of its most perilous positions both on the ground and geo-politically since its war in the Lebanon in the nineteen eighties.

In all that time however, Israel has remained a democracy and need take no lessons from the Arab world about governance, economic diversity, and the rule of law. Arab support for the Palestinians is paper thin and behind all the rhetoric, there is a great deal of fear in the former so-called " front line " states of the destabilising nature of the Palestinian diaspora in their own countries, as Jordan and Lebanon can attest from bitter memory. Perhaps it is the sham of Arab "solidarity" which has increasingly driven the Palestinians towards Islamic fundamentalism. It is a rich irony that their main state sponsor would now appear to be Persian Iran, which has its own history of bloody warfare against its Arab neighbours, most recently with Iraq across the decade of the nineteen eighties. Iran continues to de-stabilise the region, supporting wars by proxy in Syria and Yemen and by continuing to undermine the fragile stability of Lebanon and Iraq. In these conflicts the Palestinians are now mixed up in the barely contained antagonism between Sunni and Shia Islam, an enormous handicap in the quest for their own statehood.

Yet the state of Israel is also riven by inter-Jewish tension. The ultra-Orthodox and Haredi traditions are not at all reconciled to the Israeli state in its current form. This is a community over 1.5m strong, but it has exerted a dis-proportionate influence over the political right in Israel. Indeed back in 1995, Rabin suspected that at some point, concessions to the Arabs might spark a civil war in Israel itself.

Since the foundation of Israel in 1948 the USA has been the major influence in the region on account of its super-power status and long association with the Jewish diaspora. Its role as a "force for good" (in its own estimation ) is not without tarnish. GW Bush will one day be fairly judged as one of the most disastrous presidents in US history, not least in the sphere of foreign policy and in his ill-judged "War on Trrrr" in the wake of 9/11, which led to the US losing two long costly wars in both Iraq and Afghanistan. But overall, the good faith of the USA has been evidenced by the vast expenditure of political and economic capital in both the broking and underwriting of various peace attempts. By contrast, the Arab states would rather wash their hands, although it is the USA which has been serially accused as acting always as Israel's cat's-paw.

How will the current phase of Arab-Israeli conflict end? The murderous attack by Hamas on 7th October 2023 against Israeli civilians has had a galvanising effect on Israeli society - even the Haredi are joining up, whatever their reservations about the secular state. But the retribution meted out on the Gaza strip will only take Israel so far. At some point, it is conceivable that it will treat with Hamas and Hezbollah, in the same way it came to terms with the terrorist PLO, despite vowing never to do so. A two state solution remains the only realistic option, despite the huge problems that will need to be surmounted, not least the status of Jewish settlers on land occupied since the 1967 war. But given the implacably horrific nature of the current phase of conflict, this may be decades away. The main worry is surely the appetite of the USA for further engagement and material support for peace initiatives. There is a great deal of exasperation in US policy circles at Israeli settlement building and more for the refusal of the Arabs to take some responsibility for peace in the region. There are signs the USA expects Turkey to take a greater role - did not the Ottomans at least keep the Middle East in a state of inanition?

The latest religious iteration of the struggle has profound implications for societal cohesion in Europe. Muslims form a large and politically significant proportion of the citizenry of the UK, France and Sweden. In the new world of moral relativism, the greatest danger is for irrationality, ignorance and intolerant fundamentalism to gain an increasing share of the public debate. Anti-Semitism is on the increase. A reasonable mind, while deploring the carnage, must surely wonder why those demonstrating against Israeli "oppression" of the Palestinians cannot bring themselves to call for a release by Hamas of its hostages. In the minds of many of these protesters, the murders of October 7th are a case of Israel getting what was coming to it. When might this logic be turned against the very states in which they now live? Indeed does not the Manchester bombing of 2017 and various other atrocities of the past two decades on the streets of the UK suggest it has already done so?

Rishi Sunak's current aspirations for the the education of the UK's schoolchildren is to keep them learning Maths until 18 and to stop them smoking. He might be better off if he can find someone to teach them (and his ministers) some history.

ROTTEN TO THE CORE

When the German philosopher Hannah Arendt offered her famous insight about the "banality of evil", she was thinking about Adolph Eichmann and those many others who worked at the coalface of the Nazis' "Final Solution". Arendt's profundity was immortal not because it connected with the enormity of the Nazis' crimes (which were self-evident) but because she precisely pinpointed the nature of the wickedness at their heart. Nazi crimes were doubly repugnant because they were so routine. Could this same observation not now be applied, without hyperbole, to "Our" NHS (GC, lest we forget) in light of the revelations that have come from Manchester Crown Court after one of the longest murder trials in British legal history?

To read the broadsheets is to realise a metaphorical Rubicon has now been crossed. There has been no outpouring of confected hatred about a "monster", notwithstanding Lucy Letby's culpability as an individual. Even the tabloids have reined in the lurid headlines (Myra Hindley, Rosemary West, Beverley Allitt passim) and reported dispassionately. Indeed, the papers have all noted the very ordinariness of the culprit ("beige" according to one police officer) and the mystery of her motivation. As with Adolph Eichmann in the dock in Tel Aviv in 1961, her egregious crimes seem beyond human comprehension. 

Rather, the ire has been directed at those administrators, senior executives and "leaders" at the Countess of Chester Trust who, whether through pride, complacency, indifference or sheer incompetence, allowed Letby's killing spree to continue long after the first alarm was raised by a pair of paediatric consultants. There have been calls for a statutory public enquiry which can compel testimony and the wholly reasonable demand (again) that there be established some professional body which can disbar members of the healthcare bureaucracy in the same way that the GMC can discipline medical practitioners. Some are even talking of charges of corporate manslaughter being brought against the trust. There is a widespread sense that this time, an investigation that does no more than produce "lessons to be learnt" will be completely intolerable.

For we have been here many, many times before: Gosport; Grantham; Bristol; Mid Staffordshire; Harold Shipman; Jimmy Savile and Morecambe Bay. So many needless deaths and murders (or rape on the wards, in the case of Savile); so many "lessons learnt"; so many recommendations. After each outrage, another layer of "process" is applied, another quango is created and there is no discernible improvement. Barely eighteen months ago, the Ockenden Report into malfeasance at the Shrewsbury & Telford NHS Trust revealed a culture of management incompetence, professional in-fighting amongst medical staff, buck-passing on a grand scale and official lies. It seems hard to believe, but the annual rate of needless mortality on the maternity wards in Shropshire far exceeded that of the killing spree of Lucy Letby in a neo natal unit in Cheshire. Scroll forward and Donna Ockenden is now to be found examining another spate of unexplained deaths, this time in the maternity unit of a Nottinghamshire health trust.

What accounts for the banal wickedness which seems to characterise so many parts of the NHS? Behind the bald and terrible facts of the crimes of one individual and the genuinely moving testimony of the grieving parents, there were some revelations about the workings of "Our" NHS which make for sober reading:

- The culture of medical professionalism at the Countess of Chester Trust was clearly toxic. Doctors were at loggerheads with the nursing hierarchy and the only way in which medical malfeasance could be addressed was via labyrinthine HR processes which had to be routed through hospital administrators, with whom everyone seemed to be at loggerheads.

- What sane healthcare organisation would allow clinical judgements to be made by non clinicians? At very nearly every stage of the unfolding crisis, the professional opinion of the two paediatric consultants was either ignored or over-ruled. Indeed at one stage they were ordered to apologise to the culprit, who had launched a "grievance" procedure against them. 

- If non clinical hospital executives and "leaders" cannot be held to account in the same way as their clinical colleagues, from where do they derive their authority? There have been an increasing number of calls over the years for non-clinicians in leadership roles to be subject to the same processes of "re-validation" and discipline by a collective professional body (such as the GMC) as can be found for surgeons, clinicians, general practitioners and nurses. There should be no mystery as to why this hasn't happened however: nearly half the civil servants at the Department of Health and Social Care are ex-medical administrators. We can't have the ministry subjected to lawsuits, can we?

- What sane healthcare organisation would allow cultural issues to take precedence over clinical decision making? It appears the Royal College of Nursing was quick to take umbrage at the incidence of two male clinicians questioning the fitness of a female colleague (Letby) to work on the neo-natal unit. What patriarchal tyranny ! The doctors were forced to apologise by a craven hospital executive team which thought HR hassles were of greater importance than medical malfeasance. Now the president of the RCN, one Sheila Sobrany, has had the brass neck to claim that the reason why one of the consultant whistle-blowers (Ravi Jayaram) was not believed is because he is "of colour". How does such a stupid and tone deaf person get to lead something like the RCN?

- Premature babies are among the most delicate and vulnerable of patients. How does a neo-natal intensive care nurse get to be allowed to work three 12 hour shifts a week? How on earth can a professional or indeed any working person be expected to remain clear headed and alert for that length of time, notwithstanding breaks? We have been subjected to all the usual blather about how the NHS (all 1.6 million of them) is understaffed and everyone is close to "burnout". The NHS has been "burnt out" for years, largely the result of quite insane staffing practices that allow "life-style" choices by doctors, nurses and administrators to take precedence over their duty of care to patients. Wasn't it strange how (apart from two consultants) nobody in their little "work -  life balance" siloes at the Countess of Chester seemed to notice that there was anything amiss about nurse Letby?

- There are thousands of so called "leaders" in the NHS, but virtually zero leadership. Instead, responsibility is diluted by a plethora of job titles (Head of Nursing, Senior Nursing Director, Head of Nursing Care - all actual titles at the Countess of Chester and all with six figure salaries) and accountability is widely dispersed. Despite the lip service paid to the trauma of the poor bloody families who lost loved ones, everyone in any position of authority in this tale has been quick to disassociate themselves from any responsibility. Further, difficult decisions or the application of professional judgement is frequently outsourced - it's much easier to blame a management consultant if there is a cock-up on your watch. What sane developed country has a staff college for the training of the senior leadership team of its armed services but no equivalent for its health care service which is ten times bigger?  Why do whistle-blowing "protocols" in the NHS have to be endlessly strengthened if the leadership was any good?

Finally, it needs to be remembered that these are all tales about individuals. It is simply not good enough anymore to talk about the "systemic" failures of the NHS as if its practitioners have no agency. After all, its victims are all flesh-and-blood human beings.

"Stay Home, Protect the NHS, Save Lives" - never were truer words spoken.

BBC NEWS - IMMATURING WITH AGE

The BBC is a cultural phenomenon which in its 100 year history has been garlanded with awards. Its output is appreciated around the world and it has successfully cultivated both mainstream and niche audiences. It is regarded with affection by many and with distaste by few. Where it has given rise to controversy, it has attracted criticism from both the left and the right of the political spectrum in almost equal measure. There is not one government from that of Stanley Baldwin to Rishi Sunak's which has not at some point crossed swords with the creation of Sir John Reith. From each of these episodes the BBC has emerged chastened but wiser, which cannot honestly be said of the politicians.  

Reith's memorable edict that the BBC should "inform, educate and entertain" was as important for the order in which those words were placed as for their meaning. They remain a good yardstick by which to judge a public service broadcaster funded by a non-discretionary license fee. By most objective measures, the BBC still fulfils this unofficial mission statement and no amount of bloviating about Gary Lineker's blog, purist horror about the Beeb's interpretation of Great Expectations or grumpiness about the Today programme really changes that. Comparisons with Netflix, Amazon Prime and other free or pay-per-view media also miss the point as none of these have a public service remit to which they can be held accountable. 

So why does the BBC presently get up some noses like a massive dose of snuff?

Perhaps the answer lies in that part of the BBC's output which arguably should have the least trouble fulfilling the letter, spirit and word order of Reith's rubric from the 1920's - its flagship, BBC News.

The edition of the Six O' Clock News on Tuesday 27th June illustrated, in microcosm, the muddle at the heart of the BBC as an institution. With everything else going on, the very top story that evening was the finding of a Lancashire coroner that the untimely death of Nichola Bulley, a photogenic middle-aged  mortgage adviser, was caused by accidental drowning in the River Wyre in early 2023. Once-upon-a-time, this story might have struggled to be included in the BBC's regional news output, never mind leading that of the national news agenda. Nonetheless, the case  originally came to prominence as part of a confected social media "storm" about an allegedly vulnerable woman allegedly let down by police incompetence. In so far as there was any story here at all beyond the private grief of a family kept in appalling suspense about the fate of an adult loved one, it was the utter crassness and insensitivity of the social and mainstream media commentary about the incident at the time. The coverage was purely mawkish and with no connection to Reith's principle's for broadcasting.

However, a clue lies in what can only be described as the obsession of  BBC News with that word "vulnerability". In today's canon of modern manners, one sin that cries out to Heaven for vengeance is to appear "uncaring". The appearance of being uncaring is as heinous a crime as genuinely being so, notwithstanding indifference is a perfectly normal sensation that helps us from going mad. From there it is a quick step to suppose that every misfortune (whatever its origin in either fate, human agency, accident, ignorance or stupidity), is deserving of our care and support. The more publicly this ersatz empathy is expressed and institutionalised by those like the BBC the better. Nowadays, intensely private feelings such as grief are held to be inauthentic unless they are publicly expressed. In today's debased culture, no death is truly sanctified until a football crowd stands "in solidarity" and looks down in silence upon black armband wearing players. But misfortune is so quotidian a state of humanity, we need a word to describe the legions who suffer from it. Step forward the "vulnerable".

BBC news bulletins are increasingly peppered with tales of "vulnerability" and a seeming denial of human agency. We are constantly invited to empathise. Tuesday night was no exception. Despite the disturbing events in nuclear armed Russia, the Beeb prioritised some info about a bloke called Lewis Capaldi. Lewis is a successful singer who resembles an overweight chipmunk in bad need of a hair wash. The Beeb gravely informed us that he also has Tourette, a non-fatal syndrome of nervous tics and verbal outbursts suffered by a very tiny fraction of folk in the UK. Quite what was the relevance of all this to anything is unclear, but at least it gave the BBC another opportunity to piously preach about a subset of the "vulnerable". And for no other reason than poor Lewis's set at Glastonbury was interrupted by a sore throat. Following which the good natured crowd had had to carry the weight of his banal lyrics on their own for half an hour. Surely the story here was the outrageous £335 ticket price (plus £5 booking fee) that hard - up punters had had to shell out to hear acts by various geriatrics (plus Lewis Capaldi) in which no amount of pyrotechnic extravagance could conceal the increasingly brittle timbre of the voices. That and the fact that Tourette would appear to be the least of poor Lewis's health problems.

With barely a moment to ponder the relevance or otherwise of Capaldi's behaviour patterns, we were whisked off to the House of Commons as the Business and Trade Committee gave representatives of the UK food retailing industry a proper hosing down. This on account of their alleged profiteering from food price inflation and exploitation of the "vulnerable". The retailers gave a succinct description of their markets, which are among the most competitive on the planet, and pointed out their post-pandemic margins are actually lower than in 2019. Although their defence was entirely reasonable, it would have been appropriate for some relevant countervailing information (such as fuel pricing) to be presented in the piece to provide balance. But the BBC struggles hopelessly with this concept. Instead the "balance" was provided by some Labour Party blowhard who complained about the bonuses being paid to executives and the dividends being paid to apparently undeserving shareholders at a time when "ordinary families" and the "vulnerable" were under pressure. To any fair minded person, this was surely beside the point. 

There was the same technique with former Health Secretary Matt Hancock's big moment in front of the UK Covid Enquiry, now trundling towards its first anniversary even as those of France and Sweden were completed months ago. The newsworthy point here was surely Hancock's insistence, in the face of all objective evidence, of the efficacy of even tighter lockdowns to "halt" pandemics in future. Instead, the whole piece was framed around crass Matt's faux apology to Covid's victims and the scenes of relatives turning their backs on the erstwhile minister as he emerged into the street. It seemed not to occur to either Hancock or the BBC that this vain and foolish man's act of assumption of personal responsibility for Covid was as preposterous as it was nauseating. 

The nadir was arguably the item on the findings of something called the "Independent Enquiry into Equity in Cricket" chaired by the unimprovably named Cindy Butts. Over two years in gestation, Cindy's considered verdict was that English cricket is irredeemably racist and elitist. Apparently "over 50% of those in cricket had suffered discrimination" a situation Ms Butt described as "horrific". Never mind Cindy's hyperbole immediately detracted from whatever serious point she was trying to make, her premise was completely absurd. As those of BAME ethnicity comprise 17% of the UK population, either BAME folk have a disproportionate share of the cricketing community or there is some "horrific" discrimination against white people going on in the same game. In which case, what discrimination is Cindy talking about? But no matter - among her recommendations were the annual Eton v Harrow match be scrapped and that the ECB should issue an unequivocal apology forthwith. Her nonsensical views went completely unchallenged as the Beeb went over to some grovelling obeisance from the Chairman of the ECB and then to a ritual incantation from England captain Ben Stokes, who is smart enough to know (but not yet quite brave enough to denounce), the requirement for public genuflection to the growing absurdities of the "diversity & inclusion" agenda. 

Whatever the plimsoll shod Director General is trying to do to restore objectivity and impartiality to the BBC's news output, it seems pretty clear that he either does not understand the concepts or his message isn't getting through to his editorial teams. BBC News is today less about useful and important information so much as little homilies about the Beeb's London centric world view. These are that the government can never spend enough in support of the "vulnerable"; taxes are non-negotiable; the NHS is sacred; climate change is man-made; the profit motive is to be treated with suspicion; all religions (apart from Christianity) deserve to be cherished; psychopaths are "militants" and that noisy axe-grinders should everywhere be indulged. It does not matter if the autocue is read in "neutral" tones by the pertly impassive Reeta Chakrabarti, by the oddly coiffured Huw Edwards or by the increasingly narcoleptic Clive Myrie if "news" items in the hands of the BBC are no more than unexamined parables for the educationally sub-normal. Infantilism would seem to be the order of the day.

Click. Off. 

UNCIVIL SERVICE

Depending on your point of view, Britain's ambassador to the Sudan was lucky to be on holiday back in London when an enormous gun battle erupted in the capital Khartoum last week. In his absence, his staff would likely have been tidying up loose ends just as the first shots were fired. We can plausibly imagine their duties to have included final disbursements from the Overseas Aid Budget to a budding Sudanese women's band . Or facilitating some last minute governance box ticking for British business in one of the most unstable parts of Africa. Or taking part in that month's audit of micro-aggressions experienced by junior staff from their senior colleagues. Or wondering if the embassy supply of oat milk would hold out if things got out-of-hand. 

They then legged it, assisted by a bit of derring-do by the SAS. Naturally, as the latest FCO vogue is the projection of intangible "soft power", practical matters such as the care and protection of the 4,000 odd UK citizens in Sudan other than themselves might have been somewhat lower on the ambassadorial agenda. This is 2023 not 1885 and no official was going to hang around to see if some maddened Mahdi chucked a spear at them on the embassy steps. Dereliction of duty? Perhaps. But can you blame them? After all, their FCO colleagues had fled at the first whiff of cordite when the Taliban were in the process of recapturing Kabul in 2021. Except that the then Foreign Secretary (one D Raab) had ordered them back to their posts.

The week which saw the high-tailing to the Sudan exit signs also saw the defenestration of the Lord Chancellor, Deputy Prime Minister and Secretary-of-State for Justice. In consequence of a co-ordinated fit of pique by a small number of civil servants whose duty it was to support their minister in the delivery of government policy, one of the most senior members of the government felt honour bound to stand aside. The same Dominic Raab who had taken a robust approach throughout his ministerial career was found guilty of a few instances of "abrasive" behaviour rather than "abuse". But in the modern lexicon of the  "inappropriate", both words are conflated with that most heinous of new age crimes - bullying. Time past, the issues (such as they were) would have been resolved by a few firm but quiet words. Instead what we got was an absurdly lengthy, leaky and expensive KC enquiry running concurrently with an ill-informed trial by the media. It is quite a thing when the hurt feelings of a civil servant can be leveraged to sack a serving minister of a government with a majority as large as this one.

It's over 20 years since Peter Hennessy wrote his acclaimed account of the office of the the UK Prime Minister, its incumbents and the higher Civil Service since the Second World War. Were he to revise it today, there must be a good chance that he would identify April 2023 as that moment when the "Rolls Royce" ethos of the Civil Service finally died after a long and stuttering decline.  We are not talking here about those widespread strikes across the public sector and the demand for higher levels of protection from economic headwinds which are unavailable to the ordinary citizenry, notwithstanding the disruption is without precedent since the Miners Strike of 1984.  Rather it is those specific instances, such as the flight from Khartoum, which are more revealing of the culture at the heart of public service today and of the much diminished quality of governance in Great Britain which it signifies.

It would be fair to say that the government of the UK has been subjected to a sort of Fronde since the day of the Brexit Referendum result in 2016. The most obvious manifestation of this has been the continued and intense shrieking (despite a few local difficulties) of the SNP ministry in Scotland. The governing party at Westminster has also had to contend with different interpretations as to what leaving the EU actually meant within its own ranks. In 2018 and 2019 these differences brought Parliamentary processes to a virtual halt and encouraged many to suppose that the referendum result might be overturned through sheer inertia if not cumulative obstruction. The irresponsibility of the politicians at that time was without precedent since the Civil Wars of the 17th century. 

There have too been some high profile and tense stand-offs with the judiciary as the UK has sought to reclaim powers that had been lost to the "shared sovereignty" of the EU. Perhaps startled by the size of the Tory mandate in 2019, their Lord and Ladyships have begun to show a little more understanding of what needs to happen when citizens demand their laws derive from their own elected Parliament and these laws reflect the democratic choices made by UK citizens at the ballot box.

Egged by the mainstream media, large parts of which continue to carp about a decision made nearly eight years ago, these discontents have however had a powerful and lingering impact on the public sector in general and on the culture of the Civil Service in particular. There is no Fifth Column or "Deep State" at work here: public servants have a vote like everyone else. The problem is far more fundamentally rooted and is such that some parts of Whitehall and its ancillary establishment give every impression of supposing it is they rather than the elected government which calls the shots, a perspective which was reinforced by the egregious swelling of state power during the Covid pandemic. Indeed, Civil Service inertia and obstruction in the face of ministerial direction has become increasingly blatant. The instances of senior officials publicly criticising and undermining serving ministers are more frequent - who can forget Lord McDonald (erstwhile head of the FCO) calling the Prime Minister a liar in early 2022 and the sustained campaign to unseat Priti Patel at the Home Office. Dominic Raab is only the most recent target, almost all of whom are coincidentally linked by their support of Brexit. Whatever one thinks of the politicians themselves, this amounts to a complete inversion of the traditional relationship between the elected minister who bears ultimate responsibility and the unelected public servant who is seemingly accountable to no-one except their own caste.

Brexit has necessitated a profound re-fashioning of Britain's economy and geo-political position. Yet the traditional role of the Civil Service has been to manage the status quo, until directed otherwise by elected ministers. Naturally, many ministers lack the intellect or experience to force a change of direction, a dynamic which was hilariously lampooned in the series Yes Minister. Many are moved on before they have even mastered their brief, never mind their department. In such circumstances or in the absence of a Prime Ministerial direction, the default mode of the public official is continuity at best or obstruction at worst.

What has changed over the past two decades is the Civil Service has become even less accountable yet takes an increasingly discretionary view of the instructions issued by its democratically elected masters. The trend was set during the Blair ministry. "Call me Tony" dispensed with traditional cabinet government, preferring to run his administration via small cabals and by way of press releases. Setting the direction of the higher Civil Service (a long standing function of the office of the PM) seemed like far too much hard work and was delegated to the Cabinet Secretary. Blair was then surprised to be endlessly thwarted by the resultant vacuum, and not just by his increasingly bolshie neighbour in Number 11.

Yet the biggest spur to the change in official behaviours has been the deep and widespread implanting of the so-called "rights culture" throughout the public sector. The Civil Service tends to move at glacial speed, but once a trend has taken root, it remains deeply embedded. Government at both the national and local levels now has to be super-sensitive to diversity, "personal truth", "personal space" and inclusivity. Indeed an enormous official cadre has been brought into being to monitor and promote a set of human characteristics which are wholly irrelevant to the smooth running of governance. Yet elected ministers ignore this fatuous canon at their peril, as Dominic Raab has just found out. Indeed it is not too much to claim that the Equalities Act of 2010 (passed with minimal parliamentary oversight in the fag end of Gordon Brown's ministry) was the biggest land mine planted at the centre of government since the Second World War. The authority of the elected political class has been eroded to the advantage of the unelected official one.

The list of expensive official cock-ups for which there appears to be no accountability except via the indirect and blunt tool of the ballot box has never seemed so egregious. When the only things of which the establishment can boast in the past ten years are gay marriage and the timely procurement of an effective Covid vaccine by one bright, energetic woman and a team of 14 bods engaged from the private sector, you have to question the seriousness, never mind the abilities, of the higher Civil Service and public officialdom.

In 1644 Parliament, exasperated by the inability of the establishment to secure the fruits for which the civil wars were being fought, brought into being the New Model Army. With its professionalism and high ethos, this outfit was to help transform the working and effectiveness of the early modern British state. Then, things actually got done by an early version of the meritocracy. But now? 

Is it not time for a New Model Civil Service?

BEST FORGOTTEN?

To say the voluminous cache of Whitehall WhatsApp messages serialised by the Telegraph back in February does not shed the most flattering of light on UK governance during the Covid pandemic would be a bit of an understatement. The main interest is the often dubious rationale for successive restrictions, the thoughtless ways of government by social media and the appalling way decisions were taken because they looked good rather than because they were right. Yet if journos had been hoping to provoke a level of public outrage similar to that generated by that paper's expose of the MPs expenses scandal in 2009, they will likely have been disappointed. Partly this is because they have not revealed anything about the erstwhile Secretary of State for Health and Member for West Suffolk that we did not know already. To wit the Rt Hon Matt Hancock is a vain, two-timing, over-promoted and thoroughly irritating berk from Cheshire who plainly thinks the proper role of an elected public servant is endless self-promotion. In furtherance of which, the citizenry's most recent memory will be of his appearance on I'm a Celebrity. To the extent he was that member of the freak fest most frequently voted to perform the unfunny, contrived and degrading jungle tasks for which the "show" is allegedly popular, there is probably a natural British reluctance to kick a man when he is down. Plus a lot of people in the media would rather we forget about our experiences during the worst public health disaster in over a hundred years.

The Telegraph was of course an outlier in its (muted) scepticism of lockdowns during the pandemic. The abandonment of a spirit of inquiry by most of the media and its willing promotion of an atmosphere of panic and obedience to government edicts during 2020 and 2021 does not, alas, seem to be part of the official Covid Enquiry led by Lady Hallett. Which is a pity since the taxpayer funded BBC was in the vanguard of the alarmism. Instead, her "deep-dive" is highly likely to be contaminated by the culture wars, ever since a number in the vast scrum of lawyers and lobbyists demanded her ladyship consider, inter alia, "structural racism" and "health inequalities" during the pandemic based on "discrimination". Hallett has further decreed that extensive personal testimony will also be taken from the bereaved on behalf of all the "victims" of the pandemic. Leaving aside the propriety of using a forensic audit of public policy for such considerations, it encourages the belief that grief is not really grief unless it has been publicly expressed. In today's world, the private life has been almost completely subverted. You might just as well hand matters over to Ant & Dec.

Now in the seventeenth month of a veritable trek through the paperwork, Hallett's enquiry has already chewed up over £100m of public funds and has yet to reach Base Camp. Over 60 KCs are on the payroll and so far all they have managed to do is redact the names of hundreds of officials. While France and Sweden completed their own official examinations many months ago, that of the UK already seems to be buried in the long grass if not the deep rough. By the time her enquiry gets to grip with the scandal of the healthcare establishment's treatment of care homes during the pandemic, her ladyship is likely to be in one herself.

The snail like progress of the enquiry was the main reason given by the Telegraph for the disclosure of the "Hancock Papers" in the public interest. In so far as the edited highlights lack balance it is their focus on the toe-curling political mis-steps in London. But as the WhatsApp messages also seem to show some of the scientific advice was filtered or even ignored, one or two commentators have rushed to claim that the government wasn't "following the science" at all. 

Among them is Devi Sridar, Head of Public Health Policy at Edinburgh University, friend  and sometime "personal trainer" to Nicola Sturgeon. Devi, some might recall, was the photogenic advisor to the Scottish Government who was not averse to putting some heavy top-spin on the balls she was asked to play for her SNP masters during the pandemic. In one ill-judged moment, she even asserted lockdown scepticism was the lowest form of Unionism. Now in reaction to the embarrassing disclosures centred on Hancock, she says that "It is clear we didn't have a government working for the broad benefit of the British public during the Covid 19 pandemic". Naturally, we are not supposed to infer her denunciations  apply to the "progressive" government at Holyrood. Notwithstanding Sturgeon's more aggressive suspension of civil liberties in Scotland did not make a farthing of difference to the medical outcomes relative to the rest of the UK. Indeed they were rather worse.

Of course, Sridar is not the only scientist or public health official who has got their "truth" in ahead of the official enquiry. Sir Jeremy Farrar, Head of the Wellcome Foundation and prominent member of SAGE was quick out of the blocks in 2021 with his book Spike. The Guardian was happy to interpret his "thesis" as the government putting its libertarian "ideology" ahead of the science. Certainly Farrar was at the centre of the disputes around the timing of the various restrictions. At one point he even considered resigning over the seeming reluctance of Boris Johnson to order the second lockdown in October 2020. The main point of Spike is for Farrar to assure us that the mistakes during the pandemic were entirely the fault of the politicians, notwithstanding that they were (in the very initial stages at least) acting on data and advice that was, by Farrar's own estimation, highly contingent. 

So it would be good if Lady Hallett ignores all the special interest pleading and proceeds on the assumption that everyone was trying to do their best in very challenging circumstances. Otherwise, the temptation will be to see the political choices in the context of the later discredit into which the Johnson administration fell. 

But if the politicians weren't "following the science", what about the UK government's scientific advisors  themselves?

- Was SAGE really in the dark about the likely effect of the pandemic on mortality? As early as February 2020 teams from both Imperial College and the Institute for Disease Modelling in Washington separately estimated the Infection Fatality Rate (IFR) for Covid at 0.9 per cent based on an analysis of a large sample of people repatriated from China who had the virus. This was far more accurate than some of the wilder estimates of the time which were crudely extrapolated from deaths divided by the number of reported infections, a hugely underestimated number. So far the UK has reported 24.4m cases of Covid, with 219,000 fatalities.

-  Did SAGE really not have a proper grasp about those most likely to be incapacitated? The Shenzhen Centre for Disease Control and Johns Hopkins University in Baltimore separately looked at the infectiousness of the disease. It was established very early on that infection was determined by close and sustained proximity to a sufferer - among reported cases there was a 15% chance of infection in shared accommodation, and a 9.6% probability of catching it elsewhere (such as the workplace). Critically, the study indicated that age was a key determinant of mortality - the elderly were particularly at risk, the risk to children vestigial. The latter were also marginally less likely to contract the virus in the first place. The median age of those in the UK who died with Covid was 83, the majority with co-morbidities such as obesity or heart disease. Average UK life expectancy is 81. Yet there are those like Devi Sridar who assert that government policy meant people lost their lives wholly unnecessarily.

- If the likely mortality rate was so low and disproportionately hit the elderly, why did the whole country have to enter quarantine rather than the most vulnerable? Yet the rationale for lockdown was also based on the assumption that early availability of an effective vaccine was unlikely. In this case "availability" was deliberately confused for the public's mind with the process of "discovery". Techniques (such as the use of messenger RNA) and the ability to fully map the genome of the virus meant the chances of formulating a vaccine in timely fashion were good - indeed Israel claimed to have one a month after the first lockdown in the UK. The problem, as Sir Chris Whitty said at the time, is that vaccines aimed at diseases with less than a 2 percent IFR need to be subjected to lengthy trials to ensure they do not kill more people than they save. 

- Why did the work of the infectious diseases team at Imperial appear to have so little impact on the infamous "scientific" models of Neil Ferguson?  He too was at Imperial and it was his forecasts which caused the government to abandon all thoughts of following the "light touch" approach of Sweden. His warning that the UK faced half a million fatalities within a few months unless the country locked down was a pivotal moment. He also forecast over 50,000 deaths in Sweden by the summer of 2020 as they continued to treat their citizens like grown ups. The cumulative death toll in Sweden to date is under 24,000. More damningly for the lockdown zealots, Sweden has also reported the lowest incidence of "excess" deaths from all causes over the course of the pandemic in the western hemisphere. Despite early and glowing reviews in the on-message FT, Ferguson's methodology is now widely discredited.

- Why was there so much denial by those such as Farrar that the government's scientific advisors had seriously considered "herd immunity" as a viable strategy to beat Covid? This after all was the approach which Sweden chose. Both Whitty and Vallance talked of it publicly in approving terms. Was it not just a case of the medical and scientific establishment trying to pretend that every sequential decision which was made was the most logical one, when the opposite was frequently the case?

- Why was the wearing of masks and the "two metre" rule given such prominence in the public health restrictions, despite the scepticism of the government's senior scientific advisers as to their efficacy? Or was it just a grotesque bit of theatre to cause anxiety and thereby enhance compliance with other more intrusive aspects of the government's response? Hancock's revelation that Downing Street went along with mask wearing to avoid a political row with Sturgeon has a depressing ring of truth about it.

- Why was there such a muddle over the respective merits of testing and tracing? Sridar  claims that earlier testing would have been the best way of avoiding the "shutdown or nothing" approach of the government and approvingly cited the "diagnostic approach" of South Korea. But the Koreans were red hot about tracing individual citizens with symptoms of Covid rather than mass testing. They focused their efforts on immediately quarantining those infected and those who had been in proximity to them. But for some reason, the UK abandoned any thought of controlling the spread of Covid by accessing the location data held by infected people on their phones. Perhaps too many of those in authority were unhappy with a technique which would have revealed their own whereabouts. Instead, and under the deathless direction of  Baroness Harding, the UK eventually got round to burning its way through £37bn worth of mass testing (which did almost nothing of itself to prevent the spread of the disease) and a loose regime of self -isolation which had one of the lowest compliance rates in Europe outside the public sector.

Lockdown was not public health policy in action. Rather it was a grotesque sign of the hole at the centre of public health policy. The response to Covid arguably represents one of the biggest failures of the state since the 1930s. In the draconian suspension of civil liberties and the criminalisation of almost all social activity, the UK attempted to recreate a regime last seen in Britain in the seventeenth century. Citizens were not treated as human beings but as mere instruments of public policy. In fact, it is clear the establishment thought the vast majority of the population were pliable morons. That is the true meaning of Hancock's WhatsApp messages. But will Lady Hallett get it?

Meanwhile the rest of us should seriously think about trying to get a Swedish passport.

SEX & SAINT NICOLA

You would really have to have a heart of stone not to laugh at the way in which the Holyrood government has been hoist by the petard of its fixation with sexual politics. Even as the convicted rapist Isla Bryson (nee Adam Graham) was photographed sporting a well filled codpiece, flowing blonde locks and sabre sized nails, the First Minister was  denouncing sceptics of her policies on sex and gender as homophobes, transphobes and even racists. With Sturgeon moving ever closer to the point of being made to look a complete chump, the gay rights activist, B-List actor and SNP luvvie Alan Cumming was quickly launched to provide some diversionary chaff from the mid-air disaster rapidly engulfing Bute House. Alan, who is no slouch when it comes to virtue signalling, told his followers that he was handing back his OBE as he had just discovered the "toxicity" of the British Empire. Poor Alan's delicate conscience and miniscule intellect may have forced him to disclaim one gong, but he can rest easy with the Iron Cross he will surely receive for distinguished service in the culture wars. As intended, the Times obliged him by giving Cumming the whole of page three of its Saturday edition in Scotland, while pushing Nicola's prat-fall to the bottom of page nine. 

By Sunday 29th January however, even the Times had to recognise it had an absolute stinker on its hands. For whatever one feels about the rights and wrongs of banging up a criminal trans woman with a penis in a women's prison, the story also waved another red flag that is now simply too big to ignore. Which is Sturgeon's clear belief that she herself is the law. 

For a certain type of person, and regardless of political persuasion, there is a distinct whiff of the Wehrmacht about the First Minister which is pure cat-nip. Many of them will fondly recall her authoritative and uncompromising performances at the lectern during the Covid pandemic, which contrasted with the embarrassing cabaret turns in 10 Downing Street. Even some implacable Unionists were moved to admit her sure-footedness. Covid handed Sturgeon the opportunity to give some real substance to her authoritarian instincts: edicts that were presented as guidance south of the border became hard law in the hands of the SNP government. There was also the way that Covid regulations set in Westminster were invariably gold-plated as they were copied and pasted north of the Tweed. Lockdowns were always longer in Scotland and the regulations more intrusive on the grounds that Nicola was more "prudent" and "caring" than those alleged incompetents in London. She did not surrender to the shrill and increasingly demented demands of the Scottish public sector - remember the shameful behaviour of the teaching unions - because as far as she was concerned, she was the public sector.  

Further back, who can forget as well the determined efforts of her government to push through the SNP's "Named Persons Act", despite the near total inability of the cerebrally challenged education minister John Swinney to produce even a basic code of conduct which would have reassured detractors. Branded a "snoopers charter", sceptics criticised the bill for its further and heavy intrusion of the state into the private lives of citizens and their families. The bill was finally killed off in 2019 when it was formally shown beyond doubt to be a breach of human rights under the ECHR, a judgement that had been entirely foreseeable at the legislation's inception. Naturally, Sturgeon learnt nothing from this beyond the need to find some other way to burnish her "progressive" credentials. 

Post Covid, there was nothing, not the care of those medically neglected during the pandemic; nor the education of children left behind by the stupidity of school closures; nor the restitution of businesses torched by the total elimination of social life outside the home, that was more important to Sturgeon than her demented obsession to prove that women and men are sexually interchangeable and therefore biologically the same. Her Gender Recognition Reform act (GRR), which she disingenuously presented as a small bit of administrative tidying, is not the half of it.

For it turns out that the Scottish government and under its aegis the Scottish Prison Service (SPS) has effectively been abusing the existing statute on gender recognition since it was first promulgated. In all the justified outrage (and incredulity) about male bodied trans rapists being placed in women's prisons, a recent court judgement has thrown light on the way Sturgeon seeks to gainsay existing law. This was Lady Haldane's landmark judgement in late 2022 upon the change in the Scottish government's "guidance" on the proposed GRR, itself made in response to those seeking to protect women's rights. The women were further rebuffed as the new guidance stated that for the purposes of the proposed law, there was no distinction between biological sex and gender. Lady Haldane ruled that, notwithstanding an earlier judgement that women and trans folk were distinct categories under the 2010 Equalities Act, the new guidance (and its novel elimination of the differences between biological sex) was "lawful". Men and women in possession of a Gender Recognition certificate, she said, would be considered to be biologically the same as their declared gender for the purposes of law.

Yet by incarcerating offenders like Bryson/Graham in women's prisons the SPS has been behaving as if the Scottish government's new "guidance" (on a piece of legislation still to be passed), already had the force of law. Preposterously, Sturgeon asserted last week that the SPS operates independently of ministerial diktat, while in almost the same breath she insisted Bryson/Graham be conveyed to a men's prison forthwith. Order, counter-order, disorder. But the real point is that Sturgeon thinks the law is whatever corresponds to her interpretation of it. Or, in the absence of a law, it is what she personally decrees.

It's no good blaming Haldane. Some fear her ladyship has gone down the same rabbit hole as Sturgeon. But another interpretation of her ruling is that tho' the law be an ass, there is nothing illegal about elected politicians making it so. The First Minister has taken this one step further by bringing the law into disrepute even before it has been passed.

Nicola Sturgeon has spent nearly her entire adult life espousing the politics of grievance. It has played well with those who genuinely seem to believe that if only Scotland was freed from the oppression of London, all its problems would be solved in a trice. Yet for the lady herself, the experience has been thoroughly corrosive. As a result anyone who criticises or even questions her is accused of bad faith or moral failing. Like a lot of folk with severely limited horizons and an almost complete absence of a mental hinterland, her self righteousness is used to polish her self-esteem. Once you surround such a personality with sycophants as can be found among the ciphers that are her ministers, the governance of the state is in big trouble.

Sturgeon's absolute determination to defend one of the most heavily sand-bagged redoubts of the culture wars suggests that she no longer believes she will be remembered as a transgenic William Wallace. She does however stand a better chance of secular canonisation, like the androgynous Saint Sebastian, her body pierced by the arrows of homophobes and transphobes everywhere. She and her craven and witless fellow travellers in the Scottish Labour Party have chosen not to understand that the objections to the GRR are not transphobic. Instead they are based on (justifiable) fear that the law will be abused by those who wish to rape, assault and otherwise endanger women under the guise of being "women" themselves.

It is not as if her government has explained what is the problem the GRR is designed to address. Her fanaticism would be justifiable if there was some gaping chasm between the rights enjoyed by the "Rainbow Community" and those of the wider citizenry. But there is not. There is not even a crack. Like a lot of so-called "progressives", Sturgeon thinks that difference (and especially sexual difference) is deserving of a special status that trumps that of the ordinary citizen and which elevates the rights of micro-minorities whenever there is a conflict at law. In her world, the rights of a criminal perpetrator should be on a par with those of their victims. What this has got to do with the righting of real injustices is anyone's guess. Instead, it promotes division, erodes our sense of a common citizenry (even of a common humanity) and diminishes our sense of responsibility to one another. It is the politics of self love above all else - live your "best life" and the Devil take the hind-most. 

The crusade of Saint Nicola is politics at its most vacuous and decadent. In any self-respecting democracy both she, her party and their fellow travellers would get a proper thumping at the polls. It may yet happen - and they will deserve it.