COVID-19 and the failure of Populism

For years I have defined the populist agenda as presenting simple answers to complex questions which in the end prove to be no answers at all.

It has taken a pandemic to prove me right, and I take no pleasure at all that the shambolic approach to the Coronavirus crisis by the two major populist leaders in the Western world has wreaked havoc on their populations and probably cost lives.

United States President Donald Trump and United Kingdom Prime Minister Boris Johnson must face the consequences for their failure to listen to medical advice, for acting too slowly, and for adopting measures and attitudes that have patently proved to be wrong.

I will be fair and say that more traditional approaches have initially failed to stem the virus’s march in countries as different as Iran and Italy. Only by adopting draconian measures that would be unthinkable in the West has China shown some success in getting COVID-19 under control.

Elsewhere we still have a long way to go — and the missteps by the US and UK Governments may well make the path to recovery that more difficult.

In his excellent summary of the Trump Administration’s failures, Australian academic Nicholas Morieson says the President refused to acknowledge the seriousness of the crisis until an abrupt about face on March 12.

“He not only resisted taking any drastic measures to fight the virus, but actively downplayed the danger it posed, claiming COVID-19 was fake news spread by his political adversaries in the Democratic Party and the media designed to prevent his re-election,” Morieson writes.  

Now, of course, the tune has dramatically changed, with Trump suddenly claiming the country was at war with “an invisible enemy” and calling for the nation to face the threat until “total victory” was achieved.

Since then, he is beginning to claim the enemy is not so invisible, renaming COVID-19 the “China virus”, a virtual encouragement to his more rabid supporters to bombard the internet with conspiracy theories, drowning out any criticism of his own blunders.

In the UK Johnson was ready with his own solution to COVID-19, initially introducing the theory of ‘herd immunity’, allowing the virus to spread slowly, letting a lot of people get sick and recover, thus eventually building up immunity.

What Johnson didn’t seem to grasp was that most people did not want to risk their loved ones and themselves being the minority who inevitably did not recover and died.

US Virologist Akiko Iwasaki quickly pointed out that herd immunity usually works when there is a vaccination available administered under controlled circumstances.

“You don’t rely on the very deadly infectious agent to create an immune population,” she said.

Like Trump, Johnson was quickly back-peddling, claiming he only wanted to try and “flatten the curve” of COVID-19 so health services would not be overwhelmed.

However, he was forced to admit that “herd immunity is not our goal or policy”.

Both the US and the UK are now pursuing traditional measures to deal with the outbreak, but they have arrived at them at a much later stage than the rest of the world. As a result their populations are likely to suffer more, over a longer period.

Their simple answers to complex questions have proved abject failures.

The dangers of ignoring Idlib

With the relentless spread of Coronavirus dominating the world’s attention many important world events are slipping under the radar – including the continuing tragedy in Syria’s Idlib Province, which some see as the last act in the country’s nine-year civil war.

They may be optimistic. The remaining rebel fighters have been re-supplied by their ally, Turkey and have blunted the Syrian advance. In addition Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan has sent his own forces into the province which have spasmodically duelled with their Syrian counterparts.

At present a truce, brokered by Turkey and Syrian ally Russia, is supposed to be in place, but like so many similar agreements in the past, it is constantly being violated.

In the last few days President Erdogan announced that his forces had destroyed eight Russian-made Pantsir-S1 surface-to-air missile systems, while reports on the ground seem to confirm that fighting, albeit at a lower intensity, is continuing.    

Turkish journalist and political analyst, Abdullah Ayasun says under current conditions a lasting truce is unattainable, pointing to a statement by Syrian President Bashar al-Assad that he still intends to exert his regime’s control over the entire Idlib Province.

‘The truce has been declared many times before and collapsed prematurely due to the competing agendas and conflicting goals of the warring sides on the ground,” Ayasun says.

“Turkey cannot back down from its declared goal of thwarting the fall of Idlib and preventing a refugee exodus toward its borders, and Syria cannot abandon this latest stage of its longstanding aim to reunite Syria by clearing Idlib of the remaining rebel forces.

“This makes another confrontation inevitable.”

It also makes for a very dangerous game played by both sides. Erdogan would like to gain full control of Idlib, which could then be used to resettle some of the millions of Syrian refugees he is hosting. His forces could easily achieve this if Damascus was the only enemy, but also taking on Russia is a different matter.

Assad must calculate just how far Russian President Vladimir Putin is prepared to go to support him, especially if what Moscow sees as a reasonable permanent peace can be negotiated.

Putin has to consider the consequences of an all-out war against NATO member Turkey, especially given the volatility of United States President Donald Trump is likely to increase as that country’s election nears.

With the world’s attention — and many of its resources — diverted elsewhere, a sudden escalation of tensions in this perennial hotspot could easily spin out of control.

EU adjusts to a post-Brexit world

There is no doubt that the departure of the United Kingdom has shaken the European Union to the core.

Five years ago the complacent bureaucracy in Brussels was utterly confident Brexit would never happen. Three years ago, with the Brexit vote in place and leave negotiations under way, hubris was replaced by panic.

There was then a belief that the UK’s actions would be followed by others: Grexit (Greece) and Polexit (Poland) were widely tipped as the front-runners. Right-wing anti-EU movements in France and Germany were energised.

The EU’s arch foe, Nigel Farage was confidently predicting the EU would collapse and Europe would “revert to sovereign nations trading among themselves”.

Today the mood has changed again. The UK’s drawn-out and chaotic exit has given critics on the continent pause. No-one is serious about following Britain out of the door anymore, and even the most trenchant critics are talking about reform rather than dismantlement.

It is reform that is occupying the minds both of senior EU officials and leaders of member nations. The changes being considered take in foreign affairs, business and defence — and whether the bloc is ready to resume enlargement with applicant countries in the Balkans.

There is a new realism pervading the capitals of the continent, as highlighted by French President Emmanuel Macron who is calling for “a renewal of the European approach — we no longer live in the world of the 1990s”. 

Following Brexit and the fact that in Donald Trump, the EU faces the first United President who is openly hostile to it, there is a feeling that Brussels’ foreign policy must toughen up to meet the changed circumstances.

For years it has relied on soft power diplomacy to spread its influence in the world, basing it on economic and development aid (as an example the EU is one of the largest aid donors in the Pacific region, after Australia) as well as promoting cultural ties and human rights.

That is no longer seen as sufficient in a more hard-edged, aggressive world. As EU Representative for Foreign Affairs and Security, Josep Borrell said recently: “We Europeans must adjust our mental maps to deal with the world as it is, not as we hoped it would be.  

“To avoid being the losers in today’s US-China competition, we must relearn the language of power."

That has revived talk of some form of EU defence force, possibly drawn from the ranks of member countries’ militaries, ready to come together at short notice to deal with a crisis.

That will be challenging, especially without the UK’s undoubted military clout, and with a budget already under strain from other areas, such as the Green Deal Project that targets the EU becoming climate neutral by 2050.

One area where Brussels may well decide to flex its muscles is in the current talks with the UK on a post-Brexit trade deal.

There is growing irritation over the bluster emanating from some UK Government Ministers, with a curt suggestion from EU Chief Negotiator Michel Barnier that the UK “cut the rhetoric”.

There is also a feeling that Barnier is not going to jump through hoops to get a deal done by Prime Minister Boris Johnson’s self-imposed deadline of December 31.

“Brexit has not gone away,” he warned.

How this plays out will only become clear as negotiations ramp up in coming months through what could well be an angry summer of discontent.

The perils of privilege

It has become something of a cliché that Australia is a great sporting nation with all Australians devoted to their favourite sports.

Like most clichés there is some truth behind the sweeping generalisation, but the recent incidents involving a senior Government Ministers handing out sporting grants for allegedly party political purposes is testing the national love affair.

The initial outcry, which led to the Minister responsible, Bridget McKenzie, losing her job, has been well documented, but a lobby group, the Australian Taxpayers Alliance (ATA), believes the rorting goes far beyond this one case.

The ATA’s Policy Director, Emilie Dye, says she is “sick and tired” of writing on the subject and her message to the Government is “please, just stop”.

Ms Dye is taking the Minister for Health, Greg Hunt, to task for allegedly securing $A170,000 for a yacht club in his constituency.

“When Australians give up their hard-earned money to the Government they would like to think that money goes to our schools, our roads, taking care of the homeless and protecting our country from hostile forces abroad, not to a ‘struggling’ yacht club,” Ms Dye says.

“Politicians aren’t even pork-barrelling subtly when they give wealthy clubs in key electorates taxpayer money.”

Hunt defended the grant saying that it was his job as a local MP to lobby for his electorate.

This maybe the case, but Mr Hunt is a senior Minister with easy access to other Ministers and officials who decide these grants.

One wonders whether the yacht club would have received the same treatment if the electorate had been represented by an opposition backbencher.

Ms Dye claims the Government is syphoning money through taxes from poor and regional areas to subsidise the lifestyles of the wealthy. That is a huge call and probably more than a little unfair.

However, like clichés, there are grains of truth. Over the years (and not just in Australia) I have sensed a creeping sense of entitlement among those we elect.

A movement away from the concept that they are the servants of all the people towards a belief they need only hand rewards to the supporters who put them into power while the rest can go hang.

We can see where this leads in the extreme cases of countries like Lebanon and Iraq where populations have taken to the streets as a desperate measure against corrupt, governing elites interested only in self-preservation.

There is some way to go before the democratic West reaches this point, but examples are beginning to emerge — in the United States with the divisions President Donald Trump seems bent of creating, and in the United Kingdom between supporters and opponents of the European Union.

Those who govern with a ‘them and us’ mentality, determined to do what it takes to cling to power, are storing up trouble for themselves. It can only be hoped that the sports rorts scandal provides a warning to the developing Australian elites not to proceed down this road.

Because, if the electoral process fails angry minorities may seek to change things by other means.

Putin and the UK killing field

For many years now I have sought to keep alive the memory of Alexander Litvinenko, a former officer of the Russian Federal Security Bureau (FSB) who defected to the United Kingdom after he found that his own superior officers were plotting to assassinate Government critics living overseas.

In 2006 Litvinenko became a victim of the plotters, poisoned in London with a radioactive substance so secret that a long-delayed inquiry into his death ruled it could only have come from a Russian State laboratory. 

The head of that inquiry, retired High Court Judge Sir Robert Owen, went further, naming the two men sent to London to perform the murder as Andrey Lugovoy and Dimitri Kovtun.

“I have concluded that that there is a strong probability that when Mr Lugovoy poisoned Mr Litvinenko, he did so under the direction of the FSB. I have further concluded that Mr Kovtun was also acting under FSB direction,” Sir Robert said.

“I have further concluded that the FSB operation to kill Mr Litvinenko was probably approved by Mr Patrushev, then the head of the FSB, and by President Putin.”

This dramatic moment in British legal history is described in a new book From Russia with Blood, by Heidi Blake — but it is one instance in the catalogue of crime that the Russian State, with the express permission of President Vladimir Putin, committed on foreign soil, almost with impunity.

The UK became the main killing field, largely because critics of Putin fled there believing they would be safe. They were wrong, with Blake writing that there may have been as many as 14 instances of suspicious deaths.

Yet almost without exception they were explained away by authorities at the time as suicides or accidents.

Blake writes that it was only the unsuccessful attempt to poison defector Sergei Skripal and his daughter Yulia — an attack so blatant and the evidence of Russian involvement so overwhelming — that prompted then Prime Minister, David Cameron to given in to persistent demands by Litvinenko’s supporters for an inquiry into his murder.

Even so, with Sir Robert’s findings part of the public record, Cameron refused to go beyond routine denunciations about an “unacceptable breach of international law”, which Putin contemptuously dismissed.

Cameron’s excuse: “We have to go on having some sort of relationship with [Putin] because we need a solution to the Syria crisis.”  

Three and a half years on from that statement, we are seeing the “solution to the Syria crisis” as Russian planes, in support of Syrian dictator Bashar al-Assad, pound the last rebel hold-out in Idlib, levelling hospitals and orphanages and forcing yet more waves of civilian refugees to flee.

Then there are the attacks on Ukraine, the annexation of Crimea, attempts to manipulate elections in Montenegro and unproved but persistent allegations that Putin interfered in the Western electoral process to support the victory of Donald Trump and secure the Brexit referendum.

Litvinenko was a good man – an honest cop doing his job, which meant he was so dangerous to Putin’s Russia that he had to be hunted down and silenced.

He once described Russia as the ‘Mafia State’ and sadly, despite the rhetoric and occasional wrist slaps from the West, the gangsters in the Kremlin are going to continue their rule for many years to come.

‘Fun’ times as doomsday beckons

A United Kingdom journalism researcher believes he has found the answer to the decline in the country’s mainstream media — more fun news.

Nic Newman says fun is what younger audiences crave, and producing traditional stories about wars, traffic fatalities and political corruption turns them off.

Newman, a Senior Research Associate at the Reuters Institute for the Study of Journalism, said there was a disconnect between old-style journalism and a “younger, plugged-in generation looking for information, entertainment and distraction”.

It is inevitable that those of us who care about the world and how it operates must adapt to the different ways it can now be reported.

The same conference at which Newman spoke discussed how the boom in podcasting could be further exploited, for example.

However, measuring the value of news by its ‘fun factor’ is simply a bridge too far.

On the same day Newman was presenting his vision on the future of news, Human Rights Watch produced a damning report on China’s aggressive attempts to spread its ideas on media censorship to the rest of the world.

Presenting the report, the organisation’s Executive Director, Kenneth Roth said China’s global threat to human rights, if unchallenged, could “portend a dystopian future in which no-one is beyond the reach of Chinese censors”.

“It could result in an international human rights system so weakened that it no longer serves as a check on Government repression,” Roth said.

The report also covered Syria and Yemen, where warring parties were accused of a blatant disregard of international rules on chemical weapons and bombing hospitals — and China’s mass internment of its ethnic Uyghur population “the largest imprisonment of people on the basis of religion since the Holocaust”.

Definitely not Newman’s idea of ‘fun’ news, and presumably topics he believes should take second place behind celebrity gossip and Four Ways to Sleep in Bed with a New Partner to attract his ‘younger audiences’.

In any case he is wrong. It is not young people, but their elders who seem to have become lobotomised on a steady diet of sensationalised pap.

At a recent UK ‘town hall’ meeting on how the country would fare post-Brexit a member of the audience maintained that once free of the European Union’s shackles, the country would once again be free to trade with “the empire” as a route to prosperity.

I was dumbfounded, this was not someone plucked off the street in a random television interview for viewers to chuckle over. He was sitting in some kind of focus group that was supposedly formulating serious suggestions for the nation’s future.   

Contrast this with the hundreds of thousands of young people around the globe who took time off from school to demonstrate in support of more active measures to combat climate change.

They are aware, more than many of their complacent elders, of the suffering and misery that is the norm for millions of their peers across the globe — and how this is only going to get worse if current attitudes continue to prevail.

As their leaders emerge they will become a force that will not be denied. 

They are the best hope this very unfunny world has as the Doomsday Clock inches closer to midnight.

Understanding the Royal departure

During the endless debate over the United Kingdom’s exit from the European Union a friend suggested to me that the average Brit could be dressed in rags and standing in line at a soup kitchen — and would still feel himself superior to the coloured woman doling out the soup.

Despite my distaste at some of the ‘arguments’ and actions emanating from parts of the Brexit camp, I thought this a somewhat sweeping opinion — but then came the news that the Queen’s grandson and his American mixed-race wife have had enough. They were getting out.  

Revelations that the Duke and Duchess of Sussex — Prince Harry and Meghan Markle — are to live at least part of the time in Canada; step back from Royal duties and work to become financially independent has been treated with predictable rage by the UK’s red-top media.

“Petulant” screamed the Mirror… “and good riddance”; “the most spoilt brats in history”, said commentator Piers Morgan; “nothing matters to this couple apart from immediate happiness and gratification,” wrote Sarah Vine in the Daily Mail.

Then came the Twitter tirade from the great British proletariat many voicing comments and opinions of Markle that will not be repeated here, but sadly can be guessed at.

It had me thinking. All this adds up.

In the 1960s a Conservative candidate won his constituency at a General Election with the slogan ‘if you want a nigger for a neighbour vote Labour’; not long afterwards a senior Conservative Shadow Minister was talking about “rivers of blood” if coloured immigration was not halted.

Then there were the remarks that could be heard in pubs and clubs around the land about “wogs beginning at Calais”; the mixed-race guy at the bar having “a touch of the tar brush”.

The Italians were oversexed Mafiosi; the Dutch ‘clog-wogs’ and of course there were the Frogs, the Krauts and the Dagos.

Black players in visiting football teams can often expect to be greeted with monkey noises and have banana skins thrown at them. In the aftermath of the 2016 Brexit referendum third generation Britons with historic origins in the Sub-continent and the West Indies were abused and told they would soon have to “go back to where you came from”.

Author Afua Hirsch has reminded us about Prime Minister Boris Johnson’s reference to Commonwealth “flag-waving piccaninnies”. She describes Brexit as fuelled by native nationalism and a desire to rid Britain of large numbers of immigrants, “with an ever- thickening loom of Imperial nostalgia”. 

Those who thought the marriage of Harry and Meghan might be one Royal step towards a more inclusive society have learnt that it matters little if you are beautiful, glamorous, philanthropic or hard-working, nothing has changed.

In Britain today if your colouring is too dark, your accent is wrong or your clothing does not conform, you will run the risk of racist abuse or worse.

Though no particular fan of the Royal Family, I am sorry that Harry and Meghan feel the need to get out — but I can quite understand their reasons.