UPDATED

Rio Tinto apologises to traditional owners after blasting 46,000-year-old Aboriginal site

Mining giant detonated explosives at Juukan Gorge in Western Australia, destroying two ancient rock shelters

Australian Associated Press
Sun 31 May 2020 09.

 

Rio Tinto apologies for destroying Indigenous site 46,000 years old.

 Photograph: PKKP Aboriginal Corporation/AFP/Getty Images


Mining giant Rio Tinto has apologised to traditional owners in Western Australia’s north after destroying a significant Indigenous site dating back 46,000 years, saying it is urgently reviewing plans for other sites in the area.

Rio detonated explosives in a part of the Juukan Gorge last Sunday, destroying two ancient rock shelters, which has devastated the Puutu Kunti Kurrama and Pinikura people.

The mining giant was granted approval for work at the Brockman 4 iron ore project in 2013, but subsequent archaeological excavation revealed ancient artefacts including grinding stones, a bone sharpened into a tool and 4000-year-old braided hair.

“We are sorry for the distress we have caused,” Rio Tinto Iron Ore chief executive Chris Salisbury said in a statement on Sunday.


“Our relationship with the PKKP matters a lot to Rio Tinto, having worked together for many years.

“We will continue to work with the PKKP to learn from what has taken place and strengthen our partnership.

“As a matter of urgency, we are reviewing the plans of all other sites in the Juukan Gorge area.”

On Saturday, the Puutu Kunti Kurrama and Pinikura Aboriginal Corporation rejected Rio’s suggestion its representatives had failed to make clear concerns about preserving the site during years of consultation between the two parties.

Spokesman Burchell Hayes labelled the claim outrageous, saying Rio was told in October about the significance of the rock shelters and the company replied it had no plans to extend the Brockman 4 mine.

“The high significance of the site was further relayed to Rio Tinto by PKKPAC as recently as March,” Hayes said.

He said Rio did not advise of its intention to blast the area and the corporation “only found out by default on 15 May when we sought access to the area for NAIDOC Week in July”.

WA Aboriginal affairs minister Ben Wyatt has said he was unaware of the blast or concerns beforehand.

The state government hopes to pass its new Aboriginal cultural heritage bill this year, although Covid-19 has delayed the consultation process.

“It will provide for agreements between traditional owners and proponents to include a process to consider new information that may come to light, and allow the parties to be able to amend the agreements by mutual consent,” Wyatt said.

“The legislation will also provide options for appeal.”

Peter Stone, Unesco’s chair in cultural property protection and peace, said the archaeological destruction at Juukan Gorge was among the worst seen in recent history, likening it to the Taliban blowing up the Bamiyan Buddhas statues in Afghanistan and Isis annihilating sites in the Syrian city of Palmyra.

Rio said it was committed to updating its practices.

Rio Tinto admits damaging Australian Aboriginal heritage site

Issued on: 27/05/2020

A photo taken by the PKKP Aboriginal Corporation on May 15 shows Juukan Gorge in Western Australia -- one of the earliest known sites occupied by Aboriginals in Australia -- that Rio Tinto has admitted damaging Handout PKKP Aboriginal Corporation/AFP

Sydney (AFP)

Anglo-Australian mining giant Rio Tinto has admitted damaging ancient Aboriginal rock shelters in the remote Pilbara region -- blasting near the 46,000-year-old heritage site to expand an iron ore mine.

Traditional owners said the culturally significant cave in Juukan Gorge, Western Australia -- one of the earliest known sites occupied by Aboriginals in Australia -- had been destroyed in a "devastating blow" to the community.

Explosives were detonated near the site on Sunday in line with state government approvals granted seven years ago, Rio Tinto said in a statement.


"In 2013, ministerial consent was granted to allow Rio Tinto to conduct activity at the Brockman 4 mine that would impact Juukan 1 and Juukan 2 rock shelters," the spokesperson said, adding the company had liaised with the Aboriginal community.

"Rio Tinto has worked constructively together with the PKKP people on a range of heritage matters under the agreement and has, where practicable, modified its operations to avoid heritage impacts and to protect places of cultural significance to the group."

Just one year after the blasting was approved, an archaeological dig at one of the shelters uncovered the oldest known example of bone tools in Australia -- a sharpened kangaroo bone dating back 28,000 years -- and a 4,000-year-old hair plait believed to have been worn as a belt.

DNA testing of the hair had shown a genetic link to the ancestors of indigenous people who still live in the area.

The 2014 excavations also found one of the oldest examples of a grinding stone ever found in Australia.

"There are less than a handful of known Aboriginal sites in Australia that are as old as this one", Puutu Kunti Kurrama Land Committee chair John Ashburton said, describing the site as one of the earliest-occupied locations nationally.

"Our people are deeply troubled and saddened by the destruction of these rock shelters and are grieving the loss of connection to our ancestors as well as our land.

The local Aboriginal corporation said traditional owners had first learned Rio Tinto planned to blast the gorge near the rock shelters on 15 May after requesting access to the site.

Attempts to negotiate with the mining company to stop the blast failed, the corporation said, and it received advice that the charges could not safely be removed or left undetonated.

"We recognise that Rio Tinto has complied with its legal obligations, but we are gravely concerned at the inflexibility of the regulatory system," Ashburton said.

"We are now working with Rio Tinto to safeguard the remaining rock shelters in the Juukan Gorge and ensure open communication between all stakeholders."

The Western Australia state government is currently reviewing the laws as part of a process that began in 2018.

© 2020 AFP



A sacred site showing 46,000 years of continual occupation and it's completely legal to blow it up

First Dog on the Moon
Destroyed by people who probably don’t know who their ancestors were 300 years ago

Rio Tinto blasts 46,000-year-old Aboriginal site to expand iron ore mine

Mining company was given permission to blast Juukan Gorge cave, which provided a 4,000-year-old genetic link to present-day traditional owners


Calla Wahlquist
Tue 26 May 2020 modified on Wed 27 May 2020
 

This cave in the Juukan Gorge, dubbed Juukan 2, was destroyed in a mining blast on Sunday. Consent was given through outdated Aboriginal heritage laws drafted in 1972. Photograph: The Puutu Kunti Kurrama and Pinikura Aboriginal Corporation.


A sacred site in Western Australia that showed 46,000 years of continual occupation and provided a 4,000-year-old genetic link to present-day traditional owners has been destroyed in the expansion of an iron ore mine.

The cave in Juukan Gorge in the Hammersley Ranges, about 60km from Mt Tom Price, is one of the oldest in the western Pilbara region and the only inland site in Australia to show signs of continual human occupation through the last Ice Age. It was blasted along with another sacred site on Sunday.

Mining company Rio Tinto received ministerial consent to destroy or damage the site in 2013 under WA’s outdated Aboriginal heritage laws, which were drafted in 1972 to favour mining proponents.

One year after consent was granted, an archeological dig intended to salvage whatever could be saved discovered the site was more than twice as old as previously thought and rich in artefacts, including sacred objects.

Australia lodges world heritage submission for 50,000-year-old Burrup Peninsula rock art
https://www.theguardian.com/artanddesign/2020/jan/29/australia-lodges-world-heritage-submission-for-50000-year-old-burrup-peninsula-rock-art

Most precious was a 4,000-year-old length of plaited human hair, woven together from strands from the heads of several different people, which DNA testing revealed were the direct ancestors of Puutu Kunti Kurrama and Pinikura traditional owners living today.

But the outdated Aboriginal Heritage Act does not allow for a consent to be renegotiated on the basis of new information. So despite regular meetings with Rio Tinto, the Puutu Kunti Kurrama and Pinikura (PKKP) Aboriginal Corporation was unable to stop the blast from going ahead.

“It’s one of the most sacred sites in the Pilbara region … we wanted to have that area protected,” PKKP director Burchell Hayes told Guardian Australia.

“It is precious to have something like that plaited hair, found on our country, and then have further testing link it back to the Kurrama people. It’s something to be proud of, but it’s also sad. Its resting place for 4,000 years is no longer there.”

Hayes said the site had been used as a campsite by Kurrama moving through the area, including in the memory of some elders.

“We want to do the same, we want to show the next generation,” he said. “Now, if this site has been destroyed, then we can tell them stories but we can’t show them photographs or take them out there to stand at the rock shelter and say: this is where your ancestors lived, starting 46,000 years ago.”

The cave in Juukan Gorge that was blasted. It is the only inland site in Australia to show signs of continual human occupation through the last Ice Age. Photograph: The Puutu Kunti Kurrama and Pinikura Aboriginal Corporation.

The Aboriginal Heritage Act has been up for review, in some form, since 2012. Draft legislation put forward by the former Liberal government in 2014 was rejected after even a National party MP argued it was unfair to traditional owners and did not allow for adequate consultation.


Re-writing the act was listed as a priority for Labor before their election win in 2017, and last month Aboriginal affairs minister Ben Wyatt pushed back the final consultation on his draft bill until later this year due to the coronavirus pandemic.

The new legislation will provide options to appeal or amend agreements to allow for the destruction of heritage sites, Wyatt said. He wasn’t aware of the risk to the Juukan site, or its destruction, until Monday.

“It will provide for agreements between traditional owners and proponents to include a process to consider new information that may come to light, and allow the parties to be able to amend the agreements by mutual consent,” he said. “The legislation will also provide options for appeal should either party not be compliant with the agreement.”

In its submission to the legislative review, Rio Tinto said it was broadly supportive of the proposed reform but that consent orders granted under the current system should be carried over, and that rights of appeal should be fixed, not broad or subject to extensions, lest it “prolong approvals or appeals processes at a critical point in the project.”

A spokesman from Rio Tinto said the company had a relationship with the Puutu Kunti Kurrama and Pinikura people dating back three decades, “and we have been working together in relation to the Juukan area over the past 17 years”.

“Rio Tinto has worked constructively together with the PKKP People on a range of heritage matters and has, where practicable, modified its operations to avoid heritage impacts and to protect places of cultural significance to the group,” the company said.

The mining company signed a native title agreement with the traditional owners in 2011, four years before their native title claim received formal assent by the federal court. They facilitated the salvage dig in 2014, which uncovered the true age of the site.

Budj Bim Indigenous eel trap site added to world heritage list
https://www.theguardian.com/australia-news/2019/jul/07/budj-bim-indigenous-eel-trap-site-added-to-world-heritage-list

Archeologist Dr Michael Slack, who led that dig, said it was a once-in-a-lifetime discovery.

An earlier 1 metre test dig, conducted in 2008, dated the site at about 20,000 years old, but the salvage expedition uncovered a “very significant site” with more than 7,000 artefacts collected, including grid stones that were 40,000 years old, thousands of bones from middens which showed changes in fauna as the climate changed, and sacred objects.

The flat floor of the cave allowed for a significant depth of soil and sand to build up, creating a layer almost two metres deep in parts. Most archeological digs in the Pilbara hit rock at 30cm.

Most significantly, the archeological records did not disappear during the last Ice Age. Most inland archeological sites in Australia show that people moved away during the Ice Age between 23,000 and 19,000 years ago, as the country dried up and water sources dried up. Archeological evidence from Juukan Gorge suggest it was occupied throughout.

“It was the sort of site you do not get very often, you could have worked there for years,” he said. “How significant does something have to be, to be valued by wider society?” he said.

• This article was amended on 27 May 2020 to correct the spelling of Burchell Hayes.

Double Lives review – the mother of all battles for equality

Helen McCarthy’s landmark history of the lives of working mothers highlights the discrimination that remains to this day

Yvonne Roberts
Sun 31 May 2020
 

Women on a production line canning beans in Wisbech, Cambridgeshire, 1934. Photograph: Fox Photos/Getty Images


Isabel Killick, an impoverished East End tailoress with three children and a sickly husband, appeared before a House of Lords select committee in 1888 and, on one of the rare occasions in which a working-class woman could speak for herself directly to those in power, she explained that she worked from 6am to 8pm in her home to feed her family by “trouser finishing” .

Her own daily diet was a cup of tea and a herring, “as for meat, I do not expect; I get meat once in six months”. Killick was one of 4 million girls and women in paid work in Victorian Britain – 15% of whom were mothers. As historian Helen McCarthy explains in Double Lives: A History of Working Motherhood, such women were a well-established feature but were considered a deviancy, far from the social norm.

Generalisations often abound in chronicles of women’s conditions because the rich diversity of women’s lives within and between classes were either unrecorded or mediated through the views of the male upper class and middle-class females, social investigators. For instance, the sweated industries exhibition in 1906 was intended to show the plight of 450,000 homeworkers, who were often assisted by their tiny children. Visitors paid a shilling to view photographs and living exhibits with “tired faces and broken bodies” working in occupations that included making baby bonnets and industrial tools, chocolate boxes, artificial flowers and matchboxes. McCarthy writes: “As so often the case when the rich and comfortably off interpreted the lives of the poor the degradation of the nameless women (and men) on show … was deduced not by listening to voices but by observing bodies … testimony to hopeless defeated lives.”

McCarthy’s triumph lies in listening to many voices, revealing a complexity and richness that challenges the simple narrative that the working-class female has always needed to work for survival, the educated woman wants employment as a legitimate aspiration, while the male establishment and censorious nosy parkers don’t like either.
The social reformer, historian and economist Beatrice Webb. Photograph: Hulton Archive/Getty Images

Double Lives is a milestone in women’s history precisely because McCarthy persists in unpicking the contradictions, in understanding that women’s own feelings and desires, not just social convention and economic necessity, were and are “crucial to the reimagining of motherhood” and a life outside the tight girdle of domesticity. Let’s hope that, in lockdown, the diversity of experiences of mothers, many coping with paid work, childcare and managing households under siege, is as well recorded and understood by future historians.

So we hear the voice of childless campaigner Beatrice Webb, enamoured with “the holiness of motherhood”, castigating a homeworker as “an enemy to her sex” and feminist trade unionist Clementina Black instructing a committee of MPs that a box to send wedding cake through the post required 15 operations to assemble. “That box,” she said, “was made in a very grubby house but by a very clever woman.”

While again, contrary to the stereotypes, some homeworkers were judged to be “respectable”, and “well-dressed”, flourishing enough to employ apprentices. One working mother told Black: “A shilling of your own is worth two that he gives you.”


Women are still unlawfully sacked in pregnancy; still predominantly earn less than men

Double Lives seeks to discover why legislation that was supposed to end discrimination, abolish unequal pay and permit flexible working without forfeiting a career has not eased the situation of the two-thirds of women who are mothers in paid work now. Women are still unlawfully sacked in pregnancy; still predominantly earn less than men; still carry the major burden of domesticity and employment; still carry the major blame for children’s mental ill-health because they are “absent”.

Changes have come. Women are no longer only valued for their reproductive abilities, as “nurturers” of the race, but what’s missing is the radical systemic overhaul required – for example for affordable, good quality childcare. Society’s attitudes remain conflicted. Too often “good” mothers work part-time (or not at all) and compromise their chosen careers, while “bad” mothers are seen to behave like alpha males.

McCarthy says she is “white, middle class, highly educated and well paid”. Her inclusion of black and ethnic minority mothers who work skims the surface and she says others will investigate working mothers in same-sex relationships, those with disabilities, and trans-parenting. What she does very well is chart how “women’s worlds were shaped by a labour market founded on sexual difference, a welfare state which institutionalised the dependency of wives and a wider culture which prized devoted mothering and housewifery as the apotheosis of femininity”.

The watershed for working mothers was not so much the feminist battles fought again and again, McCarthy argues, but, in the 1950s, the impact of consumerism, rising wages and mass employment. Women brought in the “extra” for washing machines, a family holiday, DIY. “The moral distinction once tightly drawn between mothers who ‘needed’ to work and those who merely wanted to broke down,” she writes. “A second income in the family became a mark of prosperity rather than a source of shame.”

Before that tidal change, two world wars had allowed women to step into men’s skilled employment. A domestic skivvy on 15 shillings a week could earn four times as much working in munitions. After each war, the trade unions ensured the men retrieved their jobs, and that women’s pay packets and skills were reduced. Marriage often meant female employment was barred.

Working mothers in all their variety continue to wait for equality – as do fathers wishing to have more involvement with their children. McCarthy’s book eloquently explains why the resistance is still so strong and the roots of the ambivalence towards working mothers runs so deep. The fight goes on.

• Double Lives: A History of Working Motherhood by Helen McCarthy is published by Bloomsbury (£30)

SEE https://plawiuk.blogspot.com/search?q=FAMILY+VALUES

The answer to police violence is not 'reform'. It's defunding. Here's why

Bias training, body cameras, community dialogues – Minneapolis has tried them all. We need a better response


Alex S Vitale
Sun 31 May 2020 

WHENEVER THESE GUYS SHOW UP THERE IS A RIOT

WHICH IS WHY THEY ARE CALLED THE RIOT SQUAD

Police hold a line on the fourth day of protests in Minneapolis. Photograph: Scott Olson/Getty Images


Every time protests erupt after yet another innocent black person is killed by police, “reform” is meekly offered as the solution. But what if drastically defunding the police – not reform – is the best way to stop unnecessary violence and death committed by law enforcement against communities of color?

Minneapolis, where George Floyd was killed by a police officer who kneeled on his neck for over eight minutes, has tried reform already. Five years ago, the Minneapolis police department was under intense pressure in the wake of both the national crisis of police killings of unarmed black men and its own local history of unnecessary police violence. In response, the department’s leaders undertook a series of reforms proposed by the Obama administration’s justice department and procedural reform advocates in academia.

The Minneapolis police implemented trainings on implicit bias, mindfulness, de-escalation, and crisis intervention; diversified the department’s leadership; created tighter use-of-force standards; adopted body cameras; initiated a series of police-community dialogues; and enhanced early-warning systems to identify problem officers.

In 2015, they brought in procedural reformer and implicit bias champion Phillip Atiba Goff to lead the National Initiative for Building Community Trust and Justice, a three-year, $4.75m project to use data collection, social psychology and police community dialogues to repair and strengthen the frayed relationship between cops and communities.

Following that, Minneapolis implemented a series of training programs designed to professionalize policing in the hopes that it would reduce abuses that might trigger more protests. Officers were trained in how to respond to mental health crisis calls, how to de-escalate confrontations with the public, how to be “mindful” in dangerous circumstances, and how to be more self-aware of their implicit racial bias. In 2018, the department even wrote a report, Focusing on Procedural Justice Internally and Externally, to highlight the broad range of procedural reforms they had implemented.

None of it worked.

That’s because “procedural justice” has nothing to say about the mission or function of policing. It assumes that the police are neutrally enforcing a set of laws that are automatically beneficial to everyone. Instead of questioning the validity of using police to wage an inherently racist war on drugs, advocates of “procedural justice” politely suggest that police get anti-bias training, which they will happily deliver for no small fee.

What “procedural justice” leaves out of the conversation are questions of substantive justice. What is the actual impact of policing on those policed and what could we do differently? Over the last 40 years we have seen a massive expansion of the scope and intensity of policing. Every social problem in poor and non-white communities has been turned over to the police to manage. The schools don’t work; let’s create school policing. Mental health services are decimated; let’s send police. Overdoses are epidemic; let’s criminalize people who share drugs. Young people are caught in a cycle of violence and despair; let’s call them superpredators and put them in prison for life.

Police have also become more militarized. The Federal 1033 program, the Department of Justice’s “Cops Office,” and homeland security grants have channeled billions of dollars in military hardware into American police departments to advance their “war on crime” mentality. A whole generation of police officers have been given “warrior” training that teaches them to see every encounter with the public as potentially their last, leading to a hostile attitude towards those policed and the unnecessary killing of people falsely considered a threat, such as the 12-year-old Tamir Rice, killed for holding a toy gun in an Ohio park.


The alternative is not more money for police training programs, hardware or oversight. It is to dramatically shrink their function. We must demand that local politicians develop non-police solutions to the problems poor people face. We must invest in housing, employment and healthcare in ways that directly target the problems of public safety. Instead of criminalizing homelessness, we need publicly financed supportive housing; instead of gang units, we need community-based anti-violence programs, trauma services and jobs for young people; instead of school police we need more counselors, after-school programs, and restorative justice programs.

A growing number of local activists in Minneapolis like Reclaim the Block, Black Visions Collective and MPD 150 are demanding just that. They are calling on Mayor Jacob Frey to defund the police by $45m and shift those resources into “community-led health and safety strategies.” The Minneapolis police department currently uses up to 30% of the entire city budget. Instead of giving them more money for pointless training programs, let’s divert that money into building up communities and individuals so we don’t “need” violent and abusive policing.


Alex S Vitale is professor of sociology and coordinator of the Policing and Social Justice Project at Brooklyn College and the author of The End of Policing

What the arrest of a black CNN journalist on air taught us

The mistake was always to think that it can’t happen here, because it can, it has and – unless we remain aware and vocal – it most certainly will again
Francine Prose
Sun 31 May 2020
 

‘I suppose we shouldn’t be so deeply surprised when a black reporter is handcuffed and arrested for the crime of doing his job.’ Photograph: CNN

The circumstances surrounding the 29 May arrest of the CNN reporter Omar Jimenez couldn’t be clearer, more obvious, less subject to doubt or debate. You need only watch the video of the incident to know: this is not fake news.

In Minneapolis, Omar Jimenez was covering the protests ignited by the death of George Floyd, an unarmed black man killed by the police. Confronted by a phalanx of state policemen in riot gear, Jimenez offered to move back. “We’re getting out of your way. Just let us know. Wherever you want us, we will go.” He calmly identified himself as a CNN journalist and produced his credentials. Nonetheless, he was handcuffed and led away, as he continued to ask, peacefully and respectfully, why he was being arrested. Soon after, his producer and cameraman were also cuffed and marched off. One can hear the distraught cameraman asking what to do with his camera, which was seized by the police – apparently unaware that it was still filming.

What the camera doesn’t show is that a few blocks away, a white journalist, also reporting for CNN, was treated by the police with consummate politeness. So what we see, and don’t see, is the convergence of two profoundly toxic streams growing stronger and deeper as they continue to poison our society. One is the erosion of our first amendment protections – Jimenez’s right to document and describe what he was seeing is constitutionally guaranteed – and the other is the systemic racism that explains why a black reporter was arrested while a white one was encouraged to do his job; why a Minneapolis police officer jammed his knee into George Floyd’s neck for eight fatal minutes; and why, almost every week, another black person is killed by the police or – like Trayvon Martin and Ahmaud Arbery – by freelance white vigilantes.

One shudders to think what might have happened to Jimenez, a black man in a tense confrontation with law enforcement, had he not been employed by CNN and accompanied by a camera crew.

For many years, organizations such as PEN and the Committee to Protect Journalists have been working to safeguard the rights – and the lives – of writers and reporters around the world. Mostly, the arrests, imprisonments and murders of journalists have occurred in (and at the behest of) totalitarian regimes, and in countries in which the lawlessness of criminal cartels has gone largely unchecked. Among the most famous cases was the 2006 murder of the Russian journalist Anna Politkovskaya outside her Moscow home and the 2018 killing of the Washington Post columnist Jamal Khashoggi in the Saudi Arabian consulate in Istanbul. In just the last two weeks, a Mexican reporter, Jorge Armenta, was murdered and the car of another journalist was firebombed in Sonora state. The silencing of journalists is the hallmark of the dictatorship and the mafia state; threats and violence are the tactics traditionally employed by the powerful and the corrupt to intimidate those who try to expose corruption and the abuses of power.


We’ve watched our president deriding the press and encouraging his followers to put their faith in conspiracy theories rather than in facts

But that was always somewhere else, happening to other people, and American exceptionalism allowed us to advocate for – and feel slightly removed from – the reporters attacked and imprisoned in other countries, on other continents. Meanwhile the assaults on freedom of speech and on those who try to exercise that freedom have edged closer and closer to home. We’ve watched our president deriding the press and encouraging his followers to put their faith in conspiracy theories rather than in facts. We’ve witnessed the relentlessness with which Donald Trump has attacked the media, we’ve seen Trump and his enablers’ unapologetic disregard for the truth and for those who work to discover and tell that truth. And we’ve noted how Trump’s covert and overt racism has essentially legitimized and encouraged violence against immigrants and people of color while exacerbating the hatred and bigotry that have always been endemic in our society. It was Donald Trump, after all, who referred to the protesters as “thugs” and who suggested that looters should be shot.

Given all that, I suppose we shouldn’t be so deeply surprised when a black reporter is handcuffed and arrested for the crime of doing his job. And yet we are. One of the most striking things about the video of Jimenez’s arrest is the response of the CNN commentators watching the live feed from the newsroom, or whatever the pandemic equivalent of the newsroom is. One says, “That is an American television reporter being led away by police … I’ve never seen anything like this … Having been in the middle of protests, I’ve never seen anything like this.” The emphasis on American television reporter is significant as the commentator repeats, for a third time: I’ve never seen anything like this.


Well, one wants to say, now you have. It’s our turn. It’s happening here, right now. The climate has shifted – away from the assurances of the first amendment, away from the pretense of a color-blind, egalitarian society – and towards a moment when the arrest of a working journalist, a black journalist, is still startling, but dishearteningly foreseeable.

Incidents like this will continue to happen, and perhaps get worse, unless we remain vigilant and make our outrage known. Omar Jimenez and his camera crew have been released from police custody. George Floyd’s killer has been charged with manslaughter and third-degree murder, perhaps in part because the protesters and their supporters refused to keep quiet and let it go. We can’t stop paying atteon and, more important, calling attention to the importance of the free press and to the horrors of racism. The mistake was always to think that it can’t happen here, because it can, it has and – unless we remain aware and vocal – it most certainly will again.


Francine Prose is a novelist and the former president of PEN America

Coronavirus is our chance to completely rethink what the economy is for

The pandemic has revealed the danger of prizing ‘efficiency’ above all else. The recent slowdown in our lives points to another way of doing things
Malcolm Bull 
Sun 31 May 2020

 

Illustration: Matt Kenyon/The Guardian


There’s been a lot of argument about how best to handle the coronavirus pandemic, but if there are two things on which most people currently agree, it’s that governments should have been better prepared, and that everyone should get back to work as soon as it is safe to do so. After all, it seems more or less self-evident that you need to be ready for unexpected contingencies – and that it is better for the economy to function at full capacity. More PPE would have saved doctors’ and nurses’ lives; more work means less unemployment and more growth.

But there is a catch to this, and it has been at the heart of political debate since Machiavelli. It is impossible to achieve both goals at once. Contingency planning requires unused capacity, whereas exploiting every opportunity to the full means losing the flexibility needed to respond to sudden changes of fortune.


It wasn’t until the mid-20th century that economists started to realise that it might be better to leave a bit of slack in the economy to help cope with exogenous shocks. In the years after the Great Depression, governments saw the problem as “idle men, idle land, idle machines and idle money”. But there were also economists, such as the Englishman William Hutt, who went against the Keynesian consensus and pointed out that there were some things – fire extinguishers, for example – that were valuable precisely because they were never used. Having large stocks of PPE, underemployed nurses, or a lot of spare capacity in ICUs, falls into the same category. Idle resources are what you need in a crisis, so some degree of inefficiency isn’t necessarily a bad idea.


Trying to manage a pandemic in a world of just-in-time production lines and precarious labour brings these issues into sharper focus. On the one hand, there weren’t enough idle resources for most countries to cope adequately with the spread of the virus. On the other, the enforced idleness of the lockdown leads to calls to get the economy moving again.


For Donald Trump, the prospect of a prolonged shutdown is particularly alarming because it threatens to undermine the competitiveness of the US economy relative to other nations (notably China) that have dealt with the crisis more efficiently. That’s an argument Machiavelli would have understood very well. One of his constant refrains was that idleness could lead to what he called corruption (the diversion of resources from the public good, which Trump equates with the Dow Jones Industrial Average) – and that corruption leads inevitably to defeat at the hands of your rivals.

For Machiavelli, the contagion of corruption was spread above all by Christianity, a “religion of idleness”. And it is true that the Judeo-Christian tradition, with its sabbaths, jubilees, feast days, and religious specialists devoted to a life of prayer and contemplation rather than martial virtue, built a lot of slack into the system. Machiavelli thought it should be squeezed out through laws that would prevent surplus becoming the pretext for idleness, rather in the way that later economists looked to the pressure mechanism of competition to do the same.

But there’s a contradiction in Machiavelli’s thinking here, because he also acknowledged that one of the things every polity needed was periodic renewal and reform, and that corruption was what preceded it. So you’re in a double bind: either you can squeeze out the slack and never experience renewal, or you can court corruption and create an opportunity to start over and make things better.

With hindsight it looks like that’s one of the problems the religions of idleness tried to address, by incorporating idleness into the calendar. In ancient Hebrew tradition, there were weekly sabbaths, and every seventh year was meant to be a year of release in which the land was left to lie fallow, debts were forgiven and slaves emancipated. The idea was picked up by the Chartist William Benbow, who in 1832 used it as the model for what he called a Grand National Holiday, in effect a month-long general strike that would allow a National Congress to reform society “to obtain for all at the least expense to all, the largest sum of happiness for all”.

Benbow’s plan came to nothing, but it provides an alternative model for how the lockdown might be viewed. The Italian philosopher Giorgio Agamben has complained that the lockdown is a state of exception with an increase in executive powers and a partial abrogation of the rule of law; but the flipside is that it is the closest thing to a Grand National Holiday that most of us have ever experienced. Despite all the suffering the pandemic has caused, for many it has also meant no work, debt relief, empty roads and a rare opportunity to live on free money from the government.

Generally speaking, exogenous threats like wars or natural disasters act as pressure mechanisms forcing us to redouble our efforts to combat them together. The benefit of contagion is that the only way to combat it is to do less rather than more. That has some demonstrable advantages. There has been a dramatic global fall in carbon emissions. The only comparable reduction in greenhouse gases during the past 30 years came as the result of the decline of industrial production in eastern Europe after the fall of communism. That was managed exceptionally badly because neoliberal economists thought that what post-communist states needed was the pressure of free market competition. Shock therapy would galvanise the economy.
The pandemic has been a shock alright, but its effect has been the opposite of galvanising. People everywhere had to stop whatever they were doing or planning to do in the future. That provides an altogether different model of political change. The philosopher Walter Benjamin once noted that while Karl Marx claimed that revolutions were the locomotives of world history, things might actually turn out to be rather different: “Perhaps revolutions are the human race … travelling in this train, reaching for the emergency brake.”


Everyone keeps saying that we are living through strange times, but what is strange about it is that because everything has come to a stop, it is as though we are living out of time. The emergency brake has been pulled and time is standing still. It feels uncanny, and there’s more slack in the world economy than there ever has been before. And that means, as both Benjamin and Machiavelli would have recognised, that there is also a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity for change and renewal.


For some, this might mean a shorter working week, or less air travel. For others, it might suggest the opportunity for a more fundamental remaking of our political system. A space of possibility has unexpectedly opened up, so although the lockdown may be coming to an end, perhaps the standstill should continue.


• Malcolm Bull teaches at Oxford. His latest book is On Mercy

America must listen to its wounds. They will tell us where to look for hope

Only if the screams and tears and protests shake the very conscience of this nation can we hope for a better society on the other side of this
Reverend William Barber 
Sat 30 May 2020

‘The systemic racism that killed George Floyd has taken untold souls from us for over 400 years.’ Photograph: Christian Monterrosa/AP

No one wants to see their community burn. But the fires burning in Minneapolis, just like the fire burning in the spirits of so many marginalized Americans today, are a natural response to the trauma black communities have experienced, generation after generation.

No one wants the fires – even activists on the ground have said this. But they have also shared how their non-violent pleas and protests have gone unnoticed for years as the situation has gotten out of hand. No one knows who and what is behind the violence, but we do know that countless activists, grassroots leaders and preachers were screaming non-violently long before now: “Change, America! Change, Minneapolis!” Rather than listen, many of those in power saw even their non-violent protest as an unwelcome development.

This is so often the case because many Americans struggle to imagine that our government’s policies and its long train of abuses demand radical transformation. Too many want to believe racism is merely caused by a few bad actors. We often turn racism into a spectacle, only considering the cruel legacy of racism when an egregious action escalates outrage to this level.

Black Americans have rarely been able to sustain such illusions. Deadly racism is always with us, and not only through police brutality. In the midst of the current pandemic we are painfully aware that our families bear a disproportionate burden of Covid-19 deaths. In some cities where racial data is available, we know that black people are six times as likely to die from the virus as their white counterparts. Even before Covid, large numbers of black Americans died because of the racial disparities in healthcare, which are systemic and not unintentional.

African Americans are three times more likely to die from particulate air pollution than our fellow Americans. The percentage of black children suffering from asthma is nearly double that of white people, and the death rate is 10 times higher. This is but a reflection of the fissures of inequality that run through every institution in our public life, where the black wealth gap, education gap and healthcare gap have persisted despite the civil rights movement, legal desegregation and symbolic affirmative action. We understand that the same mentality that will accept and defend the violence of armed officers against unarmed black people will also send black, brown and poor people into harm’s way during a pandemic in the name of “liberty” and “the economy”.

Many have cited Dr King to remind Americans that a riot is the language of the unheard. But I have been reflecting on the eulogy he offered when another man – a white man who came to Selma, Alabama, to work for voting rights – was brutally murdered by racist violence in 1965. At the funeral for James Reed, Dr King said it is not enough to ask who killed the victim in a case like the murder of George Floyd. Weak and unacceptable charges have been brought against the officer whose knee choked George Floyd, staying on his neck for three minutes after he went unconscious, but no charges have been filed against the other officers who stood by and watched. Even still, dealing with who did the killing is not all that justice demands. Dr King said the question is not only who killed him, but also what killed him?

Those of us who have faced the lethal force of systemic racism have also learned something else in the American story. We can be wounded healers

The systemic racism that killed George Floyd has taken untold souls from us for over 400 years. And it is killing the very possibility of American democracy today. I join those screaming that this is all screwed up, and it’s been screwed up far too long. But we are not screwed as long we have the consciousness and humanity to know what is right and wrong.

Those of us who have faced the lethal force of systemic racism have also learned something else in the American story. We can be wounded healers. We don’t have to be arbitrarily destructive. We can be determined to never accept the destruction of our bodies and dreams by any police, person or policy. We have learned that there is a force more powerful. When hands that once picked cotton have joined together with white hands and Native hands, brown hands and Asian hands, we have been able to fundamentally reconstruct this democracy. Slavery was abolished. Women did gain the right to vote. Labor did win a 40-hour work week and a minimum wage. The civil rights movement in the face of lynching and shooting did expand voting rights to African Americans.

If we take time to listen to this nation’s wounds, they tell us where to look for hope. The hope is in the mourning and the screams, which make us want to rush from this place. There is a sense in which right now we must refuse to be comforted too quickly. Only if these screams and tears and protests shake the very conscience of this nation –and until there is real political and judicial repentance – can we hope for a better society on the other side of this.

William J Barber II is co-chair of the Poor People’s Campaign: A National Call for Moral Revival, which is mobilizing poor people and their allies for a mass assembly and march on Washington in June 2020

Policing in the US is not about enforcing law. It’s about enforcing white supremacy

Police treatment of two CNN reporters at a George Floyd protest shows the US has opposite systems of justice – one for white people, one for people of color

Paul Butler
Sat 30 May 2020 

On Friday the CNN journalist Omar Jimenez was arrested on live television as he covered protests of police brutality in Minneapolis, Minnesota. Jimenez identifies as African American and Hispanic, and when the cops confronted him, he did just what minority parents tell their kids to do. Jimenez cooperated; he was respectful, deferential even. He said: “We can move back to where you like … We are getting out of your way … Wherever you want us, we will go.”

It didn’t matter; the police officers put handcuffs on him and led him away, and then came back to arrest his crew. Jimenez narrated his arrest as they led him away. His voice is steady. His eyes, though. Jimenez is masked so his eyes are the only clue to what he’s feeling. His eyes are perplexed and terrified. I get it. When a black or brown person goes into police custody, you never know what is going to happen. You just know that when you leave police custody, if you are lucky enough to leave, you will be diminished. That is the point.

What’s most interesting is not that Jimenez and his colleagues were released shortly thereafter without any charges filed (or even being told why they had been taken into custody). That’s what class will buy a black man in America. You don’t get it quite as bad as your lower-income brethren. Jeff Zucker, the CNN president, talked to Tim Walz, the governor of Minnesota, and the crew was quickly released. With an apology from the governor, not the cops. Cops rarely apologize, especially to black men.

But what’s most interesting is what happened to Josh Campbell, a white CNN journalist who was in the same area as Jimenez and not arrested. Campbell said his experience was the “opposite” of Jimenez’s. The cops asked him “politely to move here and there”. “A couple times I’ve moved closer than they would, like, they asked politely to move back. They didn’t pull out the handcuffs.”

It’s a cliche that the US has two systems of justice, separate and unequal, but I prefer the word Campbell used. The US has “opposite” systems of justice – one for white people and another for racial minorities, especially African Americans, Latinx and Native American people.

White progressives love to focus on class subordination (I see you, Bernie Sanders!) but there is something sticky about race. Jimenez’s professional status and calm demeanor did not stop the police from treating him like a regular black dude – the subject of their vast authority to detain and humiliate. They didn’t have an actual reason and they didn’t need one. Jimenez’s dark skin was the offense.

This is how powerful a drug white privilege is. Here we have the cops policing a rally protesting police brutality against a black man. Even in that context, when the whole world is watching figuratively, and CNN’s audience is watching literally, the cops can’t help themselves. They go all brutal lite. They play “who’s the man” even when the black man, like Jimenez, goes out of his way to show he already knows who the man is. “You are, officer, Sir.” What the cops round up are the usual suspects and the usual suspects are always black and brown.

A mural depicting George Floyd is pictured at Mauerpark in Berlin, Germany. Photograph: Christian Mang/Reuters

People ask why would the police treat another human being like this, and the answer must be because they can

The whole world has seen the sordid violent recording where George Floyd narrates, over 10 minutes, his own demise. Actually, there is not 10 minutes of narration because Floyd goes limp and silent after several minutes, but that does not cause former officer Chauvin to remove his knee from Floyd’s neck. The officers had received a radio run to go to a local store, where Floyd had allegedly tried to use a counterfeit $20 bill. Floyd is across the street from the store, chilling in his car with a couple of friends, when the officers approach like they are apprehending violent offenders. They order Floyd and his friends out of the car, put Floyd in handcuffs, order him to lie face down on the ground, and pin him down with their knees and hands. Floyd complains he can’t breathe. A cop responds: “Well, get up and get in the car.”

I guess that is what you call police humor.

People ask why would the police treat another human being like this, and the answer must be because they can. There are rarely consequences. US police officers kill about 1,000 people a year (compared with the UK, where in 10 years, law enforcement took a total of 23 lives) and there are rarely consequences. Since 2005, when roughly 15,000 people have been killed by US law enforcement officers, fewer than 150 have been charged with murder.

True, the officers in George Floyd’s case lost their jobs, and now face or will face criminal prosecution. This is only because of the video evidence and the high-profile protests. The reality is that, statistically, even these officers are likely to escape conviction. Of the 150 officers charged with homicide in the line of duty, the majority have been found not guilty or had charges dropped.

For the moment, we who believe in justice are supposed to be satisfied that one cop, four days after the fact, has been taken into custody, when there are multiple videos of that officer with his knee on the victim’s back as the man complains he can’t breathe.

As a black man, and as a former prosecutor, I had no idea it was so difficult to get arrested. US cops arrest about 12,000,000 people a year, but not usually each other. For the rest of us – I mean the rest of us black and brown people – we usually get arrested and charged the same day the cops decide we are guilty. The talk our parents give us about how to act around armed agents of the state is designed not so much to prevent arrests as to preserve life. It worked for Omar Jimenez.


But not for George Floyd. On the ground, dying, George Floyd pleads for his life, respectful as a person can be when he is asking for mercy from the people who are literally crushing the life out of him. He says “please”, “officer”, and calls out to his dead mother.

But the police do not remove their knees and feet and hands from Mr Floyd’s body. They don’t even stop restraining him when his body is limp and silent.


One simple reform would be to not allow the cops to make arrests for any non-violent crime

What’s to be done? Tinkering with the system makes a difference here and there but it is not enough. If a white woman was thought to have tried to use a fake $20 bill, it’s impossible to imagine the police storming her vehicle, ordering her and her friends out, placing her in handcuffs and ultimately her winding up dead. But as long as cops have that kind of power, people of color will bear the brunt. So one simple reform would be to not allow the cops to make arrests for any non-violent crime. It’s a power they can’t be trusted with, because they will abuse it.

In the end, this is not about law enforcement. It’s about enforcing white supremacy. There’s no tinkering with that, what with white supremacy being the foundation on which the country was built. The consistent big question in the quest for racial justice has been how much white supremacy is central to the identity of the US. This is what Barack Obama and Ta-Nehisi Coates argued about. If we had something approaching equal justice, would we still even be the United States? In order to accomplish that we’d have to change the constitution, which authorizes much of the police violence that communities of color complain about, and the politics which exploits white anxiety about black and brown men.

What does it mean for people of color to live in a country where, for them to have a fair shot, law and government have to be transformed? It means that we should expect more cases like Omar Jimenez and George Floyd, regardless of whether Trump or Biden wins in November.

The real problem, ultimately, is not bad apple cops, even though these four officers are rotten to the core. The real problem is demonstrated in what a bystander told the officers as they restrained him to death. “He’s human, bro.” But Floyd was not human to these officers. Enforcing the dehumanization of people of color has become, in the United States, what you call police work.

• Paul Butler is the Albert Brick professor in law at Georgetown University. A former federal prosecutor, he is the author of Chokehold: Policing Black Men

Fire, pestilence and a country at war with itself: the Trump presidency is over

Robert Reich
Sun 31 May 2020


 

Donald Trump looks back as he boards Marine One on the South Lawn of the White House on Saturday. Photograph: Patrick Semansky/AP

You’d be forgiven if you hadn’t noticed. His verbal bombshells are louder than ever, but Donald J Trump is no longer president of the United States.

By having no constructive response to any of the monumental crises now convulsing America, Trump has abdicated his office.

He is not governing. He’s golfing, watching cable TV and tweeting.

How has Trump responded to the widespread unrest following the murder in Minneapolis of George Floyd, a black man who died after a white police officer knelt on his neck for minutes as he was handcuffed on the ground?

Trump called the protesters “thugs” and threatened to have them shot. “When the looting starts, the shooting starts,” he tweeted, parroting a former Miami police chief whose words spurred race riots in the late 1960s.

On Saturday, he gloated about “the most vicious dogs, and most ominous weapons” awaiting protesters outside the White House, should they ever break through Secret Service lines.

In reality, Donald Trump doesn’t run the government of the United States. He doesn’t manage anything

Trump’s response to the last three ghastly months of mounting disease and death has been just as heedless. Since claiming Covid-19 was a “Democratic hoax” and muzzling public health officials, he has punted management of the coronavirus to the states.

Governors have had to find ventilators to keep patients alive and protective equipment for hospital and other essential workers who lack it, often bidding against each other. They have had to decide how, when and where to reopen their economies.

Trump has claimed “no responsibility at all” for testing and contact-tracing – the keys to containing the virus. His new “plan” places responsibility on states to do their own testing and contact-tracing.

Trump is also awol in the worst economic crisis since the Great Depression.

More than 41 million Americans are jobless. In the coming weeks temporary eviction moratoriums are set to end in half of the states. One-fifth of Americans missed rent payments this month. Extra unemployment benefits are set to expire at the end of July.

What is Trump’s response? Like Herbert Hoover, who in 1930 said “the worst is behind us” as thousands starved, Trump says the economy will improve and does nothing about the growing hardship. The Democratic-led House passed a $3tn relief package on 15 May. Mitch McConnell has recessed the Senate without taking action and Trump calls the bill dead on arrival. 

What about other pressing issues a real president would be addressing? The House has passed nearly 400 bills this term, including measures to reduce climate change, enhance election security, require background checks on gun sales, reauthorize the Violence Against Women Act and reform campaign finance. All are languishing in McConnell’s inbox. Trump doesn’t seem to be aware of any of them.

There is nothing inherently wrong with golfing, watching television and tweeting. But if that’s pretty much all that a president does when the nation is engulfed in crises, he is not a president.

Trump’s tweets are no substitute for governing. They are mostly about getting even.

When he’s not fomenting violence against black protesters, he’s accusing a media personality of committing murder, retweeting slurs about a black female politician’s weight and the House speaker’s looks, conjuring up conspiracies against himself supposedly organized by Hillary Clinton and Barack Obama, and encouraging his followers to “liberate” their states from lockdown restrictions.

He tweets bogus threats that he has no power to carry out – withholding funds from states that expand absentee voting, “overruling” governors who don’t allow places of worship to reopen “right away”, and punishing Twitter for factchecking him.

And he lies incessantly.

In reality, Donald Trump doesn’t run the government of the United States. He doesn’t manage anything. He doesn’t organize anyone. He doesn’t administer or oversee or supervise. He doesn’t read memos. He hates meetings. He has no patience for briefings. His White House is in perpetual chaos.

America must listen to its wounds. They will tell us where to look for hope
Reverend William Barber

Read more

His advisers aren’t truth-tellers. They’re toadies, lackeys, sycophants and relatives.

Since moving into the Oval Office in January 2017, Trump hasn’t shown an ounce of interest in governing. He obsesses only about himself.

But it has taken the present set of crises to reveal the depths of his self-absorbed abdication – his utter contempt for his job, his total repudiation of his office.

Trump’s nonfeasance goes far beyond an absence of leadership or inattention to traditional norms and roles. In a time of national trauma, he has relinquished the core duties and responsibilities of the presidency.

He is no longer president. The sooner we stop treating him as if he were, the better.


Robert Reich, a former US secretary of labor, is professor of public policy at the University of California at Berkeley and the author of Saving Capitalism: For the Many, Not the Few and The Common Good. His new book, The System: Who Rigged It, How We Fix It, is out now. He is a columnist for Guardian US

LONG READ 

How a decade of privatisation and cuts exposed England to coronavirus 

Government reliance on private contractors follows dramatic changes to local councils and public services

by Felicity Lawrence, Juliette Garside, David Pegg, David Conn, Severin Carrell and Harry Davies

Sun 31 May 2020
FOR CHARTS AND LINKS
https://www.theguardian.com/world/2020/may/31/how-a-decade-of-privatisation-and-cuts-exposed-england-to-coronavirus

Every Thursday at 8pm, millions of Britons have opened their front doors or stood on balconies to applaud the NHS. The ritual has been a weekly expression of gratitude to medical workers, and national pride in a state-run health service said to be the envy of the world.

“Let’s not forget,” Boris Johnson said in early March, near the start of the coronavirus crisis, “we already have a fantastic NHS, fantastic testing systems and fantastic surveillance of the spread of disease.”

Yet those who have experienced the government’s emerging testing and tracing operations for Covid-19 have had limited contact with the NHS. Instead, Britons with symptoms are directed to a network of 50 drive-through testing centres, set up by management consultants at Deloitte.

Upon arrival, patients are marshalled not by NHS staff, but workers in hi-vis jackets supplied by outsourcing companies, such as Serco, G4S, Mitie and Sodexo. Those who cannot make the drive have received postal test kits, processed by the private diagnostics company Randox and delivered by Amazon.

When contact tracing to stop the spread of the virus finally moved up the agenda in late April, the health and social care secretary, Matt Hancock, said the job would be done with an as–yet unproven NHS app. The app has been developed by private firms for NHSX, the technology wing of the health service, which is also responsible for a Covid-19 government data operation involving tech companies Palantir, Faculty, Amazon, Google and Microsoft.

On Thursday the government finally launched its long-awaited NHS Test and Trace Service. But despite the name, many of the 25,000 contact tracers tracking those potentially exposed to Covid-19 and advising them to self-isolate will be working not for the NHS, but rather the outsourcing firms Serco and Sitel.

The government’s reliance on private contractors during the public health emergency comes after a decade of public sector reorganisation, marketisation and deep cuts to services and local government in England. The Guardian has interviewed dozens of public health directors, politicians, experts in infectious disease control, government scientific and political advisers, NHS leaders and emergency planners about the years leading up to the pandemic.

They described how an infrastructure that was once in place to respond to public health crises was fractured, and in some places demolished, by policies introduced by recent Conservative governments, with some changes going as far back as Labour’s years in power.

“The undermining of our responsiveness to a pandemic was one of my major concerns,” said Gabriel Scally, a professor of public health at the University of Bristol and a former regional director of public health in the NHS for almost 20 years. “There has been a destruction of the infrastructure that stops England coping with major emergencies. It absolutely explains why you’re now seeing private companies being brought into these functions.”
Councils left in the dark

Local authorities are the Cinderellas of government, their work often overlooked. But in the middle of a public health crisis, counties, districts and boroughs traditionally become the foot soldiers of national response. Few have been as badly hit as the east London borough of Newham, the local authority with the highest Covid-19 mortality rate in England and Wales.

Yet Newham’s director of public health, Jason Strelitz, was left in the dark at the start. He had no official notification that the virus had arrived in his area in mid-March, and only found out when he logged on to the government’s public coronavirus tracker web page to make his daily check on the declared numbers. Strelitz did not know who in Newham had Covid-19, where they had been tested, or which part of the borough they came from.

“We’re really concerned about the way national testing has been set up,” Strelitz said. “We still don’t have a clear picture of who is being tested in our area nor of the extent of community transmission in Newham.”

Jason Strelitz at the Covid-19 hub for local authority action in Newham. Photograph: Graeme Robertson/The Guardian

In normal times, a Public Health England (PHE) representative would be expected to contact Strelitz’s environmental health teams if a case of a notifiable disease was found in the area that needed following up, enabling them to set to work tracing contacts and containing an outbreak. But the government had just abandoned community testing and tracing so local authorities were not being contacted at that point.

Newham is among the most deprived boroughs in the country. Like all the public health directors interviewed by the Guardian, Strelitz has deep knowledge of the characteristics of his patch that make its health inequalities so stark and its residents so vulnerable to the disease. About 30,000 people have been identified by the council as being at high risk – many of them over 70, living alone and isolated.

Even now, with large-scale community testing resumed, Strelitz said he was not receiving useful test data from the centralised, privately contracted operation created by Hancock. He also has concerns about the contact-tracing operation being set up.

In addition to the contact-tracing app, the government has once more turned to outsourcing companies, including Serco and Sitel, to recruit and train 25,000 contact tracers. Working on a salary just above minimum wage, the majority will have no medical training. Using scripts, they will contact those who have tested positive, trace people they have been in contact with, and advise them on how to isolate.

“Contact tracing is a sensitive issue – I’m not sure how well it can be done with a remote call centre with no understanding of people’s local context,” Strelitz said.

Dominic Harrison, the director of public health for Blackburn and Darwen, has similar concerns. Speaking earlier this month he said there was “a huge disconnect” between different branches of government, with some functions of the local public health system having been disabled in recent years.

“People like environmental health officers, community and neighbourhood teams, youth services workers – the people who you could deploy in a crisis, who already know where the vulnerable are and how to reach them – those were the kind of staff they used during 2009 swine flu to work closely with the NHS, but they have been lost,” Harrison said. 

Council workers in Hull disinfect pavements and structures to guard against the transmission of coronavirus. Photograph: Lindsey Parnaby/AFP via Getty ImagesThe Labour leader of Nottingham city council, David Mellen, said Conservative ministers had spent so many years shrinking the state locally “they have forgotten what local authorities can do”. Nottingham has had its central government support grant cut by 80% since 2013 and, like many other councils, no longer has reserves for emergencies such as coronavirus. The Ministry of Housing, Communities and Local Government has made an emergency grant of £3.2bn to councils for Covid-19 costs, which the communities secretary, Robert Jenrick, has defended as fair and generous. Mellen disagrees. Nottingham, he said, had been given £19.8m as its share of the exceptional grant, but had already spent well over £12m extra on Covid-19 while losing at least £19m in revenue because of the lockdown.

A Department of Health and Social Care (DHSC) spokesperson did not dispute that cuts to central government grants could have had an impact on local public health networks. However, she pointed to the £3.2bn emergency funding for councils, which she said was in addition to an increase of £2.9bn in councils’ core spending power this year. “Protecting the public’s health is, and has always been, a priority for the UK government,” she said.
A decade of austerity

Next month, Britain will mark an anniversary many Conservative ministers would rather forget. Shortly after 12.30pm on 22 June 2010, George Osborne stepped up to the dispatch box as chancellor of the new coalition government and announced the longest and deepest period of cuts to public service spending since the second world war.

Ushering in a new age of austerity to a raucous Commons, Osborne outlined £81bn of cuts over five years. His aim was twofold: to eliminate the government’s budget deficit and to reduce its debt as a share of GDP. The emergency budget would, he said, bring the country back from the brink of ruin. “It pays for the past. It plans for the future. And it protects the most vulnerable in our society,” Osborne told MPs.

It was the prime minister, David Cameron, who had the previous year introduced the notion of “the age of irresponsibility giving way to the age of austerity”. He said he expected the public spending cuts would be permanent as the private and voluntary sectors stepped in to deliver public services better than the state could. Some government departments would be cut by a third and most public sector workers would have to accept a pay freeze.

Along with welfare, some of the most brutal reductions were imposed on local government in England as Osborne transferred the political risk of austerity to councils. Over the next decade, local authorities had 60% of their funding from central government cut, according to the Local Government Association. At the same time their ability to increase council tax, to try to replace the lost revenue, was capped. The cuts fell disproportionately on those authorities with the poorest populations.

Cameron promised he would “cut the deficit, not the NHS” and Osborne ringfenced its budget. It got cash increases, but these were less than 1% a year, and failed to keep pace with growing demand from an ageing population.

Approximately 32,000 overnight beds have been lost from hospitals in England in just over a decade, including some lost under Labour. Allyson Pollock, a professor of public health at Newcastle University, points out that the number of beds lost is roughly the same as the beds the NHS had to scramble to free up for Covid-19 patients.

When the coronavirus spread to Europe earlier this year, the UK ranked 24th among European countries for its numbers of critical care beds, with 6.6 per 100,000 population, compared with Germany, which topped the league with 29.2 per 100,000.
NHS fragmentation

Two years after Osborne’s announcement, with austerity beginning to bite, the then health secretary, Andrew Lansley, embarked on a complete market-oriented restructuring of the NHS. Despite Cameron’s pre-election promise that there would be no more pointless, disruptive top-down reorganisations, critics argue that Lansley’s 2012 Health and Social Care Act did just that.

Labour had done its fair share of subjecting the NHS to upheaval. Its programme of building new hospitals under the private finance initiative required other hospital and community health services to close, and shrank bed numbers to help cover the high annual fees to private companies. It accelerated changes brought in by the Conservatives to mimic a market, and created NHS trusts that could operate as semi-autonomous corporate bodies. By 2006, Labour’s reorganisations had created 152 primary care trusts (PCTs). Overarching priorities were set by regional strategic health authorities and the Department of Health.

But every area still had a Public Health Observatory, which included infectious disease control teams. Under government pandemic plans, each had to identify rapid response teams for testing and tracing, and these were activated during the swine flu outbreak in 2009.

Health authorities also had consultants in communicable disease control appointed at senior level on a par with NHS hospital consultants. An independent public body, the Health Protection Agency (HPA), provided specialist support on the threat of emerging diseases. There were critics of the structures, but in planning for emergencies there was, at least, a clear chain of command and control. “Labour started the process of fragmenting public health but it was at least still integrated with communicable disease control and the NHS,” Pollock said.

Lansley’s legislation did away with much of that. He abolished PCTs and strategic health authorities. Instead, existing public health structures were stripped out of the NHS and redistributed, along with their budgets and staff. In a dramatic shift, local authorities were given responsibility for public health for their areas, with larger ones being required to appoint a director of public health.

David Cameron, Nick Clegg and Andrew Lansley speaking with staff at Frimley Park hospital in 2011. Photograph: Reuters

“They took a perfectly well-functioning public health system and fractured it,” said Julie Hotchkiss, a PCT director with responsibility for emergency pandemic response who moved to York city council during the changes. She said it took her a year to work out where her infectious disease control nurses had gone. “No one knew and there was no one to ask.”

Dr Jeanelle de Gruchy, the president of the Association of Directors of Public Health, argues it was right for local authorities to have a key role in tackling health inequalities, which tend to relate to people’s living circumstances and socio-economic status. She regards the transfer of public health to local authorities as “incredibly important and positive”. But she adds: “It’s a very big job and the transition came at a time of cuts to the public sector, not just to local government, although those were huge.”

Lansley’s act also created an entirely new agency that has been at the centre of the response to the coronavirus outbreak: Public Health England. It was given two primary responsibilities: improving health and reducing inequalities by tackling “lifestyle” diseases, such as obesity; and protecting the public from infectious diseases and environmental hazards.

The HPA, which had previously taken a lead on infectious disease control, was folded into PHE. Martin McKee, a professor of European public health at the London School of Hygiene and Tropical Medicine, argues the result of all these new arrangements was “a hugely weakened and fragmented public health system with consequences writ large in Covid-19”.

The DHSC rejected the suggestion that the system was fragmented and that changes had affected the government’s ability to respond. Lord Lansley did too. He told the Guardian that an independent review of the public health changes from 2013 published by the the King’s Fund thinktank in January, “concluded that they were the right reforms, but were not supported subsequently by the right level of resources”. Combating health threats, such as pandemics, was “no more or less fragmented” after 2013, Lansley said, and the problem was not the new structures or moving public health to local government but money. “Our intention was for a real-terms increase in public health budgets alongside those for the NHS, but this was not followed through from 2015 onwards,” he said.

The ringfenced annual grant for public health from central government to local authorities – currently about £3.2bn – has been cut by a cumulative £850m in real terms since 2015-16, according to the King’s Fund review.

During his two-decade career in government, Scally had been involved in emergency responses for swine flu, foot and mouth, BSE, and the fuel crisis. For previous epidemics, he said, the government took “a public health approach; go in quick and hard, test, trace, isolate, throw everything at it”. But, he said, “the whole system was demolished” by Lansley’s changes, which led him to resign.

He then worked as an adviser for Labour’s former shadow health secretary, Andy Burnham, who is now the mayor of Greater Manchester. Burnham recalls Scally constantly warning him as Lansley’s bill was going through parliament that “we were losing pandemic preparedness”.
Testing time for Public Health England

No branch of government appears to have received more flak over its handling of the Covid-19 outbreak than Public Health England. The government’s chief scientific adviser, Sir Patrick Vallance, suggested it had failed to expand testing at the right moment. Its top executive has been criticised by leading public health experts, such as Prof Anthony Costello of University College London, for being “invisible”.

Even before the outbreak, the agency was a target of complaints from across the spectrum. Leftwing critics have accused PHE of failing to be tough enough in its role of promoting better health. The right has accused it of being the instrument of a nanny state with a bloated budget. PHE has had precious few political friends. But even those who might be natural allies – like Prof John Ashton, the former regional director of public health for north-west England – suggest it has “had a bad Covid war”.

Some of this might be down to bad luck. Its chief executive, Duncan Selbie, caught the virus along with key advisers in Westminster, and its director of health protection, Prof Paul Cosford, has cancer and has been self-isolating, although both have been working throughout.

However, there have also been structural challenges. The Lansley act created an agency that lacked independence from government, in contrast to its predecessor, the HPA. That has led to suspicions that some PHE decisions were politically influenced, such as the varying guidance on what kind of personal protective equipment (PPE) was needed for frontline staff treating Covid-19 patients. In late March, PHE said a lower specification of protective gowns than previously advised could be used, leading unions to accuse it of basing decisions on shortages of PPE, rather than evidence. This month, it downgraded the type of masks NHS workers should use “as a pragmatic approach for times of severe shortage”.

 

Clinical staff wearing PPE as they care for a patient at the intensive care unit at Royal Papworth hospital in Cambridge. Photograph: Getty Images

PHE disputes that it was slow off the mark, and Selbie points out that it rolled out the details for its first diagnostic test in January, making it “the fastest deployment of a novel test in recent UK history”. It says the guidance on PPE has been misunderstood: it was offering a solution in the event of extreme shortages.

“Our track record speaks for itself,” a PHE spokesperson said. “During 2018-19 alone, we responded to more than 10,000 disease outbreaks and emergencies across England, including meningitis, measles, E coli and the first ever UK case of monkeypox. Our flu vaccination programme grows every year and cases of TB have fallen to the lowest level since records began.” They said that far from being invisible, Selbie had been at the coalface, helping to advise government on its decision-making.

The DHSC spokesperson cited a positive report by the International Association of National Public Health Institutes, which described PHE as a “strong, capable, coordinated, united and efficient public health agency”. The report only examined PHE and not the public health systems devolved to local authorities. The same report pointed out that “there is scope for greater clarity in the responsibilities of PHE’s local partners”.

In its defence, PHE has had to absorb disparate functions since its creation in 2013. And it too has been struck by austerity: a public health source said PHE’s operational budget sustained a 40% real-terms cut between 2013 and 2019.

It was PHE that initially had responsibility for testing, tracing and advising isolation for those who became infected. It was a huge and complicated task, but one the World Health Organization has made clear from the outset was the single most important thing countries could do to suppress the disease. The government’s decision to abandon large-scale testing and tracing on 12 March remains one of its most controversial decisions.

PHE says it reprioritised limited resources rather than abandoning tracing completely. “When the lockdown began, our contact-tracing resource was refocused on to complex outbreaks in care homes, prisons and immigration centres,” Selbie said. “The good news is, now that we have testing capacity in place and are working towards recovery, we can start mass contact tracing through the NHS test and trace programme.

“PHE’s contact tracing during the ‘‘contain’ phase of the pandemic bought several weeks of time for the government and the NHS to prepare for what was to come, and has undoubtedly saved lives,” he said.

Greg Clark, the chair of the Commons science and technology select committee, accused PHE of choosing to “concentrate” tests in its own limited number of labs rather than expanding capacity rapidly by using university and private labs, as the Germans and South Koreans had done, even though the need for mass testing was “identifiable from the beginning”. PHE responded by blaming the DHSC, saying it was responsible for decisions on testing policy.

The DHSC spokesperson said: “Although Britain had a world-class pharmaceutical industry, it did not have the existing diagnostic base necessary to test hundreds of thousands of people each week for a new virus.” She said the government had more than doubled the capacity of NHS and PHE laboratories since early March, with more than 3m tests carried out by mid-May, and that anyone with symptoms could now book a test.

The government boasts that its new Test and Trace programme will mobilise an “army” of contact tracers. But in the two months leading up to 12 March, PHE’s team resembled no more than a small platoon. The Guardian has established it consisted of just 70 staff in its field services, 120 in local health protection teams, and 20 specially recruited clinical staff. In total, the contact tracing operation to manage the pandemic consisted of just 210 people.

Documents released on Friday by the government’s Scientific Advisory Group on Emergencies (Sage) suggest the contact-tracing operation initially only envisaged the need to deal with a handful of cases a week. Minutes from an 18 February meeting of the group said: “Currently PHE can cope with five new cases a week (requiring isolation of 800 contacts).” The minutes added: “Modelling suggests this capacity could be increased to 50 new cases a week (8,000 contact isolations) but this assumption needs to be stress-tested with PHE operational colleagues.”

Rather than ramp–up capacity, the government scientists instead agreed in the same meeting they would need data “to feed into trigger points for decisions on when the current monitoring and contact-tracing approach is no longer working”. The minutes added: “When there is sustained transmission in the UK, contact tracing will no longer be useful.”

PHE told the Sunday Telegraph that the reference to five cases a week was based on a modelling of how it would cope with imported cases of Covid-19 – and it was certain it had capacity to track and trace more cases at that time. “The model used an assumption of five importation events per week in the initial phase,” a PHE spokeswoman said. “This means five imported cases and subsequent cases that may arise as a consequence of those imported cases; the modelling considered the associated contacts for both. Modelling stated that the number of contacts could be managed by PHE.”

However, two days later, at another Sage meeting, the advisers acknowledged “individual cases could already have been missed” and again discussed when it would be appropriate to abandon the nascent operation. Appearing to acknowledge such a move would be controversial, the minutes said: “Any decision to discontinue contact tracing will generate a public reaction – which requires consideration with input from behavioural scientists.”

By the time community tracing was shelvedin mid–March, PHE had “contact traced” only 3,500 people who were likely to have been in close proximity with infected people on flights, cruises or other places where there were known outbreaks. Of those, only 3% tested positive for Covid-19 and were advised to self-isolate.

In other words, PHE had managed to identify and warn about 100 people with Covid-19 who might otherwise have spread the disease – a tiny fraction of the infected people. Vallance said there were 5,000 confirmed Covid cases when the community testing and tracing programme stopped, but epidemiologists at Imperial College London estimated 1.8 million people in Britain were infected by the end of March.

William Hanage, a professor of infectious disease epidemiology at Harvard University, said the numbers of PHE staff dedicated to contact tracing in Britain in the weeks leading up to mid-March was shocking. “I am sure that the people involved in this programme worked incredibly hard, and I have the utmost respect for them, tasked with doing this in the face of a global pandemic,” he said. “But it beggars belief to see these numbers held up as adequate.”
The elusive 100,000 target

On 2 April, three weeks after capacity had been overwhelmed and PHE had abandoned testing in the community, Hancock announced a five-pillar testing plan. He pledged to scale up the country’s testing capacity to reach a target of 100,000 tests a day by the end of the month.

But the architecture created in the postwar years to respond to pandemics was no longer standing. In the past, the Public Health Laboratories Service had been tasked with disease control, and with coordinating support and advice to the NHS and others. In 2003, Labour folded it into the HPA. Fifty PHLS labs that existed two decades ago have been merged with hospital labs or “consolidated” by successive governments to make efficiency savings. As of January this year, just eight laboratories remained under direct PHE control, along with 122 NHS labs in England.  

 Matt Hancock giving one of Downing Street’s daily coronavirus press briefings. Photograph: Pippa Fowles/10 Downing Street/AFP via Getty Images

Hancock expected hospital labs testing patients and staff and PHE to make up 25,000 of the ambitious 100,000 target. For the other 75,000 he turned to the private sector. Deloitte, one of the big four accountancy firms, was asked to set up a network of 50 drive-through rapid testing centres, and yet more private companies, such as Serco, Sodexo, Mitie and G4S, would operate and manage the day-to-day running of them.

A lab network to process the tests was also established. Deloitte was again given the coordinating role in the creation of new Lighthouse labs in Milton Keynes, Glasgow, Belfast and Cheshire and a further facility in Cambridge, with day-to-day running entrusted to a coalition of private and public partners, including universities and drug companies.

But Hancock’s 2 April announcement made no mention of one of the main purposes of testing: tracking or tracing.

The Guardian soon received reports from people trying to get tested of chaos at some sites, with results going astray, dangerously leaking swab samples arriving at labs, queues of more than three hours and symptomatic people being unable to book a test or told to make round trips of more than 100 miles to test centres. Many still report results taking seven to 10 days to arrive – too long to be useful for quarantine purposes – but the DHSC maintains that 97% of test results are obtained within 48 hours.

In the last week of April, the government changed its criteria for counting tests to include ones that had been dispatched, even if they had not been received, returned or processed. The date of 30 April came and Hancock missed his 100,000 target; the number of tests conducted that day was 81,611. But the next day, on 1 May, he appeared to smash it, as 122,347 tests were recorded in government data. The magic number had, by Hancock’s own admission, included nearly 30,000 postal tests sent out but not yet analysed. By 3 May the number was back down to 76,496, and the government would fail to meet its target for the next seven days, before getting back on track on 11 May.

For Chris Hopson, the chief executive of NHS Providers, which represents foundation trusts in England, Hancock’s single-minded focus on reaching an arbitrary number cost the country another precious month. “Too much of April was wasted by focusing on the 100,000 tests by 30 April target at the expense of other aspects of a clear strategy,” he said. “The testing strategy, if there was one, got hijacked on the basis of just meeting that target when there were lots of other things that needed to be done.”

Hopson said the saga also illustrates the danger of trying to control testing from the centre. “We need to be ready to do test, track and trace in every part of the country. That can only be done effectively with greater local control.”