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UK

Priti Patel repeatedly backed company accused of obtaining Nigerian gas contract through corruption
Solomon Hughes and Kim Sengupta
Fri, 20 November 2020

Priti Patel is already embroiled in a political row over bullying of civil servants (AFP/Getty)

Priti Patel sought to publicly intervene three times on behalf of an offshore company which has been accused in a British court of obtaining a £100m contract from the Nigerian government through corruption.

She repeatedly backed the company, Process & Industrial Development (P&ID), a British Virgin Islands-registered gas company, in its long legal dispute with the Nigerian government over a gas processing plant.

The home secretary is currently in the centre of a political storm after being accused of bullying staff in her department. She faces calls to resign after an investigation concluded that she had breached the ministerial code of conduct, although it also found her actions may have been “unintentional”.

Watch: Boris Johnson tried to water down Priti Patel bullying report, say Whitehall sources



Ms Patel’s intervention in the court case took place before she was appointed home secretary by Boris Johnson. She was joined in supporting the company by Shanker Singham, a prominent fellow Brexit advocate, who is now a government trade adviser, in the bitterly contested legal action.

The case had been an issue of huge public interest in Nigeria with accusations of bribery and collusion between public officials and private concerns. President Muhammadu Buhari raised the matter during a speech at the United Nations General Assembly in September. “The present Nigerian government is facing the challenges of corruption head on,” he said. “We are giving notice to international criminal groups by the vigorous prosecution of the P&ID scam attempting to cheat Nigeria out of billions of dollars.”

P&ID had an agreement with Nigeria to build a massive plant to process natural gas. No work, however, was carried out on the plant. The company blamed the government for not supplying the gas; the government claims the contract was part of a fraudulent scheme.

P&ID had won compensation of $10bn over the failed deal. But the Nigerian government are appealing against the judgment, claiming that massive bribes had been paid to secure the contract.

P&ID denies any wrongdoing and holds that the Nigerian government had invented the corruption allegations in an effort to avoid paying compensation and to delay the seizure of assets.

In September, a judge in London granted the Nigerian government the right to appeal. He ruled that “Nigeria has established a strong prima facie case” that the contract was “procured by bribes paid to insiders as part of a larger scheme to defraud Nigeria”. Sitting in the High Court earlier this month, Sir Ross Cranston added that there is “also a strong prima facie case” that one of the firm’s directors, and a main witness in the court case “gave perjured evidence”.

The Nigerian government had a separate ruling in their favour when the court ordered the release of £200m it had put in place as security while the appeal is being heard. Judge Cranston had rejected the request by P&ID to increase the security level to £400m.

Ms Patel first publicly supported P&ID in an article for the newspaper City AM in November 2018, saying that Nigeria “must honour its obligations to companies like P&ID” and pay the firm “almost $9bn” (as the sum in legal action was at that stage). She condemned the further legal action by the Nigerian government as a “running scandal”, “obstinate”, and “flouting international law and convention”.

In May last year, Ms Patel wrote an introduction to a pamphlet by Shanker Singham which also backed P&ID against Nigeria. The pamphlet had been produced by a consultancy firm run by Mr Singham, called Competere.

The same month Ms Patel co-wrote an article in the Daily Telegraph newspaper with Mr Singham about post-Brexit aid and trade, offering support once again for P&ID, and an apparent warning to Nigeria on the consequences for its alleged failure to adhere to laws.

The article said: “The erosion of Nigeria’s commitment to the rule of law is highly worrying. Currently, Nigeria is a defendant in multiple investor disputes, including with telecoms firm MTN; an energy project with P&ID and a hydroelectric contract with Sunrise Power. In the P&ID case, Nigeria owes the company over $9bn, due to Nigeria’s failure to honour a gas supply contract.”

It continued: “The UK’s national interest is best-served by an open system that encourages free trade, protects property rights, and upholds the rule of law. Our development strategy and our independent trade policy post-Brexit can be harnessed to ensure maximum value for the British taxpayer.”

There were already recurring allegations of corruption in Nigeria over the deal when Ms Patel and Mr Singham expressed their support for P&ID in the second article.

The day before the Telegraph article appeared there was an interview with Brendan Cahill, from Ireland, one of the co-founders of P&ID, in a Nigerian newspaper during which he was asked “there has been a persistent claim that P&ID is a ‘fake’ company that made a ‘fraudulent arrangement’ with some persons in Nigeria. How do you react to this claim?”

Mr Cahill replied: “We are well aware of the government’s efforts to characterise P&ID, and its founders, as frauds. This is absolutely false. The arbitrators in London spent five years carefully reviewing the written agreement and all the facts surrounding the deal, and in the end they unanimously concluded that Nigeria was to blame for the deal’s collapse and had to pay damages to P&ID.”

The Nigerian government alleges that P&ID paid more than $390,000 (almost £303,000) in bribes to secure the contract. The country’s attorney general, Abubakar Malami, submitted a witness statement to the Property Courts of England and Wales, High Courts of Justice in January this year.

Mr Malami, in his statement, alleges that P&ID indirectly paid more than $300,000 (£225, 850) to a company linked to an official who reviewed the contract. It also alleges two P&ID executives dropped a duffel bag packed with $50,000 in the trunk of his car in the capital, Abuja, in April 2009.

Grace Taiga, a former petroleum ministry lawyer in Nigeria who oversaw a contract review committee, has also been charged with accepting bribes from P&ID-linked companies between 2015 and 2019. Ms Taiga was scheduled to retire in September 2010, say investigators, but she remained in her position for another 16 months as the P&ID contract was being finalised.

Ms Taiga has pleaded not guilty to the charges.

Ms Patel and Mr Singham did not respond to questions about their public support for P&ID and whether they were aware of the corruption allegations.

P&ID did not respond to questions about the legal action or why Ms Patel and Mr Singham was supporting them, or what their working relationship was with Ms Patel and Mr Singham.

The company said previously: “The economic cost to Nigeria of fighting and losing this case is substantial. Nigeria, which emerged from recession in 2017, approved a three-year plan in 2016 to borrow more from abroad.

“The government wants 40 per cent of its loans to come from offshore to lower borrowing costs and help to fund its record-high budgets. In addition, the Buhari administration continues to incur costs in fighting this battle in the UK and US courts, and due to its failure to comply with court procedures, has been forced to pay some costs of P&ID’s counsel.

“The re-elected Buhari administration must come to terms with the award and decide whether to continue with delaying tactics to postpone the inevitable, or if the new government has the courage to atone for its previous mistakes and reach a settlement that will allow the country to move forward.”

RIP

John Fraser: ‘Dam Busters’ star who shunned Hollywood


Anthony Hayward
Fri, 20 November 2020

Fraser believed his sexuality held back his career(Rex)

John Fraser, who has died aged 89, was a British film star who captured the public’s imagination when he appeared in The Dam Busters as Flight Lieutenant JV “Hoppy” Hopgood, taking part in a daring Second World War RAF operation – and offering a pint of beer to the beloved dog of his wing commander.

He followed the 1955 box-office hit two years later by taking the role of Inigo Jollifant in The Good Companions, a screen musical version of the JB Priestley play. He and Janette Scott acted the romantic leads, with his schoolteacher-turned-songwriter joining her in a touring variety troupe.

The film, an attempt to compete with American musicals, flopped with cinemagoers but helped to give Fraser heart-throb status and launch a brief singing career. He released “Bye Bye Love” in 1957, but it failed to chart – in a year when several other versions were released, notably the Everly Brothers’ first hit.

Fraser’s star was on the rise again when he appeared in the biopic The Trials of Oscar Wilde (1960) as Lord Alfred Douglas, known as “Bosie”, poet lover of Peter Finch’s title character. One critic praised his “suitably vain, selfish, vindictive and petulant” portrayal of the Marquis of Queensberry’s son.

Fraser, who acted opposite Hollywood legends such as Sophia Loren over the years, believed his own homosexuality held back his career in an industry where discretion was paramount during the days when it was illegal.

In Close Up: An Actor Telling Tales, his 2004 autobiography, Fraser spilled the beans on his own sexual exploits and those of some of the film world’s most famous names.

He had a six-week fling with Russian ballet dancer Rudolf Nureyev that ended only when his agent told him: “If you don’t stop this madness instantly, your career will be over!”

Producer Jimmy Woolf had “taken a serious shine” to Fraser, according to the actor’s memoirs, and showered him with presents while considering who to cast in the title role of Lawrence of Arabia (1962), the epic directed by David Lean. He resisted the advances and Woolf gave the part to Peter O’Toole.

Meanwhile, he wrote, Woolf was known to be the lover of Laurence Harvey, who “kept marrying to further his career”.

Living a lie like this made Fraser want to shun Hollywood and, while promoting The Good Companions in Los Angeles, he turned down an offer by an American producer to further his career.

He observed how having different private and public personas affected one major star’s life when, in the late 1950s, he was invited to supper at the mansion of Dirk Bogarde, who kept out of the public eye his long-term relationship with Tony Forwood, whom he simply described as his business manager.

“Do you and Tony still make love?” Fraser asked Bogarde, who replied: “We’ve been together a long time. Now, we’re like brothers.” So Fraser asked what the star did for sex – embark on casual affairs, perhaps? “God, no,” said Bogarde. “How could I possibly in my position? I can’t go anywhere without being recognised.”

Then, Bogarde took Fraser to the loft to reveal his pride and joy, a Harley-Davidson motorcycle standing on a plinth – his substitute for sex.

Fraser confronted his own sexuality by visiting a brothel and consulting a psychiatrist with the idea of changing his sexual orientation but eventually resigned himself to being what was then described euphemistically as a “confirmed bachelor”.

He saw his career out in television and brought his intelligent insights to print as the author of several novels and autobiographical books.

John Alexander Fraser’s life began in poverty on a Glasgow council estate in 1931. At the age of 11, he was sexually abused by a soldier.

Two years later, the death of his father, John, an alcoholic who ran an engineering business until being hospitalised, was followed within six months by that of his mother, Christina (née MacDonald). He and his two sisters were brought up by an aunt.

On leaving Glasgow High School aged 16, he joined the city’s Park Theatre company as an assistant stage manager and was soon landing acting parts.

Following national service as a lieutenant in the Royal Corps of Signals on the Rhine, he became a member of the new Pitlochry Festival Theatre company, set up by the director of the Park Theatre after its closure.

In 1952, Fraser made his television debut by starring as David Balfour in a BBC serialisation of Kidnapped.

It led to a seven-year contract with the Associated British Picture Corporation, which thrust him into the spotlight in Valley of Song (1953), romancing Maureen Swanson, a fellow Glaswegian who later became a lord’s wife.

Fraser’s other significant film roles included a Scottish piper in Tunes of Glory (1960), alongside Alec Guinness and John Mills; Prince Alfonso in El Cid (1961); and Catherine Deneuve’s ill-fated suitor in the psychological thriller Repulsion (1965), directed by Roman Polanski.

On stage, he gained valuable experience in the classics during two seasons at the Old Vic, London (1955-57), with parts that included Claudio in Much Ado About Nothing.

There were also starring roles in the West End, but Shakespeare became his lasting love. In 1976, he was a founder member of the London Shakespeare Group, directing the actors on annual tours abroad, funded by the British Council.

His 1978 book The Bard in the Bush recounted a tour of Africa, when costumes and props for five plays were typically carried in one trunk, which doubled as the set.

Fraser also devised his own one-man stage show, JM Barrie: The Man Who Wrote Peter Pan, performed at the National’s Olivier Theatre in 1998.

His TV roles included Julius von Felden in A Legacy (1975), Lieutenant Commander “Monty” Morgan in Thundercloud (1979) and Dr Lawrence Golding in The Practice (1985-86).

By the middle of the 1990s, he had retired to Tuscany and La Contadina, the 10-room mountain-top house near Cortona that he bought in 1971, having fallen in love with Italy while playing Hedy Lamarr’s young lover in the 1954 film L’Amante di Paride (Loves of Three Queens).

“I loved the paintings, the towns, the soupy music of Puccini and Verdi and, above all, the people,” he said.

Fraser, who returned permanently to the UK in 2010, is survived by Rodney Pienaar, an artist and his partner of 42 years.

John Fraser, actor and author, born 18 March 1931, died 7 November 2020

Meet Pennsylvania’s anger translator, and Donald Trump’s worst nightmare

Richard Hall
Sat, 21 November 2020

Pennsylvania Lt. Gov. John Fetterman (AP Photo/Marc Levy)

When Donald Trump set his sights on overturning the results of the election in Pennsylvania, there were a few things working against him. First, the margin of Joe Biden’s victory put it beyond the need for a recount. Second, Pennsylvania is the birthplace of American democracy, and they take this stuff very seriously. Third, John Fetterman.

Fetterman, the burly lieutenant governor of Pennsylvania, has been a constant thorn in the side of the Trump campaign’s efforts to undermine the election in his state. In doing so, he has emerged from the chaos of campaign season with a new legion of fans.

He was a familiar presence on television throughout the state’s arduous and pivotal ballot count, often on hand to swat away Trump campaign attacks against the integrity of the counting process. At 6ft 8in tall, tattoos on his arms, a long goatee and often in short sleeves, he stood out amid the parade of suits. He once said of his appearance: “I do not look like a typical politician. I do not even look like a typical person.”

He doesn’t talk like a typical politician either. His Twitter feed is full of dry humour, memes and barbs. In the weeks since the election, he has continued his crusade against disinformation and played down any talk of a Trump longshot coup. While others have cloaked themselves in sober and diplomatic language, he has been Pennsylvania’s anger translator.

“Everybody, including and especially the president, knows how this movie is gonna end,” he tells The Independent by phone, on a break from his day job presiding over the Pennsylvania state senate.

“They are just these little Twitter storm freakouts. It's just sad and pathetic that the president of the United States has become just some sad internet troll.”

Fetterman has been pretty clear from day one that there is no way Trump can overturn the will of Pennsylvanian voters (“math doesn’t care about your feelings or lies,” is one of his favourite refrains), but he is also stark in his assessment of the president’s norm-shattering behaviour.

“I've said this time and time again, the media needs to turn its back on the president's reckless claims of voter fraud. He is and has been for some time now yelling ‘fire’ in a crowded theatre. This is not free or protected speech. This is dangerous and damaging speech. And it really just comes down to that,” he says.

He is fiercely proud of the job that Pennsylvania did in pulling off an extraordinary election, coming as it did in the midst of a pandemic, with a record number of mail-in ballots, and in the face of daily attacks from the White House.

Trump singled out Pennsylvania early on for a campaign of falsehoods about the integrity of mail-in ballots. The president claimed without evidence that voting by mail was susceptible to fraud, and that Pennsylvania would be the centre of that fraud. He famously remarked during one of his presidential debates: “Bad things happen in Philadelphia.”

I don’t know who needs to hear this but there’s not one single suit that can stop legal votes being counted + PA going for Biden.
SCOTUS could gift every “late ballot” to the President. 🥱
That’s what happens when you sue a ham sandwich, it’s still well, just a ham sandwich.
— John Fetterman (@JohnFetterman) November 16, 2020

“This was a campaign of misinformation from the biggest microphone in the world,” says Fetterman. “And it was [my job] to push back against that. This idea that there was any fraud, well actually, no, there were exactly three cases of documented fraud in Pennsylvania.”

“We pulled up the biggest election in Pennsylvania history, and there wasn't any of that, none of that, and this idea that it was anything other than a fair, free and full accounting of the democratic will of Pennsylvania voters has been widely debunked in every courtroom at every juncture,” he adds.

Fetterman has used his Twitter feed to refute some of the wilder claims of voting fraud from the president. “The President just tweeted this article and said “DEAD PEOPLE VOTED” and in Pennsylvania he’s RIGHT. In Luzerne County, a Republican attempted to vote for the President for his dead mother,” he wrote in response to one of Trump’s tweets.

He also tried to claim a reward from his Republican counterpart in Texas, lieutenant governor Dan Patrick, who offered a $1million for reports of voter fraud that lead to a conviction. Sharing the same two examples above, he asked for his reward to be paid in gift cards for Sheetz — a Pennsylvania convenience store.

Hey, Governor Patrick- it’s your counterpart in Pennsylvania.
I’d like to collect your handsome reward for reporting voter fraud.
I got a dude in Forty Fort, PA who tried to have his dead mom vote for Trump.
I’d like mine in Sheetz gift cards pls.
ps. The Cowboys blow. https://t.co/Y21Q3ZkSEH
— John Fetterman (@JohnFetterman) November 10, 2020

Fetterman began his political career in the eastern suburbs of Pittsburgh. He won his first election by one vote to become the mayor of Braddock, a gritty former steel town, and won two more times after that.

In Braddock, Fetterman championed a community-led approach to tackling crime and poverty, both of which blighted the town. He took the job seriously — very seriously. On his right arm he has tattooed the dates of murders that took place in Braddock while he was mayor. He currently has nine dates and is due to add one more. On his left arm he has the town’s zip code.

He made an unsuccessful run for the US senate in 2016, before eventually winning election as lieutenant governor in 2018. During that campaign, he was endorsed by Bernie Sanders, who called Fetterman the "candidate of the working people". After he won, he refused to take up the residence his position afforded him, and chose to live in a converted car dealership.

It’s tempting to look at Fetterman and wonder where he sits in the Democratic Party nationally. There isn’t an easy answer. He is liberal on most issues: he is an advocate of a higher minimum wage, the legalisation of cannabis and campaigned for the US to accept more Syrian refugees during the height of the crisis there.

And while he is a proponent of fighting climate change head-on, he has also advocated a transition to a carbon-free future that takes into account the impact on places like rural Pennsylvania — one that goes beyond asking miners to learn to code. He has said previously that Democrats need to “get honest” about energy and advocated for a “bipartisan Marshall Plan” to battle climate change.

It was former mining towns in western Pennsylvania that sent Donald Trump to the White House in 2016, and where he still retains support today. Fetterman’s time spent in the working-class communities of Braddock has also given him an insight into Trump’s unique appeal in those areas. In fact, he was sounding the alarm bells long before November.

“I said this from before the election, he is a uniquely distinctive and popular individual in Pennsylvania. Don't ever make the mistake of underestimating his appeal. I warned our party that this was going to be a brawl. And that's exactly what it turned out to be,” he says.

“He was a transformative figure in American politics. I mean that pejoratively,” he says. “He speaks to and engages a segment of our population that is intensely loyal and that's what's going to make him relevant and dangerous going forward because he is just not planning to go quietly into the night.”

But how do you reach those voters who turned away from Democrats and embraced Trump in the last two elections — the people who made this one a nail-biter?

“Some of them aren’t reachable,” he says. “But there is an extraordinary number of thoughtful Pennsylvanians that care very deeply about good, solid public policies. We've demonstrated that,” he says.

“Right now we're at a point in Pennsylvania where we all have to come together because we're headed for a tough winter with these record high Covid cases. We have to recover from this pandemic.”

He is also not quite ready to take his eye off Trump just yet. He believes the outgoing president will run in 2024 without much opposition from Republicans.

“We need to be mindful,” he says. But, he adds, “you can only run on chaos for so long before it collapses on itself."

Hong Kong UPDATES: 

Joshua Wong remains defiant in face of potential five years in prison

Hong Kong activist Joshua Wong told DW that defying "the greatest human rights abuser is essential" ahead of his trial next week. He faces up to five years in prison for his role in pro-democracy protests.


Hong Kong activist Joshua Wong on Friday told DW that he faces up to five years in jail if found guilty of instigating unlawful protests last year.

Wong rose to prominence during the pro-democracy demonstrations that were triggered by the introduction of the Fugitive Offenders amendment bill by the Hong Kong government. The now-aborted legislation would have potentially meant the extradition of Hong Kong citizens to mainland China, where Wong and other activists felt residents would be subjected to Beijing's stricter approach to civil liberties.

Wong, whose trial starts on Monday, remained defiant, despite the threat of a lengthy jail term. "Prison bars have never stopped me from activism and thinking critically. Even though more than 10,000 Hong Kongers have been arrested since last summer and 2,000 people — including me — were prosecuted, it's still important for us to stay and fight."

Wong not expecting a fair trial

But Wong has little confidence in the judicial process ahead. "Courts in Hong Kong are being interfered with by the Beijing authorities, and the rule of law in Hong Kong exists in name only."

Police arrested Wong on September 24 for participating in an unauthorized assembly in October 2019, as well as for violating the city’s anti-mask law by covering his face during the protests.

That arrest added to several unlawful assembly charges, or suspected offenses he and other activists have been accused of related to last year’s protests.
'The greatest human rights abuser'

Despite the pressure, Wong showed no signs of easing up as he said: "No matter what happens, to defy the greatest human rights abuser is essential to restore democracy for our generation and the generation following us."

Watch video  https://p.dw.com/p/3lcGL

'To defy greatest human rights abuser is essential'

Wong hopes others will keep a watchful eye on developments in Hong Kong should he go to prison.

"It's important that the new [US] administration holds China accountable. It's important to seek bipartisan support because supporting Hong Kong is not a matter of left or right, it's a matter of right or wrong."

Read more: Opinion: Hong Kong's rule of law is at its end

"I only wish that during my absence, people around the world can continue to stand with the people of Hong Kong by following closely the developments, whether it's the canceled election, the large-scale arrests under the national security law and the 12 activists being detained in China."

At the beginning of last month, China formally approved the arrests of 12 Hong Kong activists caught last month while allegedly trying to flee the former British colony for Taiwan.

Families of detained Hong Kong dozen protest on island near Chinese prison

By Jessie Pang and James Pomfret
Sat, 21 November 2020

Families of detained Hong Kong dozen protest on island near Chinese prison

Relatives and supporters of the 12 Hong Kong people detained in mainland China release balloons in Hong Kong

By Jessie Pang and James Pomfret

HONG KONG (Reuters) - Relatives and supporters of 12 Hongkongers, detained in China after trying to flee the city by speedboat, protested on Saturday on an island near the Chinese prison where they have been held virtually incommunicado for nearly three months.

The 11 men and one woman were captured by the Chinese coastguard on Aug. 23 aboard a speedboat believed to be bound for Taiwan.

All had faced charges linked to the protest movement embroiling Hong Kong, including rioting and violation of the a national security law China imposed in June.

Family members and supporters of some of the 12 hiked to the peak of Kat O island in Hong Kong's remote northeastern reaches, looking onto China's high-tech boomtown of Shenzhen, and the Yantian district where the dozen are being held.

Some peered through binoculars at a hill where the detention centre is located. Several told Reuters they want the Chinese authorities to deal with the cases in a just, fair and transparent manner.

The group inflated blue and white balloons and wrote the names of the detainees on them, before releasing them into a leaden sky. They chanted for their "immediate safe return" while holding white banners reading "SAVE 12" and "Return Home".

"I hope he can see the balloons and know we didn’t give up yet," said the 28-year-old wife of detainee Wong Wai-yin.

A Hong Kong marine police vessel later docked on the island, with police questioning and taking down the details of several reporters present.

Authorities have denied family and lawyers access to the 12, insisting they be represented by officially appointed lawyers. Last week seven detainees wrote handwritten letters to their family, but the group said in a statement that "they seem to have been compiled under duress".

Eddie Chu, a former lawmaker who recently quit his post in protest against political suppression by authorities under the national security law, said it was important to keep fighting.

"We are so close to them, just a few kilometres in reality, but in fact it's like ... something unreachable. So we need to have the balloons to do this for us.”

(Reporting by Jessie Pang and James Pomfret; Editing by William Mallard)

COVID-19 UPDATES

 UK volunteer first in the world to trial coronavirus antibody treatment

Fri, 20 November 2020


The UK is to become the first country to begin clinical trials of a new coronavirus antibody treatment aimed at people with a weakened immune system who cannot be vaccinated.

A volunteer in Wakefield, West Yorkshire, will be the first in the world to receive AstraZeneca's new "antibody cocktail" as part of the trial to test whether it will prevent COVID-19 for up to year.

The clinical trial programme will recruit 5,000 participants, which includes 1,000 people from nine sites in the UK.

The aim of the trial is to evaluate the safety and effectiveness of a combination of two long-acting monoclonal antibodies - man-made proteins that act like natural human antibodies in the immune system.

Sir Mene Pangalos, executive vice president of biopharmaceuticals R&D at AstraZeneca, said the treatment can be injected or administered intravenously.

"There is going to be a significant number of people - even in a world where vaccines are highly effective - who will not respond to vaccines, or in fact will not take vaccines," he added.

"So having monoclonal antibodies as potential therapeutics is also important."

The UK government has an in-principle agreement to secure access to one million doses of the antibody combination, dubbed AZD7442, if it is successful in the phase three trials.

The trial aims to enrol adults who are at increased risk of coronavirus infection or who are more likely to have an inadequate response to vaccination, and will include people from health care and care home settings.

Initial results from the randomised control trial are expected to be published in the first half of 2021, although the trial is expected to last for 12 months.

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While it is unclear how much the antibody treatment will cost, Sir Mene said it will be "more expensive than vaccines", but added "we hope to make it cost effective".

Business Secretary Alok Sharma said: "As we move closer to a COVID-19 vaccine, we must keep driving forward clinical trials for new and alternative treatments that protect our vulnerable, particularly those who cannot receive a vaccine."

Childhood vaccine linked to less severe COVID-19, cigarette smoke raises risk

By Nancy Lapid
Fri, 20 November 2020

An illustration, created at the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC), depicts the 2019 Novel Coronavirus


By Nancy Lapid

(Reuters) - The following is a roundup of some of the latest scientific studies on the novel coronavirus and efforts to find treatments and vaccines for COVID-19, the illness caused by the virus.

Childhood vaccine may help prevent severe COVID-19

People whose immune systems responded strongly to a measles-mumps-rubella (MMR) vaccine may be less likely to become severely ill if they are infected with the new coronavirus, new data suggest. The MMR II vaccine, manufactured by Merck and licensed in 1979, works by triggering the immune system to produce antibodies. Researchers reported on Friday in mBio that among 50 COVID-19 patients under the age of 42 who had received the MMR II as children, the higher their titers -- or levels -- of so-called IgG antibodies produced by the vaccine and directed against the mumps virus in particular, the less severe their symptoms. People with the highest mumps antibody titers had asymptomatic COVID-19. More research is needed to prove the vaccine prevents severe COVID-19. Still, the new findings "may explain why children have a much lower COVID-19 case rate than adults, as well as a much lower death rate," coauthor Jeffrey Gold, president of World Organization, in Watkinsville, Georgia, said in a statement. "The majority of children get their first MMR vaccination around 12 to 15 months of age and a second one from 4 to 6 years of age." (https://bit.ly/3kPnW6P)

Cigarette smoke increases cell vulnerability to COVID-19

Exposure to cigarette smoke makes airway cells more vulnerable to infection with the new coronavirus, UCLA researchers found. They obtained airway-lining cells from five individuals without COVID-19 and exposed some of the cells to cigarette smoke in test tubes. Then they exposed all the cells to the coronavirus. Compared to cells not exposed to the smoke, smoke-exposed cells were two- or even three-times more likely to become infected with the virus, the researchers reported on Tuesday in Cell Stem Cell. Analysis of individual airway cells showed the cigarette smoke reduced the immune response to the virus. "If you think of the airways like the high walls that protect a castle, smoking cigarettes is like creating holes in these walls," coauthor Brigitte Gomperts told Reuters. "Smoking reduces the natural defenses and this allows the virus to enter and take over the cells." (https://bit.ly/3kPAYRx)

AstraZeneca's COVID-19 vaccine shows promise in elderly

AstraZeneca and Oxford University's experimental COVID-19 vaccine produced strong immune responses in older adults in a mid-stage trial, researchers reported on Thursday in The Lancet. Late-stage trials are underway to confirm whether the vaccine protects against COVID-19 in a broad range of people, including those with underlying health conditions. The current study involved 560 healthy volunteers, including 240 age 70 or over. Volunteers received one or two doses of the vaccine, made from a weakened version of a common cold virus found in chimpanzees, or a placebo. No serious side effects were reported. Participants older than 80, frail patients, and those with substantial chronic illnesses were excluded, according to an editorial published with the study. "Frailty is increasingly understood to affect older adults' responses to vaccines," the editorialists write. "A plan for how to consider frailty in COVID-19 vaccine development is important." 

https://bit.ly/35OVrlq; https://bit.ly/3kKXDhP; https://reut.rs/2IVeod0

Researchers look into cells infected with new coronavirus

Cells infected with the new coronavirus die within a day or two, and researchers have found a way to see what the virus is doing to them. By integrating multiple imaging techniques, they saw the virus create "virus-copying factories" in cells that look like clusters of balloons. The virus also disrupts cellular systems responsible for secreting substances, the researchers reported on Tuesday in Cell Host & Microbe. Furthermore, it reorganizes the "cytoskeleton," which gives cells their shape and "serves like a railway system to allow the transport of various cargos inside the cell," coauthor Dr. Ralf Bartenschlager of the University of Heidelberg, Germany told Reuters. When his team added drugs that affect the cytoskeleton, the virus had trouble making copies of itself, "which indicates to us that the virus needs to reorganize the cytoskeleton in order to replicate with high efficiency," Bartenschlager said. "We now have a much better idea how SARS-CoV-2 changes the intracellular architecture of the infected cell and this will help us to understand why the cells are dying so quickly." The Zika virus causes similar cell changes, he said, so it might be possible to develop drugs for COVID-19 that also work against other viruses. https://bit.ly/2UI9BOT

Open https://tmsnrt.rs/3a5EyDh in an external browser for a Reuters graphic on vaccines and treatments in development.

(Reporting by Nancy Lapid, Kate Kelland and Alistair Smout; Editing by Tiffany Wu)

Cesarean section-born children may face higher risk of infection-related hospitalisation

November 22, 2020 


Children born via cesarean section may be more likely to be hospitalised for infection during early childhood. A study published in PLOS Medicine by Jessica Miller at the Murdoch Children's Research Institute, Australia and colleagues suggests that compared to vaginally-born children, cesarean-born children may have a higher risk of infection-related hospitalisation for up to five years of age.

While the researchers were able to observe an association between birth by cesarean section and an increased risk of infection, the study was limited in that postnatal factors that influence infection risk, such as breast feeding, vaccination status, and postnatal smoke exposure were unavailable, which could potentially confound the results.

The authors stress that the findings should not discourage women from having cesareans when medically indicated and despite the small increased risk of childhood infections, cesarean births may be the safest option for some women and babies.

UK
Public sector pay freeze puts manifesto promise to boost new teacher pay to £30,000 in doubt


Harry Yorke
Fri, 20 November 2020

Boris Johnson

Boris Johnson’s election pledge to raise newly qualified teachers’ pay to £30,000 appeared in doubt on Friday as Rishi Sunak prepares to usher in "pay restraint" across the public sector.

The £6,000 pay hike was a central plank of the Conservative Party’s election manifesto, with Mr Johnson promising to make teaching one of the “most competitive” jobs in the graduate labour market.

However, Downing Street refused to say whether the commitment, which represents a 25 per cent uplift and is supposed to be fulfilled by 2022, would still be met after the Chancellor sets out the one-year spending review next week.

Ministers have previously said the rises would have to be funded from planned increases to school budgets over the next three years.

It came as the Office for National Statistics yesterday confirmed that public sector debt hit £2.08 trillion in October, with Government borrowing in the first seven months of the financial year rising to an estimated £215bn.

Government spending as a share of GDP has also risen from 40 per cent to 60 per cent of GDP in 2020, the highest level seen since the Second World War, according to an analysis by the Resolution Foundation think tank.

Mr Sunak said that the figures showed that “over time it’s right we ensure the public finances are put on a sustainable path”, with the Chancellor now expected to announce a one-year freeze or cap.

Teachers, police officers, soldiers and civil servants are expected to be included, although NHS workers could be exempted in recognition of their efforts during the coronavirus pandemic.

The reports prompted a widespread backlash from trade union leaders yesterday, with Mark Serwotka, general secretary of the Public and Commercial Services union, warning that “industrial action cannot be ruled out.”

Frances O’Grady, leader of the Trades Union Congress, added: “TUC general secretary Frances O'Grady said: "A pay freeze would be a bitter pill for care workers, refuse collectors, emergency workers and all the key workers in the public sector who have helped keep the country going through this pandemic.”

While the freeze or cap is expected to last for one year, there are fears that the scale of the blackhole in the public finances created by the crisis will require continued restraint throughout the course of this Parliament.

The Centre for Policy Studies think tank has estimated that a three-year freeze could save the Exchequer up to £23 billion, falling to £11.7bn if Mr Sunak opts for a one per cent pay cap, and £7.7bn if healthcare workers are excluded.

Torsten Bell, chief executive of the Resolution Foundation, told The Telegraph that it was “difficult” to see how the Government could maintain the commitment to increasing qualified teachers’ salaries to £30,000.

Paul Whiteman, general secretary of school leaders’ union NAHT, said: “The teaching profession has already endured a decade of pay freezes, in contrast to pay growth in the private sector.

“This made teaching an uncompetitive career option for graduates who have looked to other sectors to build their careers. The government’s plans will make a dire situation even worse.”

Speaking to reporters yesterday, the Prime Minister’s spokesman said that there would be “no return to austerity” but refused to rule out a public sector pay freeze.

Asked whether newly qualified teachers would be exempt, he added: “You wouldn’t expect me to comment on what could, or may or may not be in the spending review next week.”

The Telegraph understands that Mr Sunak is also unlikely to bring forward any long-term solution for fixing Britain’s social care system.

Government insiders had previously suggested that Downing Street had been considering a cut to university tuition fees, as recommended by the Augur review.

However, the idea is also believed to have been dismissed following the decision to opt for a one-year spending review.

Belloc's Anti-Capitalism

A tip o' the blog to the Distributist Review. A blog that links here. A collective effort has an interesting piece on the British Christian Distributist; C. K. Chesterton, and his discovery by the post-Marxist and Neo-Leninist Slavoj Žižek They also link to this Hillarie Belloc excerpt from Athanasius Contra Mundum His is a particularly pointed alternative view of why capitalism evolved as it did, and one can see the similarity with, and appeal it would have to, those who advocate market socialism, the ideas of cooperative capitalism and guild socialism, the mutualist and volunteerist libertarians.

Consider in what way the industrial system developed upon Capitalist lines. Why were a few rich men put with such ease into possession of the new methods? Why was it normal and natural in their eyes and in that of contemporary society that those who produced the new wealth with the new machinery should be proletarian and dispossessed? Simply because the England upon which the new discoveries had come was already an England owned as to its soil and accumulations of wealth by a small minority: it was already an England in which perhaps half of the whole population was proletarian, and a medium for exploitation ready to hand. When any one of the new industries was launched it had to be capitalized; that is, accumulated wealth from some source or other had to be found which would support labor in the process of production until that process should be complete. Someone must find the corn and the meat and the housing and the clothing by which should be supported, between the extraction of the raw material and the moment when the consumption of the finished article could begin, the human agents which dealt with that raw material and turned it into the finished product. Had property been well distributed, protected by cooperative guilds, fenced round and supported by custom and by the autonomy of great artisan corporations, those accumulations of wealth, necessary for the launching of each new method of production and for each new perfection of it, would have been discovered in the mass of small owners. Their corporations, their little parcels of wealth combined would have furnished the capitalization required for the new process, and men already owners would, as one invention succeeded another, have increased the total wealth of the community without disturbing, the balance of distribution. There is no conceivable link in reason or in experience which binds the capitalization of a new process with the idea of a few employing owners and a mass of employed non-owners working at a wage. Such great discoveries coming in society like that of the thirteenth century would have blest and enriched mankind. Coming upon the diseased moral conditions of the eighteenth century in this country, they proved a curse. Hilaire Belloc, The Servile State

An audio version of the Servile State can be downloaded from Yahoos for American Freedom. A variety of digitalized editions are available for download here. Belloc is embraced by the post WWII new right whether by the YAF or Murray Rothbard, as a conservative.

Book Review: The Servile State by Hilaire Belloc

By Leonard P. Liggio Hilaire Belloc (1870-1953) was indeed an Edwardian Radical as described in John McCarthy's biography (also published by Liberty Press). The Servile State represented Belloc's disgust with politics after serving in the House of Commons. He found politicians in control of organizing any new industries; cabinet officers determining which businessmen would control new industries. If capitalism were absolutely recognized, according to Belloc, government-created monopolies could not continue. But, from inside parliament, he saw “executive statesmen” determining which group of businessmen would operate that sphere of industry. The system described by Belloc in 1913 emerged most fully as the corporatism of the 1930s; it extended from Berlin to Washington. F. A. Hayek in The Road to Serfdom saw Belloc as a prophet; and Robert Nisbet, in his introduction to this edition, notes “just as Belloc predicted, we find the real liberties of individuals diminished and constricted by the Leviathan we have built in the name of equality.”

It is a view that is also shared by Catholic apologists and promoters of a Catholic Third Way between socialism and capitalism. Which in Canada is reflected in the ideology of Elizabeth May's Green Party.

Hilaire Belloc "and All the Rest of It"

In Land and Water, his speculations on the developments of the First World War won accolades from the Times. In his classic The Servile State, is there not an anticipation of that socialist choking of individual liberty as is evidenced in post-war Western governments? Already in 1913 Belloc seemed to see the coming Keynesian model of state control of the economy through money and taxes when he forecasted:

The future of industrial society... is a future in which subsistence and security shall be guaranteed for the proletariat, but shall be guaranteed at the expense of the old political freedom and by the establishment of that proletariat in a status really, though not nominally, servile.³

From a personal viewpoint, and within the narrow latitude of my knowledge of English letters, I would put forward that next to Maritain’s seminal work on the philosophical implications of Luther’s revolt,⁴ Belloc’s thesis of the after-effects of the Reformation, in a socio-political context, were very accurate and not so outlandish as some of his critics have contested

Hilaire Belloc and the Liberal Revival

There is arguably a parallel liberal tradition in Britain which has usually been independent of the Liberals or Liberal Democrats.

It is recognisably Liberal in its commitment to individual freedom and local self-determination, but it has included Radicals (Cobbett), Tories (Ruskin, or so he said), Socialists (Morris) and Greens (Schumacher). And though both traditions have influenced each other in every generation, they have rarely come together in Parliament.

The exception - and it was a brief exception - was in the political career of the writer, poet and historian Hilaire Belloc, Liberal MP for South Salford from 1906 to 1910.

And although the Roman Catholic political doctrines that so influenced Belloc seem pretty dusty in the UK these days, it was Pope Leo XIII who first coined the concept of 'subsidiarity' in his encyclical Rerum Novarum in 1896. It was this idea that was taken up by Belloc, turned into a political creed in Distributism, rescued from obscurity by Schumacher - only to pop up again as the central tenet of Euro-ideology, and the part that knits Liberal Democrat European policy with its enthusiasm for decentralisation.

Though at the time of his publishing the Servile State in 1912, the American Marxist; Daniel De Leon declared Belloc a communist anarchist. Of course it was a backhanded compliment, since De Leon himself was strongly opposed to communist anarchism, being a party man. His party the Socialist Labour Party, had attempted unsuccessfully to align the IWW with it as their party union, which was rejected by the membership through a counter campaign organized by the anarchists.

Socialism and the Servile State By Daniel De Leon There reached us some time ago from England a pamphlet containing the verbatim report of a debate on “Socialism and the Servile State,” which took place at Memorial Hall, London, on May 5, 1911, between Hilaire Belloc, Liberal member of Parliament in 1906–1910, and J. Ramsay MacDonald, then and still a Social-Democratic member of Parliament. The sender accompanied the pamphlet with a request for a review. Recent dispatches from London, reporting the Labor Party’s proposal for the nationalization of mines, give actuality to the debate. So far as Belloc’s economic views are concerned, he may, or may not, be a Socialist. Hard to tell. MacDonald not unjustly charged his remarks with obscurity. From certain sentiments that he dropped, we should judge that, notwithstanding that he was a Liberal member of Parliament as late as 1910, Belloc belongs—not at all an uncommon thing among the intellectual bourgeois—in the category of communist anarchy, a theory of small cooperative communities brought about by a cataclysm through despair. This, however, matters little to the subject. Belloc was not treating socialism, its merits, or demerits, its principles and its tactics. He spoke to a thesis, and that he elaborated with sufficient clearness. Belloc defined the “servile state” as a condition of society in which the mass of the people, although enjoying a minimum of economic “security and sufficiency,” are “permanently dispossessed of the means of production.” With the servile state thus defined, Belloc maintained that the Socialists, meaning the Socialists typified in Parliament by MacDonald, are drifting ever further away from socialism, and ever nearer to the idea or perfect servile state. In other words, Belloc’s contention is that the Labor Party makes for a social system in which, schooled in the school of experience, a capitalist oligarchy, possessed of the means of production, will wisely “leave well enough alone”; will wisely rest content with an abundance without toil, instead of striving after a superabundance; and will secure their rule by drying up the headspring of revolt through a system of organization that will “humanely” give security through economic sufficiency for the masses.

His definition of Belloc's political economy as communist anarchy, is correct.It is the same same political economic stateless 'socialism' as espoused by Kropotkin as well as Proudhon and Tucker. And as Marx pointed out America was the ideal of this producers alternative to capitalism; production based on use value rather than exchange value. Belloc has influenced both the right and the left, and so while he is no libertarian we could call Belloc, a conservative anti-capitalist in much the same way Marx applied that appellation to Proudhon. The belief in a nation of small, independent landowners, craftsmen and merchants. Belloc and Proudhon,viewed their ideal as a cooperative guild socialism one influenced as it was by the role of the guilds and co-fraternities in Catholic Europe and their later corporatization in England as I have written about here. And here is the critical part of Belloc's work, his Catholic view of Europe, was that of the medieval guilds and the fact that a different kind of society could have evolved out of feudalism, rather than capitalism. Based on the ideals of the guilds and co-fraternities, an alternative had always existed to both feudalism and capitalism. Not unlike Kropotkin who posits such as movement as well in the free city states, that existed outside of the State's control. While embraced by the right, Belloc's 'communist anarchism' appealed to Dorothy Day and the Catholic Worker movement.

"The Servile State" By Dorothy Day The Catholic Worker, July August 1945, 1, 3

On the eve of Hilaire Belloc’s seventy-fifth birthday, the Servile State was ushered into Great Britain with Prime Minister Attlee taking the place of Churchill. Contrary to the opinion of most conservatives, the new government is not a step toward collectivism, but a solidifying of capitalism, with the sop thrown to the proletariat of social security, health laws, education laws, etc. The State has taken possession of the masses, with their approval. Most people look upon the new regime as the lesser of two evils, and a step forward in progress.

And while the right wing likes to claim Belloc's critique of the state is an attack on socialism, it isn't. Rather it is an attack on the liberal capitalist state. A state that developed after WWI, in response to the Bolshevik Revolution. A state that capitalism needed to halt a world wide revolutionary movement. As a result capitalism instead of collapsing as predicted by vulgar Marxists, embraced the state as its savior heralding the historic era of state capitalism.

Distributivism

But today the future of the Keynesian arrangement seems in doubt. In both Europe and America, the costs of government seem ready to outstrip the ability of society to support them. Further, the willingness of corporate interests to continue the arrangement is ending; they have invested great sums and great energies in seeking an end to the system and their efforts are paying off. Corporations are seeking to externalize social costs that have heretofore been part of the wage system, such as medical insurance, pensions, and unemployment costs. However, it is doubtful that shifting these responsibilities can be accomplished without introducing the very insecurities that occasioned the arrangements in the first place. Thus the Keynesian system seems to be caught in a conundrum, the very conundrum pointed out by Belloc. It cannot continue its Keynesian bargain (and this is especially so in the face of global competition), and it cannot drop it without risking chaos. John P. McCarthy, Hilaire Belloc: Edwardian Radical. Indianapolis: Liberty Press, 1978. 373 pp. $2.00. This book I have read only in cursory fashion, but I have picked up enough to know why Tolkien and Lewis are indebted to him. Tolkien was educated at the same school at Cardinal Newman's Oratory in Birmingham, but Belloc was not nearly so taken with the sacred image of Saint John Henry as Tolkien was. On the contrary, his hero was Cardinal Manning, the author of Rerum Novarum and champion of the small property owner. Newman, in Belloc’s estimate, was allied with the Old Catholics who were quite content to remain a noble and dignified minority, but Manning was an Ultramontane Catholic who championed the immigrant workers and converts. Yet Tolkien and Belloc were agreed in being Little Englanders who feared foreign alliances, not from xenophobia but because they were opposed to all nationalistic accretions of state power to defend interests abroad. Belloc is thus, like Chesterton a curious paradox: a radical Tory (323), an admirer of both the Catholic Middle Ages and the French Revolution, a hater of capitalism and a lover of private ownership of property. But Belloc is far from being mere inane contradiction. He was opposed to all privileges and monopolies in society: ownership of land, religious establishment, and local government. He wanted to extend the personal freedom and economic liberty won by the petit bourgeoisie to the entire populace: “What the radicals hoped to achieve was the extension of economic freedom attained by the middle-class entrepreneur to the population at large. They sought to correct the economic plight of the poorer classes while remaining within the laissez-faire system. They sought to put workers in more competitive relation with their employers by controls on child labor, graduated income taxes, and workmen's compensation. But in no way were these negative restraints meant to discourage savings or enterprise, nor to put industries in the hands of the state as the socialists wanted.” Such were also the original aims of the old Victorian Liberals: John Ruskin and William Morris, John Bright and John Morley, Richard Cobden, William Cobbett and Benjamin Disraeli. It was Lloyd George who first betrayed this vision. He changed an essentially negative vision of government as putting restraints on privilege to a positive vision of the welfare state as providing for all the basic needs of society. And George also linked this new omnicompetent state to an increasingly bureaucratized party supported by a plutocracy far worse than the old landowners. The party also spent most of its energy on popular elections that appealed entirely to the collectivist voter fighting for his mere economic interests: “Belloc saw the new style of mass politics and the collectivist new liberalism as closely intertwined, and subservient to the interests and needs of the newer privileged class, the capitalist plutocrats, who had come to replace the landed aristocracy.” But because these New Liberals wouldn't go all the way over to outright socialism, the Labor Party was founded to realize the full-fledged welfare state. Belloc was more opposed to the Liberals than the Fabians because he saw the former as producing a benignly servile state "where the proletariat masses would be reassured as to their economic security and sufficiency, and protected against cruelty by the owners of capital, but where at the same time they would be 'permanently dispossessed of the means of production'" (288-89). Thus did Belloc think Liberalism far more dangerous than the overt socialism of the Fabians.

The Roads to Serfdom by Theodore Dalrymple, City Journal Spring 2005

In fact, Hilaire Belloc, in his book The Servile State, predicted just such a form of collectivism as early as 1912. Like most intellectuals of the age, Belloc was a critic of capitalism, because he held it responsible for the poverty and misery he saw in the London slums. His view was static, not dynamic: he did not see that the striving there could—and would—lift people out of their poverty, and he therefore argued that the liberal, laissez-faire state—“mere capitalist anarchy,” he called it—could not, and should not, continue. He foresaw three possible outcomes.

His preferred resolution was more or less the same as Carlyle’s half a century earlier: a return to the allegedly stable and happy medieval world of reciprocal rights and duties. There would be guilds of craftsmen and merchants in the towns, supplying mainly handmade goods to one another and to peasant farmers, who in turn would supply them with food. Everyone would own at least some property, thereby having a measure of independence, but no one would be either plutocrat or pauper. However desirable this resolution, though, even Belloc knew it was fantasy.

The second possible resolution was the socialist one: total expropriation of the means of production, followed by state ownership, allegedly administered in the interests of everyone. Belloc had little to say on whether he thought this would work, since in his opinion it was unlikely to happen: the current owners of the means of production were still far too strong.

That left the third, and most likely, resolution. The effect of collectivist thought on a capitalist society would not be socialism, but something quite distinct, whose outlines he believed he discerned in the newly established compulsory unemployment insurance. The means of production would remain in private hands, but the state would offer workers certain benefits, in return for their quiescence and agreement not to agitate for total expropriation as demanded in socialist propaganda.

Unlike Orwell or Beveridge, however, he realized that such benefits would exact a further price: “A man has been compelled by law to put aside sums from his wages as insurance against unemployment. But he is no longer the judge of how such sums shall be used. They are not in his possession; they are not even in the hands of some society which he can really control. They are in the hands of a Government official. ‘Here is work offered to you at twenty-five shillings a week. If you do not take it you shall certainly not have a right to the money you have been compelled to put aside. If you will take it the sum shall stand to your credit, and when next in my judgment your unemployment is not due to your recalcitrance and refusal to labour, I will permit you to have some of your money; not otherwise.’ ”

What applied to unemployment insurance would apply to all other spheres into which government intruded, Belloc intuited; and all of the benefits government conferred, paid for by the compulsory contributions of the taxpayer, in effect would take choice and decision making out of the hands of the individual, placing them in those of the official. Although the benefits offered by the government were as yet few when Belloc wrote, he foresaw a state in which the “whole of labour is mapped out and controlled.” In his view, “The future of industrial society, and in particular of English society . . . is a future in which subsistence and security shall be guaranteed for the Proletariat, but shall be guaranteed . . . by the establishment of that Proletariat in a status really, though not nominally, servile.” The people lose “that tradition of . . . freedom, and are most powerfully inclined to [the] acceptance of [their servile status] by the positive benefits it confers.”

An Essay on the Restoration of Property, by Hilaire Belloc

In this essay, Belloc presents an alternative to the dehumanising obsession with money, and the monopolistic capitalist power that so often flows from it. That alternative is, as the title suggests, the restoration of property; in a word, "distributism."

"The evil [industrial capitalism] has gone so far," Belloc tells us, "that the creation of new and effective immediate machinery [to counteract it] is impossible." Therefore, the restoration of property - whether it be in the shape of families farming small parcels of land, self-reliant businesses, independent craftsmen, and so on - must be the result of a new mood. "It must grow from seed planted in the breast," he says. And to have a chance at success, the distributist vision "must everywhere be particular, local, and in its origins at least, small."

Restoration of Property is, perhaps, Belloc's most famous distributist tract. It is his roadmap, guiding us through the distributist vision of things, what a distributist society looks like, and how it might be achieved and preserved.

And what benefit does Belloc see at the core of that vision? In his words: "The object of those who think as I do in this matter is not to restore purchasing power [for the average working man] but to restore economic freedom."

Of course to be set free of something, one must first be bound by something. That "something" in this case is what, in Belloc's early 20th century world, he refers to as the "servile state," i.e., that capitalist society where all men (except for the few powerful controllers of wealth) are securely nourished "on a wage, or, lacking this, a subsidy in idleness."

That description, though obviously unknown to Belloc at the time, describes a society remarkably like most of the industrialised Western world of the 21st century.

Moreover, there are indications that Belloc's notions about economic freedom for the common man, and the evils associated with the acquisition of unlimited wealth and power, were not merely reflective of the times in which he wrote.

Consider this comment from Samuel Francis in a recent issue of a popular journal of American culture: "The economic trend in the United States today, aided by the political trend of the federal government, is toward the concentration of economic and political power in fewer and fewer hands".

Welfare in the Servile State' In our century, we have recognised totalitarianism as a system of enslavement. In 1912 Hilaire Belloc, responding to the Lloyd George budget of 1909 thought he detected the emergence of something called "The Servile State".

It was this phrase which the philosopher John Anderson took up in Sydney during the last war, in 1943, in the course of diagnosing the development of regimentation and servility in Australia. In 1961, Michael Oakeshott took up a similar theme in "The Masses in Representative Democracy". I want to make some comments on these last two writers.

Anderson in 1943 was in the process of liberating himself from "the worker's movement" - though not from a belief in the reality of "movements". But what he wanted to insist on was that workers are different from slaves: different both economically and politically, and the difference lies in the moral fact he called "enterprise".John Anderson, "The Servile State" in Studies in Empirical Philosophy, Sydney: Angus and Robertson, 1962, p. 329. What did he mean by "enterprise"? The most obvious thing he meant by enterprise was opposition. "The servile state", he remarks at the end, "is the unopposed state". But then opposition is a relational term, and depends rather on what one is opposing. Anderson was happy to live in a world of abstractions and did not much go into concrete practical matters. But it is clear that in Anderson's view a worker on strike would be enterprising as long as he was striking for some sort of principle, exhibiting independence. If he were striking for higher wages, or a better society, on the other hand, and thus exhibiting ends-means rationality, he would (on my reading of Anderson) be exhibiting the spirit of servility. "...the attitude of putting the economic first' "(he wrote) "leads straight to that servility whose growth Belloc undoubtedly deplores."Anderson, pp. 330 - 331.For Anderson at this point was a follower of George Sorel. The point of strikes was opposition itself, for its own sake, and any idea of "betterment" was just, as Sorel put it, a myth. By myth he did not mean anything so vulgar as a lie, but a passionate if unreal belief which generated heroic action.

Following this line, Anderson attacked the "propaganda" of social improvement. His target was wartime solidarism, the notion that we must all pull together in order to achieve victory, and that all other activities ranging from education to art and science must be subordinated to this aim. " Servile" is thus a term properly applied to " those States which are marked by the suppression of all political opposition and thus of all independent enterprise." Anderson, p. 333.He recognises that in wartime many voluntary sacrifices will be made, and such spontaneity is in his view a sign of the strength of free societies. It is always repression, direction, central planning which he dislikes, partly for the Hayekian reason that " the anomalies and confusions of directed work are only too apparent." Anderson, p. 335.And for Anderson, the moral suasion of a feeling that one ought to do something is part of that repression. He is at heart an anarchist. That is perhaps why he is so exhilarating.

ORIGINALLY WRITTEN JULY 2007

Trump pentagon nominee hunted and killed elephants in Zimbabwe

Josh Marcus
Fri, 20 November 2020

Baby elephants pictured in Zimbabwe

(Humane Society International)

Scott O’Grady, a famous former Air Force officer recently nominated for a top Defense Department role in the Trump administration, hunted and killed two elephants in Zimbabwe in 2014 and lobbied Congress to lift trophy hunting restrictions.

The revelations were first reported by independent journalist Yashar Ali but come from congressional testimony by Mr O’Grady.

O’Grady, who became a national sensation after surviving behind enemy lines in Bosnia when his jet was shot down during the NATO peace-keeping mission, hunted the elephants on a 2014 safari. He said it was the “fulfillment of a life-long dream,” for which he paid $75,000, more than his annual income at the time.

After returning from Zimbabwe that spring, Mr O’Grady, who was nominated Tuesday to be assistant secretary of defense for international security affairs, testified before a Congressional subcommittee on wildlife affairs in support of lifting the US Fish and Wildlife Service’s (FWS) April 2014 suspension on importing elephant trophies from Zimbabwe and Tanzania.

The agency said elephants were “under siege” in both countries, saying poor “management practices, a lack of effective law enforcement and weak governance have resulted in uncontrolled poaching and catastrophic population declines of African elephants."

Mr O’Grady argued in his testimony that trophy hunting helps fund conservation, and that he was accompanied by Zimbabwean government wildlife officials who monitored the hunt.

“I passionately believe that we all have a unique responsibility to conserve wild places and wild species,” he told the committee , adding “hunters are conservationists.”

Mr O’Grady did not respond to requests for comment.

At the time, Robert Mugabe was still in power in Zimbabwe. Mr Mugabe, who ran the country as a kleptocracy for nearly four decades, reportedly once ate baby elephant during a $1 million birthday celebration in 2015, and sold over 90 elephants to China and Dubai to help fund wildlife conservation.

He also criticized “white-owned” and American safaris for their impact.

“They can’t say ‘allow our people to visit, allow our people to have safaris,’ to kill our lions and take safari trophies to America,” Mr Mugabe said in 2015.

Prior to his testimony, Mr O’Grady reportedly prepared for “several weeks,” with Safari Club International, a hunting and conservation organization, who did not respond to a request for comment. He’d also previously met with FWS leadership to discuss the trophy ban in May.

The 12-year Air Force veteran is a co-chair of the Veterans for Trump group, and has previously retweeted a variety of right-wing conspiracy theories online, which included supporting Q-anon followers, as well as retweeting those labeling Dr. Anthony Fauci a member of the “deep state” and calling Covid a plot to install Marxism, according to Media Matters For America, a liberal watchdog group.

The president has reshuffled the Pentagon to elevate loyalists following his election defeat, which he refuses to concede, and the ouster of Defense Secretary Mark Esper, who had opposed the president’s desire to use active-duty troops against civil rights protests this summer.

Coronavirus epidemic 25,000 years ago could help treat current Covid-19 sufferers, study finds

Phoebe Southworth
Sat, 21 November 2020

A doctor examines a patient's lungs - Nathan Laine /Bloomberg

An ancient coronavirus epidemic 25,000 years ago could help us treat current Covid-19 sufferers, a study has found.

Scientists have identified a set of 42 genes which were altered after coming into contact with coronavirus some 900 generations ago.

The adaptations were caused by a "multigenerational coronavirus epidemic" among East Asian populations, the researchers from the USA and Australia concluded.

This likely triggered an "arms race", similar to today's worldwide rush to find a vaccine against Covid-19, the study suggests.

The scientists studied 26 populations from five regions in East Asia using data from the 1000 Genomes Project - the largest public catalogue of human genomic data.

These findings could help scientists currently working on developing treatments for Covid-19, as drugs could be tailored to target the 42 genes identified as being impacted by the virus in the past, the researchers say.

They also believe future pandemics could be prevented altogether.

"Modern human genomes contain evolutionary information tracing back tens of thousands of years, which may help identify the viruses that have impacted our ancestors – pointing to which viruses have future pandemic potential," the study states.

"By revealing the identity of our ancient pathogenic foes, evolutionary genomic methods may ultimately improve our ability to predict – and thus prevent – the epidemics of the future."

The study, which is yet to be peer reviewed, comes as scientists continue to work on ways of identifying what makes some people particularly badly affected by Covid-19, and how they can be treated.

They believe there could be genetic differences between individuals which cause some to experience more severe symptoms than others.

These differences in DNA are now being tracked by researchers who believe they offer a route to developing new drugs that could halt many of the worst consequences of suffering from Covid-19.

“The crucial point is that by understanding the impact of gene variants in the body we can now think about finding drugs that could block their pathways and help patients,” said Jeffrey Barrett, of the Wellcome Sanger Institute’s Covid-19 genomic surveillance programme.

“The bad news is that it can take years of experiments to find treatments this way. The good news is that there are now so many scientists working on this kind of thing that we might still get some quick answers.”

Previous research by King's College London suggested that genes are around 50 per cent responsible for how badly infected people suffer from certain symptoms.

In particular, it showed a strong genetic link to delirium, fever, fatigue, shortness of breath, diarrhoea and the loss of taste and smell.