June 2020 – Skat's Chat

Coronavirus week 14 – Not ‘the new normal’ but ‘a reorientation…’

‘So what’s the story?’….time for change

This week’s blog will be a shorter one (who shouted hurrah!) as I am busy this weekend taking part in a ‘virtual Methodist Conference’ along with 300+ other people from all over the country and the world. The Conference met for the first time with founder John Wesley in the chair in 1744, and has convened annually in the 275 years until 2019 when I attended for the first time in Birmingham. It would be easy to characterise our church as ‘old fashioned’ and living in the past, but the first thing we did was spend half an hour voting electronically via ‘raised hands’ and Zoom polls to put aside our ancient rules designed for a physical gathering. This had taken a great deal of work by our Law & Polity team in conjunction with the Charity Commission. It could have been a very short conference if we hadn’t voted unanimously to do so. Who says our church is stuck in its ways?!

A casual glance at our new President Rev Richard Teal, dressed in black robes with a white collar, the 60+ year old white male that he is, might have reinforced the old-fashioned tag. But his message that this time of lockdown must lead to a time of ‘reorientation’ – to see people and do things differently in the future, shows we are rooted in the present not the past. He used the word ‘oriented’ to describe the way we felt just a few months ago, comfortable in our situation, and the example of his feelings seeing his new grandchild for the first time to emphasise the emotions that existed at the time. Next he talked about feeling ‘disoriented’ during the last three months, unsure of what it means, and without many of the things which make our lives stable, including family and being part of a local church with all its traditions and routines. What we need to do next is ‘reorientation’ as a church, with the things we have learned. We are finding more people than ever wanting to be part of on-line services and gatherings, we have reached out to those who live in our area most in need – particularly those who are lonely and isolated. We need to value those who do vital work and have been underappreciated in the past.

Richard follows a President in Rev Barbara Glasson who exemplified the diverse talents we have in our ordained ministers. Barbara has spent her ministry working with people ‘on the margins’ or outside our church. In Liverpool city centre she started a group of people including those with learning disabilities, from the LGBTQ community, the homeless, and young people, who came together every week to make two loaves of bread, then gave them away to whoever wanted it. Never the same group two weeks running, the ‘Bread Church’ is still going strong. She currently directs the Touchstone Project in another city centre, Bradford, that works from a terraced house in a Muslim-Pakistani heritage area on interfaith relations. They are about to move into a refurbished pub. Barbara is a blessing in our church. With 2019 Vice President Clive we were encouraged and challenged to tell our story of faith – hence many of my blogs using their phrase ‘So what’s the story..?’.

Our new Vice President Carolyn, in her 50’s, described herself as an introvert, activist, impatient, easily bored and liable to make flippant remarks – an honest assessment of her humanity. She confessed to being uncertain about taking on such an important role, but the testimony she gave on how she got here was powerful. She described the church as part ‘mad’ – some of our members can get very worked up if people use the wrong cups, wear the wrong clothes, put papers on, or take them off, the noticeboard. There is a whole potential for trouble around anything to do with setting out, stacking or moving chairs! It is also part ugly – this ranges from telling visitors off when they sit in ‘someone else’s seat’, we can say the cruelest things to each other, have inappropriate comments and touching, bullying and controlling behaviour. Ministers from our overseas churches can be subjected to racist comments from our members, and homophobia is not uncommon. This ugliness extends to some extremely serious cases of abuse, which we need to continually guard against.

Carolyn’s hope is that the best of the work we do is really good and awesome; helping the weakest in society, and through our overseas relief and development charity, All We Can, those in poorer countries. She wants to use the year meeting with local churches and encouraging us to use our gifts to the utmost.

It is a very different conference this year, but our group of 8 local Chester & Stoke District representatives are keeping in touch, and helping each other during debates via a WhatsApp group. We won’t be able to hold the deep and passionate debates where speakers come forward to give different views, but we will be reviewing some important reports and committing millions of pounds of funding to important mission and outreach projects. We will also do the ‘mundane and routine’ business such as approving accounts, membership of committees and working parties. There is a sadness that the vital debates we held last year, and the provisional legislation needed, to make us a more inclusive church that recognises a wide-variety of relationships as valid, will not be completed as it was felt the format would not allow the ‘deep personal conferring needed’. Those in single sex relationships are already welcomed, and can hold any position in Methodism, but will have to wait until the conference of 2021 to find out if they can marry in our churches.

Our ministers in training are usually ‘ordained’ on Conference Sunday, but this year they had to make their promises on Saturday via Zoom as the first part, but will have to wait until we can get back into churches to have the physical ‘laying on of hands’ in the special service with friends and family. After one of the candidates made her promise from home our chair Helen sent a message on WhatsApp saying ‘we need to get Natalie into our district’, prompted by a framed message on the wall in Natalie’s house that read ‘Gin is my saviour’!

In the conference last year we learned that language is so important, not only in what is said but how it is said. Hence my wish not to use the term ‘new normal’ for our post-Covid society but the hope that, using Richard’s word we will ‘re-orientate’ ourselves. This week with the ‘White Lives Matter’ banner flown over a premier league match we learned again this lesson of use of language.

With cases not falling as fast and the death rate levelling off to about 150 per day, there is concern that the ‘welcomed’ easing of lockdown has sent the message that ‘it’s all over, we can have a party’. Scenes at ‘block parties’ in London, the celebrations in Liverpool after their team won the Premier League title after a 30-year wait, and overcrowding on the beach at Bournemouth during a very warm spell, raised fears of a second spike of infections. And all that before the pubs open on 4th July. Add alcohol to the mix and arguments over what constitutes ‘one metre plus’ in crowded pubs will lead, as one punter said, ‘to even more fights on a Friday night’!

I understand some of the reasons, but in my opinion it says a lot about our country that we work hard to get the pubs open, but not the gyms and swimming pools. Judging by the photo on the front page of one newspaper this morning, Boris Johnson clearly thinks an office floor is all that is need to become ‘as fit as a butcher’s dog’. Although I am not sure wearing a suit and tie is recommended gym wear?

We really are at a ‘turning point’ or maybe looking over a precipice with the virus. Infections are reducing, deaths at least leveling out, and there are signs of hope. Yet scientists keep telling us that there is no sign of the virus just dying out and it will be with us at some level for ‘years to come’. The next three months and how we as individuals react will be critical to the future path of the virus, even more than the past 14 weeks of lockdown.

We need to re-orientate our country if there is not to be a pandemic of unemployment. In my less optimistic times I worry about a complete breakdown of society as those in work continue to regain wealth, but those in lower paid jobs or no jobs get poorer and poorer – or am I kidding myself, as that has been the case for decades?

Other news this week

The daily briefings came to an end on Tuesday with the announcement of the next stage of easing, adding to the ‘its all over’ feeling. Those who are shielding were told that they could leave the house at the same time. There is uncertainty and real fear among some. It may be that the presence of the virus is such that on average you need to meet 1,700 people before you interact with someone who carries the virus, but the effect if you are the unlucky winner of that particular lottery is no less devastating if you are vulnerable.
With the briefings ending, you have to work hard to find the daily new cases and death figures. The four days figures Tuesday to Friday were 154, 149, 186, 100 and the total is 43,550 and the average new daily cases is about 900 which is at least moving in the right direction. Globally we passed 10 million confirmed cases and 500,000 deaths.
At the weekend it was announced that from the 6th July we will be able to go to some European countries via so-called ‘air corridors’, meaning that on return there will be no requirement to go into two weeks’ quarantine.
Infections in the US are continuing to rise at a dramatic pace and President Trump is still in denial, with his senior team appearing increasingly uncomfortable trying to defend the indefensible. It is such a large country and a major part of the world economy, even beyond the personal impact the loss of over 125,700 of its citizens.
World number one tennis player Nova Djokovic arranged a short tour of his native Serbia, and Croatia in which there was little attention paid the social distancing or ‘covid security measures’. Djokovic himself got the disease as did his wife and several of the organising team. He is a self-declared ‘anti-vaxxer’, an area I plan to explore in a later article as the ‘conspiracy’ theorists and those who ignore science facts are dangerous for the rest of us.

How was week 14 for us?

It didn’t start well as on Monday Alyson was seriously ill with sickness and stomach upset. At first I did wonder if she had caught Covid-19 from working in the pharmacy on the Saturday. It turned out to be a reaction to a new type of antibiotic she was taking. It was the first time in 93 days that she hadn’t been on our exercise bike and her Wii Fit. We had to cancel our trip to meet friends from Shrewsbury the next day for a walk around a lake at a park halfway between us. It was a gloriously sunny day and such a shame.

The weather stayed hot and sunny and by Thursday when Alyson finally got to meet three former work colleagues in our garden, we needed to put up the gazebo we had bought specially, not for the rain, but so that they could sit in the shade. It was the hottest day of the year at 30 degrees.

The opening of self-catering accommodation on 4th July means that our holiday at a National Trust cottage in a remote area of Norfolk is back on. It will be good to get away even if we can’t visit some of the places we planned to. It will be a change of scenery and walks along coastal paths. I admit to glancing at the availability of villas in Spain, Crete and Croatia when the air corridors were announced, but Alyson is a bit more cautious and is waiting for the ‘second spike’ and what happens when the ‘winter flu’ season starts again.

I continued to do my local parkruns twice a week and am feeling the benefits both in some weight loss, and clearing my mind of confusion.

We had a meeting of our head injury charity trustees via phone and the figures I had prepared as treasurer showed that our reserves have increased. There really has been great support for small charities like ours who can’t hold fundraising events. We have been fortunate with the grants we have applied for – and received. Apart from the National Lottery the money we have received is from local trusts and benefactors wanting to support Cheshire-based charities. We have not furloughed our two employees, as the work they do supporting members who were socially isolated even before the restrictions caused by the virus, is vital. We too will continue with ‘reorientation’ of our services, taking some of the ‘virtual coffee mornings’ and chat rooms forwards to reach those who haven’t wanted to attend physical meetings even in normal times.

Alyson’s hairdresser called to ask if she wanted an appointment in the first few days of opening. I am getting used to her long hair and she doesn’t want it taken back to where it was, just the fringe tidied up. I love the haircuts Alyson gives me with my trimmers and not sure I will ever go back to paying for one!

Although there was no formal Conference Service this year, our new President and Vice President joined the service at Westminster Central Hall via Zoom. Richard’s sermon was about John Wesley’s drive for Methodists to strive for ‘personal holiness’, but to live out the gospel we proclaim via what he called ‘social holiness’. This is a radical, active care for those in society who need it. Richard talked about the last letter Wesley ever wrote being to William Wilberforce supporting the abolition of slavery. He worked in the desperate slums of London where he saw people in extreme poverty continue to work and help others. Richard used a modern-day example of this social holiness by telling of a member in his circuit in rural Yorkshire, inspired by her faith to help the local food bank and deliver to the housebound and isolated in her community.

Vice President Carolyn led us in prayers for those who are broken-hearted, worried about the virus, struggling with loneliness and living in conditions where social distancing is impossible. For countries where health systems are overwhelmed and asked that we use our social holiness to do what we can.

We finished with video messages from our sister churches around the world from, Bolivia, Rwanda, Australia, The Caribbean, and Italy. As Methodists we adapt one of Wesley’s famously sayings ‘the world is our parish’.

Keep safe and let’s see what the next week brings us.

Coronavirus week 13 – The best and worst of the NHS – the old normal is back…

C₂₂H₂₉FO_{5 – the wonder drug}

As it is nearly 40 years since I was awarded a BA(Hons) in Chemistry, I think I can be forgiven for not being able to give the modern name for dexamethasone. This is the drug announced this week used to treat patients with Covid-19 resulting in reduced deaths for those receiving oxygen or on mechanical ventilators.

Nomenclature has changed since I taught chemistry for five years in the mid-80s. Looking back at the literature of the time it was called 9α-fluoro-16α-methylprednisolone or 6α-methyl-9α-fluoroprednisolone, but either way even having done a biochemistry module I am not sure I would have known it was a steroid derivative of the well-known drug hydrocortisone. One of the main topics I enjoyed was organic chemistry, that of carbon compounds. Looking through the 1,280 pages of Hendrickson, Cram and Hammond’s textbook from 1977 there is no mention of it, despite being used in a clinical way since 1961. To complete the confusion that people often express when I tell them I used to teach chemistry, it is always good to have a chemical structure to describe the compound. Here are two for this drug.

The slightly more modern version on the right shows the different elements hydrogen, oxygen and fluorine as different colours and the methyl (CH3-) structures as a dark triangle. My pharmacy consultant (and wife) Alyson tells me that I was on dexamethasone for a short time in 2012. I was in hospital for 12 weeks (the time we have been locked down now) with a brain abscess, and was given it to reduce the resultant swelling of my brain.

The research on dexamethasone done in British hospitals, with volunteer patients involved in the clinical trials, has been hailed as ground-breaking. The drug has potential to save tens of thousands of lives worldwide. It must be devastating for those who have lost loved ones who may have benefited from it. This and the amazing dedication of the care staff, cleaners, physios, pharmacists, therapists, doctors, nurses, and administrators demonstrate the best of our NHS. As a country and tax payers we need to fund them to the level required. We will have a thorough review and ‘learn the lessons’, but I fear that once ‘real life’ takes over and self-interest resumes its ‘normal life’, we will forget those weeks early on when as one voice we said ‘this can’t be allowed to happen again’.

The whole system needs a thorough rethink. There have been many reviews and reorganisations over the years, and it would be natural for those who work in it to think ‘oh no not again’. The NHS needs rebuilding from the ground up, and possibly renaming. Before Covid-19 I think most people thought of the NHS mainly as the hospitals and local surgeries. In latter years, and certainly during the crisis, there have been concerns that care homes, mental health services, and some social care is linked to the NHS. Many people comment on ‘private business’ not getting involved in our health system as a bad thing. Well I have news for them, much of what we think of are ‘private businesses’. Community pharmacies which I worked in for over 20 years and Alyson has worked in for 40 now, are private limited companies owned mostly by pharmacists but some by medical wholesalers. The same is true of almost every doctor’s surgery who are businesses of doctors setup as a partnership of lead GPs who employ other GPs to help them. These private businesses operate as ‘contractors’ and are paid by Department for Health and Social Care (DHSC), itself only renamed in January 2018. They are paid a rate for their services, whether that’s seeing patients, running clinics or dispensing prescription or carrying out medicine use reviews that is negotiated by their professional bodies with DHSC. It should not be a surprise that negotiating with what is in effect a ‘monopoly’ supplier is not one that leads to mass riches. What does surprise those doctors who visit pharmacies or chat to owners is unlike their partnerships, DHSC pays nothing towards premises or staffing costs of pharmacy businesses, or pay for the holding of large amounts of drug stocks. And don’t even get me on the subject of Dispensing Doctor practices – people who can write a prescription if they have too much stock of a particular drug, or choose the one that’s best for their business rather than the patient.

‘Business’ and the idea of accountability and competition has been part of the health service for many years, and now we have ‘Trusts’ who are independent organisations running services at a local or regional level. They contract to suppliers and surgeries, pharmacies and ‘buy in’ other services from blood and organ donation services, laboratory services and a host of other clinical ones. There are companies who contract for IT projects, finance, property building and maintenance, catering, cleaning etc. This started when I was still in pharmacy 20 years ago and even then I could see the problems of having local GPs on trusts. As with teachers and risk assessments I wrote about in an earlier blog, most GPs are not businesspeople and they can’t be blamed for conflicts of interest between their business and that of patients and other contractors.

Many governments have presided over reforms but the last major one by the coalition government in 2010 and overseen by Andrew Lansley has proven to be disastrous. Even before starting it drew criticism from a lot of areas. The idea of giving even more power to GPs and frontline staff and increased ‘competition’ on one level might seem like a good one, but in reality it led to a mix of systems and lack of any central accountability. The devolving of the social care and public health issues to local government foundered as the secretary of state for health, Jeremy Hunt, cut the budgets under the guise of ‘austerity measures’. The well-publicised ‘scandals’ with Mid Staffordshire NHS Trust and others in care homes can be laid at the lack of oversight on patient safety. The organisation Public Health England (PHE) was formed as a result of abolishing Strategic Health Authorities (SHAs), and at the time several directors warned that this would compromise our ability to ‘fight any future pandemic’. SHA’s would have been able to lead on organising the local response and would have people on the ground able to conduct a ‘track and trace’ system. Andrew Lansley stepped down from government in 2015 and was rewarded for his efforts with a seat in the House of Lords.

Jeremy Hunt was the secretary of health who ignored the results of ‘Operation Cygnus’ in October 2016 used to check the resilience of the NHS to respond to a pandemic (albeit one of influenza). As widely reported at the start of this pandemic, this led to a failure to replenish our stockpiles of PPE, antiviral drugs and ventilators. It is shocking to see him in recent weeks, as the now chair of the parliamentary health and social care select committee, taking the government to task over their failure on issues he was responsible for. When he was elected by MPs to this role in January there was a feeling that this conflict of interest might stop him questioning too much. It’s extraordinary to see the exact opposite happening, but his ability to wipe clean his own responsibility is equally unbelievable.

Andrew Lansley promised a ‘bottom up’ review but ended up with more ‘top down’ structures in place and setting up a whole series of ‘independent bodies’ to monitor things.

Several people have expressed surprise that hospices receive so little funding from DHSC and other government bodies that they have to rely on local fundraising and charitable status to continue. This was put in the spotlight early in the current crisis when fundraising stopped and no provision was forthcoming to help with PPE. If a national health service is supposed to cater for us from ‘cradle to grave’, what has gone so wrong that patients and their families who are facing the real end of the health system are left to donations and sales from charity shops for the provision of care to their loved ones. Another part of the health service that I have experience of, and which has been neglected are rehabilitation units. It seems Covid-19 is an illness that takes a terrible toll on survivors, with months of aftercare needed to even walk again. Many weeks on a ventilator in a medically-induced coma leads to mental health issues as well as physical weakness.

NHS IT provision, which I had some experience of when trying to implement the Electronic Prescription Service (EPS) in our pharmacy branches in 2005/6 was one riven with problems. With the help of our wholesalers and investment in NHS broadband we got all 50 branches setup just as we were sold to the Co-op. Alyson continued working in branch and even now, 14 years on, the system is not fully implemented and looks unlikely to be any time soon. Only recently can pharmacists see a very small amount of information held nationally on any patient who comes into their branchwhen they are away from the place they live. I know from personal experience that my local hospital, 15 miles from the one in another county and a separate trust where I was treated for my brain injury, can’t access any of my scans or records. This is why I have a lever arch folder with all my records and several CDs of my scans/x-rays that I can take in should it happen again.

As predicted by my sons in a blog six weeks ago NHS IT, or NHSX as it is now called, was criticised this week for the failure to deliver the NHS Test & Trace app, and are considering reverting to the Google/Apple model. As my chair of district tweeted;

In all the ‘clap for carers’ and accolades given to those in the health and care systems, we shouldn’t fall into the trap of thinking everyone is working for the common good. In an organisation of about 1.5 million people there will be some ‘bad apples’ and strong management and administration supported by decent pay and training is needed.

Our National Health service should be as much about prevention and encouragement to live a healthy lifestyle as it is about treating us when we fall ill. The effects of obesity, diabetes, heart disease and respiratory conditions on the death rate from coronavirus demonstrates this need. The savings made from prevention should outweigh the costs of later treatment. Education, as in many things, is vital for health outcomes as is reducing poverty.

Let’s hope the next review takes all of the factors into account and, as I wrote last week, as a country we can fund the necessary changes. Our National Health Service has become a ‘Reactive Illness Programme’ (RIP), and needs to change, and quickly.

Other news this week

The ‘old normal’ resurfaced in our area this week when 6,000 people attended raves in two separate areas of Manchester on Monday. Several people were stabbed, one girl allegedly raped and local people had to clear up the mess after everyone had left.
Crime seems to be on the increase (or at least being more reported) and terror is back on our streets with the stabbings in Reading this weekend.
There is more talk of reducing the social distancing requirements to one metre to get hospitality and self-catering holiday accommodation open.
Dame Vera Lynn died this week at the age of 103. She was called the ‘forces sweetheart’ during World War Two and had shared her thoughts during the current crisis and her song was echoed in the address to the nation by our Queen when she said ‘we will meet again’.
The Labour Party review on the reasons for disastrous results in December’s general election was published. It didn’t make comfortable reading for members of the party like me. We must work for Labour to produce policies which chime with the need to do things differently in relation to funding the new health and social care system, tackling poverty, improving education and closing the gap between the wealthy and poorer in society.
The daily death announced totals continue to fall with the Monday-Friday total this week being 853 down from 1,065 last week (a fall of 20%). The total of deaths at the end of the week was 42,632.
With numbers seemingly under control in European countries despite some local outbreaks in Germany, I looked again at the statistics on Johns Hopkins site and there are some awful looking graphs in other areas of the world. Here are the graphs for cases in Europe;

These show that we are over the (first?) peak of infections. The story in two countries with presidents who think it is nothing to worry about, and are trying to get their country’s open again is not so hopeful…

and note that the scales on these are tens of thousands rather than the thousands in Europe.
The middle and far east countries are also showing curves which are concerning, with a ‘double peak’ for Iran. The cases are in hundreds but show no signs of decreasing.
We need to start looking overseas again now that we are getting the UK cases down. There is concern from aid charities that helping less well-off countries will be harder now that the department for international development (DFID) and the UKAid agency has been subsumed into the Foreign Office. A move criticised by three recent former prime ministers from both Conservative and Labour.
The debate and protests around racism and the ‘Black Lives Matter’ movement continued across the world.
I was going to write that the demonstrations and actions of climate protestors, similar to the ones for Black Lives Matters with marches and ‘direct action’ had not resurfaced, when yesterday I saw an interview with Greta Thunberg saying that she was looking forward to going back to school in Sweden, and vowing to carry on campaigning.
Greta’s target for criticism president Donald J Trump was back on the campaign trail with a ‘huge rally’ in Tulsa, Oklahoma where only 6,000 of a possible 19,000 seats were occupied despite over a million applications for tickets. For those who did attend there was little sign of masks or social distancing, and six of the organisers caught the virus. At the time of writing there are reports that Mr Trumps rally had been ‘turned over’ by teens and young people responding to campaigns on the Tik-Tok and K-Pop social media platforms applying for tickets then not turning up. Mr Trump said earlier in the week that a million supporters would come.

How has week 13 been for us?

Unfortunately we have another example of the ‘worst of the NHS’ in our household. Five weeks after Alyson applied to help out NHS 111 with taking phone calls from people who need to speak to a pharmacist, and after three polite chasing emails and responses from the HR team doing the ‘on-boarding’ stating that she will hear ‘in a few days’, there is still no sign of her contract or training plans. She has played her part by taking two more calls on the SOS NHS volunteering app.

We haven’t ventured to ‘non-essential shops’ yet and the crush at the Nike store in London and the lady interviewed in the Primark queue in Manchester who stated that she ‘felt like I’ve won the lottery’ didn’t pursuade us. We did go for another walk in Delamere Forest and had a picnic which was pleasant. The weather meant another postponement of meeting with friends in our garden, but we have a walk planned in a park further afield this week.

I have watched a couple of the Premier League football matches now live on ‘free tv’ and have been surprised how realistic the ‘virtual crowd noise’ is to make them seem more ‘normal’ despite empty stadiums. The online radio commentary I heard for my team Middlesbrough was a sign of the ‘new normal’ being much like the old – we lost 3-0 and are looking at relegation again.

I had my first international Zoom with a call to our subcontractors’ office in India with the person who helps on the IT project I am doing. We have had training sessions with the team from our district who are attending the Methodist Conference in a week’s time. With over 300 representatives, Zoom will be in the form of a webinar where we can only see the person presenting and another speaker who wants to add to the debate. Voting will by the raising of a virtual hand or completing a poll on the screen, so the feedback on numbers should be much quicker than the usual manual count of raised hands in the conference hall. I will write more about this next week. The conference service on Sunday will be at my now ‘virtual home church’ of Methodist Central Hall, Westminster in London.

Keep safe and let’s hope there is a safe further easing of lockdown in the coming week.

Coronavirus week 12 – what I have (not) done…

Looking to a more just society…

Even though lockdown has been eased and we are allowed to do more things than before, my week has been dominated by planned activities that I have not done.

Alyson gave me a lovely thoughtful present to surprise me on my birthday in April. It was something that she knows I had looked at, but dismissed as probably too expensive and not fitting in with our plans at the time. This weekend should have been the ‘London Series’ of Major League Baseball (MLB) where teams from the US play a two-game series at the ex-Olympic Stadium, now the London Stadium and home to Premier League team West Ham United. The two teams due to play were the St Louis Cardinals and the Chicago Cubs, who play in the Central Division of the National League(NL) so it would be one game in a long-standing rivalry.

The 2019 series, the first one to showcase MLB overseas by playing in the UK, was another rivalry between the New York Yankees and the Boston Red Sox of the American League (AL) East Division. Some readers may know that I have been a supporter of another AL East team the Toronto Blue Jays since I first saw them in the early 80’s and have been to matches each time we have been to Toronto since, including last September. So, it would have been great to see a live game in London, but the virus put a stop to that.

I am sure more people would have been looking forward to the next thing I have (not) done this week – the Euro 2020 football championships. Friday would have been the first match in Rome where Turkey would have taken on Italy at 10pm UK time. Saturday would have seen Wales play and today England would have played Croatia at Wembley. I had put all the matches into the calendar on my computer which I do months before each major tournament in case people try to arrange church or charity meetings. Not that I wouldn’t go if they did, I just want to be able to inform them, and to have the chance not to do so!

The third activity I have (not) done this week like the 11 weeks before is my regular Saturday morning Parkrun at 9am in Delamere Forest. I have written about Parkrun before if you look back at posts, starting in April 2016 when I did my first run and first post, to February 2018 when I did my 50th, and last October when I did a sponsored 10k the week after completing my 100th. I really miss the run, the team of volunteers and other runners. During lockdown I have done a 5k run on Wednesday and a longer 6.1k on Saturday morning. The great thing is that I have come first every time, and today was my second fastest time of the 12 weeks.

However, the one thing I have (not) done and want to write about the most is an event I chose not to go to on Tuesday, despite being successful in my application to attend. We met up with Alyson’s sister and husband in Cannock Chase Forest park for a lovely walk and a ‘socially distanced picnic’ sitting either end of a felled tree. There were a lot of people around, but it was easy to keep a safe distance on the miles of paths. There was a takeout service from the cafe and there were plenty of Portaloo facilities which were clean and had plenty of hand sanitiser.

The event I chose not to go to was a Zoom conference with the Shadow Work and Pensions Secretary Jonathan Reynolds and other MPs and Labour Party members. It was to discuss policies that feed into the National Policy Forum consultation taking place this summer. The agenda looked an extensive one;

This policy discussion is on the subject of the future of social security after coronavirus and we would like to hear your thoughts and ideas on the questions below:

What has the crisis taught us about the role of social security in protecting the most vulnerable in society and the gaps in the current system?

To what extent has the crisis changed public perceptions of social security? How can we build on any changes to ensure wider public support for the system?

To what extent should social security be a universal entitlement available to all?

How can social security support self-employed workers?

What role can social security play in addressing inequalities and poverty in society?

Many of these were topics I wanted to write about when I started this blog and if you look back to the first one on the 5th April there is a section on Economics where I ask

How we use our wealth to best effect for what both main political parties agree should be ‘for the many not the few’.

How corporations, public bodies, small and medium businesses, wealthy individuals, and every individual supports each other.

Do we need a fundamental rethink and ‘reordering’ of past conventions?

So it would have been extremely interesting to have been in the session and one of the ‘breakout room’ where we would have had the opportunity to discuss in smaller groups with other MPs acting as leaders and Johnathan popping in to listen and answer questions.

The brief paper that we needed to read before attending the forum set out the problems with the current system, many of which were there before the crisis, but have been highlighted in recent weeks. It acknowledged the steps the present government has taken in the furlough, business rates, business loan and help for the self-employed, which have been unprecedented in recent times. The paper also pointed out the issues that need a fundamental rethink.

I admit to having no formal economic training and acknowledge that the taxation and benefits system for any ‘developed’ country is complex. A balance between ‘fairness’, ‘equality’, ‘incentive’, ‘reward’, ‘ethics’, ‘environment’, the fast-moving needs of the ‘labour market’ and dealing with factors arising from being an interconnected world and ‘globalisation’. But you don’t need to be any sort of expert to know that the present system is failing. It fails not just those in real poverty and need, but large numbers of working people who are claiming benefits and slipping into poverty as housing and other costs rise at a time when wages are rising slowly.

To pick up on the current mood, the effects of the virus and ‘Black Lives Matter’, the present system already discriminates against the BAME community, those who we now call ‘heroes’ in low-paid but vital jobs, many of who are women, the disabled, young people coming out of education trying to get employment and into a home of their own. After the virus, these impacts will only increase.

In mid-February I ordered the book below, prompted by a discussion we were having in one of our church study groups with Richard who worked at the local Credit Union. I had been reading the second one for the last year. Both have something to add to the conversation we would have had at the forum and for a policy fit for the 21st century.

Richard’s statement about what we could do to help those who he sees at the Credit Union was simple. ‘As one of the richest countries in the world, it’s time we paid everybody in the country a basic income’. The other book explains how our current taxation system is exploited by global corporations and wealthy individuals, using tax-havens and false reporting of money flows to avoid paying a fair share to support society. This can be to the point of criminality by those who setup the money markets to manipulate it in ways that even governments don’t understand, and for which there is little transparency. Radical change is needed considering the ideas in both books to reform the economy.

A Basic Citizen’s Income

There is not enough room to explain all the ideas around this and I suspect most people’s reaction would be ‘well it is a nice idea, but it will never work’. The details need to be worked out after a full debate and explanation. The amount needs to be considered but the ‘simplicity’ of it, in my opinion, is unarguable.

Every citizen who reaches working age will receive a basic income for them to use as they wish. It is unconditional and nonwithdrawable (with higher amounts for older people and smaller amounts for children). It will be paid by the government directly into people’s bank account on a regular basis with no means testing at all. This immediately cuts out whole swathes of bureaucracy or ‘red tape’ so disliked by many politicians, it allows citizens who live in the present world characterised as a ‘precariat’ of uncertain income and changing jobs frequently, quickly slipping into needing help. There would be no need for Universal Benefit as everyone would have some income and could build a ‘reserve’ to see them through short periods of unemployment or sickness (or lack of income caused by a situation like the present virus). It could, over time, replace the need to pay a state pension. It will give the ability to those who want to pursue higher education the means to subsidise that, those who want to setup a small business to do so, and those in work to help others less fortunate or to pool ‘unneeded income’ to give a hand up to other family members. All such income would be taxable.

It needs bringing in with another pillar of a fair society – education. I can already hear people suggesting that it is a recipe for ‘scroungers and wasters’. Children and families will be taught basic money management and the way the economy works. Banks would have to change their model to help people manage their money well, and stop them from getting into debt through bad choices.

There is not enough room in this blog to explain it all, but I hope the chapter titles in Malcolm Torry’s book will prompt you to think about it more;

Imagine….
How did we get to where we are now?
The economy. work and employment
Individuals and their families
Administrative efficiency
Reducing poverty and inequality
Is it feasible?
Options for implementation
Pilot projects and experiments
Objections
Alternatives to a Citizen’s Basic Income

Tax and the Campaign for a Just Society

This is the subtitle of the second book I read a review in The Methodist Recorder and asked for it as a Christmas present. I have not read it all but the parts I have made me realise that the reason a universal basic income might not happen, is the people who setup our complex financial structures are also those who control and exploit it. Although not formally setup until March 2003 the Tax Justice Network (TJN) has its roots in the almost total lack of research as to what lead to extreme poverty in Africa, South-East Asia and Latin America as money flowed out from these countries under the guise of ‘aid’ to the financial centres in Geneva, New York and London via a complex network of offshore companies and trusts located in secrecy jurisdictions. They exploited the fact that many of the countries they were ‘helping’ had poor governance and taxation systems and officials willing to be corrupted by the promise of wealth such people could only dream of. One of the writers of the book has worked ‘on the inside’ and struggled with what he saw in terms of ‘transfer pricing’, tax havens and ‘illicit financial flows’ as part of a team working for accountants Deloitte Touche and as Economic Advisor to the States of Jersey and alongside the Organisation for Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD). He witnesses what he calls the ‘dark arts of tax havenry’ and relations with Hong Kong, Jersey, London, and Singapore. Every time he questioned something with senior people, lecturers for his degree or powerful people in government, it was side-stepped and he realised he had wandered into an ‘economic blind spot’. TJN is now an established organisation working with partners in the charity sector and other likeminded organisation to campaign for transparency and information and changes to the global economic system. Not easy when you have the full weight of large financial institutions funding lobbyists and vested interests.

Again, there is not enough space here to write in full, but the book is in the form of individual articles/papers written by a variety of authors. I urge you to read some of them and here is a selection;

What is necessary is possible
Pinstripe Outlaws
The Africa Question: Where Do All the Profits Go?
Tax Justice and the Oil Industry
Tax Competition: A case of Winner Takes All?
Revealed: How Multinational Companies Avoid the Taxman
Making the Link: Tax, Governance and Civil Society
The City of London: A State Within a State
Harnessing Land Value as a Green Tax
How Much Should the Rich Pay in Taxes
Didn’t they notice?
Human Rights and Just Taxation
Public Duty, Private Gain: Professional Ethics and Tax

The one highlighted in red I found the most shocking as it exposes the City of London as the largest enablers of tax havens in the world. In four short pages written 11 years ago it explains why it is unlikely that any UK Government will agree to such a radical policy as transparency in tax avoidance, and how the narrative against a citizens income could be stopped in its tracks by ‘those who have the real power’.

Other news this week

The Black Lives Matters protests continued and after the toppling of Edward Colston’s statue last week and the graffiti daubed on Winston Churchill’s in Parliament Square, a debate started on which others should be removed. This, like most topics I have written about, is why education is so important. The historical context of our ‘famous’ people and the benefit to society needs to be explained and the flaws of whatever size or nature drawn out. In some cases this could lead to public statues being placed into museums and others to have information that gives both sides of the stories. None of this should take focus away from what we need to do now and in the future to change society for the better.
There is no doubt that the violence on Saturday by so called ‘protectors of the statues’ was nothing more than extremist thuggery and anarchists and aggression towards the police. Many of the young men involved are clearly missing the chance to fight other football hooligans in the (not) Euro 2020 Championships.
I admit to being taken aback when one of my ‘local heroes’ Captain James Cook’s statue in Whitby as well as those in Australia. In the several books I have read of Cook’s life story it is clear that he is an example of someone from Middlesbrough born to a labourer who worked his way up from farmhand, to shop assistant, to junior sailor in the merchant navy, and became a senior captain in the Admiralty and who led surveys of large parts of the then ‘undiscovered continents’ and routes between them. These were ‘different times’ but Cook was known to treat his crews ‘relatively well’ and never lost one from the diseases of the time. He is honoured in his hometown with schools and the major hospital named after him. The other parkrun I sometimes do when I am in the north east starts just outside the Captain Cook Birthplace Museum in a park in Marton next to the place where he was born in what was at the time little more than a shack and is no longer there. The cottage the family is supposed to have lived in when they moved to Great Ayton was moved to Melbourne in Australia in 1934.
I completely understand the objection by indigenous first nation Australians that James Cook ‘discovered Australia’ and the suggestion by them that 26th January the ‘Australia Day’ national holiday should be renamed ‘Invasion Day’/ ‘National Day of Mourning’ / ‘Survival Day’ and the colonial nature of the planting of the flag on Australian soil by Co0k’s fleet that day should be set in historical context.

But as far as being involved in the slave trade, there is nothing of that in Cook’s story that I have read, but it is true that he killed Maori warriors on arrival in New Zealand and proceeded to subdue the then self-governing people, misunderstanding their initial ‘welcome’ as one of a threat to his ship and crew. Similarly an incident of kidnapping a king on Hawaii that lead ultimately to Cook’s death was a tragic episode.
The protests in the US continued and another unarmed black man was shot by a white policeman. Another name added to the ever growing list.
Education has been to the fore again this week. A government that put a lot of energy into the building of new hospitals and getting retired medical staff to return, appears unwilling to do a similar thing for our schools. There is no sign of building temporary classrooms or taking over unused public buildings or exhibition centres to setup places to help the generation that is missing out on six months of formal education, particularly those with no facilities at home. A straw poll of retired teachers I know shows that some might be willing to go back and help in the short term with classes to make up for lost time. As someone who left teaching 34 years ago I am not sure my ‘skills’ are up to the job or my subject knowledge of Chemistry and Mathematics!
The official number of total deaths announced at the daily briefings continued to fall gradually as measured by the 7-day average. The figures for Wednesday to Saturday were 151, 202, 181, 36 and on Sunday the total stood at 41,698.
The 14-day quarantine for people arriving at airports was introduced but other than airlines complaining there was little news on the effectiveness and no numbers on how many people had been followed up or fined.
In the coming week ‘non-essential’ shops who have put social distancing measures and are self-declared ‘Covid Secure’ can re-open.
As I write Boris Johnson, pushed by some Conservative MPs are looking to reduce the social distancing from two metres. It seems ironic that many who were in favour of ‘taking back control’ from the EU are now quoting many countries from who are using shorter distances than we are. It would be interesting to know if their views would be the same if a declaration by the EU that all member states should adopt a distance of one metre had been given when we were still part of the bloc and operating a ‘different standard? I am not sure how those retailers who have already spent millions of pounds (much of it grants from local government) on reorganising layouts and putting signage in, will feel when the advice changes again in three weeks as hospitality starts opening.
Today is also the third anniversary of the Grenfell Tower disaster. We saw the tower covered in screening as we drove through London last August. It was a larger example of the covered statues this weekend. At the time there was much talk about how the lower paid and largely ethnic minority key workers who live there had been forgotten by the wealthy borough next door. Three years on this seems to have been dropped from the agenda. Sound familiar? This and the violence in the centre of London makes me less optimistic that we will ‘learn the lessons’ and start being kinder to each other.

So how has week 12 been for us?

Apart from our walk in Cannock Chase Forest, Alyson has continued daily walks and I joined her for one on Friday which was also the anniversary of her mum’s death 12 months ago. We walked on a footpath through fields of corn and stopped between the showers to listen to the sounds of birds singing. The sadness of the anniversary was tempered by feelings of gratitude that this time last year we didn’t have to cope with a pandemic, and the associated issues of visiting care homes, organising the funeral, and sorting the sale of the family house in the north east.

Alyson took another trip to the garden centre to buy a yellow rose to plant as a reminder of her mum who loved roses and the colour yellow. The garden is starting to look a blaze of colours as other plants flower and grow.

The birdlife in our garden continues to become more varied and this week as Alyson was exercising on the bike in our conservatory she saw a buzzard land briefly, and today a green woodpecker visited. The buzzard probably explained the headless body and scattered feathers from a blackbird we found on Monday.

With the announcement of ‘household bubbles’ where single person households can pair with others without social distancing and even stay overnight, we asked our son David if he wanted to travel from Bath to see us. He declared himself ‘happy in his own bubble’! He has managed to go for an open water swim and some more rowing.

Zoom coffees have continued and I attended my weekly streamed service from Methodist Central Hall, thankfully not affected by the violence just outside in Parliament Square. I am not sure that any statues of our founder John Wesley are on the ‘hitlist’ of those for removal, but like all of us his life was not without flaws. There is a statue in what was a British Colony of Georgia in the southern states of America. In 1736 John and his brother Charles travelled to the newly formed parish Savannah, as Anglican High churchmen with the primary aim of evangelising to the Native Americans. This was not successful and an incident with a young lady who he had a failed relationship with, and then banned from taking communion did not go down well.

Nevertheless, John Wesley went on to found a movement that, as as I written before, was a reforming one with social principles and members who were key in the Trade Unions and Labour Party. I try to live by his rules on wealth which sparked my interest in the two books in this blog. Those rules were;

Gain all you can. Save all you can. Give all you can.

Stay safe and let’s see what the next seven days brings. Two things are certain;

we will (not) be rushing to join the queues in the shops that are opening.
Alyson will definitely (not) be watching the restart of live sport in the form of Premier League and Championship football!

A Tribute to my Uncle Wilf – a hero of The Evacuation of Dunkirk.

It has been said that a person only truly dies once somebody mentions their name for the last time. When we visited the Tutankahmen Exhibition in London in February, I remember this phrase coming up as we walked around. Many of the pharaohs erased the names and monuments of their predecessors in the hope that people would forget them.

Uncle Wilf would have been 106 if he was alive today. I never met him or even knew of his existence until about 15 years ago. But this blog is to keep his memory alive. My mum showed me a letter she had received from the Museum of D-Day Aviation in Shoreham about her brother Wilf. This blog is published 80 years to the day that Wilf died. The researcher at the museum found that Wilf was a member of 43 Squadron and he wrote

43 Squadron was a front line fighter squadron flying Hurricanes and rated the best, and was to give cover during the Dunkirk Evacuation.Your brother was killed flying back after another sortie – the third that day – by a sneak and chance attack by German fighters and his Hurricane N2615, crashed 4 miles south of Shoreham. His body washed ashore at Shoreham on June 15th…..his body was sent for burial at the family’s request to Middlesbrough

We have just celebrated the 80th anniversary of the Dunkirk Evacuation between 26th and 31st May 1940. We don’t know how many sorties my uncle flew during that time, but we know that only 9 days later he was dead. He was just 26 years old.I never knew why my mum would get upset on Remembrance Day but I think it was because she remembered the sacrifice of her brother. When we were clearing my parents’ house after dad died in 2017 I found a note of a talk mum had given to her local church on Remembrance Day when she spoke about her brother Wilf. She had written

I have in my possession a little book that was among Wilf’s returned belongings and given to him in 1931 by the leader of the Young Men’s Class at our church, called ‘The Greatest Thing in the World’….It is based on 1 Corinthians Chapter 13: The Greatest Thing being LOVE…I never heard my mother utter a word of bitterness, and just after the war my brother who was 17yrs old died suddenly of painless pneumonia. She used to say ‘Laugh and the world laughs with you. Cry and you cry alone.’ It was only when I had sons of my own that I realised how she must have felt. When they went to university/college I missed them but reminded myself that at least I wasn’t sending them to war.

I am one of those sons, and I had talked with mum a few years before she died, about the letter from the museum. She started to cry. She told me that she loved her older brother and looked forward to the times he would come home from the RAF and play with her. She called him ‘my Wilfy’. He bounced her on his knee. It must have been difficult for a seven year old to comprehend what had happened when she learned of his death. Then to lose another brother a few years later, a week after her 12th birthday, was hard. I am not certain but I think her dad, my grandad who I also never met, died as a result of being gassed in the Great War. All three are buried with grandma at a family plot in Linthorpe Cemetery. After mum died we took dad to try and find the grave, but didn’t succeed. I have found a document in mum’s possessions about it and know the plot number so will go and put flowers on it one day.

Wilf left Middlesbrough and his job as a ‘Storeman’ aged 16 to join the RAF as an Aircraft Apprentice, or as a ‘boy’ 5ft 3ins with a 31 inch chest as his record states. By the time he was commissioned as an 18 year old man he had grown in height by 2 inches and put an extra half inch on his chest. I have a copy of his service record or ‘Service and Discharge’ as it is called. This was all the family got as there were so many killed at that time, Commanding Officers didn’t have time to write details of how their men died. I am not sure grandma ever knew, and it was only mum visiting the museum, on the way to a holiday, that led to the research being done. I know she didn’t get anywhere at first and it was only on receiving a follow-up letter asking for more details, that the story came to light.

Wilf was trained as a Flight Rigger, someone who worked on the airframe and cables, not the engines. He rose through the ranks and started a year’s pilot training due to a shortage of pilots as the build up to war started. He passed the training on New Year’s Eve 1939. He was with several other squadrons in Hornchurch in Essex and then Manston in Kent. In the run up to what would become The Battle of Britain he was posted to 25 Squadron based at North Weald, Essex, using a new type of radar for night interception. As losses of fighter pilots became high, pilots like Wilf in lighter bomber squadrons were moved to fill the gaps. Wilf’s final posting was to 43 Squadron based at Tangmere in West Sussex where later Wing Commander Douglas Bader would be stationed in 1941.

I am now the keeper of Uncle Wilf’s possessions and there is also Bible inscribed ‘With best wishes from mother to Wilf 1930‘. I suspect it was for his 16th birthday, or perhaps as he left to join the RAF. Mum’s family, like my dad’s were Methodists and worshiped at Woodlands Road church. Mum and dad met at the youth club and were married at the church. We hoped to visit Shoreham to see the rose that the museum promised to plant in Wilf’s honour, but that will have to wait until next year – once the current ‘war’ against Covid-19 has ended.

Rest in peace Uncle Wilf. We will remember you.

Coronavirus week 11 – ‘I can’t breathe…’ not because of Covid-19

How many pandemics can we have at once?

When I started to draft this week’s blog the other day, the first lines were about other news breaking in, and that for the first time in weeks it wasn’t part of the first headline. I suggested that even the Daily Briefings are getting ‘bored with themselves’, with just slides and questions rather than new announcements. By Friday Matt Hancock was on his own with no scientists. I thought that by next weekend they will be finished or once a week. It turns out that they are going to be only on weekdays, so none this weekend. The statistics were still produced by the Department of Health and Social Care and they showed that on Saturday 204 deaths were announced and on Sunday 77 bringing the total to 40,542.

As the number of official deaths passed 40,000 it felt like a grim milestone, and the Office for National Statistics (ONS) figures of all deaths mentioning Covid-19 is over 60,000. This week worldwide deaths passed 400,000.

The news that pushed Coronavirus off the front pages of newspapers and further down the television bulletins were protests in the US and other countries about the death of George Floyd. George was a black American killed by a white policeman by kneeling on his neck for 8 minutes 46 seconds, while George repeatedly said ‘I can’t breathe’. At first the Minneapolis Police Department denied there was anything untoward, but after mobile phone footage of the incident was broadcast, that was shown not to be true. This triggered several days of protests in many of the larger cities across the US, several of which were used as cover for looting of shops and burning of public buildings.

I was particularly shocked by footage from a security camera of tens of people stripping a small family-run pharmacy in the Bronx area of New York of all of its stock including prescriptions made up waiting for patients to collect them.

The irony of many of them wearing masks to protect them from coronavirus was lost among interviews with the devastated owners, as it had taken them 14 years to build the business up in a relatively poor neighbourhood. The Rodriguez family are themselves members of a minority community.

As the protests spread out to Atlanta, Chicago, Los Angeles and Philadelphia under the banner of ‘Black Lives Matter’ the long-standing issue of racism that has been part of American society back to the Civil War and the Civil Rights cases in the 1960’s, was high up the political agenda once more. Protesters and some policemen went down on one knee in a reminder of the act of the policeman in Milwaukee, and an echo of the protests by black players from the National Football League (NFL) a couple of years ago. President Trump had called for them to be sacked at the time. Now he sent the National Guard to clear protestors in Washington who had gathered outside a church, and then he posed in front of the church with Bible in hand, much to the indignation of the local ministers.

The Floyd family have the services of Ben Crump an attorney who takes on high profile cases for those who need representation in the areas of unlawful death and civil rights. At the memorial service in Minneapolis he said

..it was not the coronavirus pandemic that killed George Floyd. It was that other pandemic, the pandemic of racism and discrimination.

Rev Al Sharpton, a veteran of civil rights cases alongside Rev Jesse Jackson in his eulogy said it was time to stand up and say “get your knee off our necks”.

In the social media furore around the riots an interview with a former police chief of Milwaukee appeared to show him ranting about the fact that people know the names of the last three people killed because they are black, but not the names of the last 300 killed by criminals using guns. He said there are a lot of bad policemen, but there are also a lot of unlicensed guns and he was on his way to reports of a five-year-old girl accidentally shot through the head. The video was from 2014. The President’s son Donald Trump Jr used it to divert attention away from the race issue. The fact that the police chief was speaking after attending a meeting about the shooting of another black man Dontre Hamilton, was not mentioned. The white officer involved was fired as he had stopped and frisked the man for no apparent reason.

Given that a record 2 million extra handguns were sold in March, many to first time gun owners, it could be that the number of Americans dying in the future from the ‘pandemic of gun ownership’, will be a high figure.

Despite the home secretary Priti Patel and Australian prime minister Scott Morrison appealing for demonstrations not to happen due to the virus this weekend, large numbers turned out in London and Sydney. Masks and gloves were handed out, but as numbers grew social distancing became an issue. This type of protests needs to be done ‘in the moment’, but it could affect the spread of the virus. So I understand those who criticise. We shouldn’t forget that in the UK we have had our own problems with ‘stop and search’ tactics of policing, and claims of ‘institutional racism’. And these things are not only apparent in police and government, but in business and housing. The scenes of disturbances around Downing Street and violence directed towards the police were shocking. During the demonstrations earlier in the week some people had defaced memorials around the Cenotaph on Whitehall. The next morning a group of young people were filmed cleaning the graffiti off and being berated by a protestor who said ‘could you not leave it for just one day’. It turns out the ‘young people’ were cadet trainees at the Household Cavalry from barracks nearby. On Sunday in Bristol a statue of the ‘slave master’ Edward Colston was pulled down and one of the demonstrators knelt on his neck. The city is built on the wealth of the slave trade and even though Colston gave much of his wealth to charitable causes, setup schools and hospitals, there are some who think the record of their former MP was ‘sanitised’ and rewritten before the statue was erected.

On the news pictures I saw, however, most of the demonstrations were peaceful and did their best to maintain social distancing (if not the regulations about more than six people meeting). Overhead shots of demonstrations in Chicago, Philadelphia and Washington in the US and Manchester in our area of the UK showed a great deal of good distancing and masks.

Australia, like America has had problems with police brutality and race and this was the focus of the protests. in 2016 David Dungay Jr an indigenous Australian man was killed whilst being restrained by police in a hospital saying those same words ‘I can’t breathe’. We saw the pictures of people talking about their frustration that yet again something happens and again nothing happens.

The last word goes to an academic on a video my cousin Janet’s husband Chris posted on Facebook. I don’t know the name of the person or anything of their background, and it was from an organisation called ‘Atheist Republic’ and appeared to be cut together from a longer one. None of that matters as it struck a chord with its simple message . The question was put ‘why do we hate’?

We hate because we are taught to hate. We hate because we are ignorant….We have been taught that there are four or five different races…there are not…there is only one race on this earth which we are all part of, and that’s the human race. But we have separated ourselves into different races so that some of us can see ourselves as superior to others….It hasn’t worked, and it is bad for everyone. It’s time to get over this business. There is no gene for racism, no gene for bigotry, you’re not born a bigot, you need to learn to be a bigot. Anything you learn you can unlearn, it’s time to unlearn bigotry. It’s time to get over this thing…and pretty soon. I am an educator…and it’s my business to lead people out of ignorance, the ignorance that you are better or worse than someone because of the amount of a pigment you have in your skin. Pigmentation of your skin has nothing to do with intelligence or your worth as a human being. It’s time to get over that.

We are struggling to find a vaccine for the coronavirus pandemic and are worried that it may take a year rather than a few months. It seems that we have been unable to find a vaccine for the pandemics of racism and gun control, or the other pandemics of hunger, poverty, and inequality which have been with us for centuries. After the coronavirus pandemic is over there could be a pandemic of unemployment, a pandemic of economic uncertainty and a pandemic of growing debt. Can we do things to ‘unlearn’ the behaviours that make them happen.

As a representative to the Methodist Conference at the end of the month (see note later on about our week), I have been asked to complete some training on ‘unconscious’ bias as part of the church’s Equality Diversity Inclusion (EDI) policies. I commit to doing so as a small step to understanding my own behaviours and to check if I need to ‘unlearn’ some attitudes.

Other news this week

The news that pushed coronavirus down to third place on the television bulletins was that of the German police identifying a suspect for the abduction of Madeleine McCann in 2007 and declared it a murder inquiry. It is a story that was horrible the first time around and doesn’t get any easier each time it crops up again. I hope that the family get some certainty soon.
We live in an area, the north west, where the number of infections is not decreasing, and the R-number is on the unsafe value of almost 1. The north west as defined by the government is a large area stretching from where we live in Crewe to Kendal 110 miles away on the edge of the Lake District. However, the detailed statistical tables show that in our local hospital there was only one death on Wednesday, Friday and Sunday this week, compared to deaths every day and a total of 15 the week before.
Crewe is a town which is dependent on the ‘health’ of one of its largest employers Bentley Motors. Admittedly, not as dependent as it was when we moved here 40 years ago and along with the Railway Works, Rolls Royce Bentley as it was then were the main employers in the town. The announcement on Friday that nearly 25% of the 4,200 workforce were under the threat of redundancy is a blow to the local economy. This wasn’t due entirely to coronavirus but adjustments for social distancing has cut production by half in recent weeks.
With the government declaring two weeks quarantine on travellers coming in through airports, there was talk of ‘air bridges’ that would allow those from some countries with lower infections not to have to do so. The airline owners are against the quarantines and some countries will not allow UK citizens to have an ‘air bridge’ with them as we are a country with a high infection rate.
Track, test, and trace continued to be a point of contention with Boris Johnson challenged at Prime Ministers Questions about the lack of statistics and details around this topic.
MPs returned to parliament and there was much discontent about having to vote by forming a queue which was over a kilometre long to walk past the Speaker to say which way they were voting. The irony was that the motion was about the type of voting that could be used if they remain away from the House of Commons due to the virus. One said it was like ‘doing the Mogg conga queuing for a ride at Alton Towers that turned out to be a little bit sh*t.’

How was week 11 for us?

Alyson took advantage of the new ‘freedoms’ to go to a garden centre 8 miles away but came back disappointed by the choice of plants and the lack of atmosphere as the main centre and shops were not open.

Alyson was delighted, however, that as we watched another week of BBC’s Springwatch we had a version going on in our garden. Visitors to the feeders included, bullfinch, greenfinch, goldfinch, long-tailed tits, and a mother blue tit feeding three tiny fledglings as they lined up on one of the supports.

I was elected as one of seven representatives from our District to go to the Methodist Conference in Telford at the end of June, but that has been cancelled in its usual form. We usually meet as a group to discuss the topics and format of the 5 days, and we did so this year but via Zoom, as we will with 300+ others this year. The Conference will not have the debate and resolution of the report we discussed last year on our understanding of relationships. This could have paved the way to same sex marriage taking place in our churches, but it has been held over to next year. It was felt that if we couldn’t give the time needed, meet in smaller groups face to face, and share on the fringes of the Conference, it could be challenged. This won’t stop us looking at more reports and ‘business’ to move our witness and evangelism forward.

Wednesday was Global Running Day, but I wasn’t aware of that as I set out in the rain for my early morning 5k run. It was only when I got back and Alyson told me that she heard it on the radio and I found out that I had joined with over a million people in 170 countries to celebrate a simple sport that those like me with little natural ability can participate in.

During my weekly virtual coffee later that morning with David, a friend from church, we reflected on the ways we need to change personally and as a church in how things are done, and lessons learned during the pandemic. My evening Bible study with 10 others via Zoom is one such example that we will continue with. There really is little point splitting us into two groups and travelling to each other’s houses, especially on cold wet winter evenings.

The cold and damp weather that started on Wednesday led to Alyson cancelling the get together with three former work colleagues in our garden on Thursday morning. The beauty of a ‘virtual coffee morning’ like the one I hosted for our head injury charity, is that the weather will not stop it taking place. There were 11 of us and I used a feature in Zoom that allowed all of us to be put in two separate ‘rooms’. One for the group that would normally meet in Crewe and the other at Ellesmere Port. It worked well and the smaller numbers meant that those who didn’t want to speak in the larger gathering chatted to members that they were used to meeting.

HIP Charity – Cheshire-wide coffee group members

We had ‘virtual Friday night drinks’ with Alyson’s brother and sister and then on Saturday night we had a Zoom quiz with my cousins and family. Alyson and I came second out of ten teams after 100 questions using an app on my phone called ‘Kahoot’.

Sunday brought my now weekly trip via YouTube to the service at Methodist Central Hall in London. We restated our belief in the sanctity of all human life, knelt in solidarity with those who are victims of discrimination, and prayed for the family of George Floyd. It brought to mind one of the modern songs we sing that challenges us to act for the wider good. These are three of the verses. They seem appropriate given the news this week.

Will you use your voice; will you not sit down
when the multitudes are silent?
Will you make a choice to stand your ground
when the crowds are turning violent?

In your city streets will you be God’s heart?
Will you listen to the voiceless?
Will you stop and eat, and when friendships start,
will you share your faith with the faithless?

Will you watch the news with the eyes of faith
and believe it could be different?
Will you share your views using words of grace?
Will you leave a thoughtful imprint?

Stay safe and I hope to post another instalment next week.

‘So what’s the story?’….time for change

Other news this week

How was week 14 for us?

C22H29FO5 – the wonder drug

Other news this week

How has week 13 been for us?

Looking to a more just society…

A Basic Citizen’s Income

Tax and the Campaign for a Just Society

Other news this week

So how has week 12 been for us?

How many pandemics can we have at once?

Other news this week

How was week 11 for us?

C₂₂H₂₉FO_{5 – the wonder drug}