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Over the past several days, I have been digesting The Telegraph‘s series about the pandemic, The Lockdown Files.
Readers who missed them can catch up on my posts here, here, here, here and here. That last post, from March 8, 2023, discusses then-Health and Social Care Secretary Matt Hancock’s desire to ‘frighten the pants off people’ with the Kent variant at the end of 2020. Top civil servant Simon Case agreed that behavioural change using fear and guilt was paramount. Masks, as many Covid sceptics suggested at the time, were the most visible means of compliance — or submission — to Government diktats.
Top oncologist reacts
On Thursday, March 9, The Telegraph published a post from the UK’s top oncologist, Prof Karl Sikora: ‘Lockdown supporters called me a killer — they should be disgusted with themselves’ (emphases mine below):
Opposing the relentless raft of lockdown policies was a lonely and, at times, extremely unpleasant experience. Those of us who voiced concerns about effectively closing down a country were labelled as far-Right extremists who were happy to see millions perish to the disease. It was a disgrace, legitimised by low-grade politicians such as Matt Hancock who were far too interested in advancing their own public image. Thousands succumbed to the destructive, and often pointless, lockdown measures they pushed at every opportunity.
There will be no apologies from the baying lockdown mob – the damage has been done, the debate has mostly moved on and the inquiry may well become a total whitewash. The Telegraph’s lockdown files have done a great service in partially halting that march.
… Many of those voices are now totally silent on the thousands and thousands of non-Covid excess deaths related to lockdown delays and backlogs. I have no regrets in my opposition to a variety of lockdown policies and the language I used throughout the pandemic – I wonder if they can say the same?
We now know for sure that some decisions taken were based in PR and politics, rather than science and sense. When the Health Secretary is talking about “frightening the pants off everyone” with a new strain, those of us who voiced scepticism at the time about the language used can feel vindicated …
I’m desperate for a Covid inquiry whitewash to be avoided for one simple reason: this cannot be allowed to happen again. If we don’t at least ask the questions, when another pandemic, or the threat of one, comes around, lockdown cannot be the go-to option. The advisers who made the past recommendations cannot be used ever again.
… Routine healthcare for non-Covid conditions was effectively shut down to millions for months on end, and now we have thousands and thousands of non-Covid excess deaths. What did they think would happen, honestly?
My lockdown inbox was overflowing with desperate cancer patients whose treatment had been indefinitely postponed. I remember one case of a mother who had her chemotherapy cancelled, leading to her tragic death leaving behind three young children and a loving husband. And it’s not just cancer: cardiac issues untreated, blood pressure out of control, strokes uncared for, other preventative measures forgotten and of course soaring obesity. The post-lockdown crisis is across all aspects of healthcare, physical and mental. That is for those lucky enough to receive any medical support or diagnosis at all. Others were told to stay home and that’s exactly what they did – dying there without the care they needed and deserved.
To those of you who took a brave stand speaking out against various restrictions and policies – from me, a sincere thank you. We comprehensively lost the argument in the court of public opinion, but hopefully a small difference was made. I suspect the national mood may have significantly shifted over the last week. Sunlight is the best disinfectant after all, and spring is on the way.
That same day, Helia Ebrahimi, who had a mastectomy in 2022, told her story to the paper: ‘They said I’d lose a breast and maybe my life — but the NHS made me wait four months’:
In the UK, more than 5,500 women are diagnosed with invasive lobular carcinoma every year. But often their diagnoses are late. Sometimes too late. When it became clear how progressed my cancer was, my surgeon wanted to start treatment immediately. I was at The Royal Marsden in London, a standard bearer in cancer care that also benefits from charity funding. But even at the Marsden, the pressures on the NHS are inescapable. Especially last year, when the country was reeling from a Covid backlog and 327,000 people were on the cancer waiting list in England alone, with 34,000 people failing to get treatment within the Government target of 62 days – the worst backlog on record. Almost 10,000 people were still not receiving treatment within 104 days …
Ultimately, my husband and I decided we couldn’t wait, so I used my work health insurance scheme to cover most of the cost. My surgeon from the Marsden still performed the operation but at a private hospital, with theatre space.
An article about the waiting list times also appeared in The Telegraph that day, ‘Nearly half of cancer patients waiting too long for treatment, the worst on record’:
More than 7,000 patients did not receive their first treatment within 62 days following an urgent GP referral, official figures for January show.
Only 54.4 per cent of patients with an urgent referral were seen within the target time, against a benchmark of 85 per cent – the lowest on records dating back to 2009 …
It comes after NHS bosses admitted this week cancer recovery targets are likely to be pushed back another year to March 2024.
The article has more statistics.
It is interesting that there is no mention of the pandemic or the lockdown of the NHS to patients such as these. Equally interesting is Prof Stephen Powis’s response. Powis was also an adviser on pandemic policy:
Professor Stephen Powis, NHS national medical director, said there had been “no let-up” of pressures, with staff facing “significant levels of respiratory illness in hospital, which came at the same time as disruption from industrial action”.
“Despite this, staff continued to deliver for patients, bringing down elective waits, treating more cancer patients and delivering more diagnostic tests for people than ever before,” he said.
Instead, he points to possible upcoming strikes by junior doctors:
He added: “The NHS will not stop in its efforts to bring down 18 month waits for elective care and bring down the cancer backlog, but it is inevitable that if the upcoming junior doctors strikes happen they will have a significant impact on cancer care and routine operations that were scheduled to happen.
“As ever, we will do all we can to limit the impact to patients.”
Early 2020: Persuading MPs through messaging
Going back to the start of 2020, chief Downing Street adviser Dominic Cummings and Matt Hancock thought that Boris Johnson’s 2019 campaign director could get ‘hawkish’ Cabinet members on board with the pandemic measures. A full lockdown began on March 23, 2020.
On March 2, 2023, The Telegraph explains how the two did it in ‘Dominic Cummings deployed election mastermind to reassure Cabinet hawks of public support for lockdown’:
they set up a meeting between Cabinet ministers and Isaac Levido in April 2020.
Mr Levido, an Australian political strategist and protegee of the former Tory aide Sir Lynton Crosby, was recruited to Downing Street in March 2020 to improve the Government’s Covid messaging.
He is credited with masterminding Mr Johnson’s 2019 election victory three months earlier and is a close ally of Mr Cummings.
In a conversation between Mr Hancock and Mr Cummings on April 23 exactly one month after the imposition of the first lockdown, the former health secretary said his Cabinet colleagues should be told that more than half of voters either supported lockdown measures or thought they should be strengthened.
At that point, if we look at Boris’s words from March, the two or three weeks ‘to flatten the sombrero’ would have meant that a lifting of lockdown was in sight. Not so. England remained in lockdown until July 4 that year, with a gradual loosening in between for construction workers and, in June, schools.
Not surprisingly, in April, some Cabinet members were ready to lift lockdown, for obvious reasons:
… the conversation took place as some ministers were beginning to make the case, often in anonymous briefings to newspapers, that keeping lockdown measures in place for too long would have serious consequences for the economy and society.
It was unclear what polling Hancock was using. In addition, Isaac Levido stayed on board only for a few months before pursuing his own interests:
It is unclear which polling Mr Hancock was referring to in his messages to Mr Cummings, but research from a Cambridge University team led by Prof Sir David Spiegelhalter in April 2020 showed 87 per cent of the public did believe lockdown should remain in place for at least another three weeks.
Mr Levido left Downing Street in July 2020 and founded Fleetwood Strategy, a public relations firm. He was later brought back into Conservative Campaign Headquarters (CCHQ) as a strategist during Nadhim Zahawi’s tenure as chairman.
By late April, Mr Hancock had recently announced a testing capacity target of 100,000 swabs a day, and been criticised by Downing Street sources for an “irrational” and “arbitrary” approach to the pandemic.
“Hancock’s not had a good crisis,” one No10 source told The Telegraph at the time.
“The prime minister will say he has confidence in him, but it doesn’t feel like that.”
At this point, Boris was out of hospital recovering from his near-fatal bout of the virus. According to a WhatsApp message from Cummings shown in the article, he allegedly urged harmony:
“FYI Boris called a few people tonight to say — all these attacks [on] Matt, I want us to stick up for him etc,” he said.
Cummings’s approach to policy was similar to Hancock’s:
On June 1, the day schools began to reopen from the first lockdown, he suggested enforcing mask-wearing on trains and buses.
“I think we shd make it legally compulsory to wear mask on public transport (with only eg small child/disabled etc exception). It’s free, buys us some R, no real downside,” he said.
Lee Cain, the Downing Street director of communications, replied: “We need to bottom out enforcement etc – if we are doing it PM can drop it on Wednesday.”
The policy was announced three days later, and came into force on June 15.
How libertarian Boris became lockdown ‘zealot’
On March 4, The Telegraph published ‘How Boris Johnson veered from lockdown sceptic to zealot’.
The article explains how Cummings began to refer to the then-Prime Minister as ‘the trolley’. In other words, like a shopping trolley with a wonky wheel, he careered all over the place with decision-making during the pandemic:
New evidence suggests Mr Cummings was at least partially right. In WhatsApp conversations with ministers and officials, Mr Johnson veered between lockdown sceptic and lockdown zealot, as he reacted to the ever-changing data and advice.
The former prime minister would sometimes introduce an idea, only to abandon his stance even when others agreed with him.
Mr Johnson’s biggest internal conflict came over the three national lockdowns that were controversially imposed in 2020 and 2021.
A libertarian by nature, Mr Johnson repeatedly changed his mind over forcing people to stay at home depending on who he had been talking to …
In July 2020, Mr Johnson described the idea of a second lockdown as the “nuclear option”. In Oct 2020, he described the idea as “the height of absurdity”.
Yet in June 2020, when the country was still in the grip of the first national lockdown, Mr Johnson’s attitude seemed to be different …
He has always denied that his brush with death changed his mind on government policy.
The article includes screenshots of WhatsApp exchanges during that time.
Later in 2020, Matt Hancock began to find Boris’s vacillating exasperating:
At the end of Oct 2020, the then prime minister was wrestling with the decision of whether or not to put the country into lockdown for a second time.
At Prime Minister’s Questions on Oct 21, in response to a question from Sir Keir Starmer, the Labour leader, Mr Johnson described a second lockdown as “the height of absurdity”.
And on Oct 30, Mr Hancock was messaging Simon Case, the Cabinet Secretary, expressing exasperation that Mr Johnson appeared even more reluctant than Rishi Sunak, the then chancellor, to take tough measures.
Less than a week later, Mr Johnson introduced a second lockdown, saying: “Now is the time to take action, as there is no other choice.”
It was claimed at the time that he had been “bounced” into announcing the lockdown after Michael Gove, the then Chancellor of the Duchy of Lancaster, was accused of leaking plans for the lockdown to the media before Mr Johnson had made up his mind.
England entered a third semi-lockdown on Monday, January 4, 2021. Pupils had returned to school that day only to be told by the end of it that schools were closed for the forseeable future.
Hospitality venues, having lost out on Christmas 2020 bookings, were also severely affected during that time. Some never recovered.
Nor, indeed, had a significant number of schoolchildren. Mental health problems exploded during and after lockdown.
Schoolchild kills himself
On March 4, Isabel Oakeshott, to whom Hancock gave 100,000 WhatsApp messages which form the basis of The Lockdown Files, told us about a tragic case of suicide in ‘The dreadful consequences of Matt Hancock’s lockdown scare tactics’:
While Matt Hancock breezily discussed how to “frighten the pants off everyone” with a new strain, a boy called Mark was listening to the drumbeat towards another national lockdown grow louder in deepening despair.
It was December 2020, and the 15-year-old’s life had already been turned upside down by the pandemic.
A few months earlier, his mother Anna Marie had decided that they should move house because they couldn’t even go to the local park during the first lockdown.
She describes how over-zealous council officials had shut the playground, leaving her struggling to cope with Mark’s little brother, a hyperactive five-year-old …
Now, the family was in a better place in the North East, but Anna Marie had been unable to get Mark into a new school.
With “home schooling” now an easy default, education authorities shrugged that he could just study for his GCSEs online.
Unable to play football during the first lockdown, he started putting on weight. When other children returned to school that autumn, he became increasingly isolated – and frightened.
As Mr Hancock and his acolytes plotted to use a new strain of coronavirus to terrify the population, that fear descended into paranoia. Mark became so scared of the virus that he would not even open his bedroom window.
“His nails were bitten to the bone. He was literally frightened of the air. He wore a mask everywhere,” his mother says …
“We tried to keep the TV off, but we were being bombarded,” she says, of the prophecies of doom relentlessly pumped out by an acquiescing media.
“Mark knew we were going into another lockdown. The fear was the thing that affected him most. He was disconnected; distant. I didn’t know what to do.”
In December 2021:
Almost exactly a year later, when most of the population had been vaccinated against Covid but the Omicron variant prompted yet another fear campaign, he told his mother he was popping out to the shops – and never returned.
His body was found by dog walkers three days later, hanging from a tree.
Though he had never talked of taking his own life, his family had been prepared for the worst, after discovering that he had searched the internet for how to tie a noose …
An intelligent child, Mark had hoped to study computer science when he left school. Instead, his education came to a juddering halt …
After the harrowing discovery on Christmas Eve, Mark was cremated. His mother and siblings took his ashes to Seaton Carew Beach near Hartlepool, a place Mark loved. They scattered the ashes over the sand dunes.
“He went off on the wind,” Anna Marie says quietly.
Let not the lessons from this tragedy also blow away on the breeze.
“Frightening the pants off people” had truly dreadful consequences.
Oakeshott expresses thoughts I have had since March 2020 about Britons who had houses with gardens versus those who were trapped in flats along with our notional betters who were at the helm of this tragic decision-making:
Those responsible for “Project Fear” had no idea about the lives of people like Anna Marie and her children.
In their spacious houses, in leafy parts of London, with access to all the luxuries that made lockdowns quite tolerable for the better off, their own families were doing fine.
Hancock and his advisers were caught up in their own sense of heroism.
Mr Hancock and his advisers did not even try to imagine how the tactics they were gleefully discussing to achieve “proper behaviour change” would affect the most vulnerable in society.
Heady on the unprecedented power they had seized to control all our lives, they were caught up in the excitement of managing the day-to-day crisis and their own sense of heroism at their leading roles in the drama.
They were completely removed from the reality of lockdowns for those at the other end of the socio-economic spectrum.
Judging from the total absence of any discussion about collateral damage in their WhatsApp messages, they had zero interest in hearing about it either …
Is Simon Case pondering his future?
Cabinet Secretary Simon Case, who is also the head of the Civil Service, has come under criticism for his WhatsApp messages revealed in The Lockdown Files.
Case’s messages show that he that he thought quarantining holidaymakers ‘hilarious’. He also thought that fear and guilt were appropriate tools to get the British public to comply with pandemic policies.
Conservative MPs were unhappy with what they had read in The Telegraph. On Saturday, March 4, the paper published ‘Tories accuse Simon Case of left-wing bias over Covid rules’:
Britain’s top civil servant has been accused of left-wing bias by senior Tories after he dismissed concerns about Covid rules as “pure Conservative ideology”.
Simon Case is facing questions over his political impartiality and conduct during the pandemic, following the emergence of leaked WhatsApp messages obtained by The Telegraph.
On Saturday Rishi Sunak, the Prime Minister, was forced to declare that Mr Case, who is Cabinet Secretary and head of the Civil Service, retained his “confidence”.
Mr Case’s comment that Sir Alok Sharma, the then business secretary, opposed compelling hospitality venues to keep customers’ details because of “pure Conservative ideology”, have led to claims that he overstepped the mark of Civil Service impartiality.
At the time, Mr Case was the Downing Street permanent secretary in charge of the Civil Service response to Covid.
At various points during the pandemic, he appeared to side with Matt Hancock against other Cabinet ministers, including Mr Sunak, the then chancellor, who on one occasion he described as “going bonkers” over a policy that hospitality venues should keep customers’ details for contact-tracing purposes. Mr Case added that Sir Alok would be “mad” to oppose it.
Elsewhere, the leaked messages show that he joked about passengers being “locked up” in “shoe box” rooms in quarantine hotels.
The criticism of Mr Case comes at a time when the Civil Service is facing increased scrutiny over its impartiality, after the decision of top mandarin Sue Gray to quit Whitehall and accept a job as Sir Keir Starmer’s chief of staff.
Esther McVey, a former Cabinet minister, led the criticism of Mr Case’s conduct, saying: “This is the highest civil servant in the land letting the cat out of the bag by suggesting that one of the most centrist of Conservative MPs was pursuing ‘pure Conservative ideology’ simply for questioning some of the lockdown rules.
“Leaving aside the fact that this is a Conservative government and so what would he expect from its ministers, if Mr Case thinks Alok Sharma was pursuing such a hard-line Conservative ideology it can only mean that he is yet another senior civil servant on the left wing of British politics.”
She was joined by fellow former Cabinet minister Jacob Rees-Mogg who said the messages revealed that there was a desire from Mr Hancock and Whitehall officials to “lock us down and keep us locked down”.
“They seem to have enjoyed taking control of people’s lives,” he said, adding that the messages between Mr Case and Mr Hancock show that “they criticised the Chancellor and anyone who is not in favour [of stricter measures], then they tried to marginalise them” …
A third former Cabinet minister said Mr Case’s language is “inappropriate”, adding that civil servants are “not there to make judgement on people’s motivations. It just undermines people who are democratically elected. They are meant to be impartial, professional and objective”.
And a fourth said: “Sue Gray is clearly not the only party political civil servant who doesn’t like the Conservatives. She confirmed what many people thought – that the Civil Service is hostile to the Tory party. And this [Simon Case’s messages] just underlines it.”
However, civil servants also objected to what they have read about Case. One spoke to The Telegraph:
Jill Rutter, former Treasury mandarin, said she was surprised by the “casual callousness” of Mr Case’s remarks.
“The interesting thing is who does Case think he is working for?” she said. “Does he think he is there as a neutral broker to get all the ministers to a view they can accept? Or does he know what the PM wants and is helping him to achieve that outcome? Or is he just trying to achieve Matt Hancock’s objectives?” …
Case’s remarks were one of the more surprising revelations from The Lockdown Files:
The Lockdown Files piled further pressure on Mr Case after a string of difficult news stories.
He faced questions over his apparent role in clearing a controversial £800,000 loan facility for Boris Johnson when he was prime minister and he was also criticised over the partygate affair.
In one exchange with Hancock, Case seemed to doubt Boris Johnson’s honesty:
In another, from October 30, 2020, Case intimated that Boris — his boss — was seen to be untrustworthy:
By Monday, March 6, 2023, despite Rishi’s expressed confidence in him, Cabinet ministers were calling for Case’s departure for his ‘level of indiscretion’. The Times had the story:
That day, The Financial Times had a story about Case on its front page, purporting that he was eyeing an ‘early exit’:
“I can’t see how Simon Case survives this, especially if there are more messages of his directly slagging off other ministers,” one senior Conservative backbencher told the Financial Times.
While friends of the cabinet secretary say that he has continued to receive support from his colleagues, he is also said to be “fed up”.
Among Case’s fellow officials, there is particular concern about his handling of “partygate”, which centred on rule-breaking in Downing Street and Whitehall during Covid restrictions in 2020 and 2021.
One senior official said: “Simon didn’t stand up for his own people over partygate,” adding that junior staff were issued with fines for attending events happening on his watch.
Case has also drawn scrutiny for his knowledge of Johnson’s personal financial relationship with the chair of the BBC and for the government’s response to bullying allegations against Dominic Raab, the justice secretary.
Rishi Sunak’s spokesman declined to comment on the WhatsApp messages. Downing Street said: “The cabinet secretary has the confidence of the prime minister and that has not changed.”
An ally of Case said that they contained “casual language being used in a casual setting . . . There are a lot of Conservatives who dislike the civil service, but who can name only one civil servant.” Another ally of Case said that his “original sin was being young and talented and promoted to that job before he was grey”.
Another issue upsetting officials was the removal of Tom Scholar, the former permanent secretary of the Treasury, by Kwasi Kwarteng, who briefly served as chancellor in Liz Truss’s shortlived government. This was regarded as inappropriate over-reach by ministers. Case, however, is known to be wounded by the implication that he failed to support Scholar.
And yet:
A Cabinet Office insider said they considered a departure this year very unlikely.
Another senior official said: “The charge sheet is now so long against him, the only interpretation can be that the PM probably doesn’t want to get rid of him.”
However, The Financial Times had pointed the finger at Case on January 31 this year in ‘Simon Case: can the head of Britain’s civil service survive?’
Although he is a career civil servant, Case took a break to work for Prince William. The Prince highly recommended him to Downing Street when Boris became Prime Minister.
It seems as if Case picked up courtier-type habits:
One serving senior official said: “He operates as a courtier. His writ doesn’t run across Whitehall. He doesn’t seem to be in key meetings with the prime minister.” Another former permanent secretary in a major department said: “I don’t think he has any credibility left and really he should go.”
That said, he has his supporters:
… Case’s supporters insist that he is determined to uphold standards and that he retains the confidence of Rishi Sunak, the prime minister. They also argue that he has given the “best possible advice” and point out his job was not always easy during the chaotic premierships of Johnson and Liz Truss.
In the last days of Truss’s crumbling 44-day administration, he advised her to reverse parts of her disastrous “mini” Budget to stave off economic disaster, according to Downing Street insiders. They say he was also instrumental in coordinating with Buckingham Palace over arrangements for the Queen’s funeral.
Case’s supporters add that he hoped to serve at Sunak’s right hand until at least the next election, expected in late 2024. “Cabinet secretaries tend to change after an election,” said one.
Case became cabinet secretary and head of the civil service in September 2020 when Johnson sacked his predecessor, Sir Mark Sedwill, after only two years in the post.
Dominic Cummings, Johnson’s former chief adviser, was instrumental in bringing Case in. At the age of 41 he had held a range of roles in Whitehall and had been Prince William’s private secretary.
A series of scandals engulfed Johnson’s premiership, ranging from the financing of his flat refurbishment and the partygate scandal over Covid-19 lockdown-breaking gatherings in Downing Street, to the appointments of Zahawi and Sharp, which reverberate today. Case, as the prime minister’s most senior adviser, is inevitably in the line of fire.
The article goes on to enumerate the scandals.
Apparently, morale among civil servants began declining in 2022:
Case recognised the problem of falling morale last month in a memo to civil servants, saying that results from a staff survey were “heading in the wrong direction and show that you feel things have become worse”.
Returning to March 6, The Telegraph published ‘Simon Case branded “naive” by top civil servants over “embarassing” WhatsApp remarks’:
Simon Case’s WhatsApp messages, exposed by the Lockdown Files, reveal a “naivety” and “inexperience” that has damaged his reputation, current and former senior civil servants have said …
One former permanent secretary told The Telegraph that the messages showed “a certain naivety and to be honest inexperience”, adding: “It will hurt his reputation.”
The source said: “You should be a bit above the fray [as Cabinet Secretary]. I don’t know why he engaged in those sorts of exchanges. He didn’t need to.”
A former civil servant who advised prime ministers during a decades long career in Whitehall is understood to have found the exchanges highly unusual in their political nature.
The concerns also stretch into the senior echelons of the current civil service, with some insiders noting the pronounced difference in tone of Mr Case’s messages to senior scientific advisers such as Prof Sir Chris Whitty and Sir Patrick Vallance.
A senior Whitehall source told this newspaper of the Case messages: “They are really embarrassing. It is absolutely cringe-worthy. The things he was saying, the way he was saying them, the awful embarrassing chumminess of them all.”
Mr Case and the Cabinet Office have not responded directly to the contents of the leaked messages sent by Mr Case …
Mr Case became the youngest ever Cabinet Secretary when he was appointed to the role in September 2020 under Boris Johnson.
He had never headed up a government department as a permanent secretary before taking up the position, breaking with the experience of many of his predecessors.
Mr Case is onto his third prime minister, having served as Cabinet Secretary to Mr Johnson, Liz Truss and now Mr Sunak.
Fraser Nelson, The Spectator‘s editor who also writes for The Telegraph, made some excellent points in ‘Simon Case must take his share of the blame for chaotic lockdown decision-making’:
When Simon Case was made the youngest-ever Cabinet Secretary, Matt Hancock sent a message congratulating him.
“I think 41 is a good age to be in these very big jobs,” said the 41-year-old health secretary. By this time, both were wielding incredible power, overseeing the biggest suspension of civil liberties in peacetime.
The members of the “top team” WhatsApp group had started to see lockdown as a political campaign – with enemies to be identified, mocked and destabilised. The only person in the group in a position to lower the political temperature and insist upon sound government was Simon Case.
But The Lockdown Files show that, time and time again, he ended up as political as the politicians – in some cases, even more so. Some of the most outrageous comments on the files are his.
Like others, he started off quite moderate. But before too long he was revelling in the power to lock people up (saying he wished he could see “some of the faces of people coming out of first class and into a Premier Inn shoe box”) and being just as gung-ho as the ministers he worked with. The civil servant became indistinguishable from the politicians …
His predecessor, Mark Sedwill, had clashed with Dominic Cummings about reshaping the Civil Service. Case, a former principal private secretary to David Cameron, had by then left the civil service and was working for Prince William.
He was called back to Whitehall to run the Government in a new, more buccaneering way: first in Number 10 and then running the whole show as Cabinet Secretary. There seemed to be an unspoken deal: Case would be given unprecedented power at a young age. In return, he’d be more likely than his predecessor to go with the political flow …
We know what other permanent secretaries might have done because they’ve made it public. Gus O’Donnell, who ran the Civil Service from 2005 to 2011, has pointed out the biggest architectural flaw.
Sage had far too much power, he says, and its reports should have been fed into a higher committee that would have made the decisions – not just on Covid, but factoring in economic and social damage. In other words, there would have been a cost-benefit analysis: a basic tool for public health interventions.
In The Lockdown Files, we see the prime minister appallingly served and briefed. Almost suspiciously so. At one stage, he is so in the dark about Covid’s fatality rate that he misinterprets a figure by a factor of one hundred – thinking it’s 0.04 per cent, not four per cent. It’s easy to mock a Classics graduate for numeracy issues, but it raises another question.
He had Simon Case by his side: so why did Case not make sure the PM had all of these basic facts to hand? Or had Case, like Cummings, come to regard his boss as a “wonky shopping trolley” to be steered, rather than served? And if so, steered at whose direction? …
Simon Case could at least have addressed the abysmal state of Sage reports: opaque, confusing and – as it turned out in the omicron wave – staggeringly wrong. By then, JP Morgan ended up giving its clients far better Covid analysis than ministers were given by the UK Government, and these ministers (including Rishi Sunak) ended up phoning around contacts to find non-government (ergo, trustworthy) advice. Case presided over this shambles …
Prime ministers run the civil service, and they are ultimately responsible for any dysfunction. But Case should not have taken sides during the lockdown wars. He ought to have been on the side of basic government standards, of cost-benefit analyses and informed, properly-communicated decisions.
The Lockdown Files show that Britain ended up with a standard of decision-making far below what could or should have been. And for that, Case deserves his full share of the blame.
I will have a few more articles about Simon Case to share next week. Along with that comes political infighting over pandemic policy.
Fraser Nelson is right. This was an absolute shambles.
Karol Sikora is also right. This must never happen again.
Following on from my news items of November 21, I have more, this time on Thanksgiving, crossword puzzles, technology and health.
Thanksgiving everywhere!
It is hard to disagree with Jordan Cracknell, the American wife of Olympic rower James Cracknell.
On November 22, 2022, she wrote an article for Metro: ‘Thanksgiving is a holiday that all Brits need in their lives’.
I couldn’t agree more, and I wouldn’t restrict it to the UK, either.
The problem is turkey, which the British associate with Christmas dinner. The other problem is the lack of sausage links — chipolatas — which the British associate with turkey and are absent from Thanksgiving dinner.
Not surprisingly, when Mrs Cracknell took her husband to his first Thanksgiving dinner in 2019 at a friend’s house:
he grumbled about ‘the bastardisation of British dishes’.
Oh, yes. My far better half thought similarly three decades ago.
Now things are different, in both our households. James Cracknell’s reaction sums up that of those Britons who taste Thanksgiving dinners and become converts:
By the time we’d eaten, he was in awe of the ‘un-Britishly moist and juicy’ turkey.
Indeed. Americans can definitely roast turkey to perfection.
His wife writes:
Now, I am firmly of the belief that this American holiday needs to become a British fixture.
Of course, the United States celebrates Thanksgiving in honour of our earliest settlers who learned from the Native Americans to cultivate the land and local livestock. That partnership and its bounty was the focus of the feast. The settlers gave thanks to God for that first harvest.
Admittedly, in Florida, initially settled by the Spanish, the menu might not include turkey. However, most Americans follow the New England menu celebrated in Massachusetts in the 1620s: turkey and corn being mainstays.
Jordan Cracknell explains what Americans give thanks for today. Her second paragraph below explains why I prefer Thanksgiving to Christmas (emphases mine):
Sometimes it can just be having gratitude for being able to see relatives, who might have travelled thousands of miles across the US. Other times we give thanks for our health.
It is as simple and lovely as that, and unlike Christmas there’s no exchange of presents. A positive and non-materialistic holiday, where all the family get together, is something that seems to be missing from the British annual calendar …
I’m one of around 166,000 Americans living in the UK, and in my experience, other US expats would also be hard-pressed to give up the holiday …
Since being here, I have managed to convince a handful of UK friends to mark the day by inviting them to dinner. Going in with an open mind, they too have enjoyed it.
Thanksgiving is now James’ favourite US holiday, and not just because of the food. ‘It just makes sense to have two major holidays back-to-back to spend with family,’ he says. ‘Why try and fit it all in over Christmas where inevitably someone gets disappointed?’
I agree – and there are also a lot of benefits to having a holiday where the focus is merely on giving thanks and spending time with your family.
She is the descendant of one of those first settlers in Massachusetts who arrived on the Mayflower and learned from the Wampanoags (pron. ‘Wom-pa-nogs’) how to cultivate the land. As she says:
My ancestors would have starved to death without the help of the Wampanoag people.
True!
There are two other advantages to Thanksgiving, for me, anyway. First, turkey is out of the way for another year, enabling us to eat goose at Christmas. Secondly, it is the start of the holiday season, so we start decorating the house for Christmas in the days that follow.
The Telegraph‘s new Cross Atlantic crossword
Speaking of things American, The Telegraph is introducing a new crossword puzzle called Cross Atlantic.
The article says that The Telegraph was the first British paper to feature crosswords, an American creation. That was around 100 years ago:
It is that rare treat: a new puzzle, to be published every weekend and daily online, in our own Telegraph, a newspaper that knows a thing or two about the genre, having delivered its first crossword to readers almost a century ago, years before Fleet Street rivals cottoned on. The name of the new game gives a hint of its origins: American crosswords whose clues engagingly blend wordplay, odd definitions, colloquialisms, general knowledge and current affairs, stretching and testing the brain without the forbidding challenge that the cryptic grid presents to the uninitiated (and which, in the 1940s, prompted Bletchley Park to use the Telegraph crossword as a test to recruit new code-breakers).
The article shows the first Telegraph crossword, which is splendidly symmetrical and a joy to behold, unlike the new Cross Atlantic, which looks ugly by comparison. I can do the original puzzle, which has quick rather than the cryptic clues that are so characteristic of British newspaper crosswords.
My British readers will be interested to know that the geeky comedian Dave Gorman already sets the paper’s cryptic crosswords and offers this advice to neophytes like me:
The formulations are unavoidable. The most frequent are hints that an anagram may be involved – using words like ‘unsettled’ that indicate other parts of the clue are anagrams of the answer. Then there are substitutes for letters. For example, ‘sailor’ often indicates the use of ‘AB’ for Able Bodied. Most solutions blend several such elements in directing the reader to a single answer.
I am lost already. I would not connect the word ‘sailor’ with the terms ‘AB’ or ‘Able Bodied’.
Anyway:
To the inexperienced, says Gorman, all this can seem impossibly complicated, not to say convoluted – an off-putting ritual only for those initiated into its dark arts.
But there is a shortcut, he says, a way that smug solvers rarely mention. This is the fact that each clue contains a simple, straightforward pointer to the whole answer. What surrounds it are small elements of the whole. But if you can find that critical definition, usually at the beginning or end of the clue, you can leap straight to guessing at the answer. Then, says Gorman, ‘you can work backwards’, to confirm your guess using the other elements of the clue.
Take a poser of which Dave is extremely proud. The elements are as follows: sea eagles are known as ernes. ‘Min’ is an abbreviation of minimum, or smallest. Golf, as military folk know, is the letter ‘G’ in the Nato alphabet. And a way, or path, is also a course.
Again, that would not even enter my head.
Continuing on:
Armed with all that, try deciphering the clue: Eagles on the smallest golf course.
Did you get it?
No, I did not.
Here’s the solution:
ERNES+THE+MIN+G+WAY. Which may still look baffling. But that’s before you add the clue to the whole answer and the number of letters:
Writer eagles on the smallest golf course (6,9) = Ernest Hemingway.
Gorman says that ‘it’s far from being the best clue I’ve written but the discovery of it – the idea that a real person’s name can also quite sensibly be rendered as a meaningful sentence – is somewhat delightful. There’s no wrestling it into submission, adding an initial of something here or the last letter of something there. So it feels like it’s been hiding in plain sight for ever. It’s like discovering a fossil on a Dorset beach – the setter doesn’t invent a clue, they find it.’
I’ll leave cryptic crosswords there. Life is too short.
Old technology fans
On Wednesday, November 23, The Guardian had a fascinating article about fans of old technology, from 100-year-old typewriters to Atari. A number of the people interviewed would have been too young to experience the initial rush when these items first appeared.
The comments were equally fascinating. I read them all. It’s amazing what people still enjoy and why.
Definitely an article to enjoy on Black Friday, while the rest of the family is out Christmas shopping.
The ‘big night out’ returns
Thankfully, after two years of pandemic fears, the big night out has returned.
This is the complete opposite to staying in with old tech.
On Saturday, November 19, The Times reported that disco-style skating rinks are this year’s hot venue for Christmas parties:
This month has seen the arrival of Flipper’s, a vast rink in a disused power station in west London, large enough to house 1,800 guests. Whatever you do, though, don’t call it a roller disco — it is a roller “boogie palace”, insists the venue, which has become one of the hottest places to host a Christmas party this year …
And it is not the only new skate venue to open in recent months. Two new rinks have opened in Manchester, including Paradise Skate World, which has seen Christmas bookings flood in. It’s billed as an intergalactic experience, with tunnels you whizz through on the dancefloor and the option to hire “space visors”.
“The obvious route was to go down the retro 1980s style, but we didn’t want to regurgitate old ideas,” says Chris Legh, the co-founder, who was also behind Junkyard Golf Club, another so-called “competitive socialising” format. This is the term used to describe a phenomenon of the past decade which has transformed the nightlife of many towns. Instead of going out drinking with your friends, you take part in some low-level sporting competition: ping-pong, crazy golf, cricket nets or axe-throwing …
Flipper’s is co-owned by Liberty Ross, the model and daughter of Ian “Flipper” Ross, who founded the original rollerskating nightclub in Los Angeles in the late 1970s. It was swifty dubbed “Studio 54 on wheels” because it attracted Prince, Robin Williams, Elton John, Nile Rodgers, Cher and other hard-partying celebrities. It lasted until 1981 before it shut down …
At Flipper’s it costs £22.50 for a two-hour session for an adult, including the hire of skates in a funky electric-blue suede.
Legh has another theory as to why rollerskating has become the new party craze: “If you are in charge of your Christmas party and you only have a £30-a-head budget, do you really want to spend £20 of it throwing drinks down your throat? Because so many young people don’t drink now, there is still quite a bit of discretionary spending, and skating feels active and wholesome.
“For a couple of hours, it is escapism from the digital world,” he adds. “Sure, people will take photos and post them on Instagram, but you can’t be on WhatsApp while you’re skating.”
Partying deplored in 1922
Every generation thinks it is the first to decry partying.
To the finger-waggers, any and every party is bad, especially where seemingly endless alcohol and — gasp! — cigarettes are involved.
On November 23, The Times dug out an article on the topic from its 1922 archive: ‘What cocktails, cigarettes and unhealthy meals meant for “society girls”‘.
In reality, most socialites, then and now, get parties out of their system early on and settle down with a husband and a family.
But there’s always someone, then and now, who wants to make them out to be physical and psychological wrecks.
Such was the case with Dr Agnes Savill, who delivered a lecture on partying socialites a century ago:
Dr Agnes Savill delivered a lecture on “The Dangers of Society to Health” at the Institute of Hygiene last evening. She said that the development of communities was found in the earliest stages of human society, and this gathering together of families to share a common life had many advantages, provided the individuals concerned were of a high grade and had a sound organization.
… the girl who could command her parents’ wealth left school for a life of continual excitement which resulted in mental and physical deterioration …
“I have seen some of these girls after a few years of society life aged by ten years and, before the age of twenty, as worn out and nerve-tired as if they were forty.
The hectic life of continual excitement, the absence of all repose, all time for meditation, the perpetual change, the cigarette smoking, irregular and unhealthy meals — no wonder these girls become the prey of disease. And though the physical consequences are disastrous, even of greater importance is the evil effect of this life upon the character.
“Society life is responsible for deficient sleep and consequent deterioration of the nervous system. It encourages the pernicious habit of the too-frequent cigarette. It encourages the girls to take cocktails and whiskies-and-sodas, which ruin their digestion, impair their livers, and upset the nervous system, and it encourages them to take rich foods, which upset the rhythm of the body.
“The ill-health of modern society girls is in a measure the fault of their parents, who have it in their hands to postpone the downfall of our modern civilization.”
My diagnosis of Dr Savill? She was deeply envious, as are all killjoys — then and now — who wish to restrain us, young and old, from having a bit of fun.
Most socialites have taken great care of themselves throughout their lives. Very few deteriorate. They cannot. They are in the public eye all the time.
Online gambling ‘addiction’ damaging young adults
Unlike cocktails, ciggies and rich food, there is a serious phenomenon affecting some twenty-somethings, especially young men on low incomes: the lure of online gambling.
I first read about this phenomenon in a French newsweekly earlier this year. Young lads place bets on sporting events, most often football fixtures, often prompted by frequent texts from gambling firms. Enough young men are going into debt and are sometimes driven to suicide because of it to be a worry.
In fact, the French government is currently running an advert about the lure of online gambling, showing some of the texts those who bet often receive. I’ve seen them on M6. If they were in English, they’d be something along the lines of:
Hi there, haven’t heard from you in a while. Fancy a flutter?
The more the recipient ignores the messages, the more frequent they become, driven by algorithms.
The Times has a good article from November 22 on what is happening in the UK, especially in England. It says that victims also come from the middle classes. Furthermore, young women are also affected:
Health bosses urged betting firms to “think hard about the human cost behind their profits” after a 42 per cent annual rise in demand for NHS gambling clinics was revealed.
Doctors said more patients were attending A&E after losing all their money in online betting sprees. NHS gambling clinics are full of “young men in football shirts” who have fallen foul of “predatory tactics” by betting firms, including a boom in addictive “in-play” sports betting.
The health service will announce tomorrow that it has opened clinics in Southampton and Stoke, adding to a national network of five commissioned in 2019. Figures seen by The Times show that 599 patients have been referred to the service in the past six months, a 42 per cent increase on the same period last year and up 65 per cent from 2020-21.
The clinics offer addiction therapy, including medication usually given to opioid users to reduce cravings. Patients can be sent by GPs or hospitals or self-refer and usually spend several months in treatment. One in three have attempted suicide; 57 per cent report thinking they would be better off dead. There are more than 400 gambling-related suicides a year in England.
Matthew Gaskell, a consultant psychologist and clinical lead at NHS Northern Gambling Service, said that almost all the patients it saw were hooked on online gambling, including in-play betting, which allows fans to bet on every aspect of a live game. He said: “People start gambling as soon as they wake up in the morning; they’re gambling in the shower, gambling while they’re driving to work. The NHS is picking up the tab.
“There has been an increase in people turning up at A&E in crisis, in a state of suicide. People are completely desperate, begging for help and seeing suicide as a genuine escape.” The service opened in 2019 and has clinics in Leeds, Manchester and Sunderland.
With football’s World Cup going on as I write, one can only imagine the damage.
The article profiles a 34-year-old woman who developed an online slot machine addiction at the age of 24:
Jennifer, a young mother, spent weeks in hospital and lost custody of her children after her gambling addiction triggered a mental breakdown.
Jennifer — a pseudonym because she did not want to reveal her real name — began gambling a decade ago aged 24, and became addicted to online slot machines, feeling trapped “in a never-ending spiral with no escape”.
By 2019 Jennifer had £40,000 of debt and was declared bankrupt. Her mental health collapsed and she was admitted to hospital, with social services taking control of her children …
She has not placed a bet for two years. She said: “The group therapy made me realise there’s gambling addicts from all walks of life. By giving me the tools to manage gambling addiction, I’ve had the platform to rebuild my life financially and it means the world to me to be with my kids again as a happy family.”
The article briefly mentioned two young men who took their lives, one of whom was an English teacher:
Jack Ritchie, 24, an English teacher, killed himself in 2017 after six years of battling his addiction to gambling.
Joshua Jones, 23, a talented jazz musician, leapt to his death from a ninth-floor balcony in 2015 after an addiction that culminated in him gambling all his money away and even selling his prized trombone.
I’m not the world’s biggest fan of betting shops, but at least, I would imagine, they have some human control. Men who frequent betting shops often have a group of mates they meet up with there. They might tell their friend that he’s been betting too much too often. The staff behind the counter are also likely to have a kind word with someone they see a bit too frequently.
Feet rule knees and hips
On November 19, The Times had an instructive article on the importance of our feet and how they affect other parts of our body.
While this is intended mostly for women, sedentary men would do well to pay attention, too:
According to Dalton Wong, the founder of Twenty-Two Training and who has worked with a host of celebrities including Jennifer Lawrence and Olivia Colman, stretching and strengthening the lower limbs can prevent pain in the feet and postural problems elsewhere in the body. Yet most of us neglect to focus on strengthening the 29 muscles of the foot and ankle.
“I am seeing an increasing number of clients coming in with hip, lower-back and knee issues that can be traced back to weakness and instability of their foot and ankle,” Wong says. “What so many don’t realise is that if you are not working your foot muscles enough, then it is reflected further up the body as ankle, knee and hip joints don’t work well.” Anatomically, these interconnecting body parts, joints and muscles that work together to perform particular movements are referred to as the kinetic chain. “Our toes, feet, ankles, lower legs, knees, upper legs, hips, pelvis and spine are all part of the body’s lower kinetic chain,” Wong says. “If one part is weak or out of kilter it has the potential to affect the rest of the chain.”
A strong, healthy foot has a moderately high arch, minimal overpronation — rolling inwards — and some natural spreading of the toes. There are four layers of muscle and soft tissue in the feet that help to lock them into position and keep us upright. A team of Harvard researchers writing in the British Journal of Sports Medicine described how the foot has an intertwining central “core” of muscles that work to maintain a naturally raised arch, providing us with the stability needed to hold us in good posture or to support even the most basic movement patterns, such as walking. It follows that misuse of these muscles through, say, lots of sitting or the wearing of ill-fitting shoes can play havoc with foot performance and structure. For starters, too little strength of muscles in the feet can lead to decreased ankle mobility. “If your ankles are stiff and inflexible, you will be less able to transfer weight from foot to foot in a walking or running stride,” says Lucinda Meade, a physiotherapist at Twenty-Two Training.
We should be able to flex our toes easily:
Big toe mobility is particularly important for better balance and gait. “If you can’t bend and flex the big toe, your posture and functional movement will deteriorate,” Meade says. “We should be moving all of our toes, especially our big toes, freely for at least 15 minutes every day.”
Walking around in bare feet is also helpful:
Wong recommends that his clients perform some weekly workouts barefoot. “We spend so little time without shoes that even 20-30 minutes a couple of times a week going barefoot is helpful for strengthening the feet,” he says. Not that you should ditch shoes for workouts overnight. “It takes time to strengthen the muscles in the feet, so build up your barefoot time gradually, starting with 5-10 minutes daily,” Wong says.
Your ability to walk around in bare feet is dictated not just by the feet but by the strength of your glutes in supporting the pelvis and hips, and if these muscles are not strong enough the inside of the foot will collapse if you suddenly go shoeless, Wong says.
At the very least, practise some foot moves for ten minutes each day. “Setting aside some time for your feet will pay huge dividends,” Wong says. “And if your feet are tired or tight, roll them on a cold bottle of water to release the fascia underneath the foot.”
The article has simple foot exercises that anyone can do.
Who knew the role feet played in governing the body? I certainly didn’t.
Egg news latest
And finally, barely a day goes by without a story about Britain’s notional egg shortage. My last news post had an article about egg substitutes.
On Tuesday, November 22, The Telegraph reported that supermarkets will be rationing eggs and that the shortage is expected to last six months.
The second sentence below irritated me:
Both M&S and Morrisons have confirmed its customers are now limited to two boxes each. A spokesperson for Morrisons, which only sells British eggs, said the rationing followed “unprecedented demand” at the end of last week.
The reason for ‘unprecedented demand’ came from the media, blasting news of a ‘shortage’ here, there and everywhere.
At my supermarket, egg prices have remained relatively static for around two years: £1.10 for six, then $1.20 and, only within the past few weeks, £1.40.
Someone’s not getting paid properly — the farmers:
… farmers are grappling with double-digit inflation in the price of feed and soaring energy costs to store eggs. The National Farmers’ Union has warned the supply chain issues causing egg shortages on supermarket shelves could last until next summer …
Farmers who are currently making a loss on eggs are not reinvesting in new flocks of hens, leading to a shortage for shoppers.
Robert Gooch, of the British Free Range Egg Producers Association, said the egg shortages would last until “retailers pay a fair price to farmers” …
Ioan Humphreys, a fourth generation farmer in Wales, has 32,000 birds, for which the cost of feed has risen from £250 a tonne last year to £400 today. Meanwhile his electric bill on the farm has more than tripled.
But since December, Mr Humphreys has only received a 5p increase from retailers for each dozen eggs he sells them and is operating at a loss.
He said: “I have got to sell them even if at a loss to get some money in.
“Retailers are blaming bird flu for the shortages, but I haven’t culled one bird from my flock this year. There are shortages on the shelves because farmers are not being paid fairly by supermarkets.”
An M&S spokesperson said the company had provided “additional support, including for animal feed” to help suppliers manage rising costs. Meanwhile Sainsburys said it had increased the amount it paid to its own-brand egg packers, not directly to farmers, by 40pc in the past year.
A spokesman for Asda said the supermarket was “working hard” with its egg suppliers to resolve industry challenges.
Tesco and Ocado did not respond to requests for comment.
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In conclusion, I hope that my American readers had an enjoyable turkey day and that they’ve got plenty left over to enjoy this weekend.
In writing this week’s Forbidden Bible Verses post on Philippians 2:14-18, I used, as per usual, John MacArthur’s sermons.
‘Stop Complaining, Part 1’ begins with his view of an overly indulged, complaining generation.
He says that the problem is getting worse, rather than better.
Emphases mine below:
Let me sort of ease in to our subject a little bit, if I might. We’re in Philippians chapter 2 verses 14 through 16. And I titled the message, “Stop Complaining.” There’s a reason for that, and it’s fairly obvious if you look at verse 14 where Paul says, “Do all things without grumbling or disputing,” which are really two ways of saying stop complaining. And as I was thinking about this very pertinent message about living your Christian life without complaining, it became very apparent to me that we live in a very complaining society. And I really believe we are breeding a generation of complainers, and they seem to be getting worse with each passing generation.
And as I’ve said to you on a number of occasions, it is a curiosity to me that the most indulged society is the most discontent society, that the more people have, the more they seem to be discontent with what they have and the more complaining they seem to be. In thinking about this, and there would be many ways to approach it, I was just inadvertently flipping on the radio this week and I heard a speech by a sociologist that was quite curious to me and quite interesting. The sociologist made a very interesting point. He was talking about the young people in our culture, talking about their discontent, talking about their complaining attitude, their resistance to responsibility, and how that nothing is ever the way they would like it. And they go through life with a kind of sullen discontent, kind of rejection of things the way they are. And he had an interesting thesis. What he basically said was this: that in many ways this discontented generation of young people is a product of small families. His thesis was that where you have families where the average is two or less, of course the average family now in America is 1.7 children, which is kind of strange to think about; as one brother said to his sister, “I’m the one and you’re the point seven.” But every family seems to come out at about 1.7.7. We realize that families are getting smaller and smaller and moving toward one child families, if that. Most families in America have either none, one, or two children …
And the difference is where you have a small family, the system bends to the child. Where you have a large family, the child bends to the system. And so, what you have, he said, is young people growing up in an environment where the system bends to them. And you have child-centered parenting.
MacArthur grew up in a large family, where choice was not an option:
I know as a child myself, one of the reasons I wanted to grow up was I wanted freedom. I lived in a totally conformed society. I ate what they gave me. I don’t ever remember going shopping with my mother, ever. I wore whatever she brought home. I never picked out a thing, never. I don’t even remember going to a department store clothing section as a young person. My mother brought me what I needed, and I put it on. And I conformed to the system. And I looked forward to adulthood so that I could be free to make my own choices. The reverse is true now; children grow up controlling the family and they don’t want to become adults because that means conformity. Then, they have to go to work, and nobody at work says, “Now, how would you like your office decorated? And what time would you like to take a break for lunch?” Nobody says that. They put you on an assembly line or they put you in a place where you are forced to conform, so what you have then is a generation of young people who don’t want to grow up.
And this sociologist said on the radio, you ask the average high-school kid, what do you want to do when you get out of school? What’s his answer? “I don’t know.” You ask the average college student, what do you want to do when you’re out of college? “I don’t know.” And the reason he doesn’t know is because he is postponing responsibility because responsibility means conformity to a system, whereas childhood for him has been absolute freedom. Eat what you want when you want, wear what you want when you want, and your mother will take you anywhere you want to go whenever you want. And so, you breed a generation of young people who are irresponsible. And when they do get a job, they get a job simply to finance themselves so they can enjoy their indulgences, and then when they’re 28 years old their license plate says, “He wins who has the most toys.” And the whole idea of adulthood is to collect toys, boats, cars, vacation trips, on and on and on.
Now, what you have in this kind of thing, said this sociologist, is breeding moody discontent. And you build young people who cannot conform and cannot be satisfied, over-indulged kids who don’t want to be adults, continue to push off responsibility; they grow up in an environment they control. They don’t like being controlled. And they become discontent. They don’t want to take responsibility. They don’t want to work. And their adult years are sad. They become sullen, very often, they become complainers. And I really believe that he’s right in many cases. One of the curses of our culture are overindulged childish kind of adults who are really complainers about everything. Nothing is ever enough. That’s why we have a whole society with a critical mentality, constantly attacking everything.
The church environment is no different:
Now, I want you to know this has found its way into the church. And the church is full of its own complainers, and what is really sad is many of them are run by their children’s discontent. People leaving the church because their children don’t like it. Can’t imagine such a thing, unless their children control the family. The church has its complainers. And here we are with so much, so much. How in the world could we possibly complain just because every little thing in life isn’t exactly the way we want it? Frankly, I would suggest to you that few sins are uglier to me and few sins are uglier to God than the sin of complaining. Frankly, I think the church at large does much to feed this thing by continuing to propagate this self-esteem, self-fulfillment garbage that just feeds the same discontent. There’s little loyalty. There’s little thankfulness. There’s little gratitude. And there’s very little contentment. And sadly, what happens eventually is your griping, grumbling, murmuring discontent is really blaming God because, after all, God is the one who put you where you are. So, just know who you’re complaining against.
He discusses how famous people from the Bible railed against God, from the very beginning:
Now, having said all of that there is a sense in which this complaining is part of our culture. There’s another sense in which it’s not new at all. Who was the first complainer who ever walked the earth? Who was it? The first complaining human being who ever walked was the first human being whoever walked. And what was Adam’s first complaint? “God, the woman You gave me.” We are in this mess because of this woman. He didn’t blame Eve; he blamed God. Eve had nothing to do with it. God made Eve. Adam wasn’t married; he woke up one morning he was married. God could have picked anybody He wanted, He picked her. Why? It’s God’s fault. She led the whole human race in sin. The woman You gave me, complaining. Cain complained to God about God’s work in his life, Genesis 4:13 and 14. Moses complained to God for not doing what he wanted Him to do when he wanted Him to do it, Exodus 5:22 and 23. Aaron and Miriam complained to God against Moses, His chosen leader and their own brother in Numbers chapter 12. Jonah complained to God because he was mad at God for saving the Ninevites, Jonah chapter 4 verses 9 and 10. And it is still a popular pastime to complain at God. And may I say that all of your complaints in one way or another are complaints against the providential purpose and will of God.
There’s a new book out called “Disappointment With God,” very popular and being promoted very heavily. It seems to me to make complaining against God okay. It sort of tries to define God as a lonely misunderstood lover who is really trying to work things out, but is really kind of a victim of all of us and we shouldn’t complain against Him, we ought to love Him. What a strange view of God. He is not some lonely misunderstood lover; He is the sovereign God who has ordered the circumstances of all of our lives. And to complain against God, to grumble against God is a sin and we must see it as such.
In the ninth chapter of Romans verse 20, “O man, who answers back to God? The thing molded will not say to the molder, ‘Why did you make me like this,’ will it?” Who in the world are you to answer back to God? What an unthinkable thing to do. And when describing the apostates in Jude 16, it says they are grumblers finding fault following after their own lusts. All they want is what they want when they want it, they don’t get it, they grumble and find fault. It’s characteristic sin of the proud and it is characteristic sin of the wicked.
Now, the tragedy of this particular sin is that it is so contagious. Let me take a minute to usher you back into the Old Testament, chapter 13 of Numbers. And I want you to follow me and we’ll at least get through this little introduction and I think set the stage for what is ahead of us. This is really very, very interesting and very important. We go back to the number one illustration of grumbling, murmuring belly-aching griping people the world has ever known, namely whom? The Israelites. Numbers 13 just gives us a little insight in to the potential power of this attitude to spread. Verse 30 says, “Caleb quieted the people before Moses and said, we should by all means go up and take possession of it for we shall surely overcome it.” Joshua, you remember, and Caleb came back from spying out the land and they said we can do it; God is on our side, we can take it. “But the men who had gone up with him said, we are not able to go up against the people for they are too strong for us.” Which is nothing but doubting God. “So, they gave out to the sons of Israel a bad report of the land which they had spied out saying the land through which we have gone in spying it out is a land that devours its inhabitants, and all the people whom we saw in it are men of great size.” And then, they said this, “Also we saw the Nephilim, the sons of Anak are part of the Nephilim, and we became like grasshoppers in our own sight and so were we in their sight.”
So, they come back with this complaining: we’ll never do it, we can’t make it, we can’t defeat them. It’s a bad report. It will fail, it will never make it. Prophets of doom, they are. And they’re really complaining against the fact that God has told them to go in.
God hates complaining as much as He hates sin.
God killed complaining Israelites. The wages of complaining were death:
Now, go over to chapter 14, watch what happens in verse 36, “As for the men whom Moses sent to spy out the land and who returned and made all the congregation,” what? “Grumble against him by bringing out a bad report concerning the land, even those men who brought out the very bad report of the land,” follow this, “died by a plague before the Lord.” You know what the Lord thinks of grumblers? He killed them because they spread a brooding discontent against God. That’s the issue. These people complained against God, they complained against God calling them to go into the land, they complained because the odds were against them humanly speaking. And in their disbelief and complaining against God, they caused the whole nation to grumble, and as a result God killed them with a plague. Grumbling really spreads, and your discontent, and your critical spirit, and your grumbling attitude, and your murmuring complaints will infect other people.
Here were the children of God. They had been led out of Egypt. God had parted the Red Sea for them. They had seen ten plagues, miraculous plagues at the point of their deliverance. And as soon as they got out of the land of Egypt they started to complain, and it never really ended. Can I take you through a little trek? Go back to Exodus and let’s go back to where it started in the Exodus. Verse 11 of chapter 14, “Then, they said to Moses,” and they’re out in the wilderness now. “Is it because there were no graves in Egypt that you have taken us away to die in the wilderness?” They said, “What do you bring us out here for, because there weren’t any graves in Egypt?” Which is a mocking statement. I mean, wasn’t there a place to bury us there? You’re going to have to take us to the desert to bury us? “Why have you dealt with us in this way, bringing us out of Egypt?” Here’s the complaint, it’s not like they want it. They’ve left Egypt, it’s not the way they want it. Pharaoh is moving after them, and they begin to complain. Of course, God did a marvelous thing, He opened the Red Sea, drowned Pharaoh’s entire army and saved them.
Go to chapter 15, they come through the Red Sea, they’ve been delivered, and in that great 15th chapter, the song of Moses sings of God’s great deliverance. And it’s no sooner than they’ve done that, verse 22, then Moses led Israel from the Red Sea, and they went out into the wilderness of Shur, and they went three days and they didn’t have any water, three days. And they came to Marah, they couldn’t drink the waters of Marah, they were bitter therefore it was named Marah, so the people what? Grumbled at Moses saying, “What shall we drink?” Again, the same attitude. Chapter 16, by the way, God provided water for them. You remember it. Verse 27 of chapter 15, 12 springs of water and they camped there and 70 date palms and they had a feast. “Then, they set out from Elim and all the congregation of the sons of Israel came to the wilderness of Sin which is between Elim and Sinai, on the 15th day of the second month after their departure from the land of Egypt, and the whole congregation of Israel grumbled against Moses.” Nothing is ever enough. Part the Red Sea, provide the water, more grumbling. “Would that we had died by the Lord’s hand in the land of Egypt, we would have been better off there when we sat by the pots of meat, when we ate bread to the full.” Boy, this is a crass crowd, right? They don’t care about anything but food. “We’re all going to die of hunger.” Boy, they’re real deep, aren’t they? Real deep people. “And the Lord provides again.” It’s absolutely incredible. God sends quail, God sends manna down.
Then, you come to chapter 17. “Then, all the congregation of the sons of Israel journeyed by stages from the wilderness of Sin according to the command of the Lord and camped at Rephidim and there was no water for the people to drink. Therefore the people quarreled with Moses and said, give us water that we may drink.” See, here’s more complaining, griping, grumbling, quarreling, disputing. “Moses said to them, why do you quarrel with me? Why do you test the Lord? He is the one who has ordained the circumstances. But the people thirsted there for water and they grumbled against Moses and they said, why now have you brought us up from Egypt to kill us and our children and our livestock with thirst?”
Well, Moses is getting to the end of his rope. So, Moses cried to the Lord, and I’m sure it was loud, “What shall I do to this people? A little more and they’ll stone me.” Some group, huh? So, the Lord said, “Pass before the people, take with you some of the elders of Israel, take in your hand your staff with which you struck the Nile and go. I’ll stand before you there on the rock at Horeb and you’ll strike the rock and water will come out of it the people may drink. Moses did so in the sight of the elders of Israel, he named the place Massah and Meribah because of the quarrel of the sons of Israel, and because they tested the Lord saying, is the Lord among us or not?” It doesn’t take very long for people to forget the provision of God.
Now, go over to Numbers for just a moment or two because I want you to see this pattern. Now, they’re at the other end of the 40 years. They’re ready. Time is ready to go into the land. And it’s not much different. Verse 1 of chapter 11 of Numbers, “Now, the people became like those who complain.” You ought to underline that. “They became like those who complain of adversity. Complaining of adversity in the hearing of the Lord.” That’s where their complaint really was directed. “And when the Lord heard it His anger was kindled, and the fire of the Lord burned among them and consumed some of the outskirts of the camp. The people therefore cried out to Moses and Moses prayed to the Lord and the fire died out. So, the name of the place was called Taberah because the first of the Lord burned among them.” 40 years later, and they have been complaining the whole time about everything.
Verse 4 says, “The rabble who were among them had greedy desires, and the sons of Israel wept again and said, who will give us meat to eat? We remember the fish and the cucumbers and the melons and the leeks and the onions and the garlic, and we’ve got nothing but manna, crummy manna.” Day after day, this is typical complaining. Chapter 14, God keeps on providing. God sends the spies into the land. And what happens? They come out, they give this evil report, we can’t do it. Verse 27 of chapter 14, “How long,” the Lord says to Moses and Aaron, “shall I bear with this evil congregation who are grumbling against Me? I have heard the complaints of the sons of Israel which they are making against Me. Say to them as I live, says the Lord, just as you have spoken in my hearing, so I will surely do to you. Your corpses shall fall in this wilderness, even all your numbered men according to your complete number from 20 years old and upward who have grumbled against Me.” God says I’ll kill the whole lot of you, you’ll never enter the promised land, and He did it. He did it.
Chapter 16 verse 41, “On the next day,” what next day? The next day after God had just punished some people for invading the priesthood. The next day after God’s object lesson about serious treatment of His law, “All the congregation of the sons of Israel,” verse 41, “grumbled against Moses and Aaron, and they’re saying you are the ones who caused the death of the Lord’s people.” And the Lord was furious. Verse 45, He says, “Get away from among this congregation that I may consume them instantly. Then, they fell on their faces.” And Moses said to Aaron, “Take your censer and put in a fire from the altar and take incense in and bring it quickly to the congregation and make atonement for them, for wrath has gone out from the Lord, the plague has begun. Then, Aaron took it as Moses had spoken, ran into the midst of the assembly, for behold the plague had begun among the people so he put on the incense and made atonement for the people. And he took his stand between the dead and the living and the plague was checked, but those who died by the plague were 14,700, besides those who died on account of Korah,” where the ground swallowed them all up. God just starts slaughtering thousands of them because of their grumbling, complaining, discontent.
You find it again in chapter 20. You find it again in chapter 21. I won’t read them to you. I suppose the summary of all of it could be in Psalm 106, just listen to this, verse 25. It says, “They didn’t believe in His word but grumbled in their tents. They didn’t listen to the voice of the Lord. Therefore, He swore to them that He would cast them down in the wilderness.” And that’s exactly what He did.
I read with interest and thought that this must be quite a recent sermon.
How old do you think it is?
MacArthur delivered that sermon on January 15, 1989!
Let’s return to our generation of complainers from that era, 33 years ago, as I write in 2022.
Their parents would have been born in the late 1950s through to the early 1960s, in most cases.
Those young adults, their children, in 1989, would have started getting married and bearing their own offspring in the 1990s.
Here we are, three decades — and three generations — later.
I have an update on today’s youth from Saturday’s Telegraph, July 30, 2022: ‘Our fixation with feelings has created a damaged generation’.
The article is about British youth. Post-pandemic, the main topic that appears in many news articles and parliamentary debates is mental health.
If I had £1 for every time I’ve heard the words ‘mental health’ in parliamentary debates between 2020 and 2022, I’d be living in Monaco right now.
Not only do we have a new generation of complainers, they say they are suffering.
They are suffering because they are too introspective.
Feelings are the order of the day. A dangerous solution to that is the Online Safety Bill currently in the House of Commons. Pray that we can put an end to it, because it has provisions for ‘legal but harmful’ speech. The Secretary of State for Digital, Culture, Media and Sport — currently Nadine Dorries — can decide what is ‘legal but harmful’ speech.
Whoa!
That is a very dangerous route.
Even more dangerous are the voices coming from Labour MPs, who say that if they are ever in government again — a likely possibility — they will clamp down on whatever free speech remains.
Even worse, the legislation has not been passed, yet, here are Hampshire Constabulary just last Saturday, July 30, 2022, arresting a military veteran for tweeting a meme. The person who complained said that the meme caused him or her ‘anxiety’.
The police don’t ordinarily go to people’s homes to investigate crime these days. Yet, they are all too ready to look into social media.
Five officers attended this man’s residence and arrested him. It appears that no charges stuck, possibly because of the Reclaim Party’s Laurence Fox’s video of the incident. Perhaps the police were embarrassed?
The man tweeting this — unrelated to the incident — is former firefighter Paul Embery, a GB News panellist and Labour Party member who is active in unions, someone concerned about freedom of expression:
Guido Fawkes has more on the story and points out (emphasis in the original):
Arresting people for causing offence or anxiety, all while Hampshire recorded 8,000 burglaries in the last year, probably isn’t the best use of police time…
How did we get here?
The Telegraph article consists of an interview with Gillian Bridge, 71, who is an addiction therapist, mental health advocate, teacher and author of many years’ experience in schools and prisons.
Now you might think she makes all manner of apologies for today’s youth.
Au contraire!
Gillian Bridge was aghast to find that the BBC put great emphasis earlier this year on how young Britons were reacting to the war in Ukraine. She said:
… there was this expectation that they were going to be enormously distressed – and about something that was not affecting them directly. Meanwhile, what were they doing in Ukraine? Living in bomb shelters; giving birth in cellars. But we were supposed to worry about the ‘anxiety’ young people were experiencing here? Frankly, I found that terrifying.
She said that this was not surprising, because in our post-pandemic world, feelings in a world of short attention spans are the only thing that matter.
As such, Ukraine is less important now. It shouldn’t be, but it is:
Terrifying, but “not surprising”, she adds with a sigh. “And you’ll notice that just like other political subjects that have prompted huge emotional outpourings on and off social media of late, things have now gone very quiet on that front. Once we’ve had these ‘big’ emotions, we are no longer particularly interested, it seems.” She cites our celebration of the NHS as another example. “People were virtually orgasmic about their pan-banging, but how many of them then went on to volunteer or do something tangibly helpful?” It’s in part down to our gnat-like attention span, says Bridge, “but also the fact that a lot of the time we’re not interested in the actual subject, just the way we feel about it.”
Mental health problems, real or otherwise, have spun out of control over the past few years, even pre-pandemic:
… the 71-year-old has watched our “fixation with feelings” balloon out of all proportion, eclipsing reason, and predicted how damaging it would be, especially for the young. However, even Bridge was shocked by figures showing that more than a million prescriptions for antidepressants are now written for teenagers in England each year, with NHS data confirming that the number of drugs doled out to 13 to 19-year-olds has risen by a quarter between 2016 and 2020.
Child mental health services are reported to be “at breaking point”, with referrals up by 52 per cent last year and some parents even admitting that they have been sleeping outside their children’s bedrooms in order to check they are not self-harming. There is no doubt that we are dealing with an unprecedented crisis – one that was definitely heightened by the pandemic. “But Covid cannot be held responsible for all of it,” cautions Bridge. “And while antidepressants can be very effective, we need to be asking ourselves how we reached this point? Because whatever we’ve been doing clearly isn’t working.”
Bridge blames this on too much introspection:
At the Headmasters’ and Headmistresses’ Conference in 2019 Bridge told the 250 independent school heads in attendance what she believed to be the root cause of this mass unhappiness: “This focus on ‘me, myself and I’ is the problem… It’s taking people who are vulnerable to begin with and asking them to focus inwards.” And in Bridge’s ground-breaking book, Sweet Distress: How Our Love Affair With Feelings Has Fuelled the Current Mental Health Crisis, the behavioural expert explains why too much emphasis on emotion is as bad for our health as a surfeit of sweet treats. Indeed the “empty calories contained in some feelings” have only helped our “sense of self-importance to grow fat”, she says. Hence the “emotional obesity many are suffering from now”.
Cancel culture and censorship are part of this dreadful focus on feelings:
The book – which kicks off with Bridge’s assertion, “We’ve been living in a gross-out world of personal emotional self-indulgence and sentiment for decades now … decades which have seen the nation’s mental health worsening” – is a succession of equally magnificent declarations. Magnificent because she has pinpointed the cause of a whole range of societal problems, from mental distress and the determined fragility of the young to the woke chaos of universities and cancel culture.
Interestingly, Bridge believes that this toxic focus on feelings began in the 1970s. MacArthur and the sociologist he cited spoke in 1989. The timing makes sense.
Bridge told The Telegraph:
Certainly the touchy-feely approach to things had already started in classrooms back in the 1970s.
From there, it gradually expanded, year after year, decade after decade:
Flash forward to today, when every boss can be silenced by an employee starting a sentence with: “I just feel that …”
Whereas you could do so in the old days, it is now taboo to downplay someone’s feelings, and that is not a good thing:
The great value of feelings today, Bridge tells me, “is that no one else can ever deny them … so if you feel offended then someone has genuinely harmed you”. Celebrity culture has promoted this new way of thinking as much as social media, “where you can witness people actually gorging on themselves, getting high on the strength of their own feelings just as they do on sugar – self-pleasuring, basically. And listen, it may feel good in the short term, but it’s very bad for us in the long run.”
People can convince themselves that their feelings are the truth, their truth, anyway. That omits fact, what really happened. Bridge mentioned Meghan Markle’s complaints:
Take the Duchess of Sussex, she points out, and her litany of “heartfelt” complaints. “Just last week there she was explaining that she didn’t lie to Oprah about growing up an only child, because she felt like one, so it was, as she put it ‘a subjective statement’.” Bridge laughs; shakes her head. “We really are tying ourselves up in knots now, aren’t we? Because it’s all about me, myself and I, and someone like Meghan has made it so much easier for people to follow in her footsteps, when the reality is that feelings are not immutable. They are not fixed, an absolute. They are not fact. And they are certainly not something that must override everything else.”
Yet there is a natural neurological process whereby the brain is able to turn feelings into fact, Bridge explains. “If you revise, rehearse, repeat and reinforce, then you create a fact, and that fact will then be embedded in your memory: ‘your truth’. Going back to Markle, that’s crucially a truth that no amount of counter-evidence can challenge.”
Bridge says that encouraging children to emote and focus on their feelings is unhelpful for them and for society at large. The focus on feelings originated in the United States, the source of all bad ideas in our time:
“The worst possible thing you can do with a child is to give them a fixed idea that they are feeling a certain way,” she says with aplomb. So those “emotional literacy” classes that started in California and are now being taught at schools here in the UK? The ones using a “traffic light” system, with pupils as young as four being asked to describe their “happiness levels” accordingly? “A terrible idea,” Bridge groans. “Feelings are simply physiological sensations mediated by cultural expectations; they go up and they go down!” Yet thanks to the pervasive narrative that every feeling should be given weight, “instead of enjoying the limitless health and optimism of youth” many youngsters “are now entrenched in their own misery”.
Bridge then tapped unknowingly into what MacArthur preached about in 1989, the notion that there were once roles for us in life, conformity to social expectations:
The desire to feel significant (either by embracing victimhood or by other means) is hardly new where young people are concerned, Bridge reminds me, and her tone is notably empathetic. “Let’s not forget that people used to have a role in life assigned for them within their communities. You might do an apprenticeship and then go and work in a factory or go into your father’s firm, or you might be preparing to get married and have babies. Now people have to find their role, they have to choose an identity, and that is much more complicated for them.”
Remember when we older folk — the 60+ group — were taught resilience at home when we were children? ‘Tomorrow’s another day’? It meant that today’s setback was temporary and, sure, we were hurt or upset, but better times were on the way. And, sure enough, they were.
Parents and schools are not teaching children about the temporary nature of setbacks. Therefore, today’s children lack resilience, which gave all of us who learned it so long ago hope for the future:
“The reason ‘everything will look better in the morning’ is so important,” says Bridge, “is that just like the children who did well in [Walter Mischel’s famous 1972] marshmallow experiment, they were able to predict the future based on their past.” That ability to delay and see the bigger picture is closely associated with the development of the hippocampus, she explains, “which is memory, navigation and good mental health. Yet by immersing ourselves in feelings and the now, we’ve blotted out the ‘OK so I’m feeling bad, but tomorrow will be another day’ logic, and we’re trusting the least intelligent part of our brains. As parents, we should all be discouraging this in our children. Because a child has to believe in tomorrow.”
Developing resilience is good for brain health, and it helps us to survive.
Bridge says that altruism also helps our brain health. We look out for others, not just ourselves. She says:
Studies have shown that it protects us from mental decline in our later years, but that the self-involved are more likely to develop dementia.
She cautions against cancelling or revising our history, whether it be factual or cultural:
Learning and a sense of history are equally important when it comes to brain health. “Yet again we seem to be distancing ourselves from the very things that we need to thrive. We’re so threatened by history and its characters that we try to cancel them! When you only have to read something like Hamlet’s ‘to be, or not to be’ speech to understand that it encapsulates all of the issues and irritations we still suffer from today. And surely knowing that gives you a sense of belonging, a sense of context, continuity and, crucially, relativity?”
Alarmingly, Bridge says that some young people believe that suicide is a melodrama, not a final act:
… they don’t actually realise it’s the end of them. Instead, they are almost able to view it as a melodrama that they can observe from the outside. Which is a deeply distressing thought.
Scary.
Bridge warns that too much introspection can lead to criminality:
Although it’s hard to condense everything she learnt about the criminal brain during those years down to a tidy sound bite, “what was notable and important in this context,” she says, “was their fixation on themselves. So the more a person looks inwards at the me, myself and I, the more they’re likely to run afoul of everything, from addiction to criminality. In a way, the best thing you can do for your brain is to look beyond it.”
She tells me about a prisoner she was working with “who came up to me and said: ‘I’ve got mental health’ – as though that were a disorder. Because people have become so ‘into’ the problem that the phrase is now only negative. That’s surely one of the most worrying developments of all. And it’s why I refuse to use or accept the term ‘mental health’ unless it is prefixed by ‘good’ or ‘bad’.”
Incredibly, with all the misplaced importance on feelings, Bridge says she has never had a bad reception to her talks:
… she stresses she “has never encountered negativity anywhere I have spoken”. Yet another reason why Bridge isn’t about to dampen her argument.
She thinks there might be the seeds of a turnaround, based on news items over the past few weeks:
“I think people understand that it’s time for some tough talking,” she writes in Sweet Distress. “There is increasing evidence that families, schools and universities are being overwhelmed by an epidemic of mental ill health.” So whatever we are doing isn’t just “not helping”, but harming? “Absolutely. But I am seeing more and more people speaking up about this now. The narrative is changing. Just look at what the Coldstream Guards fitness instructor, Farren Morgan, said last week about body positivity promoting ‘a dangerous lifestyle’. He’s right.” She shrugs. “It’s no good saying ‘it’s OK to be any size you please’ when we know that if children have bad diets, that can in turn lead to obesity – which in turn makes it more likely that they will suffer both physically and mentally later on.”
She mentions the new smart dress code implemented by the head of Greater Manchester Police – the one that, according to reports last week, helped turn the force around into one of the “most improved” in the country. “These officers were performing better at work because they were dressed smarter. So what does that tell us? That if you have a disciplined life and if you accomplish the things you set out to do, that gives you self-esteem – which makes you happier. But of course none of this happens if we are just sitting around ‘feeling’ things.”
She suggests that a good way of getting young people out of the cancel culture narrative is to point out that, someday, they might be cancelled, too. Also note the final word:
How do we get people out of themselves when they are so entrenched, though? How do we root them when they are flailing to such an extent? “By giving them a sense of being part of history! By getting them to see that if they want to cancel someone who lived 50 or 100 years ago, then in 50 or 100 years’ time someone may have entirely ‘valid’ reasons to cancel them. By building the inner scaffolding that will keep them standing throughout life’s ups and downs. And you know what that inner scaffold is called?” she asks with a small smile. “Resilience.”
Get Gillian Bridge into the new Government, coming soon, as an adviser. The nation needs someone like her. She would be perfect in helping us to defeat our mental health pandemic.
Warning: this post contains references to suicide as per reports listed below.
An American mother, Dr Free N. Hess (aka PediMom), has a warning for parents whose children watch YouTube Kids videos. Some of them have to do with suicide and contain other content inappropriate for younger viewers.
On February 23, CBS News reported:
Video promoting self-harm tips — spliced between clips of a popular video game — has surfaced at least twice on YouTube and YouTube Kids since July, according to a pediatrician and mom who discovered the video.
The suicide instructions are sandwiched between clips from the popular Nintendo game Splatoon and delivered by a man speaking in front of what appears to be a green screen — an apparent effort to have him blend in with the rest of the animated video …
The man featured is YouTuber Filthy Frank, who has over 6.2 million subscribers and calls himself “the embodiment of everything a person should not be,” although there is no evidence that Frank, whose real name is George Miller, was involved in creating the doctored video. He did not immediately respond to CBS News’ request for comment.
When Free Hess found the video on YouTube last week, she posted it on her blog — warning other parents to take control over what their kids may be watching.
“Looking at the comments, it had been up for a while, and people had even reported it eight months prior,” Hess told CBS News on Friday.
Shortly after she published her blog post, YouTube took the video down, saying it violated the site’s community guidelines, according to Hess.
This is not Dr Hess’s first foray into YouTube videos for children. She and a group of parents were able to successfully campaign for another video’s removal in July 2018.
CBS reports that Hess became concerned about what children were viewing based on her own experiences as a paediatrician (emphases mine):
Hess said after seeing higher rates of suicide in children in her own emergency room over the last few years, she made it her mission to bring awareness to disturbing and violent content being consumed by children on social media. She said she’s reported hundreds of unsettling videos to YouTube, with some success. On Friday, she found and reported seven more disturbing videos on YouTube Kids, and said they were just the tip of the iceberg.
“I had to stop, but I could have kept going,” Hess said. “Once you start looking into it, things get darker and weirder. I don’t understand how it’s not getting caught.”
YouTube Kids is not for pre-teens. In fact, quite the opposite. The videos are intended for children under the age of eight.
Hess described what she saw:
She said she logs onto the app posing as a child, rather than an adult, so that she can see exactly what kids around the world are seeing. The videos Hess has found contain mentions or visuals of self-harm, suicide, sexual exploitation, trafficking, domestic violence, sexual abuse and gun violence, including a simulated school shooting. She said many of the kids she treats in the ER list videos on YouTube as a method used to learn destructive behaviors and self-harm techniques.
Good grief.
It’s interesting that YouTube has no problem removing content from and accounts of conservative video posters, yet they allow this depravity aimed at small children, which was first reported in 2017.
CBS provides the apologies from YouTube, but:
This week, new cases of inappropriate content prompted high-profile responses, including from Disney and Nestle, which pulled advertising from YouTube after a blogger described “a wormhole into a soft-core pedophilia ring” on the site.
To be fair, YouTube has taken action, but compared to what they do to conservatives — actively seeking out accounts to ban — theirs is a reactive stance when it comes to perverse videos, especially where children are concerned:
Hess has more information about these videos on her website, including this:
Exposure to videos, photos, and other self-harm and suicidal promoting content is a huge problem that our children are facing today. Suicide is the SECOND leading cause of death in individuals between the ages of 10 and 34 and the numbers of children exhibiting some form of self-harm is growing rapidly. In a nationwide survey of high school students in the US 16% of students stated they had seriously considered suicide, 13% admitted to creating a plan, and 8% admitted to attempting suicide at some point in the 12 months prior to the survey. Every year 157,000 young people between the ages of 10 and 24 present to Emergency Departments for self-inflicted injuries and/or suicide attempts.
Many experts believe that access to self-harm and suicide promoting content is making the situation worse. There have been several recent reports of teens committing suicide after viewing self-harm and suicide material online and on social media platforms. More and more researchers are starting to look into how access to this type of material is linked to self-harm and suicide in adolescents. One such study has just been commissioned and will hopefully give us some good insight into this issue.
But we have to start doing something NOW and we should start by educating ourselves, educating our children, and speaking up when we see something that is dangerous for our children. We also need to fight to have the developers of social media platforms held responsible when they do not assure that age restrictions are followed and when they do not remove inappropriate and/or dangerous material when reported.
We need to all work together to #ProtectOurKids and let them know that #ParentsDemandAction!
Who knew children’s videos were so injurious to kids’ mental health?
I also think that there could be peer pressure associated with these videos. Some children think these videos are ‘cool’ and that, if their peers do not watch them, they are wimps. Parents will have to know how to combat that, too.
Churchmouse Campanologist 