Night’s candles are burnt out, and jocund day stands tiptoe on the misty mountain tops.
Spanish life is not always likeable but it is compellingly loveable.
- Christopher Howse: 'A Pilgrim in Spain'
Covid
The UK: See below the latest Overview from MD of Private Eye.
Cosas de España
The 2nd ‘article’ below is something I recorded when teaching as an 18-19 year old in the Seychelles islands. Reading it now after many years made me laugh again. At the same time, I have to confess it reminded me of Spanish politics. In which the Presidenta of the Madrid region can tell voters It's 'a choice between communism and liberty and accuse her opponent of being the candidate of the squatter, the seizure and the cobbles who wants all of his opponents flung into jail and an ETA environment out on the street. Adding that: If they accuse you of being a fascist, you must be doing something right. Or pretty far right in her case. Then there's the General Secretary of the even-further-right Vox party, who’s accused the same chap of abandoning the elderly in residences and trying to bring communism to Spain. In his latest book, Paul Preston claims the Spanish have always been betrayed by their politicians. It’s hard not to agree with this assessment.
Cousas de Galiza
Yesterday, a friend of mine, eating and drinking on a terrace, was reminded by a police officer that she needed to constantly raise and lower the mask she had around her neck. The officer then went on to fine the woman at the next able as he'd seen her move her mask from her arm to her face as he approached the place. Did I say semi-police state?
The UK
Britain's tabloid press is infamously bad. Scurrilous even. Not least of all the - phenomenally successful - Mailonline. This week - ever willing to prioritise bad news over good - it's given its readers all the side effects of the AZ vaccine. These, it claims, include:-
Losing teeth
Flatulence
Retirement
Taking up smoking
Insect bites
Bouts of crying
Excessive blinking, and
Fear of death
Who was it said: No one has ever lost money by underestimating the intelligence of the great masses of the plain people?
The UK and The EU and Covid
Well, knock me down and call me Mother . . President Macron has acknowledged that Europe faces a vaccine shortage because it lacked ambition and urgency in the race to find a remedy. 'We are perhaps too rational', he admitted. Speaking mainly of his compatriots, I guess. Or maybe just himself.
In the end, the EU stepped back from its threat to impose a ban on the export of vaccines to Britain. Nor did EU leaders endorse any of the other wilder ideas, such as seizing factories and waiving intellectual property rights. Rightly so. No possible good could come from deploying such powers - for the EU, for Britain or the world.
But a PR victory for the EU mandarins? At least on the Continent, if rather the opposite in the UK.
English
New word for me: To flense: To slice the skin or fat from a carcass, especially that of a whale.
Finally . . .
I have Spotify but with ads. Or should I say 'ad'. For, every few minutes some bloody UK government announcement comes on, starting with "UK nationals: Because the UK has left the EU . . " It's driving me nuts - even tho' I can (and do) end it by tapping a key on my laptop. I’m pretty sure it's meant to push me toward the premium service.
THE ARTICLES
1. An Overview: MD, Private Eye:
Bouncing Checks
It was obvious from the start the government's Covid "bounce back" loan scheme was open to fraud - but comments from the senior police officer responsible for doing something about it show the crime is set to go largely undetected, never mind punished.
With £45bn doled out on almost 2m loans with next to no checks but a 100% government guarantee, law enforcers know there's a problem. The Eye has learned that a sample seen by the British Business Bank which organised the loans showed that a third of applications - for amounts up to £50,000 or 25% of a business's turnover - were dodgy. Prior income was exaggerated or sometimes invented, with some claimants buying dormant companies to present as genuine businesses and using the cash to spend on luxuries.
Leading counter-fraud efforts is the City of London police, whose assistant commissioner Angela McLaren recently wrote a letter, headed "Bounce Back Loans" and seen by the Eye, to colleagues around the country. She pointed out that "a decision was taken at National Tasking Level (endorsed by the National Police Chiefs' Council and the Home Office) that Policing will not routinely investigate or prioritise public sector fraud investigation [ie Covid fraud] at the expense of core business".
Staff from a unit that looks at public sector fraud, the Essex-based National Investigation Service, have been seconded to the business department to look at "serious and organised crime threats linked to the loan schemes". But there are no more than 10 in the team, along with a similar number of civil servants. Few are actual police officers with powers of arrest. Real police officers may be called in but only, reiterated McLaren, in cases that "involve clear links to serious organised crime and core policing business". Other Covid fraud on taxpayers, often running into tens of thousands of pounds, is not on police radar.
Nor is it beeping on the banks' radars. They have little incentive to chase funds because a full government guarantee means loans can sit on their balance sheets for years without requiring them to declare losses as they would on other bad loans. Over time taxpayers will quietly cough up billions in guarantee payments.
The handful of arrests for bounce-back loan fraud - linked to obvious organised wide-scale scams - have generated useful publicity for Inspector Knacker and were used by the director-general of the National Economic Crime Centre, Graeme Biggar, as evidence to a committee of MPs that "we are on it". But the reality is that hundreds of thousands of fraudsters will escape scot-free, with none but the big-time gangsters held up as a deterrent to fiddling government support schemes when, inevitably, they come round again .
Sick Decisions
Low sick pay has contributed to Covid- l 9's spread in the UK, yet Mitie, a leading government contractor, has not paid sick pay on key Covid-19 and NHS contracts.
When firms don't pay company sick pay, workers get only minimal £95-a-week statutory sick pay (SSP). This discourages them, especially the low-paid, from responding to symptoms, testing or properly isolating. Mitie has an ongoing contract to run many Covid-19 test centres - in a deal worth £32m over just the first six months.
In January, Mitie's Inverness test centre was closed after a Covid-19 outbreak among staff. Scottish investigative website the Ferret spoke to workers who said nearly half the 40 staff were infected, they were not properly sent home to isolate, and cleaning was poor. Mitie rejected many of the charges but could not deny its workers only get the minimal £95 SSP.
Mitie has also run sick-pay-free cleaning and catering services in hospitals. It has 400 staff, for example, at West Hertfordshire Hospitals NHS Trust, where the GMB union's members campaigned last year to receive full wages while sick rather than SSP, because they were on the Covid-19 Frontline.
In April, the NHS trust agreed to pay Mitie extra to fund the scheme. But in October the sick pay scheme was stopped without notice and staff were put back on SSP as the pandemic's second wave hit. GMB members, reps and officials campaigned again, and this month the trust and Mitie reinstated full sick pay, backdated to cover those who had to take time off last year.
The Eye asked Mitie why it doesn't pay all staff full sick pay automatically. It said the terms of pay and sick pay "are set by our clients", adding that it has "regular and open dialogue" with them to explain "the benefits of paying full sick pay rather than statutory sick pay, particularly during the Cov id-19 pandemic".
Mille made £48m annual profit. according to its latest accounts, so it's not short of cash. But it is arguable that it and its clients - essentially the government - are jointly responsible for the sick pay crisis. The Department of Health and Social Care priced the outdoor testing centre contracts without sick pay included. In hospitals, NHS Improvement introduced guidance and payments underwriting sick pay for subcontracted staff last year - but payments stopped in October.
The GMB said that without its campaign in West Herts, staff would still not get sick pay, but it "applauded" West Herts NHS Trust for using its own cash to cover the reinstated sick pay as the government was no longer funding it.
Brussels Sprouts
Panicked by its botched vaccine procurement and the glacial pace of vaccination rollout across the EU, the European Commission just keeps digging.
After its decision to block a delivery of 250,000 AstraZeneca vaccines to Australia prompted angry reactions, the EU seems to have twigged that this kind of overt vaccine nationalism doesn't look good (though Boris Johnson seems to have got away with it, telling Ireland only last week it would have to wait until the UK was vaccinated before any · .~
UK supplies would come their way).
The commission's spin machine, meanwhile, has been tasked with pumping up the bloc's contribution to international vaccine supply, particularly the World Health Organization's Covax programme, which is supplying (albeit slowly) developing countries with vaccines.
The arrival of the first Covid vaccines in Uganda prompted the EU's diplomatic unit, the External Action Service, to proclaim: "Uganda receives 1st batch of Covid-19 vaccines thanks to #TeamEurope". "The arrival of the vaccines in Uganda is a significant moment and a concrete example of global solidarity in action," said Attilio Pacifici, the EU's man in Kampala. "After months of work, we are seeing the EU Vaccines Strategy bear fruit." This is, to put it mildly, over-egging the pudding.
The EU also claims that #TeamEurope "is the biggest donor to the Covax facility and has provided more than €2.2bn". But most of that has come from national governments, entirely independently of EU institutions - and US president Joe Biden has trumped them anyway by pledging $4bn to Covax,
The EU has even sought to claim credit for Israel's successful vaccination programme, with European Council president Charles Michel saying: "Israel has incontestable scientific capabilities. But it has neither developed nor produced any vaccines. Most vaccination technologies have been initiated or developed in Europe."
Still, the EU's vaccine supply boasts pale compared with Michel's sophistry about vaccine exports. After claiming, wrongly, that the UK and US had imposed "an outright ban on the export of vaccines or vaccine components produced on their territory", Michel denied that the EU had done any such thing: "The European Union, the region with the largest vaccine production capacity in the world, has simply put in place a system for controlling the export of doses produced in the EU."
Indeed, and that authorisation mechanism, which allows the EU to block any vaccine exports to a country deemed "non-vulnerable", was used by the commission and Italy to block Australia's AstraZeneca delivery on 4 March. "The facts do not lie," added Michel. How right he is.
2. Political life in the Seychelles a few decades ago . . .
Surrounded by such Arch Supporters as Mr Nicholson Stravens of Pointe Larue, Mr Norman Mancienne of Glacis, Mr Davidson Chang Him of Bel Ombre, Mr Ange Cadeau of Plaisance, Mrs Daisy Benoiton of English River, Mr Uranus Bibi of Victoria Market, Mr Philip Jumeau of Rochon, Mr Joseph Max of Benezet Street, Mr Leonnel Luch of Pointe Conan, Mr Antoine Samson of des Camells, Mr Francis Mein of St. Louis, Mr Eugene Marie of Roche Bois and many other local personalities, Messrs Mancham and Joubert had the crowd with them, for them and in love with them. This was too much for Africa-trained politician Philibert Loizeau who kept on interrupting the meeting with jungle-type audacity. Whereupon a lady spectator remarked: "La verité y offense son maitre".This was too much for Loizeau who threatened to slap the woman. This, of course, was poor political diplomacy for it caused many to remark - If already he behaving like this. what won't he do, given power, after Independence? Rifred Jumeau - with an air of gentlemanship seldom seen in the past - then came towards Loizeau and dragged him away. But the latter was not to behave. A few minutes later he emerged on the other side of the field - just a few yards from blushing Rene - determined to carry on with his cheap political monkey tricks of interrupting the truth. René called him aside and spoke to him but Loizeau showed no sign of discipline.
P. S. Gérard Hoarau was an exiled opposition leader from Seychelles and was head of the Mouvement Pour La Resistance (MPR) that sought the peaceful overthrow of the France-Albert René regime which had come to power on 5 June 1977 in a coup d'état. The opposition was based in London. He was assassinated on 29 November 1985 by an unidentified gunman, on the doorstep of his home London.