Who's doing the painting?

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The revelation that it is going to cost £900,000 to have an RAF aeroplane repainted in red, white and blue to boost the image of the PM when he travels abroad has raised more than a few eyebrows. There is a minor (?) question about how the PM is going to fly anywhere without having to go into quarantine for a fortnight when he returns (he surely wouldn’t want to be caught out breaking his own rules), although the story seems to suggest that the repainting job is going to take a while, so perhaps it won’t be finished until after the quarantine rules have been scrapped. It’s an expensive ego trip.

It made me wonder, though, about this story from late April about the emergency flight collecting PPE from China (picture from BBC story at the time). It was all arranged in a huge rush, allegedly, yet somehow the company managed to fit in the time and money to have the plane repainted in NHS livery before sending it out to China. Did that little PR exercise really cost them £900.000? Somehow, I doubt it. And I also doubt that it took very long to get the job done.

So, what’s the difference? I find myself wondering if this isn’t one of those very profitable outsourcing contracts which the MoD has negotiated under which the painting of aircraft is undertaken by a private company which charges an extortionate amount, completely legitimately under the terms of a poorly negotiated contract, all in the name of converting public cost into private profit. A bit like the £5,500 sink or the £884 chair, maybe. At £900,000, someone, somewhere must be making a lot of money.

Are all comparisons odious?

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The idea that comparisons are odious isn’t a new one; the first use of the phrase in English appears to date from around 1440. And as an admonition against comparing things which are unalike, or judging people against each other, it has a great deal of merit. People – governments, even – should as a rule be judged on their own merits, not by comparing them to others. So, when government ministers and their apologists complain about the UK’s coronavirus statistics being compared with those of other European countries, they have a point, especially so when they underline that not everyone is counting the same thing. They are also correct in pointing out that we don’t yet know the final outcomes, and things could still change, although their faith that that change will vindicate them looks, shall we say, ‘optimistic’ at the moment. But their point would be even more valid if they hadn’t been making the international comparisons themselves until very recently in an attempt to show they weren’t doing badly, and if we didn’t know that the country most guilty of under-reporting is probably the UK itself – the FT have estimated that the true number of deaths resulting from the pandemic is more like 54,000 than the officially-admitted 30,000. Totalitarian states like China aren’t the only ones who hide the truth behind carefully massaged figures.

However odious they may be, and whatever the difficulties in ensuring that the same things are being compared, comparisons do have a valuable role in determining whether, for instance, one approach has worked better than another. And given the advantage the UK had in that the pandemic struck after we could already see what had happened in Italy, there was every reason at the outset to suppose that a well-prepared and well-organised country (which is what the UK claimed to be) could and would avoid the scale of the disaster which hit Italy by learning from their experience. As it turned out, the country was neither well-prepared nor well-organised, and instead of mobilising immediately, the country’s leaders chose to believe that British exceptionalism could and would defeat the virus. We were well-prepared and well-organised only in the sense that our leaders ‘know’ that the UK is special and exceptional and that everything the UK does is, by definition, ‘world-class’, ‘world-leading’ and ‘the very best’. When their definition starts from the assumption that no-one can ever do any better, there is never going to be any predisposition to study what happens elsewhere and learn from it – they simply assume that other people are having a torrid time because not only are they not British but they didn’t come here for advice first. When reality doesn’t match their preconceptions, they simply redefine reality by denying the validity of any comparisons, hiding the truth, and doubling down on the lies and bluster.

Those who rely on the UK media for their news will be largely unaware of the incredulity with which most of the rest of the world has looked on as the UK stumbles from mistake to mistake. Wee Ginger Dug has compiled a few links here which show just how astounded people elsewhere have been by the performance of Johnson and his pals. Things are unlikely to change, though. Perhaps they really do believe their own propaganda, in the same way that Trump genuinely believes himself to be a genius. When you ‘know’ something to be true, mere evidence and facts are not going to change that. Some of us already know that jingoism is no more a cure for the virus than is snake oil, but the snake oil marketing business is far from being as dead as it should be.

The most successful family of nations

Tweet It’s a beautiful piece of rhetoric, and was deployed repeatedly in the ‘battle to save the union’ as some saw it.  But what exactly does “the world’s most successful family of nations” (or other formulations of the same phrase) mean?  Is it true?

Since we know (because they tell us) that those using the phrase are not jingoistic nationalists – indeed, they reject nationalism in all its forms – then the phrase has to be based on some facts and truths, surely.  I have two questions to ask in thinking about this.

The first is this: “how are they defining ‘success’?”.

They could, of course, be referring to the successes of the past; and in that context it’s worth noting that the same people seem to find it difficult not to mention the war.  The military history of this island state seems to be a key part of their identity, along with the empire on which the sun never set.  Less militaristically, they could of course be referring to the British rôle in the Industrial Revolution and the leading rôle of British scientists and inventors.  But, as the warning to investors always says, ‘past performance is no guide to the future’, and to be an argument for carrying on as we are, ‘success’ has to be defined in terms of what’s happening now, and what is likely to happen in the future, not what happened in the past.

Present ‘success’ would look very different from different perspectives.  I can certainly see how the top 1% would see the current state as being a huge success; they have after all done very well out of it.  But the hard statistics show that the UK is an immensely unequal country in terms of income and wealth.  And whilst there are all sorts of caveats to be placed around the definition of ‘poverty’, the government’s own figures suggest that up to 20% of the population are living below their own defined poverty line.  It would be an oversimplification to argue that ‘the union’ is responsible for that (and it affects parts of England as much as it affects Wales and Scotland) but the point is that the current state hardly looks like a ‘success’ from the perspective of those affected.

Of course, it doesn’t need to for the phrase to be true, because the phrase is a relative one, not an absolute one.  And that brings me to my second question: “In defining ‘most’ successful, with which other states is the comparison being made?”

Actually, I’m finding it difficult to find any direct comparators.  There’s Spain, of course – another family of nations, including Basques and Catalans, coerced into a single state.  Or France, with its Bretons and Basques, perhaps.  I’m not sure that they’re direct comparators, but I suppose one could argue that Spain is less economically successful than the UK, even if it would be harder to argue the same in the case of France.  Perhaps the former Yugoslavia is another example.  The bloody and bitter nature of the breakup was a tragedy, but the states which emerged from the wreckage actually seem to be doing rather better than their former state.  It’s a case where the sum of the parts really does look greater than the former whole – not a comparison which helps the unionist cause a great deal.

It’s possible that there simply are no fair and direct comparisons.  That would mean that I’d have to accept that the phrase is true, and an accurate description.  After all, the only entry in any category is bound to be the most successful.  It’s equally true of course that the only entry in any category is also bound to be the least successful…