Has The UK Legalised Abortion On Demand Up To Birth? The Answer is Darker Than You Think

Tonia Antoniazzi’s NC1 Amendment to the Crime and Policing Bill, carried by a majority of 242,  after less than an hour of parliamentary debate, sets off a legal hand grenade at the heart of UK Abortion Legislation that may go far beyond its intended purpose…or was that the plan all along?

The Trojan Horse of the 1967 Abortion Act

The history of abortion law in the UK is complex and nuanced. Understanding how it fits together is crucial to understanding why the new amendment is so problematic.

By default, Abortion is criminal in the UK, under the Offences Against the Person Act 1861. And the offence is a serious one – carrying up to life imprisonment.

For the most part, that was the situation until the Abortion Act of 1967. In the early 1960s, it was estimated that less than 10,000 abortions a year were taking place illegally in the UK.

The stated aim of the legislation in 1967 was to make those 10,000 abortions safer for the women and legal. That was the focus of most of the debate in parliament about the act at the time.

To that end, the wording of the act is actually, on the face of it, quite restrictive. The relevant section is reproduced in full below:

• (1)Subject to the provisions of this section, a person shall not be guilty of an offence under the law relating to abortion when a pregnancy is terminated by a registered medical practitioner if two registered medical practitioners are of the opinion, formed in good faith—
• (a)that the pregnancy has not exceeded its twenty-fourth week and that the continuance of the pregnancy would involve risk, greater than if the pregnancy were terminated, of injury to the physical or mental health of the pregnant woman or any existing children of her family; or
• (b)that the termination is necessary to prevent grave permanent injury to the physical or mental health of the pregnant woman; or
• (c)that the continuance of the pregnancy would involve risk to the life of the pregnant woman, greater than if the pregnancy were terminated; or
• (d)that there is a substantial risk that if the child were born it would suffer from such physical or mental abnormalities as to be seriously handicapped

It’s important to notice this act gives a woman no “right” to an abortion at all in a legal sense. It gives, if anything, a “right” to a doctor to perform one, when they deem it medically reasonable within the limitations given above.

In practice, however, this seemingly quite restrictive wording allowed for abortion on demand up to 24 weeks. Why? Because the terminology of section (a) was vague enough to allow two medical practitioners of an abortion favouring mindset to conclude that any pregnancy continuing to birth might be worse for the mental health of a woman than ending it. The Act only requires that “Two medical practitioners form an opinion in good faith”, it doesn’t even necessarily need to be proven true.

And therefore, provided two medical practitioners are ideologically of the opinion that abortion is better for a woman’s mental health than an an unplanned birth, it is available to women on demand up to 24 weeks under clause (a) of the 1967 Abortion Act.

The year after the Act, 25,000 abortions were performed. By 1971, the number was over 100,000 and by the mid 1970s, consistently hitting 170,000 a year.

The wider impacts of that, on society, on its demographics, on its ethics, and on the economy, were simply never discussed or debated when the 1967 act was passed. The tone of the debate was primarily about the relatively small number (less than 10,000 a year) of “back street” abortions. The innocuous wording of the act masked the fact that, within a decade, 1 in 5 pregnancies would end in abortion.

This would have profound social consequences. It contributed to the aging population, it contributed to the increased need for immigration to maintain the UK economy, 20 years down the line. It’s no coincidence that, at the exact point the missing “Abortion generation” should have been becoming economically active adults in the 1990s, the UK turned to mass immigration to solve the economic malaise of an aging population. This, in turn, has contributed to profound cultural changes in the UK.

Now, some might consider these changes positive, but, by any stretch of the imagination, they are changes vastly beyond the original scope of the discussion that took place over the Abortion Act when it passed through the House of Commons.

What was simply not discussed was the enormous cumulative effect, all over the country, of “two medical practitioners forming an opinion in good faith”: By the time the next decade was out, nearly 2 million less British citizens would have been born.

And yet it was very likely always the intent of those who brought in the 1967 Abortion Act to create abortion on demand up to 24 weeks. However, it was brought about in a way which allowed it smooth passage through parliament, and with less opposition than if its true intent had been overtly stated.

The second Trojan Horse of Tonia Antoniazzi’s NC1 Amendment to the Crime and Policing Bill

The reason for outlining the history of the 1967 Abortion Act in this way is because the lesson learned from history is that changes to the abortion law often go beyond their (supposedly) intended consequences.

Here is the wording as it now appears in the Crime and Policing Bill:

PART 15 ABORTION Removal of women from the criminal law related to abortion For the purposes of the law related to abortion, including sections 58 and 59 of the Offences Against the Person Act 1861 and the Infant Life (Preservation) Act 1929, no offence is committed by a woman acting in relation to her own pregnancy.

The implication, we are told, is simply that a woman not be prosecuted for her own termination were she to attempt her own abortion. It is not supposed to affect the actions of medical professionals in regards to the 1967 act.

The stated reason for this is to stop a woman who loses a pregnancy late having to undergo the trauma of police investigation. That is the whole stated aim that Tonia Antoniazzi has given for the bill.

Except, there are problems with this: If a woman turned up with a dead newborn baby of post 24 weeks gestation and stated she had procured her own abortion, this would still need to be investigated by the police, because while abortion may have been decriminalised, infanticide has not. It would not be possible without investigation to exclude the latter. Forensic pathology of the fetus would be required. The police would have to collect evidence and take statements from anyone involved – including the woman.

Antoniazzi tweeted, on 29th May 2025 the following:

It is dystopian that women are facing criminal investigations for seeking medical care at the most desperate moments of their lives. This has got to end. That’s why I tabled NC1 – it’s time for Parliament to support this change

But wait? What her tweet says is completely different to what her amendment claims to achieve?

“Seeking medical care”? The amendment she tabled appears to just simply stop women who carry out their own DIY abortion, with, perhaps, drugs they have procured off the internet, being prosecuted for it.

So this is very curious. On the one hand, a woman carrying out her own private abortion after 24 weeks would still be investigated by the police for infanticide, so what Antoniazzi said about her amendment inside the House of Commons doesn’t make sense.

On the other hand, what she wrote in her tweet outside the house of commons implies her amendment does something totally different altogether, and applies to women “seeking medical care”?

What on earth is going on here?

Here’s what I think is happening:

Antoniazzi knows that her amendment exploits a loophole in the law, and does, in fact, fully legalise all abortion up to term, on demand.

Why? For this we need to consider the wording of the 1967 Abortion Act again. It legalises abortion under several different sets of circumstances. Typically, most abortions in the UK are conducted under (a) – the mental health clause that allows for abortion on demand, for all practical purposes, before 24 weeks.

However, under the 1967 Abortion Act, abortion has always been legal under the other conditions (b) (c) and (d) up until full term – but these would be extraordinarily rare to apply in practice.

However, consider these terms in the light of a woman attempting her own DIY abortion now no longer being criminal:

• (b)The termination is necessary to prevent grave permanent injury to the physical or mental health of the pregnant woman
• (c)The continuance of the pregnancy would involve risk to the life of the pregnant woman, greater than if the pregnancy were terminated
• (d)There is a substantial risk that if the child were born it would suffer from such physical or mental abnormalities as to be seriously handicapped

Clearly, all of these would apply to a woman who claimed she was about to attempt her own DIY abortion at home. And remember, all that is required is for “two medical practitioners to form the opinion in good faith”. None of these things to be proved beyond reasonable doubt, or to a point of certainty.

Antoniazzi’s tweet reveals how she actually now expects the law to work in practice:

A woman at any point of a pregnancy, even after 24 weeks, decides she wants an abortion for any reason. She will simply tell the gynaecologist she wants an abortion. He might ask her if she intends to procure her own abortion with pills bought off the internet or a coat hanger, or something similar. She says “yes”. She can say “yes” without fear because she is no longer suggesting anything illegal.

At this point, the abortionist can now proceed with a medical abortion at any point of pregnancy, since he can simply take her at her word in “good faith”, and clearly a professional medical abortion would reduce both the risk of grave permanent injury to the physical or mental health of the pregnant woman, and indeed, reduce the risk of a handicapped child being born due to the result of a failed attempt at a DIY home abortion.

Previous to this law change, the correct response of the doctor would have been to inform either police or social services or both, because the woman had just implied intent to carry out a serious criminal offence, but this is no longer the case.

Thus, under almost no circumstances that I can conceive of, would an abortionist now not be able to offer a woman an abortion on demand up to term.

And of course, this makes perfect sense: Does anyone really imagine that Antoniazzi’s intention was that a woman who is 35 weeks pregnant with a healthy pregnancy be turned away by a doctor from having an abortion, but free to then go away and attempt to carry one out herself? Of course not. Her idea is, as her tweet suggests, that she will be able to “seek medical care” and then be offered termination under any circumstances.

This also explains why she isn’t worried about the police still having to investigate the woman for procuring her own abortion with regards to excluding the possibility of infanticide: Because she’s not picturing women having their own self-induced abortions at 25, 30, or 35 or even 40 weeks at all. She’s picturing them happening as legal procedures under section (b)0, (c )and (d) of the 1967 abortion act, and circumventing the 24 week limit of section (a).

Thus, the law achieves, in a round about way, an almost certain route to abortion on demand, up to term in the UK. This is Antoniazzi’s intent, and it’s the only conclusion that actually makes sense out of her comments about police investigation, and her tweet regarding “seeking medical care”. Once you understand this, all the curious anomalies and seeming oversights of her amendment makes perfect sense.

Antoniazzi is worthy of a form of grudging respect for understanding the law, the parliamentary system, and how to manipulate it. There is certainly a kind of evil genius to her scheme. I am willing to bet at least 25% of those who voted for this in the House of Commons don’t really have any idea what they have just done.

A majority of British people find this horrific. A majority do not want this. This was not in any party manifesto. This wasn’t even what was discussed in the House of Commons. Yet, this is what has almost certainly just happened

The Third Trojan Horse – The Real Intention

The question that you may be wondering is why?

After all, in the rare circumstances of serious medical complications to either mother or fetus, abortion beyond the 24 week limit was already legal. There was no good reason in the UK for any woman to have to procure a very late abortion beyond 24 weeks herself for any medical reason. So why was Atoniazzi and others of her ilk so desperate to have this amendment on the books?

Why does a certain segment of the left get so zealous about the idea that a woman must have total right to abortion on demand up to the last second of her pregnancy, and that no fetus must ever be afforded any amount of human rights?

The true reason is darker than you might think.

If the 1967 Act was the first trojan horse – appearing to offer limited legalisation of abortion while in fact making it mainstream, and Antoniazzi’s amendment is the second, appearing to stop police investigation of late abortions, while in fact legalising them up to term, both actually serve towards a third, greater trojan horse.

That is the greatest part of the leftist political project in the UK – what C.S. Lewis called “The Abolition of Man”.

Why is it so crucial that no fetus have a right to life in the womb? Why is it so crucial that any woman should have the right to end its life up until the moment of birth?

The real reason is in two conflicting views of what a human being actually is.

On the first, old, traditional view, a human being is a soul created by God. And the value of that human being rests in its intrinsic value given to him or her by God Himself. The value of a human being doesn’t depend on what anyone else thinks of that human, and is absolute, and objective.

On that view – the value of a human life starts at the first point its individual human identity can be discerned – in the womb, and it remains with that human being until the last moment that the individual human’s identity persists: Death – when God “takes back” the soul from the invidivudal.

Now, it’s important to remember that even many atheists still hold to this view of what a human is. They may have dispensed with (at least on the surface) belief in the existence of God, but they have not dispensed with belief in the human soul as something of a supernatural entity, and therefore the unique sacred nature of each human being.

However, the leftist view of a human is very different: Based not on what it is but what it does – primarily as a component in the leftist machine of “society”. Each human is merely a cog enabling the wheels of the machine to turn. And its value, even to the point of its recognition of existence, lies only in its function to the state.

Should you be wondering why this should be: On the traditional view, the human being is the eternal thing, and the society is the temporary thing. A human soul, once created, persists eternally, even after death, in the afterlife. Meanwhile, even the greatest civilisations and societies will eventually crumble into the dust. On the other hand, on the modern leftist view, the human being is merely temporary, while the society may persist for generations, centuries, or even millennia.

On such a view, a human being is thus not a human being at all if society doesn’t want it, has no purpose for it, and it serves no function.

At the beginning of life – this means, in the womb, a human fetus is merely a fetus – not a human being. It has no rights, because it has no societal function, and if it is not wanted by its mother or society, it therefore simply does not exist as a human being at all. On the other hand, if it is “wanted”, then it may be allowed a sort of probationary status of recognition until its birth.

The great conceit of this view is to think that it is within the gift of the state to decide when human rights begin, and, in fact, to decide when a human being “begins”.

One state has gone further than most in this: Canada. It has fully and explicitly decriminalised all abortion on the grounds that a fetus is simply not a human being. It has stated this explicitly in its law:

 Section 223(1) of the Criminal Code states: “A child becomes a human being when it has completely proceeded, in a living state, from the body of its mother”.

Now, quite apart from whether you agree with the timing when they say a human being begins, notice that, under this law who “creates” a human being? God? No. The state. You become a human being when the state, in its law, says you do. (If you dislike the religious term “God” you might want to substitute it for “nature” if you want. The answer is still “no”).

What if the state decided to change the wording to say an entity became a human being, not when it had “completely proceeded from the body of its mother” but “On its second birthday”. Under such a provision, any child under two would literally not exist as a “human being” simply because the state says so. Why? Because the law says they don’t. A human being is simply whatever the state decrees it is by fiat. This is both unbelievably absurd and unbelievably sinister.

In free democratic states, our laws are typically a combination of specific “statute” laws, but also something called “common law”. This is simply law held to be common to all people at all places at all times. It is what we might call “common knowledge”. Statute laws are useful for decreeing a law which is one way, but could quite easily be another. Statute laws typically define things which are often somewhat arbitrary: A Statute law might make a speed limit forty miles an hour on a particular road, but it could just have easily have been thirty. The very idea of defining what a human being is by statute, rather than by common law, is actually quite obscene.

The reason this is so obscene, of course, is that what the state gives, the state can take away. If the state decides when someone becomes a human being, then they can simply decide they stop being a human being as well.

And that brings us to the next step in the leftist master plan: Assisted Dying.

While the UK is not pursuing this while agenda agenda as brazenly as Canada, it is achieving the same ends by different means.

While Tonia Antoniazzi is busy allowing the state to define where humanity begins, Kim Leadbeater’s assisted dying bill is shortly going to allow the state to define where human beings end. No long does God, (or, if you prefer, “nature”) determine when you being to exist with your conception, and when you cease to exist with your death. You begin to exist and you cease to exist when the state says you do.

And of course, just like Antoniazzi’s bill is dressed up in such a way as to hide its true intent, so is the Leadbeater assisted dying bill. The bill is absurd and makes no sense on its own legal terms. Most doctors find it incomprehensible in its intent or implementation. This is, I suspect, intentional. It is there to act as a key in a lock. The door it opens is state control over death, just as Antoniazzi’s amendment establishes state control over the creation of life. Once the door is unlocked, it can be kicked open at a later date.

In some senses, a lot of this might be dismissed as academic. There almost certainly is going to be a huge number of women suddenly wanting terminations at 35 weeks for healthy pregnancies. But there will be some, maybe just a tiny handful. They have from an leftist ideological point of view, almost ritualistic symbolic significance – asserting that the state has the right to define what a human being is, and what a human being isn’t.

History is full of dark lessons on what states can do once they have established that power.

Why “Freedom Day” May Still Make Sense

COVID19 new cases are pushing past 50,000 a day. We are clearly in the midst of a “Third wave”. How can “freedom day”, tomorrow, lifting further restrictions, possibly make sense? Like most things about COVID19, the answer is complex.

The average man in the street doesn’t have much of an opinion on particle physics, or proteomics, or the relative merits of using ICSI in IVF treatment. All these things are, in their own field, important areas of study and research, but the general public are largely unaware of them. Different experts will have different opinions within their field, debates will rage, and most people who really know what they are talking about in such fields will be happy to say “there is no consensus on this”.

Science is by it’s nature heavily esoteric. There are very few questions in science which are truly “settled” and clear cut. However, every now and then, an esoteric, complex bit of science crosses over out of the world of academia into the mainstream, to the point where everyone from the Chief Medical Officer to your local taxi driver will have their opinion on it. Invariably the correct response to most questions is “It’s a bit more more complex than that…” but that doesn’t play well on the 6 o’ clock news. Thus, a complex topic becomes boiled down into polarised “Pro/Anti” view points. It’s happened with Climate Change, it’s happened with COVID 19.

Thus, the question has become “Anti-lockdown vs Pro-lockdown” or “Pro mask vs anti-mask”, and the answers are always more nuanced than this.

The developing view is that “stupid Boris Johnson” is recklessly persuing “freedom day” even though we are in the midst of a third wave. How very dare he?

Well, the reality is continuing with the current plan may very well still make sense. It might be Johnson is bloody-mindedly pursuing it stupidly, but that doesn’t necessarily mean it’s actually the wrong thing to do. And here’s two reasons why:

Reason One: Pragmatic Assessment of Risk

Last time we crossed the threshold of 50,000 cases a day was in late December 2020. At that time the number of deaths a day was around 900. At this point, on crossing 50,000 cases a day, the number of deaths per day is around 40.

This is the result of vaccination of course. For at least 2 reasons: Firstly, vaccinated people get milder illness when they get COVID, and second, we vaccinated those with the highest probability of mortality from COVID if they caught it, so the cases are now occuring mostly in the remaining unvaccinated population.

If nothing else, slashing the death rate of the virus by a factor of 10 should have an impact on our risk assessment.

The risk assessment of COVID is the difficult question which no one wants to have: In many years, prior to 2019, we had “bad flu seasons” when, sadly, there would be 40,000 or 50,000 excess flu deaths. This was simply taken to be a fact of life. No masks, no lockdowns. There are deaths on UK roads every year – we still have cars. We have to ask ourselves, what level of mortality risk from covid will validate a return to normal life, because it’s never going to be “zero”.

The mortality risk of covid is, amazingly, still somewhat contentious, and a single figure doesn’t tell you very much, as it is much higher for at-risk groups and much lower for people in low risk groups, but we are probably talking about an overall mortality in low single figure percentages overall.

It should be noted this could be a lot worse. COVID19 is similar to another virus called SARS which emerged in the early 2000s. That had a mortality rate of anywhere between 15 and up to 50%. Spanish Flu in 1918 had a mortality rate perhaps as high as 20%, and notably, this was highest amongst 20 to 40 year olds, rather than the elderly. A few hundred years ago it’s estimated up to half the population of England died of the black death.

The potential exists, in the next 10 to 20 years, for another new coronavirus or influenza virus to emerge which has a mortality rate significantly higher than covid19. Serious questions have to be had about what level of risk is tolerable to a society. And if we go “all in” on risk aversion for COVID19 what will we do when COVID19’s nastier successor eventually comes along?

Therefore, we have to factor in the fact that vaccination has significantly taken the “sting” out of COVID’s mortality rate in determining what sort of response is appropriate.

Reason Two: Management of Herd Immunity

Ah, that dreaded phrase “herd immunity”. Referencing back to my first part of this article, herd immunity is a complex and nuanced concept, reduced to “let everyone catch it” by the tabloid press.

The issue I’m referring to is not actually just covid19 herd immunity. It’s immunity to countless other viruses. Let’s talk about that first, and then come the question of COVID19 immunity specifically afterward:

Hospitals across the country are currently reporting outbreaks of RSV, a virus which causes respiratory illness in babies and toddlers primarily. It’s often mild, but occasionally severe and even life threatening. This was, previously, almost exclusively a winter disease. Indeed, paediatrics would look out for the first case of RSV as heralding the onset of winter. Now we are seeing cases in the summer.

Why? The answer is simply that months of social isolation and lockdown have thrown all of our natural immunity out of whack.

When two human beings meet, shake hands, hug or kiss, they almost always are going to be exchanging some bacteria and some viruses. They won’t even know. Their immune systems will simply brush this off. However, in the process of doing the “brushing off” your immune system gets “reminded” of those viruses and bacteria.

Moreover, your immune system gets an “update” to new variants. Imagine it like the virus checker on your computer: You install it, but you have to download updates regularly to keep it up to speed with new variants.

Your immune system is similar. You have immunity to Virus A, which evolves into Virus B and then Virus B evolves into Virus C. Now, if you have immunity to Virus A, and then come into contact with B, it may be similar enough to A that your immune system barely notices it. You may be asymptomatic, or get a very mild illness. However, you’ve now “patched” your immune system to bring it up to date. When you subsequently run into C, the same thing happens.

But lets suppose you miss out on catching “B” and instead, you go from having immunity to A to coming into contact with “C”. Your immune system “software” is out of date. You have far less immunity to C and get more sick as a result.

This is the true meaning of herd immunity: It’s the constant interaction of human beings asymptomatically, or near asymptomatically swapping bacteria and viruses all the time and thus “updating” each others immune systems.

This has been known about for years: It’s well known for example that unreached tribes with no contact with the outside world can be completely wiped out by coming into contact with a healthy westerner, who dumps a load of new viruses and bacteria onto them, and is one of the key arguments for avoiding contact with uncontacted tribes.

At a more every day level, everyone has heard of “freshers flu” where students come from all over the country to a new university, and swap viruses from different parts of the country which they had not been previously exposed to. Likewise, parents will know children seem most likely to pick up a bug shortly after going back to school after a long break.

We have never in history embarked on such an extended experiment in playing with our pre-existing herd immunity as COVID19 lockdowns have inflicted on us. We simply do not know what the impact of this will be. While it’s unlikely to be quite as dramatic as wiping us all out like an unreached amazonian tribe, there are certainly potential concerns.

It should be said what I have described is somewhat controversial in epidemiology, simply because the degree to which the sort of effect I described plays out in reality has always been very hard to study in the past. It wasn’t possible to isolate large numbers of people to see how it would impact their immunity – until the entire population was signed up to a epidemiological experiment called “covid 19 lock down”. This cannot be stressed enough: Lockdowns are effectively an epidemiological experiment being played out.

So now let’s talk about why lockdown lifting now is sensible specifically from a COVID19 point of view.

Covid 19 is not going away. Ever. Let’s just get that into our heads at this point. It will hopefully fade into being less significant, but, much like flu, it will bubble away in the background, and occasionally rear up into waves of more severe illness.

Therefore, at this point, we have to be thinking about long term strategy.

It was absolutely the right thing to vaccinate as many people as possible as quickly as possible when the vaccines became available, but, given COVID19 is likely to end up being a predominantly winter illness, once it settles down into an annual pattern, we vaccinated the most vulnerable at exactly the wrong point from a long term planning point of view: We rolled out vaccination at the back end of the winter of 2020/2021.

Typically, when vaccinating for flu, for example, we do it in the Autumn to make sure people’s immune systems are well prepped for the winter.

There is a real concern that the immunity of those vaccinated early will be fading by the time a winter covid wave hits.

Here’s the thing: If you accept that it’s a certainty you are going to get covid at some point, and the only choice is “when”, then your best bet is getting it while you still have strong immunity from your vaccine. It’s not feasible we are going to get around to giving everyone a third booster shot before the winter, so, here’s the thing: There’s actually an argument for saying if you were vaccinated in early 2021, having some covid exposure over the summer of 2021 while your immunity is still strong is safer than keeping you locked away until winter 2021 and then being exposed when your vaccine immunity from early 2021 is fading.

I am in no way advocating, as individuals, hunting out covid 19 exposure while your immunity is strong, but at the level of national risk management and pandemic planning, it’s surely a factor that needs to be considered. It remains my view that lockdown measures were held in place far too long during the summer of 2020. We had negligible cases through the summer of 2020, but all that meant was we loaded up our cases going into the winter. The stated aim of lockdown measures has never been to reduce total number of cases but to spread out case load. We failed to do this. Last year, hospitals stood empty over the summer, only to be utterly inundated during the the subsequent winter.

We will hopefully learn from this for summer 2021. Higher cases numbers through August-October will hopefully help see off a massive spike in winter, which will actually help hospitals to cope better when they face the dual threat of COVID19 with winter flu.

Going forward, COVID19 variants will continue to emerge. Vaccines are crucial to our immunity, but the fact is that vaccines will be unlikely to keep up with every single emerging variant. However, catching a variant when you are already vaccinated against the original type should lead to a) more mild illness and b) Giving your immune system an “update” to the latest variant as previously discussed. This combination approach of natural and vaccination immunity is going to be part of how society copes with covid 19 going forward for the long term.

It will not have a zero mortality rate. Just as flu has never had zero mortality rate.

Thus, on balance, there is still an argument to be made for continuing to lift lockdown measures at this point. As I said at the start though, it’s nuanced: What would change the picture is genuine concern of hospitals being overwhelmed with cases. However, at the time of writing hospitalisations are around 500 a day, with 50,000 cases in the community, while in December 2020, when cases hit 50,000 a day, the hospitalisation rate was 5 times that – at 2,500 a day. Which suggests the NHS really should be able to cope with the influx at this point.

These two reasons are far from the whole story. Economic, psycho-social and other medical impacts of ongoing restrictions all need to be factored in. Ultimately the point is this: Lockdowns will not eradicate covid19. It will remain. At the point where we have vaccinated virtually all the vulnerable, we have now done as much as we possibly can to mitigate the risk.

New variants and changing data may change the picture because they may change the risk profile. None of this is set in stone, but, at this point in time, the argument for lifting restrictions, remains, in my view, valid.

Football Racism And The Response

It is saddening and frustrating that the players who missed penalties for England suffered racial abuse online. The desire that “something must be done” is an easy one to understand. It comes from an understandable moral imperative: Racism appauls us, and we want to make a moral stand. The problem is, that may be exactly the wrong thing to do if you are interested in actually reducing racial abuse and here’s why.

As already stated above, racism is always a horrible and evil thing. No sane, decent person condones it. No one wants it to continue. The question is, what behaviours and responses are actually likely to be helpful, and what might potentially make it worse?

To understand that, we need to look at this, not as a moral problem, but a psychological and data problem.

First, we should look at what is good news: Despite all of the media coverage, the amount of racial abuse is,as a percentage of society, minimal. The data on the online social media abuse of players following the Euro 2020 final is as follows:

1,913 social media posts have been tagged as potentially abusive

167 were considered “high risk” abuse.

(Source: BBC quoting the PFA)

Now, nearly 2000 abusive posts is horrible. It sounds like “a lot”. But “A lot” only means something in context.

Here, the context is people watching the Euro 2020 final.

And that number is huge. Incomprehensibly huge. Full data is not yet in for the 2020 final, but we can expect it to be comparable to the Euro 2016 final, which was watched by 600 million people world wide.

Even if we take the higher number of “potentially” abusive posts, rather than the lower “high risk” ones, we should pay attention to the following conclusion:

0.00032% of people who watched the final racially abused the players online after.

99.99968% of people who watched the final did not racially abuse the players online afterwards.

Percentages don’t mean a lot to people, a visual image may help:

Lets imagine the 600,000,000 people who watched the cup final each being represented by a grain of rice.

You would have about eight tonnes of rice. Enough to completely fill the back of a small lorry.

Imagine opening the back door of the lorry, and letting the avalanche of rice grains pour out.

Now imagine reaching down and taking a one single handful. – That would be about 2000 grains.

That’s the proportion of people who racially abused the players online.

That’s the level of abuse we are talking about here.

Here’s what I’m not saying: I’m not saying the abuse doesn’t matter because its’ a small proportion of the total. It matters. It absolutely matters. Where that abuse reaches a legal threshold to do so, the police should track down and prosecute it. It matters for social media companies to take steps to contain and remove it.

The point is, what sort of response is appropriate from society as a whole.

The response we are seeing basically is taking the approach of assuming that somehow, society as a whole needs to take more social responsibility around racism to deal with this issue. Taking the knee etc, is often described as being about “raising awareness” or “showing solidarity”. There is also a sense in which that gesture is supposed to be about collective responsibility, a sort of admission, at a collective level, that society (which after all only means “all of us”) is morally responsible for the racism of the few.

The hope, it is assumed, is that if society gets slightly better, slightly nicer, slightly kinder, the racial abuse will stop.

Except that the data says 99.999% of society is not responsible. 0.00032% of society is.

And you cannot expect to reach 0.00032% of society the same way you would reach the other 99.99968%

The temptation is to think that people carrying out the abuse are normal. However, by statistical definition, they are abnormal. You cannot assume that they think the way you or I do. You cannot assume that a sense of social shame, or guilt, or a sense of moral responsibility are going to change their behaviour.

This is not the case. It’s very likely that there is a sub-section of society for whom the “moral lecturing” of taking the knee increases their chance of behaving in a socially destructive or offensive way out of oppositional defiance to social norms.

It’s almost impossible to see how you could suppress that paradoxical, counter-intuitive behaviour to any lower than 0.00032% of the population.

Indeed, that percentage is already remarkably low. If you were to ask “What percentage of the population are likely to behave in a deliberately antagonistic manner counter to social norms?”, a reasonable answer would be to consider the percentage that have an anti-social personality disorder. The prevalence of anti-social personality disorder in society is estimated at 2 to 3% of the population. A statistic which seems unbelievably high to me, but that’s what the data says.

If that’s the case, the fact is that the level of online abuse, even amongst people with anti-social personality disorder is, almost astonishingly, at most, only 0.1% .

But it also shows how the wrong response could make things worse rather than better . Because here’s the thing: Amongst that segment of society, the more socially taboo something is, the more “wrong” it is, the more likely, due to oppositional defiant traits in their behaviour, they are to react in a negative manner and their behaviour will become worse not better. That’s not going to be every person with an anti-social personality disorder, but it’s certainly going to be more than 0.00032% of the population.

So here’s the thing: At the level of abuse currently indicated by the data, I would suggest there is a very good argument for saying if you want to focus on actual results, the best response is to deny the online abuse any publicity. Essentially, get twitter to remove the offensive tweets, prosecute those which are worthy of prosecution, and then, as far as possible, ignore it.

Online racists are trolls: Do not feed the troll.

The danger of pursuing the current approach is actually driving a significant proportion of the population – potentially 2 or 3% of the population, which is about 10,000 times more than the current level, towards being more polarised and more racist and more abusive.

This seems to me an interpretation of the available data which is at least worth consideration in the ongoing conversation about how we fight racism. We make this consideration in other contexts. For example, during the Euro 2020 final, there was a streaker on the pitch. The camera cut away. The commentators avoided direct comment on it. If you weren’t paying close attention you may not have even noticed it. Why? Because it is well understood that increasing the publicity encourages that kind of behaviour. Thus, protocols are in place with sports broadcasters to deliberately avoid any attention on pitch invaders. My argument is that online racism is at a level of rarity where a similar form of pragmatism is potentially the appropriate response.

The vast majority of people who are posting messages of support on Marcus Rashford’s mural, or taking the knee, or post anti-racist posts on Facebook, are simply decent people acting out of compassion. But they are probably doing so under the impression of the online racism being at a vastly higher level of prevalence than it in fact is, based on the saturation media coverage which they have seen.

However, one might wonder whether all of those who are providing that coverage are seeking to give the online racism the maximum amount of publicity are actually wanting to reduce the amount of racism, or are actually seeking to drive the perception of it being a much larger scale problem, creating political and social polarisation in order to further their political agenda – and simply don’t care that they may actually increase the amount of racism suffered by those from ethnic minorities along the way?

Brexit COVID19 Vaccine Programme Saving Over 650 Lives a Week

Let’s start with a a truly stunning graph from ourworldindata.org

Within the EU bloc, big nations like Germany, Italy, Spain etc are only hovering just above the average EU level.

The UK has vaccinated 10.38 people per 100 as of the last plotted date (25th Jan). The EU had vaccinated just 1.97 per 100 at the same point in time.

To translate that into something more meaningful, if the UK were only performing at the EU average rate, we would have vaccinated 5.6million less people, at this point than we, in fact, have.

8617 people died of COVID19 in the UK in the last 7 days.

That’s something in the order of 11.5 people out of every 100,000 of the UK population.

Or, to make it more relevant, around 650 out of every 5.6million.

In simple terms, at this moment in time, 650 deaths per week from COVID19 have been prevented in that cohort of 5.6million people who wouldn’t have been vaccinated if we were running vaccination at, or around, the EU average rate, which is presumably where we would be, were we still in the EU.

Now, there are some caveats to that. Technically, some of those people currently vaccinated won’t yet have full immunity because they have had their vaccination in the last 14 to 21 days. Some might argue that makes the number lower.

However, the counter to that is two fold: Firstly, once you are immune, you are being protected every week going forward, not just for one week, so that 650/week is cumulative. Secondly, we aren’t vaccinating randomly. We are vaccinating those at the highest risk of dying of COVID19, so arguably, we are going to save many many more lives than we would calculate from a raw national average.

An analysis at a single point on the graph is very crude. A more detailed mathematical analysis of the areas under the graphs would be better, with a detailed analysis taking into account the changing virus infection rates, the specific demographics of the vaccinated population, and the delay before vaccine achieves efficacy. However, the point here is simply a “back of an envelope” attempt to get a sense of the order of magnitude, and to more to make a general point: This slowness to vaccinate in the EU is going to cost an actual number of real lives.

And these delays the EU vaccine programme are arising basically because of all the things that Brexiteers argued we should leave the EU for: Sluggish central control with over regulation, getting bogged down in regional disputes within the Union, getting concerned about protectionist politics of which vaccine to buy (Apparently there was some degree of reluctance to buy in American backed Pfizer vaccine over European versons), and the basic problem of trying to get a behemoth organisation to react rapidly to a crisis event.

Over in the USA, Joe Biden is about to discover the same problem. His team have churlishly stated that there was “No plan” for vaccination in the USA when he took office.

That seems odd, seeing as, on the day of his Inauguration, the USA had vaccinated 5.3% of its population – double the EU rate. Impressive to manage that with “no plan”, surely?

What they mean is there was no federal plan, because Trump had left a lot of the management of the vaccine roll out to the individual states, rather than imposing federal control. There is actually great wisdom in this approach, and it is why the USA, to this point, has not suffered the same problem with vaccine roll out that the EU has.

This is quietly demonstrated in the small-text of Biden’s vaccine policy. He has loudly announced they will “Vaccinate 100 million in the first 100 days”. That’s around 1 million vaccines a day then.

They have stated this is some great leap forward from the Trump vaccination programme which was giving only half a million a day, on average. However, “average” is a meaningless statistic when the vaccine programme was, by its nature, starting from zero. The question is how many people were vaccinated on the last day of the Trump administration? The answer (whisper it quietly if you’re in the Biden administration) is 984,600. Virtually one million in a day.

So Joe Biden’s promise to vaccinate “100 million in 100 days” represents virtually zero improvement on the vaccination rate compared to where the Trump vaccination programme had got to as of the day of handover. Not something a single mainstream media news outlet has picked up on, naturally.

Some have argued that the UK could have had the MRHA go it alone on authorising the vaccines even if we were still in the EU. This is sort of true, in the same sense that it’s sort of true we could have done a lot of things, like control immigration more, while we were in the EU, but in, fact, towed EU policy line.

Moreover, the EU had a scheme for joint drug purchasing, as well as licencing, which would have restricted the UK from buying vaccine as freely as it has. A few months ago, the media were quick to condemn the government for taking this gamble of using our brexit freedoms to opt out of this scheme. Now it has paid off.

Now, here’s the thing, the exact numbers will be difficult, perhaps impossible to calculate. The “650 lives a week” number this article gives in the headline is simply a starting point for a quantitative analysis. However, it is a certainty that the UK’s rapid vaccine roll out for COVID19 will save lives. It is also impossible to argue we would have been in the unique position we are with vaccine procurement were we still in the EU.

This means, where COVID19 vaccinations are concerned, Brexit has saved lives.

Now imagine, for a moment, our vaccine procurement had been worse than the EU’s for some reason. You can be certain that the media would be full of calculations by now about how the brexit vaccine failure had cost X number of lives.

It’s almost as if the media care less about lives than they do cherry picking stories that fit their political narrative and reinforce it in the minds of the public. Surely not?

Insurrection At The Capitol

What happened this week at the Capitol in Washington D.C. was a dark day for democracy. There is no excuse for what we saw, for any attempt to undo the processes of democracy by brute force. The loss of life was tragic, the damage to both the reputation of the USA, and democracy in general was immense.

Today I want to look at two aspects of this:

Why Everything That Happened at the Capitol Was Trump’s Fault

First, let’s talk about the fact that Trump blew this election. Utterly blew it. On any on-paper analysis, he has had an insanely successful first term. Until COVID-19, the economy was booming, unemployment was at record lows, he had instigated successful policy on many of his election promises, got three supreme court judge picks through and in place, and, made real advances in middle east peace by strengthening America’s hand, defused tension with North Korea, AND managed to avoid any significant new military conflict.

There is absolutely no way that an incumbent first term President with that record should have failed to secure a second term. Not least when he was running against a a weak, dull, uninspiring, fumbling candidate who has more skeletons in his closets than a Halloween fancy dress store.

But fail he did. And, at the end of the day, his failure was down to his own vanity, his own capricious nature, his arrogance, refusal to listen to any kind of correction, and his belief in his own superiority. He could have got away with this, had COVID19 not put him to the test. His fundamental failure, this single thing, which I suspect ultimately lost him the election was the absurdity of claiming himself to be an expert in COVID19, and the infamous comments about “injecting bleach”. Now, that’s not actually what he said, but, he said something close to it, and more importantly, he portrayed himself as some kind of expert on COVID19 while being anything but. The result was to give an impression of spectacular incompetence. As I have commented previously on COVID19, I remain somewhat skeptical that the ultimate numbers of COVID19 cases and deaths are anywhere near as responsive to government intervention as many people like to suggest, but there’s no denying that Trump’s approach did not inspire confidence, and he sent ambivalent, confusing, and at times dangerous messages out about the virus.

Very few people, even among his supporters tend to claim Trump is a man without flaws. After his election defeat, every flaw of his character seemed to come to the fore.

N.B. At this point, I would like to be able to link back to Trump’s tweets to quote them directly. Unfortunately I cannot, due to his Twitter ban. This, incidentally, is a big part of why banning his twitter is so incredibly dangerous. Trump communicated through twitter with the public for the whole four years of his presidency. His tweets are the historic record of his presidency – for good or ill – and they are now no longer viewable. That is, I’m afraid, the moral equivalent of book-burning. If Twitter want to ban him from tweeting going forward, that’s one thing, but removing his tweet history is sinister censorship worthy of North Korea.

Trump made all sorts of allegations of fraud after election day, and, for quite some time, I was willing to give a fair bit of this the benefit of the doubt. However, in the last few days prior to the electoral college vote, he demonstrated just how far removed from reality he has become.

With just a couple of days to go, he tweeted to the effect “If Mike Pence does his job we will still win the election.”

When Mike Pence did his his duty entirely correctly and in accordance with the law and consitution, Trump then tweeted out that Mike Pence had betrayed him.

Now, hang on a moment here: Pence is Trump’s right hand man. Surely he had spoken to Pence ahead of the vote? Surely he knew exactly what Pence planned to do, days in advance?

There can be only a few possibilities here

1. Pence lied to him, said he was going to try to subvert the vote and then didn’t. This doesn’t seem likely..
2. Trump knew full well that Pence wasn’t going to do any such thing, but tweeted out something suggesting he would, thus deliberately misleading his own followers to give them false hope.
3. Pence told Trump what he planned to do, and Trump, so utterly distorted in his view of reality by his own narcissism simply heard the exact opposite, or believed right up to the moment of the vote he might somehow change Pence’s mind.
4. Trump and Pence have perhaps fallen out, aren’t even on speaking terms and aren’t communicating, and thus Trump had no idea what Pence might do, but, if that was the case, there’s no reason for Trump to think Pence would support him, in fact, surely quite the opposite.

In a sense, it doesn’t matter which of those 4 possibilities is the explanation of this. It’s almost impossible to think of a scenario that doesn’t make Trump look spectacularly bad from those Pence tweets.

Much of this goes back to a fundamental failure in Trump’s approach to re-election.

Trump has, consistently, shown virtually no interest at all in winning moderate, middle ground voters. He has preached to the choir. Floating voters don’t go to Trump rallies. The hardcore supporters do. He made it his mission to create a central core of incredibly loyal followers and try and grow that central fanbase. This he actually did: An under reported aspect of this election is that Trump actually won over eleven million more votes in 2020 than he did in 2016.

And yet Biden attracted more, because for every one person who Trump won over to his cause, his extreme rhetoric turned off more than one person and pushed them towards voting Biden.

Biden on the other hand did the exact opposite. There is virtually no one who is an enthusiastic Biden supporter. Two kinds of people voted for Biden:

1. People in the middle of the road of Politics, or those who frankly don’t pay much attention to politics and just think Trump comes off as sounding obnoxious and crazy on TV. The sort of voters who think Biden is a more respectable, mainstream sort of Presidential figure, with very little idea what any of his actual policy positions are.
2. Proper hard-leftists who actually despise Biden, but despise him less than they despise Trump, and also see Biden as weak, easily manipulated and believe that a hard-left faction of the Democratic party will be able to pull him around like a puppet on a strong to activate a left wing agenda.

The second group were never going to vote for Trump, but the first easily could have done if Trump had only reigned in his worst excesses and just made some tiny fraction of effort to at least appear somewhat presidential in his tone and speech over the last four years.

Trump’s narcissistic desire to only engage with people who approved of him without question cost him dearly.

Finally, his rhetoric of insisting that the election had been stolen, way beyond the point where this could achieve anything useful was stupid, and damaging, irrespective of whether it was true.

For starters, it meant he threw away the Georgia senate run off race. He should have admitted defeat, and told republicans they absolutely had to get out and vote to retain control of the senate to stop Biden railroading through a radical left agenda. He failed to do this, instead wasting his time picking fights with Republicans he didn’t think were sufficiently loyal to his “stolen election” trope, and giving his hardcore base false reassurance he would still be president, so they didn’t need to worry too much about losing control of the Senate. As a result, Biden holds all the cards now.

Did he incite the riot at the capitol in a strict legal sense? No. He did not. The criteria of incitement, if you take free speech seriously are very strict indeed, and he did not cross that threshold. He did not tell anyone to go and be violent or perform violent acts. Did he talk in a stupid, careless way without proper regard for the consequences? Absolutely. While it may not reach the threshold of legal culpability, Trump’s stupid and aggressive rhetoric in the days leading up to the Capitol incident certainly place on him a significant moral responsibility for the events that took place, for which he should hang his head in shame, but we know he will not.

Based on all of this, you can make a clear case that what Trump has said and done makes what happened at the Capitol his fault. And it’s a strong case at that.

Why Everything that Happened at the Capitol was NOT Trump’s Fault

There are, however two sides to every story, and I Want to consider those now. We should at least entertain the possibility there is an alternative explanation.

Right back on day one of Trump’s election win in 2016, I warned that the way his opponents were challenging him was not constructive. Let’s not forget there were riots on the day of Trump’s inauguration. The refusal to accept the result of a democratic process doesn’t start with Trumps followers, it starts with Hillary Clinton’s followers “not my President” calls in the aftermath of Trump’s 2016 victory.

Social media platforms and mainstream media platforms have never given Trump anything close to fair unbiased representation throughout his Presidency. They have consistently painted him in the worst possible light. When he has done good things – they ignore it. When he has done bad things (and he has done bad things) they have portrayed them to be deliberately worse than in fact they are.

This, in fact, had the opposite of the intended effect. Trump’s followers have watched this for four years. They know the mainstream media lies about Trump. They know it takes a 5 second clip for an hour long speech to make out Trump said something terrible, which (while it may have often been bad) was usually far less terrible in context, than the media would make it appear. Conversely, they know the media has given Biden an easy ride.They know the media has consistently downplayed Trump’s Presidential achievements.

This biased media representation gave Trump credibility with his followers way above what it should have been. The fact that mainstream media came out all guns blazing on Trump before he had done anything, completely discredited their coverage of him on day one in the eyes of Trump followers.

The fact of the matter is that neither you nor I have actually seen a single vote counted in the 2020 election. We rely on media sources to tell us what happened. They “called” the election, there is a very scary, real sense in which the election result “is” what ever the media says it is. On the morning following the election they “called” it for Biden. Long before all the votes were even counted, when the number of complaints and concerns about voting irregularities were piling up, they decided to commit to saying Biden had won.

This, in the mind of Trump supporters rendered all their subsequent coverage of the voter fraud stories suspect. We knew the media wanted Biden to win, so why should anyone belief a CNN reporter telling you there was “No Evidence of Voter Fraud”? The media had been misrepresenting Trump for four years. Why should this be different now?

Now, let’s talk about The “No Evidence of voter fraud” thing for a moment.

Most of us are familiar with the concept of innocent until proven guilty. If you make an accusation, you need to offer proof. If you have no evidence of it, the accusation fails.

That’s true of the general context of criminal conviction, and it seems that the media and every one else, seems ready to use that as the standard for voter fraud. Except this completely misunderstands the situation.

Suppose you are in a pub (I’m assuming there’s no Covid lockdown in place!) and a man offers to sell you a car. He takes you outside, shows you the car and offers you the keys for £500. You draw cash out and pay him for it in cash. He gives you no receipt. He tells you the V5 registration document has unfortunately been lost, but he’ll apply to the DVLA for a new one and send it on to you in a few days time.

Have you legally bought the car? Well, the answer is may be yes. There’s no evidence that you haven’t bought the car. However, the answer may also be “no”. Perhaps the guy in the pub didn’t really own the car and just stole the keys. Even if he did have a registration document, there might be outstanding fiance on the car preventing him from legally selling it you.

So have you bought the car or not? Maybe, maybe not, but your defence cannot be “There’s no evidence that I haven’t bought the car legally”. You can’t ask for a “presumption of innocence” because you have bought a car in untraceable cash and don’t have the appropriate paperwork. Indeed, this absence of evidence that you have bought the car legally is clearly good evidence that you may well have not bought the car legally.

And a vote in an election is much like this scenario. There is no presumption that just because a piece of paper with an X against a candidate name exists that it is necessarily a valid vote, unless the full chain of appropriate evidence is in place to show it is valid, and if that is not produced, then that is good reason to question it’s validity. Particularly in the most toxic and vicious election in living memory.

Now let’s be quite clear: An unauthenticated ballot might not be fraudulent, just the same as your car purchase without receipt or paper work might not be fraudulent, but the point is whether you can demonstrate its authenticity, not its fraudulence.

And this is why the media’s constant referral to “No evidence of widespread election fraud” is misleading.

For the most part, Trump’s campaign have not argued that they can prove election fraud, but rather that the authentication process of ballots is, in many cases, inadequate to confirm their authenticity, and that this, combined with some other bits of evidence throws the result of the ballot into question.

The simplest example of this is the question of poll watching of postal ballot opening.

All elections have to deal with a basic problem: The vote itself must be anonymous, but, at the same time ,you must ensure that voters are authentic, and not duplicated. On the one hand, you need robust checks on who is voting, while making it actually impossible to know what they voted.

In “in person” voting this is achieved by checking the person on arrival then handing them a ballot paper, which they place in a sealed box in a private voting booth. On the one hand, their identity can be confirmed, on the other hand, no one can ever know who they voted for.

In mail in voting this is achieved a different way. The envelope is not anonymous. It has a signature on it which must be cross referenced with the voting register for authenticity before the envelope is opened. Then the envelope is opened, separated from the ballot paper inside (Which is important to retain voter anonymity) and then vote counted, and the envelope discarded. The envelope must not be traceable to the ballot that was inside it once they are separated, precisely to maintain voter anonymity.

It is crucial, therefore, that the envelope opening process happens in a satisfactorily audited way. The way this has been traditionally achieved in the USA is to have representatives of both Democrat and Republican party present to watch the opening to be happy to the satisfaction of both sides that the envelop is authentic before opening.

Repeatedly in this election, Republican poll watchers say they were not allowed to do this and votes were opened without their observation. You can count and recount the votes inside as many times as you like afterwards, but the fact is, once that event happened, and the Republican poll watchers contested it, there is simply no way to say confidently how many of those ballots were authentic. Maybe all of them were, maybe none of them were, maybe somewhere in between. No one can say.

The media are correct, strictly speaking to say there is “no evidence of voter fraud”, but the point is whether there was a breach in the process of authentication.

You may think that the courts have addressed this. You will have heard of numerous court cases being “thrown out”.

However, this does not mean, in most cases that a judge actually listened to testamony or heard evidence or found it lacking, rather it means that the cases were thrown out when the judge looked at the front cover of the evidence provided without so much as looking inside.

The cases were thrown out often because the judge involved claimed they were the wrong court, or the case was submitted wrongly, or the court had no authority to rule on the case.

This was most notable in the supreme court case brought by other states against contested states. The Supreme court simply ruled that the other states were not entitled to bring a case. End of story, no real detective work or analysis of the content of the case at all required.

None of this means fraud did occur. It was therefore wrong for Trump to declare so emphatically that it did.

The correct formulation of words is to say that the authenticity of the election was not satisfactorily demonstrated, not that fraud was proven. However, that’s not a quick soundbite, and Trump only does quick soundbites. However, it does mean that Trump’s supports are not unreasonable to feel they may have a grievance, and are particularly likely to feel this precisely because the media, has been so ready to simply pass over even the suggestion of fraud in the election.

(This, remember, is the same media which was like a dog with a bone over the concept of “Russian collusion” for about 3 years after the 2016 election, which resulted in zero evidence)

The situation was deeply compounded by the postal voting situation.

If you weren’t paying attention to this, you need to.

In 2016, there were 33 million postal votes in the election.

In 2020 there were over 100 million postal votes. That is a massive change, which makes this election like no other.

According to Pew research just 17% of all Biden votes were cast in person on the day.

Trump voters were twice as likely as Biden voters to turn out to vote in person on the day. Trump campaigned in person at giant rallies while Biden spent much of his time at tiny events or event at home in Delaware.

Now, the rights and wrongs of those approaches due to COVID19 are one thing, but in terms of a democratic process, it should not surprise us that people express suspicion about an, at best, mediocre candidate winning more votes than an any other electoral candidate in history, while spending most of the campaign at home, and well over half his votes arrived, unseen, in the mail, in many cases added to to the vote count after counting up nearly all the Trump votes.

Democracy isn’t just about democracy being done, it’s about democracy being seen to be done, and the circumstances of the 2020 election – so heavily dependent on remote voting due to COVID19 – did seriously damage that process of visible democracy.

Consider this thought experiment: Suppose there was an election where the rules of the election were that if you voted for Trump, you had to turn up in person and vote on the day, but if you wanted to vote for Biden you had to vote by post. You were then told the Trump votes would be counted first, and then the Biden votes afterward.

I think most people would see this fundamentally ruined how a free and fair election should work simply by virtue of removing anonymity of who the votes were for. You could easily see how the count could be manipulated if you knew who the vote was for simply by virtue of its source – either in person or by mail.

Moreover, we can probably see that many would argue the party voting by post had several advantages: They could collect votes over a period of time, over days or weeks before. You couldn’t be sure if, in a house hold, one member of the family would simply get all the voting cards and fill them in to vote by post for Biden and send them back. Elderly frail relatives who might have actually wanted to vote for Trump might have their vote manipulated by a carer or relative “helping” them to fill in their voting card.

Now, while this election wasn’t officially divided this way, but in practice it was divided this way, due to the messaging of the two camps. Was that arguably Trump’s fault? Possibly. The traditional idea that voting in person would reduce fraud was significantly counterbalanced by the fact that so clearly delineating the votes by their source actually potentially made fraud easier to commit.

However, the fact of the matter is, that’s what happened, and it’s not surprising that Trump voters would have suspicions about in-person vs mail in voting.

Finally this was compounded by the use of electronic voting. Now, the question here is not whether the electronic voting machines were rigged or not rigged. It’s about the fact they exist at all.

Electronic voting is a terrible, terrible idea, and most people who know anything about technology agree about this, and have done, long before this election. See this video from 2014 and also this video from 2019.

The USA elections use lots of electronic voting. Hopefully the two videos above show you, just by themselves, why it is not unreasonable for Trump voters to have concerns about the elections authenticity, and why saying there is “no evidence of voter fraud” completely misses the point.

So take all that together, the tone-deaf attitude of the media towards the concern of red-state voters, the numerous problems with demonstrating the authenticity of the election itself in an atmosphere of zero-trust, could we not suggest that, with or without Trump’s rhetoric about “stolen elections”, it was perhaps foreseeable that at least some radical fringe segment of the Pro-Trump brigade were going to feel so ignored, so aggrieved that they would do something as dreadful and wrong as what happened at the Capitol?

If we don’t have democracy we trust, we have horror and chaos. Which is something no one in their right mind would want. What happened at the Capitol was heinous and evil. Which is exactly why it is such a powerful reminded that robust democracy is so crucial.

So isn’t blaming Trumps moronic messaging and tweeting just an easy cop out from a far, far more profound problem?

Is it lazy, and dangerous to think that just because Trump will likely disappear like a bad dream after 20th January, all of this will just go away, or that there isn’t a much deeper problem here than Trump’s immature tweets? Or, would you simply prefer to just believe the version of events I gave in the first part of this article?

Time will tell which is the correct analysis.

“Life finds a way” – What Jurassic Park Might Have to Teach Us About COVID19

There is a piece of dialogue which is often overlooked in amongst the special effects and jump-scares of Spielbergs Jurassic park. It is found in a scene here:

Jurassic Park, while now best known as a film, was, in fact, a book first, by Michael Crichton. Crichton’s writing is interesting, because, while he wrote books easily dismissed as trashy paperbacks, ideally suited to blockbuster movies, the books often actually contained a far greater level of nuance and depth than the films they spawned.

Jurassic park is a classic example of this. The novel, while it focuses on a “running away from dinosaurs” narrative is interspersed with a sprawling commentary on chaos theory and evolutionary biology. Most of this is lost in the film, but a tantalizing snippet remains in this dialogue with expert in chaos theory, Ian Malcolm:

Malcolm: “The kind of control you’re attempting, it’s not possible. You see, if there’s one thing that the history of evolution has taught us, it’s that life will not be contained, life breaks free, it expands to new territories, and crashes through barriers, maybe painfully, maybe even dangerously but, ah, well, there it is.”

Scientist: “You’re implying a group composed entirely of female animals will, er, breed?”

Malcolm: “No, I’m simply saying that life finds a way”

Now, actually, an entire subtext of the book is really boiled down into this brief exchange in the film, but actually it underpins the whole story, which is a warning. It’s not even really a warning about genetic engineering specifically, but rather of having excessive confidence in a particular theory of thought or science in an overly dogmatic way.

What is the relevance to COVID19? The relevance, as the the new strain launches the second wave of the pandemic in earnest in the UK, is that life finds a way. And in this case, the life is the virus. The virus will find a way.

Malcolm’s speech might be easily given in response to the idea that COVID19 would be controlled through lockdown measures. Over-confidence, to the point of arrogance, in this approach, might cost us dearly.

Before we go further, if you are too lazy to read the whole article, the author is not anti-lockdown, or anti-mask. If that is what you take from the article then you have failed to appreciate the nuance of the position expressed, and please re-read until you do.

To understand the issue here, we must start with the logic behind virus reproduction.

The Science of Lockdown

Back in the halcyon days of 2018, when apocalyptic global pandemics were merely a fun hypothetical topic for science lectures, Professor Chris Whitty gave a lecture entitled “How to control a Pandemic” . The lecture is actually not well named, because, frankly, it doesn’t give an answer.

Despite the misleading name, it is a very good lecture, and anyone interested in what is happening should watch it, but if you do so, you will be disturbed at how it departs from how COVID19 has, in fact, been managed. Not, however, in the way you might imagine. You might imagine the scientists would have been calling for more to be done earlier, but in fact, it turns out, they were likely calling for less.

There is a disaster film cliche in which, in the opening scene, the scientist runs into the room of politicians with a shopping list of things they must do right now to avoid disaster (be it from an asteroid, a virus, killer robots, whatever…) . The silly politicians dismiss the concerns (usually for nefarious reasons involving money and their own reputation) and consequently disaster unfolds. If only they’d listened to the scientist!

This is not what happened in the outset of COVID 19. In fact, it is closer to the opposite. The traditional epidemiological science was highly skeptical of major interventions to thwart the pandemic itself, and, instead, focused on how one might mitigate the consequences. It was the politicians who were agitated early on and asking the epidemiologists what might be done, to which the epidemiologists mostly shrugged their shoulders and offered the suggestion “Wash your hands?”.

Consider the comments Whitty makes in the “How to control a pandemic” lecture regarding influenza-type pandemics:

• The biggest cause of damage in most pandemics is “panic”.

• There is no mention of masks.

• Screening at airports will be “utterly useless”

• “This will be chaotic and big” says Whitty, with very few clear answers on what would make it less chaotic or less big.

What is abundantly clear is that Whitty (rightly in my view) felt there were actually no clear answers, at least ahead of time, on what measures would or would not be effective in a major global flu-type (i.e. respiratory spread) pandemic.

He was, I suspect, instinctively reluctant to give any answers therefore, perhaps almost subconsciously, because of the maxim of medicine “First do no harm”.

Doctors are trained, from very early on, to be non-interventional, except where you are sure your intervention will work.

It is almost a cliched trope of medicine for the keen junior doctor to try and treat a patient with 10 different drugs in an attempt to make things better, only for things to get worse. The junior then says to the senior “I’m not sure what to do, I’ve tried everything!”. The consultant nods sagely and replies “Have you tried, doing nothing?” and then crosses off from the drug chart all the drugs the patient was on, and the patient immediately gets better – the problem they had in the first place was being caused by the one drug they were already on to start with.

Of course, like many cliches, it’s an exaggeration of reality, but it contains truth.

For example, early in the pandemic, most experts were reluctant to recommend public mask wearing. Some people strongly called for it, and to many it seemed a no brainer. Why wouldn’t you have people wear masks?

After all, “What could be the harm?” Many people would think.

People were keen to share memes on social media showing how experiments showed masks reduced droplet spread, or reduced the number of bacteria on a petri dish if you coughed on it, with or without a mask. (Let’s ignore for the moment we are talking about a virus not a bacterium.)

Experienced clinicians, with an instinctive feel for the “first do no harm” principle, and an instinctive skepticism about how theoretical experiments play out in reality, do not, however, treat “What could be the harm?” to ever be simply a rhetorical question, where a new intervention imposed on 60 million people is concerned. It is important to at least consider the question seriously and see what one can come up with.

There is an interesting technique in problem solving and management called the Pre-mortem. We know what a post-mortem is. After someone has died, you examine the body to see what went wrong – why did the person die? Likewise, you can have a post-mortem of an event, such as a disaster, an enquiry into why it happened. A Pre-mortem is a thought experiment that you can undertake at the start of any new project or idea to spot potential flaws in your plan.

What you do, is imagine, in advance, your wonderful plan has gone wrong. The worst has happened. It has flopped, or gone badly wrong in some way. Then, you work backwards, and ask yourself, why might that be? What were the weakness? What went wrong?

It’s worth considering this in the context of lockdowns and mask wearing. Suppose mask wearing, against expectation, were to lead to a marked rise in COVID19 transmission, why might that be? What theories or explanations would come to mind to explain that fact?

At least two potential harms come to mind in terms of COVID 19 transmission and mask wearing. (And no, I’m not talking about nonsense like the mask lowering the amount of oxygen you are breathing in.)

First – change in behaviour. Humans are not lab rats, and the response of human beings to any particular intervention must be considered. Economist Gordon Tullock perhaps gave the most famous example of this by opining that the best way to increase car safety, and reduce road deaths, was not more safety measures, but rather a large spike “The Tullock Spike” placed coming out of a car steering wheel.

The idea was simple: Having a dagger-like spike pointed 6 inches away from your heart for you to crash into would focus people’s minds on safer driving. On the other hand, adding more safety measures, made them feel safer, and thus drive more recklessly, thus potentially increasing the total number of road deaths

I strongly suspect, we instinctively feel safer when we put our masks on. They give us a sense of a force field around us, and I am fairly convinced this changes human behaviour. People are more ready to get within 2 metres of each other when they are wearing mask. They social-distance more and feel “naked” and unprotected when they are not. This is subconscious, instinctive.

The problem with this is that the distribution of viral particles in respiratory droplets will probably follow inverse square law . At twice the distance, the virus particles are spread out four times as much. At three times the distance, they are spread out nine times as much.

Thus, even getting a little bit closer to other people increases the exposure dose of virus dramatically. This potentially could compensate for the benefits of the the mask, and it’s very hard to test this in a real world scenario at scale.

Second – Fomite spread – that is, spread of the virus on surfaces. In an operating theatre, masks are worn. However, if a surgeon so much as touches his mask even once, during operating, he is considered to have “de-sterilised” himself. He will need to take off his gloves, re-scrub, and put on new ones.

At the end of an operation, his mask, as a single use item is carefully disposed of, without touching the edges, straight into a bio-waste bag.

In this context, masks can be effective in reducing spread of infection.

This is not how Mr. Average uses his mask when he is popping into the newsagents for a pint of milk and the morning paper.

He takes his mask out his pocket when he is outside and puts it on. He touches it frequently while he is in the shop, also touching items he is shopping for. He then goes to pay for goods in the shop. He reaches into his pocket (where the mask was) and touches his wallet, which was touching his mask, and pays the shop assistant with money from that wallet, which has had the mask rubbing all over it. He then takes the mask off and puts it back in the same pocket when he leaves.

While Mr. Average may not have coughed COVID19 onto anyone because of his mask, he may well have smeared virons of COVID19 all over the place for many other people to touch and get infected by.

Dr. Zubin Damania, an American physician with a strong social media presence, and an unusual degree of balance and Socratic method to his coverage, has made the point that what masks may do is reduce the number of viral particles you come into contact with and therefore increase the chance of getting less severe covid 19 infection, which is actually one of the best arguments in favour of masks, which can be found in his excellent discussion with Prof. Monica Ghandi. However one point, not made here is that the viral particles you then come into contact with are not random. They will, by definition, be those viral particles which were best able to defeat a mask by whatever means, and thus may actually have genetic variations which make them so, thus enhancing the virus infectiousness.

Now, none of these things mean masks are not a good idea. They are just potential narratives of how masks might turn out to not be a good idea. If it turned out that masks didn’t reduce covid 19 transmission (or indeed, made it worse) these would be potential reasons one would look at as to why.

And this is why, I suspect, we did not find Prof Chris Whitty speculating about Mask wearing for flu-like pandemics back in 2018, or indeed, in the early phases of the pandemic.

There is actually a deeper problem at work here: Testing how the virus might respond to mask wearing in, say, April 2020 may not be at all the same thing as the effects by April 2021, when you apply that mask wearing protocol to millions of people and countless billions of viral particles and the virus starts to respond o the pressures placed upon it.

“Life finds a way” – How might the virus respond to a mask?

Let’s suppose, in the short run, over a few days or weeks, the masks seem to work. They reduce COVID19 transmission. If they completely eradicate it, then you will have a success, but what if they only suppress it, what happens then?

Well, remember COVID19 can spread at least two different ways: In coughed droplets, and by touching surfaces.

Changes in the nature of the virus will alter how effectively it will transmit by these methods.

For example, to survive on a surface, the virus needs to have a more hardy outer shell, which allows it to sit on a surface and not die for some longer period of time, particularly when it dries out, until someone comes along and touches it.

However, having that protective outer shell which allows it to survive on a surface longer may actually have a detrimental effect to the virus. It may actually make it more difficult for the virus to invade cells, (for example) so if it can spread by direct respiratory droplet spread, it’s actually better off not having that hardy outer shell.

Let’s suppose variants of the virus exist in both forms – a form that that readily transmits through airborne droplet transmission, and a form that transmits through surface contact.

What happens when we bring the masks into play? Well, clearly, we make life very difficult for the airborne droplet version of the virus, however, its surface-spread cousin, which previously was in the shadow of its relative, now has a chance to shine and spread more freely, without finding that potential hosts have already been infected by the droplet spread variant before it gets to them.

After a while, viral rates of transmission start to climb again, but now with the version of the virus which has evolved its way around the mask.

The changes might have other effects on the virus. They may, by accident, make it more deadly, or less deadly, or neither. Who knows?

Who knows? This is exactly the point. And this is why, at the outset of the pandemic, people like Prof Chris Whitty were probably very reticent to propose many extreme measures, applied very generally across the population, and stuck to the most mundane of suggestions, like washing your hands and keeping a distance.

We ought to be extremely cautious about being dogmatic as to what the effect of a particular intervention will be. We would do well to remember that in the 1918 Spanish Flu pandemic, one piece of official public health advice was to “smoke more”, because everyone just knew in 1918 that smoking was good for the lungs.

Rather than laughing at that ignorance, we ought to be trying to examine our own preconceptions about the COVID19 pandemic to identify which ones will, in retrospect, be equally misplaced.

Back to Jurassic Park…

In the speech this post opened with, Malcolm postulates that somehow, nature will find a way around the fact that the dinosaurs are all female in order to breed. He is roundly mocked. What an idiot! What a stupid thing to suggest! It turns out, in the book and film, nature does find a way: The available DNA for making the dinosaurs was incomplete, and was spliced with frog DNA to fill the gaps. However, some frogs have the ability to change their sex. Turns out, that some of that DNA is lurking within the dinosaurs, and a couple of loose gene mutations reactivates it. Some of the dinosaurs change sex, and start breeding.

Now, the point here is that Malcolm didn’t know about the frog DNA. He didn’t know what mechanism would bring this about. However, as a mathematician and an expert in chaos theory applied to real world situations, what he did know was that massively complex self replicating DNA behaves in chaotic and unexpected ways when selective pressure is applied to it.

And that is exactly what a virus is. It is foolhardy to fall into static thinking about the virus, and forget that it is mobile and a dynamic, changing entity.

Consider the Lockdowns. It has been maintained throughout that schools could remain open, even in the highest tier lockdown areas because “Children don’t spread COVID19”. Well, that was never strictly true. It was always true that some kids got covid 19, just not as many as adults (possibly – I always felt the data on this was suspect).

This is an alarm bell right there: If the virus already has, at least, the potential to infect some children, then all it needs to do is hone that potential.

And what makes a virus hone it’s potential? Selective pressure.

All the while the virus could replicate in other environments, there was no particular benefit to rare and unusual genetic mutations of the virus which could spread readily in kids. They would tend to get out-competed. (COVID19 strains it must be remembered, are ultimately in competition with each other.).

However, when the lockdowns slammed shut every method of replication for the virus apart from schools, suddenly, those rare variants of the virus which could spread in the one environment where transmission was easy may have had a competitive advantage. All of a sudden, rare mutations of the virus which could spread better in kids were the only game in town, and they may have started to propagate more.

Now, to be clear, it is not established if this is what has happened with the new strain but this has been suggested by The London School of Tropical Hygiene

It may not be what’s happened, but “the story” is a plausible one, and if it’s not the true story, it’s only by sheer dumb luck that it isn’t.

Were lockdowns wrong then? That is not what I’m saying, neither am I anti-mask. This isn’t about being pro-lockdown or anti-lockdown. It’s about applying interventions with care and thought, particularly for the unforeseen negative consequences.

Lockdowns initially had a very specific, limited, aim. This was to blunt the rising curve of the COVID19 wave just enough to avoid hospitals being overwhelmed. That’s all lock downs were initially proposed to do.

However, my view is the epidemiologists and the politicians got greedy. Lockdown was so effective in the first instance at this, they thought they could press on with it to try and attempt something akin to eradication of covid19 by the lockdown techniques. Thus, many measures of lockdown continued right into the summer, when cases in hospital were negligible. This was possibly a mistake.

This blog commented on this kind of potential for lockdown to cause evolutionary mischief back in May. and also commented that keeping schools open was a potentially dangerous glitch in lockdown strategy in early November -albeit for slightly different reasons in each case, however the whole point is not that these things were predictable, but rather that the negative consequences of lockdown were predictably unpredictable

Lockdown measures may be a dangerous game to play with the DNA of the virus. Under selective pressure, previously insignificant mutations of the virus will become incredibly important and rapidly predominate in a way they would not if the wild type were reproducing freely.

The current mutation is a warning. If we apply selective pressure on the virus in this way, we could do much worse.

As a worst case scenario, there is a theoretical danger that when the virus is under heavy selective pressure, it will throw up a mutation which might have higher mortality rates, perhaps in younger healthy individuals. This could happen. It’s not likely, but it’s possible. However, creating a bizarre evolutionary habitat for the virus to occupy, with lockdown measures, makes this potentially more likely.

It’s more unlikely to happen when the virus is not under heavy selective pressure and the common-or-garden wild-type covid19 is roaming freely and any new mutation is having to compete in a busy marketplace against many many other common-or-garden variant COVID19 virons.

And under these circumstances, the natural behaviour of human beings will tend to favour milder strains of a virus. If the virus makes you seriously sick, you will automatically self-isolate by taking to your bed. If another strain of the virus gives milder symptoms, such that the person continues to go about their daily business, then it will infect more people and propagate. This subtle natural evolutionary pressure towards favouring more mild strains is disrupted by lockdowns and indeed the quarantining on those with mild illness or asymptomatic disease. That’s not to say those things are wrong in the short term, but they are considerations in the long game.

Organisms in stable, unchanging habitats do not change. This is why there are bizzare sea-creatures which live near volcanic vents deep under sea which have not changed a bit in 50 million years. On the other hand, organisms in changing environments, under heavy evolutionary selective pressure, evolve rapidly over a few generations.

So to reiterate; brief, short sharp shocks of lockdown and mask-wearing to “blunt” the curve were sensible and necessary measures. They should be continue to be used in a “pulsed” fashion, but only to the point of managing the strain on NHS critical care services.

However, sustained abnormal societal behaviour which creates a complex and erratic landscape for the virus to breed in are likely to generate complex and erratic variations in the virus. That might pan out well by creating milder strains, but it’s entirely plausible that it could pan out very badly indeed by creating a more deadly strain.

Amongst the many things this could do is push the virus to the point of “antigen escape” whereby it changes so much it is no longer responsive to the vaccine, which is the best weapon we have.

Tiered lockdown could be tiered “virus training”

Imagine getting a new video game, and immediately setting it to the most difficult setting and playing – you die almost immediately. You keep dying every time you play for an hour. You get bored, you give up and don’t play again.

This is why good computer games have tiered difficulty levels. These allow you to progress. If there was no difficulty, you would never fail, never learn from your mistakes and never improve. However, a game with well constructed difficulty levels will let you fail just enough to learn and progress. After a while, you can take on the top difficulty level setting which seemed impossible at the start.

It does occur to me that the tiered lockdown system in the UK is very much like setting a training programme for the virus in how to adapt and survive. It slowly ramps up the difficulty on virus replication. The virus responds by accumulating mutations. Mutations are effectively the virus “memory”, they are how it “learns”. It can do this in tiers 1 2 and 3, which give it some chance of surviving in tier 4, where it can thus come up with an even better mutation.

We should note that in no tier is virus replication reduced to zero. Only to very low levels. Which means, by definition, the virus variants which are replicating in the environments those tiers create are exactly the variants best suited to doing so.

My instinct is that lockdown, when it happens, therefore should be short, sharp, national, and complete. And I do mean complete. I mean every road, school church park and non-essential shop should be empty. However, this should be for short, well defined periods. Probably 3 to 4 weeks maximum And when released, it should be pretty much fully released, with perhaps just a few exceptions.

One thing that should continue throughout, lock down or not, is the careful shielding of the highest risk individuals.

Lock downs are a little like using steroids in medicine: An absolutely essential drug, and it’s often useful to give a critically ill patient a huge dose of steroids to save their lives, but you don’t want to leave them on that big dose very long, otherwise you create more problems than you solve. Doctors are generally good at this nuanced understanding: They don’t have “good” drugs and “bad” drugs. They have “appropriate” drugs and “inappropriate” drugs. Steroids could be good at one time, and bad at another. Likewise, it’s not a case of lockdowns (or perhaps masks) being “good” or “bad”. It’s a case of them being appropriate or not appropriate at a given point.

It must be stressed again, that the explicit aim of lockdown is only an emergency brake on the coping ability of the healthcare system. I hold out no hope of lockdowns achieving any other aim in the long run, and the migration of expectations of what lockdown could achieve from this limited aim to an aim of sustained suppression of the virus was not helpful in my view.

The vaccine changes things a bit. It is legitimate to think that lockdown might be used to blunt the curve for long enough to give the vaccine. However, there is a problem with this, which is that among the possible mutations which lockdown may propagate are those which exhibit “antigen escape”, that is, they are significantly different enough from original wild type COVID19 to not be affected by the vaccine, and lock down may make that worse.

A currently raging debate is about whether to vaccinate everyone once, or some people twice and others not at all. Also, should we vaccinate those most likely to get severely ill, or those most likely to spread the virus most?

I don’t exactly know the right answer to that, but I know the right answer involves considering, first and foremost, on following the strategy which minimizes the chances of the virus evolving around the vaccine. Otherwise we will be back at square one. We would do well to remember that one of the reasons we do not have a vaccine for a common cold is not that it would be impossible to make a vaccine for particular cold virus, but rather that the myriad of cold viruses would mutate and render a vaccine useless very rapidly. We do not yet know if this problem will occur with COVID 19.

In conclusion

The Covid 19 pandemic has been markedly political. Even amongst the scientists and the medics. Politics leads to dogma and entrenched, highly polarised views. This article is not anti-lockdown or anti-mask, or any other measure, but merely sounding a cautionary warning that “Life finds a way”. We should proceed with extreme caution, particularly now we have vaccines which, if used correctly may end the pandemic, but if deployed incorrectly may be wasted. If we use lockdown it should be complete, in short bursts, focused only on holding the virus below the surge capacity of the NHS . Outside of periods of lock down, focus should be on maximising shielding protection to the vulnerable, and minimising restrictions on the rest.

At the time of writing, the rapid spread of the new variants means that such a national lockdown may well be required imminently. This (and mask wearing) are likely to be the correct course of action at the present time, but, we must keep focused on the aim of these measures – to control pressure on the NHS, not a well meaning, but ill-concieved attempt at virus eradication which may make the situation much worse.

Fact Check: Did the Fact checkers get it right on Dead voters?

We all know that person who will post utterly absurd nonsense they find on the internet from a completely random source. This blog has previously addressed such nonsense as 5G causing COVID19.

However, there is a group of internet users who think they are smarter than this. They know to ignore posts from dodgy sources they have never heard of, but they trust articles from BBC, CNN or Associated Press. They also know to look for “Fact Checks” from Politifact or Snopes.

The problem is, a little like wearing a seatbelt can make you feel safer and thus drive more recklessly, there is a tenancy for people to simply not question these sources, including the fact checkers closely enough.

There are numerous examples of questionable fact checks in the latest American election.

Let’s use the case of “William Bradley”, a man in Michigan, who apparently voted in this election. Nothing remarkable so far, except, William Bradley is 118 years old, and, even more remarkably, appears to have died in 1984.

This was uncovered by a Twitter user, Austin Fletcher, user handle of @fleccas

Turns out 118 year old “William Bradley” voted via absentee ballot in Wayne County, Michigan. William Bradley died in 1984.

How long has this been going on?

Try it for yourself: https://t.co/UWupRTi0Rw pic.twitter.com/aOLSe1DXJo

— Essential Fleccas 🇺🇸 (@fleccas) November 5, 2020

He demonstrates here, going to the official Michigan government, entering the details of the late Mr. Bradley, with name and date of birth, and, low and behold, the website reports that:

1. Mr. Bradley requested a voting ballot
2. Had one mailed out to him
3. Completed it and sent it back in.

Now, let’s be clear, @fleccas does not claim that this means that ballot was counted. It is possible that it could have been filtered out on arrival and rejected.

Michigan state department responded very quickly to this by saying in a tweet:

“This is misinformation. Ballots of voters who have died are rejected in Michigan, even if the voter cast an absentee ballot and then died before Election Day.”

Snopes responded with a “Mostly False” response as follows in an article entitled “Was the Ballot of Deceased Man named William Bradley Counted In Michigan?”

Now, notice the classic Snopes tactic here in the title: Snopes very often strawman claims so that they can answer them in the way they wish. @Fleccas did not claim he knew that the ballot was counted, merely that the ballot was requested and returned. He then simply poses the not unreasonable questions of “Why is someone requesting ballots for a dead person?” and “Was this ballot in fact counted?”.

This is classic snopes, and I have written about this before that snopes will change a claim to a slightly different claim in order to report it as “false” when it suits their political bias.

However, snopes articles can still be useful, as they often do dig into the details under the headline a fair bit, and so it proves to be the case here. Snopes appear to have got some details on what happened with “William Bradley” from Michigan.

First Snopes says:

“While it is true that a vote was recorded in the Michigan state election system by the now-deceased Bradley, election officials have publicly stated that it was done in error and was not a form of fraud.”

So, let’s be clear, this isn’t fake information, it’s not a made up story. However, the claim is that it was an innocent error.

The first response to this is “So what?” If the vote was counted in error or fraudulently makes no difference to whether it effects the election outcome or not. Second, their opening statement is notably vague “recorded in the system”, does that mean the vote was counted? Or not?

Snopes goes on to offer an explanation of the error and quotes another fact checking site, politifact to clarify what happened:

“A search for a Michigan resident in Wayne County under the name of William Bradley returned another Michigan resident registered at the same ZIP code, although he was born in 1959, not 1902.

In an interview with PolitiFact, the younger Bradley told the fact-checking site that he had received an absentee ballot for both himself and his deceased father, but he threw the latter out. Daniel Baxter, a consultant for the Detroit Department of Elections, sent the publication a statement explaining that the son’s ballot had been mistakenly logged as that of his dead father“

So, there we have it. A simple confusion over father and son with the same name.

Even if this is true, it’s still a major concern that this could get all the way as far as the ballot being submitted. That still points to the possibility of major inaccuracies in the voting system.

As far as Snopes is concerned this is the end of the story. Now, this is the problem with fact checking websites. Snopes, I suspect, probably honestly felt they had “debunked” this story at this point. They had a arrived at narrative which suited their position and stopped their investigation there. Why? because we all tend to like narratives that suit our own biases. My problem isn’t with Snopes having bias, it’s with them claiming a special neutral “fact checking” status, which does not, in fact, exist.

It turns out that part of what @Fleccas was trying to do was not only to expose voting issues, but also expose the inadequacy of fact checking websites.

What he kept from everyone when posting the initial story was the following:

A data dump of in excess of ELEVEN THOUSAND names of deceased individuals who were mailed out ballots and apparently returned them.

You can watch @Fleccas explain this all himself here

And you don’t have to take his word for it. It is perfectly possible to pick the names off the list and enter them yourself on the Michigan government website and see how these individuals apparently requested ballots, received them and returned them.

Now, there are two separate questions here:

First, is the question of these “dead voters”, but second is the question of Snopes’ fact checking.

Because clearly, all of their story about Bradley’s son and mistaken identity, as a refutation is blown out the water by a list of 11,000 names of dead people returning ballots.

So what were snopes doing, rushing to get out a “refutation” story? Why did they not spend a little longer digging on this story? The reason is because all the fact checkers have been falling over themselves to get “fact checks” out in real time during this election season, which then social media companies can use to filter content. Mostly, it seems to hamper the republican side. That may not be their stated intent, but that is the clear effect.

The problem here, is that clearly this is suppressing real news, and creating a monochrome narrative, devoid of nuance at best, and flat out wrong at worst.

Now, what is the truth behind those 11,000 names? We just don’t know at this point. However, the following points seem relevant to make:

1. You would think a government would really have a mechanism to NOT send out ballots to long-dead residents in the first place.
2. Why are so many being returned? Apparently, there are some mechanisms for “auto sending” ballots which may still send them out for years after someone dies, but why would they be returned when they arrive at a address of a dead person?
3. If the vote counters really are picking up all these invalid votes, which have presumably been coming in for years, not just this election, surely they would have fed back that information to the people sending the ballots out in the first place to stop this wasting their time? The fact this has not happened strongly implies many of these are ending up being counted.

It is not clear how any of this will affect the presidental race, (it may well not) but it’s very telling about the mentality of mainstream media, fact checkers and how social media interacts with them, and that should concern all of us.

Remembrance Day: Remembering Master Sgt. John Chapman

It is over a decade since the last fighting Tommy, Harry Patch, passed away, and with him, World War I moved from living memory to legend. Just over 20 years separated the wars, and thus, it will not be very long before World War II starts to pass from living memory to the history books too. Indeed, as one example: At the time of writing, just one of the 3000 pilots of the Battle of Britain (Churchill’s “Few”) remains, the 101 year old John “Paddy” Hemingway.

It is easy to imagine this means the sacrifices made in combat for the sake of our continuing freedom are therefore becoming a part of our past.

Nothing could be further from the truth. Liberty is not something once bought and paid for, but a debt that has to be constantly serviced. Acts of utterly astonishing valour in the name of defence of liberty are not just confined to the past. They are part of our modern age too, and we should take time on remembrance day to remember those also.

And it’s for that reason, I wish to spend a moment sharing the extraordinary story, which I came across recently, of an American Air Combat Controller, Master Sgt. John Chapman. As just one example of the ongoing heroism which protects our freedoms. For every story we know about, like Chapman’s, there will be 10 others, equally heroic, that we do not know.

Chapman was an American, and this is a British blog, but, in this sense it makes little difference. In the events in question he was serving in support of American Navy Seals in Afghanistan, but the nature of his role is such, that he could just as easily have been embedded with British soldiers of the SAS, and, in his primary role, acting as an battlefield air controller, talking aircraft onto targets with pin point accuracy, he could just have found himself handling RAF jets as well as US airforce and navy aircraft.

Chapman was a posthumous recipient of the Medal of Honor, the highest award for valour in the United States, the American equivalent of the Victoria Cross. What makes his award unique, is that the acts which won him the medal were captured on camera, from a CIA Reaper drone, high above the battlefield. In a moment, we will view that footage, but, the footage requires some context, about the mission, and the man.

First, the man: John Chapman was a special forces soldier, yet, in many respects does not fit our stereotype. For one thing, he was a good deal older than you might imagine: 36 years of age.

He was married, with two young girls. Indeed, shortly before September 11th 2001, after a nearly two decade career of peacetime soldiering, he was preparing to move himself out of harm’s way and moved into a non-combat role within the military. His priorities in life had changed. As a young man in his 20s, being the best soldier he could be was his primary aim in life, but by 2001, he had an exit strategy from the military; to put his wife and two little girls first.

Then, September 11th happened. And, just before his military career was about to end, he found himself called into the fight in Afghanistan. Not that he hesitated to answer the call for a second, his sense of duty would not have allowed him to do otherwise.

He dearly missed his family and his children when away on operations. In one of his missions in Afghanistan, his unit had to take up residence in the house of some Afghan civilians. The Americans and the Afghans often treated each other with great mutual suspicion. Yet, perhaps missing his own little girls, Chapman struck up a rapport with a little Afghan girl who lived in the house. To such an extent that one day, the little girl’s mother put her on Chapman’s lap for an impromptu photo. In the culture of Afghanistan, and given the level of distrust of American soldiers from many Afghans, this picture speaks volumes for the the kind of man John Chapman was.

Part of the reason Chapman won the mother’s trust, was that on arrival at the house, other soldiers he was with had wanted to move the Afghan family out of the one room in the house which had a heater, to a cold room. Chapman had intervened: He alone had insisted that the mother and her child would stay in the heated room, Chapman, and his team would sleep in the cold. This selflessness and compassion was a hallmark of his character.

These things are important to know, because in watching the video that you will shortly watch at the end of this post, it’s important to know Chapman was not some hot-headed 21 year old young gun with a rush of blood to the head, neither was he a stone-cold fearless, emotionless sociopath. He was, in the words of too many of his compatriots to discount their testimony as mere posthumous flattery , a humble, kind and selfless man.

So, to the mission, on 4th March 2002: While attempting to take a snowy mountain top position to protect troops in the valley below from the entrenched Al Qaeda, the helicopter that Chapman’s team was in came under fire.

Just a few feet above the snow, on landing, the helicopter was hit, and one of Chapman’s team, Neil Roberts, fell from the helicopter into the snow. The helicopter pilot pulled his helicopter away from the mountain top without landing, leaving Roberts stranded on the mountain top.

Roberts did, in fact, it is believed, survive the fall, and was immediately engaged in combat by the Al Qaeda forces on the mountain top. Tragically, he quickly perished under their fire, when, blood from his own wounds clogged the firing mechanism of his rifle preventing him from firing back. However, the rest of his team had no way of knowing whether he was dead or alive. All they knew was they had left one of their team behind, alone, on a mountain top surrounded by the enemy.

Badly damaged, the helicopter staggered down the mountain, crash landing 4 miles away. Immediately, Chapman radioed for a replacement helicopter. When it arrived, despite knowing the mountain top was a hornet’s nest of enemy fire, the entire team agreed they had to go back for Roberts. They would not leave him alone on the mountain.

Which is where the video below picks up the story.

So what we see in the first seconds of this 8 minute video is already an act of stunning bravery on the part of the entire team. They had just survived a helicopter crash after being shot down, which would be enough to give any mere mortal PTSD by itself, yet, here they are, minutes later, returning to the very same location to rescue their comrade.

Watching the video, the bravery of Chapman stands out, over and above that of his team mates, and yet, in context, we see that every team member was conducting an act of near incomprehensible bravery just by being there.

By 40 seconds into the video the situation is utterly terrifying to contemplate. The team are in the dark, on a steep mountain, in freezing temperatures, in thigh deep snow, being shot at, on all four sides. (it is worth noting that the SEALS had one advantage over their enemy: Night vision goggles. Thus, Chapman’s position became considerably worse tactically after dawn when that advantage evaporated.)

What happens at 2min 5 seconds into this video is an act of astonishing individual bravery.

What happens at 4min 40 is horrifying.

From 5min into the video the story of John Chapman goes beyond mere heroism to the stuff of Legend and folklore.

By six minutes the laws of physics and biology seem to have been suspended as Chapman achieves things which shouldn’t be possible for a mortal man to do.

And the final minute, by which time Chapman has, to recap: been in a helicopter crash, climbed a mountain in the dark in thigh deep snow under fire, been in a firefight, been left for dead in cold snow 11,000 foot up a mountain in the dark, bombed by his own side, and having sustained more than a dozen bullet wounds from more than two dozen enemy while fighting abandoned and alone, and yet is still putting himself deliberately in harms way to save his brothers in arms, defies really any description without risking cliche or understatement.

So now, here is the story of the final stand of Master Sgt John Chapman.

“Of every one hundred men, ten shouldn’t even be there, eighty are nothing but targets, nine are real fighters, we are lucky to have them, they make the battle. Ah, but the one, just one of them is a Warrior…and he will bring the others back” Hericletus, Roman General 500BC

Rest in peace Master Sgt. John Chapman. May we never forget that every single freedom we have in the west was paid for, time and again, in the blood of warriors like him.

The American Election Debacle

The American Election has descended into a debacle.

Reports of numerous 120 year olds casting absentee ballots in Michigan, reports of non-residents casting votes in Nevada, reports of double voting and late vote counting in Pennsylvania.

You might believe these stories, you might not. They might be true, they might not, but the fundamental problem is this: In a highly divided USA, faith in the system just collapsed.

There are no good outcomes to this election now. Whichever side loses, will howl that they were deprived of an election which should have been theirs. Of course, this is often true to some extent in elections, but this is much more so the case this time around.

And the problem, quite simply, is mail-in voting.

“But we’ve always had mail in voting!” Someone will say. Yes, this is true, but, uniquely, in this election 100 million votes were cast by mail. Compared to 30 million in the last election.

That’s a massive change in voting patterns, but the problem is worse than that, because everyone agrees, there is a strong correlation between how people voted, and who they voted for. If you voted by mail – you very likely voted democrat. If you voted in person – you probably voted republican.

This is a massive problem, because it means any slight tweak to the mechanics of the voting is likely to directly affect the result, and that in turn is likely to lead to allegations of bias.

For example, the question of what to do with late arriving mail-in ballots. Should they be counted or not? How much leeway should there be in the deadline? Should it be the case that a ballot has to arrive by election day, or simply be sent by election day?

Now, there has to be some decision on that question, but the point is this, if voting was party-equal between methods, then that decision would not be particularly a big deal. It would make no great odds. However, because it’s not equal, a simple question about the mechanics of how the election is run is suddenly laden with partisan political significance.

Across the US there were states showing hundreds of thousands of votes lead for Trump on election night, and, as the mail in votes trickled in over the following days, those leads ebbed away to nothing.

Now, maybe all those votes were legitimate democrat votes. Quite possibly, but the fact is, it’s not a good look. Voting in a democracy isn’t just about democracy being done, it’s about democracy being seen to be done, and even if every one of those mail-in votes is utterly legitimate, the sight of this massive discrepancy is going to create tension.

Mail in voting, is, basically, a terrible idea, and should be used to the most limited degree possible in elections

Elections are often referred to as acts of democracy, and it is the “act” that is important. The process, the ritual tradition, if you like, of going to the polling station, queuing to vote, receiving your ballot paper, making your vote in a secret booth and placing it into the ballot box is part of that act of democracy, as much as the actual mark on the ballot paper is.

It’s easy to dismiss it as irrelevant, but like most traditions that have stood the test of time, things have evolved a certain way for a reason.

Voting in person ensures a few key things:

1) It allows for some basic fraud checks

This is fairly obvious. Concerns about 120 year olds voting would be significantly ameliorated by in-person voting. Double voting, non-resident voting, etc, would all be reduced.

Now, some will say that mail voting has been shown to have very low levels of fraud previously, but never before have the numbers been so significant that mail-in voting would effectively decide an election. Also, the tendancy to talk about low levels of fraud in mail-in voting in the strictly technical sense of the word “fraud” fails to appreciate the effect of other biases as we shall describe in the next couple of points.

2) It reduces the chances of coercion in voting

This is a major issue, and it’s not an issue which will ever be picked up as “fraud” as such. Trump has consistently outperformed the polls, and part of that is because of the “Shy Trump voter” phenomenon. People not wanting to tell a pollster they will vote for Trump, but then secretly voting for him in the privacy of the polling booth.

Mail in voting removes the secrecy from your ballot. You are not alone in the polling booth when that mail in paper drops through your door. I wonder how many families there are where, secretly, spouses vote differently to each other, and one says to the other “You voted for Biden didn’t you?” and the other partner says “Oh yes dear, of course I did” but secretly voted Trump! I bet, in the secrecy of a polling booth, that happens, and more than you might think.

However, with mail in ballot where everyone in a family is perhaps filling in their ballot around the kitchen table, that may not be the case. I would bet, that where mail in ballots occur, families vote almost uniformly for the same party or person, effectively creating family voting blocs.

Ironically, this is almost a return to the old days when only men could vote. Part of the rationale for this was that the man was the “head of the family” and was effectively casting a representative vote for his whole household.

Mail-in voting puts a very different slant on vote canvassing. The knock comes at your door. Traditionally, the canvasser would say “Hi, I’m campaigning for Joe Biden, can we count on your vote on November 3rd?”. If you were a shy Trump voter, you could simply say “Oh yes, I’ll be voting for him, thanks!” and close the door, and then quietly go vote for Trump when the day came.

Mail in voting puts the possibility of a hard doorstep salesmen tactic onto voting. The canvasser can immediately say “Oh, you know you can vote by mail don’t you? Do you want to fill in your ballot right now? Do you want any help with how to fill it in? I’ll even help you mail it…”.

I don’t know if this happened, or how much this might have happened, but clearly it could happen, and it’s very difficult to see how you could stop it, or audit it.

Care homes for the elderly would be particularly prone to this. A stack of mail-in voting papers arrive for the 50 residents of a care home, and a “helpful” member of the staff of the care home goes around every resident to “help” them fill in their ballot, and it just so happens they all vote the same way as that member of staff. Funny that, eh?

3) It increases the quality of voting.

Linked to the previous point: To vote in person you have to care enough to actually go to the polling station. This affords a basic level of connection with politics and the issues. Mail in voting, particularly in conjunction with gentle coercion of the kind mentioned in point 2 is likely to generate votes from people who wouldn’t rise to the basic level of political motivation to actually go to a polling booth. This is not indicative of someone making a well reasoned voting decision.

It’s often said it’s good to get more people to vote, and this is good for democracy. Well, maybe. It’s good if those votes arise out of increased engagement with the political process.

However, if what is actually happening is you have one “influencer” who is then effectively harvesting more votes from otherwise apathetic individuals about them, who, left to their own devices would be non-voters, but are coaxed into filling in a mail-in ballot to stop the nagging of the “influencer” then it’s not such a good thing at all.

The loss of voting anonymity is going to change the voting result

All the above are just basic reasons why mail-in voting is, in general, a bad idea. However, in the case of the American election it’s even worse, because of the strong correlation between how people vote and who they vote for.

One of the great problems with trying to rig elections is how you can differentiate between the votes you want (for the person you want to win) against the person you don’t want to win.

However, the voting split in the American election, clearly opens up the possibility of exploiting the difference in how people vote to affect the outcome.

For example, if you are a corrupt republican postman, just accidentally “lose” a sack of mail with ballots in. You will lose some trump ones ,sure, but you know on average, you will lose more Biden ones.

If you are a corrupt democratic supporter, set off a fire alarm in a polling station, causing it to be shut for an hour and lose a bunch of people polling. Some of them will have been Biden votes, but you know most will have been Trump.

There are numerous other ways this can be exploited, deliberately, in addition to more innocent biasing of the result as mentioned earlier in this post.

All of these things should have probably been considered more closely before the mass roll out of mail-in voting for this election, but it’s too late now.

It is entirely possible that Joe Biden has won this election fair and square. It’s entirely possible that Donald Trump has. It’s very likely to come down to a few thousand votes in a couple of states, and the questions over mail-in voting will hang over those few thousand votes, because, even if there is in reality no fraud, (and there is very possibly at least some) the whole process undermines public confidence.

Donald Trump’s hysterical rhetoric is certainly not helping, but it wouldn’t matter who the candidate was. If you have a situation where your leading by what looks like a healthy margin with 90%,or even 95% of the vote counted and that seems to whittle away to nothing in the last 5% of counting dragging on over days….that seriously undermines confidence in the process even if it was legitimate (which it may or may not be) . Appearances matter in democracy, and the nature of the way the counts have gone in Georgia and Michigan will appear to have a contrived appearance, even if that is not actually the case. And that matters.

Hopefully confidence can be restored before the inauguration day, whichever man is taking the oath of office, I sincerely hope so, but mail in voting may have been critical in fracturing trust with the electoral system completely, which is very bad news for America, and democracy around the world.