Andrew Rawnsley writes that “the pantomime Johnson has been ... replaced with the sombre Johnson we now see at news conferences” (“This coronavirus crisis has forced the retirement of pantomime Johnson”, Comment) and in commending the prime minister’s candour, Rawnsley compares his recent utterings to wartime pronouncements. We are often told that Johnson sees himself as a Winston Churchill for our time. My parents wished Churchill well during the war, not least because they wanted to survive.
So let us allow the prime minister his Churchill moment, and wish him every success too. But when it’s all over, let’s not forget what the British people said to Churchill in 1945 – thanks for winning the war, but we’ll have a Labour government now, please.
John Filby
Ashover, Derbyshire
In his article in support of government policies to deal with the coronavirus crisis, Andrew Rawnsley cites the Fukushima nuclear disaster in which 20 people died of radiation but 1,000 died in the evacuation, the implication being that the decision to evacuate was a mistake. However, there is no way of knowing how many more would have died from radiation, possibly many thousands, if they had not been evacuated.
Rawnsley also states that there are “various models for tackling the pandemic”, yet there is a general consensus that locking down and testing are the key measures, both of which the UK has been reluctant to adopt. The initial focus on the dubious policy of promoting so-called herd immunity, now apparently abandoned, risked a higher death toll among the old and infirm, apparently regarded as expendable and a price worth paying.
The public has been proactive in taking measures forcing the government to, as the BBC journalist Laura Kuenssberg said, “scramble to keep up”. Its failure to take stronger action sooner may with hindsight be judged culpable.
Stephen Butcher
Tullaghgarley, Ballymena,
Co Antrim
Devi Sridhar points out the risks of ignoring the lessons from other countries (“Britain goes it alone over coronavirus. We can only hope the gamble pays off”, Comment).
The policy put forward by our government has some weaknesses. Individuals with mild symptoms are asked to self-isolate at home without calling NHS 111, and without being offered a test, because we have not built up our testing capacity. However, without a call to NHS 111 or a test, it seems unlikely that these patients will have the information or motivation to comply with the stringent home isolation measures that reduce further transmission.
Should we not have built up the capacity for large-scale testing? In South Korea, this has been notably more successful than the use of lockdown in Italy. Furthermore, the recommended duration of self-isolation (seven days from the onset of symptoms) seems inadequate. Covid-19 symptoms and infectivity often continue for longer than seven days.
Dr Giuseppe Bignardi, retired consultant microbiologist
Springfield Park, Durham
Michael Savage demonstrated the difficulties for the government with coronavirus and Brexit transition talks coinciding (“Pandemic sparks calls to extend EU trade talks”, News).
We can only hope that Boris Johnson will heed the calls to delay transition, so that the most important problem for the whole world, the Covid-19 pandemic, can be concentrated on, even before climate change. These far outweigh the UK’s exit from the EU.
Jill Brian
Farringdon, Alton, Hants
The voice of a generation
Andrew Anthony’s dismissal of Stuart Maconie’s The Nanny State Made Me (New Review) as “scattershot” is itself wide of the mark. Far from being an example of the “cult of the individual”, Maconie speaks for a whole generation who have rich experience of a more democratic way of life that was reversed under Margaret Thatcher and has gone further backwards to today’s bullying leaders.
Steve Gooch
Robertsbridge, East Sussex
Solidarity with Nazi victims
The barbarous destruction of the Czech village of Lidice, accompanied by the murder of its inhabitants, brings back haunting memories of a youngster thousands of miles away in far-flung, what was then British Guiana (“Czech village razed by Hitler at heart of row on truth and history”, World).
On hearing the news, I, a member of the World Peace Council, held a commemoration in the village of Glasgow and Edinburgh on the east bank of Demerara, as an expression of solidarity with victims of Nazi atrocities. It was held outdoors, with the candle flies flitting around the gas light.
Eric Lindbergh Huntley
London W13
My solution to climate crisis
I disagree with Anatol Lieven (“Patriotism could be the answer to solving the climate crisis”, Comment). To look to the nation state as the institutional and policy-making framework for dealing with the climate crisis – and with the 21st century’s other policy challenges such as the financial and coronavirus crises – is to look backwards to a system that is way out of date. That world that has been globalising and fragmenting for decades.
Yes, let’s rebuild the welfare state and public services, but the scale of today’s challenges run above and below and cut across what is increasingly a “reactive state” in the wake of these changes, not an effectively proactive one.
Global and transnational responses have to be built from the bottom up. And, in the case of the climate crisis, it is far more important for renewables to become more profitable than fossil fuels for the transnationalising private sector.
An international system based on nation states does not have the capacity to confront these challenges. It will increasingly trail and fail.
Philip Cerny, professor emeritus of politics and global affairs, York
Metaphorically speaking
In Kenan Malik’s fascinating article on the importance of metaphors in everyday language, he makes the point that “metaphors are at the heart of scientific thinking” (“Like a moth to a flame, we are drawn to metaphors to explain ourselves”, Comment).
It is therefore remarkable that science and technology have had little impact on the metaphors we use in everyday life. There are exceptions, such as the rather clumsy use of “computer” to describe the brain, the more appropriate “virus” for a malicious programme that spreads from one computer to another, and the more recent emergence of “Petri dish” to describe a crowd of people at risk in a pandemic. But irrelevant or unsolicited email is, of all things, spam.
Perhaps scientists and engineers themselves could do more to help refresh the metaphor gene pool by introducing scientific and technological concepts into the metaphors they use in their everyday communication. How about describing a world-beating sprinter as a “photon of the track”?
David Head
Peterborough
