28 1GM Monday July 27 2020 | the timesComment
I
have spent years kicking up a fuss
about restrictions on scientists
connected with government.
During previous emergencies
I have raged against rules that
made the best scientists fall silent in
the media because being appointed
to the Scientific Advisory Group for
Emergencies (Sage) meant signing
non-disclosure agreements and even
the Official Secrets Act.
So you might expect me to be
joining in the criticism about a lack
of transparency of scientific advice
during Covid-19. I am not. In fact I
am struck by the opposite. We have
seen unprecedented levels of media
engagement from scientific advisers.
There were the daily Downing Street
press conferences, often with Sir
Patrick Vallance and Chris Whitty,
and if we were left wanting more we
could turn on the TV to catch them
and Sage members being grilled by
politicians on select committees. Sage
members such as Jeremy Farrar,
Susan Michie, Neil Ferguson and
John Edmunds have been all over the
media, often sounding a different
note to ministers and warning that
lockdown was being lifted too soon.
After the furore about Dominic
Cummings attending Sage meetings,
I expected my invitation to Vallance
to take part in a press conference
about how Sage works to be turned
down. It wasn’t, and 45 journalists
got to question him about Cummings
and every aspect of how Sage works.
Of course, things could have been
better. I lobbied government
communications people from day
one to publish the names of the
independent scientists on Sage. Their
refusal on the grounds of a “duty of
care” to the experts rang hollow,
given the scientists wanted the
information out there and the failure
to do so exposed them to a narrative
about Sage as a secretive cabal.
As media pressure grew, Whitty
and Vallance made it clear publicly
that they favoured publishing the
membership alongside minutes and
papers from all Sage meetings.
Special advisers gave in and from
April the chief scientist has run
separate weekly press briefings for
science journalists to coincide with
the publication of Sage papers.
Critics of the lack of openness
suggest we have learnt nothing from
previous crises. Thankfully they are
wrong. During BSE there was no
Sage, and independent scientific
advisers briefed government officials
behind closed doors. During
Fukushima and the volcanic ash
disruption, scientists appointed to
Sage in effect left the public domain.
The lesson we should learn from
Covid-19 is how important it is to
hear directly from the scientists
advising government and why we
must not return to the bad old days
when they were hidden from view.Fiona Fox is director of the
Science Media CentrePlanning to
redecorate?
Try doing it
by the book
T
he news that sales of print
books rose last year as
Britons turned to literature
to decorate their homes
and appear intelligent in
Zoom calls has been greeted with
sniffiness by literary types. I don’t see
the problem at all. The only
meaningful interior decoration I’ve
done in more than a decade has
involved the installation of shelves:
rows of books are the single easiest
way of lifting a room.
I have three beautiful history
books from Kashi House Publishing
holding up my Sky Box. There are
eight hardback cookbooks in my
kitchen concealing an unsightly gap
between the microwave and boiler.
Hilary Mantel’s The Mirror and The
Light is keeping a bedroom door
open (it also comes in handy as an
alternative to dumbbells and as a
block to use in Zoom yoga classes),
and my eldest niece likes to do
conference calls against shelves thatfeature 300 books she has never read
(including some written by me), and
about 200 books I’ve never read
either. Does this make us
pretentious? Maybe. Occasionally,
though, it’s nice to stumble across, in
your own home, a book that you
haven’t read. And I know as a writer
that a royalty is a royalty, whether
someone buys your stuff to read, or
to pretend to read, or to conceal a
stain on a skirting board.Capital no-nos
A
question posed by the actor
Joseph Martin — “What one
piece of advice do you wish
you could give to tourists before they
visit London for the first time?” —
went viral on social networking last
week, and I enjoyed many of the
responses. They included: “We
Londoners have nothing to do with
the M&M store, so don’t blame
us”; “Camden Market is
incredibly exciting when you are
17 and a half, and not a
minute older”; “Liverpool
Street is not reached via a
two-hour and £200
journey on the west
coast mainline”; “RE:
pubs. If there’s a sign
outside for fish and
chips, don’t get the
fish and chips.”
Having written a
column aimed atLondon tourists for the British
Airways magazine for a few years I’d
like proffer some advice of my own:
going up the Monument is infinitely
better than paying ten times more to
go up the Shard; never ever go to
Madame Tussauds; walk to Covent
Garden from Leicester Square Tube;
and if you’re ever caught short
luxury hotels are a decent bet. Staff
rarely have the time to get to know
all the guests, you can usually get in
and out without being bothered, and
unlike the average Starbucks loo,
there usually isn’t someone shooting
up heroin in the next cubicle.Modern-day torture
I
really do feel sorry for young
people. They are inheriting an
environmental disaster of our
instigation, it’s impossible for them to
get on the property ladder, and
last week I learnt that some
have it worse with exam
results too. In my day the
ritual was simple: we’d walk
to a board at school or
university at a specified time,
yelp in despair or delight
at our results, and
then go to one of
the many nearby
pubs that let us
drink under-age
even when we
were in our
school uniforms.Sathnam Sanghera Notebook
The idea we all need to ‘stay in our lane’ denies the celebration of other cultures enjoyed by many
Woke warriors threaten our sense of identity
failure on the left is that we only see
identity as a source of oppressing or
suffering. Hence when Stephen
Lamonby ventured to suggest that
Jewish people were among the
cleverest in the world, it seems that
his university colleagues could only
read this as a prelude to discrimination.
To be clear, Dr Lamonby forfeited
my own sympathy when he opined,
with zero evidence, that most
Nigerians did not have it in their
DNA to be engineers. But I am
troubled by a judge’s assertion that
ascribing certain talents to a group
was “potentially racist” because
“talents or abilities will vary wildly
from individual to individual”.
Singing “glad to be gay” does not
demean heterosexuality any more
than declaring “I am woman”
suggests that men are a bad lot. It is
true that while most great jazz
trumpeters are black I’ll never be one
of them. I once ran very fast but I
was always a duffer with a cricket
ball. Neither fact prevents me from
identifying with the success of
American jazz musicians and West
Indian fast bowlers; pride in my
identity does not have to imply
criticism of anyone else’s. But
increasingly, the woke are turning
what should be the very basis of
solidarity — pleasure in what people
who share your background bring to
the world — into a source of
suffering, misery and fear. If the left
wants to defeat nationalism, it needs
to change its tune on belonging.
Discrimination on the basis of
gender, race or sexual orientation has
caused us all much grief. Let’s not
make the joy of belonging to a tribe a
fresh casualty of the culture wars.performance and one for a classical
music recording. In 1984 he did the
double again. In 1985 he neglected to
produce a classical album and
contented himself with the jazz prize.
Miles Davis, whose album Kind of
Blue had sold more copies than any
jazz album in history, evidently did
not think much of the upstart. When
the rivals appeared at the Vancouver
Jazz Festival, Marsalis climbed on the
stage and began to play along to
Davis’s set as jazzmen sometimes do.
Davis stopped the band and rasped:
“What the f*** are you doing up
here... get the f*** off the stage.”
Marsalis left. They never made up,
and Davis died in 1991.
It emerged in Davis’s
autobiography that, while he
regarded Marsalis as a technically
great player, his musical eclecticism
irked the older man. “They got
Wynton playing some old dead
European music,” Davis complained.
“If he keeps on, they’re going to f***
him up.” Davis’s philosophy was based
on the idea that black musicians
should stick to the African-American
tradition and not fool around with
other people’s notes. Marsalis, a
bolder, more confident soul, believed
that he could take on the European
tradition at its own game and win.
Progressives today tend to share
Davis’s view that people should stay
in their lane but I’m with Marsalis.
The fact that a particular activity
may be dominated by a group does
not mean that they own it. No list of
great horn players would omit Bix
Beiderbecke and Chet Baker. And
celebration of a group’s tradition
shouldn’t limit its members’
ambition. However, the most seriousH
ere’s one of those cryptic
puzzles familiar to
listeners of radio quizzes:
what do the sacking of a
university lecturer for
musing that Jewish people excel in
some academic disciplines, the
disbanding of a cathedral choir, and
Boris Johnson catching crabs in
Orkney have in common with the
Vancouver Jazz Festival?
Let’s start with the simple ones.
The prime minister knows he is
unpopular in Scotland. It’s not
evident that he understands why.
Last week Mr Johnson did his best to
reassure Scots that he felt their
economic pain; he added, sotto voce,
that without the UK Treasury’s
ability to provide a shower of cash
for furloughed workers, they would
really get to know what pain feels
like. But I don’t think it will work: to
paraphrase Bill Clinton’s 1992 slogan,
it’s not the economy, stupid.
It’s true that economics and
identity are always in the front seats
of the political car, and for most of
my lifetime economics has had its
hands on the steering wheel. We used
to have a consensus on questions of
ethnic or gender identity; what
divided us were questions about
public spending and taxes. In recentyears economics has moved over to
the passenger seat thanks to a
growing consensus on public finances
while identity politics have seized the
wheel. Western societies are now
veering all over the road and the
political satnav has lost its signal.
This week’s prize nuttiness comes
from Duke University, North
Carolina, ranked 20th in the world,
ahead of the London School of
Economics and Edinburgh. Its
“Teaching for Equity” programme
tells academics that “objectivity”,
“perfectionism” and “a sense of
urgency” are traits of — I kid you
not — “white supremacy”. As is
“worship of the written word”.
Here, the decision to disband the
Sheffield Cathedral choir, while no
doubt largely down to some internal
disputes, owes something, apparently,
to the notion that choral music is
alienating to what the dean calls a“mixed urban community”: code for
a city with some people of colour in
it. Tell that to the great bass baritone
Sir Willard White, or to the soprano
Kathleen Battle, both pretty “urban”.
We’ll come to Jewish braininess in
a moment. But a dispute between
two indisputably great musicians
provides a lens through which to
understand what is at stake. In 1983
a 22-year-old trumpeter, Wynton
Marsalis, achieved a feat never
previously managed, winning two
Grammy awards, one for a jazzPride in my identity
doesn’t imply criticism
of anyone else’s
When scientists
speak freely, it’s
better for everyone
Fiona Fox
Over the past two weeks my
younger niece (yes, both are still
residing with me) received her
degree results from the London
School of Economics in the most
torturous way imaginable: one week
she was sent some “provisional
marks”, which had not been
“confirmed by the relevant Board of
Examiners” and “may therefore
change”, and the next she was sent
the actual results.
I don’t know how many
universities do this, but it is the
academic equivalent of being made
to watch an operation before you
have one yourself. Surely, the one
rule of delivering big news, whether
it is exam results, or that you’re
leaving your husband, is to do it
clearly and at once. She eventually
triumphed with a proud-making 2:1,
but we still have not recovered from
the seven days of speculative mental
arithmetic. And then, worst of all for
her, she only had her uncle and sister
to celebrate with.Titus Androgynous
T
weet of the month:
@MisterABK: “Words that
sounds like Shakespeare
characters:- Portfolio
- Patio
- Androgynous
- Taliban
- Wonderbras.”
Trevor
Phillips@trevorptweetst