The Times - UK (2020-10-20)

28 1GM Tuesday October 20 2020 | the times

Comment

I’ll move all

my cl o cks

sideways

this weekend

I

n the traditional 8.54am slanging

match on Radio 4’s Toda y

programme between two people

who pretend to have strong

opinions about something

nobody else cares about, so that we

can all throw coffee down our necks

and toast into our children as we

hustle out of the door to the sound

of somebody other than the people

we love being vile to each other, two

men went at it hammer and tongs

yesterday over the putting forward of

the clocks. Or the putting back.

Whichever it is that we are meant

to do next Sunday. Or Saturday.

Or Monday.

On one side of the debate was a

man from an organisation that was

violently in favour of whichever it is

we are about to do. Or possibly

against it. And on the other side,

whichever side that was, was Peter

Hitchens of The Mail on Sunday, as

usual, whose position was that his

Rapid tests are the

only way to break

the virus impasse

Matthew Lesh

B

ritain is stuck in Covid

purgatory. If we do nothing,

tens of thousands could die.

If we continue with

lockdowns, livelihoods and

liberties will be destroyed.

NHS Test and Trace, costing a

whopping £12 billion, was meant to

solve this dilemma. It has been a

colossal failure. The government

never learnt from its earlier mistakes,

maintaining a highly centralised

approach that shuns outsiders.

The testing regime is largely

dependent on PCR (polymerase

chain reaction) tests. These are

highly accurate but slow, expensive

and logistically challenging. The

government has also bought kit from

Oxford Nanopore and DnaNudge —

tests are faster but rely on expensive

proprietary technology and machines.

What we need are cheap and rapid

tests that we can take every day, half

an hour before catching a plane, or

entering a restaurant, theatre or club.

This would allow the prompt

discovery of contagious cases before

they can spread. Life could largely

return to normal even before (or

without) a vaccine.

Thankfully, this technology exists.

We just aren’t using it. RT-Lamp

(Reverse Transcription Loop-

mediated Isothermal Amplification)

can detect the virus using a rapid

and cheap one-step process. It

proved effective in tackling Ebola

in Africa. Lamp tests mean spitting

in a tube (or taking a swab and

dipping it in a tube), placing the tube

in a heat block for 15-30 minutes,

and seeing whether it changes

colour.

Unlike a PCR test it does not

require advanced machinery at a

laboratory. We could do rapid Lamp

tests at GP surgeries, pharmacies,

airports, railway stations and sports

stadiums. Open-source test designs

have been verified by leading

universities and research institutes,

including Oxford University and the

Francis Crick Institute in London.

There are also new “antigen” tests,

run via a paper strip like a pregnancy

test, which have been approved by

US regulators and have a CE mark

for hospitals or GPs. These tests cost

about £5-£10 a pop. They still need

approval for use at home.

Regulators may be wary because

LAMP (90%-97% +) and antigen

tests (84%-98%) are not as sensitive

as PCR tests (95%-100%), meaning

that there will be some false

negatives (and probably fewer false

positives). Incumbent diagnostic

companies will also express doubt

since profit margins are thin.

But millions of rapid tests that can

identify most cases and limit the

spread would be better than our

present system: one that is too

inaccessible, expensive and slow to

provide much practical use.

Matthew Lesh is head of research at

the Adam Smith Institute

Fanaticism will thrive until the West properly upholds its values and supports Muslim reformers

Macron’s war against Islamism is not enough

would expect to see New Labour’s

swivel-eyed hobgoblin-in-chief

canoodling with his bezzies of an

evening. I hope Blair was in breach

of the regs, I hope he’s got it, and I

hope he gave it to every man jack of

them. (Although — to be clear — I

hope nobody dies and, should my

powers of voodoo prove more

efficacious than I was expecting, I

exclude the staff from my fantasy).

Neighbourhood botch

V

olunteers are to be issued with

speed cameras by police as

part of a “community

speedwatch” scheme to catch

drivers breaking rules in the areas

that plod himself cannot (be

bothered to) reach. The bad news is

that this will empower local

busybodies in high-viz jackets to

leap out and give you a heart attack

when you finally accelerate away

from a traffic jam on the morning

school run. The good news is that, as

drivers can’t be prosecuted using

evidence from volunteers, you won’t

get a fine. Or points. Just a letter

from the police.

My hope is that it will say: “Dear

Mr Coren, some meddling nerk has

zapped you doing 24mph on an

empty road round Hampstead Heath

at 4.23am; will you be going round to

give him a slap in the chops and tell

him to mind his own business, or can

we do it for you?”

for example, is a prime weapon in

the campaign of western takeover

identified by Macron. The

accusation aims to silence any

criticism of the Islamic world,

however well founded, and incites

and sanitises attacks on people who

make any such criticism. It also

hinders Muslim reformers in France

and elsewhere who are engaged in a

desperate and dangerous struggle to

promote moderate views.

Macron’s aim to create a synthesis

between French secularism and

Islam has been attacked by

Islamic fundamentalists as “racism”

and by assimilated Muslims for

trying to turn France into a

caliphate. Among many Muslim

reformers, however, his words have

been welcomed. In Middle East

Online, an Iraqi writer, Farouk

Yousef, wrote: “Islam is in crisis

because it has been distorted,

mutilated, and destroyed from

within. We should have said

thank you to Macron rather than

curse him.”

Similarly praising Macron’s

initiative, the Saudi writer Fahad

Shoqiran nevertheless criticised

France for having enabled the rise of

Islamism because it “did not enact

laws that deter the institutions of

political Islam, which enabled them

to penetrate the communities there”.

The threat from Islamic fanaticism

won’t recede unless Islam is

reformed from within. Absent that

happy development, the single most

important task for the West is to stop

demonising those sounding a

warning, identify its own core values

and then make no allowances in

defending them.

Charlie Hebdo’s old offices after the

start of the trial of people accused of

involvement in the massacre there.

As the problem has worsened,

however, the state has responded by

cracking down on those sounding

the alarm. The journalist Éric

Zemmour, for example, is under

investigation by the authorities

because of “Islamophobic prejudice”

and “incitement to racial prejudice”.

His alleged offence was to criticise,

after Mehmoud’s attack, immigration

and the “uncontrolled presence of

unaccompanied minors, many of

whom lie about their age and turn

out to be thieves and assassins”. Yet

Mehmoud had entered France

illegally in 2018 and asked for asylum

as an “isolated minor”, having lied to

a judge that he was 18.

Zemmour uses inflammatory

language and is regarded as an

extremist. However, Jean-Louis

Thiériot, the former president of the

departmental council of Seine-et-

Marne in Paris, told Le Figaro that

migrants often claim to be children

owing to the benefits they receive

and that almost 80 per cent of such

claims in his area were fraudulent.

Macron has used tough rhetoric,

stating that “Islamic separatism” is

problematic and warning that the

goal of the “ideology of Islamism” is

to “take complete control” of society.

Despite such fierce language, it’s

doubtful whether his new measures

will have much effect. It is not enough

to tackle problematic behaviour

within the Muslim community; both

France and the West in general also

need to put a stop to assumptions of

their own that foster it.

The accusation of Islamophobia,

T

he horrific murder of a

teacher last Friday has

graphically illustrated

France’s deepening crisis

over Islamist fanaticism.

Samuel Paty, who taught in a

suburban school in Paris, was

beheaded by Abdullakh Anzorov, an

18-year-old Muslim of Chechen

origin who had been granted leave to

remain in France as a refugee.

Paty was murdered because he had

shown his class satirical cartoons of

Islam’s prophet, Muhammad. He

showed these cartoons every year as

part of a discussion about freedom

after the attack in 2015 on the

magazine Charlie Hebdo, when 12

people were murdered and 11 injured

because it had republished these and

other cartoons mocking Muhammad.

The French authorities

investigating Paty’s murder have

arrested 11 people suspected of

terrorist sympathies who are linked

to the killer and to the father of a

pupil in the teacher’s class who had

started an internet campaign against

him with the help of a radical imam.

The atrocity came hard on the

heels of new measures that

President Macron had announced to

tackle Islamism. These included

tightening controls over schools,

requiring imams to be trained and

licensed in France, and requiring

state-subsidised community

associations to sign a contract of

commitment to French secular

values.

Islamism, or politicised Islam that

aims to subject all societies to

Islamic religious precepts, is an

interpretation founded in the

religious sources. It is, however,

resisted by millions of Muslims

who abhor the idea of a supremacist

holy war and want to live under

human rights.

The Islamist problem in France is

of a different type and order of

magnitude from Britain. With a large

number of descendants from

France’s colonial past in north Africa,

French Islamists are more numerous,

more violent and more implacable.

Segregated into dormitory areas

ringing the big cities, they have

turned these into no-go areas for the

French authorities, who have

responded to sporadic violence there

with persistent appeasement.

There have been a series of

atrocities as well as that carried out

at Charlie Hebdo — the attack on a

Jewish school in Toulouse in 2012,

the simultaneous attacks on the

Bataclan concert hall and other Paris

venues in November 2015, and the

Nice truck attack in July 2016. Last

month a 25-year-old Pakistani man,

Zaheer Hassan Mehmoud, wounded

two people with a cleaver outside

The state has cracked

down on those who

sounded the alarm

way of doing the clocks was the

“natural” way. Which I presumed to

mean that it was not the gay or

lefty or Muslim way. And that felt

like a good, strong, conservative

opinion to have on the big issue,

and I thought I might hold it for

the day, if I could only remember

for three seconds at a time which

of the two it was that was only

right and proper for all

clean-living,

heteronormative

Christian natives, and

which was an

abomination to God

and all right-thinking

humans.

But I can’t. So I have

decided next week to

put my clock neither

forwards nor back,

but sideways. At the

stroke of whenever it

is that you’re supposed

to do it (usually 2am –

to guarantee

maximum likelihood

of no one

remembering), I plan

to fling the time on

all my clocks from

2am to 2pm — either

on the following or

previous day, but not

make a note of

which, so that I wake

up in the morning to

find that it is, in fact, early evening,

and I am 12 hours late for

everything, or possibly early.

The great thing about this system

is that it couldn’t be any more

confusing than the one we have at

the moment, at least we won’t be

arguing about one piddly hour

either way, and, let’s face it, nobody

is going anywhere or doing

anything anyway at the moment, so

who gives a flying clock what bloody

time it is?

A plague on Blair’s bar

I

nteresting that the restaurant

Tony Blair visited last month in

(possible) contravention of

Covid quarantine

regulations was the

dismal Harry’s Bar in

Mayfair, a sick,

pretentious, wildly

overpriced

knock-off of

the equally

overrated

Venice

original,

created

for the

refreshment of

London’s least

salubrious non-

domiciled plutocrats,

kleptocrats, kakistocrats

and smelligarchs and just

exactly the sort of place I

Giles Coren Notebook

Melanie

Phillips

@melanielatest

who gives a flying clock

time it is?

A plague on B

nteresting that the

Tony Blair visited

(possible) contrave

Covid quaran

regulation

dismal H

Mayfair

preten

over

kn

t

fo

ref

Lon

salubr

domicile

kleptocrats, k

and smelligar

exactlytheso