24 2GN The Sunday Times November 14, 2021
NEWS
The Cop26 summit in Glasgow was not
meant to end with its president express-
ing how deeply sorry he was about the
way the process had unfolded, and saying
he understood the disappointment that
many countries would feel. Alok Sharma
was speaking from the heart about the
last-minute machinations by China and
India that watered down the summit’s
commitment to phasing out coal.
He should not, however, be too down-
hearted. Lord Stern of Brentford, chair-
man of the Grantham Research Institute
on Climate and the Environment, said
that the summit had brought “important
advances”.
Even on coal, according to Lord Stern:
“The last-minute watering-down of this
statement is unfortunate but is unlikely to
slow down a strong momentum past coal,
a dirty fuel of an earlier era.”
In the meantime we should mark the
fact that Cop26 achieved its broad aim of
“keeping 1.5 alive” — maintaining the pos-
sibility of limiting global warming to 1.5C.
To do so will, as was always the case,
require further meetings and commit-
ments, but Glasgow has handed the baton
on, rather than ended the race.
Among its successes were agreements
by more than 100 leaders to end and
reverse deforestation by 2030, and to cut
more than 30 per cent of methane emis-
sions by the same date. China and Amer-ica are committed to a climate dialogue.
The world is in a better place.
Critics, predictably, will say that Cop26
lacked ambition, especially on cutting
usage of fossil fuels — a criticism given
added weight by the last-minute man-
oeuvres — and climate protesters will have
a field day with Glasgow’s downbeat
ending. But if, as they claim, all these sum-
mits are good for is “blah, blah, blah”, and
if world leaders are just scoundrels who
say they will take action and do not, what
is the incentive for the rest of us to take cli-
mate change seriously? Most people want
to do things right, not roar down the road
in gas-guzzling SUVs or turn the thermo-
stat up high. But if our efforts are dis-
missed as fluff, then why should we
change?
The spirit of change is there, and it has
been strengthened by Cop 26. It has to be
handled carefully and, as the mayor of
Greater Manchester, Andy Burnham,
pointed out on Friday, climate policies
cannot be a mechanism for increasing
inequalities by loading costs onto poorer
households. The consistent message from
polls before and during the Glasgow con-
ference was that people want to change.
Cop26 was never going to be the un-
alloyed triumph some hoped for. But it
has sharpened the focus and made some
important progress. It is up to govern-
ments to harness the change people want.I
t has become a mantra for this gov-
ernment that it intends to “build
back better”. Armed with an infra-
structure fighting fund of hundreds
of billions of pounds, Boris Johnson
plans to spend more on rebuilding
Britain than any of his recent pre-
decessors.
This is easier said than done, and for
months ministers have had a dilemma on
their hands. It has been an open secret
that the eastern extension of HS2, the new
high-speed railway, is under threat. That
eastern extension, the 120-mile right arm
of a “Y” taking the railway from Birming-
ham to Leeds, is seen by northern leaders
as a measure of the government’s commit-
ment to its levelling-up agenda. Without
it, they have warned, its ambitions will
ring hollow.
Announcements this week will there-
fore be a significant test for that agenda.
As the cost of HS2 has ballooned from an
original figure of just over £30 billion in
2010 to a likely £100 billion-plus now,
prompting Treasury alarm, so the eastern
extension appears to have become the
casualty. The line will still run up to Man-
chester, but not Leeds.
This week’s announcements — the Inte-
grated Rail Plan to be unveiled by Grant
Shapps, the transport secretary — will
offer, instead of the eastern extension to
HS2, £96 billion of additional rail funding
intended to improve connectivity within
the Midlands and northern England. It
will include a new 42-mile line from Bir-
mingham to East Midlands Parkway, just
south of Nottingham. The journey time
between these two big cities in the west
and east Midlands is 72 minutes at
present. This will reduce it to 27.
Leeds will be served by a high-speed
line running south to Sheffield, according
to the plans, cutting journey times
between the two Yorkshire cities from 42
to 24 minutes. There will also be a new line
from Crewe to Manchester and upgraded
links between Leeds and Manchester. The
aim is a laudable one: to create a railcommuting culture across the north and
Midlands to rival that which is associated
with the prosperity of London and the
southeast.
The plans, which are in line with rec-
ommendations from the National Infra-
structure Commission, make a lot of
sense. Northern and Midlands political
and business leaders have long argued for
better connections between their towns
and cities, as well as to London.
With a fair wind this week’s announce-
ments will be seen as putting flesh on the
bones of the government’s levelling-up
agenda and compensating for the loss of
the eastern extension to HS2. The north
had always argued it needed both
improved connectivity and a full HS2.
These plans have the advantage, as White-
hall sources point out, of being delivered
much quicker. Had it been built — and it
still could be eventually — the eastern
branch of HS2 would not have been com-
plete until the 2040s.
This should be a strong argument, as is
the fact that this plan offers a better
opportunity to connect stations with local
transport networks. Levelling-up is not,
though, just about improving the trans-
port infrastructure of the north and the
Midlands. Northern prosperity will
require a sustained improvement in its
productivity, which now lags well behind
that of London and the southeast.
Achieving that will require not just
large sums of public money but large-
scale business investment, alongside
innovation and skills. History is littered
with examples of public projects that have
failed to make the kind of difference that
those championing them claimed they
would.
The government, and the prime minis-
ter, has struggled to define what
levelling-up actually means. This week’s
rail plans, which deserve to get a good
hearing in the north, are an important
start. But they are just that, and they will
not come to fruition for some time. This
levelling-up journey will be a long one.A dirty move took the shine off
Cop26, but change is in the air
A new doll asks children to fix its “major
beauty fail”. A magic facemask transforms
the doll from an unhappy make-up disas-
ter into what looks like a beaming compet-
itor from The Only Way Is Essex.
The FailFix (as it is charmlessly known)
has been condemned for reinforcing
sexual stereotypes. Quite right too. Play is
a rehearsal for life, and toys that teach
young girls that their looks are the meas-
ure of their worth are not helpful.
And yet, despite ourselves, we see theappeal. Who hasn’t looked in the mirror
after a spirited night out and longed for a
magic facemask — or, failing that, a new
face entirely?
The maker would at least have some
defence against the charge of sexism if
there were a male equivalent. Where is
the FailFix for those who’d like to turn
jowls and a paunch into a steely jaw and a
six-pack? If the manufacturer does pro-
duce one, it might let us know. Well, a man
can dream.Guys and dolls
ESTABLISHED 1822A rail plan for the country —
the first stop on a long journey
Dominic Lawson
care home residence, which our results
suggest explained some but not all of the
increased risk”.
It is true that a minority of the vaccinated
will still get Covid, and therefore infect others.
But research published last month by the
National Institute for Public Health and the
Environment in the Netherlands suggests that,
even with the ultra-contagious Delta variant,
the rate at which the vaccinated but infected
passed on the virus was 63 per cent lower than
the rate at which it was passed on by the
unvaccinated infected. When you have a child
whose chances of dying from Covid, if she is
infected, are ten times the typical rate for
someone of her age, that 63 per cent reduction
really matters. So I would have words to say to
an NHS antivaxer who tried to justify their
decision on the grounds that they might
anyway become a transmitter of Covid, even if
they had the jab.
Still, the public service unions representing
workers in the NHS have spoken out against the
“jab or no job” threat. Sara Gorton of Unison
said: “This isn’t about what’s right to do for
patients;” — obviously not — “this is about what
is the best way of increasing rates of
vaccination across the NHS.” So, forget what
patients and their families think, and stick to
persuasion, rather than threat. That argument
is partly in reaction to the sacking of care home
staff, whose own vaccine deadline was on
Friday, which may well result in many of those
refusers applying for work in the NHS, at least
for the next five months.
However, the French example suggests the
threat might be highly effective: there, the
introduction of mandatory Covid jabs for
health service workers lifted their rates of
vaccination, within three months, from
under two thirds to 99 per cent. It’s actually an
old-fashioned approach, not a novel one. The
NHS has long insisted that those involved in
surgical procedures are vaccinated against
hepatitis B, and the official guidance of the
General Medical Council is that “doctors
should be immunised against serious
communicable diseases unless medically
contraindicated”.
Last week The Daily Telegraph published
this short letter from Carmel Smedley: “In 1956
I applied to become a nurse in Birmingham.
Smallpox vaccination was compulsory. It never
occurred to any of us to refuse.”
If only the head of NHS England could
communicate as clearly and sensibly as that.
[email protected]W
hen people have been dissuaded
by falsehoods from taking the
Covid-19 vaccine, it is essential to
be completely scrupulous in
response. Fighting wicked lies
with “virtuous” untruths is not
just reprehensible; it is stupid.
Yet that is precisely what the
head of NHS England has done. In an effort to
encourage more people to have their booster
jabs, Amanda Pritchard asserted last week:
“We have had 14 times the number of people in
hospital with Covid-19 than we saw this time
last year.” This was repeated by various
broadcasters, which didn’t think to check
whether it was true.
Of course, it wasn’t: there are thousands
fewer people in hospital with Covid than this
time last year. When Pritchard’s office was
challenged, it defended her remarks on the
grounds that “in August” Covid hospital
admissions were 14 times higher than in August- That’s like the weatherman telling you in
November to be careful of sunburn and, if
queried, pointing out that it was hot in August.
What made this even more unforgivable was
that it coincided with the health secretary’s
announcement that all NHS staff who come
into regular contact with patients must be
“double-vaccinated” against Covid 19 if they
wish to stay in their jobs. Given the extent to
which those NHS staff who are still refusing are
doing so because they have been led to believe
that the vaccination is ineffective (or worse),
the Pritchard intervention might make the
deluded feel vindicated. If it were actually the
case that the NHS was being overrun with
Covid cases in the way she suggested, it would
imply the vaccines were pretty useless; in fact
it is only because of their efficacy that we have
been able to return to some form of normality
in our lives.
Sajid Javid is right to insist that all “patient-
facing” NHS staff be vaccinated; if anything,
it is perplexing that it has taken this long to
make it a requirement for frontline staff. Even
now, the secretary of state has given them a
deadline of April 2022, which somehow
detracts from the supposed urgency. This is
partly because the health department fears an
exodus of non-complying staff during the
winter months, when demands on the NHS
peak, and partly, in the words of the official
announcement, to “allow time ... to prepare
and encourage workers’ uptake before the
measures are introduced”.
They’ve had enough time, already. NHS
workers were offered the vaccine before
anyone else — they were getting their first jab
back in December last year. And it has long
been evident that its risks are infinitesimal. The
refusing staff (roughly ten per cent of the total)
have been “self-certifying” as having health
reasons not to receive the jab; Javid also
declared that such “self-certification” would no
longer suffice. In other words, genuine and
independently assessed grounds for exemption
will be required, not just an individual’s
unsubstantiated belief that he or she has a
special vulnerability to vaccine side effects.
It is the truly vulnerable, rather than
hypochondriacs and antivax faddists within
the NHS, whom this measure is designed to
protect. I am thinking, for example, of my
friend Stephen Pollard, editor of The Jewish
Chronicle. He has leukaemia: the combination
of the condition and the essential drugs used to
treat it means he has generated no Covid
antibodies despite having been given the
vaccine twice. Stephen observes that this
will be true of many if not all of the 250,000
people in the UK with that particular form of
cancer. And not just them. As the British
Medical Journal reported: “Failure to
seroconvert” — that is, to develop antibodies —
“was particularly high in certain groups
[including] 98 per cent of patients with
inflammatory arthritis.”
I also think of my younger daughter, who
has Down’s syndrome. She had her booster
shot a week ago, but the vaccine is not totally
effective in blocking infection; it just makes it a
lot less likely. And the most exhaustive
research, commissioned by the Department
of Health and published by the Annals of
Internal Medicine, concluded that there was
“a fourfold increased risk for Covid-19-related
hospitalisation and a tenfold increased risk for
Covid-19-related death in persons with Down’s
syndrome. This was after adjusting for
cardiovascular and pulmonary diseases andI
love the “blame the medication” defence,
the classic get-out-of-jail-free blister pack.
The latest to pull this out of the hat was an
MP who, with two others, was allegedly
hog-whimperingly overserved before and
during a flight to an official Armistice Day
ceremony in Gibraltar. The MP in question
was so medicated that she apparently
required a wheelchair to ferry her between
baggage reclaim and bus.
But drinking in airports and on planes is a
noble British tradition. There’s nothing more
seductive than the opportunity to booze at
transgressive times of day. These are odd,
liminal spaces, worlds between worlds, where
you’re required to turn up hours earlier than
departure times and there’s not much to do
other than consume. Some go for duty-free
Burberry bags or giant Toblerones. And some
hit the ’Spoons for the traditional 7.30am cut-
price pints. Or the VIP lounges — where our
merry trio had been allegedly pre-loading —
dazzling fairylands of free drinks, tiny bags of
crisps and curious sandwiches. If you’re not
used to these places (and I’ve never got over
the excitement of occasionally scoring access
to one), the temptation is almost too much to
bear: cin-cin and make mine eight G&Ts. Then,
once above the clouds, what else are you going
to do? The novelty of a private screening of a
new movie is not what it once was, but the
miniature bottles of spirits still bring the buzz.
I used to be an airport-to-plane drinker,
suckered by a glass of champagne or two at
those odd circular bars that sell caviar and
smoked salmon in a weird simulacrum of
luxury. It was always, always flat. I’d perch on
my stool thinking, ain’t this the life, gaslit by
flat fizz. And in the air it was all such fun,
from those miniatures to the bar area in
transatlantic first class where, no matter what
time in the morning it was, some smiling chap
would ply you with hooch under dimmed
cabin lights, like an airborne Lloyd the
bartender from The Shining.
Then two things put me off. One was a trip
back from Las Vegas, where I’d been socomprehensively polluted by Sin City’s
organised debauchery that I thought I’d keep it
rolling on the flight home. I’d like to
retropologise to the poor woman sitting next to
me, who thought at first she was making a top
new pal before eventually realising the full
horror of the situation as I ordered the
umpteenth bloody mary. (Bloody marys are
still the only drink to binge on while flying:
scientific fact.) The hangover — literal
comedown — from that little jaunt lasted more
than a week. The toxic shame, a lot longer.
The other was travelling to Seoul with a large
pal who couldn’t believe our luck at being
somehow upgraded to the very highest class on
an Emirates flight: we had separate little rooms
and the staff plied us with outrageous wines.
There was even a tiny spa. By this time I was
more about the restraint, but the pal went all
in: gallons of Dom Pérignon and Meursault and
Château Lafite. He immersed himself in so
much of the stuff that at one point he managed
to lock himself in the spa — what he was doing
there is anyone’s guess; a nice paralytic facial?
— and I was roped in to rescue him, cabin crew
refusing point blank. When we finally reached
Seoul, he thought he was going to die. My
sympathy was, of course, immense. He
recovered enough to panic that there wouldn’t
be a coffin in Korea large enough to
accommodate him, before remembering the
US military base in the city. “Hey,” he blearily
thought, “I’ll be given a coffin from there. I’ll
be going home a hero.”Stressful doesn’t begin to describe the
experience. It put me off plane boozing for life.
Times have changed too: once you could get
completely rat-arsed with very little judgment.
Social media has now put paid to that with a
slew of early-boozer shaming posts. These days
you can’t drunkenly take a pop at long-
suffering cabin crew without someone
capturing it for the world on their phone.
Accountability sucks, as Kate Moss
discovered while popularising the insult
“basic bitch” in a furious rant on an easyJet
flight from Bodrum. Me, I don’t judge: if the
refreshment choice is the grim Joe & the Juice
or something phoned in by James Martin, if
Pret is the best a traveller can expect, who
could blame anyone for hitting the mojito jugs
at one of the huge, anonymous airport
boozeramas?
Mind you, those break-of-dawn drinkers
aren’t off to represent the country in a First
World War memorial service. But those
bibulous MPs are having none of it, lashing out
at their accusers, declaring the allegations “a
shameless attempt to divert attention from the
Tory corruption scandal”, top work on the
deflationary tactic front. (To be scrupulously
fair, it’s not as if there haven’t been a few of
these dead cats floating around elsewhere.)
Again, in fairness, drink hits us differently mid-
air. According to the Civil Aviation Authority,
it’s something to do with low air pressure
thinning the blood. Others argue that it’s a case
of less oxygen getting to the brain. Either way,
insta-blotto.
Also, there have been worse behaviours:
Gérard Depardieu weeing all over an Air
France carpet; Sean Bean and his wife hurling
wine at each other. Even though I abstain
nowadays, world-between-worlds drinking
isn’t the greatest crime: most people manage to
have a few drinks to soften the tedium of travel
without acting like complete clowns. And
there’s never any excuse for rudeness or
aggression towards airline staff. Typical UK
politicians: giving the rest of us a bad name.
@MarinaOLoughlinMarina O’Loughlin
A trio of MPs have fallen foul of the 7.30am ‘Spoons pint. I’m not judging
Boozing before take-off
is a fine British tradition
There can be no justification for delaying mandatory vaccines for staff
When we reached
Seoul, my friend
thought he was dying
My daughter’s risk of
dying from Covid is
increased tenfold
Sorry: time’s up for
the NHS jab-dodgers