The unexamined life

Welcome to Perspective’s newsletter, our view on what’s been happening over the past week, bringing you some of the best independent writing on current affairs, culture, history and life in general. (If this email has been forwarded, you can subscribe here).

The unexamined life

My sixteen-year-old sat his first GCSE exam on Friday. Biology, since you ask. He reported back: “When I checked my answers afterwards with my smart friends, they were mostly the same.” Neither of my children has felt clever at secondary school level, which may have something to do with living in Cambridge. My older son came back after his first day at the local Academy and said, “Mum, there’s a boy in my class who can recite Pi to three hundred places. It’s really weird.” I told him it wasn’t as unusual as our neighbour who spoke twelve languages and had built his own harpsichord.

My household has a slightly off-piste view of school exams. My older boy was out of education altogether (a long story and his to tell) when his peers sat GCSEs and didn't get any. It was hard not to feel very worried, as most of us love our children to distraction and have an unrealistic desire for them to lead charmed lives. On top of that, the narrative around exam results is unhealthily frenzied nowadays. Schools lead the charge with league tables turned into battlegrounds, while social media’s full of people saying how marvellously their children have done.  And while I don't want to rain on anyone's parade, it's hard for parents with children who are having a "wobble" (far too light a word for the physical and mental illness, social issues, bullying, or perhaps underlying “neurodivergence” that tends to be involved) not to feel despondent. Or borderline murderous.

Anyway, despite my older son’s supposedly damning lack of grades he progressed to a local state sixth-form, where amazing teachers tailored a course round him and fed his curiosity. Last autumn he started at university, studying psychology, which means he can spend his spare time diagnosing his parents’ personality flaws. And, despite what we're told about how dreadful it will be if you or your child does not achieve 22 grade 9s  I am here to say: nope, GCSEs aren’t the be all and end all. Nor will A-levels define your life. A friend's child got no formal qualifications at all, took an Open University degree in English, got a First, went on to do a Masters and has just written her first novel.

Contrary to what we’re told, there are almost no rules when it comes to educational success. Some of the cleverest people I have met dropped out of formal learning when young. Doing badly at one stage of your life can be the springboard for later endeavour. It breaks my heart whenever you hear of a young person destroyed by a slipped grade. Perfectionism can be an unbearable burden if you don’t have the capacity to declare, like Scarlett O’Hara, “tomorrow is another day”.

I want the curriculum to be remade so it’s about passion and engagement (I’d throw in learning poetry) and properly understanding things – not learning to the exam. Hey ho. And I want a winged horse.

From hero to zero: the AZ vaccine

Our world-beating vaccine was pretty much deemed the greatest British invention since the Spitfire. Certainly, the ingenuity, speed and efficiency involved was a brief reminder that this creaking old nation can be impressive when the right people are harnessed. However, this also meant you couldn’t say the teeniest weeniest disobliging thing about our jab, because that would be unpatriotic – like dissing Dame Judi Dench.

Even so, the Oxford-AstraZeneca covid vaccine was withdrawn from the global market last week after more than three billion doses had been administered. Which coincided with renewed headlines about the “extremely rare side effects” associated with 81 deaths in the UK. AstraZeneca has admitted in legal papers that their jab can cause thrombosis with thrombocytopenia syndrome – in layman’s language “blood clots with low platelet count”. Now dozens of patients and families are launching legal action against AstraZeneca. According to the BMJ, “some have lost relatives and some have survived with catastrophic injuries following blood clots.” Adding insult to injury, the UK’s Vaccine Damage Payment Scheme is widely deemed not fit for purpose.

None of this is really news. The story has been evolving since the death of 44-year-old BBC radio presenter Lisa Shaw in May 2021 from complications caused by the AZ vaccine. And if you’re as nosy as me you’ll have kept a weather eye on plenty of other cases that didn’t get as much media coverage. You may also have noted that the UK quietly stopped giving the AZ vaccine in late 2021 (moving to MRNA instead). It was rebranded Vaxzevria and dispatched overseas, like sending your dodgy uncle to Panama. This went largely unreported by mainstream media outlets lest such stories encourage “anti-vaxxers” – second only to kiddy-fiddlers as a term of contempt.

But it seemed pretty obvious that if the state and media started being opaque about rare but real vaccine side-effects, you’d actively encourage the cynicism and mistrust you were trying to quell. Nothing is as effective in healthcare as transparency. Most of us are prepared to take a tiny side-helping of risk if we properly understand the greater chance of benefits. Open any medicine packet and you’ll extract some folded paper warning you of the myriad ghastly-but-unlikely things that may happen to you upon ingestion. Vaccines and antibiotics are miracles of our modern age. Even so, if you give my husband penicillin it may well kill him (he’s allergic).

Greater honesty around covid vaccines would have led to the admission they were not 100 per cent failsafe and did not prevent transmission (what was said on that front was supposition, not science). The benefits were clearest for older people and those with comorbidities. Had this been public health policy I’m sure there would have still been good vaccine take-up and we wouldn’t now see suspicion extended towards established vaccines that have kept the populace largely free from measles, rubella, whooping cough and other childhood plagues for generations.

Plenty of scientists, doctors and epidemiologists said this at the time, but their voices weren’t amplified. Let’s hope lessons are learnt before the next pandemic.

Speaking truth to power

I faced a moment of existential angst this week when I discovered Lee Anderson and I were born on exactly the same day. Having grown up on my knees, I guiltily assumed it was a sign. Did I need to confront my wokery and listen to the preachings of 30p Lee?  I was already fascinated by this coalminer son’s political double-Damascus. In 2018 he’d fled Labour for the Tories, only to take a further step right in 2024 to become Reform's new pin-up boy.

Anderson’s rightward march isn’t just a Red Wall phenomenon – there’s a slew of metropolitan types making the same journey. It’s hard to blame them, given the almost unbearable dilemma faced by genuine liberals. Democracy is in crisis: our institutions are increasingly corrupted, and our freedoms curtailed. Our governments, abetted by global corporations and a compliant media, wage unjust wars in our name, lie and cover up their wrongdoings to protect their power and profits. Millions are impoverished and lack employment security. Is it any wonder some turn to populists with their convenient scapegoats and easy solutions?

With Labour almost certain of victory here in the UK, flirting with the right hardly matters. Only in their wettest of political dreams do the likes of Nigel Farage or Anderson have any chance of darkening the door of Number 10 any time soon. So if you want to join the mob, knock yourself out.

In the US, of course, despite facing several lawsuits, and even charges of treason, there’s a serious possibility of Donald Trump’s re-election in November. There, the left-to-right trend has seen a veritable host of once progressive commentators move beyond the war on wokery to openly supporting Trump. It can be painful to watch.

One is Matt Taibbi, who used to applaud the anti-Iraq War movement in Rolling Stone magazine. Recently he appeared on the ultra-conservative Newsmax broadcast, which was taking aim at the (“poisonous”, “far-left”, “jihadist”) US student demonstrations in support of Gaza. “Universities shouldn’t be in the business of politics”, Taibbi opined. Students, he continued, “don’t know a whole lot,” and instead should sit up straight while they’re “taught how to think”.

The quandary for Taibbi and his ilk is that if you set yourself up to speak truth to power, then you must accept it cuts both ways. As right as it is to call out the rot eating away at our liberal democracies, we cannot recklessly sanction a leap from the neoliberal frying pan into the fascist fire. While it’s inadvisable to overstretch historical analogies, it’s equally foolish to ignore the lessons of history. In 1933, Adolf Hitler bullied his way into the Chancellorship and with a single piece of legislation dispensed with any further democratic niceties.

It matters not whether Trump would go even a fraction as far or be able to. The US remains more politically robust than 1930s Germany, and Trump probably lacks the discipline and attention span to be a proper dictator. But if we care for the truth, we cannot ignore his sanction of violence, his language of division and exclusion, or his promises of retribution. It’s straight from the fascist playbook. It's all too easy to say it can't be worse, but if history teaches us anything, it’s to be careful what we wish for. 

Fake views

This week an extraordinary photo-like picture appeared on my Facebook wall. It came with a caption claiming it was a painting of an Egyptian woman from over 2,000 years ago, a “Fayum portrait”. There were a few “Wow!”s from the more gullible, but these were quickly drowned out by howls of protest. “No one with even a cursory knowledge of ancient art would fall for this,” said one comment. “So fake!” shouted many. Such was the storm that one protestor regretted having facetiously re-posted the joke, when others threatened to defriend her.

It isn’t just visual art that gets the AI fake treatment. There are boundless 21st-century Shakespearean “quotes” and several writers, from Epictetus to Orwell, who seem to have penned more wisdom lately than they did in their own lifetimes. There are fake puzzles, scientific findings and dozens of new animal “facts”. Did you know that pet mice prefer pink bathtubs? Indeed, these days there’s little on the internet that can be taken at face value, making the process of verification even more hazardous.

Back to this ancient Egyptian beauty, it struck me that in all the hullaballoo, the magnificence of the image itself had been forgotten: the exquisite detail of the beads, the way the light falls across her face, making her lips shine. I’m no Philip Mould, but without the caption the picture didn’t immediately scream AI to me. Given the chance, I might even have been a Wow!er myself. We’ve used AI at Perspective because we don’t yet have the budget for a big artistic team. But the ease with which we can be fooled by such “art” makes me feel uncomfortable. How far will it go? Will AI hollow out humanity’s artistic entrails and devour them right in front of us?

Book of the Week

Whale Fall 
By Elizabeth O’Connor
(336pp, Picador, £16.99, hb)
Reviewed by Belinda Bamber

Set on a tiny fictional island off Wales inhabited by twelve families, Whale Fall is narrated by eighteen-year-old Manod, a clever young woman who dreams of escaping to the mainland. The story opens in 1938, on the eve of another war, when a newly beached whale feels like a bad omen to the community, its rotting odour soon carried by the breeze.

Manod’s life revolves around her taciturn, lobster-catcher father and stroppy adolescent sister, but she’s determined not to follow the expected pattern of marrying her dull local boyfriend and dying young like her own mother. Things look up when a visiting English couple, Joan and Edward, arrive by boat to do research into local life and folklore, enlisting her help as assistant and interpreter.

Initially beguiled, Manod soon discovers that the lip-sticked, fascist-sympathising Joan has a romanticised, patronising idea of island life that she’s determined to convey, regardless of the evidence. “We believe there is great wisdom in people who live with the land. In ordinary, working folk,” she intones. The Hardy-esque flourish in which the whale carcass is inscribed with phallic graffiti and the initials of local teenage lovers is just one of many details that Joan is blind to.

The couple’s inevitable betrayals fail to topple Manod, whose resilience has been learned from birth. She remembers how, on the rare occasions their mother showed affection, “she held our bodies tightly, leaving red welts”. Manod in turn cares for her little sister with rough love, angrily scrubbing the fish scales off her body in the tin bath.

Elizabeth O’Connor’s debut story is slender but vibrant, like a watercolour painted outside. The sky presages storms and the sea promises escape, though it might be difficult to get away completely. Even the whale, having been pulled out to sea by the tide, is brought back again by the current. “Fish attached themselves to the edges of the body like frills, and the low tide returned it, a bed of insects cushioning its chin.”