- 1. Brexiteers can now show Remainers the tangible benefit of leaving the EU – a life saving vaccine
- 2. Aleksei Navalny is resisting Putin, and winning
- 3. AOC knew she’d face a backlash for talking about her trauma. There’s a reason she told us anyway
- 4. Beating Covid requires luck as much as skill
- 5. Let the Instagram influencers go to Dubai – they're uniting the nation
1. Brexiteers can now show Remainers the tangible benefit of leaving the EU – a life saving vaccine
Allison Pearson in The Daily Telegraph
“The European project has survived this long, but will 27 states really feel grateful for ‘coordinated action’ when they can count the cost of unity in deceased citizens? And what of all those Remainers who castigated the government for not joining the European Vaccine Scheme back in June? They said opting out was nationalistic, childish and irresponsible. Well, they look pretty damn stupid now. If we’d listened to them, nine million of our beloved countrymen and women would not today have the protection of a first dose. The events of the past week have been like a Medieval morality play in which every vice Brexiteers knew the EU to be guilty of have been paraded on the world stage.”
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2. Aleksei Navalny is resisting Putin, and winning
Editorial board of The New York Times
on Putin’s foe
“Massive police repression and winter frosts may quell the demonstrations. But the vast movement Mr. Navalny has mobilized is quantitatively different from earlier opposition forces, and still growing. The Biden administration and European governments were quick to condemn Mr. Navalny’s imprisonment and may follow that up with more sanctions against Mr. Putin and his lieutenants. That would be well deserved. But Mr. Putin would do well to see that the fiercest challenge to his crooked rule is not from abroad, but from Russian citizens who seek and speak the truth.”
3. AOC knew she’d face a backlash for talking about her trauma. There’s a reason she told us anyway
Kathleen N. Walsh in The Independent
on political candour
“In describing the events, Ocasio-Cortez included that she is a survivor of sexual assault, describing the impact of compounded trauma, and drawing comparisons between ‘these folks who tell us to move on, that it’s not a big deal, that we should forget what’s happened, or even telling us to apologize,’ and abusers. In other words, she is rejecting the model that tells public figures to be stoic, cold, and unaffected by trauma. And more poignantly, she’s rejecting a culture that dismisses and delegitimizes the reality of trauma - especially women’s trauma - as a matter of course.”
4. Beating Covid requires luck as much as skill
Daniel Finkelstein in The Times
on fortune’s role
“The success of the vaccination programme rests on bets, some of which we know are correct and some of which we do not. We chose vaccines that ended up working while the EU was distracted by a French option that hasn’t come off. But what if it had been the other way round? It looks like our early approval of the vaccines will be vindicated and many are confident that our delaying of the second shots is a sensible move. But what if it turns out we were wrong? If we had been unlucky with our vaccine decisions it wouldn’t have turned the programme leaders retrospectively into fools or incompetents.”
5. Let the Instagram influencers go to Dubai – they're uniting the nation
Marina Hyde in The Guardian
on furious followers
“I definitely can’t take seriously the calls for the smelling salts by those who follow the absentee influencers. The revelation that the influencers are relatively self-interested people seems to have SHOCKED their followers, who’ve apparently been under the impression they’ve been hanging on the every brand endorsement of a troupe of Mahatma Gandhis. In fact, I actively enjoy the fits of morality by people who would kill to be having a cocktail on a beach, but – failing that – would settle for threatening to kill the person who is having the cocktail on the beach.”
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