The moronic plague
A study into 14th Century plague victims brings out the brain-dead as its lessons infuriate the UK's culture warriors
The Black Death that ravaged Europe between 1346 and 1353 was caused by flea-infested rats that jumped ship on arrival in Genoa.
Nearly 700 years later, rats leaving the sinking ship that is the UK’s Conservative Party in its current guise have invoked the same great plague that killed 25 million people. But instead of fevers and pustules, they bring health warnings for the ‘woke’ as they unite around divisive politics to wait out their time in opposition.
Recently, Conservative MP Philip Hollowbone, a man who presumably dons his famous Union Jack tracksuit so he doesn’t forget where he lives, raised concerns in the House of Commons about an academic study in Bioarchaeology International, which suggests that people of African origin were more likely than white Britons to die from the plague in 14th century London.
Don’t call it the Black Death, though, because faced with the academics’ discoveries, a furrow-browed yet toothy-grinned Hollowbone sought assurance from Kemi Badenoch, Minister for Equalities (sic.) and favourite of the party’s right-wing, that the “woke archaeology” of the study conducted for the Museum of London “would not influence current health and pandemic policy.”
Badenoch, seeing an opportunity to double down on her firebrand USPs, acknowledged the cosplay John Bull’s concerns, and told the House that “this type of research is damaging to trust, to social cohesion and even to trust in health services.”
There is a lot to unpack here. Firstly, I find it hard to see how a scholarly analysis of plague-related morbidity in the 14th Century could possibly damage trust in the UK’s health services in 2023 unless the report’s authors recommended the reintroduction of bloodletting, leeches and other archaic medical practices.
Actually, maybe we could learn something from the study? Medieval Plague Doctors at least had their own PPE, including a beaked facemask stuffed with lavender, thought to counter the effects of the plague. Which is more than can be said for the UK’s doctors at the height of Covid-19 in 2020, who had to beg, borrow and steal surgical gowns and facemasks in the absence of enough across the NHS.
Instead of worrying about how scholarship in 14th Century pestilence might undermine a 21st Century national health service that has been underfunded by the same government for 13 years, Badenoch could perhaps lobby her colleague, the Chancellor of the Exchequer, for money for more CT and MRI scanners, given the UK has considerably less per patient than any other OECD country? Or maybe she could discuss the Health Secretary’s plans to reduce a patient waiting list more than seven million long?
Given the importance that the Right Honourable Tracksuit for Kettering and the Minister for Statue Preservation attach to maintaining trust in the UK’s national health service, they will no doubt be interested to learn that there is, in fact, an inquiry underway at present into a pandemic that occurred rather more recently than 1348.
Yes, the UK Covid-19 inquiry currently in session aims to “examine the UK’s response to and impact of the Covid-19 pandemic, and learn lessons for the future.”
I am sure Hollowbone and Badenoch will be fascinated not only by the greed, ineptitude and foul language of those in government during the pandemic but also the fact that during the first and second wave of Covid-19, minority ethnic groups – and those from a black African background, in particular – had a significantly higher mortality rate than white Britons.
While higher Covid-19 mortality among ethnic minority groups in England and Wales subsided in subsequent waves of the disease, the Office for National Statistics referenced “measures of disadvantage” to explain higher initial morbidity among minority ethnic groups. No less than the BMJ cited “geography and socioeconomic factors such as deprivation and occupation.”
In parallel, the Bioarchaeology International study that so incensed Hollowbone and Badenoch provided similar possible explanations for the higher morbidity found in Black Africans in 14th Century London, citing “existing inequalities, in addition to migration (free or forced) outcomes.”
It’s uncanny.
This infection has not yet run its course.
I’m not talking about Covid-19, but the slow creep of snide cultural attack, as a right-wing that wrongly presumes to talk for ‘real people’, aligns itself around confected horrors such as museums reflecting on the history of their collections, teenagers that use they / their pronouns, and the gossamer fragility of granite when used to commemorate historical figures in statuesque form.
In so doing they ignore the rights of those actually under oppression, of course, and they dismiss those with the types of “luxury beliefs” that allow for sympathy and kindness. Politicians like Kemi Badenoch and Suella Braverman — both the daughters of immigrants — attack multiculturalism by picking at the precarious scab formed over a deep and still smarting wound. A wound caused by injuries as old as the Windrush scandal, and as recent as the Safety of Rwanda (Asylum and Immigration) Bill.
They may not spread a pox like those rats of old, but they air ‘fears’ that poison public debate and corrode government policy, often in the base pursuit of narrow, personal political gain. It may be a moronic, not a bubonic, plague that we now face, but just like Covid-19, expect wave after wave of it – and many a cancelled Christmas before it disappears.
