Lock step: England to shut down, again

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Hello and welcome to the Intelligence on Economist Radio. I'm your host, Jason Palmer. Every weekday we provide a fresh perspective on the events shaping your world. There's a big election coming up and there are real concerns that it will be marred by misinformation. On Facebook, of course, I'm talking about Myanmar, where for many people Facebook is the Internet and bookshelves are heaving under the weight of memoirs. This year, the political kind. As the cut and thrust of international politics becomes more like entertainment, the kinds of celebrity tell alls that used to top the charts are falling by the wayside. But first. Today, Britain's Prime Minister Boris Johnson can expect vicious questioning in Parliament where he will explain his decision for a second national lockdown.

We've got to be humble in the face of nature.

On Saturday, details of his plans leaked to the media, but his press conference to outline them was repeatedly delayed. Eventually, Mr. Johnson interrupted primetime television to lay out the option he'd previously all but ruled out.

And so now is the time to take action, because there is no alternative. And from Thursday until the start of December, you must stay at home. You may only leave home for specific reasons.

Strict measures will be put in place just in England. Non essential shops, pubs, restaurants and gyms will all close. England is clocking up about 20,000 new coronavirus cases Every day. Government scientists have warned that their previously modeled worst case scenario of 80,000 deaths could well be exceeded. The sharp and sudden U turn has raised ire among members of Mr. Johnson's Conservative Party and fatigue among the English public.

This is a pretty significant about turn.

Matthew Hullhouse is our British political correspondent.

Sage the government scientific committee recommended in mid September that there be a circuit breaker or a mini lockdown brought in to arrest the spread of the virus. The Government rejected that advice. When those minutes were made public in October, the Labour Party said that they should implement them. The Government again rejected that advice, saying that its approach of regional and tiered lockdown was better. That situation has now changed. The Government is implementing a full lockdown. It was going to be at least a month. It is a complete reversal on where they were just a few weeks ago.

And why did Mr. Johnson say he had to make the choice? Were there really no other options?

The case presented by the Government was simply that the rate of growth notwithstanding the regional lockdown measures that have been put in place was such that they warned that come December, the NHS would be overwhelmed with cases. The number of COVID patients would exceed both the normal NHS space, but also the extra capacity created by these Nightingale hospitals. And the warning that the government provided was that not only would the NHS not being able to take on more COVID patients, but also people with routine conditions, heart attacks or strokes, the rest of it wouldn't be able to get treatment at all. And they said that that was something that they weren't prepared to do. So that was the case presented by the government for doing this.

But it has been an incredibly politically fraught decision. I mean, how much pressure will Mr. Johnson have had from within the Cabinet, within his party, not to do this after essentially promising he wouldn't?

Yes, well, we know that there was quite intense discussion on this. On the one hand, there was the pressure to prevent that scenario that I've just described. On the other hand, Rishi Sunak, the Chancellor, is very, very concerned about the state of the economy. And the Conservative Party is deeply, deeply unhappy about this, partly because many people in the Conservative party become Conservative MPs because they believe in liberty and the right of people to sort of live their lives, that they like and abhor these sorts of big state measures. And on the other hand, they have very, very deep concerns about the toll that this is taking on jobs, on young people's prospects, on city economies.

Right, well, what about that economic side of this? Given that another lockdown is going to be potentially Crippling once more.

Yes. The furlough scheme, which was put in place during the first wave in March, will be reintroduced. That's 80% of a person's wages and it ties them to their employer. However, this is not the position that the Chancellor wanted to be in. He wanted to unwind the furlough scheme. He's made several attempts to move to a less generous scheme, one that requires employers to put in more money and therefore think more carefully about who they want to keep on their books. That's partly because of the sheer cost of this thing, but it's also because he's wanting to encourage the economy to stimulate new jobs, to not have people clinging to old jobs which simply won't exist anymore.

And Mr. Johnson has to present his plan to Parliament today. How do you suppose that's going to go?

The dynamics in Parliament are going to be very interesting. On the one hand, you have the Labour Party who will support the measures, but they will also take great satisfaction in saying, I told you so, because the Labour Party called for this sort of lockdown three weeks ago. On the other side, we should expect significant criticism from the Conservative benches who do not want to be in this position. So really, he is going to be defending a relatively small patch of ground which is going to be under criticism from both sides. There is no doubt that the measures will pass because he has the support of the Labour Party. It is an open debate exactly how big the actual rebellion in the Conservative Party will be in terms of votes, but certainly the unhappiness is very real.

And apart from the politics, what's been the public reaction to the news?

The snap polls issued over the weekend suggested around three quarters of the public, or perhaps just under, support the second lockdown. So the idea that there is a great rebellion in the land against lockdown isn't really supported by the polling evidence. And that should give the Prime Minister some comfort. The Prime Minister has been trying to sort of inject some positivity, saying that we're improving our treatments and that this great vaccine project or the series of great vaccine projects are just on the Horiz and we just need to stick it out a few more months. He's also suggested that we could perhaps enjoy a Christmas break.

Christmas is going to be different this year, perhaps very different, but it's my sincere hope and belief that by taking tough action now, we can allow families across the country to be together.

However, it's worth bearing in mind that the Prime Minister, throughout this crisis, one of his mistakes has been to suggest that in 12 weeks we could have this thing licked, that we'd be back to normal by and so some of these deadlines, some of these horizons have proven to be a bit of a mirage.

And to your mind, does all of this translate into a threat to Mr. Johnson's leadership?

So I think it's premature to be talking about a threat to his leadership. There is no sort of plot in the ether. What it's fair to say is that this is not the premiership that he was expecting. He won a stonking general election victory last December. People were talking about him being able to govern for 10 years. Perhaps that great stock of political capital that he accumulated then has been burnt through with remarkable speed, partly because of the government's own unforced errors, but also just because the sheer succession of incredibly difficult and unpopular decisions that have been forced upon them. So that a prime Minister who's only 10 or 11 months since the last election actually looks like he's been in office for four, five, six, seven years through this sheer accumulation of bad news that he's walked into. So it's not that his leadership is in crisis in any sense, more that it's looking a lot more sort of battered and bedraggled than one might expect at this point in the electoral cycle.

Matthew, thank you very much for your time.

Thank you.

This weekend, the people of Myanmar will head to the polls. It's widely expected that Aung San Suu Kyi's rul ruling NLD party will win and that Ms. Suu Kyi will return as leader. In the run up to the vote. Politicians have been campaigning in person and online. That digital presence has become something of a liability. Independent social media monitors have recorded growing volumes of disinformation, particularly on Facebook, which is used by more than two out of five Burmese people as their primary news source. While the social media company says its monitoring has pushed hate speech to near historic lows, much may still be slipping through. That's partially because of just how successful the company has been at drawing Burmese people onto its platform.

MAU MAU cha is a 27 year old from Myanmar. He vividly remembers the day in 2012 when he got his first mobile phone.

Charlie McCann is the Economist's Southeast Asia correspondent.

At the time, the country was just opening up after decades of rule by a military junta. The civilian government ended the media censorship of the previous era and liberalized the telecommunications sector, which meant that SIM cards, which had once cost as much as $2,000, dropped in price quite significantly. So when it Came time for Mao Mao Chow to pick up his SIM card, He shelled out something like 300 bucks. And he got his phone and he took it to the university where he was studying and just showed it off to all his friends. He told me that he felt a little bit like a star at the time.

And so with that sudden wide availability of phones and SIM cards to people, what changes did that bring?

Well, it meant people could access the Internet, and it meant that they could also get up on social media. Mamoud Cha, when he got his phone, he found that Facebook was pre installed on it, and that was very common. Facebook really did its darndest to muscle into the market as the country was opening up. And in 2016, it rolled out its Free Basics program, which gave users who signed up for a Facebook account free access to a limited number of websites. So Facebook was basically giving people who'd sign up for free Internet. And this was a remarkably successful initiative. Facebook now has 27 million users in Myanmar, which is equivalent to almost half of the population. It is by far the dominant social media platform in the country, to the point that it is common to find mobile phone users who don't understand that the Internet actually exists beyond what's available through Facebook.

So while people suddenly had access to the Internet, they ultimately only accessed a thin slice of it.

Yeah, absolutely. And for two out of five Facebook users in Myanmar, the platform is their primary source of news. And what a lot of users are coming across is hate speech and misinformation, particularly on the themes of race and religion. Since 2012, a Buddhist nationalist movement has created a a virtual community on Facebook which is bound together by a fear that Muslims are going to take over the country and jeopardize the survival of their Buddhist faith. A fear which we saw expressed Most shockingly in 2017, when the Burmese military and mobs of Buddhists attacked the villages of an ethnic Muslim minority, the Rohingyas, and caused over 700,000 of them to flee to neighboring Bangladesh. Since then, we haven't seen this kind of hate speech abate at all. Government figures and generals routinely post messages that diminish the suffering of Rohingya or deny them their right to live in the country. And as the country has geared up for its election on November 8, there's been growing amounts of disinformation, claiming, for instance, that Aung San SUU Kyi, who's the de facto leader of Myanmar, has.

Died of COVID But, I mean, is this any different in scope or depth to the kinds of misinformation we see elsewhere in the world?

No, but I think for very societal reasons, some Burmese are highly susceptible to this kind of content. The education system places this emphasis on learning by rote. Critical thinking is absent from curricula, and that deprives students of the skills necessary to distinguish fact from fiction. At the same time, Myanmar is a supremely hierarchical society, and a lot of the most offensive posts are often ridden by powerful figures, from senior Buddhist monks to top generals. Some Burmese, though, do see through the hate mongering and lies.

So is that to say that Facebook has done something about the misinformation and made it easier to get to the good stuff?

Facebook argues that it's doing much more than it was previously to combat this kind of abuse. It has banned some prominent monks and generals from the platform. It has an artificial intelligence system that's trained in the Burmese language, which, along with human monitors, scrub the platform of abusive content. And it has also temporarily expanded its definition of hate speech to encompass not merely attacks against Muslims, say, but also attacks against religions like Islam. There are reasons for skepticism, though. The platform has set itself a goal of removing offensive content within 24 hours of its posting. But if a post is up for 12 hours, 24 hours, it can still be seen by lots of people. And Facebook's AI is trained only in Burmese, not in any of the many ethnic minority languages which are spoken by about 40% of the population. So they're catching much more, but they're nonetheless missing lots.

And how do you see all of this playing into the election, the quantity and the consumption of all this misinformation and hate speech?

So look, what I'd say is at least Facebook is trying to do something about all this hate speech. The government is not interested in healing divisions in society by promoting the idea that Myanmar belongs to all its residents, and nor is it particularly interested in cracking down on hate speech and disinformation, which is actually coming from both sides of the political divide, from the supporters of the army and its proxy party, and also from supporters of the National League of Democracy, the party of Aung San SUU Kyi. Much of this content is intended to undermine support for the election, so we'll have to see how strong turnout is on the 8th.

Charlie, thank you very much for your time.

Thank you, Jason.

For more on the ground analysis like this from our international network of correspondence, subscribe to the Economist. To get the best introductory offer wherever you are, just go to economist.com intelligenceoffer the link is in the show Notes.

I think people will read my most recent book. They'll make up their own minds whether they agree with it or not, and they can make their judgments accordingly.

Last week, my colleague Ann McElroy spoke to John Bolton, President Trump's former national security adviser, on our sister show. The Economist asks. One topic of Conversation was Mr. Bolton's book the Room Where It Happened, a behind the scenes look at the inner workings of the administration.

I think it's important for the American people to know what actually goes on in the government without any sugar coating. So I don't apologize for writing about the truth.

His was one of many political biographies this year related to time spent in the Trump White House. And like so many others, it sold quite well, a change from years past.

More people in the past are buying biographies of politicians and historical figures.

Tom Rowley is our Britain correspondent.

Celebrity books are still selling a lot more than any other non fiction, particularly the best selling celebrity memoirs. But the trend is changing.

People are at last going off the celebrity tell alls.

Yes, that's right. For a long while, that seemed to be all that was shifting. In fact, at their peak in 2008, celebrity titles made up about 55% of the biography and memoirs market. But by last year that had dwindled to slightly more than half of the market. And over the same period, the market for political biographies has risen as well. They made up about a tenth of the overall market back in 2008 and now they're about a sixth.

So people have learned as much about celebrities, it seems, as they want to learn.

In part, yes, they've got all the questions they could possibly want to ask about celebrities answered on Twitter and Instagram and all of these direct methods of communication that celebrities have. Another answer is that newspapers and magazines, which previously would have shelled out thousands and thousands of pounds for first gigs on this gossip when a book was coming out, are poorer than they once were because of their own dwindling circulations. And then booksellers are fewer and pickier than they once were.

Hausa, what do you mean by that?

I spoke to James dawn, the boss of Waterstones, who now gives managers of their local stores the power to choose which books they do or don't want to stock, which means they'll flog far fewer of the sort of mass market celebrity biographies than in the past. He told me that you could no longer just give a celebrity a million pounds to have a book ghost written about them and know with confidence that it would be piled up from one end of Britain to the other.

But it's not clear why a decline in celebrity memoirs would necessarily correspond to a rise in political ones.

That's right. And I think it would be wrong to assume that Britain's have got any more cerebral or desperate to read the terrible details of boring cabinet discussions. I think it's more that politics has got more entertaining. You've got Donald Trump, of course, in Britain, Jeremy Corbyn, the former Labour leader, Boris Johnson. They're all unusual characters, people who attract a real sort of fascination. And so books by Mary Trump, the President's niece, and James Comey, an ex head of the FBI, have all sold well in Britain as well as over the pond. And Michelle Obama's autobiography did very well last year. Her husband's latest book is also tipped to be a Christmas bestseller here.

So perhaps readers appetites are just the same, but what's being supplied is just coming from a different sphere.

I think that's right. People are always going to be fascinated in other people's lives and it just so happens that maybe not for the good of society, but certainly for the good of publishers coffers, the most interesting people right now are politicians.

Thanks very much for joining us, Tom.

Pleasure.

That's all for this episode of the Intelligence. If you like us, give us a rating on Apple podcasts and see you back here tomorrow.