Pictures telling a thousand words

 

 

This graph is from an Australian source and relates to the situation  as at August 2020.  It was sent to me by a friend who now works out there.  You will see that Australia is proudly in the top right-hand corner, in terms of deaths per million, outstripped by only Japan and Korea, and by minimal economic shrink only by South Korea.

In the bottom left hand corner, with the most deaths per million of population, is the UK.  We also have the largest percentage fall in economic activity.

Of course this graph shows only ten countries (plus the over-all picture for the EU.)  In case you feel the countries have been chosen rather selectively, here's another picture comparing the  performance of a few more economies.

 

 China 's economy  is still growing,  Vietnam and Taiwan only marginally affected, Australia still looking good.  This time the UK is not quite at the bottom.  At lest one economy, Spain's, is more badly affected than ours.

Still think this is selective?

Here are the performances of about 40 countries, if your eyesight is good enough to read which they are.

And yet day after day UK ministers on the media use phrases like "World Beating, "our success," guard out shores "against infection the hand of war" (Shakespeare made that last one up.)

We should recall the information in these graphs when we hear the government complaining the the BBC is given a biassed picture of its performance.

Rule Britannia: the wong U-turn

 

Yesterday the "powers that be" caved in to the indignation of the right-wing press and the  words of "Rule, Britannia" and "Land of Hope and Glory" will, after all, be sung at the BBC's "Last Night of the Proms. "

 Sadly in the same week, a genuinley damaging move to Britain's reputation went ahead, and the  Department for  International Development, the record of which on helping to reduce World poverty is genuinely "world beating," was demoted to being subsidiary of the Foreign Office.  

This, in spite of the protests and petitions of the just about everybody concerned with the elimination of World Poverty, both in this country and abroad.

We have become a La-La Land in which rose-coloured  fiction about the past  triumphs over facts about the present..