The Times Companion to 2017

by Ian Brunskill

  Health statistics, the doctor added, have become “a nasty business” in Venezuela: “There’s been no real data for eight years. Everyone mistrusts the system.” The government has failed to publish a great deal of medical data since shortages worsened.

  Scrolling through an Excel spreadsheet that is shared annually with the health ministry, however, shows that the hospital recorded 14 maternal deaths in 2016, a level last seen a decade ago and up from six in 2014.

  According to data compiled by the charity Médicos por la Salud (Doctors for Health), Venezuela’s maternal mortality rate has soared from 68 to 101 deaths per 100,000 pregnant women since President Maduro assumed office in 2013. That represents a 43 per cent rise in three years and the biggest increase during any presidential term since 1940. Mr Maduro is yet to complete his five-year term.

  Figures obtained by Human Rights Watch from Venezuela’s Ministry of Health suggest that the rate could be even higher: 130.7 maternal deaths for every 100,000 births between January and May 2016, which is well above Syria, El Salvador and Cuba.

  Julio Castro Méndez, a renowned doctor and professor at the Central University of Venezuela, said: “If as an investigator I had to choose one statistic that reflects the state of our national healthcare system, it would be the rate of maternal mortality.”

  At Maternidad, where mothers are not fed from 4pm on a Friday to Monday lunchtime, family members are relied upon to bring in meals.

  “They’re expected to breastfeed already malnourished newborns while practically fasting,” said a senior neonatal doctor dressed in lavender scrubs. She said that in her 16 years at the hospital she had never imagined that the system could fail mothers the way it has.

  For Angeyeimar, her time to decide where to give birth is running out. “If I can’t get the money together then I’ll have to go to the public hospital in Santa Monica,” she said.

  In better news, her husband, Carlos, just managed to get hold of a jumbo pack of 250 newborn nappies from a cousin on his way back from Miami. “We’ve got the first two months covered,” she said.

  CHUCK BERRY WAS A POLITICAL REVOLUTIONARY

  Daniel Finkelstein

  MARCH 22 2017

  CHARLES EDWARD Anderson Berry was a person of great political importance. Which is a pretty odd statement to make, given that he hardly ever said or did a political thing.

  Let me start with this. “He sort of had this persona of wanting to be Hawaiian, the way his hair was, his shirts. He would say he was part Hawaiian, and in a way he could look Hawaiian. I think that something with his being Hawaiian was knowing that he could be more successful if maybe he wasn’t black.”

  This observation, by the record executive Marshall Chess, is not the only time one of Chuck Berry’s friends commented on what his biographer Bruce Pegg has called the musician’s “racial ambivalence”. Johnnie Johnson, his musical collaborator over many decades, once remarked that Berry “wanted to be everything … but an Afro-American I guess”. When the band were stopped by the New York police, Johnson noted that the singer’s driving licence identified him as “Indian”.

  Chuck Berry was the grandson of a slave. He grew up in Missouri in an area so segregated that the first time he saw a white person was at the age of three. It was a firefighter, and he thought it was merely the heat and fear of the fire that had whitened the man’s skin. When, as an established star, he performed in the south, he found it so hard to find somewhere to stay that he took to sleeping in his own car.

  So he can hardly be blamed for playing down his racial origins. He did it for commercial reasons — to reach bigger audiences — and for safety. He will have been only too aware of how in 1956 Nat King Cole had been beaten up on stage, in front of the audience in the middle of his show, by members of the Alabama white citizens council.

  Understandable though it was, Berry’s reaction wasn’t everyone’s. His great hits, the zenith of his career, came during the turbulent days of the civil rights movement and urban revolt. As black people and liberals all over the world took up the cause of racial equality and resistance, Berry was silent.

  Indeed, he died at the age of 90 having written an autobiography and starred in many documentaries, leaving behind (as far as I can tell, and I’ve looked pretty hard) not a single properly political statement or song. He once said he was pleased to see the first black president elected, played at a concert to encourage the Democrats to stage their convention in his home town, and gave $1,000 to a Democratic leaders victory fund. And that’s it.

  So why argue that he was an important political figure? It’s because of the significance of rock’n’roll to cultural life and Berry’s significance to rock’n’roll.

  Few deny the writer of Johnny B Goode, of Memphis, Tennessee, and of Roll Over Beethoven the right to be called one of the great pioneers of rock music. It wasn’t just the power and wit of his early records, it was his ability to reach new audiences.

  Berry’s first hit, Maybellene (the title inspired by a bottle of mascara), crossed over not just from the R&B charts into the pop charts, but from black to white audiences. Before Maybellene, most black music became a hit only when recorded as a white cover version. Berry’s record was one of the first to outsell its white cover versions.

  And then in the south, Berry desegregated his audiences. Not by political statements or any act of conscious resistance. Just by playing. The promoters would allow in black and white fans so long as they were separated by a rope down the centre aisle. And each time, as the rock frenzy grew, the rope would come down and everyone would be dancing together.

  Berry wasn’t much interested in the political implications of this. He was interested in its financial implications. More record buyers, more money. As the guitar hero Bo Diddley once said: “Chuck Berry is a businessman. I admire him for being a businessman. The name of the game is dollar bills.” His local paper headlined a piece on his film Chuck Berry Hail! Hail! Rock ’n’ Roll with the words: “Hail! Hail! The Bankroll.”

  Yet it was because of this, not despite it, that Berry was a liberator. He wanted to sell to everyone. Rock’n’roll is the fullest expression of consumer culture. Its impact was deep. It reached out to people whatever their race, whatever their class, whatever their gender or sexual orientation. It made posh accents seem ridiculous and inherited social distinctions seem bizarre. It was — it is — entirely democratic.

  It breaks down national borders too. John Lennon and Paul McCartney lived in a port town, where African-American records came off the boats. Keith Richards first noticed Mick Jagger because Jagger was carrying a rare Chuck Berry record that had to be ordered from Chicago. Then the Beatles and the Rolling Stones went to America and sold back American music to them.

  Rock’s power isn’t that it was the counter culture, but that it became the culture. The only barrier it didn’t initially break down was age. There are people whose politics and social attitudes have as their main point of reference some time before 1958, when Berry cut Johnny B Goode, and those whose reference point is after that.

  The generation gap written about in the Sixties didn’t repeat itself, as everyone thought it would. Instead it was a single gap, separating the era before rock from the era after it. The people who feared that rock would sweep away customs and barriers and change cultural attitudes were right to fear it.

  Sir Tom Stoppard’s play Rock’n’Roll tells the (true) story of the attempts by the communist Czechoslovakian government in the mid-Seventies to suppress a rock group called the Plastic People of the Universe. They were not avowedly political but the Husak government could see that nevertheless they were.

  They couldn’t allow the Plastics just to do their thing. They appreciated that unless they imprisoned them and made them cut their hair, there would be no stopping the revolution. Their culminating act of oppression (in Stoppard’s drama) is to smash the western record collection of the play’s central character.

  Even if Chuck Berry didn’t
see himself as political, the Czechs could see that he was wrong.

  ON WESTMINSTER BRIDGE

  Leading Article

  MARCH 23 2017

  THE PALACE OF Westminster, the very heart of British democracy, has come under attack. Not in a sophisticated cyberintervention, but from the crudest of weapons: a car driven at speed, steered by a man with a knife. The trail of dead and injured stretching down Westminster Bridge to the gates of parliament is a sign of how the wars of the world have encroached on our way of life.

  Since the dark days of the bombing campaigns of the IRA, Britain has been largely spared a major terrorist assault. The 7/7 attacks in London, the 2013 murder of Fusilier Lee Rigby in Woolwich, the murder of the member of parliament Jo Cox: all these events were deeply shocking, a bracing reminder that we are not immune from the overspill of an apparently global pool of anger. Yet for the most part we have been content to rely on the efficiency of our intelligence services to fend off danger, and to envelop ourselves in a sense of British exceptionalism. That complacency has now surely run its course.

  It is too easy to talk today about erecting new bollards in Parliament Square or throwing an even tighter security cordon around the whole of Whitehall. Increased vigilance is necessary but not sufficient. It was fitting that in Washington yesterday a meeting of 68 foreign ministers debated the practicalities of taking the fight against terror to the ragged armies of the Islamic State and other jihadist groups. To protect our own traditions of tolerance and liberal values, we have to be ready not only to fight in concert against terror but also to address its causes.

  Even though little is known about the background to the Westminster attack, it bears the hallmarks of the kind of “lone wolf” operation that has been ordered up by the many propaganda channels of Isis. On Bastille Day last year a lorry driver mowed down and killed 86 people on Nice promenade. A few months later in Berlin a stolen vehicle was used to crash into a Christmas market, killing 12 people and injuring 56 others. Yesterday’s bulldozing of innocents was on a smaller scale but its intent was clear: to strike out at a national symbol; to show contempt for democratic tradition.

  There were already plenty of reasons for concern. Britain’s official terror level was declared to be “severe” — that is, an attack was deemed “highly likely”. Britain is a target not just because it is an active participant in the wars against Isis in Syria and Iraq, nor because it is a close ally of the United States. Its readiness to defend the principles of an open society is in itself offensive to jihadists and their sympathisers.

  The modern expression of this grievance is asymmetric warfare. For all the work of the security services, we cannot predict where or when these agents of terror will strike next. French school children felt perhaps more secure on Westminster Bridge yesterday than in Paris, a city that has been rocked by its own bloody terror events. At 2.35pm yesterday they received a terrifying reminder that this kind of warfare is global.

  There were other reminders. After intelligence reports that jihadists are planning to smuggle bombs inside laptops on to passenger aircraft, the US and Britain have imposed a ban on electronic devices in cabins on flights to and from some Middle Eastern countries. This was met with outrage by business travellers and yet now seems a sensible precaution. The anniversary of the Brussels airport attacks, meanwhile, marked by moving ceremonies, brought home the ubiquity of the threat.

  President Trump seeks to address these insecurities by going on the offensive against Islamic State. If properly funded and supported by the US political as well as military establishments, this is at least the beginning of a strategy. Isis must be shown that it cannot occupy lawless space and use it as a base for wreaking international havoc. It must be squeezed, and if this causes its adherents to seek out softer targets then they too must be met with coherent counterterrorism measures.

  This war has to be intelligence-led, a compelling argument for the president to make peace with his intelligence community, and for preserving intelligence sharing between the US and its closest allies. It is too soon to assume any direct connection between Isis and the innocents mown down on Westminster Bridge, but it is past time for the free world to agree a strategy that vanquishes barbarism with sophistication and resolve.

  Overcoming the Isis strongholds of Mosul in Iraq and Raqqa in Syria has been declared the Trump administration’s military priority. The logic is impeccable: these are the nerve centres of the self-proclaimed caliphate. Impatient for quick results, President Trump has in effect announced that the gloves are off.

  There are, nonetheless, pitfalls in using overwhelming force against Isis-occupied cities. The risks are threefold. First, Sunni states may come to believe that their co-religionists are being killed without proper discrimination between terrorists and innocents. This could weaken the currently high level of solidarity behind the Trump administration’s military push.

  Second, Isis on the back foot threatens to become as dangerous as Isis at its brazen worst. Its digital reach allows it to trigger sleeper cells across the world. Experts argue that its use of lone wolf killers is a sign of weakness. Yet, as Nice, Berlin and perhaps Westminster have shown, their impact can be devastating. Third, every western airstrike that takes civilian lives, however carefully that risk is minimised, serves as a recruiting sergeant for fundamentalism.

  The war against Isis is the same war that British intelligence and police officers fight every day to prevent attacks such as the one that sent MPs running for cover yesterday. It must be fought with subtlety. Its pace should not be dictated by US domestic politics or showmanship and its ingredients are legion. In the Middle East, Isis fighters must be prevented from moving from Mosul to Raqqa and their leaders tracked to their strongholds. From Europe to Asia, their support networks must be disabled: these are as important in the end as the exact moment that Mosul falls.

  In London, as in every city across Europe bloodied by maniacs in the past 16 months, life will go on. Yet public wariness will intensify and with it the government’s duty to keep the public safe. There is no such thing as absolute security in an open society, nor is there a silver bullet on either side in this asymmetric war. There is only the relentless work of the police and security services, side by side with the softer arms of government, to anticipate plots the better to defeat them; and the stoicism of a citizenry that will never let hate win.

  IT’S TIME TO RECLAIM OUR RIGHTS FROM BIG TECH

  Iain Martin

  MARCH 30 2017

  MY 12-YEAR-OLD SON is good at puzzles and ejoys the Codeword in this newspaper. I have no facility for unravelling puzzles — other than deciphering the meaning of Theresa May’s speeches — but my dad does. With my son in London and his grandparents in Scotland, via FaceTime they finish the day seeing each other and talking about words, clues and assorted amusing events. And they complete the puzzle.

  Many families surely have similar stories of how the internet revolution has strengthened bonds across the generations through cyberspace. Perhaps it is because there have been such obvious practical benefits to our lives that we in the West have so far made such a mess of unscrambling the puzzle of how to rein in the companies behind the revolution. For the burglary of content and accumulation of power undertaken by the tech giants since the start of the century amounts to nothing less than one of the biggest heists in human history.

  The cleverest part of the scam is the illusion that what we get from tech comes free of charge. No — we are the product. Our data and our choices are collected and sold as thousands of data points. That is why Google is valued at $578 billion. It is not magic. Google and Facebook are simply the biggest ever advertising businesses and you are for sale. Meanwhile, Amazon is turning itself into the West’s one-stop marketplace.

  The Silicon Valley arrogance that this produces makes journalists and estate agents look humble. Indeed, the annoyance of those in government at having to deal with the tech companies after last week’s terror attacks
is rooted in years of being patronised by people who refuse to take responsibility. “They think they’re gods and we’re little people,” is how one minister puts it.

  Of course, journalists and publishers have an interest to declare here. Too many of us in the media once naively embraced the illusion that everything should be free at the click of a mouse.

  If you are tempted to dismiss such complaints as the griping of hacks angry at having their lunch eaten, be assured that the tech giants want your industry on the menu next. Almost every profession or trade, from accountancy, law, finance and retail, through to driving, building and bricklaying, faces epic disruption by big tech.

  The conventional free-market response to this conundrum — and I am generally as pro-market as they come — is a shrug followed by a “so what?” Innovation creates casualties and the new players will rise and fall. We all benefit in the end.

  Well, up to a point. One of the central lessons of the financial crisis is that we should be wary of cross-border industries that become far too big, because they cost us dear when they get it wrong.

  The message of the period before the 2008 crash was that banking was globalised and superior, floating above silly old national governments and taxpayers. But when their bubble burst, what do you know? The bill was not global and landed on national governments and the taxpayers who fund them.

  Similar vulnerabilities to future crises are building up in tech, whether it’s the prospect of our exposure to armed drones that are able to fly long distances, or artificial intelligence mutating, or jihadi hackers finding a way of halting the modern food supply system that operates on a 24 to 48-hour cycle.