Jay Rayner’s parting shot as he announced his departure from The Observer after 28 years tops off a turbulent few months at Guardian Media Group (GMG). Next week, indignant journalists will be striking in protest at the sale of the paper to Tortoise, an online media organisation. The Scott Trust, they claim, is betraying its commitment to The Observer — a  feeling reflected by The Observer’s former editor, Paul Webster, who lambasted the deal as a betrayal when he retired last week.

Rayner also expressed concern at the sale, claiming that “The Guardian has told me they will terminate all our contracts if they can sell The Observer to Tortoise”. Perhaps he was also anticipating this cost-cutting by the new owners as he resigned. But his strongly worded statement about the failure of the Editor in Chief, Katherine Viner to deal with antisemitism struck a chord.

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Rayner is not the first big name to have publicly accused Viner of not handling controversial issues as she should. In December 2020, Suzanne Moore jumped ship, having been the subject of a complaint sent to Viner, signed by over 300 “colleagues” after she was finally allowed to write about the gender wars.

Moore was followed by Hadley Freeman in November 2022. She resigned because she was unable to write freely about the “gender issue”. But in her resignation letter she disclosed that she had been warned off writing about Israel “from her perspective as a Jew” describing the paper as “internally dysfunctional”.

I’m no fan of Rayner: it often feels like his ego is bigger than his appetite. A decade ago, I made a joke about his attitude on Masterchef, and received a nasty, vitriolic email in response, despite having never corresponded with him in the past. Nevertheless, I believe him when he says there are antisemites at the paper — because I have encountered them myself. Once upon a time, before I was slowly cancelled from every section of the newspaper, I would go to parties there, and I recall one particular member of staff saying the most outrageous things about Jews under the guise of anti-Zionism.

I first met Viner when she was editor of The Guardian’s Weekend Magazine; it was a great newspaper, and The Observer the best Sunday around. I would write the occasional column to fill in for Julie Burchill and Viner was a joy to work for. When she was appointed the first female Editor in Chief, in 2015, my feminist crowd were pleased, because she had long prioritised women’s issues, and in particular the campaign against male violence.

She had also defended me in 2004, when the paper had come in for an almighty kicking after publishing my “Gender bender beware” column — the one that first got me labelled a transphobic hate figure. I remember when I filed the piece, she said “We are going to get shit for this you know?”, only to send me back a very light edit. When I was nominated for Stonewall Journalist of the Year in 2008 and I got word that I would be greeted by a 200-strong picket outside the venue, Viner came with me, offering support. I respected her immensely.

There were moments, though, when her nervousness about certain issues showed. One example was when, back in 2006, I pitched a piece about the phenomena of so-called grooming gangs operating in former mill towns in the north of England.  As we now know, a sizable majority of the perpetrators were of Pakistani Muslim origin, because that was the demographic of young men in those towns.

She said: “We’ll be seen as racist.” I explained that I was writing as a left-wing feminist who had never been accused of racism, but she wouldn’t commission me. So I took the story to The Sunday Times, where it was published in September 2007, four years before The Times ran its first piece (in January 2011) by Andrew Norfolk, who was credited with breaking the story. Norfolk had been given five months to research the phenomenon and it turned into the massive story I had suggested, way back in 2006; Viner, though, had seemed more concerned with being labelled “Islamophobic”.

Still, Viner commanded respect among feminists. But by the time she became Editor, the trans train had picked up speed. Two years earlier, in 2013, The Observer had removed a column by Julie Burchill defending Suzanne Moore from allegations of transphobia, with the commissioning editor admitting that the newspaper had “got it wrong” by publishing it.

It is true, though, that while Viner is Editor in Chief of both The Guardian and The Observer, the latter has managed to be more open and honest about the gender issue. But many of the journalists on the latter have told me they are appalled at the censorious, often anti-feminist atmosphere at The Guardian. And when Webster retired, some admitted they were nervous about whether Viner would merge the editorial line into that of The Guardian. But given Rayner’s objection, the rot seems too deep. By failing to confront the ideologues, Viner has betrayed the principles of liberal, open-minded journalism.

I predict Rayner leaving in a storm of controversy will change nothing. His allegations will be denied. And the sale — described by Webster as a “discreditable conclusion to a damaging episode in the company’s history” — will go through. But I do think that rather than preparing to strike, the many decent, sensible people still at GMG should take a good look at the discreditable state of their journalism. Instead of going along with the ideological madness that Viner has allowed to flourish, they should, instead, demand that she is replaced by someone who has the courage to stand up for the similarly brave journalists.

It probably wouldn’t work, he said. The audience for opera is in London. I told him I disagreed. We had both just witnessed first-hand a large and enthusiastic audience for opera in Greater Manchester, after all. Not only could the move work, but it would also be a great thing for the UK to have a leading company operating out of one of its most central and fast-growing cities. Allied with Opera North, whose production we had just watched and who tour the entire region from Leeds, it would make this part of the country a global opera powerhouse.

By the time I got off the bus, my companion was telling me how a Manchester ENO would allow talented musicians like him to stay in the North after graduating, rather than feeling forced to move to London, or overseas. “I’m just surprised that you are the only person making the argument,” he said.

The reason nobody has heard the case for a Manchester ENO is that the media coverage of this important arts story has been laughably, atrociously London-centric. “English National Opera fights ‘absurd’ plan to relocate to Manchester,” ran the headline of a story on the BBC. It quoted the ENO’s chief executive Stuart Murphy calling the move “insane” but didn’t counter his analysis with a single northern voice.

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Several newspaper reports accepted, apparently without fact-checking, Murphy’s comparison of London’s “9 million people” with “Manchester’s half a million”. It seems neither the reporters nor the editors on those papers could see the mistake the ENO chief was making, although it seems that Northern readers pointed out the problem to the Guardian. The paper has removed Murphy’s misleading quote and replaced it with “a more accurate comparison between the greater metropolitan populations of London and Manchester”. (The population of Greater Manchester is almost 3 million.)

The ignorance didn’t end there. The Observer’s classical music critic Fiona Maddocks said the ENO plans “certainly make no sense” because Manchester is already “well served” by Opera North — a company that is based in Leeds and usually only comes to Salford for one week every year. Maddocks, perhaps, was straying a little outside her area of expertise: the Observer’s classical desk, as one of my readers emailed me this week, “pretty much exclusively writes about things staged in London”. The reader went on to point out that whereas Opera North’s headquarters, at Leeds’ Howard Assembly Room, are an hour and a half’s drive from central Manchester, “the ENO is about six minutes’ walk away from the Royal Opera House, so who is best served?”

It’s understandable that the art world is shaken by the idea of the ENO moving. It is a loss for most of the people making and writing about opera, because they live in London. And it makes sense for an industry to fight against imminent job losses, and to complain that the decision has been made without proper planning or pitch-rolling in the North. What is unforgivable is that the media acted as a supportive chorus for London-based vested interests. I’ve yet to see a story in the national press that doesn’t frame the ENO funding decision as a disastrous folly or a betrayal of the arts. (Melvyn Bragg, also in the Observer, described the Arts Council decision as “stealing arts cash from London”, as though the capital is entitled to as much as it likes from the national coffers.) And it’s not just me who clocks this London-centricity in British journalism — and hates it.

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“It’s all been reported as ‘London is losing this thing’,” says a journalist from a national newspaper who I spoke to this week (who asked me not to use their name). “So they fucking should,” they went on. “Why should that be in London? If that’s taxpayer funded, if it’s the ‘National Opera’, why shouldn’t it be in Manchester? Why should Manchester residents have to travel to London?”

That journalist is one of the very small cohort of national newspaper correspondents not based in London, covering a patch that can only be described as “the rest of the country”. Of course, that’s impossible. “You’re not covering the country — you’re covering what Londoners want to read about the rest of the country,” this person told me, pointing out that the tabloids are better staffed out here in the wilds than the broadsheets are.

As the coverage of the ENO story makes clear, we don’t have a national press. We have lots of London newspapers whose claim to be national ranges from wafer thin — the Guardian has a staff of four in Manchester — to arguably fraudulent. Most of the national newspapers in England have fewer than five staff correspondents outside London. Some “nationals” don’t appear to have a single one.

“They call themselves national because they are sold in a shop in Cumbria, but they’re not national,” one northern editor told me this week. The papers that claim to speak for the whole country are, in the view of this seasoned reporter, clever variations on the London Evening Standard.

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That’s the paper where I spent the first five years of my career, by the way. I’m a southerner who values the capital’s diverse and noisy journalistic scene. What’s annoying isn’t that the London media exists and is strong and argues eloquently and passionately for the protection and extension of London’s privileges — it’s that it does those things while pretending to be the national media. It makes total sense that newspapers whose editors and reporters almost all live in a single city would reflect that city’s interests and blind spots. But it doesn’t make for very satisfying coverage for those of us living elsewhere.

When I asked my Twitter followers for their favourite examples of London-centric media coverage following the ENO debacle, the answers came thick and fast. One theme was the assumption that everyone lives in London. There was a piece in the Sunday Times property section about moving to York which listed one of the downsides as: “It’s so far away.” There was a column in the New Statesman in which a well-meaning political journalist wrote: “In my view, every journalist should make a New Year’s resolution to get out of London more.”

Lots of replies to my tweet mentioned weather coverage, from the trivial — snow coverage tends to kick in when it’s snowing in the South East — to the rather sad. “When the North East had awful weather early last year, some areas of Northumberland had to wait weeks for all utilities to be restored,” one person wrote, noting that the story and its impact on millions of people was sparsely covered in the national news.

What shocks me, as a relative newcomer to the North, is how bad the public transport is — and how little I’d been prepared for it by reading the national (sorry, London) newspapers. There is no way that the current state of the North’s railways — appalling; unbelievable — would be allowed to continue if it were happening in the South East. It’s often journalists personally experiencing things that lead them to prioritise a story, and very few of them are experiencing the 23 cancelled services every day from Manchester to Leeds.

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Imagine if this kind of disruption took place anywhere near London — actually, we don’t have to imagine: remember the Southern Rail strikes, reported as if it were a national emergency — the editors who frame our national debate would be firing off angry emails to their columnists and news editors from freezing platforms. The stink would be so great that ministers would be forced to drop everything and fix it within days. And yet up here, month after month, despite the attempts of local politicians to raise the issue, the crisis drags on, paralysing large swathes of the country.

After Brexit there seemed to be a moment of self-reflection in the British press, from certain columnists at least, regarding the abject failure to understand the brewing feelings and major demographic shifts that drove a seismic political event that few in London saw coming. But the reason for that short-sightedness was structural, not something a few fleeting trips to the high streets (never the more-important suburbs) of Northern towns is going to fix.

The structural problem is that if you have 95% of your workforce living in one world, you are going to miss a lot of important stories in all the other worlds that make up this country. “You have got an insane number of people sitting together in the same room with the same lives and talking about the same experiences,” as one Northern correspondent put it to me. “It’s utterly bizarre.”

I’m writing this article from The Mill’s office on Cross Street, over the road from where The Manchester Guardian used to be based. That building has long gone and is now a Boots, with a small plaque on the outside wall marking its former use. Within walking distance there used to be massive northern newspaper offices for the Daily Express, the Daily Telegraph and the Daily Mail — an ecosystem, referred to as “the other Fleet Street”, that lasted for half of the twentieth century.

Technological change put an end to those operations and drove a radical centralisation of our media in London. But the technology we have now means that any news organisation can quite easily have dozens of reporters spread across every region. Suddenly, we would see a different kind of journalism creeping into the papers — one that tells us less about meaningless jockeying between random 20-something political advisors in Westminster, and more about how government policy is impacting people’s lives; how people hundreds of miles from the centre of power are experiencing the British state. The benefits of de-Londonising the media will flow far beyond journalism into policymaking and the nation’s understanding of itself. The newspapers could decide tomorrow that they want to represent this country properly again. And if they want us to call them nationals, they should.

This is certainly a new departure. As we have previously noted on UnHerd, the Left has strongly supported restrictive measures in the fight against the pandemic.

It argued that these restrictions, which clearly infringe on individual freedoms and rights, were nonetheless justified in the name of “the collective good” and “the collective right to life”. This allowed them to pre-empt any criticism of the new Covid consensus: if you’re against any of these measures, you’re against the collective interest. And so thinkers like us, who have always criticised neoliberal individualism and argued in favour of progressive state intervention, suddenly found ourselves accused of being libertarians or outright “Right-wingers”, just for taking a critical stance of governments’ response to the pandemic.

Indeed, it would appear that for many on the Left today, anything can be justified in the name of the “collective good”. It’s easy to see why Right-wing critics view this uncritical invoking of collective benefits as proof of the Left’s inclination towards authoritarian or “Stalinist” control. While such caricatural definitions are easy to laugh off, as leftists we can’t deny that there is something disturbing about the lack of critical commentary from the Left on how to reconcile the need for collective action with the importance of individual rights and freedoms in the response to Covid.

After all, the Left has historically championed civil rights and freedoms in society which are associated with individual liberties: the right to protest, the right to work, the right to sexual independence and freedom. Expanding the freedoms of men and women — while emphasising that this can only be achieved through collective action — has always been a central tenet of leftist, even socialist-democratic, ideology. So clearly something more complex than “default authoritarianism” is at work in the juxtaposition of the current Covid crisis and the Left’s broad response towards civil and individual liberties.

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Part of it has to do, we believe, with the Left’s criticism of the rise of desocialised individualism. The growing emphasis in economic and political thought on personal autonomy and the individual’s responsibility for their own fate, which has accompanied the rolling back of welfarism, has radicalised the ideological construction of the individual. We can see this in the renewed popularity of a figure such as Ayn Rand, with her message of enlightened egoism as the basis of civilised life. However, criticising modern individualism is one thing; laughing off the very idea that individual rights and freedoms matter is another, as is arguing that anything goes in the pursuit of “saving lives” and the “collective good”.

All of which has meant that, until the Observer’s interview with Mark Woolhouse, there has been painfully little critical analysis from the mainstream Left as to whether the raft of restrictive Covid measures we have seen over the past two years have indeed served the collective good — or saved lives for that matter. By definition, for something to be considered in the collective interest of a society, it has to be in the interest of at least a significant majority of its members. However, it’s hard to see how lockdowns (and other subsequent measures) meet this criterion.

Their psychological, social and economic impact might have been justified from a collective-interest and life-saving standpoint if Covid represented an equal threat to all citizens. Yet soon into the pandemic, it became clear that Covid-19 was almost exclusively a threat to the elderly (60+): in the last quarter of 2020, the mean age of those dying both with and of Covid-19 in the UK was 82.4, while by early 2020 the Infection Fatality Rate (IFR) — the risk of actually dying if you catch Covid — in people under 60 was already known to be exceptionally low: 0.5 per cent or less. A paper written late in 2020 for the WHO by professor John Ioannidis of Stanford University, one of the world’s foremost epidemiologists, then estimated that the IFR for those under 70 was even lower: 0.05%. As Woolhouse points out in his interview “people over 75 are an astonishing 10,000 times more at risk than those who are under 15”.

Moreover, given the impacts on other aspects of medical care, the preservation (or prolonging) of life of the elderly was certainly being achieved at the expense of the life expectancies of younger sectors of the population — to say nothing of the catastrophic impacts in the Global South. This has indeed been confirmed by evidence which shows that excess deaths in younger age groups rose sharply in 2021, with very little of this attributable to Covid mortality.

If anything, Covid restrictions should have been framed in terms of solidarity: as measures which implied the overwhelming majority of the collective, which risked little or nothing from Covid, paying a price, and a heavy one at that, in order to protect, in theory at least, a minority (in Western countries people aged 60 or older represent on average around 25% of the population). Acknowledging this from the start would have avoided much loss of trust in public institutions down the road, and would have allowed for a rational discussion around important questions of intergenerational equity, proportionality and the balancing of rights and interests.

A possible counter-argument is that avoiding healthcare systems being overrun with Covid patients, regardless of their age, was in the interests of everyone. This might be true from a purely theoretical standpoint. However, both arguments hinge on the assumption that lockdowns were actually useful in reducing hospitalisations and deaths. But there’s hardly any evidence that this has been the case.

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In early 2021, John Ioannidis published a paper claiming that there was no practical difference in epidemiological terms between countries that had locked down and those that hadn’t. Several other studies have appeared since then that confirm Ioannidis’s initial findings: see, for example, here, here and here. Indeed, some of the countries that locked down the hardest are also those with the highest mortality figures and excess death rate. Peru is an obvious example, while Sweden’s excess mortality is below the European average for 2020.

Meanwhile in the US, the end of 2021 confirmed the reality that lockdown strategies had little or no impact on Covid mortality. The two neighbouring states of Michigan and Wisconsin followed very different Covid policies, with Michigan favouring severe restrictions while Wisconsin lifted them much earlier; yet at the start of this month, Michigan’s Covid mortality rate was far higher than Wisconsin’s, at 2,906 deaths per million compared to 1,919 per million in Wisconsin. Another stark example comes from comparing two other neighbouring states: North and South Dakota. South Dakota infamously imposed no Covid restrictions, while there were mask mandates in North Dakota during the second wave in Winter 2020/2021: yet as of January 1st 2022, the two states’ death rates are very similar, at 2,810 per million (South Dakota) and 2,640 (North Dakota).

Another case that is less talked about is that of Italy. Over the course of the past two years, Italy has implemented some of the strictest and longest lockdowns in the world (indeed, it is the country that “invented” the concept of national lockdown), topping every other Western country in terms of average stringency of anti-Covid measures. Yet Italy is also one of the countries with the highest mortality rate per capita — well above the United Kingdom, Spain, France, Germany, Sweden and several other countries that adopted much less restrictive measures. And there’s evidence that this isn’t despite the lockdowns but, most likely, because of them.

As Piero Stanig and Gianmarco Daniele, two professors at Bocconi University, explain in their book Fallimento lockdown (“Lockdown Failure”), the worst possible thing you can do when dealing with a highly infectious disease that spreads almost exclusively indoors and targets the elderly is to lock old people up inside their homes with other family members, and ban citizens from spending time in arguably the safest place of all: outdoors. In other words, even from the narrow perspective of saving lives, not only were lockdowns not in the collective interest of society, they weren’t even in the interest of those whose lives were actually at risk.

Such an outcome was easily predictable. Indeed, the WHO’s 2019 report on pandemic preparedness states that the quarantine of exposed individuals — let alone of the entire population — “is not recommended because there is no obvious rationale for this measure”.

The grotesquery of the global responses becomes even more apparent when we take into account the fact that while governments went out of their way to keep healthy people locked in, chasing runners down solitary beaches or checking shopping trolleys to make sure people were only buying essentials, they all but abandoned those most vulnerable: nursing home residents. According to a recent Collateral Global study, Covid deaths in nursing homes amount on average to a staggering 40% of all Covid deaths in Western countries, despite representing less than 1% of the population. In some countries (Belgium, France, the Netherlands, Slovenia, Spain, Sweden, the UK and the US), more than 5% of all care home residents were killed.

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In view of this, it seems obvious that the focused protection approach championed by the Great Barrington Declaration (GBD) — based on “allow[ing] those who are at minimal risk of death to live their lives normally to build up immunity to the virus through natural infection, while better protecting those who are at highest risk” — was the right course of action. It would have avoided inflicting needless pain on workers, women and children through repeated lockdowns, while arguably saving countless lives, by focusing first and foremost on the elderly and especially on nursing homes.

Naturally, the way in which this worked would have been very different in different settings. While in richer countries the resources and infrastructure were certainly available to direct policy in this way, in poorer countries with high Covid mortality and weak healthcare systems — such as Latin America, India and South Africa — the capacity of governments to offer focused protection was limited. Nevertheless, funds could have been used for this purpose, rather than to fund schemes such as contact tracing, which the WHO had specifically disbarred in all circumstances as a pandemic response in its aforementioned 2019 report.

Instead, countries such as Argentina, Colombia, Peru and South Africa have faced the catastrophe of both severe Covid restrictions and high Covid mortality. What has followed is the destruction of the livelihoods and access to food of tens of millions of citizens; a recent report showed that after almost two years, Covid restrictions have completely shattered the world’s informal economies, with 40% of domestic workers, street vendors and waste pickers still earning less than 75% of their pre-Covid earnings.

And yet as we enter 2022, our openness to reassessing the paths not taken remains constrained. Not only has there been no acknowledgment of the missed opportunity of focused protection at the institutional level — and no apology to the authors of the statement, victims of a vicious smearing campaign — but even now the GBD is dismissed by academics and epidemiologists such as Woolhouse, even though the focused protection policy he advocates is drawn from it.

Meanwhile, throughout the past year, governments have actually upped the ante, coming up with even more invasive, oppressive and discriminatory measures — all in the name of public health and the collective interest. Yet surely the past two years have revealed the dangers of assuming that a “collective response” to the pandemic requires lockdown measures. Many other “collective responses” — such as focused protection and the GBD’s suggestions of free deliveries of groceries to the elderly and vulnerable, and frequent rapid testing of care home staff and visitors — would likely have been more effective.

It is time for the Left to look reality in the face and take stock of the fact that the prevailing Covid response of most Western governments has been an abysmal failure on all fronts —not least that of “saving lives”. An alternative approach is desperately needed. Fortunately, and tragically, it’s been hiding in plain sight all this time.