Now we health workers know how empty Boris Johnson's 'clap for heroes' really was
When the NHS saved his life last April, Boris Johnson could not have reacted more fulsomely on social media. “Our NHS is the beating heart of this country,” he waxed lyrical in a widely posted video. “It is the best of this country. It is unconquerable. It is powered by love.” The prime minister made a point of singling out two of his intensive care nurses by name, Luis Pitarma and Jenny McGee, whose courage, devotion and duty left him struggling “to find words to express my debt”.
Those of us risking our lives at the time – making the daily choice to brave hospital wards, general practices and care homes steeped in Covid – watched askance as the media lapped it up. We remembered all too well the footage in 2017 of Conservative MPs in the House of Commons literally cheering as they voted down a proper pay rise for nurses. Boris Johnson was, of course, among them, as were Rishi Sunak, Matt Hancock and the rest of the current cabinet.
For a government minister, garlanding NHS “angels” with praise has two irresistible attractions. First, it wraps you in an ersatz sheen of pseudoselflessness. The more lavishly you clap ‘“the healthcare heroes”, the better you persuade the voters that you too care. Second, all those public declarations of praise – so fervently tweeted, televised, promoted and shared – have the advantage of being entirely free. They cost the politician, and the Treasury, nothing at all.
We’ve had a year of performative gestures. That never-ending applause from the steps of Number 10, those photo ops of Johnson in goggles squirting water into test tubes, the extraordinary footage of Hancock’s dry-eyed tears when the health secretary was seemingly overcome with emotion at the arrival of Covid vaccines.
Now, though, the mask has well and truly slipped. We’ve discovered precisely how much Johnson really values NHS staff. And – in an inverse relationship to the zeal with which he has clapped – it turns out the answer is one Pret a Manger sandwich. Yes: £3.50 a week is precisely how much extra he thinks each NHS nurse deserves.
Incredibly, the 1% pay “rise” the government has proposed for NHS staff – it’s a real-terms pay cut, of course, once inflation is factored in – is being touted as beneficence. Indeed, the minister for mental health, Nadine Dorries, has insisted she is “pleasantly surprised” by the proposal, adding that she believes “nurses are about more than superficial soundbites, I think nurses love their job. They do their job because they love their job.”
There it is, that word “love” again. Never have four letters been used so vacuously. To dispel any lingering prime ministerial doubts, the NHS is powered not by love but by its annual budget – and love has never paid a hard-pressed nurse’s grocery bills. Many NHS staff do indeed love their jobs, but we still have mortgages and gas bills, and hungry kids to feed. We will go the extra mile for patients again and again, but that doesn’t mean our better natures should be exploited by Number 10.
Johnson needs to understand that love – real, genuine NHS love – is neither trite, nor easy, nor effortless, nor glib. NHS love is caring for a colleague as they suffocate from Covid, knowing that you could be the next to be infected and die. NHS love is being failed by the government on protective equipment but working regardless, wrapped in hospital bin bags and a visor you had to buy from B&Q.
NHS love is kneeling on the floor to help a child into a mask and apron so she can say goodbye to Mummy, who is dying in intensive care. NHS love is nearly vomiting with anxiety by the side of the road – because there’s only so much dying one human being can take – before setting off again towards the patients you know still need you. NHS love is the doctors and nurses who even now, as I type, are suffering from PTSD, anxiety and depression in their droves: who feel they can’t go on, who are broken, who have even talked of suicide when their defences are down.
This government insists a proper NHS pay rise is unaffordable. They bow their heads and say, “I’m sorry, our hands are tied.” It’s claptrap, of course. It’s a political choice. This is, after all, the very same government that is perfectly willing to spend £65bn on the first phase of HS2 – a project whose total cost could climb to £107bn or more, even as it seems that fewer of us will be making train journeys.
Here, then, is the stark truth behind the derisory 1% pay offer. If the prime minister can afford to spend two-thirds of the entire NHS annual budget on a very fast train, he can also afford to reward NHS staff with a real-terms pay rise. The fact that he has chosen, quite deliberately, not to do so speaks volumes.
All the praise was empty, the sycophancy merely that. This government has made no meaningful commitment to the NHS or NHS staff at all. The sorry truth, as every NHS nurse who’s ever used a food bank knows, is that money can’t buy you love – and love can’t buy you anything at all.
• Rachel Clarke is a palliative care doctor and author of Breathtaking: Inside the NHS in a Time of Pandemic
One of the most extensive collections of prints by Otto Dix is to be offered at auction this month in which the German artist’s unique perspective of fighting in the first world war and coping with its aftermath is given expression in some of the most poignant images of 20th-century Europe.
The works – which include Dix’s early prints and rare, complete portfolios from drypoint etchings to to wood cuts and aquatints – are considered valuable rarities, having been produced only in limited runs.
Because many of his paintings were confiscated and destroyed by the Nazi propaganda ministry, which labelled them “degenerate”, the prints, which have survived in far greater number, form the bulk of his work.
“As they were more affordable than his paintings, the prints were more likely to be hanging in private homes rather than galleries and were therefore less likely to be confiscated,” Séverine
Nackers, the head of prints for Sotheby’s Europe, said.
The works, which will be sold by Sotheby’s London in a 10-day online auction from 9 March, are with a private European collector who acquired them in the 1960s from Galerie Nierendorf. Its owner, the Berlin ex-banker Karl Nierendorf, was one of Dix’s greatest champions and supporters and published about 20 of his prints as well as three portfolios, including Der Krieg, (the war), which is the highlight of the London sale.
Widely considered the most important German portfolio of prints of the 20th century, Der Krieg, which is estimated at £200,000 to £300,000, comprises 50 etchings with drypoint and aquatint. Executed in 1923-24, it chronicles the artist’s life on the western front, where he served as a machine gunner for three years, including at the battle of the Somme, offering him an angle of vision he would adopt as his own for life.
“He lived mainly underground, in dugouts, and you see he is always looking at everything from this perspective, looking down rather than up – even after the war this is the perspective
from which he viewed the world,” Nackers said.
“His mantra was that artists should not look away and he never did, because he did not want the horrors of war and its after-effects to be repeated.”
No artist, wrote a critic in the Süddeutsche Zeitung newspaper at the time, was able to approximate Dix’s ability to convey “the apocalyptic face and the naked grimace of war”.
One series in the portfolio offers a documentary study of what his military unit might have seen as they waded through the carnage of mud and corpses, weighed down by their equipment. He also depicts the squalor of life in the dark, dank dugouts and the effects of poison gas. Images that convey the absurdities of war – such as soldiers firing at the moon after being ordered to keep up the attack come what may – are something of a Dix trademark.
Ian Jeffrey from the Archive of Modern Conflict, which has advised Sotheby’s on the collection, has said although Dix sketched and drew at the front, he mainly worked from memory. He was likely inspired by Goya, whose series of early 19th century prints, The Disasters of War, have an equally powerful ethical dimension.
Jeffrey points out that Dix’s preoccupation with using “murky aquatint” was based on his first-hand experience of “the theatre of war [being] poorly and oddly lit by carbide lamps, by moonlight and by Verey flames”. They in turn illuminated the horrors such as the exploded corpses of men and horses.
Significantly, Der Krieg also goes beyond the scene of the battlefield to show the collateral damage, depicting a woman driven mad by the grief of losing a child. Dix’s view extends to post-war Dresden, where he witnessed first-hand after being demobilised the shattered lives of veterans, such as the amputee forced to sell matchsticks who was ignored by passersby except for a dog, which urinates on his stump.
He depicted prostitutes and sex killers, the excess, ecstasy and garishness of Weimar Germany, abandoning a brief foray into romantic fantasy in favour of harsh reality. Relief of sorts, comes in Zirkus, his drypoint set of circus prints in which the relative glamour of the famous Sarrasani Circus, based in Dresden, is a welcome contrast to the grimness of city life. But even here death is not far away, in the Death Defiers and the Lion Tamer, and in the aloof and steely expressions on the faces of the performers.
Dix’s rare woodcuts, described as among the most optimistic of his works, capture the dynamism of city life, in the crackle and fizz of the electric tram, whose passengers shout to be heard above the din. In Noise of the Street, he even manages to evoke a note of romance, albeit referring to life’s brevity in a caption from the composer Franz Liszt’s lied O Love as Long as You Can Love.
Dix only began his formal training as an artist after the end of the war. Often considered too honest and shocking, he was adopted by the antiwar movement but his exhibited works frequently had to be taken down in response to protests long before the rise of the Nazis.
Martin Dammann, a painter and member of the Archive of Modern Conflict, describes Dix as “a unique figure in the art of the 20th century” as the only visual artist who survived the first world war and then transformed his trauma into his works.
Night Shyamalan’s critically lambasted sci-fi mystery The Happening isn’t sobad-it’s-good, it’s just plain good.
Since his glory days in the late 90s and early 2000s, The Sixth Sense director has become somewhat of a punchline in Hollywood for his bizarro scripts and predictably twistladen style, with The Happening generally considered (in addition to his deservedly panned 2010 adventure flick, The Last Airbender) a low-point. Audiences hoping for a slow-burn thriller in the mode of his early work instead got something much weirder and more unhinged: a climate crisis parable in which the plants lash out against humankind by secreting neurotoxins that make people suicidal. On top of its already outlandish plot, the movie piled on performances so earnest they felt goofy and dialogue seemingly pulled out of a strange dream. And yet, so eager were viewers to pick apart its apparent failures at meeting blandly conventional standards of good film-making (the kind that privileges realistic acting and natural dialogue as markers of quality), that the film’s intentional humor and absurdism must have gone over their heads.
Drawing from mid-century B-movie
tropes, The Happening imagines a post-9/11 crisis in the mode of a nuclear age disaster film steeped in crippling paranoia. It begins in Manhattan, where construction workers start throwing themselves off buildings, and cops take out their guns and shoot themselves in the head. This fever spreads throughout the north-east, leading entire cities to evacuate: though on what grounds? The authorities, much less the average person, haven’t the slightest idea what’s causing these mass suicides. In their frenzied, directionless desperation, people simply begin to run. Shyamalan envisions a mass exodus from Philadelphia through a couple’s perspective, with each leg of their journey increasingly distanced from the potential dangers of civilization. Yet in the end, even the wind seems to pose a threat. Darkly hilarious is the idea that this “virus” might be an act of war. When a zookeeper willingly gets his limbs ripped off by a pack of lions, an onlooker cries out: “What kinds of terrorists are these?”
Of course, the “terrorists” have nothing to do with the suicide plague. Nevertheless, the film’s harrowing uncertainty, and this notion that anyone and anything might be weaponized against you at any time, seems to echo the “war on terror” and the myth of the omnipresent enemy advanced by political rhetoric at the time. Shyamalan is certainly heavy-handed in his warning about the apocalyptic consequences of climate change, yet embedded in his approach is a near-Buñuelian parody of people’s inability to tell the difference between a terror attack and an environmental catastrophe.
Watching it recently for this writing, however, I was struck by emotional whiplash: how one moment I’d be cackling at the sheer ridiculousness of a man allowing himself to get run over by a lawnmower, and in the next thrust into a moment of intense, wobbly-eyed passion when John Leguizamo’s character embarks on what’s destined to be a suicide mission to rescue his missing wife. Shyamalan tempers his mockery of our fears (ie Mark Wahlberg talking to a plant, only to find out it’s made of plastic) with characters that play everything entirely straight – simultaneously in on the joke and yet oddly dignified in their struggle. Like in the melodramas of old Hollywood, The Happening understands the power of faces, and luxuriates in those of its actors with extreme facial closeups that revel in their devastation and distress. It might feel overly earnest, yet there’s something to such clearcut emotionalism that acknowledges the very real violence and horror of the events taking place. Wahlberg and Zooey Deschanel get a lot of flak for their performances here, yet they both seem to be playing off the kind of dopey American idyllicism conveyed by directors like Frank Capra – without their gushing sentimentality and doe-eyed goodness, the film’s deadpan humor would lose much of its bite.
But what I find particularly resonant about The Happening, especially in these pandemic times, is the way it brings to bear the frailty of human knowledge, how easily our scientific and civilizational advances topple when confronted with something that eludes understanding. Shyamalan recapitulates Hitchcock’s The Birds in this regard, but adds to its own mystifying tale of nature’s vengeance, an intense cynicism that underscores its human relations. “Can you believe how crappy people are?” exclaims Wahlberg in his signature whine. If anything, the film makes this point clear by showing just how individualistic and ridiculously brutal folks can get when panicked: take for instance the scene when an unidentified number of people (Shyamalan wisely leaves it up to our imagination) in a rundown house reject our protagonists’ pleas for food and shelter, then murder two of their more insistent teenage companions with a shotgun peeping through the walls
The real kicker comes at the very end, though contrary to expectation it doesn’t come in the form of a surprise. It’s actually quite banal, and all the more haunting because of it: the crisis ends and people get back to their routines and comfortable homes. The corpses may have already faded from memory, yet society’s inability to truly grasp and address the root cause of the catastrophe means it’ll inevitably happen again. And so it does.
The Happening is available to rent digitally in the US and on Disney+ in the UK