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to have responded promptly and sufficiently would have meant jettisoning an entire structure of political thought developed in these countries over the past half century.

Politics is best understood as public relations for particular interests. The interests come first; politics is the means by which they are justified and promoted

On the left, the dominant interest groups can be very large – everyone who uses public services, for instance

On the right they tend to be much smaller. In the US, the UK and Australia, they are very small indeed: mostly multimillionaires and a very particular group of companies: those whose profits depend on the cavalier treatment of people and planet

I’ve seen how the tobacco companies covertly funded an infrastructure of persuasion to deny the impacts of smoking. This infrastructure was then used, often by the same professional lobbyists, to pour doubt on climate science and attack researchers and environmental campaigners.

these companies funded rightwing thinktanks and university professors to launch attacks on public health policy in general and create a new narrative of risk, tested on focus groups and honed in the media

They reframed responsible government as the “nanny state”, the “health police” and “elf ’n’ safety zealots”. They dismissed scientific findings and predictions as “unfounded fears”, “risk aversion” and “scaremongering”.

Public protections were recast as “red tape”, “interference” and “state control”. Government itself was presented as a mortal threat to our freedom.

The groups these corporations helped to fund – thinktanks and policy units, lobbyists and political action committees – were then used by other interests: private health companies hoping to break up the NHS, pesticide manufacturers seeking to strike down regulatory controls, junk food manufacturers resisting advertising restrictions, billionaires seeking to avoid tax

Between them, these groups refined the justifying ideology for fragmenting and privatising public services, shrinking the state and crippling its ability to govern.

Now, in these three nations, this infrastructure is the government. No 10 Downing Street has been filled with people from groups strongly associated with attacks on regulation and state interventio

Modern politics is impossible to understand without grasping the pollution paradox. The greater the risk to public health and wellbeing a company presents, the more money it must spend on politics – to ensure it isn’t regulated out of existence. Political spending comes to be dominated by the dirtiest companies

The theory on which this form of government is founded can seem plausible and logically consistent. Then reality hits, and we find ourselves in the worst place from which to respond to crisis, with governments that have an ingrained disregard for public safety and a reflexive resort to denial

It is what we see today, as the Trump, Johnson and Morrison governments flounder in the face of this pandemic. They are called upon to govern, but they know only that government is the enemy.

Shierholz said despite the gloom, the federal government has the power and resources to intervene. “The economy is taking a big hit, but it is a policy choice, the level of human suffering that is caused,” Shierholz said.EPI is one of several bodies advocating for the federal government to waive unemployment insurance requirements, such as making people demonstrate they are looking for work; increase funding to social support systems, such as food stamps; place moratoriums on evictions; and allow laid off or furloughed people to continue using their employer-sponsored healthcare so state health insurance programs aren’t overwhelmed. Worker advocates are also encouraging employers to simply keep paying their employees, because when the crisis is over, those jobs will need to be filled again.

Early Wednesday, Congress reached a deal on what is expected to be the largest US economic stimulus measure ever passed.Democrats and Republicans had been divided on the level of oversight required for industries receiving bailouts. Progressives are concerned the Republican plan would allow billions of dollars to go to business leaders while workers continue to live without pay or health insurance.

The Brookings Institution thinktank said more than 24.2 million Americans work in the five high-risk sectors facing a sharp slowdown. This includes travel, hospitality, employment services, transportation and energy centers, such as Texas oil and gas towns.

More working people need to feel that hope, said Johnson. “This is like a wartime economy,” he said. The government needs to decide what its goals are “and get them done”.

So what is it? In short, it is their lives.

It was not always the case that ethnic-minority children did better than white English ones, but the reason why some of them do now is pretty obvious: their problem – racism – is defined; their language skills tend to be well-developed; their culture is one of aspiration; they have social and religious institutions that promote cohesion.

By contrast, the problem of poor white kids cannot be properly defined: not in the language of freemarket capitalism, at least. It has nothing to do with being “overtaken” – still less with any reverse discrimination against them.

It is simply that a specific part of their culture has been destroyed. A culture based on work, rising wages, strict unspoken rules against disorder, obligatory collaboration and mutual aid. It all had to go, and the means of destroying it was the long-term unemployment millions of people had to suffer in the 1980s.

If the country is populated with low-achieving, inarticulate white kids it is something that happens between the year they stop being toddlers and the year they start being Neets (Not in Education, Employment or Training).

the great discovery of the modern right was that you only have to do this once. Suppress paternalism and solidarity for one generation and you create multigenerational ignorance and poverty. Convert Labour to the idea that wealth will trickle down, and to attacks on the undeserving poor, and you remove the means even to acknowledge the problem, let alone solve it.

Thatcherism didn’t just crush unions: alone that would not have been enough to produce this spectacular mismatch between aspiration and delivery in the education system. It crushed a story.

And what the most successful Chinese, Indian and white Irish children probably have – although you would need more research than offered here to give this assertion rigour – is a clear and compelling story.

In my first week at university, myself and a few other working-class kids on our course were quizzed by our middle-class peers: “You must be exceptionally bright to get here, against these odds,” was the theme. We were incredulous. We had been headed for university since we picked up Ladybird books. Without solidarity and knowledge, we are just scum, is the lesson trade unionism and social democracy taught the working-class kids of the 1960s; and Methodism and Catholicism taught the same.

To put right the injustice revealed by the CentreForum report requires us to put aside racist fantasies about “preferential treatment” for ethnic minorities; if their kids are preferentially treated, it is by their parents and their communities – who arm them with narratives and skills for overcoming economic disadvantage.

educational reforms alone will barely scratch the surface. We have to find a form of economics that – without nostalgia or racism – allows the working population to define, once again, its own values, its own aspirations, its own story.

The initial report presents a flexible daily diet for all food groups based on the best health science, which also limits the impact of food production on the planet

The Eat-Lancet report posits that the global food system is broken. From the numbers quoted alone, it is hard to disagree: more than 2 billion people are micronutrient deficient, and almost 1 billion go hungry, while 2.1 billion adults are overweight or obese

Unhealthy diets are, it says, “the largest global burden of disease”, and pose a greater risk to morbidity and mortality than “unsafe sex, alcohol, drug, and tobacco use combined”

we are not (yet) extinct, but we have an era named after us. And what we are eating has a lot to do with that. Food production, the report states, “is the largest source of environmental degradation”.

It has identified a daily win-win diet – good for health, good for the environment – that is loosely based on the much-lauded Mediterranean diet, but with fewer eggs, less meat and fish, and next to no sugar.

it does include a range of foodstuff types that are adaptable, in theory, to the cuisines (potato or cassava; palm-oil-based, say, or soy-rich) and primary dietary restrictions (omnivore, no pork, pescatarian, vegetarian, vegan) found across the world

the daily ration of red meat stands at 7g (with an allowable range of 0-14g); unless you are creative enough to make a small steak feed two football sides and their subs, you will only be eating one once a month.

you are allocated little more than two chicken breast fillets and three eggs every fortnight and two tins of tuna or 1.5 salmon fillets a week

Per day, you get 250g of full-fat milk products (milk, butter, yoghurt, cheese): the average splash of milk in not very milky tea is 30g

The diet functions on the basis of 2,500 kcal daily,

It is still more food – way, way more – than two billion people currently have access to.

The future served up on a plate Monday

Breakfast: Porridge (made with water) with 1 tbsp honey or maple syrup, topped with nuts and seeds, and one piece of fruit; one cup of tea or coffee with milk

Lunch: Fennel, avocado, spinach and broccoli salad with feta and mustard and plant-oil dressing with one slice of sourdough bread, plus one plain yoghurt pot with a handful of berries

Dinner: Roast red cabbage and red lentil dahl with rice

Snack: Sugar-free ricecakes with nut butter.

Tuesday Breakfast: Two eggs with two slices wholemeal toast and Marmite

Lunch: Barley or other wholegrain salad with smoked mackerel, seeds

radishes, celery, chickpeas, herbs, oil and lemon juice dressing; one piece of fruit.

Dinner: One baked sweet potato with salsa, cavolo nero, avocado, black beans, grated cheese and a dollop of sour cream.

Snack: One handful of roasted chickpeas.

Wednesday Breakfast: Two slices of wholemeal toast with one sliced banana and honey; one cup of tea or coffee with milk.

Lunch: Spicy miso noodle soup with tofu, radishes, leafy greens and poached egg (that’s your quota for two weeks used up: no eggs for you next week); small pot of plain yoghurt

Dinner: Steamed veg (kale, broccoli and carrot) with a yoghurt and fresh herb dressing and olive oil, root veg and bean mash.

Snack: Cannellini bean dip with red pepper sticks

“You end up with this conspiracy theory about big government taking over our lives, taking away our freedoms, subjecting us to stay-at-home orders that we have to liberate ourselves from,”

The Manhattan Institute, which calls itself a free-market thinktank, ran an article from Heather MacDonald in which she wrote: “Even if my odds of dying from coronavirus should suddenly jump ten-thousand-fold, from the current rate of 0.000012 percent across the U.S. population all the way up to 0.12 percent, I’d happily take those odds over the destruction being wrought on the U.S. and global economy from this unbridled panic.”

Alex Epstein, the founder of the Center for Industrial Progress which DeSmog cites as associated with various groups connected to the rightwing billionaire brothers Charles and David Koch, called the current recession a “mild preview of the Green New Deal”, and said that “our biggest ally in the fight against coronavirus is the fossil fuel industry.”

The US president’s joint address to Congress this week was well received but was rapidly overshadowed by revelations that his attorney general, Jeff Sessions, had twice spoken with the Russian ambassador during last year’s presidential election.

The congressman Adam Schiff, the top Democrat on the House intelligence committee, has called for Sessions to quit, saying he “clearly misled” the Senate about contacts with Russian officials, and demanded that a special prosecutor be appointed.

Despite the conclusions of US intelligence agencies, Sessions refused to say whether Putin favoured Trump over Hillary Clinton in the presidential race. “I have never been told that,” he told the host, Tucker Carlson. “I don’t have any idea, Tucker – you’d have to ask them.

Last month Trump’s national security adviser, Michael Flynn, was forced to resign amid controversy over his discussions with Kislyak in late December. On Thursday, it emerged that Kushner joined Flynn at a private meeting with the ambassador at Trump Tower in New York. Another campaign aide, Carter Page, did not deny meeting Kislyak during the Republican national convention. And the Wall Street Journal reported that Trump’s son, Donald Jr, was probably paid at least $50,000 for an appearance late last year at a French thinktank whose founder and wife have strong ties to Russia.

Trump, meanwhile, said that Sessions was the target of a “witch-hunt” and declared his “total” confidence in him.

At The Wall Street Journal’s editorial page, nearly every editor and writer of the “Never Trump” persuasion left the paper in the past year, this writer included. George Will did not have his contract renewed at Fox News after his anti-Trump views fell afoul of a network in thrall to the president.

At the Foundation for Defense of Democracies, a hawkish, nonpartisan research group, at least two people left over the way the think tank responded to Mr. Trump’s election. “The ability to criticize became very limited. We had to be more and more populist and right wing in our views and our analysis,” one former employee told me. He said that the reason was explained clearly by the leadership: “We were told time and time again that for eight years we’ve been out in the wilderness. Now we have an opportunity for access. We can’t pass it up.”

For a sense of what it looks like for the bomb throwers to run the joint, one needn’t look far. The Heritage Foundation, by far the most influential think tank of the Trump era, is widely seen as a redoubt of Trumpism in large part because of the tremendous influence of the Mercers, who are major donors

“Heritage has gotten away from its core function, which was to provide top-notch policy research to advise conservative lawmakers. It’s become the de facto arm of Bannonism,” one person close to Heritage told me. In recent weeks, the think tank has hosted the president. The home page of its website boasts: “Donald Trump and many newly elected Republican congressmen promised they’d drain the swamp. And Heritage is here to help them do just that!”

“Bannon and Trumpism is a definitive threat to the country. The ideology is a dramatic departure from a long American tradition of America being a global leader,” added Mr. Radosh. “Bannon has spoken of wanting an international alliance with all these emerging right-wing populists in Europe. It is a fundamental rejection of liberalism.”

Less money is spent on black patients with the same level of need as white patients, causing the algorithm to conclude that black patients were less sick, the researchers found.

Reformulating these biases in the algorithm would more than double the number of black patients flagged for additional care

black patients actually had 48,772 more active chronic conditions than white patients who had been ranked at the same level of risk

Biases like these are inadvertently built into the technology we use at many different stages, said Ruha Benjamin, author of Race After Technology and associate professor of African American studies at Princeton University.

“Pre-existing social processes shape data collection, algorithm design and even the formulation of problems that need addressing by technology,” she said.

When researchers tweaked the algorithm to make predictions about patients’ future health conditions rather than which patients would incur the highest costs, it reduced biases by 84%. “These results suggest that label biases are fixable,” the study said.

Predictive algorithms that power these tools should be continually reviewed and refined

researchers suggested similar biases probably exist across a number of industries. As algorithms are increasingly used for job recruiting, housing loans and policing, Benjamin noted that more legislation is needed to ensure algorithms take into consideration historical biases.

“Indifference to social reality is, perhaps, more dangerous than outright bigotry.”

Chinese scientists have even submitted a paper for publication to the Lancet – although it has not yet been peer-reviewed – that claims “Wuhan is not the place where human-to-human Sars-CoV-2 transmission first happened”, suggesting instead that the first case may have been in the “Indian subcontinent”.

Claims that the virus had origins outside China are given little credence by western scientists. Michael Ryan, director of the health emergencies programme at the World Health Organization (WHO), said last week that it would be “highly speculative” to argue that the disease did not emerge in China. “It is clear from a public health perspective that you start your investigations where the human cases first emerged,” he told a news briefing in Geneva.

Reports of Covid circulating in Italy in autumn 2019, based on samples from a cancer unit, seem “weak”, said Prof Jonathan Stoye, a virologist at the Francis Crick Institute in London. “The serological data [from Italy] can most likely be explained by cross-reactive antibodies directed against other coronaviruses.” In other words, antibodies found in the cases in Italy had been triggered in individuals who had been infected by different coronaviruses, not those responsible for Covid-19

And while traces of coronavirus have been found on frozen food packaging, scientists think that represents a very low risk for a disease now believed to be overwhelmingly transmitted through respiratory droplets.

A positive test “doesn’t indicate infectious virus, just that some signal from the virus is present on that surface,” Andrew Pekosz of the Bloomberg School of Public Health at Johns Hopkins University told AP. “I’ve seen no convincing data that Sars-CoV-2 on food packaging poses a significant risk for infection.”

But as the human and economic toll of the pandemic mounts, Beijing is keen to protect its reputation at home and abroad. Covid-19 has now infected over 60 million people and killed nearly 1.5 million.

“China is still struggling to deal with the fact that it is held responsible for the “original sin” of the outbreak, which undercuts virtually every effort to salvage its image,” said Andrew Small, a China scholar and senior fellow with the German Marshall Fund, a US thinktank.

“Recent months have shown what a catastrophic impact the pandemic has had for China in international public opinion.”

He does not think there is any doubt in the minds of senior Chinese leadership about the origin of the virus, and sees the focus on reporting possible alternative origins as a propaganda campaign.

The reports fit an internal narrative of a strong China led by an efficient Communist party. Domestically, Beijing has promoted its enormous success in virtually eradicating the disease and returning life within its borders to something like normal

Internationally, China’s aims probably include introducing some doubt for global audiences who are likely to believe it, turning basic facts into a “contested, politically sensitive matter” in relations with Beijing, Small said.

China’s questioning of the origin of the virus in Wuhan might be more credible if it was supporting an independent investigation into the disease, but instead authorities have repeatedly proved obstructive

WHO investigators who visited Wuhan earlier this year were not able to visit the food market linked to the initial outbreak. A new team is expected to head to China soon to build on initial work by a Chinese team, but they still don’t have a date for travel, with the WHO saying only that they will travel “in due time”.

This battalion of free-market thinkers has now been welcomed into 10 Downing Street. Five of the new prime minister’s closest advisers are Tufton Street alumni, including Ms. Truss’s chief economic adviser and her political secretary, and at least nine Tufton Street alumni are scattered across other major government departments. Tellingly, Mr. Littlewood says that Ms. Truss has spoken at his think tank’s events more than “any other politician over the past 12 years.”

Notoriously opaque about their sources of funding, something they defend as a right to privacy for donors, they have been found by investigative reporters to have financial links to the oil giants BP and Exxon Mobil, big tobacco companies and American libertarian groups. But the picture depicted is only partial. We simply do not know who is bankrolling the groups now at the heart of the British government.

First and foremost, they are significant operatives in Conservative circles: The Center for Policy Studies, for example, claims that it was “responsible for developing the bulk of the policy agenda that became known as Thatcherism.” Given that Margaret Thatcher herself co-founded the think tank, it’s not an idle boast. In the decades since, groups like it have multiplied as the Tufton Street network evolved from a pseudo-academic forum to an orchestrated lobbying outfit whose influence stretches well beyond the Conservative Party.

It’s common for a representative from these groups to appear on flagship current affairs programs, blandly presented as an impartial expert. There are striking parallels with America, where — as described by Jane Mayer in “Dark Money” — libertarian billionaires fund an assembly line of anti-tax, anti-regulation politics, gamely diffused through the media. In setting the terms of political debate, skewing perceptions of the state and the economy to the right, it has been a remarkably successful strategy.

Under Ms. Truss, once nicknamed the “human hand grenade” for her ideological obduracy, the libertarian right has detonated the British economy. The cost, for all but the richest, could be incalculable.

In the Netherlands, the PVV surged to become the largest party among 18- to 34-year-olds, winning 17% of their vote against 7% previously. In Sweden’s 2022 ballot, 22% of the 18-21 cohort voted for the far-right Sweden Democrats, against 12% in 2018.

“I am not a racist because I voted for Wilders. It frustrates me that migrants receive more help from the government than Dutch people – but I’m not against Islam; I don’t want mosques closed. I just think we need to control immigration better.”

Koen, 19, a student in Amsterdam, echoed that view. “I still live with my parents – I can’t afford a room in Amsterdam,” he said. “I have to commute every day. Wilders wants to give housing to people who are from here – I don’t think that’s strange.”

Far-right parties are not the preferred option – or even second choice – for younger voters everywhere in Europe, analysts caution. The trend appears strongest in countries such as Austria, Germany, the Netherlands, Sweden and Denmark

In Spain, the ultra-conservative Vox party’s share of the under-35 vote soared from 22% in April 2019 to a record 34% that November, echoing its rollercoaster performance with the electorate as a whole. It fell back in July this year but still stands at 27%.

Issues such as housing, overcrowded classes and struggling hospitals were key to the youth vote, De Vries said. “Wilders may want ‘Dutch people first’ but he promises to fix these things,” she said. “The government parties imposed austerity.”

Zerka also identified economic insecurity as the most significant factor. “Young voters haven’t moved rightwards on migration, abortion, minority rights,” he said. “Far-right parties have convinced them that they offer a credible economic alternative.”

Other factors include some far-right parties “managing to position themselves as a ‘cool’ electoral option”, Zerka said. “They are increasingly offering younger voters equally young, often charismatic politicians – people who speak their language.”

Zerka also cites far-right parties’ social media skills: Spain’s Vox has a particularly slick operation, and Sławomir Mentzen, the 37-year-old leader of Poland’s ultra-liberal far-right Konfederacja (Confederation) party, has 800,000 followers on TikTok.

Jacob Davey, the head of policy and research at the Institute for Strategic Dialogue thinktank, identified the influence of a far- and ultra-right youth counterculture, typified by the far-right pan-European Generation Identity group, as an additional factor.

Even if “economic grievances, insecurities around housing, jobs, futures” may account for much of the youth vote, he said, “we’re seeing the growth to fruition of a concerted far- and extreme-right effort to reach and radicalise young people”.

finally, said De Vries, there was “simply, normalisation. For many of these young voters, far-right parties have been part of the political landscape their whole lives. They’ve grown up with them. There’s not the stigmatisation there once was.”

“My mother’s a nurse, and healthcare is not coping. Wilders campaigned on investing in healthcare and old people’s homes. When it comes to migration, people from a war country deserve a better life here but it shouldn’t be at the expense of Dutch people.”