Society

There is little chance of a safe escape from lockdown restrictions unless NHS Test and Trace is picking up most of those infected with coronavirus, and those who have come into contact with them. How is it doing so far? It is early days, but it looks as though only around one in nine of those with the illness are being reached. Here are the numbers that imply too few infected people are being contacted. According to government data, details of around 1,160 people per day were passed to the contact tracers, of whom only 770 were actually contacted. That compares with between 1,500 and 2,000 people per day who

The suspension of schooling has already led to fears of a lasting impact on children’s education, especially among poorer children. As I wrote here a couple of weeks ago, the Education Endowment Foundation has estimated that a six-month closure of schools could lead to an attainment gap of 36 per cent between children from the best-off and worst-off households. But what about the effect of school closures on children’s emotional development? A team from Cambridge University and the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, writing in the Lancet Child and Adolescent Health, warns that deprivation of peer contact among adolescents could have a serious impact on brain development, leading to anxiety, depression

The Black Lives Matter movement and the ‘Topple the Racists’ campaign have reminded us that monuments in public spaces can make powerful statements, on the rare occasions when we get round to noticing them. If the campaigners’ energy does not slacken, we can expect to have quite a few vacant plinths, and this will give us an opportunity to ‘confront’ (as some like to say) our history, and perhaps educate ourselves about the links between Britain and the ending of the appalling trade in human beings between Africa and the Americas, and between Africa and the Muslim world. Many people will have ideas about this, and indeed have expressed them

Toppling statues is relatively novel in the ‘Anglo-Saxon’ world, for whom revolutions, coup d’etats and regime change are a rarity. That is why the Anglosphere is taken by surprise when statue toppling happens, why they do it so childishly and with so little historical maturity. But for the French who have been doing it for centuries it is akin to a national sport. That is why they are more experienced and adult about it and why unspoken rules apply. The French Revolution was by no means the beginning of the French people’s experience of political iconoclasm, but it taught them its excesses and how subsequently to manage it. And they