Science, politics and financial capital have always shared a turbulent relationship.
As far back as the Renaissance, when Galileo joyously announced that science had proved the earth orbited the sun, the political and financial heavyweight champion of the world, the Catholic Church, was not happy.
Church dogma was that the earth was the centre of the universe. Science said that was factually incorrect.
The Church didn’t like that answer so it sent its own version of the Proud Boys, the Inquisition, to declared Galileo a heretic for documenting what he saw in his telescope. Faced with having his shoulders dislocated on the rack, along with some creative application of red-hot pokers, no one blamed Galileo for recanting his arse off to save his life.
For centuries, the tortured lies from the Inquisition drove the population to believe that the sun was spinning around the earth.
When leadership ignores science and tell lies, great damage is done to society.
Last year bushfires tore through massive tracts of pristine Australian forests. This catastrophe dragged the science of climate change into the lies of the culture wars.
Capital that invested in the Australian fossil fuel industry cracked the whip at their lackey politicians. Their mouthpiece, the Murdoch media, spewed forth a torrent of denials that climate change had caused the years of crippling drought prior to the fires.
The lunatic leadership then invented the lie that the ravaging bushfires were started by squads of “greenie” arsonists, whose reason for igniting the forests they wanted protected was an attempt trick us into believing the cause of the fire was climate change.
Despite being so profoundly ridiculous, this lie was accepted as a truth by many on the political right in Australia.
After the bushfire disaster, an independent governmental inquiry was commissioned. It found not one shred of evidence to back the arsonist theory. They also attributed the foundational cause of the drought and the bushfires to climate change. Despite these findings, many in “the great unwashed” still believe the lies of the green arsonist conspiracy and not the science.
In liberal western democracies, businesses that invest capital can and do attempt to influence the political class to deny science, if the truth of that science is perceived to impact on their bottom line. They attempt to challenge the fact that science does not sit on the political left or the right. Science is simply the truth.
Cautionary lesson
The Covid-19 pandemic provides a cautionary lesson for leaders who allow themselves to be influenced by capital and deny science.
In March 2020 the island nations of Taiwan, New Zealand and Australia accepted the advice of medical science and took the unprecedented action against Covid-19 of locking down their societies and closing their borders to all travellers, including offshore citizens.
The Australian, New Zealand and Taiwanese economies all took a major hit last March. Now they are enjoying strong economic recoveries. Their societies have avoided the paralysing cycles of repeated lockdowns. More important than economics, they have Covid mortality rates incomparably lower than Europe and the US. These politicians, who are from both the left and right, acted decisively on the science and are now enjoying high approval ratings from their constituents.
They provide proof that leaders who make key decisions based on science can have both flourishing economies and popularity.
At the beginning of the pandemic the political leadership in Ireland, the UK, Europe, and the US either partially or fully ignored the medical science for fear of the economic consequences. Those decisions have led to a cycle of repeated lockdowns that have ripped their economies into tatters. Tragically those countries have also recorded hundreds of thousands of deaths that could and should have been avoided.
Ireland’s crisis began last March, in the week prior to the Six Nations game against Italy at the Aviva. The National Public Health Emergency Team (Nphet) formally postponed the match because science identified that the risk of Covid-19 being transmitted was high. Correctly, the Italian rugby squad of 40 were stopped from travelling to Ireland.
Despite this, the needs of capital influenced our politicians and the Irish borders remained open. An estimated 5,000 Italian supporters, who predominately came from the Lombardy region in northern Italy, which was the epicentre of the pandemic in Europe at that time, swept into Dublin for a party weekend.
That Saturday night, inside the packed Dublin pubs, songs were sung, arms were linked and friends were embraced. Covid-19 sunk its teeth deep into Irish society. Short-term cash flow trumped long-term public health.
Why the Italian team were banned from travelling to Ireland and the door was opened to thousands of their supporters was a public health catastrophe and a massive political folly. The science of a pandemic was not acceptable to capital and the politicians. But that did not change the science.
The looming cash cow that is every Lions tour has rugby’s political leaders facing a similar dilemma. The Lions are scheduled to travel into a South African society in the depths of Covid crisis. Due to an initial response to the pandemic that had industrial-scale inadequacies, South Africa now has over one million people infected and a new super-infectious variant is rampant. A nationwide curfew is now in place.
Highly contagious
This not an environment for the Lions and their 30,000 supporters to visit.
The ocean of money generated from Lions tours is undeniable but so is the science. A Lions tour would be more than folly, it would be morally culpable.
The proposed Rainbow Competition in March, which would combine the leading South African provinces with the Pro12 teams is an excellent concept. South Africa’s Super Rugby franchises will bring levels of intensity, skill and pace that the Pro12 desperately needs.
With the highly contagious variant strain of Covid-19 in South African society, common sense tells our leaders that a competition with multiple teams travelling between Ireland, the UK and South Africa will have to wait.
The French minister for sport Roxana Maracineanu, has issued the Six Nations organisers with a deadline. France will commit to the first round of the Six Nations Championship but by the second weekend in February, Ireland and the UK must show the French authorities that they have their infections rates under control or the French team will not be permitted to travel.
Last week Ireland was the most infectious country on the planet and this week the UK had its highest daily rate of deaths on record. With that deadline less than a month away, it will take some serious spin to convince the French that the UK and Ireland are safe rugby havens.
This crisis has been created across the globe, from Beijing to Washington to London and Dublin, because politicians deep love of capital seduced them into ignoring the science.
Despite rugby’s political class sprouting “the show must go on” the science does not lie. The pandemic is raging across the UK, Ireland and South Africa.
Rugby’s leadership would do well to reflect on the consequences for those who made decisions based on science and those who chased the short-term cash.
We all desperately want the joy that the Six Nations and the Lions tour will bring to these dark days.
Covid-19 and its effects are not wanted or welcomed by our community, but that does not change the science.
