Naomi Firsht in The Telegraph
The surge in post-natal depression is no surprise with the appalling way women have been treated during lockdown
on a pandemic pregnancies
“Becoming a mother is an overwhelming experience, and to do so when you are forcibly cut off from the support of your family and friends is incredibly isolating,” writes Naomi Firsht in The Telegraph. “I know I am far from being the only mother who thinks the government has paid very little mind to women’s maternity experience throughout the past year’s constant cycle of lockdowns and restrictions.” She argues that “pregnant women have been treated appallingly throughout this pandemic” and “maternity care has been sub-standard”. The government’s “inhumane policies” saw women “undergo difficult maternity appointments and even childbirth alone without the support of their partners”. “Postpartum care wasn’t much better,” she continues. “When an appointment for a baby is not a
SCOTLAND SUPPLEMENT II - A joint oppressor
Left nationalists are in thrall to a bogus history, argues Jack Conrad. Scotland was not subject to an English takeover with the 1707 Act of Union. Nor does Scotland suffer from English cultural imperialism
Europe’s first nations had an embryonic existence, which for the sake of neatness is usually dated back to the 13th and 14th centuries. Here we have fertilisation, eg, Geoffrey Chaucer and his use of Middle English in works such as
Tales of Caunterbury (1400). At the time the prestigious languages in England were Norman-French and Latin. Chaucer’s Middle English reflected the growing importance of market relations: ie, circulation, and the rise of capitalism. He was the first author of standing to use many common English phrases and words: ‘add’, ‘agree’, ‘desk’, ‘dishonest’, etc. Because of the printing press, by the early 16th century, his writings gained a mass audience amongst the educated minority. All part of
Ivan Krastev’s
Is It Tomorrow Yet? is a long essay published as a short book in which, with characteristic wit and insight, he grapples with what he calls the paradoxes of the pandemic. For Krastev, a Bulgarian public intellectual based at the Institute for Human Sciences in Vienna, epidemics do not only transform society, they also reveal the truth of who we are and how we have been living. “Fear of the virus in the early stages of the pandemic inspired a state of national unity that many societies have not experienced in years, but in the longer term it will deepen existing social and political divides,” he writes. I hope he’s wrong. It’s true the renewed sense of solidarity we experienced in the spring – consider those 750,000 people in the UK who responded within a few days to the government’s appeal for volunteers to support the NHS – had dissipated by midsummer.