Sensemaker: One country, one system

• Biden won Arizona, and China congratulated him on winning the US presidency.
• Cummings said he’d leave Downing Street by the end of the year (more below).
• Aung San Suu Kyi’s National League for Democracy claimed victory in elections in Myanmar, but the army refused to accept the result.
• Amnesty International said scores of civilians have been killed by separatist forces in Tigray in northern Ethiopia.

One country, one system. The self-inflicted implosion of Hong Kong’s democratic opposition has been under-reported in a week of big news elsewhere. Four members of the legislature were expelled on Tuesday by Carrie Lam, the pro-Beijing chief executive, for being insufficiently patriotic. Fifteen more resigned the next day. In their absence Lam’s rubber-stamp administration plans to

• extend voting rights to Hong Kongers living on the Chinese mainland, where they are expected overwhelmingly to toe the Communist Party line;
• renounce the separation of powers that used to shore up the independence of Hong Kong’s courts;
• scrap the liberal studies curriculum taught in Hong Kong schools that Beijing loyalists blame for last year’s youth-led pro-democracy protests.

There’s honour in the mass resignation, but little left of the democracy the outgoing lawmakers stand for. Local elections next year may be its last gasp. Democracy in Hong Kong is probably doomed anyway, but it’s worth remembering that Britain sailed away in 1997 hoping it would grow rather than wither, as it was growing at the other end of the Eurasian continent. Things have – emphatically, ominously, sadly – not turned out that way.

Four countries, no system. As widely forecast, Dominic Cummings, Boris Johnson’s Rasputin, will follow Lee Cain out of Number Ten at the end of the year. He denies it’s a resignation and denies it has anything to do with Brexit, but his departure will unquestionably change the tone and priorities of Johnson’s dysfunctional government. Specifically…

• On the British union, Johnson wants to make a positive case for it rather than simply telling Scotland it can’t have another referendum, The Times reports (£).
• On Covid, he will need to rebuild public trust in his government’s capacity to test, trace and now vaccinate safely and equitably, after Cummings’ lockdown-defying and brazenly hypocritical trip to Barnard Castle last March. In particular he’ll want to ensure that arguments about Northern Ireland’s bespoke lockdown arrangements don’t sabotage the province’s fragile executive.
• On Brexit, he needs a deal with the EU not least because Biden has personally made clear that he’ll need one to get one with the US. That means quick compromises on fishing and state aid rules rather than the down-to-the-wire brinkmanship that Cummings and Cain favoured.

Brexit deadlines are already being stretched to breaking point and Sky’s Sam Coates has been tweeting about rumours of Remainers ganging up in Number Ten to lobby for another year’s delay to the whole project. If that sounds perfectly sensible, it won’t happen. Right?

Disney plus plus plus
The theme parks have been empty but, blimey, the sofas have been full. Disney’s relatively new streaming service has signed up nearly 74 million members ($) in 11 months, which is more than it says it was expecting in five years. Even allowing for carefully managed expectations and a 19 million-subscriber leg up in the form of existing customers in India and Indonesia who were moved over to Disney Plus automatically, this is what they used to call boffo box office. It’s fewer than half Netflix’s subscriber base but still a huge number. Investors are happy – Disney’s stock rose last night even though the pandemic wiped more than $3 billion off its profits in the third quarter alone – but what about cinemas? Will we ever go back?

Stone henge tunnel
They’re going to build one at last. Insofar as anything is certain in Johnsonian England, a tunnel will be built to hide traffic as it passes Stonehenge along the A303. This is a big call by Grant Shapps, the transport secretary. The tunnel will cost at least £1.7 billion and it defies his own planning inspectorate, which says it will cause “permanent, irreversible harm” to the site. The worry is that all the vibrations modern tunneling entails will disturb the ancient monoliths. It’s worth noting, too, that some of the best views of Stonehenge are to be had from the road. There’s no doubt the road goes too close, but those views will vanish. If the tunnel pleased the druids who gather at Stonehenge for solstices that might have clinched the argument, but one calls it a violation. I’d be interested to know what Tortoise members think.

Save the Popa langur
A new species of primate has been found in the jungles of Myanmar, and it’s already close to extinction. There are only an estimated 260 Popa langurs left. This elegant, silvery monkey was not completely undiscovered, in that London’s Natural History Museum already had a 100 year-old specimen – but it was not identified as a distinct species until a team from Fauna & Flora International and the German Primate Center did so on Wednesday in the journal Zoological Research. Can it be saved? That’s an ask for ASSK as she returns to power in Myanmar (see above) and – perhaps – looks for new channels for her energies besides oppressing the Rohingya Muslims.

Sweden’s surge
Sweden has reimposed a ban on visits to nursing homes and is rushing to introduce antigen tests for staff as Covid infection and hospitalisation rates rise exponentially. The country’s seven-day average of new infections has risen eight-fold since early October and the proportion of new cases being admitted to hospital is rising faster than anywhere else in Europe. In absolute terms the numbers are still low – Sweden is currently treating 1,004 Covid patients in hospital – but that number is 60 per cent higher than last week and Sweden’s per capita Covid death rate is ten times higher than in neighbouring Norway, which has deployed its Home Guard to patrol the two countries’ long land border. Sweden’s laissez-faire approach to the virus early in the pandemic won many fans abroad, including in the UK. They’re not talking much about it now.

Obama’s book
The first volume of Barack Obama’s presidential memoir is being trucked to bookstores and he has remarkable things to say about race in US politics. Not general things. Highly specific ones. For instance: he sent Joe Biden, then his vice president, to act as go-between in negotiations between the White House and the Republicans’ Senate majority leader, Mitch McConnell, because of “my awareness that in McConnell’s mind, negotiations with the vice president didn’t inflame the Republican base in quite the same way that any appearance of cooperation with (Black, Muslim socialist) Obama was bound to do”. No cooperation was forthcoming; McConnell vowed to make Obama a one-term president and obstructed his legislative agenda at every opportunity. Whether he’ll be more cooperative with Biden as president is one of the big questions of this extraordinary moment.

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Giles Whittell
@GWhittell