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      Blow to US vaccination campaign as J&J ‘one-shot’ vaccine deliveries plummet

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      US deliveries of the “one-shot” Johnson and Johnson vaccine are set to drop by 85% next week, in a setback to the government’s vaccination campaign.The Biden administration has allocated just 700,000 J&J doses to states for the week beginning 12 April, according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, a huge drop from the nearly 5m shots allocated the week before.The decline comes after J&J reported a batch of its Covid-19 vaccines developed in Baltimore had failed quality standards and cannot be used – as Anthony Fauci warned the US is at risk from a new coronavirus surge.Distribution of the J&J vaccine – which requires just one dose, as opposed to the two-shot Moderna and Pfizer vaccines also authorized for use in the US – has been uneven since it was introduced.The government allocated 2.8m doses to states at the beginning of March, only for that to drop to 493,000 the next week, but the drop to 12 April is the steepest yet.The slowdown comes after workers at the plant manufacturing coronavirus shots for J&J and AstraZeneca accidentally conflated the vaccines’ ingredients several weeks ago, the New York Times reported.It is unclear if the mix-up is the reason for the drop in J&J doses, and a J&J spokesman told the Wall Street Journal that the company still aimed to deliver 100m doses to the US by the middle of year, most of those by the end of May. The federal government has a deal with J&J for 200m doses.On Thursday Fauci, the top infectious diseases expert in the US, told CNN coronavirus cases had plateaued at a “disturbingly high level”. More than 61,000 new cases were reported on Wednesday, according to Johns Hopkins University.“It’s almost a race between getting people vaccinated and this surge that seems to want to increase,” Fauci said.Health experts have warned the rising number of coronavirus cases in dozens of US states is probably attributable to the spread of virus variants. Michigan has recorded the worst increase in infections over the past two weeks, at a rate not seen since early December.On Tuesday, the Associated Press reported that nearly half of new US virus infections are in just five states, with New York, Michigan, Florida, Pennsylvania and New Jersey responsible for nearly 197,500 new cases in the latest available seven-day period.Despite Michigan’s rate of new infections in the past two weeks, Gretchen Whitmer, the states Democratic governor, has stopped short of ordering restrictions, instead asking for voluntary compliance. She has blamed the virus surge on pandemic fatigue, which has people moving about more, as well as more contagious variants.This week, Joe Biden said half of all American adults are on track to have received at least one Covid-19 vaccination by this weekend. The president has set a goal of delivering 200m vaccinations by 30 April – which marks his first 100 days in office.One in four American adults have now been fully vaccinated against the virus, according to the CDC. More

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      Biden restores $200m in US aid to Palestinians slashed by Trump

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      The US will restore more than $200m (£145m) in aid to Palestinians, reversing massive funding cuts under the Trump administration that left humanitarian groups scrambling to keep people from plunging into poverty.
      “[We] plan to restart US economic, development, and humanitarian assistance for the Palestinian people,” the secretary of state, Antony Blinken, said in a statement.
      The aid includes $75m in economic and development funds for the occupied West Bank and Gaza, which will provide food and clean water to Palestinians and help small businesses. A further $150m will be provided to the United Nations relief and works agency for Palestine refugees in the near east (UNRWA), a UN body that supports more than 5 million Palestinian refugees across the region.
      After Donald Trump’s row with the Palestinian leadership, President Joe Biden has sought to restart Washington’s flailing efforts to push for a two-state resolution for the Israel-Palestinian crisis, and restoring the aid is part of that. In his statement, Blinken said US foreign assistance “serves important US interests and values”.
      “The United States is committed to advancing prosperity, security, and freedom for both Israelis and Palestinians in tangible ways in the immediate term, which is important in its own right, but also as a means to advance towards a negotiated two-state solution,” he said.
      Palestinian leaders and the UN welcomed the resumption of aid. Israel, however, criticised the decision to restore funds to UNRWA, a body it has long claimed is a bloated, flawed group.
      “We believe that this UN agency for so-called refugees should not exist in its current format,” said Israel’s ambassador to the UN, Gilad Erdan. Pro-Israel US lawmakers joined the country in opposition to the aid and said they would scrutinise it in Congress.
      From 2018, Trump gradually cut virtually all US money to Palestinian aid projects after the Palestinian leadership accused him of being biased towards Israel and refused to talk. The US president accused Palestinians of lacking “appreciation or respect”.
      The former president cancelled more than $200m in economic aid, including $25m earmarked for underfunded East Jerusalem hospitals that have suffered during the Covid-19 crisis. Trump’s cuts to UNRWA, which also serves Palestinian refugees in war-stricken Syria and elsewhere in the Middle East, was described by the agency’s then head as “the biggest and most severe” funding crisis since the body was created in 1949. The US was previously UNRWA’s biggest donor.

      To outcry from aid workers, leaked emails suggested the move may have partly been a political tactic to weaken the Palestinian leadership. Those emails alleged that Trump’s son-in-law and adviser Jared Kushner had argued that “ending the assistance outright could strengthen his negotiating hand” to push Palestinians to accept their blueprint for an Israeli-Palestinian deal.
      The cuts were decried as catastrophic for Palestinians’ ability to provide basic healthcare, schooling and sanitation, including by prominent Israeli establishment figures.
      Last April, as the coronavirus pandemic hit, Trump’s government announced it would send money to Palestinians. The $5m one-off donation was roughly 1% of the amount Washington provided a year before Trump began slashing aid. More

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      The Guardian view on women and the pandemic: what happened to building back better? | Editorial

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      One year into the pandemic, women have little cause to celebrate International Women’s Day tomorrow, and less energy to battle for change. Men are more likely to die from Covid-19. But women have suffered the greatest economic and social blows. They have taken the brunt of increased caregiving, have been more likely to lose their jobs and have seen a sharp rise in domestic abuse.In the UK, women did two-thirds of the extra childcare in the first lockdown, and were more likely to be furloughed. In the US, every one of the 140,000 jobs lost in December belonged to a woman: they saw 156,000 jobs disappear, while men gained 16,000. But white women actually made gains, while black and Latina women – disproportionately in jobs that offer no sick pay and little flexibility – lost out. Race, wealth, disability and migration status have all determined who is hit hardest. Previous experience suggests that the effects of health crises can be long-lasting: in Sierra Leone, over a year after Ebola broke out, 63% of men had returned to work but only 17% of women.The interruption to girls’ education is particularly alarming: Malala Fund research suggests that 20 million may never return to schooling. The United Nations Population Fund warns that there could be an extra 13 million child marriages over the next decade, and 7 million more unplanned pregnancies; both provision of and access to reproductive health services has been disrupted. In the US, Ohio and Texas exploited disease control measures to reduce access to abortions. The UN has described the surge in domestic violence which began in China and swept around the world as a “shadow pandemic”. Research has even suggested that the pandemic may lead to more restrictive ideas about gender roles, with uncertainty promoting conservatism.Coronavirus has not created inequality or misogyny. It has exacerbated them and laid them bare. Structural problems such as the pay gap, as well as gendered expectations, explain why women have taken on more of the extra caregiving. The pandemic’s radicalising effect has echoes of the #MeToo movement. Women knew the challenges they faced, but Covid has confronted them with unpalatable truths at both intimate and institutional levels.In doing so, it has created an opportunity to do better. Germany has given parents an extra 10 days paid leave to cover sickness or school and nursery closures, and single parents 20. Czech authorities have trained postal workers to identify potential signs of domestic abuse. But the deeper task is to rethink our flawed economies and find ways to reward work that is essential to us all. So far, there are precious few signs of building back better.Around 70% of health and social care workers globally are female, and they are concentrated in lower-paid, lower-status jobs. They deserve a decent wage. The 1% rise offered to NHS workers in the UK is an insult. The government also needs to bail out the childcare sector: without it, women will not return to work. It has not done equality impact assessments on key decisions – and it shows. The budget has admittedly earmarked £19m for tackling domestic violence, but Women’s Aid estimates that £393m is needed. And the UK is slashing international aid at a time when spending on services such as reproductive health is more essential than ever. Nonetheless, as a donor, it should at least press recipient governments to prioritise women in their recovery plans.Overworked and undervalued women have more awareness than ever of the need for change, and less capacity to press for it. Men too must play their part. Some have recognised more fully the demands of childcare and housework, and seen the potential benefits of greater involvement at home. Significant “use it or lose it” paternity leave might help to reset expectations both in families and the workplace. There were never easy solutions, and many look harder than ever. But the pandemic has shown that we can’t carry on like this. More

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      Assume Nothing: new book details alleged abuse by former New York attorney general

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      Amid warnings that domestic abuse has spiked alarmingly during the pandemic, an account published on Tuesday of a year-long relationship between a women’s right’s activist and successful producer Tanya Selvaratnam and the former New York state attorney general Eric Schneiderman, could hardly be more timely.Selvaratnam went public with accusations of intimate violence against her former boyfriend in the New Yorker in May 2018. Three other women who had been involved with Schneiderman also came forward with disturbing accounts of subjugation.The attorney general, who had established a political platform as a civil rights advocate, including suing the convicted rapist Harvey Weinstein, stepped down.The New York governor, Andrew Cuomo, called for a special prosecutor to look into the allegations against Schneiderman, but after a six-month criminal investigation prosecutors concluded that while the accusations of abuse were credible, there were legal hurdles to bringing charges. Schneiderman has denied the allegations.In Assume Nothing: A Story of Intimate Violence, Selvaratnam describes “a fairytale that became a nightmare” and recounts the relationship in the context of Schneiderman’s “entrapment, isolation, control, demeaning, and abuse”. The account makes for disturbing reading in which alleged physical abuse was but one instrument of subjugation.Selvaratnam alleges that Schneiderman would “slap me until I agreed to call him ‘Master’ or ‘Daddy’”. He recounted his fantasies of finding me somewhere far away to be his slave, his “brown girl”.The abuse, she said, increased to the point that Schneiderman spat on her and choked her. “I didn’t realize it at the time, but I was dealing with the kind of abuse that can go on between people in committed relationships: intimate violence.“But I had convinced myself that he would be my partner, maybe for life. If I wanted to keep him, I felt I had to let him dominate me.” Scared to come forward with her story, Selvaratnam writes that Schneiderman threatened to kill her if they broke up.In an interview with the Guardian on Tuesday, Selvaratnam, who is also the author of The Big Lie, an examination of the work-family conflict many women face, said she “wrote her way out of the darkness” of that relationship.She described intimate partner violence (IPV) in committed relationships as the next wave of the #MeToo movement. In recent weeks, Evan Rachel Wood and FKA twigs have come forward with their own accounts of abuse within past relationships, while Justin Timberlake issued an apology to Britney Spears for “missteps” that he said contributed to “a system that condones misogyny and racism”.In coming forward, Selvaratnam hopes to “shift the perception of what a victim looks like”.“Even fierce women – strong and independent – get abused. And there are so many people who can’t get out of abusive relationships because they don’t have the support and resources to do so. The pandemic has heightened the urgency of a domestic violence crisis because victims have been in lockdown with their abusers.”On average, one in four women and one in nine men experience intimate partner violence. A recent New England Journal of Medicine paper, A Pandemic within a Pandemic, warned of a surge in this type of violence, though calls to helplines had dropped by more than 50%.“Experts in the field knew that rates of IPV had not decreased, but rather that victims were unable to safely connect with services,” the report warned.According to theAmerican Journal of Emergency Medicine and the United Nations entity UN Women, incidents of domestic violence have increased by as much as 300% in Hubei, China; 25% in Argentina, 30% in Cyprus, 33% in Singapore and 50% in Brazil during the pandemic.Meanwhile, Selvaratnam said it was important in her account to excavate why she had stayed in the relationship with Schneiderman as long as she did. “I had to explore how I got into the relationship in the first place,” she said. In part, she said, she discovered echoes of her parents’ relationship.“I wasn’t prepared for my path to intersect with an abuser, and I wasn’t prepared for the grooming, gaslighting and manipulation.” In her case, Selvaratnam said, her abuser was shielded by “powerful allies including his ex-wife, meditators, feminists. He fooled a lot of people, not just me. And a lot of people encouraged me to be in the relationship.” Schneiderman was at the time rumored to be steering toward a run for New York governor had Hillary Clinton, as anticipated, won the 2016 presidential election and the current governor, Cuomo, received a call to serve in the administration. Neither scenario transpired.Still, Selvaratnam said she was aware of the dangers she faced exposing a powerful politician, and was prepared to do so without the support of other women who, it would turn out, had been in the same predicament.In the book, Selvaratnam recounts that she and Schneiderman were introduced in July 2016 at the Democratic national convention in Philadelphia where they exchanged phone numbers. He began emailing her with articles about his battles with Exxon and Trump. “Good fantasy reading before bed …” he wrote. He sent a photo with himself and the spiritual teacher Ram Dass.At a fundraiser for Hillary Clinton’s presidential campaign, the candidate complimented Schneiderman on the work he was doing. At a second, Harvey Weinstein approached with offers of raising money. Bill Clinton, too, was seated nearby.Five years on, Selvaratnam has developed a different impression of the “fairytale” she was seduced by. “The cults of personality that form around rich people, powerful people, talented people who are abusers are damaging to those who are in the cult and damaging to society. There’s a whole ecosystem and power-structure that needs to be dismantled so abusers are no longer shielded.”Selvaratnam said that while accumulation of power was not her motive, she was “swept up in the spotlight that was around Eric but that also made it difficult to come forward. There were many people who hoped he’d save us. He had a public-facing feminism and spirituality, but privately he abused me.“No powerful person who is an abuser is indispensable,” she states plainly, “and we now have Letitia James as state attorney general. I’m proud of that. It feels right. So I know I did the right thing, and that gives me strength.” More

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      in US Politics

      The Guardian view on Covid relief: ideologies matter in democracies | Editorial

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      When Covid struck, it was governments that decided people could not go to work and governments that took people’s money away. It is now down to governments to decide whether or not to return that money and when to open up the economy. In the US, Democrats want to give generously. While $1.9tn dollars is a lot of money – about the size of Canada’s GDP – it probably is not enough.As Randall Wray of the Levy Institute has pointed out, the US government is engaged in relief, not stimulus, spending. It is offering much-needed assistance to the devastated balance sheets of households, school districts and local governments. Rescuing public services, making sure people don’t starve and building Covid-testing systems is not an economic stimulus but a necessary antidepressant. Reducing the size of the relief package would prolong the recession, which, given the virus’s capacity to surprise, may last longer than the experts predict. President Joe Biden was right to rebuff criticism that Democrats risked overheating the economy, saying the problem was spending too little, not too much. There is slack in the US economy: 400,000 Americans left the labour market in January.Mr Biden aims to control the virus and then create jobs with infrastructure investments to reinvent the post-crisis economy for a zero-carbon world. Call it a spend-then-tax policy. If he succeeds, Mr Biden will go some way to repudiate the conventional economic wisdom that argues that if governments keep borrowing too much, they risk defaulting, will end up printing money and be forced in a panic to put up interest rates. The pandemic revealed this to be bunk. Central banks can keep interest rates low by buying government bonds with money created from thin air. Last year, they bought 75% of all public debt.Within days of assuming power, Mr Biden had a plan, and new thinking, to rebuild a Covid-scarred country. Boris Johnson has little to show after months. His government intends to cut universal credit, raise council tax bills and freeze public-sector pay, weakening household finances. Given this mindset, which has dominated policy since 2010, it is hardly surprising that the £900bn of Bank of England “quantitative easing” money sitting with banks can’t find profits in the real economy. The Bank has “knowledge gaps” about QE. Yet there is truth in the quote attributed to Keynes that “you can’t push on a string” – when demand is weak, monetary policy can do little about it.With interest rates low, no recovery to invest in and no new regulations, UK banks will turn inwards, not outwards. Instead of the City contributing to the productive economy and a just green transition, expect speculation and Ponzi-like balance sheets. It is lobbying to expand lucrative but socially useless activities. In January, Tory peers with City interests argued for a new finance regulator with a “competitiveness” objective – a Trojan horse for deregulation.Central banks are creatures of their legislatures, but have been permitted, for ideological reasons, to work without a social contract. In her recent paper, Revolution Without Revolutionaries, the economist Daniela Gabor warned that unelected technocrats must not be allowed to hand politicians reasons to adopt external constraints that can be blamed for unpopular policies. It is timely advice. The UK will have record peacetime levels of debt. Rishi Sunak says such borrowing is “unsustainable”. Yet UK gilts are a risk-free financial asset, which is why banks crave them.The inequality, financial instability and ecological crises have multiple causes, but their existence is built on radical, free-market economics. It is not the case that the government’s ability to spend is temporary while interest rates remain low, as Mr Sunak claimed. Bond-purchasing programmes can control yields. A system that benefits private finance but subordinates the state and threatens to expose it, post-pandemic, to austerity and elevated levels of unemployment must be resisted. Only those unable or unwilling to believe the evidence of their own eyes would say otherwise. More

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      in US Politics

      Biden move to refund UN population agency is 'ray of hope for millions'

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      The decision by US president Joe Biden to refund the UN population fund, UNFPA, offers “a ray of hope for millions of people around the world”, said the agency’s executive director.
      Dr Natalia Kanem said the announcement on Thursday would have an “enormous” impact on the agency’s work, particularly as the world continues to grapple with the coronavirus pandemic.
      In 2017, the Trump administration halted funding to the UNFPA, claiming it supported coercive abortion and involuntary sterilisation – claims strongly denied by the agency.
      The US was one of the agency’s largest funders. In 2016, it provided $69m (£50m) to support its work in more than 150 countries.
      “Ending funding to UNFPA has become a political football, far removed from the tragic reality it leads to on the ground. Women’s bodies are not political bargaining chips, and their right to plan their pregnancies, give birth safely and live free from violence should be something we can all agree on,” said Kanem.
      She added that the pandemic had hit particularly hard the vulnerable communities in which the UNFPA works. “US support will be instrumental in helping us build back better and fairer.”
      US secretary of state Antony Blinken said his department would appropriate $32.5m to support the UNFPA this year.
      “UNFPA’s work is essential to the health and wellbeing of women around the world and directly supports the safety and prosperity of communities around the globe, especially in the context of the global Covid-19 pandemic,” he said.
      Blinken also confirmed that the US would withdraw its support for the “Geneva Consensus Declaration” – an anti-abortion policy introduced last year by the then secretary of state Mike Pompeo, and signed by more than 30 countries, including Brazil, Hungary and Uganda.
      “The United States is re-engaging multilaterally to protect and promote the human rights of all women and girls, consistent with the longstanding global consensus on gender equality and sexual and reproductive health and reproductive rights,” said Blinken. More

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      Joe Biden axes 'global gag rule' but health groups call on him to go further

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      Health groups around the world are celebrating the end of a harmful policy banning US funding for overseas aid organisations that facilitate or promote abortion, which was scrapped by the US president, Joe Biden, in a presidential memorandum on Thursday.Reproductive rights advocates are urging the new administration to now go further and permanently repeal the Mexico City policy – known as the “global gag rule” – to prevent it being reinstated by a future Republican president. The policy has been blamed for contributing to thousands of maternal deaths in the developing world over the past four years.The gag rule prevents overseas organisations that receive American aid from using their own money to provide information about abortion, or carry out abortions. First adopted by the Reagan administration in 1984, it has been repealed by every Democratic administration and reinstated by every Republican one in the years since.In a short appearance in the Oval Office on Thursday afternoon, Biden said he ended the policy as part of an effort to “protect women’s health at home and abroad”.But Donald Trump went further than previous Republican presidents. The policy usually applies to family planning organisations. But the Trump administration expanded the policy to include all global health programmes, including programmes that address HIV, nutrition, malaria and cholera.Widening the rule increased the pool of aid funds it affected from roughly $600m to about $12bn (£8.7bn), according to the Guttmacher Institute, a health policy research group.“We can breathe,” said Serra Sippel, the president of the Center for Health and Gender Equity, of Biden’s plans to repeal the policy. “There’s just so much hope and optimism in Washington DC right now. We have a lot of work to do, but it’s so much better.”The consequences of Thursday’s memorandum will ripple out from Washington into more than 70 countries including some of the poorest places in the world, where essential women’s health operations were abruptly halted or scaled down after Trump reinstated the rule in January 2017.In Zimbabwe, a women’s health team run by Abebe Shibru, from the organisation MSI Reproductive Choices, cut its operations by 60%. “We reduced our outreach from 700,000 women to about 300,000,” Shibru, who now heads the organisation’s Ethiopian operations, told the Guardian.“Women missed out on information, they had no access to family planning, and in return they were exposed to unintended pregnancy and unsafe abortion, which contributed to higher maternal mortality.”Zimbabwe’s teenage pregnancy rate increased by 2% over the past four years, according to Unicef data, a trend Shibru said was exacerbated by cuts as a result of the gag rule.“We were not providing services to rural women, so they had no choice but to get pregnant against their wish,” he said.Pledging conferences attracted hundreds of millions of dollars in donations from governments and private groups to try to bridge the gap in American funding, but could not meet the total shortfall.An assessment of the rule’s impact released last year, surveying health organisations in Nigeria, Kenya, South Africa and Nepal, found a sector in “crisis” with confusion over what was banned and permitted using US aid, a growing stigma around reproductive health services and widespread closures and scaling downs of programmes.Trump’s ban also spawned a new wave of activism, including a new grassroots movement, SheDecides, which is pressuring policymakers around the world to commit to upholding reproductive and sexual health rights.Zara Ahmed, the associate director of federal issues at the Guttmacher Institute, said repealing the gag rule “is just the first step in undoing [the US’s] current status as the greatest global hindrance to reproductive health”.“We are glad that the Biden-Harris administration is addressing the global gag rule …… But let’s be clear, repealing the global gag rule is the bare minimum this administration can do to address the harm caused by the previous administration’s coercive and spiteful approach to foreign policy,” she said.“The Biden-Harris administration can, and must, take a comprehensive approach to unravelling the dangerous, punitive and coercive policies the outgoing administration has woven into our foreign policy, and it must take action to address longstanding harmful policies like the Helms amendment.”The Helms amendment has been widely misinterpreted as a total ban on US funding used for abortion overseas, when in fact it can be used to support abortion in cases of rape, incest or a woman’s life being in danger. A bill to permanently repeal it was introduced last year.On Thursday, the Global Health, Empowerment and Rights Act (Global HER Act) to permanently repeal the global gag rule will be introduced for the third time in Congress. The bill, cosponsored by the new vice-president, Kamala Harris, has received cross-party support, and hopes are high it will pass.“It’s not automatic and it’s not going to be easy but we’re starting in a very strong place to get the act passed,” said Sippel. “If not the bill itself, but the language of the bill incorporated into another bill. Getting rid of the GGR, that’s what we’re striving for.”Sippel also called on the Biden administration to disavow the “Geneva consensus declaration” – an anti-abortion policy Trump promoted last year – to “signal to the world that abortion and LGBTQ rights and sexual and reproductive rights are important, and to state that loudly to the world”.She added that some activists wanted the Biden administration to issue a formal apology for US policies on sexual and reproductive health and rights over the past four years.Biden also ordered funding restored to the UN population fund, UNFPA, which Trump stopped.The agency’s executive director, Natalia Kanem, hailed the “enormous” impact of the decision.“Ending funding to UNFPA has become a political football, far removed from the tragic reality it leads to on the ground. Women’s bodies are not political bargaining chips, and their right to plan their pregnancies, give birth safely and live free from violence should be something we can all agree on,” she said. More

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      in Elections

      Amanda Gorman at Biden's inauguration reminded me: politics needs poetry

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      Obama-endorsed and wearing gold-clipped braids and Oprah-gifted earrings, 22-year old poet Amanada Gorman and her poem The Hill We Climb have been the talking point of Biden’s inauguration. Her five-minute poem, which started with the question “When day comes we ask ourselves, where can we find light in this never-ending shade?”, explored grief, redemption and recovery, and wowed the world. Imperfect but fervent, it reminded us of something important: politics needs poetry.Gorman, born in 1998 in Los Angeles and raised by a mother who works as a teacher, graduated from Harvard university in 2020. She was the first US national youth poet laureate and its youngest ever inaugural poet. Owing to a speech impediment, she couldn’t pronounce the letter R until two years ago. She has described spoken word as “my own type of pathology”. Praise has overflowed for the young poet and many have celebrated her passion, beauty and poise in this historic moment that closes the door on Trump. “I honor you, @TheAmandaGorman. Thank you,” wrote the daughter of Dr Martin Luther King Junior, Bernice King on Twitter.The clips circulating on the internet of Gorman, glowing and optimistic, stand in utter contrast to scenes of Trump supporters storming the Capitol, grotesque and desperate. She wrote the remainder of the piece after the events of 6 January , staying up late to watch the storming the Capitol. The line: “We’ve seen a force that would shatter our nation rather than share it” speaks directly to the attempted derailment of democracy.On Instagram, Gorman describes herself as a dreamer, and the line: “Our people diverse and beautiful will emerge, battered and beautiful” shows her faith – a young woman dreaming aloud before millions of people in the form of spoken word. The moment has gone viral. Spoken word is a craft and a powerful art form, from the cadence to the delivery, to the subtle choreography. The moment, as internationally syndicated as it was, belongs to America. I don’t necessarily desire to see a version of it reproduced should Keir Starmer ever be elected prime minister (nor for the poet to find inspiration in Winston Churchill speeches).American politics’ relationship to poetry has a deep legacy in its fight for justice. In 1861, Frances Ellen Watkins Harper, a poet and lecturer, wrote To the Union Savers of Cleveland, a poem about Sara Lucy Bagby, a woman who had escaped enslavement and was arrested and returned to her “owner” under the Fugitive Slave Act. Harper published the poem in abolitionist newspaper The Anti-Slavery Bugle, and addressed it fervently to the white people of Ohio, writing “And your guilty, sin-cursed Union/ Shall be shaken to its base/ Till ye learn that simple justice/ Is the right of every race.” Poetry has long been the platform for opposing the current condition. As Matt Sandler writes in The Black Romantic Revolution: “Harper and her contemporaries borrowed and transformed the techniques and theories of Romanticism in an effort to bring about the end of slavery.”Poets are vendors of aspiration and are always fashioning together depictions of a better tomorrow, but it’s fair to ask if they are ever truly listened to in political spaces.Maya Angelou read her poem On the Pulse of Morning in 1993, at the inauguration of Bill Clinton. She says: “Lift up your hearts/ Each new hour holds new chances/ For a new beginning./ Do not be wedded forever/ To fear, yoked eternally/ To brutishness./ The horizon leans forward,/ Offering you space to place new steps of change.” Clinton would later go on to instigate the war on drugs and enact the 1994 Crime Bill that would destroy many lives and accelerate the incarceration of African Americans.I have wished many times to see more poets in positions of power, though writing poetry hasn’t made presidents any less barbaric or kinder – as one might think a writer of similes would be. Obama published poems at 19 in a literary review, published in 1982 by Occidental College. Jimmy Carter was the first US president to write a book of poetry, Always a Reckoning, and Other Poems, in 1995. Neither of these men has clean hands.For now, it’s paramount that young poets be given the space, funding and opportunities to be the voices of their communities. They are often spokespeople for those who look and live like them. Don’t wait until a black poet is on the world stage to be inspired by them – often they are not invited, and often they don’t want to endorse state activities by engaging in such ceremonies.Those poems, performed on neighbourhood stages, sitting in anthologies and self-published books, showcased at slams and open mics, have the answers too. There are many young poets like Gorman, who have glistening ideas for tomorrow and deserve to be recognised and propelled into superstardom, or at least just read. Buy their books too.Gorman was an alumnus of empowering youth projects such as Youth Speaks and Urban Word. If you fell in love with Gorman’s inaugural poem, support your local equivalent too. More