As the UK continues to battle the combined effects of crises in the cost of living, energy supply, the water industry, the NHS and travel chaos continues with further transport strikes, it seems extraordinary that our prime minister departed for another holiday, Downing Street astonishingly declaring that he would only be contacted if ‘anything urgent’ arose. If the current situation isn’t urgent, what the heck is? On spotting Johnson and his entourage in a Greek supermarket, a Brit was heard to shout ‘Get back to work, you lazy fat ponce’ – soon trending on Twitter. It’s timely, then, a week before the energy price cap is set to rise again, that Labour has written to Boris Johnson, Liz Truss and Rishi Sunak to demand a recall of Parliament to address these crises. We simply cannot afford to wait three further weeks, but the absurdly drawn out Conservative Party leadership contest continues its schedule of hustings ‘up and down the country’, the candidates making increasingly desperate bids for support, even resorting to dog whistle tactics like blaming benefits claimants for inflation. A huge vanity project and excuse for delaying any action until September.
We’ve all heard shocking examples of where these various crises are leading, for example energy bills likely to cost households £5,000 by next January, with two thirds of households in fuel poverty; inflation now up to 10%, the highest level in 40 years; an 87 year old with a broken pelvis left to wait in the rain for an ambulance for 15 hours; drought conditions leading to hosepipe bans and discharge of sewage into rivers and the sea while water company bosses get a 20% rise in their bonuses. Now regulator Ofwat says companies lost an average of 2,923.8m litres of water a day in 2021-22.
Meanwhile, smooth-talking energy and water company bosses and their regulators are interviewed on one news programme after another, coming out with endless sound bites, nothing new to say, but alarmingly, there are no real mechanisms to force the companies to take action. Yet again, all of this is appalling for the nation’s mental wellbeing. We’ve never had quite this chaotic situation with no one in charge before and many are talking privately, if not more openly, about the effects on their mental health.
If you read nothing else this weekend, I urge you to read this, in The Week, originally from the Guardian’s Long Read. It tells the story of how two skilled amateurs, a former detective and a scientist, supported by a local group, developed a data collection system to assemble the evidence of regular pollution of their local river, and by extension, many others. One shocking discovery after another eventually led to the undeniable facts that companies were dumping untreated waste a) much more often and in much larger quantities than was legally allowed (as if any dumping was acceptable!) and b) were not, as they should have been, informing the regulator or Environment Agency. One of the most shocking things here is surely that it took so much work of these two brave men and their supporters to uncover this scandal which so many in the water industry covered up or turned a blind eye to. What else is going on that we don’t yet know about?
Two quotes several days apart from Chancellor Nadhim Zahawi illustrate that this zombie government has no idea how to deal with the problems facing us and zero sense of urgency. Alluding to his meeting with the energy companies last weekend: ‘Yesterday I met with the industry to look at what more we can do with the industry on direct debit, on prepayment metres, all the things that families are worried about, we’re making sure we’re doing the work so on 5 September the new PM can hit the ground running and get those things into place’. Not only is this too little too late but we can be sure no new PM will be ready to ‘hit the ground running’ on 5 September. A few days later, The Independent tells us, struggling to put a positive spin on the latest dire financial outlook from the ONS: ‘This highlights the resilience of the UK economy and the fantastic businesses who (sic) are creating new jobs across the country. Although there are no easy solutions to the cost of living pressures people are facing, we are providing help where we can’. There are no words for this level of ineptitude, especially coming from a government that’s been in power for 12 years.
Adding to this is the overlooked loss of businesses, which are not only their owner’s source of income and that of their staff but also often the life blood of their communities. We know how depressing it is to live alongside or even visit an area consisting of boarded up shops, but this is likely now to become commonplace. ‘Across the UK, growing numbers of traders are closing their doors for good in the face of unaffordable costs driven by record inflation, with some reporting tenfold increases in utility bills. In yet another flashing red light for the economy, which is forecast by the Bank of England to fall into recession next year, data published on Friday by the Federation of Small Businesses (FSB) shows that a majority of firms – 53% – expect to stagnate, shrink or fold in the coming 12 months’.
The Guardian quotes Simon Francis of the End Fuel Poverty Coalition, who added his voice to Labour’s regarding recall of Parliament: ‘The demand for parliament to be recalled tops a week of chaos as Britain’s broken energy system starts to unravel. Ofgem is now facing potential legal challenges to its decisions while charities stepped up warnings of the grim spectre of elderly people dying cold and alone this winter. But as chaos reigns, the government remains silent on how it will help people stay warm this winter. A week of political focus on fuel poverty now could bring in the extra financial help needed and also lay the groundwork to tackle the problem in the long term’. Labour proposed a £29bn plan including freezing the cap at the current level of £1,971 for six months from October, which would save the average household £1,000, putting pressure on the next prime minister to follow suit. The plan also includes an £8bn windfall tax on energy company profits.
Reflecting some unease in the ranks of regulators, at least one (more to come?) has exemplified some principle and backbone by resigning from Ofgem on the grounds that the needs of business were being placed above those of consumers.
Nearly every day now we hear more about the parlous state of the NHS and, as if they weren’t already up against it, this week a junior health minister, Maria Caulfield, was forced to admit that that 34 buildings at 16 different health trusts contained reinforced autoclaved aerated concrete (RAAC), which one hospital boss likened to a “chocolate Aero bar”. ‘RAAC was widely used in building hospitals and schools in the 1960s, 70s and 80s but has a 30-year lifespan and is now causing serious problems’. Can you imagine finally getting inside a hospital after 15 hours or more in an ambulance, then the roof above you starting to crumble? Since ministers and policymakers knew about the lifespan of this material, plans should have been put in place years ago to replace or reinforce it.
On Friday, the day of a London Underground strike and day sandwiched between two national rail strikes, news emerged of further groups of workers including nurses considering strike action, prompting RMT Mick Lynch’s hint of a national strike in the autumn. ‘People are getting poorer every day of the week. People can’t pay their bills. They’re getting treated despicably in the workplace. I think there will be generalised and synchronised action’ (The Independent’s Quote of the Day on Friday’. Transport Minister Grant Shapps continues to stand on the sidelines, hiding behind ‘the employers’ (even though he’s set their agendas) rather than taking the lead in trying to resolve these disputes. The RMT has made it very clear they’re not prepared to roll over and, with the threat of strikes spreading to other key industries over the next few months, the government may have to change its traditional stance of stonewalling those taking industrial action. Such obstinacy might cost them (and us) dear.
But besides the fear and anxiety people will be feeling about paying their bills, it’s chilling to realise what such a situation can ultimately lead to. Therese Coffey’s Department of Work and Pensions has long been criticised for its treatment of benefit claimants and now it’s emerged that this minister has refused to publish five reports highly critical of its performance. The reports focus on the benefit cap, deaths of claimants, the impact of Universal Credit and benefit sanctions, unpaid carers and Work Capability Assessments. ‘The DWP has started 140 internal process reviews since July 2019 into claimants whose deaths may be linked to benefits. In 2018, Errol Graham died of starvation after benefits were cut off…. In January, the (Commons Work and Pensions) select committee took the unusual step of writing to NatCen Social Research, Britain’s largest independent social researcher, using parliamentary powers to order it to provide a copy of a report commissioned by the DWP into disability benefits’. Committee Chair Stephen Timms said that the research threw up some awkward questions for ministers, who decided it was not convenient to publish these reports. Since then Timms and his Committee have discovered a whole tranche of reports which should have been published but weren’t. Such a lack of transparency is unacceptable.
Keir Starmer has called the current situation a ‘national emergency’ and we hear that a coalition of 70 major charities signed an open letter to Truss and Sunak calling on them to double the level of support to low-income families in order to avert a “catastrophe” over the winter. No doubt this will be another letter ignored by the candidates as they press on regardless with their inward-looking pantomime where the real issues of the day are out of bounds. Boris Johnson had obviously taken to heart Monday’s designation as National Relaxation Day, pictured on a Greek beach, but some proof he hadn’t completely taken his eye off the ball at home was evidence of his imminent departure from Downing Street (large removal vans outside), to spend the rest of his ‘premiership’ at Chequers. How typically cowardly that he’s avoiding the pain and humiliation of having this so publicly witnessed by zillions of journalists and onlookers: the location of Chequers means far less scrutiny. This will be very different from the memorable departure of the tearful Mrs Thatcher.
At least very welcome for most of us was the weather finally breaking on Monday, bringing showers or torrential rain, depending on location, as London didn’t get the downpours and floods until Wednesday. But this caused much of the country to go from one extreme to another – blistering heat to damaging floods, another water industry fail. But also one local government must take some responsibility for. On a similar occasion last year, it was found (by patient locals, not the council’s own staff) in several London boroughs at least that numerous drains were blocked so flood water couldn’t drain away. Some councillors even tried to deny this.
We’ve recently heard quite a lot about the workforce being depleted because so many over 50s have stopped work. (About 1 million people in the UK have left work since the start of the pandemic in March 2020). Some will be financially strong enough to do so but I do wonder how all the others are managing, especially given the current cost of living crisis. What lies behind such a major decision? The Office for National Statistics confirmed what I had long suspected, not only that 77% between 50 and 59 said they’d left their jobs sooner than expected but mainly because of ‘disillusionment with management or the nature of their work, increasing stress and feeling undervalued, some saying living more meaningfully or simply was more important than lucrative work’. This is a significantly overlooked issue, in my view. So many managers have no idea how to manage people and don’t even see it as their job, which is extraordinary, leading to numerous workers feeling undervalued and in a limbo. Managers should be nurturing their staff to achieve their potential: work should be about much more than earning money just to live and can be, when people feel valued at work.
But those who want to quit might still feel the need for a regular salary, so some take a different path. Rather than staying and working hard or leaving, The Week’s editorial (13 August) discussed a phenomenon many of us will have seen at some point in their working lives: ‘quiet quitting’. A growing number of people are said to be opting not to leave jobs they’ve tired of, but instead stay while doing the minimum amount of work to avoid being sacked. (And the difficulty of being fired in some organisations is yet another issue because so many employers abdicate the responsibility of performance management). This editorial suggests that bosses ‘will have to think a lot harder about how to motivate and engage their staff: if not, they risk being stuck with a zombie workforce that slowly drains their business of its life force’. Quite right and way overdue, but so many also need to think about paying workers properly and not treating the workforce just as cheap labour while they continue to make excessive profits!
Politics and mental health - the missing link? 
Brilliantly perceptive, well researched and prescient as ever Roslyn, but I can’t help straying into gallows’ humour territory following your last para about ‘quiet quitting’ and zombie workforces which, to take us back to your initial para, is exactly what we have with Jonson and his cabinet. The words ‘Rome… fiddling… burns’ etc., etc. have obvious resonance here, too.
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