Even this time last week it would not have been too late for the government to heed the many calls for them to recall Parliament in order to urgently address the cost of living crisis, a large part of which is attributable to energy costs, but no. The dim-witted limpet-like attachment to laissez-faire ideology had to prevail, as did ministers’ and the PM’s holidays, leading to the shocking but predictable news on Friday of the energy price cap rising by 80% from October to £3,549. Yes, 80%, just not a realistic situation and this only reflects the unit price of energy so you could end up paying much more. We’re told ‘Ofgem decides the price cap by observing what wholesale energy prices do over several months’. What a reflection of this crazily privatised market so much work went into selling us years ago. All week people have been asking where Johnson, Truss and Sunak are on this as there’s been no plan from any of them and the fact that it’s a Bank Holiday hasn’t hushed the voices of economists, who continue to demand urgent action. Even Chancellor Zahawi, despite his egregious attempts to blame prices on the Ukraine war, has come out and said it’s not just ‘the most vulnerable’ who will need help but middle class families too. The shameful best Zahawi can come up with is suggesting households should think about reducing their energy use. Fiddling while Rome burns has never been truer.
Tweeters didn’t hold back about the terrible situation this puts the UK in. ‘Don’t expect any significant intervention from this Government over energy and household bills. Remember, they’re fully signed up free-market ideologues. The ‘invisible hand’ of the market will make it all come good.’ ‘Talk to your energy supplier’ – it’s far too late for this con debunked by Martin Lewis that this would make any difference. The system was broken years ago including the feeble regulatory system’. ‘Yes, Ofgem CEO Jonathan Brearley is more or less admitting the regulatory system isn’t fit for purpose, though he denies this. It’s criminal the government didn’t heed the many demands last week to recall Parliament to address the cost of living crisis’.‘BREAK: Chancellor Nadhim Zahawi has emerged from his bunker to urge the desperate and vulnerable to ‘remain resilient’ in order to give more to ‘the war effort.’ Possibly the greatest single attempt of despicable Tory gaslighting in a long line of despicable Tory gaslighting.’
Experts have predicted it will lead to destitution and avoidable deaths. An increasingly angry Martin Lewis said: ‘If we do not get further government intervention, on top of what was announced in May, then lives will be lost this winter’ and think tank Resolution Foundation’s Torsten Bell declared: ‘Winter energy bills are set to average around £500 a month, while prepayment customers will need to find over £700, more than half their disposable income, to keep the heating on in January alone. These costs pose a serious threat to families’ physical and financial health’. Environment Minister George Eustice (and you could swear some presenters say ‘Useless’ by mistake but with unconscious meaning) excuses the inaction by saying it’s ‘right’ that the next prime minister waits until they take office to weigh up ‘all of the options’ and that it’s not long to wait now. This is so out of touch and infantilising, rather like parents trying to reassure fractious children who keep asking during a journey ‘are we nearly there?’ The fact is it is indeed too long to wait, the whole of this month, as at least one desperate caller conveyed, speaking on Five Live’s Stephen Nolan programme last night, even implying that they would not be able to carry on.
So what’s the answer to all this? It seems the government hasn’t even considered the various solutions proposed. While many are proposing renationalising the utilities, this takes time and neither of the two leadership candidates would go anywhere near it at the same time as having no realistic plans themselves. The Resolution Foundation proposed a new social tariff under which people claiming benefits or where no one in the household earned more than £25,000 would receive a 30% bill reduction. Another proposal is for the government could decide on a universal cut in bills partly offset by a solidarity tax, taking the form of a 1% increase in income tax that would fall most heavily on those on higher incomes.
But Dale Vince of Ecotricity, a purveyor of green energy, argues, ‘Britain makes 50% of the gas it needs in its North Sea. We allow global commodity markets to set the price, which had gone up 5-10 fold… So we should have a price cap on North Sea gas… which would collapse its price.’ But here’s another way out for one lucky household…you could hardly make it up that the Mail has offered as a prize the payment of the winner’s energy bills for a year – how tasteless is that? There were noisy protests outside the Mail’s offices, the London Economic saying ‘Nothing sums up ‘Broken Britain’ quite like the Daily Mail’s latest front-page offer’.But never mind all this doom and gloom, as our AWOL prime minister has told us he’s absolutely convinced ‘Britain’s bounceback will be golden’. Is there anyone left in the country who’s convinced by Boris Johnson being ‘convinced’?
Meanwhile, more and more groups of workers are considering striking, the latest being criminal barristers, making a general strike in the autumn more than a possibility. Our local postman, on strike on Friday, says the Post Office is expecting them to work till 10 pm 7 days a week in order to compete with private operators. But the PO was never set up for this and it’s well known the private operators cherry pick, not to mention often falling way below expectations on customer service. How often do you hear complaints or have problems yourselves with parcels wrongly delivered or not at all? Around here some operators have thought they were clever leaving a parcel inside the food waste bin on collection day, so when the customer gets home there’s no parcel, instead a problem to resolve with the retailer. ‘Britain is facing a wave of coordinated industrial action by striking unions this autumn in protest at the escalating cost of living crisis…A series of motions tabled by the country’s biggest unions ahead of the TUC congress next month demand that they work closely together to maximise their impact and “win” the fight for inflation-related pay rises’. Perhaps it’s surprising that the government hasn’t said words to the effect of count yourselves lucky inflation’s ‘only’ 10% – it’s 70% in Argentina’.
Alongside industrial action the Enough is Enough movement is gathering momentum, with 50 rallies planned for next month. Mayor of Greater Manchester, Andy Burnham, is backing the movement, which was set up by trade union leaders including the RMT’s Mick Lynch and which now has 450, 000 supporters. The movement has a number of demands including ones many would consider no brainers: a cut to the energy price cap to the pre-April level of £1,277 a year; a real-terms public sector pay rise; a reverse to the national insurance hike; and a £20-a-week universal credit increase. Enough is Enough has inevitably attracted criticism from some quarters, for example that the financial undertakings would be unaffordable, but what cost the alternative? More destitution and deaths? One of the organisers seems to convey the key point, that participants aren’t ‘the traditional leftwing activists, they are ordinary people. We are providing the platform for people to start organising and take on these issues’. This is really important because so often those making up this largely supine nation have not felt able to protest.
Despite the travel chaos still being witnessed on roads, rail and at airports, many might understandably feel at this time of year, perhaps having gone without holidays in recent years, that they can at least escape problems for a few days and enjoy some hours on the beach. But now, in England at least, that’s much harder because of the recent shocking revelations regarding raw sewage dumping in rivers and at coastal locations. This is really going to hit the tourism industry hard and seriously upset the many who’ve long booked their holiday and looked forward to it. Needless to say, though, Environment Minister George Eustice, interviewed quite trenchantly on Radio 4’s Today programme, stuck firmly to trotting out the usual script, starting with the shameless suggestion that this situation was basically the fault of poor infrastructure, when the argument given to privatise water supply years ago was investment in renewal of said infrastructure. One tweeter attracted nearly 50 likes and numerous retweets for this: ‘No, George Eustice, ‘the first thing to say’ is NOT that this sewage scandal is due to the Victorian infrastructure etc etc. You should apologise to the whole nation for this disgusting situation and the way it’s been covered up’.
‘Swimmers have been warned to stay away after sewage was discharged on beaches across England and Wales, predominantly in the south. Pollution alerts have been issued to beachgoers by the Environment Agency, and on some beaches signs have been put up to warn people. The environmental campaign group Surfers Against Sewage (SAS) has collected data that suggests storm sewage discharges have taken place in the waters of beaches in Cornwall, Cumbria, Devon, Essex, Lancashire, Lincolnshire, Northumberland and Sussex’. It certainly looks as if this country is once again ‘the dirty old man of Europe’ as it was pre-EU membership days. What an achievement for this government.
I thought (and I won’t be the only one) that one of the most important news items this week, spreading its tentacles far and wide, was the revelation by broadcaster Emily Maitlis of what many of us have known for some time: the presence of a ‘Tory agent’ (the chair, too) within the BBC. Robbie Gibb has morphed between media and politics in ways which should have caused alarm bells to ring years ago. We have witnessed the insidious infiltration of BBC news and political coverage by the Tory narrative. This is regularly manifested in cynical manipulation of language, presenters’ attacks on opposition parties, interrupting opposition politicians during interviews, and cutting off interviewees who say it like it is (as this would be off-message). An obvious current example is narrative presented as fact eg wage rises are inflationary, public services are ‘a cost’ rather than crucial investment and so on. The huge danger of all this is that many only get their news from the BBC so, without the benefit of other news sources and views, tend to believe the state broadcaster, with knock-on effects on their thinking and voting patterns. Many just will not recognise what they hear as Conservative propaganda.
The Times reports that Maitlis has since been supported by ‘BBC insiders’ regarding her claims, saying she was right to call out Sir Robbie Gibb as an ‘active agent’ of the Tory party who interfered with editorial matters. ‘Without naming him, Maitlis, 51, said in an Edinburgh TV Festival speech on Thursday that Theresa May’s former communications chief, 58, was ‘acting as the arbiter of BBC impartiality’ from his seat on the corporation’s board. The words resonated with insiders, who voiced concern about Gibb’s eagerness to challenge editorial matters, even when not fully apprised of the details. Others said his concept of impartiality was impossible to separate from his political allegiances’.
Astonishingly, despite these public revelations and BBC staff’s support for them, some presenters at least have continued to practise what’s just been outed, suggesting that they think we don’t know or that their editors have told them to carry on regardless. Very striking was Today’s interview with veteran broadcaster David Dimbleby, who sought to minimise the Maitlis claims and their widespread effects by trying to make it all about the Newsnight episode which Maitlis had used an example. Some listeners made very clear their views of his stance, tweeting: ‘Maitlis’s lecture was much, much bigger than ‘the Newsnight thing’ Mr Dimbleby. You have just demonstrated one of the pieces of self-censureship that she spent 90% of the lecture explaining’ and ‘Man whose family has benefited from the way the BBC operates for generations defends the way the BBC operates’. The BBC’s very choice of interviewee speaks volumes. Even more than before it behoves us to carefully filter for Tory bias everything we hear from this broadcaster.
Our Awol prime minister continues to enjoy his last few weeks in office, mostly on holiday and apparently planning more parties at Chequers, but perhaps it wasn’t surprising that, unable to resist another ego boost and farewell gesture opportunity, he decided to visit Kiev to join the marking of Ukraine’s Independence Day. One of the most gaslighting, egregious things he’s ever said must be his conflation of the UK’s energy price crisis with supporting Ukraine, exhorting us to ‘stay the course’…… we have high energy bills but Ukraine is paying in blood, the implication being if we complain about these bills we’re unpatriotic and anti supporting Ukraine. ‘Boris: we must ‘endure’ fuel bill pain to defeat Putin’, said one newspaper headline: that narrative again, of course not mentioning that a key reason for these high prices is his government’s mismanagement of the energy market.
Meanwhile, both leadership candidates continue to demonstrate exactly why they shouldn’t be PM, for example Liz Truss’s ridiculous response on the Macron friend or foe question, not committing to appointing an ethics adviser and being reported to the Cabinet secretary for using Chevening for a campaign meeting, and Rishi Sunak’s ignorant right-wing appeasing condemnation of ‘scientists’ who ‘screwed’ the country with lockdowns. Other ministers have also embarrassed themselves, reinforcing the impression of an incompetent bunch totally incapable of reassuring the public that there’s anyone really in charge. Examples include Priti Patel, despite her macho talk, having to confront the fact of the highest ever daily number of migrants arriving here on Monday (1300) and Health Secretary Steve Barclay, finally emerging from his bunker to give a press conference, being confronted by an angry woman asking what he was going to do about the NHS problems and telling him before stalking off that in 12 years they’d done ‘bugger all about it’.
The cost of living crisis has brought the contrast between society’s haves and have-nots further under the microscope and an interesting example which could change the way we view access to nature is the latest right to roam initiative. Those pushing for this rightly state how we need access to nature for our mental health and wellbeing (brought more to the fore during the pandemic), yet in many cases over the years, access has been restricted or prevented by landowners. Radio 4’s Positive Thinking series recently featured campaigner Guy Shrubsole, author of Who Owns England and founder of Right to Roam – a campaign to improve access to privately held land.‘ According to Shrubsole, in Britain (excluding Scotland) we are excluded from 92 per cent of the land and 97 per cent of its waterways. Yet the Covid lockdowns highlighted how much we crave green spaces and how many of us do not have the privilege of easy access to nature. In 1932, the Kinder Scout mass trespass in Derbyshire ultimately led to the establishment of our national parks in mainly upland areas – including the Peak District, the Lake District and Snowdonia. Public rights of way were further enshrined in law in the Countryside and Rights of Way Act 2000’. Shrubsole advocates mass trespass to put pressure on the government. This reinforces the message that change is unlikely to happen without protest, but this now needs to be ‘peaceful’ for another insidious reason, the passage of the policing bill which outlaws ‘noisy protests’.
Interesting and ironic, then, that 150 campaigners, many of whom were in Morris dancer type dress, recently ‘visited’ the Berkshire estate belonging to Richard Benyon, minister in charge of access to nature. They called upon him to open up access to his estate to the public. ‘The 12,000-acre (4,860ha) Englefield estate, which has been in the Benyon family for hundreds of years and is the largest in West Berkshire, contains land that was once a common, before the Enclosures Act meant it could be absorbed into the private estate. It also, according to the Ramblers, contains lost footpaths. This is where the dancers and musicians were heading. Although those assembled were breaking civil law by trespassing, the gamekeepers did not intervene and watched the strange, mystical spectacle from atop a hill from their SUV…As minister in charge of access to nature, Lord Benyon was involved in the Agnew review, which looked at broadening access to the countryside, but which was shelved with little explanation. Just 8% of England’s land has free access, including coastal paths and moorlands, and campaigners want this to change’. That 8% figure is pretty shocking so it will be interesting to see if anything comes of these campaigns. Unlikely under this government, I’d have thought, as so many are landowners themselves and will not wish to challenge the status quo.
Most of us by now may have been unable to obtain a food or household item because of supply chain problems, the war in Ukraine increasingly cited as another factor. Now the Economist has written about the dismay in France being felt on account of a lack of Dijon mustard – a big problem for them since the French are said to consumer a kilo of mustard per head every year. Not everyone would have known that Canada is the source of 80% of brown mustard seeds used to make this particular mustard, and apparently the French don’t rate the milder ‘French’ mustard used liberally in America. They use Dijon for mayonnaise, vinaigrette, steak tartare and no doubt plenty of other dishes. But the double whammy of a poor harvest due to drought in Canada and the war preventing French use of Russian or Ukrainian sources has brought the situation to a head. Stocks are not expected to improve until 2023, though, so French cooks will have to devise solutions, including, perhaps, capitulation to ‘French’ mustard. Or maybe, mon dieu, less consumption of those items considered central to French cuisine. References to something ‘cutting the mustard’ might soon take on a whole new meaning.
Finally, an item which never seems to be in short supply is ice cream, whether it’s the basic stuff in huge supermarket containers or artisan crafted gelato using an ingenious range of ingredients. Very timely given the recent heatwaves is a collation of readers’ recommendations, mostly in the UK but a few citing venues in Italy, Spain and Greece. The ‘winning tip’ is the new Shepherds Ice Cream Shop in Abergavenny (Monmouthshire), described as a ‘Wes Anderson-styled drop-in, complete with classic Neapolitan ice-cream colours and a little hatch to fetch your favourite flavours from. The twist? It’s all made locally from sheep’s milk, the business is run by two generations of a family that has some sort of tradition around a golden scoop. Shepherds often pop up with a vintage ice-cream trailer at festivals and events around the UK. It’s my family’s year-round Friday treat’. Since late last year the canny owners displayed a notice on the premises alerting locals to its opening the following April, building expectations, and they must be doing well to branch out from their shop and cafe in nearby Hay-on-Wye. I also think it’s a great idea to serve hot drinks as well, which some visitors might prefer to ice cream. No doubt they’re hoping for a bonanza during the upcoming Abergavenny Food Festival so best of luck to them!
Politics and mental health - the missing link? 